Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

He closed the phone so gently I didn’t even know he was gone.

  Emile was asleep, his back turned to the stairway. I curled up in the other bunk while the boat rocked slightly in the current. No idea where Victor was, or my father, and nothing to do but wait for the light.

  Emile was gone when I woke up. The sun was bright and hot in a line across the floor, and it was stifling inside. On the deck were several cases of water, a box filled with canned food, and candles.

  No one was on the dock. I had to walk down the road like a guilty teenager, my hair stuffed into a ball, my clothes wrinkled. Freeman and Philippe were hammering plywood onto Aunt Monie’s kitchen window. My father came around from the back of her house, carrying a board. No Victor.

  I ducked into the house and stood in the tin shower, feeling the thin skin of metal separating me from the voices outside. Aunt Monie had Lifebuoy soap and Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. My hair felt like matted straw. My ant bites were pricks of puckered skin now, like copper rivets on faded jeans. Lovely.

  I put my hair in a wet braid and put on the clothes she’d left on the chair. Her clothes. Knit pants in a turquoise shade, and a printed blouse with twirling flowers in the same shade, along with pink and yellow.

  She’d left me a pair of rubber boots, too. White. Just to the middle of the shin. Sexy.

  I was her.

  My clothes were hanging on the wash line next to hers. My white shirts hung upside down, sleeves like broken arms.

  Emile stood up from measuring a board and looked at me gravely. He wore faded jeans, boots, and a black T-shirt that said SAINTS FOR LIFE. Fleur-de-lis on each sleeve.

  “Saint, huh?” I said.

  “Just my team,” he said. Not smiling. “Your car on the levee road. We hid it cause the sheriff come by again. You need to go. I don’t want him yell at me if you die.”

  “I’m not his problem.” Under his shirt were half-moons from my fingernails. He thought I was his problem now?

  He frowned. “You in the parish, you his problem. Aunt Monie!” He called to her, where she was filling water bowls. “Fantine gonna take you. About three hours to New Orleans, and her husband got a hotel room. He told her all about it last night.”

  “Yeah, cause I’m really dressed for that romantic interlude,” I said. “That was Victor last night. I have a kid now.” I stopped. Clarette, Cerise, Bettina—all those children. “Yeah. All of a sudden, nothing’s up to me.”

  Aunt Monie looked over her shoulder at me like I was headless. “She don’t like dogs, so I ain’t go with her, me.”

  “I don’t mind dogs.”

  “She spend the night with Emile like all them.”

  All them women? Or she thinks I spend the night with all them men?

  “I spent half the night talking to Victor!” I said.

  She cocked her head at me. “She talk to him half the night and he don’t come, vrai?”

  I put my hands on my hips. “If I wanted to go home, I’d be gone. Trust me. I know how to get around, and I know how to find a hotel or an airport. I’m not leaving without him. I’m just as fucking stubborn as she is.” I lifted my chin toward Aunt Monie, who blew air from her nose and said, “Ça c’est bon.”

  She coaxed the chickens into cages with cracked corn. The peacock ignored us. There were twenty-five chickens, in ten cages, and we loaded them onto the blue pickup. My father drove slowly toward the levee road, and we put the chickens into the large refrigerated truck with EB handpainted on the driver door that Emile had parked last in the row of vehicles. “This how he haul the seafood,” my father said. “Some men come up from Buras this morning, say them oyster bed already stir up from the current.”

  The chickens were quiet in the cavernous dark space. They didn’t scream, like I thought chickens would. They mumbled, confused, and even I could feel the slight change in the air pressure, somehow, as if the river were breathing harder.

  Then we drove the pickup through the weeds and down the narrow path to the old Azure house, knocking down baby palmettos. Emile and Philippe were already there, inside the second floor of the skeletal house, moving like shadows. My father had a crowbar and an ax and a claw hammer. He handed me the hammer and said, “Take wood from here.”

  In the shell of the old house, we hoisted ourselves up to the second floor, using the studs to climb. The wooden floor was full of animal droppings. Emile was prying boards from the hallway floor, and my father handed them to me. Long pieces of wide dark wood. “Cypress,” he said. “Singalee men cut them tree. They build the house back then. 1800. This hard wood. You can’t get wood like this. Termite now and different air.”

  I touched the wall, where the plaster had been eaten away by animals. Inside were smaller boards and between then, what looked like black hair. I shivered violently, all the way through my bones.

  My father looked up. “Cheval,” he said.

  Horsehair and plaster and mud. I didn’t want to touch it. I crouched down and stacked up the boards my father halved with the ax.

  When we got back to Aunt Monie’s, Freeman was sitting in her doorway. “Sheriff come. I tell him you gone.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “Almoinette, too.” He kept his eyes on my face.

  “I’m staying.”

  He got up and carried the shotgun he’d had beside him to the truck. Looters.

  We nailed the long boards over her front window, and nailed two boards in a cross over those. It was after noon. We ate cold boiled crab and drank the rest of the beer. The heat was suffocating, and the sky looked gray and green at the edges of the south.

  My phone made the sparkling sound of a message. It had come in while I was up in the old house with my father. Tony. “I found a room at this hotel on Camp Street. A dump. But it’ll work. There’s nothing but media and crazy people. You better get your adventurous ass here, though. They’re opening the Superdome.”

  I looked up at my father. “Victor told me he was in a ditch.”

  He said, “I look in Port Sulphur, I drive down to Buras. He don’t know where he goin. Down past Venice, only water. But he come back here. He see the sky.”

  Aunt Monie said, “Allons. Fini.”

  Emile and my father left for the boats.

  The dogs lay on the porch, their tongues rolling out like pink carpets at a Barbie fashion show, their maple-gold eyes watching every move Aunt Monie made. The house was dark as a cave. Aunt Monie said, “Echelle—ce-la.” She pointed to the back of the house, where the bathroom door led onto the tiny back porch. But that had been nailed and boarded shut, too.

  “What?”

  She mimed climbing. The ladder. It was in the kitchen.

  I opened the trapdoor to the attic. She handed up plastic bins of dog food, rawhide bones, and dog biscuits. Then one more medium-sized clear plastic bin, with a blue top. She laid the Bible inside, the rosary, and two small decorative plates. Pheasants and vines. And a carved wooden box, very plain. “C’est tout. Ma vie,” she said.

  It must have been photos and letters and important papers. I pushed the boxes under the rafters of the shallow attic. There was about three feet of space along the spine of the roof, which was fairly new. Plywood covered with tin.

  She filled the kitchen sink with water, and then two five-gallon plastic jugs.

  From the trunk of my car, I brought the Octoroon cigar box, my laptop, Victor’s laptop in the messenger bag, and his backpack. I put them all in a large plastic bin which she emptied of chicken food in the yard.

  “Les poulets très heureuses après la tempête.” She actually smiled, looking out into the yard.

  Snails and bugs would be everywhere. The tempest. She was still smiling.

  We walked across the highway to the orange groves. The boats had been moved further down, vague shapes in the bayou. Aunt Monie picked up a white bucket, and she and the dogs walked the groves. She touched a few green satsumas, working her way to the back, where I couldn’t see her anymore.

  I sa
t in the plastic chair near the metal sheds. They gutted and cleaned fish here, and put them on ice. They sorted the oysters, and the shrimp and crabs. The smell was in the wood. The water was like tinted windows. Black. Impenetrable.

  Nothing moved.

  An engine started, a wasp whine. An aluminum skiff came down the bayou to the dock. My father and Emile got off and went to the metal sink to wash their hands and faces. “Twenty-four lines to tie em down,” Emile said. “Right there, the water’s deep enough. And the old cheniere is to the west.”

  The hump of land with hundreds of years of oyster shells and a few bent oaks, where my father had taken us. Where the Indians had lived.

  I washed my face with cold water, looked into the speckled mirror. My hair a thick black rope across my shoulder when I wet it and braided it again. The faded ink blossom on my arm. Glorette and I pressing our wrists together. Our hair in one braid, our shoulders tight to each other.

  The dogs came first, sniffing the sink and dock to see if anyone had brought fish. Then Aunt Monie. “Regardez—trash,” she said, tilting the bucket. “All over the back row. Somebody drive down there.”

  In the woods at the edge of the grove, near the standing water of the swamp, were two pits, one shallow, one deeper, surrounded by a crumbled brick foundation. Two empty ramen packets, Gummi Bears, and Gatorade. That must have been what was in the Thunderbird. He was eating what he had lived on before. But how long ago had he been here?

  Aunt Monie pointed to the pits. “This indigo, here. Where they make the blue for the soldier. That smell, kill the women.” Then she pointed down the dirt road. “He ask about cimitaire, I tell him so many dead people, and even a horse bury back here. By the slaves. The quarters back over there, and they bury the people on the other side.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that yesterday?”

  She frowned. “You say you look. You say you look here.”

  I’d looked in the cemeteries near the big homes. Where white people were buried. I was ashamed to even say out loud how ignorant I still was. I turned toward the trees, heavy with green fruit like ornaments camouflaged in the leaves, my face burning.

  My father said, “Too late now.” Emile said, “Too dangerous to get stuck on the road with a flat, or in the woods.”

  It was dusk, and the air turned to the mottled heavy silver of old pewter. The dogs lay down on the dock, confused about why there was no walk. At the far southern horizon, there was an eerie wash of green—not vivid, but like water hyacinth and lichen and moss rising up into the sky.

  We stayed in the shed. The small TV showed people lining up at the Superdome. Most of the people carrying plastic bags and crates and children were black, but there were some tourists from other countries, interviewed in halting, jaunty English. I looked for Claudine, Albert, Juanita in the crowd. Had they boarded up their windows in the Lafitte, or would they all go up to the second floor?

  Where would Alfonso have gone? And Jazen? Maybe their grandmother and mother had said, No guns, no fighting for tonight. Get your asses in here right now.

  My phone still worked. I left a message for Tony. “I’m still here, down in Plaquemines. I’m staying. We’re safe. They’ve done this before.”

  Then Victor. “Come back here. This hurricane is real. Get the car out of the ditch and bring it back to the levee road. I’m going there right now to leave mine.”

  ———

  Aunt Monie headed up the path with the dogs as if nothing were different. I drove my car, tires popping on the crushed shells of the road, to the levee. It felt strange to gun it up the grassy slope. No one would ever drive up a freeway embankment back home, crash through bougainvillea and ivy that sheltered homeless encampments and rat nests.

  At the top, I parked behind Emile’s blue pickup, which was behind the refrigerated truck. Chickens would sleep forever if it stayed dark forever, they told us when we were children. If the sun never came up, they would fall over eventually and die.

  I turned my car around, carefully, on the levee road so the Corsica faced north. I’d be the first to drive back off the levee tomorrow, when the storm was gone.

  Aunt Monie and the dogs were small figures walking north on the road. The batture of trees and driftwood and trash was washed with muddy brown water, but only a few feet. That was just the tide coming in. This used to be the front. I had looked at the gravestones in front. Where them blankitte bury. The slaves and free blacks were buried in the back. Nearer to the cypress swamp.

  I looked out at the river, and prayed. Dya—what Aunt Monie called the water spirits. I said to the river gods that it had been hundreds of years since Marie-Therese came up the passageway, and not to let her blood descendant go back down.

  You believe now?

  I left the keys in the car, and then I sat on the hood, white boots out in front of me like someone else’s feet, waiting for her.

  The old landing, where Moinette had been taken away with a rope tied around her wrist. A little goat. A little girl. Fourteen. I’d sat here, watching the tangles of driftwood come down the river, imagining I was Huck Finn.

  A girl in a white dress walked up out of the trees further down, where the path led to Azure. A teenaged girl. She was white.

  Behind her was a fat old white woman in a black dress, huge and slow. A man followed her, black coat long and skirted around his legs, and then a pale woman, her head down, as if she looked at her feet.

  They moved up the levee and then down the other side, into the batture’s trees and debris and they walked across the matted tangle of someone’s old fishing nets and I couldn’t see them after that.

  Blankittes. What did Aunt Monie call them at night, when she told stories?

  Bright people. Ghosts.

  I couldn’t run in the boots. The people were gone. I stumbled fast down the levee road in the darkness that seemed to grow from the trees themselves, to rise from the water, and to have nothing to do with the air. The shaking gathered at my neck like an animal tossed me. Then Aunt Monie’s boots were visible, and her scarf, and the dark dogs, who stopped and stared toward the river.

  “Eh, Lord,” she said, when I told her. “Eh, Lord, nous allons. Rien pour faire—nous allons.” She lifted her shoulders to her ears like a frightened child and crossed her arms over her chest.

  We’ll go.

  But it was too late. We’d still be in the car when the storm actually hit. “People see ghost all the time,” Emile told her. “You ain’t ever paid attention before. Ain’t no big deal.”

  Aunt Monie spoke to him in such rapid French I couldn’t follow, and he shook his head. “Fantine and Freeman stay in the house with you, then, and me and Enrique and Philippe run the engines here. I can’t lose this boat,” Emile said. He wouldn’t look at me, or anyone else. He looked toward the west, at the marshes. “All I got.”

  I had nothing.

  I wished I could lie beside him, on the boat. But I lay beside Aunt Monie. She had told Glorette and me stories in the dark. Marie-Therese, she eighteen. French man come here, to this house. This house. Blond man. Fight or don’t. She cadeau. A gift for a week, while he buy the sugar. And she get Moinette.

  Phrodite mama call Moinette a bright hardship. She say, That your only chile? And Marie-Therese say, Take one candle light a room.

  I thought I heard rain. But it was Lulu’s claws against the linoleum, clicking as she dreamed and whimpered and chased what ran behind her eyes. I wondered if my father paced on the boat. What if it sank, and this house, which had seen so much, stood? He didn’t care. Maybe he thought he was on his boat again. One Nigger.

  “What happened to my father in Texas?” I whispered to Aunt Monie. “Did he ever tell you?”

  She was quiet, and then she said, “He tell Emile grandpère. He run that rum, in a truck, and in Texas they take his truck. Take him in the bois. Take his clothes and tie him to a tree. They play with him, chat y souris.”

  Cat and mouse.

  “They pl
ay with him,” she whispered. “With a stick. Say how big. Like the toy.”

  I turned my head to the side. My father riding through those woods.

  “When he come back, he kill that boy from New Orleans,” she said, and then she turned away from me.

  The power went out sometime before midnight. The darkness was complete. We were inside our own eyelids. Freeman turned on the battery-powered lantern and went back to sleep in the easy chair, though because he was younger than my father and not used to decades of drowsing upright, his body splayed stiffly and his mouth fell open like a puppet’s, his wispy goatee a black cirrus cloud.

  Marie-Therese had slept here in a chair waiting for someone to take away her child.

  Aunt Monie dozed beside me, but every time the dogs whined or paced, she murmured words to them, and they lay back down. In my small leather purse, diagonal across my chest as if I were walking miles through a strange city, I had my cell phone, my wallet, and my little notebook. She had helped me wrap them in plastic, like sandwiches, in case we had to walk through high water.

  The rain started and then stopped, hammering the tin roof. I felt terrified as a child—what if the bright people came here, the only house where there was light?

  I couldn’t breathe. Not like being strangled, but as if a huge mouth covered me, sucking hard. The whole house vibrated, like a plane rising and falling crazily in the atmosphere. No air. My eardrums felt as if they would burst from the pressure. Emile had bolted boards over the chimney with masonry screws.

  “Aunt Monie,” I said. “I can’t breathe.”

  “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire appeared among them,” she said, her eyes open to the ceiling.

  The house shuddered, sighed, and swelled again. Then the wind hit the side of the house like a bus, and the cistern slammed against the door. Then moaning, moaning—the gods of air and water moaning. A sound no one could imagine. A million throats moaning and filling the world with sound that erased everything else.