Southern Ruby
Page 46
It took us two hours to make the short trip to the Lower Ninth Ward. The wind was starting to pick up. It was the first sign so far that a storm was coming.
We parked the car in the shade of a crepe myrtle tree that was starting to bend in the breeze. Elliot left the tops of the windows cracked open, and I passed Grandma Ruby a bottle of water. ‘We’ll only be a minute,’ I told her. I looked up at the sky, which was starting to grow darker. A minute was probably all we could spare before the heavy rains that preceded a hurricane starting pouring down, making the evacuation even more difficult.
The houses on either side of Terence’s and across the road had plywood fixed to their windows and doors. I suspected he had installed that form of hurricane protection.
The sound of hammering came from the back garden and Elliot and I went around to find Terence securing plywood to his rear windows. He gave a jolt of surprise when he saw us.
‘Amandine! Elliot! I expected you’d be well on your way out of town by now. I’ve heard I-10 is banked up already, even though they opened up the incoming lanes to outgoing traffic.’
‘We’ve come to take you with us,’ said Elliot. ‘This storm sounds bad, Terence. Really bad.’
Terence shook his head. ‘I can’t leave. Augusta’s son took her to the hospital, but I’ve still got elderly Mr and Mrs Williams across the road and the lady down the street with all her children. Then there’s Jerry near the bus stop.’
‘We can give them all a ride to the Superdome,’ said Elliot. ‘They’ll be safer there.’
Terence grimaced. ‘You know who’s going to go to the Superdome? All the gangs, drug dealers and troublemakers. I went there during Hurricane Georges and got robbed at knifepoint. Those elderly people are too frail for that, and how’s a young woman with five kids going to defend herself?’
‘Hey, Ti-Jean!’ called a man on a ladder from the house behind. ‘You staying too?’
Terence nodded. ‘And you?’
‘Sure am!’ the man replied. ‘I got my arsenal of weapons. Any looter trying to get into my house is gonna get one hell of a surprise!’
‘Why did he call you Ti-Jean?’ I asked when Terence turned back to us. I remembered that had been the name of Leroy’s brother.
‘It’s a diminutive, not a name,’ he explained. ‘My grandfather was named John Terence, and apparently I greatly resembled him so my family always referred to me as Ti-Jean — Little John — as a joke. I told my neighbour that story once at a crawfish boil and ever since he’s called me Ti-Jean.’
‘Well, that’s the longest minute I’ve ever spent in a hot car,’ said Grandma Ruby, coming around the corner with Flambeau under her arm.
She stopped in her tracks when she saw Terence and blinked. Then she brought her hand to her mouth, staring at him as if she’d seen a ghost.
‘How can it be?’ she said, her voice quivering. ‘Is it you? Is it really you?’
Terence dropped his hammer. He was trembling from head to foot. For what seemed like an endless moment, neither of them moved.
Elliot and I exchanged a glance, confused. Terence and Grandma Ruby knew each other?
Terence tried to say something, but his voice died in his throat. He stepped forward, like he wanted to rush towards Grandma Ruby but couldn’t move his feet.
Grandma Ruby edged back from him, looking bewildered. ‘All these years,’ she said. ‘For all these years I thought you were dead. I saw you in the casket.’
My heart thumped in my chest. What was I not seeing? What was I overlooking? Then my mind jammed and I stopped breathing for a moment as the realisation hit me.When she came on stage the whole world stopped. She was mesmerising. She danced at the Vieux Carré nightclub, a classy place on Bourbon Street. It’s gone now, of course. I knew from Grandma Ruby’s stories that black men weren’t allowed to watch white strippers. Terence would never even have been allowed in the Vieux Carré Club unless he was in the band. What had been jumbled up started to make sense — but in a way that seemed crazy.
Now I understood Terence’s deep love for my father: he’d loved him because he was Jewel’s son. He was the one who had been leaving flowers at my parents’ tomb. I also understood why he hadn’t wanted to help with the porch or stay at the house in the Garden District. Terence didn’t want to see Grandma Ruby because he was Leroy!
Tears ran down Grandma Ruby’s cheeks. ‘Why would you fake your own death? My heart was broken!’
‘Every day, every second of every day, I always thought of you, Jewel,’ Leroy said, his voice broken. ‘I never left you. The Klan killed my brother Terence — Ti-Jean — because of his activities, but that wasn’t enough for them — they went after my family too. And I could only imagine what they would do if they found out about you. When Terence was murdered, I begged my family to tell you that it was me who’d been killed. It was the only way I could set you free. No matter what I did or said, I knew you’d follow me anywhere, even to your own destruction. They only agreed because they loved you too, Jewel. They knew it was the right thing.’
It was clear now that Jimmy had lied when he’d told Grandma Ruby he’d murdered Leroy: he was the sort of person who would try to take credit for someone else’s racist execution.
‘It nearly killed me,’ Grandma Ruby said, running her gaze over Leroy as if she still couldn’t believe he was real.
‘I watched you from afar. I wanted too much for you to be happy — that was the reason. The only reason. Not because I ever stopped loving you.’ He sat down on the step, weeping now. ‘I would never hurt you intentionally, never! You should know that.’
The grief in Grandma Ruby’s voice intensified. ‘Our son, our beautiful son! He never got to know you as his father.’
Leroy’s head snapped up. ‘What son?’ Then, grasping the meaning of her words, he gave a short cry. ‘Dale?’
Grandma Ruby nodded, and my whole world tipped over like a ship taking in water. My father was Leroy’s son?
I leaned against Elliot for support and remembered the pictures I had seen of my father: the clean-cut, all-American boy. But if you knew what you were looking for, the clues were there: the sculpted cheekbones, the nose, the height, the tanned complexion.
I turned back to the man sitting on the step, the man I’d known as Terence. That meant he was my real grandfather, not Clifford Lalande.
Globs of rain began to fall from the sky but we had all forgotten about the hurricane. We were caught up in a storm of our own.
Elliot helped Leroy to his feet. ‘We’d better all go inside,’ he said, ‘and sort this out there.’
Leroy had moved the electric piano upstairs, and with the plywood on the windows and doors, the front room was dark. Elliot turned on a lamp while I helped Grandma Ruby into a chair. I took Flambeau from her before sitting down myself. My legs were like jelly.
‘Dale was our son?’ Leroy said.
Grandma Ruby looked at her clasped hands on her lap. ‘When I thought you were dead and I suspected I was pregnant, part of me was elated that I was carrying a legacy of the man I loved. But I was also terrified in case the child was born black. When Clifford proposed to me, I told him I couldn’t marry him because I believed I was pregnant with your child.’
‘He married you anyway,’ said Leroy, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
‘I didn’t expect that of him, but he insisted. He made sure only a doctor he trusted was present for the birth. If the child turned out to be black, we’d say it was stillborn and find a good family to raise it.’ She looked into Leroy’s face. ‘You can’t imagine how torn I was that I might have to give up our child! I often thought that if it came to that, I would kill myself. How could I go on living? But Dale was born looking like a pure white child. God had been merciful to us. Clifford claimed him as his own.’
Grandma Ruby turned to me. ‘I’m sorry for not telling you the whole truth, Amandine. I was scared of how you might react. I needed time to work up to it.’
Grandma Ruby nodded. ‘I still talk to you sometimes, like you’re there and watching over me.’
He leaned over and grabbed her hand. ‘I’ve always been watching over you. That’s why I came back to New Orleans after my family settled in San Francisco. I took Terence’s first name to honour his memory and settled in a part of town you were unlikely to visit. You were married to a good man and you’d had children. When I met Dale at Preservation Hall, I tried to avoid him in case he led you to me again. But he kept seeking me out to teach him piano. Then Amandine appeared one day with Elliot, asking about Dale. Life is strange. Of all the people in New Orleans, both Dale and Amandine had some magnetic pull towards me. It makes me believe in fate.’
‘And you, Leroy?’ Grandma Ruby asked quietly. ‘Didn’t you ever have a wife and children of your own?’
He shook his head. ‘A man can live on his own with his memories. A woman can’t. She needs a family.’
Grandma Ruby seemed to wrestle with something in her mind, then a change came over her. She sat up, her dignity and poise returned. ‘You sacrificed a lot for me,’ she said to Leroy. ‘Clifford and his family were good people, that’s true, and they were very wealthy. But in my heart I’ve always remained Jewel.’ She turned to me. ‘Amandine, get my overnight bag from the car.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Elliot said. ‘The wind sounds like it’s picking up.’
When he returned, he brought all the bags in with him. He placed Grandma Ruby’s in front of her. She unzipped it and took out the medicines and her scarves and dresses, then reached into the bottom and lifted out her red burlesque bra and G-string. Now I knew why the bag had been heavy. All those rhinestones!
‘Do you remember these?’ she asked Leroy. ‘Of all the treasures in my house these are the only ones I brought with me.’
Elliot’s eyebrows shot up and he looked at me. I wished we weren’t all crammed together for such an intimate moment.
‘When we have time, you’re going to have to explain to me what’s going on,’ he whispered. ‘Terence is really someone called Leroy, and he’s your grandfather? But first I need to go and move the car to higher ground. Do you hear the rain? It’s too late to evacuate. We’ll have to take our chances and stay put. When I get back, we’ll board up the back door and hunker down.’
I touched his arm. ‘If you still have a chance to go, then you should. I can’t now.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not leaving you, Amandine. And I know you won’t go without your grandmother. I’ll be back in about half an hour. Meanwhile make sure there’s water, food and torches upstairs. Fill the bathtub and sinks with water too. Then when Terence . . . I mean Leroy . . . is ready, make sure he takes an axe up there and a can of spray paint.’
‘An axe?’
He nodded grimly. ‘If the water goes over our heads we’ll need a way to break out.’
I kissed Elliot before he ran out into the gusty storm, and watched him until he turned the corner of the house. Then I looked back to Grandma Ruby and Leroy. Why had she thought I’d react badly? Then the truth hit me like a ton of bricks.
‘Dad found out who his father was, didn’t he?’ I said to Grandma Ruby. ‘Or at least he found out that it wasn’t Clifford Lalande.’
Grandma Ruby slumped like someone had punched her hard in the stomach. ‘I’d intended to tell Dale after Clifford’s death that Leroy was his biological father, but then he mourned Clifford’s loss so deeply that I was afraid for his sanity. When Paula came along, and you were born, he returned to his happy self again. I never seemed to find the right time. As it turned out, life did it for me. A friend of his at Tulane University was doing a study of DNA and asked Dale for a blood sample for his research. But after he tested the sample, he told Dale that one of his parents had been black. When Dale confronted me, I had to confess that Clifford wasn’t his real father. It was a tremendous shock for him.’
‘Was he angry at you when he found out?’ I asked, sitting down next to her again.
‘I tried to explain how much I’d loved Leroy,’ she replied, dabbing at the tears on her cheeks. ‘And that he’d been conceived in the greatest love he could imagine.’ She turned away and bit her lip. ‘Dale had no problem with being part black — that didn’t bother him at all. It was the fact that Clifford wasn’t his real father that upset him. But I believe he would have come to terms with that in his own time.’
She covered her face with her hands. ‘Life is cruel. It snatched him away before he had a chance to embrace his own history. That’s the bone I’ll always have to pick with God: just as you start to get a handle on something, he takes it away.’
Now the events of that night were crystal clear. My moderate, responsible father had been in shock: that’s why he had drunk too much and couldn’t drive me and my mother. Grandma Ruby was right. From all I’d learned about my father, I knew he would have sorted things out in his mind with time. But he wasn’t given any time, and all our lives were irrevocably changed because of it.
The wind was picking up velocity. It was whistling around the house like the scream of a ghost. I shuddered. ‘I’d better move our supplies upstairs.’
Grandma Ruby repacked her overnight bag and I took it up with my bag and Elliot’s. To my relief, Leroy had already put a toolbox up in the master bedroom along with bottles of water and food.
I called Elliot’s mobile but there was no connection. I returned to the lower level and found Leroy getting ready to put the final piece of plywood on the back door.
‘No, wait! Elliot’s not back yet,’ I said.
Leroy shook his head. ‘He won’t be able to get back now.’ When he saw the alarm on my face, he put his hand on my shoulder. A shiver ran over my skin. His hand was ice cold. I’d noticed the coolness of his skin when he’d handed me the root beer that first time but I’d always thought it was because the bottle was chilled. Grandma Ruby’s descriptions of Leroy having to warm his hands before playing came back to me. There had been many clues that Terence was Leroy, but they had not made sense to me until now.
‘Elliot will be all right,’ he said. ‘The roads were probably blocked off by the time he went out. The police might have refused to let him back in.’
I calmed down. Yes, Elliot is smart, I told myself. He’ll be able to look after himself.
It took both of us to shut the door and nail the plywood to it. It rattled like it was going to come loose and fly away until Leroy got the final nails into it. When we returned to Grandma Ruby, the quiet in the front room was eerie compared to the squalls outside.
Leroy turned the television on and set about making us dinner. ‘Power’s bound to go out,’ he said, ‘so let’s enjoy the last hot meal we might have for a few days.’
Soon the delicious smells of onion, garlic, celery and jasmine rice permeated our hidey-hole. We ate together calmly. Not at all like three people whose lives had been turned upside down in the last two hours and who were now facing a deadly hurricane.
‘We’ll be all right,’ Grandma Ruby assured me, patting my hand after she’d given Flambeau some of the vegetables from her plate. ‘I’ve lived through worse than hurricanes.’
‘Now,’ said Leroy, pointing his fork at Flambeau, ‘you have to explain the rooster to me.’
Grandma Ruby told him the story of how she’d acquired Flambeau. As she spoke, she and Leroy leaned closer and closer until they were holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. ‘You’ll have to get used to calling me Ruby,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to confuse our granddaughter now.’
Leroy grinned and brushed his hand down her cheek. ‘I can call you “Ruby” if that’s what you want. But when I look at you, I still see a bright, shining diamond.’
&n
bsp; I wished I could give them some privacy — I could see they had many things they wanted to discuss — but soon the sound of the hurricane prevented all conversation. The wind had picked up speed and increased in pitch: it sounded like a freight train that never actually passed. The house shuddered and shook, and I could hear things banging and flapping in the wind outside. I tried to imagine what they were from the images being broadcast on the television. Street signs? Torn-off guttering? Roofs peeling open like sardine cans?
When the pictures changed to a radar image of an ever-widening circle of destruction heading directly for New Orleans, I looked away. ‘Elliot, where are you?’ I whispered. ‘Please be safe.’
The power went out early in the morning. Leroy was prepared with hurricane lamps and a radio. But the static on the radio was too loud so we still couldn’t tell what was happening. The wind was like a howling demon now, rattling at the doors and windows and shrieking constantly. I stared at the windows as if they were my enemies. The plywood was wet and parts of it were starting to buckle. If the wind got inside this house, it would collapse for sure.
Something crashed into an outside wall, something large, and I jumped out of my seat. Flambeau shot off his chair too and went running around the room in a panic.
I took a deep breath and tried to trust in Leroy’s little shotgun house. Like ‘Amandine’, it must have weathered many a storm. I lifted Flambeau into the box that Elliot had made for him, seeing the wisdom of it now. I covered it with a throw rug to calm him. I wished I could put a throw rug over myself too; maybe it would help to quell my terror. I was starting to feel claustrophobic, but there was nowhere for me to run. I saw that my left arm was marked by strange half-moon-shaped cuts. In my trepidation I’d dug my fingernails into my skin and not even noticed.
As day broke, Leroy was able to get better reception on the radio. We could make out a few of the excited broadcaster’s words: ‘downgraded category three’ . . . ‘moved east’ . . . ‘New Orleans safe’. We looked at each other in amazement. We were safe? The hurricane hadn’t directly hit New Orleans? The three of us hugged each other with joy.