Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  “Not less you goin to Baton Rouge or back to Krotz Springs,” Albert said. “Ten miles. My car down at the barn. Keith putting some oil in. Keith and his brother the only one workin cane. That big company bought all the land about twenty years ago.”

  Henri said softly, “Cane all the way to the back do. Your house fall down, they plant cane over you.”

  Albert said, “Michelle cookin jambalaya today. She always got coffee. Tell her I’m goin to the store tonight for coffee and butter and whatever she want.”

  When I went to the front room, my father was sound asleep in the easy chair. He wore just his white V-neck T-shirt, his skin tanned at the neck. He had taken off his boots. His feet were long and pale. He never wore sandals. His toes were so defenseless next to the duffel bag that I felt a frightened pang in my chest. His head dropped onto his chest. He had been sitting up, dozing, waiting, all his life. All these nights. Now he felt like he was safe—here.

  In the bedroom, one suit and three shirts hung in an old wooden armoire whose door was swung open. There was only a picture of Jesus, his face alight, his hands raised, on the wall.

  In the kitchen, Albert put his plate in the metal sink. There was one wooden shelf nailed to the wall, with tins of pepper, Creole seasoning, salt, and Red Rooster hot sauce like a little skyline. The old wallpaper was tiny flowers.

  A door off the kitchen—a tarpaper-framed addition that must be the bathroom. At the back door, I stood on the three wooden steps and looked out at the cane fields. A row of oaks in the far distance, on a small rise. The privy out the back of the house next door, and two more after that collapsed.

  Which house had Glorette and I slept in, that August? The big pecan tree in the back.

  It was gone. The yellow trailer had taken its place.

  Albert stood behind me. “You off work? On vacation?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  His eyes glinted like bottle glass in the shaded doorway. “Michelle probably know where Alfonso and them went. He took her daughter to help him find pretty faces.”

  More likely pretty butts, if it was a video. “Meraux? Alfonso’s twins—their mama’s a Meraux.”

  “Michelle’s niece. She stay over in Bayou Becasse. Where I got my house.” He pointed out the window. “We bought ours the same time three years ago. She got the yellow house. We bought em brand-new from this guy I know.”

  “The trailer?”

  “The way you say it.” He grinned again. “Where you from?”

  “LA.”

  “Oh, yeah, ain’t no manufactured homes there. Out there, y’all call it trailer trash. White trash. But you ain’t got black trash. Just niggas. Niggas is niggas. Ain’t no need to add nothin else, right?”

  “Nobody said the word trash.” He stood right behind me now, his breath wafting over my shoulder. I went down the steps into the yard. The heat seemed to boil out of the cane in waves, and the patch of Saint Augustine grass was spongy under my feet. Someone had cut it recently.

  “Your maman Marie-Claire?” Henri asked from behind us. He stood in the doorway, bent slightly to the left, his eyes scanning the sky. His voice was clipped and French, like my father’s. “Marie-Claire cook every day,” he told Albert. “Right there where the house fell. That where we eat, when we come in from the field. She make a gumbo, chicken stew, biscuit, rice. Praline in the fall. Coffee. Get a plate every night twenty cent, fifty cent. No need to cook.” He put his hand over his eyes like a brown visor, and then he pointed at the empty yard next door. “That house finis—1995. Marie-Claire, they taken her to California, and jamais see her maman before she die.”

  Right here. My mother used to sit on wooden steps right here and sort through pounds of rice, pick out the stems and pebbles. There was only a chimney left, a tangle of vines tight around the brick, and a few depressions in the soil. Someone weed-wacked the brush to keep it clean. Because of Mr. McQuine, she never saw her mother again.

  I looked back at Henri’s house. Was he still working cane when we came that summer? All I remembered was a sea of older faces every night. They all spoke French too fast for Glorette and me. We made up our own language. We’d seen my brothers and Bettina dancing and playing their music at the barn. “Your Love Is Like the Holy Ghost,” we laughed. That old Bar-Kays song. “The antidote to fill my soul.” We rolled our eyes at the things my brothers said on the phone to Westside girls. “You fine as wine and just my kind. Wait for me after practice. I swear, you killin me.”

  In the fields, picking up the cane from the flatbed truck, we got through the heat and dust by pretending to be Marvin Gaye. “ ‘How could you be so cruel? Oh, baby—please, darlin, come back—home!’ ” At the end of a row, we threw water on each other like we’d fainted onstage.

  The wooden boards of Henri’s house were pearly gray, and with the rusted car, the chinaberry tree, and the old privy, it looked like a Walker Evans photo. What if I’d been born here? I’d been to Charleston—the narrow sideways houses, slave quarters behind. I’d seen tabby houses, slave quarters near Fernandina, Florida. The walls glinting with bits of shell. Once in Virginia, somewhere outside Richmond, I was on a tour bus and someone whispered, “My grandmother used to call that place a breed farm. Raise babies there.” It was a rainy, dark day, and the trees were bare and black, the wooden buildings dim and overgrown from the road.

  I walked down the road toward the yellow trailer.

  The front door was set squarely in the center above wooden steps. A woman opened it. Red-gold hair cut to the scalp and pressed in perfect waves like lace, brown-gold skin and three small moles under her left eye. Two lines on her throat. She was a few years younger than me. She folded her arms and said, “Don’t tell me Albert got him a new girlfriend. Who you supposed to be?”

  “Fantine,” I said. Not FX and not Antoine, because what if she knew about Mr. McQuine?

  “You from California, too?”

  “Too?”

  “Them boys—all that gangsta rap,” she said, her face impassive. “Come from LA. I’m tired of it. But my daughter went off with one of em couple hours ago. Took my car.”

  This heat swarmed like wasps down my shirt, into my throat every time I breathed. “Which one?”

  “The one with the cut arm.” She studied my blouse from Oaxaca, my too-long jeans and the sandals. “Alfonso just a grinnin fool. Last time he came here, five years ago, he had shot someone and he was runnin. He stayed with my niece and got twins. I don’t know what he up to this time. But the light one—he was shady. He didn’t want to get out the car. Somethin wrong with him.”

  “You don’t know where they went?” Immediately, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. Her daughter was with them. Now I’d questioned her discipline. Her face closed even further, her chin lifted till I saw the gleam of sweat on her neck.

  “So you from LA? Or New Orleans? You with these video people?”

  My phone rang, and then died quickly. Tony.

  “This ain’t the city. Service messed up here. You gotta go up to that headland road, you want to talk to some rap star,” she said, and closed the door in my face.

  The cane was about eight feet tall. On the narrow service road, the stalks came right up to the dirt. Each row was tightly jammed together, like ratoon cane grew because it had had all year to develop roots. The tops were green and lush, the bottoms already shaggy and brown. Gustave used to have his own sugarcane patch at home—he felled one stalk with a machete and slashed off the leaves in movements so quick Glorette and I couldn’t even see, and then sectioned it into cylinders for us to suck out the sweet juice.

  I heard birds, and a very faint rumble of someone driving a tractor maybe a mile away. The tall grass from India that had traveled here on a ship and then been turned into white crystals. It rustled. Always. Even in the stillness of this heat.

  I walked blindly. The lush green explosions of orange trees, painted on the crates and labels and in the galleries. The women tying sheaves of wheat in
France. The gleaners, following the potato harvest in England. The women carrying baskets of peppers on their heads down the mountain trails of Bolivia. Glorette and me, holding the cut cane like batons. And from each joint, a twelve-foot stalk of grass. Cut it down, burn off the leaves, grind out the juice, boil it for hours, to get a white crystal. Sparkling. A cube, in a glass saucer, on a marble table in Paris.

  My phone came back on. It was nearly two. I reached the headland road, where the trucks would park to collect the cane when the harvest began. This road was wide and high, winding through the fields and out onto the highway. From here, I could see two roofs in Sarrat, floating just past the green.

  My mother—what must she have thought, weeding in the windy aisles between orange trees behind my father, remembering this solid wall of whispering, slashing grass?

  All the splinters she had removed. And one night, she’d sewn up Claudine’s arm.

  Claudine—face impassive if we dared to knock on her door, her arms folded. The right one with two long scars, satin-shiny and keloid-raised, across the soft underside.

  “Did she try to kill herself?” I asked my mother before I went to bed one night.

  My mother was washing out coffee cups. Her face was incredulous. “Heh?”

  “Cut her wrist like that. After she had the baby?”

  My mother turned toward me, furious. “She cut that arm break into a car. Some boyfriend in San Bernardino and he take her radio. She break a window.” My mother bent her head over the sink again. “You always make up some story. Some romantic story. Nobody kill they own self.”

  I walked toward the single huge oak tree on the headland road and called Clarette, even though she’d be at work. She was the only one who might understand.

  “You know I don’t normally have my phone on,” she said. “But I’m in the office doin paperwork on a fight. Just like the fights Alfonso got in.” She sighed. “Where are you? Y’all find them?”

  “We’re in Sarrat. Louisiana. Where everybody was born.”

  “Oh, shit. What are they doin there?”

  “Apparently trying to avoid coming back to see you,” I said. “At the prison.” No shade. It was too far to the oak tree. I turned around, and could see nothing but the sun.

  “Don’t tell me that,” Clarette said, and her voice broke.

  “You okay?”

  “You know what? I’m tired today. All this stuff I’m doing—piano and book fair and tutoring—what if it doesn’t matter at all? What if Rey Jr. decides it’s more fun to hang out with Bettina’s boys? Cause they havin a ball at your maman’s.”

  I felt light-headed. Shade. I pushed into the row of cane. Shade down the tunnel. I was a rustle, an animal. “I’m the last person to ask,” I said. “I don’t know shit.”

  Clarette said, “I should have taken Victor in. But I didn’t have kids, when he was little, and then I just concentrated on my own. I feel so guilty—”

  “I could’ve done it, Clarette,” I said. The stalks slid over me as I ducked. Glorette and I, hiding from each other. “I was—”

  “Nobody expected you to do it,” she said, dismissively. Me. The selfish travel writer. The bagavond. Shame bloomed hotter inside me. Clarette said, “Just a minute,” and then a man said, “You done? They got both of em in holding.”

  Clarette was facing hundreds of prisoners, and I was whining. “You have to go,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”

  But what would I say? I stood still in the cane for a moment. Nobody expected you to do it.

  I walked back toward the houses. Glorette. I pushed my way down the row of cane behind her and she laughed. Two little animals in the forest. We ran to the gallery and some man was there, delivering something from a truck. He said, “That the one? Anjolie girl?” and the people turned to look at Glorette. He said, “Damn.” She froze like a cartoon girl, and I saw what they saw. The heart-shaped face, the huge pansy eyes, the hair in two braids to her waist.

  And she turned back toward me—the invisible one, a blurry golden cipher—before she disappeared again into the field.

  At the edge of Michelle Meraux’s yard, I stopped to wipe the sweat out of my eyes with my sleeve. The embroidered flowers like little knots. She came out of her door and crossed the lawn. “You okay?” she called.

  She curved up her lips, just a little. Her lip gloss was pale brown. She was small, like me, but she had a butt when she turned to glance at the trailer. She wore faded pink capris, and then I noticed wet white circles on her knees. “I just did the floor,” she said.

  “Gotta use the brush,” I said. “That’s what my maman made me do.”

  “My daughter won’t do it,” she said, and suddenly her voice was full of despair. “I tell her to do the floor while I’m at work, and she takes that Swiffer across the linoleum like it means something.”

  My mother’s scrub brush was plastic now, but I still remembered the smell of the wooden one, the straw bristles.

  “She just called. She’s with those boys in Baton Rouge. Said the one got himself a crazy name was lookin for some paper he dropped in the yard.” She held up a small note.

  “Victor?”

  “No. Scholastic something.” She held up the paper. “Wait—that one your son?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I came to take him home.”

  And for the first time, it was easy to say. I could see it. A daybed for Victor to replace the low-slung Indonesian chair. A desk instead of the table that held his mother’s picture.

  She put the note on my palm. I turned to the circle of shade under the chinaberry tree to focus on the small writing. A receipt from Burger King. From last night.

  I balanced all, brought all to mind

  The years to come seemed waste of breath,

  A waste of breath the years behind

  In balance with this life, this death.

  Who was that? Tennyson?

  I had just talked to him last night. He hadn’t wanted to kill himself.

  If I live, one more thing. Bassi. Indian music and American rappers.

  I felt a sharp sting on my ankle. Then I was standing in flame. A burning like I’d never felt in my life. I screamed and looked down. Tiny ants boiled over my feet as if the earth had erupted, hundreds of them. I screamed and ran.

  “No! No!” Michelle yelled at me. “Come here!”

  She pointed at my feet and said, “Take off your pants! Now!”

  The fire engulfed my legs. I unzipped the jeans and pulled them down, and two ants were on my forearms, biting instantly. I threw the inside-out jeans away from me, and stood in my underwear. Michelle took off her sandal and scraped hard, wiping the ants from my calves and feet. “You gotta unlock their jaws,” she said, while I sobbed. My blood was on fire. I fell again, and she pulled me up roughly.

  “Get inside,” she said. “Stop screamin before somebody call the cops. Albert probably over there laughin right now.”

  In a bathtub, she poured bleach and water over my legs. The bites were everywhere on my feet, my ankles, my calves, two on my thighs, two on my forearm. Like red sequins. I’d never felt pain like this in my life. The bleach fumes rose into my eyes. Red and white and then black.

  I hit my head on the side of the tub.

  Michelle’s voice was vague and her fingers hard as pliers on my wrists. She said, “You gon faint like some old lady? You ain’t gonna die. Here. Put this on your face.”

  A wet cloth scented with lavender soap.

  “Why you wearin jeans anyway?”

  “That’s all I ever wear.”

  “Why? Where you work?”

  The bleach and water once more. The pain throbbed. Not fire. Like my legs were swelling, like I was rising up to the ceiling on waves of itch already so intense that every nerve opened. Anemones of itch.

  “No. Don’t touch anything. Put your hands on the side of the tub. I’ll be right back. Good thing I was cookin today.”

  The tub was huge. An old white-enamel claw
foot tub, with silver taps across from my decorated feet. My blouse and jeans outside in the grass. My nephew’s tank top soaking wet, my gray underwear spotted with white from the bleach.

  Someone knocked on the door, and she said something, and they laughed. Albert? Then a car drove away.

  Michelle came in with a blue plastic bowl. “I can’t really let you lay on my bed, not like that, so you gon have to stay in the tub for a while.” She put slices of white onion on my legs and ankles. They were like discs, sliding off, so she tied dish towels around them to hold the onion tight to the skin. One slice on my arm, which I held like a compress.

  She sat in a wicker chair beside the door. “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, but that’s the funniest thing I ever seen in my life. If I had Danita’s new camera, I woulda taken a video. So you could see it.” She started laughing, her earrings swaying. “Albert said look like you did the Funky Chicken mixed with the Freak.”

  “I’ve never felt anything like that.”

  She sighed. “Hope you ain’t allergic.” She crossed her legs. “I better stay here.”

  “This is the prettiest tub I’ve ever seen,” I said. “Like a fancy hotel.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I got it from the lady I take care of. From her uncle’s house. We had to put in one of them sit-down showers.”

  I leaned my head back on the cool rim. Her air conditioner was working hard, moisture collecting on the bathroom window like dew.

  Michelle said, “Look at this. Friday afternoon. When I got this tub, I was picturing some fine man layin up in here. And instead I got you.”

  I would have laughed, too, if my legs weren’t boiling with fire ant venom.

  Then her face closed again. “But you probably got all kinda men out there in LA.”

  “Nope. Nobody worth a tub like this.”

  She said, “I gotta finish this jambalaya. Get some over to Henri. Then I gotta figure out where my daughter went. With your son.” Her voice was guarded. “I worked six-to-six last night. Come home this morning and she’s tellin me, ‘I ain’t never met no one like that.’ Starry-eyed shit.”