A couple of days ago we issued a cautionary note in these editorial pages to those who were calling for a hasty arrest in the St. Claire murder case. Instead we urged that the perusal of all the evidence to hand be conducted with care, thoroughness, and fairness. Mrs. Remy Lelourie St. Claire was arrested for the crime of murdering her husband late Monday evening. Two days later, Mr. Maguire, in resisting his own arrest for the same crime, proclaimed his guilt to the world. Yesterday, Mrs. St. Claire was released from the Parish Prison with all due dispatch. As we have already said on these very pages: The truth will out and justice will prevail.
Charles St. Claire's cut throat gaped rawly open and his eyes stared unseeing into Rourke's. He lay there sprawled in all his naked and exposed indignity, his blood black, his body pale and mutilated.
Who killed you, Charlie St. Claire, and why?
Rourke closed the case file folder and put it into the Open basket on his desk, with the other murdered ones who remained unspoken for.
Outside, the late Saturday evening sky was full of a buttery sun that seemed to be melting and dripping from an oyster-blue sky. He drove himself home to the Conti Street house and got out the ice-cream maker and all the fixings, and he and Katie and his mama sat in the courtyard beneath the mimosa tree. Maeve ladled the peach custard into the freezer can, giving the big blue bowl to Katie for licking, and then Rourke took over. He put the dasher in the can and fastened the cover, then put the can in the wooden pail and packed crushed ice all around it. He teased Katie about making her do the cranking, and she teased him back, saying it was a daddy's job, and so he smiled and started cranking, slow and easy as it should be done, while they all took the edge off their appetites with panné sandwiches and soufflé potatoes, and inside he still felt restless, fragmented, the case file in the Open basket haunting him.
He told himself that on Monday he would simply begin all over again. He would begin with the given, the obvious; he would have a talk with the Ghoul and go over the forensics, shifting the puzzle pieces into yet new patterns, trying to see them in a way he hadn't seen them before.
The water in the fountain made sweet music, and a breeze was coming in through the carriageway that smelled of summer, hot dust and tar. Katie sat down on the bench next to him and he saw that there was a dime with a hole in it tied around her ankle.
“Why are you wearing that good-luck gris-gris, honey?”
She went a little quiet and then shrugged. “That's so the gowman won't get me.”
He tried to think of what to say to her. He couldn't go on insisting there was no such thing if she was going to be so persistent in her belief of it. He went on cranking the ice cream instead, figuring that for this one evening at least he would just let it go, let it go.
Just then a banjo and a harmonica started up out in the street, one of the impromptu parades that could spill out of the speakeasy next door whenever the customers got to feeling a little frisky. Katie ran out into the carriageway to have a look.
“It's wearin' her down, this fear she's got,” Maeve said to him once she was out of earshot. His mother was sitting on the edge of the fountain with her arms wrapped around her drawn-up legs. She had on a big straw hat and she looked young in it, pretty.
“I don't know what more to do about it, Mama,” Rourke said. “How do you go about proving a negative?”
“Maybe one of us ought to take her out to where the gowman is supposed to be living, show her that he isn't there.”
“One of us?” he said, teasing her a little. “Lord, you are such a city gal, you'd get yourselves lost and wind up food for the gators.”
She let go of her legs and drew herself up, pretending to take offense. “I'll have you know I wasn't always a city gal. We can ask LeBeau Washington to take us out with him in his pirogue some day next week. We can make a picnic out of it, the four of us.”
The crank was getting hard to turn now, he had to put his whole back into it. It felt good, the pull of his muscles as he worked. The world smelled of peaches.
The banjo player had spotted Katie and was giving her a serenade. “She's old enough,” he said, “to have figured out that just because you can't see a thing, that doesn't mean it isn't there.”
“Maybe. But she has this need inside her to face things square on, does Katie. She's like you in that.”
One of the working girls was showing Katie how to jig the Charleston. Katie's braids were flying and her knees were knocking. As he watched her this time he saw not Jo in her, nor anything of himself, but the woman she would be.
She stopped dancing suddenly, as if she were a puppet whose strings had just been cut, and Rourke felt a shiver of fear that had no basis except that he would always be frightened now of bullets flying at his Katie from out of a smoky rain.
He watched her come through the carriageway into the courtyard, and her face was white, her mouth trembling. He was already up and running to her, when he saw LeBeau emerge from the brick-red shadows behind her. The boy had his straw hat clutched tightly in two shaking fists, and his face was swollen from crying.
“Miss Lucille, she sent me to tell y'all,” he said. “Miss Augusta, she be dead.”
The sun had had been baking the bayou mud all day, and so the air was filled with the smell of it, of ripeness and decay. The houseboat floated silent on the green, still water. It looked deserted.
Maeve walked up the gangplank as though she had been here before, but Katie stopped on the edge of it and would go no farther. She was scaring Rourke with the way her chest kept making these small jerking hitches but her eyes stayed wide open and dry. All he knew to do was to squat down next to her and grip the sides of her head with his two hands and kiss her face.
“I can stay out here with her, Mr. Day,” LeBeau said. “We go lookin' for frogs, uh-huh. They's frogs out here big as baseballs, Miss Katie.” He held out his hand, and she seemed to turn away from her father with relief. She put her hand in the boy's and she even managed a little smile. “You let me show you some of the biggest frogs you ever hope to see,” LeBeau said. “Big as baseballs.”
Rourke walked up the gangplank alone. He stopped in the doorway to the cabin, and his gaze went first to the bed. The sheet had been pulled all the way up underneath Augusta Durand's chin, but her arms lay outside, folded together over her chest. The proud bones of her face stood out in relief against the pillowcase that had been scrubbed clean by her daughter's hands and bleached white by the Louisiana sun.
Augusta had spent last evening with her daughter, trying to see Lucille through the grief of losing her man. It was LeRoy's brother, LeBeau, who had told them how Lucille was taking it so hard, sitting out on the deck in the rain and sobbing a noise that sounded like crunching bottle glass under your feet. They'd all been worried Lucille would do herself a harm, LeBeau had said, which was why Augusta had decided to stay over, but it was Augusta who had died of a stroke during the night.
Rourke saw that Lucille and his mama were at the foot of the bed, facing each other, and with a ragged silence between them, and then Lucille said, “What you think you can do for me now, after all this time and misery done passed?”
Maeve's face flinched as if she'd been slapped. “Your mother…Augusta was my friend.”
“Well, she gone now, gone out like a candle in the rain. If you come to tell her something, then you too late.”
Lucille must have sensed his presence in the doorway then, for she turned. She stared at him a moment, and her eyes were those of a woman who had gone through to the other side of hell, where the scorching, merciless sun can burn you down to nothing but ash.
“I don' want nothin' from you either, Mr. Day,” she said. “But if you want to show me respect, you can get out of my house. That what you can do.”
Rourke went back up on deck and stood at the aft rail. He watched Katie and LeBeau as they walked through the canebrakes, stirring up clouds of insects, their images blurring in the waves of wet heat that were coming off
the water.
He looked back through the open door and he saw that his mother had taken the chair beside the bed. She sat in stillness, with her hands folded in her lap and her head bowed, as if she prayed, although if she had spoken with God in his presence before it had never been with clasped hands and bent head.
Her shoulders made a sharp, jerking movement, and then she leaned over and took Augusta's face in her two hands. It was not a gentle touch; it was hard, desperate. Maeve held the other woman's face in her hands as he had done with Katie's face, as if she could make Augusta feel her touch even in death. As if by feeling her hands on her face, Augusta would have been able to understand what she was trying to say to her.
Chapter Thirty-Four
THE FIRST TIME SHE'D HAD TO GET HIS BABY CUT OUT of her, she'd gone herself to a woman on Pailet Lane. The woman had done it in her kitchen. Lucille had lain there on the old rickety pine table and looked up at a ceiling that was stained with rust, up at a dim, bare lightbulb that must have been burning out, because it kept flickering, or maybe there had just been something wrong with her eyes. She had gotten an infection from that time that had left her sick and weak and bleeding.
So when Mr. Charlie found out she was pregnant again, he said he'd arrange to have a doctor come along to the flat on Rampart Street and they'd take care of it there.
Mr. Charlie. She only ever called him Mr. Charlie. She guessed he didn't know that it was Negro slang for “white man,” and that it wasn't a compliment.
She hated him with all her heart, hated him for what he had made her into, and for what he had taken from LeRoy. Hated him for being white, and for him being able to look at her in that way of his, with that Love me, love me look he would get in his eyes, and not understand that the whole of her life was defined by the color of her skin. If you were born a Negro like me, she would think when he looked at her in that way of his, then you might as well have been born in sin, because they can do whatever they want to you, and short of dying you can't stop them.
Sometimes the hate inside her was so strong she could have beaten herself to death with her bare fists. It had grown up inside of her, the hate, the way the swamp grows, with the water slowly flooding the land and the next thing you know you're looking at the black skeletons of dead cypress trees and you've gators snapping at your heels. Sneaks right up on you unawares does a swamp, does the worst kind of hate.
Sometimes he would cling to her, holding her in a way that had nothing to do with what passed between them through their bodies. In that dark room, on that bed of soft Irish linen sheets, he would cling to her, and she would look through the gauzy veil of mosquito netting at the moon floating across the window, or sometimes there would be rain slanting through the arc of light cast by the street lamp, and she would reach, grasping, for the certainty of who and what she was. “Hold me,” he would whisper to her in the night. “Just hold me.”
She had wanted to keep it a thing that happened between them only on the bed with its veil of mosquito netting, like a prostitute would do, but he hadn't let her. Or maybe it was her own pride that hadn't let her, because she would find herself doing things for him, as though she cared for him and he for her. Like cooking up some red beans and rice and fried sac-àu-lait, so that when he came through the door he would say, “My, that does smell good,” and kiss her on the back of the neck and cup her bottom with his hands. Or she would help him with his bath, washing his back for him, rubbing her hands over his wet, slick skin, breathing in the steam and the smell of him, touching him, touching him.
She began to listen to the thing he most wanted to talk about, his work, and she realized he was doing real good for her people—a white lawyer taking their part before a white judge, using the white man's laws against them when he could. She didn't know why he was doing it, what need in him was driving him to do it, but it got done nonetheless. She didn't understand how he could do such wrong to her and have this one place of righteousness, of decency, inside him, and so she made herself despise him for it.
One evening, while she waited for him to be done with the writing of a letter, she went to stand out on the balcony, leaning her elbows on the wrought-iron railing, enjoying the promise of coolness that came with the falling darkness and the smell of jasmine rising from the courtyard below. Across the way someone began to play the saxophone, “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and the soulfulness of the music drew the words right out of her. When she was done singing, the night had come and was lying gentle now on her heart.
She turned around and he was standing in the doorway, one shoulder braced against the jamb, with his hands in his pockets. The white linen of his shirt glowed blue in the dark, and there was no mistaking the feelings on his face.
“Do you know how the wheels on a gear work?” he said.
She shook her head, not because she didn't understand about gears, but because she didn't want him talking about those feelings that were showing on his face.
“How the teeth of one wheel intermeshes with the other, so that the one wheel drives the other? It's what I feel when I'm with you. That not only is my wheel meshing with yours, but that you are the driving force of my life. Or could be.” He pushed himself upright, laughing a little, shrugging. “Lord. I don't know if I could have possibly put it more unromantically. I don't…” He waved his hand now as if his words were clouding the air between them. “I tell myself that this shouldn't be possible, that it can never be, but there it is. I love you, Lucille.”
She made her eyes go hard and her mouth go mean, but she had to lean back against the balcony's lacy, wrought-iron railing, her legs were shaking so. “You don't need to be tellin' me no lies like that, Mr. Charlie. You know what you want you goin' to be gettin', without you havin' to be tellin' me lies.”
She thought he'd turn angry with her, wanted him to, but instead his face clenched with pain, and his eyes were begging her, Love me, love me, say you love me. She told herself that it was a weakness in him, this need to be loved, a hunger that drove him to cruelties, and had long since cost him all his honor.
He closed the distance between them, and she tightened up all over in preparation for his touch. Even so, when his fingers oh so lightly brushed the curve of her cheekbone, she shuddered.
“If you were white,” he said, “I would marry you.”
She twisted away from him, unable to bear it. “Oh, Mr. Charlie, you don' know what you sayin'. You don't know. You don't know.”
But he had said it, and it changed things between them.
She caught herself thinking of him at odd moments, and her heart would give a hard, painful twist she didn't understand. While wringing out a pillowcase to hang on the line, while picking over cantaloupes in the market. While walking down a brick banquette that was slick with rain, a jasmine-scented wind lifting her hair. Sometimes she would dream at night of a man's lips and hands touching her, and they wouldn't always be LeRoy's. Sometimes they would be his.
If you were white.
The memory of those words was like a whiplash on her heart. It was bad enough to be betraying LeRoy with her body, over and over, but now her betrayal was one of the spirit. She was wanting to be something she was not.
He tried, but he was not always able to stop himself from coming inside her, and although she got potions and charms from Mamma Rae, that hoodoo wasn't always known for working.
Still, it had come as a surprise that morning when she got out of bed only to fall back into it with her belly roiling and her head reeling. She lay there with her knuckles pressed hard to her mouth, unsure whether she was stopping a scream or a sob. A baby. She was pregnant with da massa's baby. Again.
She hadn't told him about it that first time, just took care of it herself. Only he found out later, when she had got so sick, and he made her promise not to keep such a thing from him again.
So she kept her promise when the inevitable again came rolling back around, even though she was uneasy about it, the words sticking in her throa
t like tough pieces of jerked meat, sticking and choking her when she saw the hardness come over his face and eyes, showing up the mean place in him that had driven him to take her in the first place.
“We're going to have to get rid of it, of course,” he said.
She stood before him unable to breathe, swaying dizzily. What did he think she was? As big a love-fool as she must look, uh-huh. What did he think? That she was wanting to have this baby, a white man's baby, and with her LeRoy up in Angola for another forty-eight years? A white man's baby, a little girl, who would grow up looking at her skin and the way it was coming up light and always be wondering who her daddy was. Knowing that no matter how light her skin was coming up, her skin was the reason why her daddy wanted nothing to do with her, wanted none of her.
But it was the way he'd talked and that look on his face, in his eyes, get rid of it, like it was just so much garbage that had to be washed down the gutter. Like some monster that had to be cut out of her.
In that one moment the hate she felt for him was so deep and so black, it was as alive as the child she was growing in her belly.
The doctor had a neck that was thick with rolls of fat, like pink sausages, and dark, heavy-lidded eyes. He had that way about him of some white men, where he was always having to make sure she knew her place. He made her feel dirty in the way he touched her body, and in the way he looked at her. Da massa's woman. He ended up hurting her as badly as had the woman from Pailet Lane.
Afterward she lay in the azure gloom of dusk on sheets that were soft and cool and smooth to the touch. Out the window she could see lights glimmering behind the slatted blinds of the house next door. Someone was frying up a chicken for supper. She could hear the doctor and Mr. Charlie in the next room, hear the clink of a glass and the rap of something on wood.
“Well, that's taken care of,” the doctor said. “And not before time. Christ, Charles, aren't there enough pickaninnies littering the world without you makin' more of them?” And Mr. Charlie laughed.
Mortal Sins Page 39
