Mortal Sins

by Penn Williamson

  “LeBeau didn't say nothin' about takin' out no pirogue,” Lucille said, although she still didn't look at him. “Last I seen him, he had his pole and bait bucket and was headin' for the Black Bridge.”

  The cemetery was mostly wooden markers with a few rusting tin cans of withered flowers. He'd made sure to ask at the guardhouse which one was LeRoy's. They got out of the car and found it easily. It was the freshest mound. Lucille stood looking down on the oblong of soft dirt, and her face had gone back to being stone.

  “This is an ugly place,” she finally said.

  “I'll have him moved down to New Orleans for you. You can put him next to your mama, if you want.”

  She nodded slowly and carefully, as if her head might fall off. “I want you to know I don' blame you no more for what happened. I know you didn't put the thought in his head to go runnin' so's the bulls could shoot him in the back.”

  He reached out and slid his hand beneath the hair on her neck, a simple touch of comfort. “I liked it better, though, when you were blaming me rather than yourself. It wasn't any one thing any of us did, including LeRoy.”

  She wrapped her arms tightly around her waist again. “Oh, I did plenty. Plenty. An' I've killed. If anyone should be put on trial for killin', sent to Angola for killin', it should be me.”

  She began to move back and forth, back and forth, rocking her upper body. Silent tears poured over her face.

  “Luce. Did Mr. Charlie give you a baby?”

  A great moan tore out of her throat, and she rocked harder, her hair beginning to whip from side to side. “Oh, Lord God, Mr. Day. How? How did you find out?”

  “It was only a guess. You've been feeling poorly, and three or four times a week for two years is a long time to be lucky,” he said, thinking of Belle, who had only needed the one afternoon.

  She let out a harsh laugh. “You've never been able to leave things alone. You keep proddin' at 'em and pokin' at 'em 'til you get at the truth, and never mind how the truth can be ugly.”

  She stopped her rocking and stared forward, into the nothingness of the fog. “He gave me a baby, all right. Twice. And both times I got it cut out of me. But that last time, that last time had me feelin' so sick. So sick. I left Mr. Charlie's place, but then I couldn't even make it down the block, I was bleedin' that bad again, and all's I could think of was makin' it as far as the house on Conti Street. Only you and my mama weren't home, there was only Miss Maeve, and I don' know what happened 'cept I think I must've fainted, 'cause the next thing I was wakin' up, lyin' in my old bed, from when I was a little girl in that house.

  “I could hear Mama and Miss Maeve out in the hall, talkin', and Miss Maeve, she was cryin', too. They thought I was too sick to hear what they sayin', but I found out that day where I come by my light skin.”

  She lifted her arm up in the air, turning it over, and she laughed. Hard, sour. “Not that me knowin' changed what is, though. Don't change what I am. Uh-uh. Lucille, the white man's whore.”

  “No, you're not.”

  “Don't you be tellin' me what I'm not.” Her hand curled into a tight fist, and she drew it back down against her chest. “I couldn't stay out of that white man's bed. Even bein' sick I couldn't stay out of that bed. I went back to bein' with him through the night too soon, and the next mornin' I was bleedin' again and Mr. Charlie, he got scared and called up that white doctor to come over. An' that doctor he does what he has to do, an' then he go back out into the front room and he and Mr. Charlie start at it again, talkin' 'bout how they no need to be bringin' no more pickaninnies into the world, how the world's got enough niggers. Out the same mouth that was all the time talkin' 'bout how much he loved me, Mr. Charlie was callin' his own babies those awful names.

  “So after that doctor left, I made myself get outta that bed and go on in to Mr. Charlie. I thought he should know who-all who he callin' nigger, whose babies he been killin'. So I tol' him how my daddy was Mr. Reynard Lelourie, but he only laugh like I knew he would. Sayin' how they lots of niggers walking 'round N'Awlins today with Lelourie and St. Claire blood in 'em. Sayin' how it didn't mean nothin'. Sayin' how a St. Claire was never goin' to be namin' no nigger as his kin.

  “I waited 'til he done laughin' and crowin' and then it was my turn to laugh.”

  Her head fell back and Rourke watched her tears come again, watched her throat convulse, and all he could do was stand there as if he'd been kicked.

  “'Cause then I tol' him who my mama is. My mama is Miss Maeve, I said, and so what does that make your wife, huh, Mr. Charlie, Mr. High an' Mighty White Man? If Miss Maeve is my mama, and that Reynard Lelourie was my daddy, then what color does that make your wife?”

  He didn't knock on her front door this time either. He walked in and down the back hall to her bedroom. She was sitting at her dressing table, fastening a string of pearls around her throat. He stared at the nape of her neck, at the feathering of dark hair there.

  Slowly, she lifted her head, and their gazes met in the mirror. She did not turn around.

  “My partner, Fio, he once had this theory that you had an ugly secret you couldn't bear for the rest of the world to know, and somehow your man found out about it and so you killed him.”

  She said nothing, and it seemed he could see the shadows darken under her cheekbones, but the rest of her was so pale, so pale.

  “I took Lucille up to Angola this mornin'.”

  She flinched at Lucille's name, and her eyes slowly closed, although the rest of her remained still as stone, and then she said, “What did she tell you?”

  “What you killed them for—Julius and Charles. What you didn't want found out, Remy darlin'. What nobody wanted found out—that you and Lucille Durand are sisters.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  A STRANGE GREEN LIGHT HALOED THE TOPS OF THE oaks and cypress trees that summer's day in 1916, as if the spirits of the bayou were gathering there. It had grown suddenly quiet, expectant. Even the locusts had paused in their screeching.

  Remy Lelourie stopped on her way to the slave shack and looked back at the big house. Sans Souci. The house seemed to shimmer in the ghostly green light, a thing built not of wood and stone but of wantings, longings. Her love for those graceful colonnettes and sweeping galleries had come to her with her mother's milk, become a part of her flesh and bones. For so long Sans Souci had been the only thing she felt she belonged to, and yet it would never be hers.

  The door to the shack stood open, but she could see no one inside. “Julius?” she said softly, strangely reluctant to disturb the hot stillness.

  The beads clattered open with the sudden sweep of an arm, startling her.

  “Well, well,” said Julius St. Claire. “If it isn't Remy Lelourie. So you've decided to keep our little rendezvous, after all.”

  The ends of his hair were dripping sweat, his face pale, sickly. He trembled as if he had a fever. He took a step toward her, and she saw the old French revolver in his hand.

  She looked to see if the hammer had been cocked. It had.

  She looked from the gun back up to his face. The black centers of his eyes had almost swallowed up all the blue. He was scaring her. The Julius she knew was a sweet, kind-hearted boy, who just yesterday had asked her to be his wife and kissed her on the mouth, gently, so gently, as if she were a breakable thing. She had first seduced him when they'd been sixteen, yet he kept on treating her as if she were some delicate, swooning blossom of southern womanhood, even when he ought to have known better.

  “Are you going to shoot me if my answer is no?” she said, feeling a little afraid now, but liking it.

  The sound that came out of his throat was meant to be a laugh. He swayed a little on his feet. “I regret saying this, darlin', but my offer of marriage must be withdrawn. It doesn't count, you see, when the young lady in question isn't all she appears to be.”

  That made her laugh. “Oh, Julius. I've never tried to be what I appear to be. But since I can see I'm no longer wanted, I'll just—
”

  “No!” The gun jerked up, pointing at her face. “I said I was no longer interested in marrying you, but that doesn't mean I still might not want to have you one more time for old times' sake. Go on into the bedroom now, darlin'. Get!” he shouted, waving the gun wildly when she didn't move.

  She passed by him close enough for her arm to brush his belly as she went through the beads and into the bedroom. The other, matching, revolver, she saw, was lying on the bed. A light-headedness came over her, from the fear that was surging through her whole body like an electrical current, and the excitement.

  She could play this game; she had invented it.

  “Take off your clothes,” he said.

  She took off her skirt, shirtwaist, chemise and drawers, leaving them to fall where they may. She stood before him naked, her hands at her sides.

  He stared at her forever. The noise of the locusts sawing in the bamboo outside the window filled the room. The heat of the evening was like hundreds of hot, panting breaths.

  Suddenly his face pulled, twisting, and he moaned. “Oh, God, God. You are so white, your skin is so white. If I hadn't seen the truth with my own eyes.” He made a harsh, choking sound, as if he were gagging. “I loved you. I loved'you.”

  The gun jerked in his hand again, his finger nearly pulling the trigger. She flinched, but only deep inside herself where he couldn't see it.

  “If you're going to rape me, Julius. Then do it.”

  “Rape you? I intend to die with you, darlin' Remy, to take you in death. They will find us arm in arm on this bed, two lovers who couldn't be together in this life and yet couldn't bear to part, but not rape, not rape. I want you still, still…but I really shouldn't. I shouldn't so defile myself anymore as to lie with a Nigra.”

  “What? You aren't making…What?” she said again, shaking her head, her mouth kinking up in a funny way, and she felt something go wrong with her heart, felt it pause and then take up its beating again in slow, unsteady lurches.

  “Last night,” he was saying, and he was weeping now, the tears mixing with the sweat on his face. “Last night, I told Daddy how we were going to be married, and this morning he brought me into the library and he showed me everything. Told me all about you Lelouries.”

  He took a step, closing the distance between them. He put the barrel of the gun underneath her chin and forced her head up. She couldn't stop her throat from swallowing.

  “So white, your face is so white and yet he showed me…showed me…” He dug the muzzle deeper into the soft flesh under her chin. “He kept her slave papers, the bill of sale, the birth certificate—he kept it all, my great-grand-daddy did. The duel, Remy. You know the story of the duel. My great-granddaddy Pierre killing your great-granddaddy Henri under the dueling oaks with this gun. Well, Pierre's sister, who was Henri's wife, she was near mad with grief over losing first her man and then her baby. But the slave had a get that was coming up light, white as white can be, and so they brought it into the plantation house and passed it off as Henri Lelourie's child. Your great-granddaddy's child, Remy-girl. We keep the secret for y'all, my daddy says, for la famille and a promise that was made, but we keep the truth, too. So no St. Claire will ever destroy his name by joining with the Lelouries' tainted blood.”

  She closed her eyes, as if by not seeing him she could close out his words. She didn't want to understand what he was saying, but she did, she did. Those stories of her Mama's, going year after year to the places where it all had happened, the dueling oaks, the house on Conti Street. It was like one of those Valentine hearts that are torn in two and the lovers must match the pieces up together again. Her mama had given her half a heart, and now Julius had given her the other. The pieces fit, but the rip was still there.

  She felt the gun barrel slide up along her jaw to her mouth, press against her mouth. She tasted the oil and metal, and smelled the sharp, familiar tang of fear. She opened her eyes in time to see his head lowering toward hers as if he would kiss her, kiss her or kill her.

  “I loved you,” he said through tears, but the gun in his hand was steady, the muzzle still pressed hard against her mouth, bruising her lips and knocking against her teeth. “I was going to marry you, but now I can die with you. Get up on the bed, Remy.”

  Slowly, she backed up a step, and then another, her gaze flickering between his face and his finger on the trigger. When the backs of her thighs hit the bed, she scrambled up on it and snatched up the other gun.

  He came at her.

  She cocked the hammer. “Don't.”

  He kept coming, up onto the bed with her. “We'll die together now, Remy. You must want to, you know you do. This will be our marriage bed, my love, the only one we'll ever have.”

  Her breathing was coming too fast, and her arms were trembling. But she wasn't going to die. Not for him.

  “Don't make me do it for you, Remy, please. Don't make me, don't make me do it.”

  He held the gun in his hand down at his side now, but she knew what was coming, she knew the barrel would be coming up, that soon she would see the round gaping maw of the muzzle. She already saw her death in his eyes.

  She pointed the pistol at his face and shot him.

  “I almost told it all to you our last evenin' in the willow cave. But I thought that if you looked at me, then, the way Julius had, I might as well have let him kill me. There was that part of you I could never touch, you see, no matter how I tried. And I was so afraid that was the part of you that would fall out of love with me if you ever learned the truth.”

  She was sitting, still, at her dressing table, but now he knelt before her, with his face pressed into her belly, holding her tight, as if he were a bandage that could stop the bleeding.

  I will always love you, he thought, although he didn't say it, for it seemed as though he had forfeited the right.

  Her hand was stroking his hair, over and over, stroking him. He raised his head. She was looking down at him with eyes that were wide and dark, and the pulse was beating in her throat, hard and fast.

  “I would have run with you,” he said, the words coming out funny, as if their edges had got broken. “Or stayed and lied for you, if that was what you wanted.”

  She bent over and took his face in her hands, her thumb lightly brushing across his lips. Then she leaned closer and put her mouth where her thumb had been, almost with reverence. He reached up and wrapped his arms around her neck, holding her, and he laid his head on her shoulder, and she rested her chin on his head. The fog was thick outside the window, warm and enveloping like a womb.

  He didn't know how long they stayed that way, holding each other. Slowly, she pulled away, her hands lingering a moment, touching him, and then they let him go. He looked at her and he thought he had never felt pain like this, it was so pure.

  “Remy—”

  “No, Day. It was wrong, what I did.” She lifted her arm and looked at her skin, and it made him think of Lucille holding her own arm up to the sky and talking about coming up light. “Your partner, that policeman, he was right about me—I couldn't bear to be found out. I tell myself that the gun was coming up, was firing at me, that Julius was going to kill me with that old French revolver unless I shot him first, but I can no longer remember the way it really was. I only remember that I didn't want to be found out.”

  She let her hand fall back into her lap and her face went oddly dreamy, as if she were remembering someone else in a place long ago and far away. “It was such a strange and frightening thing—to suddenly not be the person you thought you were. To be something you'd been taught all your life was ugly and tainted. Something less, in the eyes of the world you'd always known. I was a coward, I know, but I ran away from it. I only knew that if I stayed and tried to hold on to what I'd always thought I was, while trying to understand what I really was—then I would be pulled apart until all that was left of me would be shattered. As surely as that revolver shattered poor Julius's face.”

  Rourke wanted to be holding h
er again. He felt flayed down to his soul, yet oddly cleansed. He wanted to tell her this, but there were no words that would measure up against all that she would be feeling. He thought of their world and the way it was, of what their world had done to Lucille and LeRoy, of Lucille telling him how he could never know, because he wasn't colored.

  “It didn't work, though,” she was saying. “Running away. I'd see a sign on a theater door—whites only—and I'd want to laugh to think that if they only knew, I wouldn't be allowed through that door to watch my white self up on the movie screen. I'd hear some man on the radio talking about how Negroes ‘must know their place,’ and I'd wonder, Where is my place? With that white man on the radio or with them, with Negroes, and I'd feel ashamed and dirty, and then I'd despise myself for feeling that way. I'd wonder: Where is my dignity? Where is my pride? But I couldn't find the courage to be true to myself, and I'd feel so alone.”

  “You're the bravest person I know and you aren't alone anymore,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No, no, Belle and Mama, they must never know,” she said, misunderstanding him. “You musn't ever tell them, Day, for you know how they are, how they've been raised to think and be and feel, and you know how they would never be able to bear it. Only four of us know the secret now—all the rest are dead. Me and you and Lucille, and Lucille's mama, of course. Your mama.”

  Rourke thought again of Lucille, holding her arm up to the light. The Lelourie girls, because of how they had come out, were allowed to keep the secret, but Lucille had to bear it before the world.

  Remy's eyes had grown unfocused now, warming with a curious light. “I ran away after I killed Julius, but something just wouldn't let me stay gone. I kept thinking how I wanted to come home so bad, if only for a little while, and that night at the premiere party, I could tell Charles's daddy had died without passing on to him the Lelouries' ugly secret. He was being so sweet to me that night, courting me, and so I thought—”