“You and me, brother, in His hands!”
Clap, clap!
“You and me, sister, in His hands!”
Clap, clap!
At the end of each verse, she twirled around to stare at me on the floor, checking to see if I was still there or if I’d tipped over into a place she couldn’t reach. While she sang, her long finger pointed down at my head then made jabs in the air around her. I followed that finger and must’ve struggled to figure out the meaning of her dance. Each wave of her arm, each blink of her eye, each clap of her hands revealed another mystery, dark and cryptic. Soon something would crack. I’d move my mouth, my arms, or my legs in the wrong way. Soon, I’d end up in sitting in another doctor’s office or kneeling on the kitchen floor with hands taped to my chest.
Instead, Mama opened the carton of eggs, took one out and placed it in my hand. She looked straight into my eyes, as if she could see affirmation, a prayer or votive. Then she balanced the egg in the middle of my palm, upside down on its northern point and—for a long moment—it spun in a perfect orbit.
In the Golden Book stories Mama read at night, the cherubic altar boy would’ve carried that egg—proud and high, sure and steady—like an alabaster tooth from the mouth of God. But the devil boy would’ve bared his own yellow teeth, would’ve shaken the egg and sucked the yolk right out of the shell. What was I, Mama wanted to know, cherub or devil? What was I, a steady boy or another kind?
“Hold it,” she said, “hold it.”
Her eyes grew wide and glowed like green marbles. Here was her hope. Here was her way out of this cramped house, with its bell jar rooms and matchbox furniture. Here was her toddler listening to her command. She’d done right to read proper English to me, to forbid anyone to speak Cajun gibberish over my crib. She’d done right to show me how to genuflect, how to bow, how to button a shirt, how to clean under my nails, how to stay out of the sun, how to keep my face white, how to be a real man, not a wild little Sabine beast.
“Hold it,” she said, “hold it.”
It was a whole world, that egg. Now it spun in my hand. And as long as Mama gazed at me, it kept spinning. Before her magic-making eyes, I became the cherub and performed another wondrous miracle. Her baby who walked before his first birthday and talked before he walked, her boy who lined up all his toys in straight rows, her son who just the night before sat upright in his bed sleep-talking from Holy Scripture, this son of hers was now carrying the world she placed in his hands. He was now performing the same magic as her lost father, that minister and traiteur.
“Hold it,” she said, “Hold it as long as you can.”
Then before her eyes and mine, the egg began to spin out of control in a shaky orbit. It was a simple command, just a couple of words, but I couldn’t get it right, couldn’t keep it straight. I should’ve known how to hold it, like her folklore father, how to control the world she gave me. But the wobbly sphere in my hand turned round and round, and my eyes crossed as it spun faster and faster, more and more furiously until it looked like a storm in my palm, the tiny white eye of a hurricane.
Then my fingers twitched, my palm shook, a storm broke out, and the whole world went spinning. The egg flew from my hand to the floor, setting off a display of yolky lightning along the way. Mama’s newly mopped floor, the bleached tiles, the white cabinets, her gleaming patent leather shoes, and the trim of her skirt were all coated in yellow sticky ooze. Though I’d dropped only one egg, it looked as if a dozen brilliant suns had burst all around us. I stared at Mama, and she stared at me, until the nerves in my legs began to buckle. I slapped down my palm, trying to numb the pulsing sensation. But when Mama’s long finger pointed at me, a warm, yellow trickle ran down my leg and collected in a puddle at my bare feet. In a flash, I plunged my hands down my pants to squeeze off the problem.
And that’s when it all finally cracked. Mama took a good hard look at me and suddenly saw the devil before her. She’d somehow missed it all along, how she’d given birth not to a perfect Cajun son, not to a Catholic altar boy, but to bayou spawn, a pant-wetting, egg-dropping son of Satan.
“What in the Hell!” she kept screaming, her eyes wide and wild. “What in the sulfur-reeking, flame-licking, burning name of Hell are you doing with your hands in your pants?”
“Holding it,” I said.
“Holding it!” she screamed.
My answer and her echo sent Mama running for the fridge. When she turned back around, she glowed the way she would in a dream, and I could no longer say what was true and what was not. I had dropped an egg. That much was certain. I had broken my mother’s heart with a weak small hand. That was certain too. Yet was she singing that song? Was she clapping like mad?
When I looked up, Mama had turned into a red-eyed furious little girl staring down a jittery phantom. In one hand she held the carton of eggs, with the lid flipped open, and in the other she was cradling a phosphorescent white oval in her palm. She didn’t place this one in my hand, though. Instead, she flung it to the ground. Then she flung another egg at the cabinet. Suddenly eggs were flying everywhere—at the sink, the stove, the baseboard. At the walls, the floor, the countertop. Mostly, though, at me. Egg ran down my face and arms and into my mouth before the carton was empty, the kitchen was coated yellow, and she finally stopped.
Tears ran down Mama’s dream face in little rivers, then they ran down mine too. Along with the eggs, my mouth became a sea of grainy salt and slimy sulfur.
Yet the revival wasn’t over. Mama dragged me across the kitchen to the concrete floor of the pantry where she planted me on two skinny knees. Lord knows her son had made a mess. Lord knows how badly she wanted me to get it right, to be the good cherub. And everyone knows a revival’s not over until someone is stricken by the spirit, accused of some unholy crime, and made to confess. Eyes cross, tongues thicken, and whole bodies go rolling into the aisle. I kneeled and begged forgiveness, while a string of Blessed Be’s and Hallowed Names crossed my mother’s lips and she chased herself around the room, shouting as if her hair had been singed and her feet were on fire.
Finally, she dragged me to the closet in my bedroom and shut the door. Between the slats, I could see her tall slim figure pacing back and forth in front of my bed. And before her shadow slipped out of view, I heard one voice, then two, rising high and loud, singing the song from the kitchen and clapping to the beat of a pair of heels.
“You and me, brother, in His hands!”
Clap, clap!
“You and me, sister, in His hands!”
Clap, clap!
In the darkness, I bit my arm until I raised a red bump. I bit long and hard until I could no longer hear the sound of those two divided voices. The falling voice of a woman dropping something precious from her hand, and the rising voice of a girl watching in horror as it hit the ground. The low raging thunder of the words, and the high crying rain of the song.
“The itty bitty baby in His hands!”
“He’s got the whole world in His hands!”
Oh, but where are the soaring horses now, Mama? Where are all the men? Who will be there when the storm breaks, when the hand drops, when the Pentecost falls?
2.
Wanted Man
In the ray of light just outside the bathroom door, I waited for my father’s resurrection. When he got home from the battle of work, he looked dead as a blind buck in the road. The only signs of life were foreboding. His eyes were bloodshot and bulging veins snaked down his neck. One eye twitched and both hands trembled. With a jutting chin and twisted grin, Papa looked like a black and white poster for a wanted man, a legend everyone passes but no one sees.
At five, I’d already begun to mourn my father. His arms had held me once, his gruff beard rubbed against my face. His lips pressed against my belly, my nose, my eyes. He carried me on his back so that I towered over the house or he carried me on his side, so that—as he pu
t it—his son could see everything his way. Cradled against him, I felt the warm and quickening beat inside his chest. Yet he no longer lifted me up, and his hands hardly ever laid on top of my head now. So I followed as he cut new tracks in the St. Augustine lawn, I raced as he headed for the garage, and I scouted souvenirs from his path: shiny beer bottle caps and glossy gum wrappers. Wherever he went, I lurked in his footsteps and shadowed his trail, in the hope of spying a glimmer of the father I wanted to know.
At seventeen, he was a local football star outrunning other boys on the field not with brute strength but with wily dodges and sneaky plays. At eighteen, he was a married man holding a son instead of a trophy, a ball, or a diploma. In name at least, he was head of a household. But where other men might’ve seen a new field to maneuver and dominate, Papa saw rising water and vanishing turf. He struggled to stay afloat with bills, taxes, and his wife’s teary tirades. His ears nearly drowned with her demands for more space, a bigger car, a faster way to a new home in a new neighborhood. New curtains, new carpet, new wallpaper. What he couldn’t afford, he charged. Still, she cried out that she was stuck or suffocated or stifled. If he touched her, she flinched. If he kissed her, she shivered. If he raised his voice or stamped his foot, she blanched and broke into tears.
Whatever man Mama wanted, he bore another face at home, wore another shirt at work. Rather than outrun that man, Papa camouflaged himself and stepped lightly over the threshold every day. He moved like a chastened animal or a man whose hands might get him into trouble. Arms at his side, eyes still and straight, and blond hair turned to early ash, he approached even his son with caution. Gingerly, he pushed pin into cloth, changing my diapers as if they were silk, as if I was a sleeping butterfly. Warily, he pushed a spoon into my mouth, feeding me from glass jars as if I too might shatter and break. He coddled me so much, so often, and so completely, that neighbors started to talk. Their chatter rose loud enough to reach even his drowned ears. What was happening in that flip-flop house? What did it mean when a man mothered, yes, mothered a child? If we’d been Greek, a chorus would’ve mounted the stage with urgent warnings and dire prophecies. Reversal means tragedy, and tragedy means someone will fall. And that someone, no doubt, would be me.
We weren’t Greek, of course, we were Cajun. Still, the drama persisted. And with Papa cast in the role of mother, Mama saw no choice but to wear another costume, to pull on boots and lay down rules. Before she lit the fifth candle on my cake, she issued her proclamation: no baby talk, no Cajun ya ya, no childish nursery rhymes, and no more holding, touching, or kissing. She would feed their son, she would bathe him, and she would tell him stories at night. Period. After all, his baby was meant to be her little man, her bright Cajun prince.
Yet she was too late. The light had long gone out on Cajun men in Louisiana, not because of any woman, but because they were—day by day—losing their religion. Not the religion of the Catholic church, which seemed filled with priests scheming for ways to run their fingers under the hem of an altar boy’s skirt. Not the religion of the Cajun language, which no one had even bothered to write down and which already had lost all currency. Not the religion of love, which left them nothing but confused. Not even the religion of the bottle, which never left their side. No, the biggest religion wasn’t practiced or preached, wasn’t spoken or sipped. It was played.
Cajun musicians were worshipped like demigods in Acadiana. Before he married any woman, a Cajun man served as a high priest in a chank-a-chank church. Along with a gang of cousins and fatras, he might’ve led a band. At the very least, he could clang a triangle or bang a cowbell. Besides having the Eucharist in his blood, every Cajun also had an accordion, a fiddle, a tit-fer, and a musical washboard. Until my grandfather’s time, every man could drain a six-pack in five-minutes flat and make a fiddle cry like a cat at a crawfish boil. After the American schools opened on the Cajun prairie, though, my grandfather became the first man in his family to master the English language and the last to hear his own father play the squeezebox.
By the time he was old enough to work, there was no money in Cajun music—or Cajun anything. So he let his father’s accordion lay silent and never picked up a bow or fiddle. With his English, he worked for a surveyor. With his wages, he bought a piece of land and stepped behind the wheel of a plow. If my grandfather couldn’t hold up the full moon of a Eucharist like a Catholic priest or saw a fiddle in half like his uncles, then there was only one thing left for his hands to do. He’d dig deep into the ground and pull up long stalks of Louisiana short grain. He’d rub the rice hull with his thumb until the brown turned gold. He’d stay out in the fields until darkness fell and the last church bell tolled.
While the men walked away from their chank-a-chank religion, the Cajun women walked the Stations of the Cross. At church, they rubbed rosary beads with holy fury. At home, they scrubbed wood floors with holy force. Who’d blame them for praying so fervently to hold the house together? Who’d blame them for scouring so frantically? Without the mantilla-headed women, their husbands and sons might’ve all grown long tails and disappeared into the swamp.
After all, women were the last keepers of the living faith. What was left of Acadiana was threaded on their looms, in their cross-stitching and in the fabric of their gossip. According to them, farming rice was the only honest work left for a Cajun man. With her own Good Book, my grandmother proclaimed sugar cane farmers “decadent,” shrimpers “low-lifes,” and oil men “nothing but the tobacco juice of the devil.” She had other sayings too, as many as there were numbers in Deuteronomy or names in Numbers.
“Hush my mouth,” to any piece of gossip she intended to pass on.
“Higher than a cat’s back,” to any price she refused to pay.
And “God don’t like ugly,” to any man, woman, or child who dared disagree with her.
She might’ve also said “God don’t like dirty” for all the force she put into bleaching already-white walls and scrubbing already-clean floors. Like a good Catholic penitent, my grandmother fell on her hands and knees before God and before the evil menace of dirt. All that bleach and ammonia must’ve filled her head with fumes, as Papa put it, for soon she started wearing latex gloves at the dinner table and foam slippers in bed. She ordered her husband to drop his farm boots at the door but still chased his footsteps with a broom. Perhaps my grandmother had forgotten that rice was not only a seed, not only a grain, but also a germ. And a dusty one at that. Rice husk clung to my grandfather’s clothes and heels like a combustible line of ash. One short fuse and he might’ve blown up.
Instead, he broke down. With all his wife’s constant talk of dirt and the devil, with all her plastic-wrapped fingers and toes following him to bed, and with all the sad lost music in his head, my grandfather’s nerves finally snapped. He hollered at every object in the house: the rug that tripped, the clock that lied, the chair that chattered, the desk that bruised, and the broom that chased. He seemed to have lost all sense of place in the house, stopping to scrutinize a hallway or looking around a corner with a suspicious eye before taking a step forward. Soon, lead collected in his feet, then in both his hands. Maybe the rice in the field would rot, maybe snakes would take over the garden, maybe frogs would clot up the windows, and maybe birds would fall out of the sky and hit the roof, but he refused to budge until my grandmother called the rectory and two men in gowns dribbled oil on his forehead, muttered prayers, and rubbed beads. One led the rosary, the other read gospels from the Holy Bible. Both sipped from a bottle and ate plate after plate delivered from the kitchen. They left with a fat church envelope while my grandfather remained silent and still in bed. In the morning, though, there was a pool of oily vomit and a depression on the pillow where his head had rested. A low wheezing sound filled the air, like an accordion played with a deep reed and heavy bellows. The room smelled of camphor and dead leaves and my grandfather was not ever seen in any one of the twenty-two parishes of Acadiana again.
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That’s when my father set out to find a woman who’d be the opposite of my grandmother. At first, Mama must’ve seemed as unlike a Catholic housewife as a girl in Louisiana could get. No frosted wig, no powdered face, no mantilla on her head. Instead, she had hair the color of motor oil and skin as dark and smooth as tawny leather. When she sat in his car, he wanted to drive like a madman through fields of sugar cane and rows of sweet potatoes, over gravel and shell and smack into the only stop sign in town.
Yet if my father thought a Pentecostal, revival-singing daughter of a voodoo man would be fond of dirt and rice chaff, if he thought she would sit idly by in the passenger seat, he was as wrong as a right hand turn in a cul-de-sac road. That turn might’ve landed him in the driveway of his own home, but the woman inside and the house itself were on fire with sanitizing fumes.
As soon as he got back from work, Papa followed Mama’s finger to the bathroom. He’d tried to plot a path away from his parents’ home, but he ended up right where he damn well started. He’d taken a step out of my grandfather’s rice fields, but he still worked with the seed as a threshing operator in a chaffing mill. He’d married a woman from deep down in the bayou, but he still spent an hour every night scrubbing the day’s work off his skin.
After my father walked out of the bathroom, I’d sneak in to flip over the soap he used in my hands, to find the place where the grime wore down the edges of the bar and his nails carved crooked lines, as if he was scratching at something deeper than dirt. There weren’t many traces of my father in our home. Whatever he touched, I wanted to touch. Whatever he held, I wanted to hold. If he couldn’t lift me up anymore, I’d lift up everything that passed under his hand. Maybe the bar of soap would turn into gold. Maybe it would transform me too, make me the boy Mama wanted: porcelain clean and chrome bright.
Black Sheep Boy Page 2
