Take One Candle Light a Room

by Susan Straight

  Things hit the house. Big things. The house shuddered, bent, absorbed the blows, shuddered again like a person being beaten. Freeman stood at the door, listening. “Trees down. Light pole, gotta be.”

  Aunt Monie and I got up. She held her walking stick, and went to the kitchen, fumbling for something. She came back with four leashes, clipped them to the dogs’ collars, and sat down in the wooden chair like a priestess, facing the cypress-wood-covered window as if she could see something.

  The wind tore at the tin roof, screaming metal, and then water came under the front door, sliding inside as if magically, a ghost able to swim through wood and walls. The dogs whined and pulled, and she said, “C’est bon, c’est bon, c’est bien, c’est bien.”

  Freeman looked at the leashes and said, “We got some rope.” He took it off the kitchen table and tied it around his own waist, then mine, and he was reaching for Aunt Monie but the dogs swerved around his legs, staggering him.

  Then the back of the house blew off. The bathroom addition. And something so large hit the house that the walls turned and groaned, as if dizzy. The house twisted, and then the water came from the front door and the window, poured into the back from the gaping entry. The dogs were up to their bellies within minutes, swimming.

  Aunt Monie was shouting in French—praying or arguing—and while Freeman was tying the rope to her waist, around her bulky blouse, the water rose to our thighs. He tried to grab the ladder, but the lightweight metal floated away, into the kitchen, and then out the back. The chairs, the bed, everything was floating. I grabbed her heavy walking stick and pushed at the trapdoor.

  The dogs were swimming frantically, and she called their names, over and over. Freeman still had his feet on the floor. He grabbed Aunt Monie and pushed her toward the attic. The water lifted me in a rush, as if it were alive. I was treading, pushed against the armoire. I grabbed Aunt Monie’s elbow and held on, but she was pulled by the dogs, who were trying to get to the floating mattress.

  “Hold her!” I screamed to Freeman, and I pulled myself into the attic, my shoulder muscles burning. The water was over his shoulders now. I grabbed Aunt Monie’s wrist. It felt like I pulled her arm out of the socket when I dragged her into the attic.

  The dogs followed her as soon as she called their names. They leapt up into the space, jostling one another, and then ran frantically over the rough splintery beams, stumbling and barking, knocking over the food containers and not even noticing the food. Fluffy pink insulation flowed in rivers between the rafters, and they waded there and then leapt out as if that were worse than water.

  It was dark and stifling in the small space below the roofline. Freeman pulled himself up, his jeans sodden, and lay on a rafter.

  The wind moaned and sobbed. Ghosts and obliteration. Sheets of sound that tore into my ears. Then a section of the tin roof tore off, and the dogs barked in looping hoarse circles at the storm itself.

  Freeman crawled over to the edge of the hole. I was too afraid to see the air making those sounds. I thought I knew—fierce Santa Anas leaving palm fronds and downed eucalyptus everywhere. My father said we were fleas on the earth and the wind tried to shake us off. Foehn in Switzerland, the rattling hot summer wind of southern France, sandstorms in the desert.

  I crawled a few feet to the trapdoor, the rope pulling at my hips. The water was swirling inside the house, choppy as if outside. The furniture was floating. The refrigerator was on its side, stuck at the top of the kitchen doorway like a white coffin.

  The water was about a foot from the ceiling.

  I crawled to the wooden vent at the front of the attic and broke one of the slats. The dawn was not light—just sheets of rain and howls of air I could see now. The water outside was brown, gray, whitecapped, churning just below the eaves. It was river and ocean and rapids. But actual waves, about three feet, came toward the house, pushing and shoving, and then one pushed the house off the foundation and we spun.

  The refrigerated truck. As the house turned, I saw that was what had hit us first—the white truck was impaled on the branches of the huge oak behind the house, cab facing down, like an elephant bowed on its knees.

  The house spun again in the current, and Aunt Monie prayed in French. Freeman yelled, “We gotta get out and find a boat. Emile said if it get bad wait for the eye.”

  The house moved in jerks and shudders and washed up against the pecan trees. It was wedged between two trunks, and we stayed there.

  Hours. The wind sucked and pulled at the roof, and the waves pulled at the walls. Then everything calmed as if in a movie. As if a biblical hand had swept over the turbulence. And the sun came out, pale and bobbling, weak apricot, but blinding us in the open hole of the roof.

  The eye? The sun?

  Freeman and I climbed out onto the slick tin roof and held on to the chimney. The water covered everything except the tops of the oaks and hackberry and cypress. The houses were gone, pushed back toward the levee road, only two roofs visible under the water that still heaved and surged with invisible tides. The dogs surged out of the hole in the roof, and Aunt Monie screamed, “Coco! Non!” Coco tore the leash from her hands and leapt into the water, swept into the current. Then Lulu followed her, and Aunt Monie slipped on the metal roof. Freeman grabbed her by the rope and then tied the excess to the chimney.

  Aunt Monie held Zizi in her left arm. And Mama stood stiff-legged, watching the other dogs swim away and then disappear. “Tournee!” Aunt Monie screamed, her voice giving out. “Tournee!”

  Come back.

  Cows were everywhere, floating on their sides, and other dogs, bellies already filling with air. Snakes swept past, swimming toward trees, moving away like writing in the water. Dead chickens.

  A horrific scream. Like a woman dying, being killed again and again. The peacock was alive, somewhere.

  A red-brown circle floated close to the roof, glistening in the sun. The mass bubbled and shifted, and I saw white rice inside. Pupae. A raft of fire ants, floating to a new home. I shouted at Aunt Monie to get her legs up and away. I felt faint—the island of ants was eddying near the eaves. If they touched the roof they’d swarm up. I pushed Aunt Monie’s stick into the mass and the ants boiled up the wood and I let go. The stick swirled away in the current, pulsing with movement.

  The air was completely still. The heat radiant. But then a cow made a strangled sound somewhere, and a boat motor droned like a june bug.

  Emile came down the flooded road, level with the tops of the oaks that lined the street. The flat-bottomed aluminum boat—he shouted, “Hurry!” He pulled me off the roof and onto the boat, and then Aunt Monie, who kept holding tight to Zizi’s collar. Mama leapt into the boat, and he said, “Hold her!” Then Freeman slid in.

  “Coco!” Aunt Monie pointed. Coco had managed to get up onto the cab of the white truck, howling now, and Emile throttled the motor.

  “Goddamn,” he whispered. “My truck. Two-ton truck. Thirty-five thousand dollars.”

  Coco howled and whined until we got close, and then she snapped and bit at the air, baring her teeth at Aunt Monie. Freeman reached for her, and she latched on to his forearm with her teeth. Emile said, “She gone crazy,” and hit her on the ear. She let go and snapped again, and he pulled the boat away.

  Aunt Monie lay flat, facedown, in the boat, tiny and shapeless as a paper doll, her arm around Zizi and Mama, who lay flat as well.

  I looked behind us. Azure was gone. Only Aunt Monie’s roof was even visible, and two cars that were floating south. A horse swam past, hooves flailing. I closed my eyes. Coco’s barking was hoarse and regular now, desperate and chest-deep as the night Victor had croup.

  I held on to Emile’s back, my face against the wet cloth, and sobbed. Victor was drowned in the car, in the woods, or floating out to sea.

  When we reached the boat, the wind had begun again, as abruptly as before. Freeman handed us up to the Lady Chance and then went to help Philippe. Emile sent us down to the galley, where we lay on t
he floor while the boat pitched and tossed and rose up against the ropes again and again. Aunt Monie held the dogs’ collars with her gnarled fingers, her face a mask. My father and Emile shouted at each other for what felt like hours. The wind was from the other side now, screaming and tearing at the boat, and the engines chugged beneath us, hot and throbbing, until I threw up again and again in the water sloshing at our feet.

  Hours later, the wind finally calmed. Again, the sun came out immediately, hot as a floodlight. I stumbled up the galley stairs.

  The world was shredded and drowned. Debris was caught in the cypress trees along the bayou—clothes and plastic and another cow caught in the branches, dead, bloating even now, its neck stretched out like a horrific caricature. To the south, the satsuma grove was gone, leaving only the round tops of trees already brown and dead from saltwater floating like thousands of tumbleweeds. Marsh grass and gas cans and boxes and dead fish moved out in the current, and then the body of a man, floating down the bayou toward the marshes and the Gulf, his T-shirt a transparent bubble of white on his back. My father stared into the water after the body, and leapt into the flood.

  Emile and I jumped in after him. The current was strong, but we swam after him. He wasn’t swimming. He was floating. He wanted to die. I kicked hard and something submerged cut me on the ankle, a searing pain. I floated in the water, and a gasoline slick lifted fumes into my nose. Then I kicked again. Emile caught him, turned him toward me. We grabbed his shoulders and swam toward the boat.

  On the deck, away from the side, Emile wrapped a rope around my father’s waist and tied him to a pole. My father opened his eyes, looked at me, and passed out. I sat next to him in the sun, cupped my hand under his nose to make sure he was still breathing. He slumped against the post, and then his chest heaved.

  The water. He saw his mother, and the dead cows and pigs and chickens from 1927. The white people swollen and black, the black people washed of pigment white.

  Aunt Monie squatted near me and whispered in my ear. “That boy from New Orleans come take Enrique liquor money. Up at Woodland, the jail by the river. Enrique put the knife on his neck. Push him in the water. He go under and Enrique turn his back.”

  The third man he had killed. A boy. I stayed with my father, while the kaleidoscope that must have been inside his head whirled and slowed.

  By late afternoon, sounds rose only from the water, and still nothing from the sky. Drowned egrets hung by their beaks from the chain-link fence around one shed, and I couldn’t look off the deck anymore to see what floated past.

  My father slumped to the side and slept. Emile and I bailed out the nasty water belowdeck and opened up the door for air. Emile carried my father and aunt to the twin beds, where they both slept, dogs stunned and silent between them.

  I sat with him on the deck, in the small shade of nets and winches. He poured Bacardi onto my ankle. I could see the perfect white of my bone. I took one long drink. He wrapped a torn T-shirt around the cut. Victor’s bandanna, Kelli’s gunshot wound, Michelle and Inez. I stared at the water. No sound except our own breathing. No threads of music from a distant radio, no cars, no bees, no laughter, no bouncing balls, no thumping stereos, no children. No sparrow or hawk or nasal grunt of a coot.

  Emile’s voice was raspy and guttural, like his throat was lined with stones. He must have shouted all night, trying to keep the boats from capsizing. He took off his shirt and lay on his back and said, “Nothing left.”

  I nodded. But so little of it had been mine. Except Victor, who had become mine, tied to me now through the stories and whatever love I had tried to give him each time we talked, under the encampment’s cloth tent, near a fire, in the tribe. I couldn’t believe he survived in the Thunderbird, when trucks had been tossed into trees, and I couldn’t bear to imagine him gone. I reached out and put my hand on Emile’s chest, and he put his fingers on top of mine.

  Oil floated down from the north in veils of black and rainbow slick, then huge slides of tarry thick skin. Rafts of marsh grass collected against the boat, and more fire ant islands. Emile sprayed the fire extinguisher until the foam sank the floating masses that held each other tightly.

  His radio snapped static, and came to life. He spoke to someone down in Empire, who said hundreds of boats were wrecked, and two giant menhaden boats had floated onto the highway. Emile said, “Anybody come for you?” and the man laughed.

  “Nobody even knows we’re down here!” he said. “You think the government cares about us? They worried about the city. New Orleans floodin now. Levees broke.”

  “How you hear?”

  “Goddamn if someone didn’t call me. Some cell phone satellite must not a gotten blown out the sky.”

  Emile stared at me, and then up to the top of a mast. “I’ma climb up here and see,” he said. “Go get your phone.”

  I pulled it from the leather bag, still in the plastic cocoon. I unwrapped it and rubbed it against my filthy print blouse.

  When Emile made it to the top, the phone made the sparkly sound of a received message.

  “Somebody call you,” he shouted. “Call last night at eight seventeen. Say he found it. The treasure.”

  Comtesse, to the north. The slave cemetery, on the other side of the road, away from the river. The only place left to look.

  We took the little skiff. The water was so full of debris that Emile had to maneuver slowly around dressers and stoves and pieces of metal roofing and hundreds of broken tree branches. My chest was hot from the rum. We stayed on the western side of the flooded highway. The cipriere. Where the black people would have been buried.

  The boat motor was the only sound. A zipper in the silence.

  If he were alive, he’d hear us.

  There were no landmarks. No canals, no roads, no barns, no roofs here. But Emile said, “Still got trees.”

  “You know where you’re going?”

  “I know. When we go out in the bay, we got trees, and chenieres, to see where the oysters are. Now the whole damn place like a bay.”

  Then he said, “Oh, damn. No.”

  At first I thought they were small boats. Metal oblongs, bobbing in the current. With handles. They were coffins. One palest blue, one silver. Then one more, turned on its side against a utility shed. A sleeve, a hand, a leg in black suit pants.

  I buried my head in my lap until the motor had whined for a long time.

  “That’s not Comtesse,” he said finally. “Those new coffins. A different cemetery. We got about another two miles. Take forever like this.”

  It must have been another two hours. We were in a strange foreshortened forest, where Emile had to steer around gas grills and trucks and tires and tangles of clothing in every color snagged up against the oak branches. We had to circle and backtrack around huge tree trunks. Then I saw a dirty yellow rag on a raft of marsh grass. Black coral.

  “Is that his shirt?” I whispered. I screamed, “Victor! Victor!” Emile gunned the motor, and I shouted again and again.

  A row of black iron spikes, separate, floating in black water. A rise in the earth. A cheniere. Oyster shells and sediment. An island. Oak trees, and three white crypts like tiny garages with their doors left wide open.

  Victor was splayed out on a branch of an oak tree, toward the top. His left arm was tied to one part of the branch with a bandanna, his left leg anchored at the knee with a leather belt. His jeans were still on, but his shirt had been torn off. “Victor!” I called, but he didn’t move his head. We came closer. His shoulders heaving. He was breathing. Crying. On his back, scars like white rosettes in a pattern. Two circles—the eyes. And five more, in an arc—the smile.

  Emile pulled the boat close. I climbed up, the bark scraping my arms. I put my hand on his neck, the burned-red thin neck, holding up the bare shorn head, his cheek etched with scratches black with dried blood.

  I couldn’t untie the bandanna around his wrist, sodden and knotted so tight. I pulled hard with my fingernails, but Emile handed me
a knife and I cut it carefully. Then I undid the belt around his knee.

  He didn’t look at me. He looked up into the higher branches and said hoarsely, “Where’s the other guy?”

  I looked up, too. There were snakes coiled in the branches like elaborate jewelry, and above that, a raccoon that stared at us with impassive black eyes.

  Victor nearly fell into the boat. He looked terrified of Emile. “Was that you? In the tree last night?”

  Emile said, “What?”

  Victor stared at me as if he were blind. I felt his forehead. His skull. The place I had been afraid to touch all those years ago. The sun flashed white from his black pupils, and he blinked.

  Then he pointed toward the crypts. He said, “She was in there. Then the water knocked out the front, and the box floated out. Like it had a motor. Went all the way down there and disappeared.” He pointed east, toward the river.

  Marie-Therese. Headed to the ocean, finally. The wind that began in Africa wanted her back. Dya, the water spirit, lifted up by Faro, the god of wind.

  When we got back to the boat, my father and Aunt Monie were on the deck, the dogs quiet by her side. Emile and I put Victor in one of the beds belowdeck. He closed his eyes. Emile touched my loose hair. “Jolie,” he murmured, and bit his lips. He gathered it in his hands, clumsy and rough, and I pulled back. But he divided my hair into three bunches and braided it loosely. Then he handed me the Bacardi and went upstairs.

  I poured rum onto a towel and wiped down the cuts on Victor’s face, his chest, and his right arm. Tree bark and pounding wind. On his back, below the horrible grin, were two deeper cuts, about five inches long.

  “Things were hitting me,” he said softly into the sheet. “Metal things.”

  He turned over. I took his left arm, where the bandanna had been. The wound was still infected, a long red line like thick-twisted licorice. Inez had taken the bullet out from the swollen part near his elbow, where the skin had crusted over. I poured a few drops of rum there. Victor whispered, “Man, I held my hand up like a Supreme. Like, ‘Stop in the Name of Love’!” Then he closed his eyes. “And he shot me anyway.”