Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  Stare at the Mississippi too long and them spirit call you drown. That’s what Aunt Monie used to say. She ignored us, walking briskly along the levee toward the south, as she probably did every single day at exactly this time, behind the dogs that raced as fast as they could along the road. She was the one who’d made me see the river and the world underneath a world, the first time.

  Aunt Monie had whispered, Attend! You don’t know the river, you get too close. But them whirlpool take you down. And them spirit hold you for themselves. Take a boat. Take a girl.

  We walked in silence. If Victor had come up here, and looked at the names on the crypts, and seen that the house held nothing, where would he go next?

  I knew the story, from Aunt Monie, but I didn’t know what he knew.

  Monie had told Glorette and me: The river bring her. Amina. The one from Senegal. She hold her girl on the boat, all the way from Africa, so no one throw her in the ocean. Then they come up this water. And Amina die from the soldier blue. Marie-Therese live in my house. She have Moinette, and watch that girl all the time. Don’t wash clothes in the bayou. Trader steal you. Then Bordelon sell Moinette. Right there at the landing. Marie-Therese drown herself in Bayou Azure. But the spirit push her back up. Dya. The spirit in the water. They don’t want her yet. Them pirate come up the bayou and they catch her. Take her to Comtesse.

  She was buried at the place we’d passed.

  We reached the old landing. Rotted pilings and what was left of a boardwalk that led off to nowhere in the woods. Past that, along the levee road, cars and trucks were parked in a straight line. The dogs turned around, confused, and ran back toward us.

  “She ain’t want to raise us,” my father said, back in the yard. “Me and Gustave.”

  Aunt Monie. I said, “I better go to Comtesse and check out the graveyard.”

  It was after four now, and the sky was leaden and gray. Three men pulled up in front of Aunt Monie’s house and unloaded plywood, propping it against the porch railing. “She won’t let us put em up till tomorrow, but leave em there now,” Emile called.

  He leaned against the truck door and cocked his head. A player.

  I put out my hand and said, “Fantine.”

  He grinned and said, “Ain’t it F-X? Look like you, anyway.” He made my name a long two syllables, and his grin pushed deep into one cheek. “F-X.”

  And just like that—like talking to Marcus, or my brothers—I laughed and the words flew out and my whole chest felt warm. “You ain’t gotta make it sound like I’m trying so hard,” I said. Emile, who had been fifteen when I was ten, who’d already had girlfriends hanging around Azure, sitting on the let-down gate of a pickup wearing shorts and swinging their legs. With his football player’s chest that summer, two flat plates of muscle that met along a pale line running vertically along his breastbone. His arms muscled from fishing and dredging oysters. I’d had a big crush on him, but Glorette and I were like little wisps of nothing. Feux follets, he called us, when we stalked him in the woods while he built a bonfire with his friends and the girls.

  “Have you seen a kid in a yellow T-shirt? Wearing a bandanna around his arm? Walking? That’s Glorette’s son. He’s in trouble.”

  “And he come down here? Who he hidin from?”

  My father spoke in French to the other men. I said to Emile, “Looking for something.”

  He said, “You don’t remember when I came to California? You only home for a hot minute that time. Dressed like some fashion model in college.”

  I frowned. A faded red car pulled up behind him, and a woman shouted, “You gon park up on the levee, Emile? That where you tell Marceline put her car?”

  He shouted back, “That blue Thunderbird? Yeah, up there by the old landing road.” He pointed toward the river. She drove down the shell road, followed by another woman in a white Suburban.

  “My second wife sister.”

  “Oh, the second one?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  So easy. “And where’s the third one?”

  He grinned and lifted his chin up high. “I done gave up.” Emile raised his eyebrows. They were thick and winged, arched like Glorette’s. He wasn’t a Picard. But his skin was the same hammered gold as hers. His eyes were brown, though, and flecked with green. I remembered them. Like agate I’d found on a beach in Oregon once.

  “Some funky bandanna tied around his arm? Just about purple? Like he a Prince fan?” Emile said.

  “Yes,” I said. “And we have to find him. We really do.” I didn’t want to tell him about the gun—down here everyone had a gun, and a knife, for fishing and hunting. I didn’t want to tell him about Jazen, Alfonso, or buried treasure, because it sounded crazy.

  Emile had teased me thirty years ago. That was all. But his eyes moved slowly over my face. I put my hand on his forearm, and I whispered, “He’s like a runaway child. Runnin wild. Serious.”

  “Okay, catin. But he could be anywhere. You see how it is.” He picked up a piece of plywood. “Ain’t nowhere to go round here less you know. He ain’t got a boat.”

  They started nailing plywood over the windows of another house, and I sat in the car, holding my phone, watching clouds move in fast from the south. Black and purple, full of rain. Emile called, “That just rain. But you better not be here tomorrow.”

  Tony went straight to message. “It’s past four. Maybe you’re just landing in New Orleans. Tony, I’m not even there anymore. I’m down the river. But I really need you to get two hotel rooms in the city. When I find my godson, I’m coming back.”

  My father came out of Aunt Monie’s house and looked up at the sky. The dangling moss on the cypress began to sway. As the first drops fell, the men kept hammering, and the white Suburban came down from the road. The woman shouted, “Emile! Marceline car ain’t on the levee. You got about ten cars up there, but not that one.”

  Emile walked over to the passenger side. “I tell everyone leave the keys inside cause I might have to move them car after the storm. Who in the hell gon steal that old Thunderbird?”

  “Did you see him drive away?” I asked her. “Glorette’s son?”

  She shook her head. “So many boys round here. And I ain’t cook. Think ol lady toujou cook. I ain’t no grandmère.” Aunt Monie made coffee in a battered metal drip pot, and poured it into two tiny china cups. She pushed one at me and sat at the table. I drank five sips of darkness. “That boy say, My grandmère dead. I say, Well, I ain’t take her place, me. He say, You know where she bury? I say, You never read your Bible? Even the wise die, the fool and the stupid alike must perish and leave their wealth to others. Their graves are their home forever. Cimitaire, cipriere.”

  Cemetery or swamp.

  “He say, How many cimitaire? Azure, Petit Clair, Comtesse, Woodland up north. Say, Diamond, Port Sulphur down south. Dead people in the river, in the levee.”

  He could be anywhere, if he’d stolen the Thunderbird. Aunt Monie listened to the rain, loud on the tin roof. She said, “Some people die in the water and never bury. Enrique know that.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of the hurricane?” I said.

  She gave me that imperious look—the one I’d seen on old men in Portugal, sitting outside a tobacco shop, watching young people walk past. An old man, Tio Wilfredo in Belize, who critiqued the way a grandson had brought in fishing nets from a cay.

  She said, “So many people come. They all want me go to Lafayette. But I ain’t go. Your love to me was extraordinary,” she said. “The evening devotion. Samuel 1:26.”

  “Your love?”

  “Mesdames,” she said. She looked at the dogs, who lay with their heads up, watching. “Mesdames want love. Jamais money.”

  The dogs leapt up. “Fantine,” my father said through the screen.

  “And Enrique,” Aunt Monie said quietly, not looking at him but at me. “All day, I make quelque-chose live. All day he make them die.”

  ———

  The rain had stopped, a
nd the trees were dripping, the sun hard again. But we had only a few hours until nightfall. Victor didn’t even know how to drive.

  “I’ll check out the cemeteries,” I said to my father.

  A stolen car and a gun. A bandanna. A pathetic gangster looking for a mythical bracelet.

  My father said, “Some them cimitaire you can’t drive. They in the woods.”

  “When I come back, we’re going to a hotel in New Orleans. If I can’t find Victor, he has to be trying to drive back to California, and he’d have to get gas money.”

  He shrugged. “I been in two storm. We ride on the boats.”

  “Papa. We’re not riding out a hurricane in a boat. Maman would kill us if we lived. Tony’s getting a hotel room. And we should take Aunt Monie.”

  Emile pulled the last sheets of plywood off the bed. He stretched his arms behind his head, and his muscles moved under the white T-shirt covered with oil, mud, and grime. “A hotel, huh?”

  Only the four men, Aunt Monie, and I were left now.

  Emile held out his hands wide. “She Aunt Monie! She just made ninety-nine. She ain’t gotta be nice. She ain’t gotta do nothing she don’t want to.” Then he bent to pick up the plywood. “But you from California. Your daddy be okay, but you? Regular rain scare the shit outta you. I seen you runnin just now.”

  I said, “Seriously? You don’t even know me. I’ve been in a blizzard in Maine. I sat on a highway in the Austrian alps for eight hours with a friend after an avalanche. A heat wave in Naples where people were lying in fountains trying to stay alive. And I’ve been through four earthquakes.”

  He waited for my father to pick up the other end of the stack. “That ain’t a storm.”

  I pulled onto the two-lane highway. The sun was dangling lower, a blurry explosion in the filthy windshield. Marie-Therese. Slaves didn’t get last names. And where the hell would he think the treasure was—buried like some old ghost story beside a tree? Marked with a damn X?

  Twice I went down dirt roads and ended up in yards, where brick ranch-style houses were boarded up. The second time, a man came out of the backyard, staring at me, a rifle held loose along his leg. I turned the car around quickly. He thought I was a looter.

  My heart was pounding, and I’d had nothing to eat all day. I saw the stand of trees—the road, and went through a gap in cars again. Comtesse. The track was puddled and rough. The levee wasn’t far—much closer than Azure. This house had fallen into the river. I got out carefully, looking for a clearing, a grassy area, a cemetery that someone had visited. A black wrought-iron fence, like lace, and six crypts, white stone with angels and crosses and faded plastic flowers and names carved onto the doors. The grass had been mowed.

  I looked through the fence. Louise Picard: 1870–1900. Philomene Picard: 1822–1865. Octave Picard: 1798–1821. And three more crypts whose etched names were blurred into nothing. Maybe Marie-Therese? But at those three, nothing was dug up, no marble was chipped or broken open.

  Maybe he would look for the second Marie-Therese, Moinette’s daughter. I got back in my car and drove south, past Azure, into Diamond, which was a bigger community, with a church. St. Jude’s. This cemetery was very large and well kept, and the levee was grassy and bare nearby. It took a long time, but I found the gravestone. Marie-Therese Antoine. “She mechant. Voleur. That why she get what she want,” Aunt Monie had said when I was small. She was bad. A thief. She’d slept with whomever she wanted to. I touched the white marble of the crypt, the carved numerals. 1835–1935. The women in our family lived a long time.

  I would be forty this year. Sixty more years? I’d be like Aunt Monie. Or I’d get a place in Zurich. Or someday move back to Sarrat, to my mother’s house? Not likely. I wouldn’t be an old lady anyone liked.

  So I’d be Aunt Monie. Great.

  I sat in the parking lot, watching the sun get less silver, more gold. I pushed the button. “Leave the digits.”

  “Victor,” I said. “You’re in a Thunderbird. Pretty impressive. Except you took it from some woman who’s gonna need it after the hurricane. We’re running out of time.”

  The air around the car was heavy as honey. I said, “I’m in the parking lot of the church at Diamond. Here’s the deal. Find whatever you think you’re looking for and then bring the car here. That way you won’t have to see anyone. Except me.”

  I closed my eyes. “I’m gonna sit here for a while. I’m really tired. But I have one more story about your father. You think your dad played your moms and didn’t want you. Nope. You told me Professor Zelman made fun of the Floaters. The Delfonics, the Whispers. What brothers put on when they get serious. Your father hated them. He was a music snob, too. He told me the Floaters were simpleminded. Let me take you to love land. You think he went off to be a famous musician. But Grady, he killed your dad. He was obsessed with your mom.”

  I thought of all the men, staring at her, thinking they knew. “It was hard to be her,” I said. “So hard.”

  I heard car doors slam near me. Someone went into the church. “One night, Grady stole a car to impress her. She could not be moved, Victor. She loved your dad like that. And then she was a few weeks away from having you, and Grady caught your dad in the parking lot of a club and killed him. He took the body—”

  Two little girls with black cornrows and white beads stared at me through the window. Victor didn’t need to know about La Paloma. “He took your dad out to the ocean. No one ever found him. I know you’re like, Nice story. But Grady told me all this five years ago. Grady’s homeless. Your mom left him and he lost his mind. Ended up on the street. I’m the only one he ever told.” I took a breath. “I never told anyone because I didn’t know which was worse—that your father got killed or that he just disappeared.”

  The white beads swung like a hundred moons when the girls ran back to their mother’s car.

  And Glorette? What Alfonso told me wouldn’t change how Victor felt. She had been killed for nothing, too.

  “Victor. Everyone lost it over love. All three of them. And Danita—she fell hard for you. DJ Scholaptitude.” I lay the seat back all the way. “I’m sitting here in Diamond. I love you, okay? I didn’t know before. Come on. We need to go home.”

  I must have slept so deeply that inside my mind went black, as if I were under layers of earth, and my chest felt full of dirt, and I couldn’t breathe.

  A loud pounding woke me up. They were boarding the windows of the church, and it was dark.

  A crown of blue in the dim light of the yard near Aunt Monie’s. A huge pot on a portable gas ring. The houses were all blind except for hers. The only light was from her porch, her front window, and two lanterns the men had put in her yard. The heat pressed down on us, but the biggest metal fan I’d ever seen—the size of a small trampoline—blew air over us and kept the mosquitoes away.

  Emile said, “He runnin outta time. This boy.”

  “I know,” I said. I looked at the complete darkness toward the levee and the river. There was no moon yet. Night here was night. Like being inside a weird black-velvet painting where only the light around us existed—the burner, the white plastic stack chairs like squat skeletons. Van Gogh but even darker, more blurred than his stars.

  Emile said, “This my cousin Freeman and his son Philippe.” They shook my hand and sat back down on the chairs. My father came out of Aunt Monie’s house carrying a pot.

  Emile said, “Guy sold us crab and redfish cheap. He wanted to empty the freezer before he left.”

  Aunt Monie sliced white onion and green pepper on a cutting board, her fingers still nimble and precise. She gave my father a withering look. “Nobody live without onion. Pepper. And oil. Corn oil right there, in that pot. You call corn a bush or a grass?”

  What the hell were they arguing about? He bowed his head and refused to look up.

  “They been had this fight before,” Emile whispered to me. “She says women raise up things to live, little things, and men kill everything. Men think they’re the
ones.”

  She put a wide flat cast-iron pot on the gas ring and fried the fish with the onion and pepper. “Creole tomato. Easter lily. Grow em all here. Bien place, ici. Why go to Texas?” she said darkly. “Why go to California?”

  She was still angry at my father for leaving. Just like my mother was angry with me.

  Redfish and blue crab. What a title for a food piece. The fish was not blackened but seared in lacy char. The crabmeat was splintery white and filled with the tingle of salt and red pepper, so spicy my lips burned.

  We had beer from an ice chest. Jimmy Taco would die. All those guys who wrote about food—this was what they lived for.

  Suddenly, just like the day before, I saw other people sitting here, in this circle.

  The old woman from Venice—Signora Passoni, at her long dining table with the most delicate, perfect handmade fettuccine like a nest of gold. An elderly woman named Jean in Southstoke, a village outside Bath, who’d saved every plastic bag and rubber band since the war, whose dark cottage was cluttered and airless but whose apricot preserves were like golden nectar. A woman about seventy with a red headscarf, grilling kielbasa at a church festival in Chicago—the best bursting-open browned thing I’d ever eaten.

  What would they say to Aunt Monie, pulling crabs from the pot? The ancient woman in the mountains outside Brienz? Her granary built on layers of flat black stones to keep out the rats. Her tiny wooden kaase-hutli. The cheese had its own house for summer.

  “Hey,” Emile said. “You left the planet?”

  I shook my head. “Just sleepy.”

  He said, “I gotta move the big truck up to the levee in the morning. Tante Monie, you got your generator set up, right? We got gas. Where we takin your animals?”

  “You not—”

  “Poulets, Aunt Monie. Where you want them?”

  She straightened her narrow shoulders in the print shirt. “Take them on the boat.”

  He shook his head. “No poulet on my boat.”