Three Novellas

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

1975 -1985

  “You’ve come a long way” the card reader told Noah who was suitably impressed. The old woman always started with that announcement. It could be understood so many different ways. “A long way” could be measured in physical miles or by emotional growth or financial ups and downs and it could mean a long way forward or a long way backward. Most people who felt the need to consult a Tarot card reader felt that they had come a long way in some direction so it never failed to impress. Then she asked her customers if they had any questions. Most wanted to know if a lover was in the cards and poor Noah was no different in that regard. He’d traveled, more or less, fourteen hundred miles, much of it on foot over a period of more than five years, all that time pulling the ark and often sleeping in it, was still sleeping in it where he’d been allowed to park it behind a church and he’d endured extreme heat and driving rains and oft-times went without very much that was good to eat and the only question he wanted the old woman to answer was if there was going to be a woman in his life. The woman laid out the cards with a slow solemnity and smiled at Noah.

  “Yes” she said, “A woman will be coming soon to be with you.” She paused a bit then went on:

  “But she is not one you were expecting.”

  “Not expecting? I’m not expecting anyone. That’s why I came here to ask you.”

  “This woman is your mother. See this card, this card represents your mother so you will be seeing your mother soon.” Actually the card was The Empress and could have represented any number of things about to happen in Noah’s life but the old woman considered that he appeared to be in need of some mothering. He however could not believe it and told the woman as much, told her he didn’t even know if his mother was still alive and if she was still alive she certainly would not be coming to visit him, she’d kicked him out of the house ten years ago.

  “Suit yourself,” said the old woman “It is what I see in the cards. Do you want to know what else I see?”

  “Sure” said Noah hoping perhaps she’d see another woman, younger like the one who had given him the peacock feather he still carried with him wherever he went.”

  “The Emperor” the old woman said in a deep and ominous voice with an exaggerated expression of fear on her face.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that someday you will meet a man with lots of wealth and power who rules a lot of people, can do whatever he wants with them, send them off to war to die or kill if he wants to, tax the fruits of their labor until they are starving, rape their daughters….” …the old woman’s voice had reached a scream and she continued to rant and yell so that Noah did not stay to hear anymore or pay the $2 he owed her. He could hear her ranting all down the street and a passerby said to Noah and anyone else who might be listening, “That woman is crazy, don’t let her fool you, she is just plain crazy, crazy as the day is long, crazy as the night is dark, crazy as the stars are a multitude…”

  “Who are you?” asked Noah of the man.

  “Me? I’m crazy too, crazy two, double crazy, that’s me, we’re all crazy on this street. Welcome to the neighborhood.”

  Later Noah thought that perhaps he was crazy himself when he found exactly the place he’d been told to look for and it appeared to have disappeared. The man at the Free University for Life Skills who had first ignited Noah’s passion to come to New Orleans had described a beautiful park like place lined with hundreds of old oak trees. Noah loved oak trees. He told Noah that the black residents of the city had their own Mardi Gras parade down this street. Noah had carefully written down the name in large block letters on the same piece of paper that his sister had written her address. It said: CLAIBORNE. And the sign on the street where Noah now found himself said CLAIBORNE. He compared it letter by letter. But there was no park. Instead of oak trees there were massive concrete columns holding up a noisy freeway that roared overhead, the same freeway that he had ridden in on. Instead of grass there was litter and broken glass and it all seemed terribly depressing to Noah. He had gotten himself fairly well lost by this time and had to ask directions to the church where he’d been let off and had parked the ark.

  The truck driver who had picked Noah up thought Noah would need some help in the big city so brought him to the church because she knew the priest would look after him. Since that day less than a week earlier, Noah had been sleeping in the ark where he could look up and see a few stars at night and returning to the comfort of his strange home, he forgot about the crazy old card reader and the lost park on Claiborne Ave. Nonetheless, the next day he took from his pocket the much folded piece of yellow lined paper and went to find the priest to get some help writing a post card to his sister. He thought he should ask her about their mother.

  The priest said why not write a real letter and Noah agreed but could not think of that much to say once he was put on the spot to say it. He asked how their mother was and if she had plans to visit him and dictated that he was now in the great city of New Orleans. The priest took it upon himself to add the address and phone number of the church and added his name and a brief note to the end.

  Not more than two weeks later Noah’s sister arrived on the church steps looking for him.

  “Mother is dead but I’m here” was all she said at first and then she began to cry and hugged Noah, gasping a bit about the long bus trip while the priest directed an altar boy to bring her suitcase inside. He was eager to explain to this woman that he’d gladly have helped Noah find a more suitable place to live but Noah refused to leave the ark even though the priest had promised it would not be stolen or damaged behind the church.

  “I understand,” the woman said and finally smiled. “He’s a tad stubborn,” she said whereafter she and the priest conferred for a good hour about possible accommodations and job openings for a hair dresser. Noah was a bit put out, he knew he was thirty years old and had lived on his own for the past ten years and here his sister still treated him like a child.

  “I can read now,” he broke in.

  “That’s wonderful” his sister exclaimed, then continued her conversation with the priest.

  “I had sex with a woman,” he broke in again even louder. This time both his sister and the priest were silent for quite a while but Noah looked so proud of himself and innocent at the same time that they both let it pass, though each resolved to question Noah further in private.

  That very afternoon they were settled in rooms they rented from a woman who knew the priest. Noah’s sister paid the deposit of $200 with a wad of ten dollar bills she accumulated from various hiding places on her person and in her luggage, for she had traveled very carefully. Noah’s sister introduced herself to their landlady as Glory, not Gloria as the woman first thought she heard, but Glory Brown. This came as an interesting surprise to Noah who had always called his sister “Sister” just like his parents had. He liked that her real name was Glory. The landlady, a woman not much older than Glory said “you can call me Corrine” and so they did. Noah and Glory shared a bed-sitting room with an alcove screened off for Glory, and a small balcony with a toilet and sink in a closet at the end. There was a large claw footed bath tub in another closet down the hall that they could use in turn with other tenants of the house. Some tenants were there for years and years and others only weeks but Noah and Glory lived there together for the next ten years and helped Corrine clean the other rooms and ate their meals with her in the large old fashioned kitchen.

  Glory worked evenings and weekends cutting and curling the hair of women who worked nine to five Mondays through Fridays and did not have much money for tips but she said they were more generous than the wealthy ladies she’d beautified back in Annapolis. She seemed happy with their simple life and Noah often heard his sister and Corrine talking and laughing late into the soft velvet nights. Noah himself liked to go to bed early looking forward to his dreams and he was always up to see the sunrise which was his greatest delight in life. He would walk miles
before the two women even stirred and arrive back in time for breakfast.

  Sometimes he’d walk up Camp Street to the quarter and peer into windows, chat with folks just waking up on their stoops where they’d fallen asleep after an evening smoking, sipping wine, singing harmonies. Or he’d walk the other direction to an old cemetery and daydream about the lives of the people whose names appeared on the tombstones, think about how some had lived so many years and some only weeks or even days. He’d wander down streets that were run down and ragged and talk to the people picking through the trash who told him fantastic stories.

  “See that green house there,” one told him. “They keep alligators behind the gate to keep burglars away. You can’t poison a gator. I seen live chickens thrown from the top windows to feed the gators.”

  It was a big event to the old guy but Noah felt bad for the chickens.

  Sometimes he’d wander into streets of mansions where the yards and gardens were well kept. He’d look into the windows of the beautiful homes hoping to see well dressed people going about their exotic lives and wondered about what they ate and if they played the piano brilliantly but he never saw any rich people and he was relieved that they never saw him either. Servants, sometimes he saw women on their knees scrubbing floors or men trimming flowers and trees, dogs and cats sleeping on the wide verandahs but never any of the wealthy folks. He liked to talk to the working men in the yards and they would stop to talk to him, tell him stories, point out the flowers and the trees the owners had brought from foreign places, taking pride in these gardens as if these gardens belonged to them. Noah loved learning the names of the exotic plants, names like Bird of Paradise, Blue Daze with a Z, and Star Jasmine or Night Blooming Jasmine. Noah loved the idea of a flower that hid from the sun and came out for the stars. He struggled to pronounce names like Bromeliad and Bougainvillea and laughed at the sound of Bambusa, savored the feel of Plumbago on his lips. He rarely remembered what flower went with what name but he didn’t care. They made a single picture in his mind and their names repeated over and over made a song that accompanied his walk through this dreamscape.

  Sometimes Corrine and Glory walked with Noah in the evenings and Corrine explained the street names to them, named for the muses she said and explained the long ago civilization of the Greeks. Calliope was the name of the muse of epic poetry and Clio the muse of history. Erato was the muse of love and erotic poetry and Corrine had to promise to explain later what erotic poetry was so Noah would let her continue her explanation of the streets in their neighborhood. Euterpe was the muse of flute playing and about this Noah did not particularly care. Melpomene was the muse of tragedy and Thalia of comedy, Polyhymnia the muse of heroic hymns and Terpsichore the muse of dance and lyric poetry. Urania was the muse of astronomy and Noah was excited to learn that astronomy was the study of the stars. Calliope, Noah practiced on his tongue, Calliope, Terpsichore, he whispered as he walked, Plumbago, Jasmine. Noah learned to love the sounds of words and wrote poems which he recited to the old men on Claiborne Ave. who seemed impressed.

  Noah spent many mornings having a cup of chicory coffee with those old men on that same Claiborne Avenue that so confused him his first week there. They told him about the old days when the place was indeed a beautiful park and how in the mid sixties the trees had been removed and a highway built right there over their very heads. It was no longer beautiful but it was still a gathering place for the folks in the neighborhood who had not been consulted about the highway. Sometimes Noah watched while an artist painted pictures around the columns, sometimes pictures of the oak trees that had grown old and magnificent there in that spot before being destroyed. One of the columns was used as a kind of bulletin board with obituaries stuck all over it. “Well,” one old man said, “people got to know about who died, don’t they?” Noah thought that was pretty depressing until he saw his first funeral parade and then he figured that people in New Orleans thought differently about death than they did in other parts of the country. The best music Noah ever heard was at funerals. He became a regular at funeral parades. Sometimes Corrine went with him but Glory never could get used to the idea.

  Corrine herself relished the eccentric customs of her home town. Come Thanksgiving she called a friend with a car to drive them along the river road and pointed out to them a number of tall wooden structures in a variety of shapes and sizes, explaining that at Christmas they would all be set ablaze, a holiday tradition. Glory was worried that it might upset Noah, but in fact come Christmas when that same friend with a car drove them out to the levee to watch, Noah enjoyed the spectacle as much as any of the multitude of children that Glory also thought might be disturbed by the sight of santas and large teddy bears being thrown into the flames. What did apparently disturb Noah was the sight of all those happy children running around setting off fire crackers and the families all so joyous. Mothers and fathers and children, enjoying themselves together. Glory could see his face become thoughtful by the wavering light of the flames in the night.

  It was shortly after Christmas that Noah asked about their mother. What had she died of? Had she suffered much? Had she ever asked about him, her son, Noah? He was hurt that she had never written him so much as a single postcard. He had not written her either but when he studied on it a bit he realized that she would have known how to reach him through Glory. He always called her Glory now, relishing the name. What his sister then told him stunned him and kept him pondering for days, sitting absolutely still under a tree in the backyard. Not easy to find out after so many years that their mother was his grandmother and his sister Glory was in fact his real mother, thirteen years old when he was born.

  Noah tried to imagine the little girls who came to church as young mothers, and he blushed to himself because he knew how babies are made. He did not really like to think about this but he loved his sister/mother and wondered why he did not live with her when he was a child. He had begun to feel angry that he did not stay with this favorite sister but realized he should understand the reasons for things before reacting to them. And Glory understood that this news was a shock to him so did not try to tell him more, thinking she would just wait until he asked, thinking he would ask when he was ready.

  When he did ask her she started with the circumstances of his birth, leaving the circumstances of his conception for later, if ever, for that would be hard for her to tell and him to hear.

  “Oh honey” (said lightly so as not to cry) “what would you say if I told you that you were born in a chicken house?” and she laughed so Noah thought it was a joke and laughed as well but no, no joke she told him.

  “When my mother realized I was pregnant she bought us some bus tickets to Charleston and her sister picked me up and drove deep into the dark woods where she lived. My mother did not even come to visit. Said the place gave her the creeps and she turned right around and went back to Annapolis. Did not even give me a hug but then our mother never did hug us, I guess you remember that. Always angry that woman was, but I guess she had her reasons. Well my auntie was pretty jolly and I liked being with her so I was ready to accept whatever living arrangements she had to offer.

  “Her house was kind of ramshackle, a room added here and there and all of them filled with little kids and stuff, she had more stuff than a person could shake a stick at. And she had this real nice chicken house, built new when she decided to make some extra money selling organic eggs. But that didn’t work out for her. Half the chicks she ordered were roosters, did you know they can’t tell a hen from a rooster until they are grown? There are some people who claim they can tell but that is just hocus pocus I think like those guys that go around looking for underground water with a forked stick. Anyway, she had to make soup out of those roosters and she froze all that soup because she had this big chest freezer on her porch and the hens, well they just didn’t take to confinement, laid their eggs all over the place, in the hay in the barn, in the trees, we even found some in
the doghouse.

  “That big beautiful new chicken house just sat there empty so auntie and me, we whitewashed it and put in this antique iron bed with a comfortable feather mattress on it and that was my home that summer before you were born. Auntie’s husband was a truck driver and hardly ever home but when he did come by he was polite to me and didn’t stare and I learned not to be afraid of him as I was afraid of men in those days but not him and not the young man who came with the midwife when it was time for you to come out. He was a paramedic he said and drove an ambulance and when he wasn’t driving the ambulance he helped the midwife who turned out to be his auntie and they delivered you nice and clean and when you were old enough to travel we took the bus back to Annapolis. But you know I’d’ve been happy to stay out there in West Virginia forever. It was a happy time for me and holding you in my arms that very first time, was the most joy I’d ever known or have ever known since.”

  This announcement made Noah happy for a moment before he worried that he had not given his mother more joy as he grew up. But he didn’t ask about that. He asked instead what happened when they got back to Annapolis.

  It was not a good time for Glory when Noah asked that question. She knew she needed more time and was supposed to be getting ready to go to work but after giving it some thought she decided to call in sick and settle in to talk a while. After all, Noah was a grown man finding out important things for the first time, things perhaps he thought he should have been told years earlier and she knew she owed him this.

  “Lets walk” she said, “Walking relaxes me and it will be easier to remember everything, there is a lot to tell, honey, some of it hard, best if we be walking while I talk.” And of course Noah enjoyed walking himself. He didn’t realize until he wanted to look at his mother’s face that walking protected her from eye contact while she told her story, and by then he realized it was better that she not see his eyes either because he did not want her to feel bad if he cried or appeared angry or shocked.

  “First I got to tell you that I never told anyone about this before you so even though I should have told you earlier I guess, you are the first to know.” Noah smiled, proud, then settled his face into a more serious demeanor for what he was about to hear.

  “I never told my mother either but I sometimes wonder if she knew. Well let me cut to the chase honey, my father. My father . . . . “

  They walked in silence while the truth that Glory could not utter revealed itself to Noah.

  “My father was my grandfather?” he asked then and she nodded, not speaking, not crying but feeling that if she did speak she would cry. They walked a good half hour in silence, hearing the crows that cawed with a hysteria that sounded like anger and it seemed the wind whipped up then rather suddenly as if all of nature were angered by her news. After a while they came to a bench and Glory sat down, exhausted, and Noah sat with her and there they sat another half hour or so before heading back home. Noah knew she’d tell him more another day. As it happened, Glory could have made it to work on time that day but she did indeed feel sick and went straight to bed. Corrine brought her some tea to help her sleep. Glory slept for the next fifteen hours and woke up relieved the following dawn in time to walk again with her son and continue her story.

  “My mother used to yell at me all the time, call me a little slut when she was drunk, hit me although she lacked the strength to hurt me physically and I did not care enough for her to have my feelings hurt. I despised her and feared my father. He stopped bothering me and I don’t know if he ever bothered my sister or not. I talked to her, warned her to steer clear of him and she spent most nights at a friend’s house, a friend with a real family, lucky for her. I think my having you scared him. He used to tell me that if I ever told anyone he’d make my life a living hell and I never said a word back because I was afraid but one day I yelled back, said my life was already a living hell and I ran away and I am so sorry, my child, I left you with them. But I was still only fourteen years old and it was hard enough to find a new home for myself let alone for both of us. I guess I’ve never really forgiven myself for that.

  “But they didn’t treat you too badly did they? I mean they didn’t hit you or anything? You were such a sweet child and even mom seemed to have a soft spot for you once I was gone. I still lived in town and I visited you and talked to the boys, asked them to protect you. Our brother Kenny was as big as Dad by the time he was twelve and he told me how he stood up to him, threatened to knock him into tomorrow if he ever took the belt to him again and he said Dad just backed down, meek as you please. He put your crib in the room all the boys shared and when you cried it was the boys saw to you.

  “Thank god they’ve all survived wherever the government has sent them. I thank god for my brothers. You know…” and here Glory laughed almost as if the memory were a sweet one… “Kenny used to call me when the folks were passed out cold from whiskey and I’d come over and step right over them sometimes and hold you in my arms and sing a bit and stroke your sweet little head, stay most the night while they snored and groaned in their drunken stupors, who knows they might even have been awake and seen me and not even known they were awake, thinking maybe they were hallucinating. Funny eh?”

  Noah thought it was heartbreaking but he gave a little laugh himself and said yes it was funny. He did not want this woman who felt more like his sister at this moment, a younger sister at that, to stop talking.

  The rest of the story was not really sad at all. Glory had a teacher at school who helped her find a job with a wealthy family in the town. They took her in to help with a new baby and help with the cleaning. She had her own bedroom and bathroom over the garage and she ate in the kitchen with the cook who liked to be called Cookie, saving her more elegant real name, Ophelia, for Sunday meeting. Cookie was good to Glory who she always called “baby girl” and Glory loved being called “baby girl” hearing the love in the phrase. She studied in her room at night and took a test and got her GED and went to cosmetology school so by the time she would have graduated from high school she was all ready to go out in the world and earn a better living than her father ever had.

  She got herself a little apartment for cheap in one of the old row houses on Prince St. near St. John’s College and for a while she even had a boyfriend although he dumped her when he graduated. He had been from a rich family and she figured he would go home and marry the daughter of one of his father’s rich friends. She knew how it worked. Cookie had warned her. Nonetheless she nursed a broken heart through the spring feeling left out of the tenderness of the season and fell into a summer lethargy that could as easily have been the heat as a temporary depression.

  By the next October she was inexplicably joyful, invigorated by the crisper air, clear blue skies and the brilliant colors of dying leaves. Once a week, Cookie would come to visit after church and they would fix a special Sunday dinner together and in this way the years passed and Glory collected better memories. Once she was working and making money her parents were happy to have her visit because there were things they wanted that they couldn’t afford and she gave them money so she could have quiet visits with her brother/son Noah and after a while, her story became his story also and they shared those memories again on their long dawn walks.

  Before they knew it Mardi Gras was in the air, everyone getting ready. Glory recalled that in his youth, Noah was much agitated by large crowds but based on how well he responded to the Xmas Eve celebration at the levee, she decided to go with him to watch a Mardi Gras parade. The crowd was larger, more unruly and Noah felt caged in and threatened by the noise and crush of bodies scrambling for strings of beads thrown out to them by the costumed people in the parade. He became so upset that Glory and Corrine had a hard time calming him down and getting him home. Corrine gave him a cup of tea with honey and a few drops of tincture of skullcap and he slept until midday the next day. The next year the three of them watched the Mardi Gras festivities on the television and the ye
ar after that Corrine went with some other tenants and promised to find someone with a television camera and wave to them if they watched for her.

  One day Corrine came running home all excited and just minutes ahead of two muscular young men who carried between them a player piano while Corrine herself had lugged up a box of rolls for it filled with music by guys with names like: Jelly Roll Morton, Memphis Slim, Montana Taylor, Piano Red, Black Boy Shine, Barrelhouse Buck, Cow Cow Davenport, Cripple Clarence Lofton and Kid Stormy Weather. That night they had the time of their lives playing the old timey piano music, making faces and making up silly lines like silent movie stars. The piano keyboard could be played without the rolls as well and Corrine sometimes liked to play some church music and get Glory and Noah to sing and so it was the women discovered that Noah had the gift of perfect pitch. The two women had known that Noah liked to sing and his voice was not spectacular, but the fact that he could accurately reproduce any tone or series of tones Corrine tapped out on the piano impressed them so much Glory decided that Noah should join a choir, maybe she would as well. Corrine said she’d stick to the piano because her vocal range spanned two notes, both of them middle C.

  Glory went to see the priest who continued to look out for the ark behind his church but he said he could not organize a choir as his shifting congregation consisted mainly of homeless and transient individuals more interested in soup and shelter than music. He did write her a letter of introduction however and sent her to another part of town where a friend of his led a first rate choir called upon for all kinds of celebrations both religious and secular. Glory came to find out as she heard him challenged that her son could not only accurately reproduce any tone played for him but he could do that as high or as low as any singer in the choir having command of a full four octaves. Everyone was suitably impressed and made jokes about Noah making it big on Broadway and knowing him “when” and Noah would forever cherish the appreciation of those seasoned singers like he still cherished his peacock feather. Glory’s own range was limited but she discovered that inserting one perfect low tone beneath the soloist’s soaring soprano enriched the timbre and thrilled her soul with its perfection. She felt the harmonies they made as a complete physical sensation that made her weep with something she thought must surely be pure joy. It was a vibrating, shimmering feeling and she felt wholly loved and protected for the first time ever in her life. “So this,” she thought, “is what it feels like to be ‘saved,’ lifted up above fear and sorrow and loneliness, engulfed in harmony.”

  1985 - 1995