Cane River

by Lalita Tademy

  “Bet is on the other side of the river.”

  “Bet doesn’t have the same kind of pain.” Philomene sighed heavily. “Emily, I understand the suckhole loneliness makes after love disappoints. Mémère Suzette and I can help.”

  “This is nothing you can mend. Joseph has left me, humiliated me.” Emily’s voice threatened to break. “Even so, I still want him.”

  “That will play out in its own way, in its own time. For now, it’s you and the children that matter.” There was a long pause, and Suzette heard the pouring of coffee, the soft scraping of a cup replaced on the table. “Emily, there is one thing you must never forget. You do not come from fragile stock.”

  Suzette thought then of her own mother, how her death left an emptiness even now but had brought young Emily closer. Maybe this was the lesson each generation had to learn, over and over again. Where the strength began, and how it kept itself alive.

  Philomene’s voice was low and soothing, almost crooning. “I am the rock in your garden, Emily, and you are the bloom in mine. Count on me.”

  Suzette quietly retraced her steps down the hall to her room, leaving mother and daughter alone in the kitchen.

  * * *

  Life went on, for all of them.

  It took time, but the flush came back to Emily’s cheeks, and the Sunday came when she sang and danced for them again. Joseph reappeared in their lives. The first reasons given for his visits were to make repairs to the house on Cornfine Bayou or to bring gifts for the grandchild, but finally the detailed excuse making fell away, and his appearances became frequent and accepted.

  As a new bride still in the habit of trying to please her husband, Lola Grandchamp reluctantly permitted the children to visit their father at Billes Landing three or four times a year, at Joseph’s insistence, but even then they couldn’t enter the house. Before allowing them to go, Emily examined each of them, inspecting their freshly washed hair, the press of their Sunday-best clothes, the polish to their shoes. Only then could they leave their house on Cornfine Bayou, the six of them together, Angelite, T.O., Josephine, Joe, and Mary, with Buck in Angelite’s arms, eagerly setting off for Billes Landing, a family adventure. As Buck got older he walked alongside them through the woods. The house on Cornfine Bayou emptied out by six, leaving behind three older generations of women, Suzette, Philomene, and Emily.

  T.O. brought back reports of Lola sitting off to one side in the deepest shade of the gallery, while Joseph basked in the center of the circle of his children. It was an uneasy truce for all of them, but they managed. For years they all managed.

  Angelite entertained the attentions of several suitors. She settled on Dennis Coutee, a tall, lanky colored farmer with an even disposition, as fair of skin as she. He was a neighbor, a sharecropper, and wanted from the first to make her his wife. Angelite broke new ground in the family by marrying Dennis and soon afterward becoming pregnant, in that order. She lived with her new husband on his plot and was close enough to walk to Emily’s house every day. The couple often took supper there.

  T.O. worked in the sawmill, with no greater ambition than a little money in his pocket, but he had a restless disposition like his father. He passed all the way into his late teens committed to no one thing in particular and often went off by himself, appearing and disappearing at will. He was a polite and self-effacing young man, handsome in a gentle way, but he kept his own counsel. T.O. was never quite the same after the move from Billes Landing, except with Angelite. Only his sister seemed to coax him toward liveliness, keep him from brooding, from going into himself too deeply. With Angelite he laughed and even joked.

  Angelite Billes and husband Dennis Coutee.

  Josephine and Mary, young women five years apart, were so compatible that it became difficult to think of them separately. They preferred their own company to any other; both were shy with outsiders. The girls seemed content around the farm.

  Joe Jr. grew tall, so confident in himself that they began to call him “Man.” The most forward of the colored girls in the small community competed for his notice, and he encouraged the attention, unable to resist a pretty face, but he never allowed himself to become entirely distracted from learning all he could to be able to follow in his father’s footsteps. Joe had Joseph Billes’s drive, did well in school, and worked hard at his lessons.

  L–R. Mary Billes, Angelite Billes holding Buck Andrieu, Emily Fredieu, Josephine Billes.

  The turn of the century came and went, and they set up their own routines on Cornfine Bayou, mixing in the past and the future. The young outnumbered the old, and they all prepared for the imminent arrival of Angelite’s second child.

  * * *

  Angelite delivered a small, weak son, but they lost her in childbirth. After a long and difficult birth, passing from one day into the next, life and death made an unbearable trade.

  It was then that Suzette began to feel she had spent enough time with both the living and the dead, that to outlive a great-granddaughter meant she had surely gone on for too long. The death place in her mind was overfull.

  Joe “Man” Billes Jr.

  They mourned on Cornfine Bayou, a deep and profound grief, but the demands of the living trumped the call of the dead. Emily plunged headlong into the raising of her two orphaned grandsons, a woman’s concession to the caprices of life. Philomene spent extra hours in the kitchen preparing food, forcing everyone to eat. Little Buck wrapped his bony arms around their necks, and they consoled him in turns.

  The old women had children to raise, food to put on the table, the farm to run, and each other. Josephine and Mary grew more inseparable every day. Joe, the clever son, was smart and popular, surrounded always by friends as well as family, and found his solace there. Everyone else had someone, but T.O. and Angelite had been the natural pairing in the family while she lived, his confidante, and after she died T.O.’s absences from the house became longer and more frequent.

  Joseph Billes started to come apart, an alarmingly rapid deterioration. Overnight he took on an old man’s shuffle, halting, tentative, losing a full inch of his height. Weight vanished from his too thin frame, the flesh covering his gaunt cheeks pulled overly tight across his face, his brooding eyes pronounced and watery.

  With Angelite gone, a neediness opened in Joseph so profound that it seemed to push aside caution. He couldn’t get enough of his remaining children and summoned them more often to the house on Billes Landing. The unbearable tension there between Joseph and Lola grew tauter than a hangman’s noose, with Joseph seemingly oblivious of the hostility Lola directed toward the six of them in their Sunday finery when they marched en masse through the gate. They went whenever summoned, still six, with Angelite gone and little Ernest added.

  Angelite Billes Coutee gravestone.

  39

  J oseph sent word to Cornfine Bayou that he requested the presence of his children on the upcoming Saturday at Billes Landing, the first anniversary of Angelite’s death. They were their customary six, outfitted in Sunday best, dresses and shirts starched and ironed, shoes polished, backs stiff even in the heat. They sat on the edges of their chairs along the cramped gallery, and Joseph held Ernest on his lap. T.O., the oldest of the Billes children now, was twenty-four, Mary at fifteen was the youngest, and Angelite’s baby, Ernest, celebrated his one-year birthday.

  Joseph made idle conversation while Lola fanned herself on the far side of the gallery. When he cleared his throat and coughed grandly, a staged sound meant to signal an announcement, T.O. put down his coffee cup.

  “As my natural children and grandchildren,” Joseph said, “this land is to be yours when I die.”

  Lola let out a small, surprised gasp and quickly pulled her lace handkerchief to her mouth, as if by so doing she could swallow Joseph’s offending words and make them disappear. She stood, all eyes now on her, and after an awkward moment of apparent disorientation fled into the house, the petticoats under her cotton dress rustling violently.

  Th
e next time the six came to Billes Landing, instead of her regular spot at the far end of the gallery, Lola refused to appear. But she was a presence just the same, perched inside the front room with the front door ajar and the outer screen door latched shut, a pair of listening ears and a voice that could lash out at them whenever she chose.

  “Mongrels,” Lola said midway through the visit. Her voice was distinct, the word clear to everyone on the gallery.

  “Mongrels,” she repeated, more loudly this time. “More of that trashy life you led before me. I won’t be a party to it. I don’t want them on my property.”

  “Woman, shut that noise,” Joseph said as if to the air. He had been drinking, and there was a slight slurring to his words. “You know whose property this is, and I’ll have anyone I please here. These are my children.”

  He made a show of bouncing Ernest on his knee until the toddler, too young to understand the mood, grinned his delight.

  After that day the invitations to the house on Billes Landing were withdrawn. No more summons, no need for T.O. to slick back his hair or polish his shoes. Joseph asked them to stop coming to the house, showing up instead more often on Cornfine Bayou.

  * * *

  The rains were heavy, and it was a nasty wintry day at the tail end of January. T.O. was grateful for the protection of his everyday fedora. As a boy he had run these same woods, but the groves were thicker then, the trees so close together that they kept out the light and either dampened some of summer’s oppressive heat or provided shelter from the worst of winter’s downpours. The pines had been thinned since those days.

  His pace was unhurried but deliberate, and he sorted through plausible explanations for why he was in this part of the woods at this time of the afternoon. He could say he was taking a shortcut to his mother’s or uncle’s house for early supper, or running an errand to borrow a blade for Mr. Ephrom over to the sawmill, or on his way to pick up a sack of salt. Now and then on his visits he came across men on foot or on horseback, usually his father’s renters or men otherwise in Joseph Billes’s employ. Some were friendly enough, stopping to make small talk, happy to run into another soul in the backcountry, and some just passed without speaking. It was a small community, and most knew who he was, as he knew them. There were times when he heard someone approach and hid until they passed, but more often than not he didn’t see anyone, coming or going.

  Theodore (T.O.) Billes.

  When he had first started the visits, his fear of discovery had been strong. Now T.O. didn’t worry about this part of the journey. He knew these woods as well as he knew the habits of the catfish in the river. Still, it wouldn’t do to be caught this far into Joseph Billes’s property without a reason ready to his tongue.

  The rhythm of the visits had settled into a familiar pattern, always starting with a vague feeling of restlessness, just beyond his grasp, as if something deep inside were fighting to be given its due. As though he were trying to remember some important promise made to a friend that kept sliding away because the doing had been left off for too long. That feeling could last for hours or it could last for days, until the sharp jolt of anxiety and panic gripped him and would not allow him to sit still. The need to take action pained him in a physical way, in the twisting of his stomach or the pounding of his head. When the pattern first started, he hadn’t known how to help himself. By now he understood that whatever else he had been doing would have to wait, no matter whether it was day or night, storm or clear, winter or summer, convenient or no.

  He needed to start on the path out to his father’s house for the visit.

  As soon as he rounded the last bend and saw the roof of the house, his heart sped. The house had power over him, fear, anger, and anticipation all balled up in a knot with each breath he took. His reaction was the same every time, as if it were the first.

  T.O. tasted that knot as it rose from deep in his belly up into his throat and threatened to choke him. What kind of life was this for a twenty-six-year-old man? For two years now he had spied on his father and his father’s wife. The urgency started from the first week Joseph had told him not to come to his house on Billes Landing anymore, that he and the others were no longer welcome there.

  Ten years had come and gone since Joseph had brought his wife from St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Cloutierville across the river to the house on Billes Landing. Direct from the wedding ceremony to the house that had been T.O.’s home just the day before.

  * * *

  T.O. decided to take his position behind the chicken house, his favorite site when the weather was wet. He could use the eaves to keep the rain off and still have an unobstructed view of the screen-enclosed gallery. T.O. knew all of the comfortable places to hide around the perimeter of the house on Billes Landing, each giving him a different vantage point of the grounds.

  When he had first been pulled to Billes Landing, T.O. sometimes kept to his position for almost an entire day, just for the possibility of a momentary glance of Joseph or Lola. Now it was enough to know that the house entwined them both in unhappiness with each other. Their sorrow was his tonic. Sometimes it took only a few minutes for the weight of the house to take hold, for him to feel soothed and strong enough to take his life back, and he could head back home without so much as shifting out of his original crouchlike stance. He never stayed more than a few hours anymore.

  Joseph often left early in the morning and stayed away late into the night. Sometimes he came home for dinner or supper, but many times he did not, and they had few visitors. In the last two years, since the banishment, Lola had also made clear that Joseph’s society-marginal friends were no longer welcome in the house. When his old acquaintances needed work, gossip, or favors, they intercepted Joseph elsewhere or called out from the gate to see if anybody was home without entering the front yard or climbing the steps.

  Even as T.O. approached the chicken house, he heard voices from the gallery. It was Antoine and Joseph, arguing. T.O. quickly hid himself deeper in the shadows, but he could still hear.

  “Be reasonable.” Antoine’s voice was honey. “I am your closest relative here. Two thousand acres cannot fall into hands incapable of overseeing it properly.”

  “My children are my closest relatives,” Joseph said.

  “They cannot inherit.”

  “How is it you have come to be so familiar with the law?”

  “It is common knowledge, your foolishness about the inheritance.” Antoine did not keep the disapproval from his voice. “I would administer it on their behalf.”

  T.O. lost a few words when Joseph lowered his voice, but he picked up the thread again.

  “We won’t do any more business together, Antoine. There’s no use working with a man you can’t trust. I was the one who made it possible for you and your family to come to this country, and this is how you repay me?”

  “Some would say it was money owing,” Antoine said, but now his voice was strained and harsh. “You talk trust? People in town want to do business with me now, it’s me they trust. You insist on turning your back on your own kind, even now. It’s not decent.”

  “Do not ever dare come back to my house,” Joseph said.

  T.O. heard Antoine mount his horse and ride away to the east and then the bang of the screened door as Joseph retreated into the house.

  T.O. thought about Antoine Morat for most of his walk back to Cornfine Bayou. Since he was a small boy, whenever white men frightened him, it was Antoine Morat’s face attached to the menace. Antoine was part of a blurry memory T.O. carried of his grandfather Narcisse pushing him out of his lap in the cool of an evening long ago, before his father went away to New Orleans. Antoine was one of the men who had moved them out of the house on Billes Landing twelve years before. All of the colored in the area knew Antoine could be mean and high-handed, and he was one of the white men in town calling for a cleaner separation between Joseph and Emily.

  But it was A. J. Morat, Antoine’s son, whom T.O. hated. Five yea
rs younger than T.O. and born to a life of white privilege T.O. could only dream of, A.J. was away at medical school while T.O. picked up odd jobs at the sawmill. Joseph had always been conspicuous in his affection and admiration for the boy and lavish in his desire to provide him opportunities in life.

  T.O. sometimes felt as if his very life were being stolen away. As if every time he tried to draw fresh air into his lungs, something tightened its grip around his body, like a snake slowly crushing its prey. They took their toll, the menial tasks at the sawmill, the spying that only confirmed the contempt people harbored for his family, his corrosive longing for other people’s lives, the unquenchable need for his father. And he was drawn to the same cycle again and again. The jitteriness, the pull, the walk, the pounding heart, bitterness confronted, the numbing calm, and the long walk home.

  He remembered happier times, when they all lived in their house together and his mother would laugh and clap and dance to the tunes his father played on his mandolin. How they would all sing together. But he also remembered his father’s absences and his mother taking on the backbreaking work. It was like hitching up a butterfly to pull a plow.

  By the time T.O. reached halfway between the house on Billes Landing and Cornfine Bayou, he was calm enough to think about how to break the cycle of the visits. Joseph and Lola were still miserable together, and Antoine had been dismissed from his father’s business. The next time the nervousness beckoned he would fight the urge and get on with his life, the way other people managed to do. He would find a good woman and marry. They would settle down and have children. There were jobs at the sawmill or the railroad, enough to support a family. He would begin his life again on his own terms. It all seemed possible.

  There was almost a lightness in his step by the time he set foot on Cornfine Bayou. Maybe he had taken his last visit. The pressure in his stomach was relieved, and his head was full of the possibility that evil could be punished, that good things could unfold for him, too.