City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  On the floor, his sneakers. And the floor lamp with the shade with the owls on it. Here was a center; here was his heart. He had no idea whether it was transplantable into another setting, nor of what he would do about it. But at least he had found it again. That it was still there at all was, undeniably, a miracle. He sat there and let himself be in that damaged heart, that bitter miracle.

  Two hours later, with his duffel bag and some clothes and other items stashed in his car, SJ set off down North Derbigny and made the right turn at the end of the block, heading for Claiborne. Before he got to Claiborne, he stopped the car, threw it into park and put his head forward on the steering wheel. If you are there, he thought, let me know what to do. I will not question your motives, but let me see what to do, let me know it, and then I can go on, at least. He sat like that for a while. Then he opened his eyes again and headed out for the road back to Houston.

  Dark. He reached for his watch on the nightstand, pressed the button for the blue glow. 5:12. He knew from experience that he would not fall back asleep, and he swung his legs over the side of the bed as quietly as he could and left her sleeping and closed the door behind him as he went down the hall to her kitchen.

  SJ looked at all of Leeshawn’s photos on her refrigerator under the bright fluorescent overhead light, including two different pictures of them together. The golden starburst clock on the wall and the jade plant on the windowsill.

  He carried a glass of chocolate milk into her living room and sat on the sofa and closed his eyes. After a while he opened them again. The room was familiar enough—the glass coffee table on the white rug in front of the couch, the wooden hutch next to the television with her exercise tapes.

  He needed his life back. He knew it sitting there, with all of Houston stretching off for miles in the dark, still asleep. He was in someone else’s life, and a balance needed to be restored. Even a broken life of his own was better than a comfortable life that wasn’t his own. Maybe later they could make a life together, a new thing. But first he needed to put his own life back together. He did not know what kind of future, if any, was possible in the Lower Nine, but if he didn’t find out it would not be because he hadn’t tried.

  Once he knew this, he felt better. He drank the chocolate milk and sat there thinking until the sky got light outside.

  26

  Craig and Alice arrived at Gus and Jean’s around two in the afternoon on Thanksgiving Day, after watching some of the Macy’s parade on television. Peter Morehead had also invited them, as had their landlady, but Gus and Jean’s was an obligation. The older couple had taken care of them when they needed it, and now they would spend the holiday with them. Craig and Alice took turns getting Annie and Malcolm dressed, which was not easy; Gus and Jean’s was a landscape of recent pain, and Annie didn’t feel well and Malcolm wanted to keep watching something on TV. But finally they got everyone corralled and into the car for the fifteen-minute drive.

  Jean had bought little foil-wrapped chocolate turkeys for the kids, and had decorated the house with cut-outs of turkeys and pilgrims. (“I haven’t had so much fun in years,” she said.) She set the dining room table with their good china and water glasses and silver, and toward either end, facing out, she placed antique-looking candles in the shape of turkeys, which Jean said they had bought for their first Thanksgiving dinner after they were married.

  There was all the usual flurry of activity on their arrival, the carrying of coats into the bedroom, the pouring of soft drinks for the kids, Gus saying, “Craig, you want something a little stronger than that? It’s Thanksgiving…?” Alice told Annie to get her little backpack and show “Mama Jean” her pictures from the Thanksgiving pageant. Gus made an abortive effort to box with Malcolm, who offered, instead, a Ninja Turtle from his pocket. “Now, what is that?” Gus said, squatting down and pulling his reading glasses out of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt.

  Thousands of people from New Orleans had awakened that morning in hotel rooms in Pittsburgh, or Salt Lake City, or Phoenix, or in a cousin’s house in Atlanta, or Chicago, or in an unfurnished apartment in Dallas on a rented bed, or Baltimore, St. Louis, Hot Springs, Nashville, Minneapolis, Seattle, Birmingham, Boston, Miami. They were the echo in the room, amid all that warmth, for Craig. He knew it was true for Alice, too, but she was better able to put on a game face. And yet, at the same time, he was glad to be there, embedded in this continuity. Their house had gone on the market and they had had one or two offers already, but Chuck Bridges had encouraged them to hold out for the asking price. Although he had made the decision, Craig still experienced attacks of grief, and even panic, at unpredictable times. But at least now he and Alice shared their feelings; they both expressed their doubts, they both expressed their ambivalence.

  The kids played and colored while dinner was readying, and Alice helped Jean in the kitchen, and Gus and Craig sat on the couch in the living room, watching television. Craig had trouble knowing what to talk about with Gus, and so they sat there without talking except for occasional remarks on the football game. Craig had had to remind himself regularly how good the man had been to them, even though Gus was a Bobby Wise fan.

  During dinner, Jean and Alice carried most of the conversation cheerfully, talking about the great job Annie did in the Thanksgiving pageant. Mr. Bourne had cooked up what Craig had initially thought of as a mishmash of more or less banal sentiments, delivered by the members of the carefully balanced multiracial cast, who stepped forward one by one to recite their words of thanksgiving. To his surprise, though, Craig found himself won over by the undeniable sincerity involved, and by Mr. Bourne’s spoken introduction about Hurricane Katrina. And, more than that, Annie looked…radiant; it was the only word he could summon. She stood in the line in an orange velvet dress Alice had bought for her, and white tights, her eyes searching the audience. Craig gave her a surreptitious wave, which he saw her notice but not acknowledge, except with a smile. Then it was her turn, and she stepped out to center stage.

  To say thanks for what we have is not enough;

  To give to others is the other part.

  Thanks go from hand to hand,

  But giving goes from heart to heart.

  She stepped back into the line of her classmates, grinning more broadly now that her lines had been delivered successfully. After the play, Annie was uncontainable, running and talking to the other kids backstage as Craig and Alice stood among the other proud parents, congratulating the children, and Mr. Bourne. Craig watched Annie. His daughter was happy—she was happy—and it brought a most bittersweet pride and happiness for Craig.

  Now, at the Thanksgiving table, Annie recited her brief lines, again, to the applause of everyone. She looked up at Craig to check on his response, and he smiled back at her and gave her the thumbs-up, which she returned.

  At one point, Jean suggested that they go around the table and that everyone talk about one thing they were thankful for. Alice started, saying she was thankful that they were all there together, and that they were all allright. Jean said, “Allie, I think you stole my answer, but I’d also say I am grateful that we have had a chance to spend time with all four of you, even though it’s under such hurtful circumstances.”

  As he listened, Craig tried to figure out what he would say. He kept coming back to the question of what right did he have to be grateful, when so many other people had lost everything? Blessings seemed so arbitrary, and if you didn’t deserve your blessing, how could you be grateful for it? Why had God been good to them and not to others? It didn’t make sense…

  Gus was up next. “I spent Thanksgiving of 19 and 52 in Korea,” he began. “We had been there for maybe eight months I guess, at that point. And, you know, so many of your friends die when you are in a situation like that, or get injured, disappear, and you can wonder why you are still alive and they aren’t.”

  Craig listened with a poker face, but his first impression was that the old man had somehow been able to read his mind. That was
a little strange.

  “We had a chaplain there with us, named Father Bill Joseph. He gave a blessing over dinner—it was so cold, and we were in a big Quonset hut—and there wasn’t any kind of phone communication available, there was no cell phone back then, no e-mail; everybody was thinking about home and our families, and thinking about our pals who would never see their families again, and wondering whether we would make it home. Holidays are hard in the service; things you ordinarily train yourself not to think about, they’re harder not to think about it during the holidays. Anyway Bill Joseph said, like he was reading our minds—but he was going through it, too, you see—he said, ‘We don’t know why we are here, and others are not. It’s not just that we don’t know; we can’t know. People go away for reasons that make no sense, and we are left here. All we know is that’s how it works; we can’t know why. So the question for those of us who are left, is not why, but how—how do you use your time you have left, which you don’t know how much it is. How do you want to live that time? Because that is the only thing you have any control over.’ And I’ll tell you, that made so much of a difference to every man there at those tables in that big hall. It was like he gave us back to ourselves, or…put us back where we needed to be. I don’t know how to say it better than that.” Gus stopped speaking for a moment. “So I’m thankful to Bill Joseph for that talk, and I am grateful to him every year, on Thanksgiving.”

  Craig sat looking at Gus, and in his mind he could almost feel the egg falling off of his own face. But you are not too old to learn something are you, Craig? It was as if one light on Gus had been switched off, and another, from another side, switched on. He would have stared at Gus for half an hour, pondering this, had it not been his turn to speak next.

  He said, trying to keep his voice steady, that he was grateful to Gus for that story. And he was grateful for his beautiful family, and that they had come through the storm together, and that they would make it through this together.

  “That’s what I’m happy for, too!” Annie broke in, and everyone smiled, chuckled, and Jean began to get dessert ready.

  Craig took the pause to step outside onto the porch in the smoky twilight and call Bobby’s cell phone in New Orleans. Bobby and Jen were having Thanksgiving in the upstairs of their house-in-progress as Bobby called it. They had invited everyone from their circle of friends who was able to get back to New Orleans for the holiday, many of whom were living in Baton Rouge or Hammond and waiting to move back until school reopened in January—Doug and Connie, half a dozen of the families from Boucher, Derek was there (Gina was still in Memphis with the kids) and the drummer from the Combustibles, whose own father had drowned in the flood.

  Bobby and Jen had in fact accomplished prodigies of work in the previous three weeks, although it would be months before they would be able to reclaim the first floor. In the meantime they had rigged up a makeshift kitchen upstairs, with a double hot plate and a rented mini-fridge; they used the bathtub to wash dishes. One lucky thing was that power had finally been restored in their area—their block, actually, since houses only three blocks away were still not hooked up to the grid; all over the city these kinds of inconsistencies drove the residents slightly mad even as they found ways of negotiating them and making the best of things.

  For Thanksgiving, Bobby had told Craig that he was renting folding tables and using blue tarpaulins for tablecloths, in homage to the ubiquitous tarps people all over the city had used to cover as-yet unrepaired holes in their roofs. All the posters from downstairs, and any books that had been left on high shelves that could be salvaged, they brought upstairs and put in a special area, under a cheap print of Noah’s Ark, pulled from a children’s Bible they found at a flea market in Hammond on an afternoon escape from the city. To keep the dust from the gutting downstairs from seeping upstairs and coating everything, they had sealed off the first floor with hanging plastic secured with duct tape, leaving one hanging flap under which they would duck to ascend the stairs to their temporary quarters.

  Out on the porch Craig punched in Bobby’s number and stood looking up the street at the deepening blue sky behind the silhouetted houses and trees, lit here and there by a streetlight, the same time of evening that they had arrived at the same house not quite three months earlier. It smelled like fall; in the windows of houses he felt the warmth of light and the light of warmth, light from televisions pulsing against partly drawn curtains, all the familiar harmonies and rhythms of family life, of continuity, of reaffirmation. Craig heard the phone pick up.

  “Thank you,” Bobby’s voice said, in the tones of a master of ceremonies. “Why? Because it’s Thanksgiving.” In the background, Craig heard a riot of voices, and some New Orleans R&B cranked up loud, yet distorted so that he couldn’t recognize it. He instantly felt a hint of vertigo on the contemplation of the bottomless distance separating that voice, those people, from him, on that porch, at that moment.

  “Hey,” Craig said. “Glad to hear you’re in the spirit of the holiday.” He hoped this sounded spry or ironic.

  “Oh yeah,” Bobby said. Then, his mouth away from the receiver, “Tell Jen the pie’s gotta come out…Derek…Tell Jen to get the pie out.” Then, back with Craig, “Microwave pie. Totally dubious experiment. How’s Thanksgiving in the city of the big shoulders?”

  “Quiet, man,” Craig said. “It’s quiet. But it’s real nice. Alice’s Aunt Jean and Uncle Gus made a real nice dinner, the kids are coloring on the living room floor…”

  “Hey,” Bobby said, “you gotta get them some coloring books. You can’t just let them color on the floor…”

  Craig recognized the music in the background—Big Boy Myles, singing, “Well come on everybody take a trip with me…”

  “Hold on,” Bobby said. “Here…”

  “Hey,” Jen said. “Where the fuck are you? This pie is a total disaster. Bobby made me make a pie in the microwave, and we were about to hit the button and Connie starts screaming, ‘Take it out of the pie plate! Take it out of the pie plate!’, like it was going to blow up the neighborhood…”

  “Yeah—you can’t put metal in there,” Craig offered.

  “I know that, goofball. But she scared me. You having fun watching Lawrence Welk?”

  “I wish I was down there with you guys.”

  “No you don’t,” Jen said. “Bobby is singing along with the boom box. He can’t sing; he sounds like a dog taking it up the ass.”

  “Thanks for that image,” Craig said.

  “Nothing you haven’t seen before,” she said. “I have to deal with this pie. When the fuck are you coming back home?”

  “As soon as I can,” he said. Then a wave of screaming, laughter, children screaming…Trying to keep Jen on the line for another minute, he asked, “How’s Gertrude coming along?”

  Her attention was elsewhere, though. “Oh shit,” she said. “Bobby…” Craig heard a welter of voices, laughing…

  Then Bobby’s voice, laughing, mouth to the phone, “That pie was doomed from the start,” he said. “I better go. You wanna say hi to Doug or anybody else?” Then, away from the phone, “Chloe…Chloe…Go help your mommy with the towels, okay?”

  “Hey man,” Craig said, “go deal with it, okay? Tell everybody I said hi. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”

  “Okay, man. It’ll be a little calmer then.”

  After he hung up Craig stood in the brisk Midwestern autumn evening chill in his shirtsleeves, not yet ready to go inside. The life he heard over the phone was his life. But Alice, and Annie, and Malcolm were his life, too. He stood there for a minute, and then another, trying to get himself together, until he heard Annie’s voice saying “Daddy?” and he turned to go back inside. Say thank you, he thought. Say it and keep saying it until you believe it.

  At that moment, in Houston, SJ and Leeshawn were taking an after-dinner walk around the streets of Aaron’s neighborhood. Music, the sounds of televisions and voices, were audible as they walked through the evening, alon
g with voices and music from the backyards. A sadness had hung over the day that was exactly the size and weight of Lucy’s absence. Camille and Melvin had flown in from North Carolina, and Wesley was there, and Jaynell and her two daughters had come over, too, along with Dot’s widowed father. Aaron had cooked a fried turkey in the backyard, and Dot had made stuffing with sausage and sage in it, and yams with caramelized sugar and marshmallows, and cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes with garlic and cayenne, along with two pecan pies and a pumpkin pie, and this last made a postdinner walk of some sort absolutely necessary, unless you were Aaron, in which case you would sit on the couch with Dot’s father and watch television while the women made noise cleaning up.

  They had had fun early in the day, talking about SJ’s parents, and times they had all had as children, and remembering Lucy, which added a heaviness to the edge of the mood, but they all knew how to give grief a place at the table without letting it run the show, although Wesley did have to leave the room twice, wordlessly, to return ten minutes later, silent but wanting to be there, in the middle of it, with his family.

  After dinner, as they repaired to the living room and let dinner settle before dessert, Aaron said, “Wait a minute. I found these the other day,” and left the room, thumping up the stairs to the bedrooms; he returned a minute or two later with a brown paper bag cradled carefully in his arms. “Look at this, J,” he said. “I found this in the closet; I had forgot we had these. Your Daddy gave them to my Daddy.”