Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  The mask? Comtesse. “Is it only phone sex?” he whispered. I didn’t move—I didn’t want him to hear me, inches away. He waited a long time. Then his footsteps receded down the hall.

  From his bed, my father said, “Who the hell?” The gun in his right hand, flat on the sheet along his leg.

  “He was pretty damn lost,” I said. In the stiff sheets which smelled vaguely of smoke, I looked at the ceiling.

  SARRAT

  WE HEADED EAST. The rising sun like a hot dime on a white sidewalk.

  “Mo parle avec t’maman,” my father said. He must have called her last night.

  “You used the room phone?” I said.

  “Call collect. Lady at the front do it.”

  I pictured everyone last night, putting flowers on Glorette’s small gravestone at the chapel, and my mother storming down to Bettina’s.

  Damn—was it Friday? Rick would try not to be pissed, but pretty soon he had to assign the next two issues. Tony—he was always booked, so his agent was going to move on if I didn’t make plans. The Oaxaca piece. It was the 26th—rent was due in a few days. All the things I said to Victor in the hallway felt like bullshit. Like I’d spent the night in a bar, talking to a stranger I wanted to impress.

  We crossed the Brazos River. Ruffled, greenish brown, and wide under the bridge near the town of San Felipe. Each small town, then dense woods.

  The woods of East Texas. Where something had happened to my father.

  I knew we wouldn’t stop to get gas or eat anything until Houston, where there were black people.

  My father couldn’t read, but he knew exactly where to go. He remembered every tree, river, bridge, and silhouette. We got off the freeway, filled up at a station, and sat in a Burger King to eat scrambled eggs and hashbrowns like damp shredded paper. The young woman at the counter was sleepy, her cheeks brown and full, and her straightened hair shiny-slick in ribbon curls. “Y’all drive careful,” she said.

  Outside Houston, after the suburbs faded into the blinding morning, the woods were dark and dense. We crossed the Trinity River in silence.

  I turned on a news station. Hurricane Katrina had finished battering Florida and headed into the Gulf. Someone made a joke about the alligator still eluding the idiots in his lake in Los Angeles.

  “Mr. McQuine,” I said. Was he the first man?

  My father didn’t answer. The man who’d invaded my dreams when I was a child. The heaviness of white flesh suffocating me. A pale blue car with dull chrome teeth that chased me down a road. A boy baby white as coconut flesh, with red hair—because for some reason red hair always scared me—biting me on the shoulder.

  Victor had bitten Glorette on the shoulder once, when he was just a year old—red dents on her skin. She’d bitten him back and he howled.

  The white baby. The place we were headed.

  “Where did they hunt you?” I said finally. “Around here?”

  We were approaching Beaumont. “Prè Vidor.”

  Vidor. Famous in the news for not wanting black residents.

  “La-bas—Jasper,” he said, lifting his chin north, toward my window.

  Jasper. Where a black man had been dragged to pieces, chained to a truck driven by drunken white guys.

  The woods were lit by sunlight in places. Lacy green. “You killed someone around here?”

  “Non. Not here. Mo tou soule.” I was all alone. Then he held up his hands. His wrists were crossed.

  It took me a moment to realize what he was showing me. They had hunted him. They had caught him. And he’d been tied.

  He said no more.

  We drove silently over the Neches River, so wide and deep it must be a hundred of my Santa Ana Rivers. The tamed silver thread near my father’s tamed forest. Rows and rows of woods that belonged to him. Where he knew every branch, every row, every fence, every gopher, every intruder.

  When we crossed the Sabine, we were in Louisiana.

  I didn’t remember this—I must have been asleep in the back with Glorette—the deep green of rice farms and cane fields around us, and rolling prairie, and more woods. We went north on a two-lane highway. Lush grass, cattle behind barbed-wire fences, and most of all, the solitary live oaks that stood along the road or in a field. They were so large, their branches wandering so far, that I could find no word to fit them. We’d left the manicured perfection of my father’s groves and the shimmering impermanence of the desert’s smoke trees and the anonymous dark woods of Texas for oaks that looked as if they’d outlived ten generations of people.

  We stopped in Basile near noon, and the heat was like an electric blanket. The gas station had a hand-lettered sign that read BOUDIN and CRACKLIN. The older white man who sat on his porch near the stand was dressed in a plaid sport shirt like the ones I saw on hipsters in Silver Lake; he spat tobacco juice into a can, and two lines of brown ran down the corners of his mouth like a faint tattoo.

  Near Eunice, I asked, “What exactly are we doing when we get there?”

  But of course he didn’t answer that.

  He said, “Temp passé, they talk on the radio about the bomb.”

  The 1950s, I thought.

  “Say, how you survive when the bomb fall? How you eat? Them Russians.” He bit the insides of his cheeks, so that deep dimples appeared in his face. “Pas bomb here. Sometime it’s a man.”

  The bomb is a man.

  A bayou covered with green duckweed vivid as neon. My father’s voice came as if from a long way. “And some people—they move toujou and everything is them.”

  They move forever. Like Arthur Graves. The world swirled around them, contracted close to them, ensured their happiness?

  “Jazen. He like that. Make a path.” My father shook his head. “But I watch, me. Nobody have to see me.”

  The fields passed. I could watch all day but I wouldn’t know what to do. “Papa, they shot a boy,” I said. “Alfonso’s done it twice now. He needs to be off the street.”

  “Oui. He do. He shoot somethin. Jamais kill, no.” The vein like flattened yarn around his temple. “Kill a pig and do boucherie, then you kill. Take that heart and cut that head. Them boy, they only shoot. Like a game on TV. Shoot from far away.”

  Grady had killed Sere Dakar up close. With his hands. Someone had killed Glorette up close. With his hands.

  “Them three,” my father said, and I thought he meant the boys. “I never shoot them, me. Kill them with my hand.” He held up his right arm this time. Not tied.

  “I know,” I said, and he turned to me, surprised. “I heard you and Gustave talk about it one night. On the porch.” I didn’t want to picture it, but I had. Gustave had said, “You throw that match.” The car had burned in a ditch.

  After a long time, he blew out a skein of smoke and said, “In Texas, I run wine and rum for someone from Plaquemines. Them sheriff get the liquor from my truck. Mais pas tout. He want laugh. Him and them deputy.”

  They had tied up my father, somehow, and found something comic. His helplessness?

  Then my father said, “Maybe Jazen want laugh, too. Laugh at Victor.”

  I remembered Opelousas. The town where Moinette bought a brick building, and her son, and then two more daughters. Why did she buy them? I thought again, remembering the bills of sale. Why did she have to own the children she’d borne?

  Somewhere here, she and Jean-Paul were buried. After he was killed for his defiant smile in a cane field. Only game he know is do or die. Superfly. I wished we could stop, look for their gravestones, see the brick home where she became free. It was a great story. And I’d never written about it.

  There was no stone for Fantine. She had died on a plantation somewhere near here, but she probably only had a wooden cross.

  Past Opelousas, a flock of egrets rose from a cattle pond like moving origami. Green, white, blue. Everything back home was brown and gold and gray by now. Ahead of us loomed the scary bridge over the Atchafalaya. This I remembered, too, suspended above the wide swath of wa
ter.

  My father raised his chin. Turn here, he meant.

  We went north before the bridge. A two-lane road that followed the levee. Somewhere on this levee, my father and Gustave had huddled against each other for warmth while the dead floated past. All these years, in my version of the story I told myself, the Mississippi River had taken away their mothers. But it was the Atchafalaya, swollen by the rains and the Mississippi overflow.

  “Say Atchafalaya so deep, Mississippi fit inside,” my father murmured, looking up at the levee. A bank of earth, covered with grass. Just a wide wall.

  Now I remembered this winding road, small bayous alongside and a lonely house or two. Baton Rouge was half an hour away east.

  There it was. Sarrat Road. The old store on the corner, facing that road, where Glorette and I had bought Cokes every evening after we finished helping my father. Like a shoebox, with the faded rectangular façade and the words SEVEN OAKS in a ghostly outline of capital letters.

  The name of the plantation house. Mr. McQuine’s house, and his father’s before him, and his father’s before him. A man sat behind the small counter in front, near the screened case that held candy and the old white cooler that held soda and beer. The first day Glorette and I came in, after we got out of the truck bed and reached into the cooler for Cokes, he went to the window, looked at the license plate, and then narrowed his eyes at us and said, “California niggers, hanh? Look same as Lousana niggers to me.”

  Nothing but cane. Taller than the car, green walls on either side of us, motionless and fierce in the heat.

  “Ratoon,” my father said.

  The language of Louisiana. Ratoon was second-crop cane, grown from the stubble left in the field from the year before. That summer, Glorette and I had followed the tractor my father drove, laying stalks of seed cane in the furrows like purple-green thighbones.

  A grass. From India. All the grasses and weeds I’d hoed out of the irrigation furrows in the orange groves. Johnsongrass, crabgrass. The wild oats I tried to boil and eat one day when I was small.

  We were surrounded by a huge weed that Moinette and Fantine had cut with cane knives. My father had cut cane when he was only seven, dragging the stalks to a pile taller than he was. He told us this when we complained in the groves.

  After about two miles of cane, we came to Bayou Becasse Road, which ran along the water. Brown-black as tea without milk, the oaks alongside leaching their tannic acid into the water. Glorette and I had been afraid to put our hands in, until my father dropped a string with a tiny piece of old chicken meat and a crawfish grabbed it. By the weekend, we had learned to catch crawfish for etouffee.

  The bridge was narrow over the bayou, and then we came to the sheltering oaks that defined Sarrat.

  The houses were set back from the road, beyond the ditches, which still held some water from rain. There had been twenty shotgun houses back then, and a barn for the tractor, and a few sheds. Behind the houses were the privies.

  Now there were maybe ten houses. One rusted roof lying on a tangle of weeds and branches like a sunken raft. My father leaned forward, squinting at the wooden homes. Four had curtains, and metal chairs on the porches. There were two ancient trailers, robin’s-egg blue with rust dripping like fangs from the window corners, and one pale yellow trailer that looked brand-new. They were set sideways on the lots so they matched the long narrow shotgun houses.

  “La-bas,” my father said, nodding toward the last wooden house at the end. “Henri house. That Claudine uncle.” We drove over the ditch and into the yard. An ancient car was behind the house, at the edge of the cane fields, so rusty it looked dipped in chocolate. When I got out of the car, the sun felt as if it would split my skull, and sweat ran between my breasts. A white man opened the door. He looked like Tony Soprano without as much belly.

  No Navigator.

  They shook hands in the front room, which was sweltering. “Enrique Antoine,” the man said. “Seen your picture before. Heard a few things about you. But we ain’t never met. Albert.”

  “You stay with Henri?” my father said, impassive as ever.

  “I help him out,” Albert said. “And this my cousin? Like Christmas round here, people visitin from California. Except none a y’all ever came at Christmas.”

  We followed him into the second room, where an ancient man roused himself from his bed, a heap of sheet, his gray head wedged into the far corner. “Take your time, Uncle Henri,” Albert said.

  In the last room, he pointed to three wooden chairs around the kitchen table, which was pushed against the wall. This house was exactly like the one where Glorette and I had slept with the old woman in the middle room. We had eaten on the back steps because the kitchen was so small.

  “They kept him up late last night,” Albert said, fanning his fingers over three glossy flyers on the table. “My nephew call hisself takin a break from Cali.” My father settled into the chair opposite him. Albert wore a cream-colored guayabera, two crescents of sweat below his chest. A cigar in the pocket. We knew nothing about him except the circumstances of his birth. Not whether he was armed, whether he knew why they were running, or what he knew about us.

  “I woke em up early and sent em to Baton Rouge,” Albert said. “I got a lil hustle goin, for a video shoot. They can make some cash. Pay Henri some rent, if they plan to crash here, like Alfonso did last time. Everybody gotta have a hustle. Even this place ain’t free.”

  He pushed the flyers over to us. “Call hisself Cane Razor,” Albert said. A handsome brown-skinned young man with almond-shaped eyes, lines shaved into his eyebrows and two front teeth edged in gold. He wore a Saints jersey. His head was cocked to the side; in his left hand he held a large handgun, in his right a cane knife polished and shiny.

  Cane Razor—Soulja Country.

  Video shoot August 26.

  canerazor.com

  Cash prize for fine ladies.

  U No Whut U Got 2 Do.

  Soulja—Soldier. I said, “What do they have to do?”

  “I met the producer in New Orleans. He wanna do a city soulja versus country soulja thing out here. The girls are free. They gotta look good. Dance. Get up onstage and show—” Albert didn’t look like much embarrassed him, but he glanced at me and smiled. “What people wanna see. For the Internet version. You got dirty and you got clean.”

  Great. “And the guys?”

  “Get paid three hundred dollars for the shoot. They said they can rap.”

  I said, “My godson’s got college. Back in California. He wants off this ride.”

  “They’ll be back tonight.” He looked at my father and then at me again. “I checked out LA few times. California ain’t nothin special.” He grinned. Albert—what was his last name? Not McQuine. Claudine’s son. Did he know what my father had done?

  He knew. Albert was all about knowing.

  “How you make it?” my father said to Albert.

  “Do what come natural.” He grinned. Old school. “I’m bringin some props to the shoot. Had big money last year, takin cars to Vegas. Got all these old cars in the fields, in people yards. Chevys, like ’56s and ’57s. Them Mescan guys in Vegas was crazy, they wanted them cars so bad. Ain’t hardly no old cars left in California. I bought the cars off old people, got my friend to hook em up on a trailer, and we took about ten of em out there. Then the Mescans started fightin with some black gang, and I ain’t been out there for a while.” He shrugged. “They thought I was Italian. But they seen the brothas drivin with me. That was that.”

  The old man called, “Enrique? Enrique?”

  My father got up and went into the bedroom, and they spoke in low French.

  Passe blanc. Albert’s goatee was brown, the hair straight and fine as a boar-bristle paintbrush. The hair on his head was sparse and combed back. It was the faint rosy pink in his skin. Like Bettina, and her mother, Claudine. He looked straight at me. “I guess you done did Italian, too. Somebody told me you call yourself whatever you want.”


  “Who?”

  He shrugged. He bent forward and said softly, “That boy stay outside in the car and Alfonso said, ‘He talkin to his marraine. She in Paris.’ ”

  “Came back early,” I said. No way of knowing whether I could tell him about the bullet. Maybe Alfonso had said Victor was the shooter. “Where’s the video filming?”

  “They checkin locations. It ain’t till later, cause the light too harsh in the day, you know? The crew came up from New Orleans. Gotta be that kinda gold light. Say that make their boy look good.”

  “Who is this kid?”

  “Lady used to live down the way. That’s her son. But Alfonso look good. They gon use him onstage. And the other one—he ain’t said much. Tryin so hard to be gangsta. The light one slept in the car. They said he was drunk. Ain’t seen him all night.”

  His eyes were gray-green as shallow water over cement. Victor was drunk? On the purple stuff? Or passed out from pain?

  “Victor—that Anjolie grandson,” Uncle Henri said, coming into the kitchen. He had combed his hair and changed his shirt. He had to have been a few years older than my father, but he gave me a strong hug with those thin arms, and he smelled of Vicks.

  “Well, Michelle’s daughter was sittin in the car with him, so he must got some play,” Albert said. “I’ma heat up the catfish she brought.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Michelle Meraux. Live down there. She cook for Henri every other day.”

  Henri smiled, his eyes webbed with that ghostly blue of old age, his teeth outlined in gold. Just like Cane Razor. And Henri’s cane knife was still in its place on the wall, by the back door. Clotted with sap, unsharpened, the hook like an eyelash.

  I wasn’t about to eat some of his catfish, since he only had three pieces. The kitchen was a two-burner stove on a counter. I looked in the cupboard, which was the old white-painted metal kind, but the only things inside were a bag of rice, one of grits, and some sugar. The thought of cooking anything, even turning on the burners in this stifling heat, made me dizzy. “I need some coffee,” I said.