Raleigh took a deep breath. “You asked me to settle a yearly allowance on him.”
“Oh, well, that’s more like it. Okay, why don’t you do that? Except give it all to him. Well, you don’t need it, do you? Hell, everybody in Thermopylae tells me you’re loaded.”
“I am not loaded. I am…comfortable.”
“Well, talking to Gates, I get the feeling he’s uncomfortable.”
“For Christ’s sake, Daddy, he’ll throw it away! You have no idea the sort of things he…well, shit.…Okay, I’ll set up a trust fund, and he can have the interest. Then, if he settles down, I’ll sign over the principal. If he tries to settle down. If he says he wants to try. How’s that? Is that fair?”
Earley grinned. “I never knew you when you weren’t fair. You’re about the fairest soul I know. In fact, right this minute you look all light and shimmery.”
Hayes crossed his arms. “That’s because you’re probably going blind on top of everything else.…Let me get this straight. You want me to settle whatever’s left in your estate after these latest escapades on Gates. And all I get is a bunch of stupid buried silver spoons….”
“How do you know it’s spoons? Maybe it’s a million dollars.”
“Okay, whatever it is you found buried somewhere in two boggy overgrown acres of sumac, thorn bushes, and poison ivy!”
“Raleigh, you crack me up!” Earley was now looking through the trunk, pushing clothes aside.
“What did you find?”
“I never found anything. I never looked.”
“You mean, because we didn’t own the property? But you used to sneak us out there fishing all the time. We used to shoot BBs at the No Trespassing sign. You had us picking boysenberries for Grandma and Flonnie. Cutting Christmas trees. God, what held you back from digging a simple hole?”
“I was already screwed up enough, without getting my hands on a wagonload of Confederate gold bullion.”
Blood raced down Raleigh’s arms. “What did you say?”
Earley shook out a pale satin dress. “Look at that. Mama’s wedding dress. Reba got married in it; why don’t you take it back to her…Well, that was the family story. Oh, you heard about it. How this Goodrich Hayes had a wagonload of Confederate bullion that General Hood sent him off to Richmond with after Atlanta fell. But he never got any farther than Themopylae with it, or never intended to get any farther, and how he buried it at Knoll Pond House. My aunt Hattie swore her grandma saw the wagon with her own eyes…Oh my, was this Papa’s harmonica? I think it was. Yep…” Earley cupped his hands around the silver rectangle and blew into it.
“A wagonload of gold?”
Slipping the harmonica in his pocket, the old man picked up a crushed stationery box with a rubber band around it. It was junked full of cheap broken jewelry, tarnished medals, and old photographs of all different sizes. “So they say. They say that’s why the Yankees burned the house down, looking for the gold.…Well, time. Time, time, time.…Look here, Raleigh.” He opened the car door so the light would shine on a photograph. It was a very old brown-andwhite group portrait taken on the porch of the East Main house. Rows of sunlit Hayeses stood on each step. Clayton and Ada, his straw bowler at a tilt, her face frowning, each holding a twin baby boy in a laced smock. Around them all their beautiful daughters in cotton summer dresses, all their handsome sons in white shirts and ties, except the youngest, Hackney, whose middy blouse rode up over his round stomach. Victoria, slender-armed, bright-haired, hugged on her lap a little girl who was sticking out her tongue. “That must be Lovie,” Raleigh said.
“That’s right. Look at those balloon-sized knickerbockers on Furbie. God, he loved those pants.”
Raleigh picked up a handful of the medals. One had a female racer on it, one, a male golfer. One was for debating, one revealed no clue at all to what it honored, one said “Camp Cherokee.” “Daddy, Uncle Whittier’s Bronze Star’s in here, just thrown in here with all this junk.”
“Oh my word, Reba and Big Em in toe shoes, now there’s a sight!” Earley had poured all the pictures out on the car seat. “…Okay. Here it is.” He held up an old bent snapshot, one corner torn off. Two teenaged boys leaned with a swaggering nonchalance against the front of a dilapidated stucco building; in its open door a black woman sat holding a cardboard fan; on its dirty window were painted the words “BEER, 10¢.” The black young man had a cigarette cocked in his mouth and a clarinet held by his side like a sword. The white young man was shorter, and cradled his trumpet across his chest.
Earley shook his head, softly saying, “‘You two keep away from that jugband trash, you hear me. Y’all headed straight for Hell.’ Well, Flonnie…pack of fools.” He put the photograph in his shirt pocket to take to Billie Rogers.
“I said, I’d like to say grace,” yelled Earley Hayes. “Hey, everybody.” He rapped his wineglass. “Can y’all hear me down there?” “No,” said Victoria. “And between the smoke and the noise and that loud music, I am losing my faculties.”
Resting the elbows of his cassock on the table, Earley folded his hands. “Dear Lord, thank you for this day and this meal and these people and this chance. Raleigh did a beautiful job getting us all here together, and thank you for helping him. It’s a wonderful.…Oh hell, they’re not listening. See you later. Amen.” He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. Everybody turned. “There. How ’bout a toast then?” He raised his glass. “To my sons Raleigh and Gates. I’m proud of you both. Long life and happiness.”
“Hip hip hooray,” said Mingo and Billie. “L’chaim,” said Simon. “Hey hey,” said Gates. “Right,” said Toutant, and Vicky and Allen Thornhill nodded. Earley put his hands around Raleigh’s head, pulled him off balance, and kissed him. Raleigh grabbed hold of Mingo’s arm, Mingo sloshed his strawberry margarita into his shrimp gumbo, everybody laughed and then went back to talking and eating.
“This is my own personal opinion, man, but the way I hear it going is, Billie leads in the verse on ‘Stardust,’ solo—da de da da deedee, like that—and then I come slap in with the sax on the refrain, and then, just like we practiced this afternoon, Earley goes straight into ‘Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams.’ What do you think, Billie?”
“Gollee, Vicky, that is really delicious. I sure never had rabbit jumbalaya before. I would have been too scared to try it on my own, I bet. Taste some of this, Weeper.”
“Awggh. Get it away. Rabbits I should inflict on my guts yet?…So, Sheffield, you’re ever in Caracas, you look me up. Likewise yourself, Victoria. South America, you never covered, am I right? Try it.”
“I might just get up and do that one of these days. Mr. Kingstree, you are not doing Earley any favors giving him cigarettes. Gates, go ask that waiter what happened to Billie’s hamburger. I could have walked to a farm, shot a cow, and made one myself by now.”
“Man, what are you talking about, Gershwin invented the Charleston?! Blacks invented the Charleston. It was stevedores that took it up to Harlem, and Gershwin went over there and stole it.”
“So, Toots, tell me already he never wrote Porgy and Bess?”
“He was good, I don’t deny it. Besides, ‘Charleston’ isn’t even what these birds are playing. They’re playing ‘Varsity Drag.’ Trying to. Now, Weep, I’m not heavying up on you, but except on ‘I’m Always Chasing Rainbows,’ just the way we worked on it in Montgomery, I don’t want you to lay a finger on those frets. You just stand there and give that bass a slap every now and then. And don’t you change any chords ’less Mingo here gives you the nod.”
“Oh, Weeper, gollee, I’m going to miss you to pieces. Why do you have to go to South America anyhow?”
“Mingo, with you I won’t mince words. Certain parties in the U.S. are too colloquial with my, with my…dactylographics.” Berg had resumed his study of the dictionary with the Ds.
“Oh. Well, I don’t know what that means, but I wish you’d come back to Thermopylae with us and meet Vera. And we’re all going to go to Kure Beach
this summer, and even if it rains, it’s still fun because we can play cards and sing.”
“If I hadn’t met your mother, Mingo Sheffield, I’d swear you were born a Hayes. Raleigh, will you please go see if that waiter flew to Alaska and took your brother with him? Well, I can certainly see why they named this place The Cave. I want y’all to know I’ve been down in volcanos in Sumbawa that were better lit.”
The Cave did, in fact, look like a cave, and in the nineteenth century had been a wine merchant’s cellar. In a bright, noisy alley off Bourbon Street, not far from Jackson Square, black iron stairs led down to the massive door with the brass plaque that still said “Le Cave,” although nobody had called it Le Cave for decades. Behind the door (the sliding peephole of the old speakeasy now painted shut), food and music had been fighting it out since the 1920s. Heavy black wood tables thickened with years of shellac circled a round dais in the middle of the room. The low ceiling curved down to white plastered walls hung with newspaper clippings and album covers and photographs of New Orleans musicians. On this Maundy Thursday, the place was not jammed, but according to Allen Thornhill, the real music people didn’t show up until the dinner trade had cleared out. It was nearly ten o’clock now, and a jazz quartet was just finishing its final set.
Squeezing his way between the tables, Raleigh Hayes looked first for a waiter, and then for Gates. He found his brother in a narrow side room at a corner bar table. Nearby, an attractive woman ignored her escort (angrily insisting that he deserved a full-time secretary) and sat openly staring at the handsome man in the elegant white linen suit. Gates was folding cocktail napkins into wings, tossing them at the ashtray.
“Gates, what are you doing hiding in here? Why didn’t you come back to the table?”
“Hey, Big Bro, the old man’s act on yet? I want to catch it. He’s a crazy bastard, you know that? Listen, talk to me a second, okay?” Looking up at Raleigh, he rubbed the black mustache, then the black curls. “Right, fine. Here’s the deal.…I’m going to split. Let this John Neill thing blow over. I’m heading out with Weep tonight.” He tapped his breast pocket. “They had a berth free, and I’ve got this truck money, and well, it was one of those things, why not, right? So, anyhow, I’m just going to slip out of here in a while, and you kind of explain to Dad and the gang later on. Will you do that? I’m not exactly big on farewell scenes, know what I mean? Not sure I can handle it.”
Raleigh sat down. “Gates, is this a joke?”
Gates showed him the ticket.
“You can’t just decide to go to South America in one day. Do you even have a passport?”
“I’m a flier, Raleigh. I’m always ready for take off.” From a wallet in his breast pocket, he took out a blue passport and then a fiftydollar bill. “Here. Pay your debts, that’s what you taught me. And thanks, listen. I don’t mean the money, you know.…Do me a couple of little favors, okay? Here’s two hundred dollars.” He tapped a roll of money bound with a rubber band. “When you get back home, would you go to a bakery and have them do a really big cake, five or six tiers, and I want it to have the Eiffel Tower on top, and I want it to say, ‘Folies Bergère.’ And then I want a magnum of champagne, and order a huge, I mean huge, horseshoe of roses, and have them write ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LOVIE,’ on it, and then April sixteenth, have it all sent out to Lovie for me? Could you do that?”
He rolled the money toward Raleigh, who caught it and said, “Lovie’s birthday was March sixteenth, not April sixteenth.”
Gates grinned. “So tell them to write, ‘Sorry I’m Late.’ ”
“Why don’t you come back with me, and go see Lovie yourself? And what about Sara Zane?”
“Oh, her. I don’t know, Raleigh. Fences, all that jazz. I’m not sure I can handle it.”
“Gates, are you sure you want to do this? Did you seriously think it through? Let’s just calm down, and analyze this.…What’s so funny?”
Gates leaned over the table and rubbed his brother’s hair. “Old Raleighkov.…Grab the check, willyah? Let’s go hear our cousin Billie sing the blues.” He stood up, shaking his black curls at the well-dressed woman still staring at him from the next table. Her escort was still talking about why he shouldn’t have to share his secretary with Joel, but he stopped in midsentence when a man who looked like a movie star suddenly bent down, kissed his wife on the inside of the wrist, murmured to her, “Bueñas noches, señora,” and said to him, “Here seets your wouman, beauteefool like las flores, and in your head ees only beeznis, beeznis. Thees is not good, amigo. Adios.”
“Who the hell was that?” spluttered the businessman at his wife, who just kept staring as the man in white turned back at the door and, with a wink, kissed his hand to her.
Chapter 33
What Raleigh Decided about Death AT TWENTY PAST TEN, when he slid into his seat behind his drums, Allen Thornhill was wearing one of the beautiful Chinese red silk short-sleeved shirts that Gates had presented to each of the musicians after dinner. Now, as they all started for the dais, Gates rubbed each on the back. “Hey, show time. You look good, you sound good. Billie, that’s a dynamite dress. Matches your voice. Hey, Daddy, hold up. Your shirt’s buttoned wrong.”
“Give me a hug for luck, gorgeous,” Earley Hayes said to Gates. “God, I’m glad you came to see me.”
“Knick-knack gem-crack high-times, right? Break a leg.”
Raleigh didn’t say anything. His heart was pounding too hard, and besides, his aunt Victoria was squeezing all the blood out of his hand. “Well,” she whispered, “thank God Gates had the sense to buy those shirts, so Earley didn’t go up there in that fool cassock and embarrass Billie to death.”
Thornhill stepped over to the microphone. “Good to be back again. Thank you. I brought some people with me tonight I want everybody to welcome.…On trumpet, the Reverend Earley Hayes, an old marching friend, and a good teacher, and the man who told me a long long time ago, ‘Drums are louder than hate.’…At the piano, Mr. Mingo Sheffield.…Joining us for a little while on bass, Mr. Sy Berger.…On tenor sax, the astonishing Mr. Toutant Kingstree.…And The Cave’s special guest, a young lady I have a feeling we’re all going to be hearing about one of these days. A young lady with a wonderful new feeling for some old traditions. Let’s give her a warm welcome to New Orleans—Miss Billie Rogers!” He lowered the microphone, and Billie walked up to it. Her black sleeveless dress flowed loosely down from her shoulders, and she wore no jewelry. Her black hair flared out glittering in the smoky light.
Toutant’s long shiny narrow shoe began to tap. Lifting the saxophone, he looked at Billie as she took a deep breath, let it slowly out, and nodded. Then he said, “And one. And two. One two three four.”
Way down yonder in New Orleans…in the land of dreamy dreams, There’s a garden of Eden…that’s what I mean… “Breathe, Aunt Vicky, she’s fine. Listen, they like her. They’re clapping. Look.”
“Of course they like her, Raleigh, don’t be an idiot. What time is it?”
“Why do you keep asking me the time? It’s ten forty-one.” He pointed at the round watch pinned to her lapel. “Is there something the matter with your watch?”
“My watch works perfectly. This light’s so bad and smoky, I can’t see it.”
…The way he’s treating me…he’ll do the very same to you. That’s the reason…got these weeping willow blues. “Does Daddy look funny to you, Aunt Vicky? He doesn’t look right.” Raleigh watched his father slip backward when he pushed himself out of the chair to stand beside Billie. The man’s red shirt was now a dark shiny crimson, and his eyes were closed as he waited, swaying, the trumpet raised.
Now he’s gone, and we’re through. Am I blue. Victoria folded her napkin into an exact square and placed it back beside her coffee cup. “Raleigh, I said I wouldn’t tell you but…I took Earley to a good doctor Wednesday, and he admitted there was nothing they could do, except try one of those artificial hearts, and then he’d probably die on the operating table.” She tapped her
nephew’s hand. “Earley’s got two choices. He can sit in a hospital and wait. Or he can keep on the way he is. Which do you think a Hayes is going to pick? Let him alone, Raleigh. I’ve known him a long time. I honestly think this is the happiest I’ve ever seen him.”
I hope that he…turns out to be Someone to watch…over me… Gates came back from the cloak room with his leather bag, a leather trench coat over his arm. “Hey, okay, Big Bro, she is good! And look at old Mingo hanging off that bench, thumping away, beating the shit out of that piano! Damn, they sound like a fucking band!”
“Gates Hayes, the only reason for that kind of language, young man, is sloth pure and simple.”
“Sorry, Aunt Vicky.” Gates unzipped the bag and set the gold trumpet on the table. “Raleigh, go on up there, go on. Oh shit, man, why not? I wish I could.”
But Raleigh shook his head.
Go down sunshine…see what tomorrow brings. Well, it may bring sunshine…then again it may bring rain.
“What time is it?”
“Eleven-o-three. Aunt Vicky? Where’re you going?” “To take a walk. I need a breath of air. It’s thick as a Malay monsoon in here. Sit down. I don’t want you dawdling along, slowing me up.”
“But you can’t just wander around the French Quarter by yourself at night. Let me or Gates walk you—”
“Women are not puppies, Raleigh. They don’t need to be walked. I swear I’m going to go out and campaign for Aura. I’ve put up with enough male foolishness to last me a lifetime.”
“I just meant in case—”
“Nobody’s going to bother me. And if they do, they’re in for a surprise.” She picked up her purse, and patted it. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”
“Tough broad,” said Gates. “What’d she have in that purse, a forty-five?”
When skies are cloudy and gray…they’re only gray for a day. So wrap your troubles in dreams…and dream your troubles away. There were no empty tables in The Cave now, and the hurrying, jostling waiters carried only drinks on their trays, bending their heads down close to the customers to hear new orders over the music. Occasionally, they’d make a halfhearted effort to shoo away the small boys passing among the crowd trying to sell single longstem roses.
Handling Sin Page 64