by Tom Piazza
“Go on,” SJ said.
Go on home, Loot, SJ thought. We are here.
Wesley crouched down and looked into the hole in the ground. Then he took the black plastic box that contained all that remained of his mother in the material world and shook its contents in to mix with the earth in the only home she had ever known.
SJ watched, thinking but not saying the old words about ashes to ashes and dust to dust. His nephew finished pouring in the contents of the plastic box and then remained, squatting and looking down, weeping. He was proud of Wesley for being able to weep. After giving him a few moments, SJ stepped over to him and put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder.
Wesley ran his forearm across his eyes, then stood up, nodding. They took turns shoveling the dirt back into the hole, mixing the ashes in with the soil. SJ nailed together a cross out of two pieces of weatherboard and drove it into the ground to mark the spot for a more permanent marker later. On the horizontal board he used a carpenter’s pencil to write her name. They had done what there was to be done, and they carried the shovel around to the front of the house, climbing over and around the smashed wood and debris.
They stood together in front of the house, looking around wordlessly. It was late morning. SJ again noticed the fascia board hanging down. He could fix that at least.
Craig found himself stopping every half a block or so as his car crawled through the wreckage of the Lower Ninth Ward, stunned at some new angle of perception on what was inconceivable. He had decided before leaving to drive around town for an hour or so and take pictures of some of the worst-hit areas to show people in Chicago. People needed to see what had happened. He had locked the front door of his house, left the key in the mailbox for the new owners, then walked down the brick walk to the curb, to his car, and looked back at his house one last time. Then he had headed out, first to Lakeview and then to the Lower Nine.
The bastards, he thought as he drove and stared. The bastards who let this happen—who built the levees wrong, who didn’t inspect them, who wouldn’t listen to the reports of the problems all over the city, who didn’t care enough, who didn’t know that you had to take care of what was important, that it didn’t just take care of itself. Who wouldn’t fund the restoration because it could cost almost as much as a month of the war in Iraq. They were not going to sweep this under the rug. He would tell everyone he knew.
He took dozens of photos; he planned to do presentations and slide shows about this. People knew him in Chicago now; the CHI EYE could sponsor the lectures. If he wasn’t going to live in New Orleans, he was at least not going to abandon it. This was not going to drop off the radar. He found himself almost choking with grief and fury as he drove down the wasted streets.
At one corner, Craig looked to his left and saw two men a block and a half away, in front of a ruined house, one on a ladder, one on the ground. He turned left onto the street and drove slowly in their direction, until he was at the next corner, half a block from them. If the men noticed him, they gave no sign. The man on the ladder was doing something to the façade of his house, which looked to Craig as if it had been wrecked, the front torn off. Still, it was one of the few left standing. The man on the ladder had hold of a piece of wood and was trying to lift it into position. The man on the ground was handing him something. Repairing a house, Craig thought. In the midst of this devastation.
What kind of person, Craig wondered? If you lived here, and lived through this, what kind of person did it take to come back and get on a ladder and start making repairs? To rebuild a life out of these ruins?
Craig put the car into park, rolled down his window, positioned his camera and zoomed in, framing the shot carefully, and took his last picture of the day. Later, he would put it above his work desk in Elkton, as a reminder of exactly what he needed to keep in focus for himself. Then, with a final look, he pulled the car around and headed out of the Lower Ninth Ward, to the northbound interstate and his new life.
The fascia board lifted easily into position, and SJ put his pocket level on it to make sure it was true. This was how you built something, he thought, as he had many times before. One step at a time. Touching the wood, even among the ruins, gave him an unreasoning happiness, the happiness from which all other happiness flowed. Maybe especially among the ruins. There was wood all around; he would build his house back from pieces of the wreckage. And on every piece of wood he would write the name of someone from the Nine until he ran out of names he could remember, and then he would start over again. Every piece of wood. As long as he had something to build, he thought, and a place to start.
SJ dug two nails out of his pocket and set them between his teeth. Then he looked down at Wesley. “It’s straight?” he said.
Wesley nodded.
“Good,” SJ said. “Hand me that hammer.”
About the Author
TOM PIAZZA is the author of the post-Katrina classic Why New Orleans Matters, the Faulkner Society Award–winning novel My Cold War, and the widely acclaimed short-story collection Blues and Trouble, which won the James Michener Award for Fiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is also well known as a writer on American music; in 2004 he won a Grammy Award for his album notes for Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues: A Musical Journey, and he is a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Tom Piazza lives in New Orleans.
www.tompiazza.com
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Also by Tom Piazza
Why New Orleans Matters
My Cold War
Blues and Trouble
Understanding Jazz
True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass
Blues Up and Down: Jazz in Our Time
The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz
Setting the Tempo (editor)
Credits
Jacket photograph by Tommy Staub
Jacket design by Archie Ferguson
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CITY OF REFUGE. Copyright © 2008 by Tom Piazza. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader July 2008 ISBN 978-0-06-169932-0
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City of Refuge
