They made a peculiar sight—a white man dressed like a soda jerk playing alongside a Creole dandy and a Spanish-looking girl with the allure of French Quarter jailbait. People refused with hoots and hollers to let them yield to another group. The sea of celebrants thickened and the action grew frenetic. Richie had only to fumble along while Walter did the work of singing and playing. He was free to enjoy the booze in his blood, the music fueling his uplift rather than weighting it with any need to be coherent. Only when Angel looked over in amusement did Richie realize he was grinning.
He didn’t know the song titles or the words. They were Cajun, with traditional lyrics that no doubt changed every time Walter sang them. But Walter’s vocals, like something cried from a scaffold, gave Richie all he needed to know about “Mon Coeur T’Appelle,” “La Valse Criminelle,” and “L’Amour Indifferent.” At the end of each number, Walter would immediately start the next. The accordion was tuned in C, a fortunate thing since the key incorporated the only chords Richie knew: C, F, and G. So off they’d go, Walter setting the pace, Angel hopping aboard, Richie hanging back till he got the chord sequence and joined in.
At some point he became aware of the Pinefield deputy sheriff watching from the side of the dance floor. Hollis Jenks had heard about the fais do-do after the Falcon show and come by with some pals, swapping his khaki uniform for dungarees and madras short sleeves. They stood in a huddle whose dour contrast to the prevailing mood few but Richie noticed. For Jenks and his friends, seeing Walter excite the room killed any fun they might have found here. Walter’s skin shone darker in the lamplight. He sweated like a field hand through his suit and his greased hair had loosened into wiry coils. Cajuns showered him with cheers that seemed to give the deputy personal offense. Richie played on, trying not to let foreboding dampen his good time.
A young woman brought them alcohol between songs. Walter yipped, “Oh darlin’!” each time she appeared, no one caring anymore whose lips touched the communal cup. The moments seemed a ripple in the room’s noisy wash until Richie noticed Jenks watching with stony reproach. He hoped that Walter would smarten up and let the woman be. She didn’t make it easy, lingering in front of him with her eyes cast dreamily upward. Richie glanced again at Jenks. The deputy’s attention had switched to Angel, where it remained as if hypnotized.
People waited for Walter to start the next tune. He called out to the room, “Y’all gonna let a Neg take a leak?” Laughter erupted. Walter hopped off the crate and darted through the side door to relieve himself outside. Tonight’s celebration was nothing if not a call of nature.
Angel took the moment to lift the rubboard from around her neck. It got warm under that sheet of metal. Perspiration had turned her dress wet and sheer across small pointed breasts naked beneath the material. She seemed unaware of the nubile vision she made. Holding the rubboard in one hand, she raked the fingers of her other hand through her hair to cool the back of her neck. Richie turned away in embarrassment. His eyes fell on Jenks, who was still staring at Angel. The deputy looked lost in wonder till he realized Richie was watching him. His reaction might have been milder if he’d only been leering. But getting caught in a state of rapture over a nigger’s daughter was something else again.
Walter bounded back inside like a vaudevillian taking an encore. The room’s energy had cooled. Families and couples made to leave, thanking him as they headed out. The moonshine woman went up to him. She withdrew a handkerchief from under her bodice and dabbed his brow. There was cause for surprise in this—white woman, black man. But the real rarity came when she refolded the hankie and returned it inside her dress, his sweat against her skin. Few saw the exchange; she rejoined her kin leaving the hall and disappeared into the night. But Deputy Jenks took note.
He and his friends waited till the wagons and motorcars thinned out around the hall. It was after midnight. Walter and Richie had collected their pay and were loading up the Ford. Angel had climbed in and was already half asleep with her head on her arms. The plan was to stop at an all-night diner and then continue southwest toward her home on the Gulf, resting at roadside and hopefully hitting another fais do-do somewhere on the way tomorrow. Richie and Walter stood by the trunk of the motorcar, counting out the money. “Turn you Cajun yet,” Walter laughed.
“Or colored,” Richie said, taking his half.
Footsteps hissed in the long grass behind them. Richie and Walter were turning to the sound when blows came down with thuds and cracks, hardwood hitting muscle and bone. Driven to the ground, Walter received extra pounding while Richie sprawled facedown beside him with his brain ringing and someone’s boot on his neck. Men stood over them in the dark, panting and grunting as if breaking rocks. Walter curled up to shield himself but his forearm was snapped by one swing of an ax handle and the side of his head was next.
It was too dark to see much blood. The men threw Walter limp into the gully. They got behind the Ford and with a rowdy heave pushed that in, too, Angel still inside; Richie later wondered if he’d heard her scream or was it in his head? Walking away, one of the attackers gave Richie a last kick that caught him square in the throat. Meanwhile Walter was drowning in six inches of swamp water at the bottom of the gully, though he never knew it.
* * *
RICHIE WOKE TO a woman’s voice somewhere in the air above him. “You in Lake Charles Hospital. Been here three days.” It hurt to open his eyes, the lids leaky and crusty both.
He couldn’t form words. She bent over him and he smelled the bleach in her uniform. He tried moving his tongue. He pushed air through his lips. “Lake Charles?” came out in a whisper.
“Lake Charles, yes. You got people here? Must be worried sick.”
Lake Charles. The words took meaning slowly. A name came to mind. “Esther Block,” he murmured before falling back into sleep.
* * *
THEY WERE MARRIED four months later at Lake Charles City Hall. It seemed a natural next step after he convalesced at Esther and her father’s house and began helping at their store as his health returned. Before long they were as good as husband and wife but for the paperwork and wedding night. Leopold witnessed, paid for the license and dinner for three at the Majestic Hotel. Esther went straight to her room after they got home. Leopold poured cognacs for him and his son-in-law until enough time had passed to assume she’d got herself ready. His goodnight wink about killed Richie with embarrassment.
Though it was her first time compared to maybe a dozen for him, all with professionals in their establishments or in his motorcar, he was the nervous one. He’d rarely done it without protection. The feel of Esther’s fingers slotting him in place and the yielding clasp when he pushed inside brought him to a fast finish. Propped on his elbows in the dark above her, his mouth fell open and some saliva dropped onto her cheek. She teased him about it afterward, saying she took it as a compliment that he’d lost himself that way. Humiliated, he curled to the wall. She lay on her back with her knees up as instructed in her pregnancy pamphlet.
Being Esther’s husband turned out okay. Thanks to the store, there was ample food and money around, and scented powder she ordered from New York always aroused him when he undid her nightgown at night. Damage to his throat had left Richie’s voice a sandpaper rasp good for telling funny stories but unable to sing a note. His memory of performing with Walter Dopsie at the fais do-do was like an itch at the end of a severed limb, not terribly hard to put out of mind once he accepted that it always would be there. Feel like you flyin’, Walter had said before they’d climbed on those crates to play. True at the time, but never again.
The sheriff’s inquiry into Walter’s death had come to a finding of drunken mishap. The details of the attack were lost to Richie. He had a dim recollection of one face at the scene, swollen and shiny with a nervous mean look that makes for the worst kind of bully, but it was no more substantial than a ghost glimpsed in a window. Pinefield teenagers had hauled his vehicle out of the gully and picked it clean of its tires,
upholstery, and engine; it was a rusting skeleton by the time Richie got back there weeks afterward. And his concern for Walter’s daughter was too awkward to bring up. Someone said she’d been returned to her mother down on the coast. Her face he pictured clearly.
* * *
THE TWINS WERE born the next summer. Justine first, followed moments later by Richard Junior. Richie was absent due to unloading deliveries at Block’s, he said, though being unmissed at the occasion by his wife and father-in-law made their doubt a non-issue. Esther’s pregnancy had been her and Leopold’s show from the start. Richie had assumed he was forever golden in their eyes for having rescued Esther from spinsterhood; their acceptance of his drinking and carousing throughout her pregnancy seemed almost amiable. But coming home to find his wife in bed with an infant at each breast and her father and the midwife looking on with pride, he realized he was extraneous here. He turned on a heel and went back to the bar.
He and Leopold worked at the store while Esther stayed home with the children. Leopold kept him at laborer status, barely letting him talk to customers much less man the register or deposit the day’s cash at the bank. Richie reminded himself that marriage and fatherhood were a game he was running—no money problems ever again, freedom when he wanted it, and a wife who let him have relations with her if he bathed and shaved and treated her nice that day. Condescension from some old Jew was nothing he couldn’t handle.
Those relations predated Esther’s pregnancy. Hands off during it he’d understood; the continued halt in the weeks and now months afterward was vexing. She’d become gigantic carrying the twins and had stayed that way since, but her size in daylight gave way to splendor at night when the press of her knee or backside under the covers posed a cushiony promise. He’d wait for a hint confirming that it wasn’t by accident. Sometimes he thought Esther too was waiting, lying there with breath held just like him. Then sleep would take over and the moment would pass unregretted.
Lately she’d become careless of the sour milk smell that attached to her after nursing. Richie in turn didn’t bother to rinse the bourbon from his mouth or pass a washcloth under his arms before bed. She would jolt awake when the babies cried in their nursery at night. He’d hear the floorboards groan under her weight and think malicious thoughts. Leopold would appear in the hallway in his robe and slippers, holding the latest electric lantern he’d purchased from some supplier or other. Their silent collusion as they went to tend the children irritated Richie more than if he’d heard them whispering about his faults. He accepted that they thought he was useless. He disliked that they preferred it that way.
His chance to assert himself came when his father-in-law brought up religion one day at the store. “Jewish from the mother,” Leopold said. “Her children.”
“Our children,” Richie said.
“You not religious, what I can see.”
“Your daughter neither.”
“We are a people. Hébreu. Justine and Richard, same.”
Richie shook his head. “I gave in on her name, that’s it.”
“Justine?”
“Wanted Bonnie, you know that.”
“Justine is beautiful.”
“Ain’t American. They’re Bainards. American. And the boy,” Richie said, “want him called R.J., not Richard.”
“I no like.”
“R. J. Bainard is a rich man’s name.”
“You not rich. I not rich.”
“Look around, Mr. Block. You made a nice business. I can take it big.”
Richie, who’d only been trying to get under Leopold’s skin, was surprised when the old man seized his arm. “You will do? For the children?”
“Just said, didn’t I?”
“I have worried on this.”
Richie tried to keep up. “Talkin’ about your store, right?”
“Maybe your store.”
Leopold’s meaning sunk in. “Bull’s-eye,” Richie said.
Expanding Block’s had been Esther’s idea originally. She didn’t care which faith if any her children adopted and seemed not to care much about them except as a point of duty. She couldn’t wait to get back to the business. She wanted to improve the space and open locations in other towns, make Block’s the popular stop for household goods and also farm tools, feed, and fertilizer. Hearing her excited plans when they came home after work was the one time each day that Richie and Leopold laid off bickering to share agreement in dismissing her.
She began interviewing prospective help, ladies endorsed as righteous and non-thieving by their pastors or previous employers. It was inconceivable to Leopold that she might so abandon her children—his grandchildren, raised by a stranger! Richie dreaded the idea of Esther bossing him around at work. He was relieved that Leopold was of the same mind to keep her home. That he might put Richie in charge, make him the owner, was an unexpected bonus.
A small law office had recently opened a few doors down from Block’s. Leopold had gathered from its fancy sign that it was a firm of two attorneys, Abelard & Percy. He’d seized on the idea that the former was of French and possibly Jewish descent. But when he asked inside for “Monsieur Abelard,” the lone gentleman there rose from his desk chair and said with drama, “While I’m honored to be on a first-name basis with you, sir, I confess that Messrs. Abelard and Percy are but one humble soul.” He gestured toward his front window and the shingle displayed outside. “My middle initial was rendered a virtual Chinese ampersand by the so-called calligrapher and as a consequence I’ve endured no end of confusion about my business, my name, and my very identity.”
None of this got through to Leopold. “You make will?”
Abelard “Abe” Percy—in his forties, portly, with a red pocket square peeking out from his threadbare suit—gave a bow. “But of course.” Seemingly full of display, the gesture in truth was grateful. This was Abe’s first client since setting up shop in Lake Charles after being expelled from his position as a state attorney in New Orleans. By his own admission in retrospect, he’d become overkeen in giving shelter and comfort to street waifs thrown to charity while their parents did time in jail. Shelter and comfort he considered it still, but people had whispered revolting things. Out here in the sticks, he hoped to leave all that behind.
* * *
LEOPOLD, WHEN CUSTOMERS entered the store, had developed a tendency to rock aggressively in his chair in order to propel himself to his feet. Richie got a kick out of seeing him, at the ring of the front bell, gather momentum with his face turning red and his white hair flying. One day the old man launched and kept going, hurtling forward like a toppled tree and smacking the floor face-first. The comedy of the pratfall preceded its seriousness by several seconds. Richie was still laughing when the realization dawned that his father-in-law was badly hurt. It was markdown day at the store. The crowd of shoppers recoiled in horror from Leopold’s lifeless body and Richie’s pealing laughter.
Block’s Dry Goods was a Lake Charles fixture and Leopold an eminent figure. Dozens of mourners came to Orange Grove Cemetery to pay respects. Richie felt them eyeing him at graveside as the lout who’d found this funny. The feeling got worse during the reading of the Kaddish prayer of mourning. The strangeness of the Hebrew spoken by Leopold’s temple colleagues brought home to Richie how bizarre it was that he should have wound up connected to this old dead foreigner.
He studied Leopold’s uncovered granite casement. It was built half out of the ground on account of the region’s high water table, the varnished casket inside looking like a long shiny shoe in a shoebox. He wondered what he was doing here, how in hell he’d fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, and did he really see himself running a department store for the rest of his life? The questions posed their own answer. He would escape first chance he got.
The Kaddish was gibberish to him, what he imagined Apaches or Zulus talked like around their heathen fires. The lingual murk set his thoughts adrift. He heard a woman’s murmur inside the Kaddish’s monotone.
He turned to the sound with hazy joy that some angel had come to save him. It was only Esther whispering, “I don’t get a word of it.” He blinked at her as if unsure who she was.
“Amen,” several men said abruptly. Richie thought the Kaddish was over and chimed in, “Amen.” But the responses were part of the ritual, standard avowals of something, and the prayer resumed with no end in sight.
“Lord,” Esther said under her breath. “Could it be any drearier?”
“That kinda day,” Richie said.
“Was Papa’s time. Gotta accept it.”
Her composure spooked him. “Your time now,” slipped out accidentally.
She put her hand inside his. “Thanks for saying that, Richie.” She rarely addressed him by name; it seemed a warning of sorts. “But really it’s our time.” She brought his hand to her lips and kissed his fingers one by one.
Two hours later they were having intercourse in their bedroom at home with clothes thrown around and Esther heedless of the bedsprings groaning or the nanny she’d hired being just down the hall with the kids. Richie was torn between self-consciousness over their racket and fright at his wife’s weird passion on this fraught afternoon. She clamped him so hard into her breasts that he had trouble getting air. Things were slippery down there as never before. Her cries in his ear became continuous. He looked over his shoulder to make sure the door was shut. He caught a glimpse of her bare legs, thick, pale, bent at the knees, jutting upward around his hips in the afternoon light. The sight astonished him, her open thighs flexing each time he pushed into her. He heard his own cries mingle with hers.
Cajun Waltz Page 3
