Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  My mother couldn’t speak to me yet.

  The terrible thing I did to my mother was to go away. In college, I stayed away, always going home for Christmas with someone else because I wanted to see Boston or New York City.

  My father had been a traveler all his life, by necessity, and he thought of my movements as survival. He didn’t think about whether I enjoyed the places I went. He thought of them as work.

  But my mother would never be the same. For the last twenty years, I had come home for a night or two now and then, between trips, or for weddings and funerals. My brothers had married and had children and lived in downtown Rio Seco for a while, but they had still come here nearly every day, and so had Cerise and Clarette.

  It had taken me years to learn that my absence was almost as unforgivable as drug addiction or imprisonment. I was not there, for my mother to see and hear and touch, and the reasons were not important. I had met other people like me, working with them on assignment, or at a party or on an airplane, and I knew it wasn’t a Louisiana thing, a rural thing, or even a black thing. It was a clan thing.

  It was the Moors.

  I’d met a Samoan guy who was an actor and never went home to Carson, where his parents had settled when they left the island. An Irish girl who was a singer and never went home to her tiny town in County Galway. A photographer from Kayenta who never returned to the Navajo reservation in Arizona except for funerals, and once, to take photos to accompany my piece on Monument Valley. When we went to see his mother, she looked at him with the same fierce and palpable resentment as my mother did me.

  People like us were not meant to measure success in the same way our families did. We were failures to them. I’d met countless ordinary people in college and during meetings who never went home except for annual holidays, who’d been raised and groomed for boarding school and college and grad school and work in distant cities, and for success measured by conversations about them while their photos smiled from a mantel. A big mantel.

  And now Victor wanted to go away. He wanted to be me.

  His three pairs of shoes were lined up on the floor like ghost feet ready to run. On the bed were papers, and a black notebook like Harriet the Spy’s.

  “Water Music—Funkadelic Aquaboogie. Dance underwater and not get wet”: notes for the essay he’d been trying to tell me about. “The journey up the Thames—7-17-1717. Persons of Quality were invited. Barges covered the width of the river.”

  He’d written notes on the back page: Montesquieu 1755 Essay on Taste: “Let us explain our feeling. This will help us exercise our taste, which is nothing else but the ability to discover easily and quickly the measure of pleasure that we ought to find in all things.” His printing was precise as a draftsman’s. Below were random lines: “I take no pleasure in her company, but my slave has provided me with hours of pleasure.” “Taste is the drum: Brazil. Woofers. Taste is the flute: England. Sails.” Lafayette and Reynaldo and Chess: Your Love Is Like the Holy Ghost.

  My mother reached the broom into Victor’s room. She looked up at me quickly, her eyes guarded and shining. “You come home last night?” she said.

  “Today.” I folded the two pages and slid them into my back pocket.

  “You sleep yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’m okay.” I went through the second doorway into the kitchen.

  Unc Gustave lived on the rice and beans my mother brought him, but mostly he warmed tortillas over the burners and rolled them up. There were white webby marks on the black cast-iron fingers of the burner. In the sink were two plates, two more coffee cups, and one spoon. I washed the dishes with a blue sponge he kept in a flowered dish.

  My mother opened the back door. She swept the dust and dried rice and small stones from Gustave’s shoes out into the darkness, and then she rinsed her hands at the sink.

  I handed her the dish towel. She was missing part of her left forefinger. It was a pink nub, blind as a mole’s nose. She’d been chopping ribs at a boucherie, when they killed a whole pig with Lanier, who raised hogs on the other side of the river. A lightning strike startled her, and the ax took off part of that finger.

  Grady’s finger. Buried with Sere Dakar.

  Victor bleeding? Or Alfonso?

  Her cheeks were soft and smudged as old gold leaf rubbed onto intricately carved wood, like picture frames from the 1700s. Smooth as mine, but with a fine mesh of lines around her eyes from the years of working fields and groves.

  “Hundred and four,” my mother said again, and from all my summers of childhood, from all the end of Augusts we had survived lying in the front yard and on the porch to sleep, listening to her moving around with the hose, sprinkling her flowers and vegetables and filling the birdbaths, I knew exactly what her next words would be. “Bien try keep everyone alive.”

  I felt something like lava rising in my chest, into my throat, and I tried to keep it in, so my mother wouldn’t hear, but I nearly screamed when the sob came out.

  They were driving now. They were listening to Fifty Cent. He was listening to The Who on his headphones. Alone.

  The broom fell like a gunshot, thwacking the floor, and my mother came running to me. “What happen? You fall? See—you tired, you ain’t sleep!”

  No, no, no, I moaned, like a ten-year-old. Like I had when I hid in the tree all day to read and found my mother and father running along the canal, sure I was drowned because no one had seen me for hours.

  No. I cried into her shoulder, big crocodile tears she used to call them, and she didn’t mean we were faking, she meant we knew we had done something wrong, something terrible, that was her version of crocodile tears, and I had done something I couldn’t even tell her, because my mother had taken care of everyone, all her life, my father and Gustave and all the children and teenagers and women who came into her house and put their heads on their arms on her wooden table and drank her coffee and said, Oh, Marie-Claire, no.

  I couldn’t tell her why I hadn’t let him stay. I had to tell my father.

  She handed me the dish towel. Smell of coffee in the weave.

  Me—the one who never stayed long enough to joke and wash dishes and feed kids, and I’m back for a minute and start sobbing hysterically—what you got to cry about?

  “You better sit down. Breeze comin now. Where you been?”

  “Switzerland.”

  “You ain’t use to the heat.”

  I was a tourist.

  We sat outside on Gustave’s porch. “You ain’t eat either,” she said.

  I used to bring a box after each trip, with a gift from the place and the magazine featuring my piece. I thought my parents would like Tony’s photos of Venice or Antibes or Brussels. But once I saw three boxes unopened in my old room. Cerise hissed, “She used to say all casual, You mind to open that one? Where Fantine done gone this time? Cause sometimes from them pictures, no one know where the hell y’all been.”

  My mother had never learned to read well. She was the only girl. She had to leave school to wash clothes and cook.

  “I was in Switzerland,” I said, looking out at Cerise’s kids. “I went to this little village way up in the mountains. All the houses were dark old wood, and they had names carved into the balconies. Each house had a name.”

  My mother nodded, looking at her own house, the porch, the bougainvillea lit vivid by the yard lights. “Name like what?”

  “Names of flowers, or trees, or a stream nearby. It was like here. All families.”

  She nodded again. Miss Felonise had gone inside. The breeze lifted the leaves along the gravel road, lifted the baby hairs off my forehead, rushed through cool and startling as it did almost every night. It was like nothing I felt anywhere else, because just over the mountains was the desert. A hundred and four all day, but by three a.m., it would be sixty-two, and everyone would turn over in their sleep and pull up a sheet.

  “Grandmère, you got Popsicles?” the kids said, crowding into the kitchen behind us, Cerise’s son Tite
Lafie at the head. He must be in sixth grade now, looking exactly like my brother. His eyes were brown with flecks of green like torn leaves, his face burnished bronze, his half grin holding something in reserve somewhere behind his left cheek.

  “It’s almost midnight,” Cerise said. “Y’all need to come in and settle down.”

  “It’s still hot!” Clarette’s son Rey Jr. said. His head was nearly bald, and Clarette ran her palm over his skull.

  “You here early!” Clarette said, getting up to wrap her arms around me, and I smelled the coconut hairdress at her temples.

  “Them rugrats wasn’t killin each other out there?” Cerise said.

  “I didn’t see any blood,” I said, and then I shivered.

  “Get em in the bed,” my mother said. She handed me a Coke with crushed ice and added, “You better sleep now.”

  “Slept some on the plane,” I said.

  “That ain’t sleep,” she said, as she always did. Then she made the last pot of coffee, the one my father and Gustave would drink at midnight, and she checked the gumbo.

  The huge cast-iron kettle was outside, over the electric burner where she cooked in the yard to keep the heat out of the house. The big black pot on the stove was only the inside gumbo, the one my mother had brought in for people coming this late. For me, and Alfonso, and Victor.

  Now he might be wounded, scared to death, and what would happen when he showed up here? Everyone would say, Why you didn’t let him stay? Why you couldn’t give up one night? Why you so selfish? Why you didn’t think of Glorette? That’s her son—you couldn’t keep him for a minute? That ain’t no godmother.

  I could write this dialogue as easily as the travel pieces. I closed my eyes and drank the icy dark Coke and felt the burst of warmth and cold collide in my body.

  My mother poured the coffee into the silver thermos. It was time to tell my father and Gustave. I said, “I’ll take it down to them. Where are they?”

  She squinted and said, “Somethin bout gophers where they put that new pipe.”

  My brothers would be drinking beer. I walked down the road to the barn, where four tall yard lights hung like caught stars above the trees. Those lights shone down onto the ramada my brothers built every summer for shade while they worked on the trucks or the tractor. It was a huge wooden structure covered with a fringed roof of palm fronds.

  My brothers, Lafayette and Reynaldo, were not bad men. They just couldn’t love Cerise and Clarette as much as they loved themselves and their friends and their trucks.

  When we were teenagers, along the river and on the football field and in the shade of the pepper tree at Sundown Liquor and the deeper shade of the ramada looming above us like a cartoon version of island paradise, my brothers held court with Chess and Alphonse and Sidney and Grady and the Thompsons. When I read Sula in college, I believed that Toni Morrison had seen the ramada, or the Sundown parking lot. Sula says to her best friend Nel, “Nobody loves a black man more than another black man.”

  But they wouldn’t love Jazen if he’d gotten Victor shot.

  My brothers sat at the wooden table, dominoes laid out before them, their shoulders like copper in the strong light, the brown beetles my father called “bêtes de chandelle” swarming around the high lights, and beer bottles glittering with moisture.

  It was a scene I had never seen painted. What my brothers would say to me was how could I love a painting, or a song, or a book, more than I loved them? How could I love van Gogh’s painting of the woman in a café at Arles enough to leave my own mother, so that I could stand in the Musée d’Orsay, a former train station with wondrously huge clocks overhead, and study the woman’s weary power at her own wooden table, so like my mother at her own kitchen table always crowded with sons and daughters-in-law and grandchildren, but not me?

  I loved Tony because he knew me better than anyone now. I loved how he still missed Ian and we could sleep in the same room if we had to and talk until three a.m. and then wake up with coffee in Naples and walk for six hours without stopping.

  But this was my tribe. I walked past the old cement cistern like our castle tower. There was to be nothing else—no one else and nowhere else—beyond the table, with the light of fluorescent bulb or candle or chandelier, with the faces of those married to us or descended from us.

  Our fire. Our compound. Our walls.

  Us. If they ever found out who had killed Glorette, they’d wait for the right time and get revenge. And they’d bury the body where no one would ever find it. If Jazen dumped Victor somewhere, they’d get retribution.

  “Gustave said Fo-head ain’t been home in two days,” Lafayette said when he saw us, a domino held midair like a white hyphen in his oil-dark palm.

  “Fo-head and Knuckle-head,” Reynaldo said. “Why they hangin out together?”

  They’d always called Victor Forehead, teased him that his big skull was full of nothing but words and no common sense. And Alfonso? Apply the knuckles to the skull over and over but it made no difference.

  Lafayette studied the dominoes. My brothers had been star football players in high school, and now they worked as plasterers. They had that same comfortable quilt of extra years around the waist as Marcus.

  My father and Gustave would never have those extra pounds. They would always be wire-thin, coiled with a different energy. Not the joy and abandon of a fistfight after a football game. The wariness of having survived death since they were small children.

  I realized Alfonso had the layer, though it was from prison food, but Jazen was thin like my father. He was dangerous. Victor was thin but not dangerous—he’d lived on ramen and nuts most of his life. And words.

  The sound of a piano came through the dark trees around us, like spangles of sunlight. Classical. I didn’t recognize the song.

  “Rey Jr.,” Reynaldo said, slamming down his domino. “He got piano camp and orthodontist and basketball and some damn thing to do every minute.”

  He and Lafayette had been living in the box houses for six months. Plastering work was slow, because all the new houses used drywall and Mexican workers; my brothers ended up working for friends half the time, making a little cash here and there, and Cerise fought with Lafayette about money all the time.

  The music stopped, and started again. Tiny golden lassoes. “I didn’t know he was that talented,” I said. “Where’d he get that?”

  “Maybe Clarette’s grandpère. They say he played piano in New Orleans. Back in the day.”

  I looked down the path toward the box houses. Lafayette jumbled the dominoes together. Wash them bones, the older men always said. Who knew how we inherited passion, really? Had Moinette Antoine given me my love for words, because she was a slave who could read? Had Sere Dakar given Victor anything?

  I untucked my shirt and fanned air underneath. Lafayette laughed and said, “Look at you.” He went into his truck and brought out a bag. “I got em for Lafie. You gon pass out in them long sleeves.”

  He handed me a three-pack of white strap undershirts. Boys’ XL. “That’ll fit you, since you still so skinny.”

  The barn’s double doors were half-open. The tractor and crates were against one wall, and the wooden shelves were filled with tools. The canvas sacks for harvest hung upside down, so rats wouldn’t nest inside. I went to the other corner, where my father had an old metal sink, and started to unbutton my shirt. On a corkboard was a map of the world.

  It was a yellowed antique I’d found during my junior year of college, studying abroad in Dijon. I had kept it in my room for a few years, and then put it in the closet. Pins were stuck in places I’d been.

  “Who stuck the pins in here?” I called out the door.

  “Me and Reynaldo. Papa asked us to. I thought you started it.”

  “I never did.”

  “You didn’t care about all the places you went?” Lafayette shouted.

  “I remembered them. Marking off places isn’t the point.”

  “What’s the point?”
>
  “Being there.” I put my finger on the Dalmatian coast, and then near New Orleans. Pula. Why did that name sound familiar?

  Olga. That was a town below Azure. In Plaquemines Parish. Those tiny places never showed on most maps. I went back outside.

  “Like you tryin to conquer the world,” Lafayette said, grinning. “You always been a bagavond.” He bent to take a beer from the cooler filled with crushed ice. It was colder than any refrigerator could possibly be.

  I remembered the uncle Alfonso had mentioned. I said, “Where’s Bettina?”

  “She stay in the last box house. Since June.”

  “Where’s her mama? Miss Claudine’s okay?”

  “She went to Louisiana back in May. She tired a Bettina, too. You should see what them twins did to her old house. Bettina begged Daddy to let her move to the box house. He should kick her out. But ever since Glorette …”

  Ever since Glorette. No one wanted a Sarrat girl to be lost like that ever again, even if it was Bettina, who had been a lost cause since she was sixteen.

  A gunshot sounded from the groves. Then another one.

  I listened, but everything was silent now. No coyotes. No night birds.

  “You sure that was Papa’s gun?”

  Lafayette said, “That’s the .22. Who else be shootin down here? Ain’t nobody huntin rabbit or pig in August.”

  Reynaldo said, “Gophers. Papa and Gustave ain’t gotta eat rabbit or squirrel now. Like all them old stories bout when they was little. They got gumbo now.”

  The thermos was heavy. I headed down the main road into the groves. I wished my father had a cell phone, so I could call him and say, “Hey, I’m bringing coffee, don’t shoot me.”

  The rows of old smudge pots stood like one-armed soldiers along the path to the shed where my father had kept kerosene for the nights when a hard freeze threatened the crop.

  In Los Feliz, my apartment would be stuffy, the night outside full of noise from cars and shouting people. But here, the wind was constant, stirring up the tired leaves and shivering the foxtails. This air come straight from Vegas, my father liked to say. Come down the Cajon Pass with nothin to stop it. Got some cigar smoke and whiskey and sweat in there. From somebody lose again.