Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  Fio stretched his arms up to the paling sky, popping his bones. “Man, I'm way past tired to almost dead myself. But you know soon as I roll on home, the wife is gonna jump on my case about being out all night.”

  “Remy Lelourie has kindly offered to give us her fingerprints,” Rourke said. “She will be paying us a visit first thing this mornin'.”

  “Oh, joy,” Fio said just as the Smoky Mary clattered over the rails behind them, her whistle wailing long and shrill and lonely.

  The house where Daman Rourke lived on Conti Street had once belonged to his mother's lover. In the last few years he'd been able to look at it without remembering that, but not tonight—or rather, this morning.

  The honey wagons were rattling over the cobblestones, carting away the refuse from those places that still had outhouses, by the time Rourke finally made it home. He let himself in through the carriageway of the beautiful old Creole cottage and into the courtyard. In the murky light of dawn, the wisteria vines and elephant ears sent blue shadows splashing across the paving stones. It smelled wet, of rain-soaked leaves and black earth.

  The courtyard was an oasis of peace in a rather rough-and-tumble part of town. The Faubourg Tremé was now known for its speakeasies, jazz, and bawdy houses. A hundred years before, though, it had been the custom for white plantation owners and their sons to maintain homes for their quadroon mistresses here.

  In those days the gens de couleur libres had also lived in the Faubourg Tremé. They had been free men of color, not slaves; although some of them owned slaves themselves. They were tailors and blacksmiths and cabinetmakers. Some became rich, and so they built houses in the Creole style, and then they filled them with mahogany furniture, hung their walls with silk, and lived within them lives that were genteel, but separate.

  They spoke French and sent their sons to school in Paris. Those sons whose skin was light enough they sent north, to disappear into the white man's life. Some sent their daughters to parade in their satin gowns and bare brown shoulders across a quadroon ballroom, to attract the eye of a protector with money and property and a pale face. For when put on a scale, the word color outweighed the wordfree, and if one of them had dared even to raise his voice to a white man, he risked being lynched from the nearest green-iron lamppost.

  That was long ago, though, in another time, and some things were different now. Now much of the neighborhood was little more than a slum, where you could buy any brand of sin you cared to name. The wrought-iron balconies on the old town houses drooped like tattered swags of lace; rats and dogs fought over the bones in the garbage-strewn courtyards. Yet somehow through it all the old houses and cobbled streets had kept their romance and charm, along with their secrets and hidden shame.

  Daman Rourke, coming from the scenes of two brutal murders, stood within the smothered emptiness of the courtyard as if not quite knowing how he came to be there. For a moment he thought it was raining again, and then he realized it was only the water splashing in the iron fountain.

  Light leaked out from around the shutters of the small rear cabinet where his mother's housekeeper slept. Augusta always got up with the dawn; she was certain the day couldn't begin without her and no one had ever been able to prove otherwise. Where he lived, in the garçonnière over the old kitchen, all was shadowed.

  He thought of the brass bed in the old slave shack out at Sans Souci and how so like Charles St. Claire it would have been to meet his mistress there, close to hearth and home and wife. Snort a little snow, drink a little wormwood, and do a little jig on the edge of the moon.

  So she walks out there, the wife, and she sees…

  Maybe it was true love, he had said to Fio, and thought that he'd been lying. And maybe he'd only wanted it to be a lie.

  If you love, desperately, passionately, and the one you love loves another, would you kill in the name of your love? Maybe. Probably.

  Yes.

  Seeing her again after all this time, in the same room, close enough to touch, to smell, had been like wrapping his fist around broken glass. Once, he might have killed her just to keep her his.

  He made a sudden movement with his hand, as if he could fling the thought away. A flock of starlings rose off the roof in a black cloud of flapping wings. He turned to watch them fly away and saw his mother.

  She sat on a bench, deep in the shadows near the fountain. He had walked right by her when he came in through the carriageway. Anyone else would have said something, but not Maeve Rourke. Some people used silence as a weapon; she used it as a shield. He had long ago given up waiting for her to explain herself to him.

  In the dawn light, her face was white and ethereal as mist. She had on her wine-colored silk dressing gown, and her long dark hair was down and fell along the sides of her face like a nun's veil. He started toward her, and that was when he saw that she wasn't alone.

  His daughter lay sleeping on the bench, her head in his mother's lap. She wore a nightgown of white cotton and eyelet lace, but she had a Pelicans baseball hat on her head, and she was hugging the mitt he'd given her for her sixth birthday to her chest as though it were a teddy bear.

  “Hey, Mama,” he said as he knelt and kissed his daughter's cheek, which was soft and sticky and smelled of watermelon. “What y'all doing out here this early in the mornin'?”

  “She was walking in her sleep again last night, and then she went and had a bad dream on top of it. Woke herself up with her crying, the poor thing. I thought she'd do better if I brought her out for some air.”

  His mother waved a palmetto fan in a slow, drowsy motion in front of the child's face. Maeve Rourke had been born and raised in Ireland, in County Kerry, but she was southern all the way to the bone now. As if she'd absorbed her southernness from this house and the Faubourg Tremé, and from the man who had brought her here.

  “She dreamt the gowman was coming to get her,” his mother said, her voice soft. She laughed, then, and the sound of it too was soft in the dawn's half-light, yet it surprised him, for she so rarely laughed. “I suspect it was either the gowman, or too much watermelon on top of supper.”

  Ever so gently he followed with his finger the length of his daughter's fat brown braid, where it curved over her shoulder and down her back, and he relieved some of the ache in his chest with the whisper of her name.

  “Katie…”

  Something brushed his cheek, a touch so light he might only have imagined it. “You looked so sad there for a moment,” Maeve said. “What's happened?”

  “Nothing. Well, no more than the usual. Two murders.”

  “And now you've taken it all uponyourself to see the culprits are brought to justice. You shouldn't care so much, Day.”

  He had to smile. “What did you and Fio do—get together and write a script?”

  “I'm sure I don't know what you are goin' on about.” She was quiet a moment, then she breathed a soft sigh. “People will always be doing ugly things to each other, bringing each other pain.”

  He didn't say it, although he could have: that she had been the first to teach him about ugly doings and pain, and she had taught him young. They had their own family secrets, he and Maeve Rourke. Their own buried sins.

  His mother waved the fan between them, while the sky lightened from cinder gray to ash. He thought he should tell her about Charles St. Claire's bad death and that Remy Lelourie had probably killed him.

  “Give her over to me,” he said instead. “I'll put her back to bed.”

  His daughter felt heavy in his arms as he lifted her. A solid and yet giving warmth, wondrously alive. At the door, he looked back to where his mother still sat on the bench. He knew it was only the way the vines were casting their shadows across her face, but in that moment she appeared strangely stricken and sad.

  Chapter Four

  THE FIRST TIME MAEVE ROURKE LOOKED INTO THE eyes of the man who would become her lover, it was over the prostrate body of the Virgin Mary.

  Later, she would decide that the moment must hav
e seduced her with its whimsy. For until then she had always arranged her life as it ought to be: laying it out for herself on a road, straight and well marked by signposts, so easy to follow. So true. She was nineteen that day her own heart played a trick on her, teaching her that it had a free will and a sense of direction all its own.

  She had been six when she decided that she had better plan her life very carefully, otherwise it was likely to go seriously awry. She'd lived in Ireland then, and though she had grown to womanhood holding little of that time in her heart, she could always remember every warp and weave of one particular morning.

  In her memories, turf smoke from the fire fills the tiny shibeen, with its solid mud walls and thatched roof. She sits on a stool with a bowl of potato gruel in her lap, gruel so thin she can see through it easier than she can see through the water that collected in the rain barrel in the yard. Her da lies sprawled on his tailbone before the hearth, his mouth pulling on a jar of poitín, and in her memories the harsh, peaty smell of it bites at her nose.

  And always, in her memories, her mem shuffles across the beaten dirt floor in her bare feet and opens the door, so that sunlight spills inside the windowless hut, warm and white. Chasing out the darkness and the smoke, and the other, brutal memories of the night before.

  Her mother lived her life in the dark. It weighed on her soul like a pile of heavy stones put there one by one. Even at six, Maeve could mark the way the stones had mounted. One for every day black crepe hung over the door for another babe born and buried. One for every day her mother dug for potatoes in a stubble field, heavy-bellied with another child that would die. One for every winter night when no turf burned on the fire, and the wind blew cold across the bleak bogs and the black hills. Stone by stone for those other nights when Da, lying on the pile of straw in the corner, rutted and grunted over her mother's body, and her mother wept.

  Stone by stone, one at a time, and so her mother was always seeking the sunlight, even on the coldest of days.

  But that morning Da had wanted none of the sun. He stared at the wash of light that poured through the door, his mouth hanging slack, his red eyes blinking.

  “Shut the bloody door,” her da had said, only that, but her mem obeyed with shoulders bowed and her mouth pulled in tight. In the instant before the shibeen was plunged once more into smoky murkiness, Maeve had been looking at her father's big hand where it was wrapped around his jar of poitín. At the way the wiry red hair curled over his thick knuckles and the dark freckles on his skin might have been splashes of her mother's blood.

  And she thought, I will never marry a redheaded, freckled-face man with hands as big and heavy and thick as peat bricks that are always ready and willing to be made into fists.

  No, she hadn't really thought such a thing, not in concrete words like that—she had been too young. Yet, still, the promise had been made to herself that morning, arriving fullblown in her heart. Even then she had known the strength of her will, and the shape of it.

  She was never going to live her mother's life.

  On the day Maeve Rourke first looked into the eyes of the man who would become her lover, she had come into the St. Louis Cathedral to get out of the bruising summer sun. Four years already gone from Ireland, four summers lived in New Orleans, and she still hadn't become used to the terrible heat.

  She sat down on a pew near the altar of the Most Blessed Virgin of the Rosary not to pray, but because her feet were hurting like the very devil. She did say a couple of Hail Marys, though, as penance for what she was about to do. No sooner was the last amen past her lips than she was unhooking her stiff new high-button shoes and wrenching them off, along with her black lisle stockings.

  She wriggled her bare toes as she leaned over to rub the ache out of her blisters, and saw a pair of plaster feet hanging off the end of the pew in front of hers.

  She half stood up and peered over the pew's high round wooden back. The Most Blessed Virgin of the Rosary lay stretched out the length of the seat, as if she had just climbed down off her marble-slabbed altar to take a little nap.

  A heel scraped on stone, and Maeve looked up. A man stood in the aisle and he, too, was staring at the statue lying on the pew. He raised his head, and their eyes met, and they shared a slow smile.

  Maeve's gaze fell back down to the prostrate virgin. Her white plaster hands were folded in prayer on her plaster chest, her plaster blue eyes stared up at the vaulted ceiling. She had, Maeve noticed now that she was getting such a good up-close look at her, a rather pink and prissy plaster mouth, but then she had probably never suffered from blisters.

  The thought nearly startled a laugh out of Maeve. She bit her lip and swallowed hard. She pressed her hands together as if in prayer and covered her face.

  The man in the aisle did laugh, trying at the last moment to turn the noise into a cough. Maeve snorted.

  She snatched up her shoes and stockings and her shopping basket, and she ran, banging her hip on the pew arm so hard she would find a bruise a couple of days later and wonder how it had come to be there. She was laughing so by the time she burst back out into the sun-drenched square that she couldn't stand up anymore, and she had to sit down on a wrought-iron bench and grab at the stitch in her side.

  He followed her out; well, she had known he would. His face was flushed and slightly damp. His eyes, looking down at her where she sat, gasping, on the bench, were bright with his own laugh tears. It hadn't been that funny, surely, the sight of the Virgin Mary taking a nap on one of the pews. Maeve couldn't imagine why they both had carried on laughing so, two strangers together.

  He was still smiling as he waved a hand back at the cathedral. “How do you suppose she…?”

  Maeve shook her head and pressed her lips together to keep from smiling back at him. “Oh, the saints do preserve us. It must've been the sight of my bare feet what did her in.”

  He laughed and that set her off again too, and their laughter mixed with the jingle of streetcar bells, the ring of mule hooves on cobblestones, and the echoing booms of ships unloading bananas at the wharf.

  When their laughter died, it seemed all the world hushed as well. The quiet that followed held a weight to it that came from the intimacy the shared moment had stirred.

  She slanted a look up at him. He was jauntily dressed in a tight-buttoned linen jacket with a high collar. He had the look of the Creole about him, in his dark hair and eyes, and in the way he held himself—old blood, old money, old name.

  She had chosen a bench next to a blooming magnolia tree, and the air around them was cloyingly sweet. Beneath her bare feet, the stones of the square burned hot from the sun. She liked the feel of it, soothing and exciting both at once. “You wouldn't happen to be having a button hook along with you?” she said.

  He actually patted down his pockets as if there was a chance he might find one, then he shook his head, smiling.

  She smiled back at him this time, and longer than she should have. “Never you mind. I've blisters on me blisters, as 'tis.”

  She stood up, smoothing down the crisp white apron she'd put on that morning for going to the French Market. In just that instant her smile had gone. She felt a scratchiness in her throat now, and her nose had grown pinched. She was ridiculously close to tears for no reason she could name, and he was looking at her as if he knew what she was thinking, which was so unfair since her thoughts were a mystery to herself.

  “I've my shopping still to do,” she said.

  He tipped his straw hat at her, but instead of turning away he stepped closer. So close his shoulder nearly brushed hers, and she could see the smile creases at the corners of his mouth and a little mole the size of a cinder above the flush of color along his cheekbone.

  “May I come along?” he said. “I can carry your shoes for you.”

  He held out his hand. It was a beautiful hand, slender and long-fingered, and he wore a wedding ring. But then her finger sported a ring as well, and he could see it plain since she'd had to ta
ke off her gloves to unbutton her shoes. She thought she would tell him no thank you and send him on his way.

  She put her shoes into his hand.

  The sky above them was hard and bled nearly white by the relentless summer sun. They walked together through the market, beneath the shade of the scrolled colonnades, past crates of cantaloupes and strawberries and plump Creole tomatoes. Past shallots hung in bouquets and big silver bells of garlic. Past bins of shrimps on ice and pyramids of oysters and latanier baskets of blue-clawed crabs. She carried her own little shopping basket over her arm, but he walked beside her, and so she was too flustered to buy anything.

  His presence beside her disturbed her, and not because of the wrongness of the moment—her, a married woman, walking barefoot through the market with a strange man. He disturbed her because he made her want something from him, although what that something was she couldn't even formulate into a thought, let alone put into words.

  He didn't cast quick looks at her, the way she was doing with him; he studied her openly. She knew what he was, and she knew what he wanted.

  They came to the end of the colonnade, where a Negro woman sat on the sidewalk balancing a big basket of rice fritters on her head. “Bels calas” she cried with the voice of an opera singer. “Bels calas, tout chauds.”

  He bought them all a fritter to eat, even the cala woman herself. Maeve thanked him and smiled, and then as if he'd only just thought of it, as if it hadn't mattered before this, he asked her what her name was. She stumbled over the giving of it as if wasn't really hers, or shouldn't have been.

  “Maeve,” he repeated after her, rolling her name around on his tongue as if tasting it. “How lovely.”

  She felt another strange smile come over her face at the compliment.

  Out on the river a tugboat tooted its horn, and a great flock of seagulls rose up from the market's tiled roof. Together they tilted back their heads and watched the birds fly off between the spires of the cathedral. She thought she should tell him that she had to go back home now, that she was late as it was.