SOMETHING LIKE SANCTIFIED
THEY BRING ME a body. They bring her in here and lay her on my couch. Glorette. Like we in Louisiana, when Michel get thrown from the mule and kick him in the head and they bring him to Auntie Viola house and she tell me, Sit here with me, bebe, so I don’t lonely while he don’t left alone.
Marie-Claire crossed herself first. Then she stood looking at Glorette’s ribs in the space of skin between the sports bra and the tight exercise pants. The two curved bones on each side of her heart, because she lay on her back. Head awkward without a pillow.
“You cold, Maman?” Reynaldo said.
Marie-Claire looked up at her two sons. She had tucked her left arm under her breasts, and her right arm crossed over them, thumb on the marble of bone atop her shoulder. She felt dizzy for a moment. This was how she’d held herself when she was nervous since she was twelve and grew breasts, and her mother began to hide her from Mr. McQuine. She always thought if she covered her chest with her arms—like a scarf wrapped around her upper body—she would be safe. She always pressed down on that round little bone with her thumb while she tried to figure out what to do.
Reynaldo slid the blanket off the end of the wing chair and put it around her.
She thought, How I’m cold and it was 109 today? None y’all ever see I do this? She said, “Quiet. Them kids.”
“Oh, shit,” Lafayette whispered. “If they come out here and see—” The four grandchildren slept in his old back bedroom.
She nodded.
Reynaldo said, “They’d kill us.”
His wife Clarette was working late shift at the prison. Lafayette’s wife Cerise, with her nametag and low heels and hair in a bun—she’d gone straight from her job to the movies with a friend.
Glorette dead but still with a face like a pansy, purple and gold and the cheekbones mischevious. Marie-Claire bent to touch her forehead. Gold and unmarked, except two faint lines above her brows from squinting in the sun. She’d been working, too.
They’d all picked oranges. But now Glorette would have been squinting to recognize men. Under a streetlight, in darkness of a parking lot.
“Quo faire?” Marie-Claire said quietly to Enrique. He stood at the foot of the couch. Lafayette and Reynaldo moved to the doorway, looking away from her.
“She get kill in the alley,” he said in French. He turned to his sons. “What his name—the one find her?” he said to them in English.
“Sidney Chabert,” Lafayette said. “He said he was comin out the taco place and he saw her in the alley. In a cart.”
“Cart?” Marie-Claire smelled shit, and for a moment she thought of the huge cane carts the mule used to pull.
“Shopping cart.”
Outside the big picture window, past her roses and sunflowers, the truck was parked on the grass, and a man was walking toward the long gravel road that led to the orange groves and the gate. “Him?”
They looked out the door.
Marie-Claire looked at the red fingernails, chipped like squirrels had been chewing on the paint. The thin hand—palm up, curled as if holding a secret. The plump little palm Anjolie used to kiss, then tickle with her fingernails when she wanted to waken Glorette from the nap after kindergarten. All five of the girls in the back of Enrique’s truck, going off to the school in the morning, and then napping on blankets here in the living room in the hot September afternoons because Marie-Claire had the only window cooler back then.
When she watched them climb into the truck for the first day of kindergarten, it felt like someone jammed a toothpick into her heart. Five tiny faces. She remembered climbing into the Apache on that frozen winter day in Louisiana with the other four girls, lying on the bags of rice under the tarp, because Mr. McQuine said she was next.
Glorette dead on the couch. These girls were supposed to be safe. “You bring her here? You ain’t call the police?”
Enrique was watching the retreating back of the young man with no shirt. “That the one?” Marie-Claire said.
Then her husband turned his head slowly toward her, the way he did. Like his body was a lighthouse and his eyes the light. He never moved his shoulders, just his head, when he was looking over the orange trees to see the color of the fruit, or studying the children to see who’d stolen the piece of chicken she’d set aside for herself on the counter, or thinking he had to kill someone.
She knew that look. He’d killed Mr. McQuine after they were driven away in the Apache. But she’d seen his face, his eyes—that unhurried calculating grace—before she left Louisiana. And she’d seen it a hundred times here, when he was deciding something.
“How you gon bring her here?” she said to her sons, but they were already looking out at the grove road. Their big muscled arms a little soft now, the white tank tops, Reynaldo with two black grease stains along his collarbone. They spent the evening working on someone’s car down at the barn, and then they went off to the liquor store. They loved only each other, just as their father loved only his own brother.
Her husband with his clean white t-shirt, his forearms so much darker than his throat, his wrists roped with veins like winter vines stripped of leaves. He was shorter and thinner than his boys. He squinted at Glorette, then at the window. He was already trying to figure out who he was hunting.
He lifted his chin, which moved her sons toward the door, and told them, “Get Gustave.”
HE SAID, “ONCE he bring her to Lafayette and Reynaldo, she been move. Police would taken them in.”
“If they find out she here—” she said, but he shook his head.
“They don’t find out.” He sat down on the wing chair and looked at Marie-Claire. She moved the skin over her shoulderbone with her thumb. He said, “Graveyard love.”
Graveyard love was what had killed Gustave’s father, back in the twenties. Graveyard love—you would kill to keep it, or die to have it.
But Marie-Claire shivered violently, once, down her spine like somebody ripped a cord from a bag of feed. Graveyard. The man her husband had killed to save her was in a graveyard in Louisiana. But the man he’d killed to get this house and these orange trees was buried somewhere here. Enrique didn’t know she knew.
And now he looked out the window with that lighthouse gaze. He was planning to kill whoever had murdered this child—who was not a child now. He’d come home after doing it and sleep beside Marie-Claire.
GUSTAVE CAME IN, gray hair long and waved by sweat on the back of his burned neck. His wife Anjolie used to trim it, but she’d passed five years ago.
He knelt beside his daughter. He murmured something to Enrique.
She said, “Law say you call the coroner, say she die here at home. But he take her down there and find she got—”
She didn’t want to say anything about the drugs. She could see fingernail scratches on Glorette’s collarbone. Anyone could have put them there. She could have scratched herself. The alley—they said she was in the alley.
When they first got to California, she and the other girls, she walked in that alley from the boardinghouse to Archuleta’s liquor store for salted plums. The first Spanish word she learned—saladitos. She was seventeen. After a windstorm, hundreds of palm fronds hung from the telephone wires like golden lion tails. Like nothing Marie-Claire had ever seen.
“You need to move her,” she whispered in French to Enrique. “Them kids in the back.”
But Gustave said, “I tell her son she die here. On the couch. Not in the alley.”
Before she could answer, they walked out to the truck.
So if the police came, and she was sitting here, she was the one wrong. Her chest was full of anger, not hot but tight like someone reached in to close fingers around her heart—like the hand that rose from the grave in those scary movies.
But they were going to get the boy.
SO HE DON’T left alone. Can’t leave them alone. The dead.
Cause of spirit?
Cause of fly. Rat. Spirit. Thief. Sais p
as, who come.
She had been five. 1947. She sat in the wooden chair beside her aunt’s wide soft thigh. Cotton dress so thin she could feel the long hard scar from a cane knife when she kept her hand on the leg to make sure her aunt didn’t leave her there with Michel. His mouth held shut with a scarf. Silver half-dollars on his eyes. His hands folded on his chest, a bowl beside his body for money to help pay for the coffin.
She pulled her chair close to Glorette. How long had she been dead? She picked up the right hand, dangling closest to her, and moved the fingers. Rubbery and a little stiff. Like old carrots. What if it took them hours to find her son?
And the smell of her. Poop and pee—her grandchildren’s favorite words when they were little. She poop, grammere. She stinky.
On my couch. No.
Marie-Claire allowed herself the tears now. She wiped her cheeks with the hard edge of her hand and felt the calluses scrape her temples. God-damn it. Midnight and you bring me a body. I had but five hours sleep last night—Enrique come in late from checkin that irrigation, and then a coyote woke me up howlin.
I already washed four loads today. God-damn it! Rey Jr. done throw up twice.
Glorette’s mouth had fallen open now. Not wide, but as if she were trying to speak. Her eyes still open.
Terrible. I should be crying to help Anjolie mourn in heaven. But they bring me a body like I know what to do. Enrique the one left behind two bodies. Who had to wash them?
Who he think he kill tonight? Who wash that one?
I have to wash this woman who was a baby in the bathtub with Fantine. Two faces turned up from the soapsuds with matching white beards. Call them Santa Babies. I put a shivery little piece soapsud on each head like whipcream.
12:45. SHE DIALED her daughter’s number. The cell phone rang only twice before Fantine’s voice said, “Hey, I’m in Zurich—I’ll get back to you.”
Zurich was Switzerland. Marie-Claire knew because Fantine had been there before. Fantine had brought a magazine with a story about Zurich, with pictures of rivers and hotels and restaurants. Sometimes when she heard Fantine say a city on the voicemail, she had no idea where her daughter was in the world.
Fantine might be home tomorrow. But she would never touch a body.
She heard a small voice. A murmur from the back bedroom. A bad dream.
The grandkids. Cerise had planned to leave them overnight. She called Clarette, who whispered, “I’m not supposed to answer the phone.”
“You finish at one?”
“They asked could I stay til three. Somebody’s late.”
“No. Come straight home at one.”
“Home?”
“Here.”
Clarette’s voice was sharp with fear. “The kids okay?”
Marie-Claire closed her eyes. “Rey Jr. thrown up. Come home fast as you can,” she whispered. It was nothing, but it would bring Clarette here.
If the kids heard voices, they’d come toward the light in the living room.
MY COUCH. THAT poop. She went quickly to the kitchen and got out the oldest oilcloth table covering. The one they used outside when she made gumbo in the yard on the electric fire because it was so hot. Hot in here now. The body would start to smell.
And she didn’t have much time now before it grew truly stiff. “Wait too long you can’t move no arm, no leg,” she remembered Auntie Viola saying to someone. “Like you break em.”
She stood with the oilcloth rolled up in her arms and looked down at Glorette.
Even with the smell, it was the mouth that hurt more. Because it made Glorette look dumb.
She went back down the hallway. Marie-Claire stopped at the door of Lafayette and Reynaldo’s old bedroom but heard nothing. No whispering. No whimpering.
In her room, she got the silk scarf from the top drawer. Fantine had brought it for her from Milan, Italy. She sat beside Glorette and pushed up gently on the chin. The bone so small. She tied the scarf tightly, and Glorette looked like a strange foreign star from an old movie.
She had to close those eyes. Her own eyes stung again like alcohol, with tears. She used to love looking at that face, when the girl came over and her son Victor was just a baby. Never see that color again. Anjolie used to say, Them eyes, like just when the sun go down. Dark purple. Make Elizabeth Taylor eyes look like nothing.
What had they put on her own grandmother’s eyes? The old people didn’t even have money back then. No coins.
Bags of rice.
She quickly put rice in two small baggies and tied them off. Glorette’s eyelids were traced with the tiniest veins like red thread. Was that from how she died?
That smell. She was too angry now to cry. The yoga pants tight and black. Was Glorette even wearing panties? Marie-Claire went to the hallway, the old linen cupboard with the drop-down front panel on which she used to fold tablecloths. She’d kept baby supplies in there when the grandkids were small. Those wipes—were they still moist?
No. I am not doin this. Had her aunt felt the same way when they brought Michel—a grown man, weighed about two hundred pounds? What had her aunt done with him, on the makeshift cooling board of a door propped on two sawhorses? All the old women had come to help.
Mo tou soule. Enrique always said that. Me, I’m all alone.
But he had never been, since Gustave.
Mo tou soule, she chanted to herself, pulling down the yoga pants, the red bikini underwear. If Gustave was telling her son she’d come here to rest on the couch, and she’d died right here, peaceful and unexpected, she couldn’t be wearing anything but what she always wore.
The poop was nothing. Less than a baby. Glorette never ate anything. She smoked whatever it was they smoked. But the pee was sharp and strong, and Marie-Claire’s chest heaved. She wiped Glorette’s bottom with the moist babywipe, breathing through the neckline of her nightdress pulled up over her mouth and nose. She didn’t have time to take off the yoga pants. So tight. She couldn’t leave the girl exposed like this on the couch, on the oilcloth of picnics and gumbo, to run back and get perfume. She pulled the wet pants back up, and heard Enrique’s truck moving slowly down the gravel road through the trees.
She slid Glorette off the oilcloth, ran to the bedroom and got an ancient bottle of Jean Nate. She left the oilcloth on the floor beside her slippers. Then she sprayed Anjolie’s daughter, as if she were going to a dance.
But she wouldn’t lie on her back, if she were resting. That looked wrong. She clasped the body to her, bent Glorette’s arms, which were resisting now, like those old Barbie dolls with their legs that would move but stubbornly, and pulled her onto her side. She lifted the bags of rice from the eyes, praying. They stayed closed. She pulled the scarf from the jaw and smoothed the hair. She hid those behind the pillow and tucked around Glorette’s legs the blanket Reynaldo had draped around her own shoulders.
Hot as hell. She wouldn’t sleep with no blanket. But now her son ain’t have to see them wet pants. The truck headlights lit up the red roses along the flowerbed, the petals burnt black at the edges by the sun.
HER SON’S HAIR was a sunburst of on-purpose tangles. Dreads. His eyes were the same purple as his mother’s. He sat on the floor beside her body and didn’t move for a long time.
And she couldn’t say to him, “You have to go. Them kids come out here…”
Because their mamas didn’t want them to scar for life by a dead body. And his mama the body. He was so scarred she couldn’t imagine it.
WHEN GUSTAVE TOOK him across the street to his house, Enrique sent Lafayette and Reynaldo down to the barn.
In the kitchen, she whispered, “They make a coffin?” she said. “You serious?”
His eyes were distant and narrowed as shards of brown glass.
She said, “Fantine in a plane. Cerise at the movies. Clarette workin late shift. You ain’t sit here. Cause you go lookin for who done it.”
He picked up the empty silver coffee pot and she said, “I can’t even make coffee for stay up
all night, not til you bring somebody sit with her.” She went back to the front room and knelt down by the couch. “You go get Archuleta.”
“Ramon?” He stared at her.
“The other one. The uncle. The priest. Tell the priest tomorrow. And bring that ice. The one for Halloween. The one make smoke.”
“I bring you coffee from Archuleta’s.”
“Drink no dishwater, me.” Her shoulders began to shake, and she was crying now. “The grandkids back there. They see her, all I hear from Cerise and Clarette is ‘scar for life.’ All they talk about—you let em fall out the tree, you let em eat too much candy. You need to put her in Fantine room. Quiet.” She pushed him toward the living room. “Can’t scar you. You see dead body before.”
He lifted his chin at her, eyes even narrower, just a crescent of glitter in the hallway light. “Been in the war, me,” he said. “You ain’t see no dead body. You been here.”
She turned away, thinking about the night Beto had come here and gotten drunk.
NEVER TRUST NO smiling man, her mother had said. Not one smile all the time.
Her mother had run the plate lunches and dinners in Sarrat. That way she and Marie-Claire didn’t have to go in the canefields.
When Marie-Claire was five, she began by sorting through the dry red beans for stems and sticks, then sifting the rice through her fingers for pebbles. After that she snapped the ends off green beans. Sitting on the two wooden steps that led to the porch where her mother plucked feathers from the chickens she killed three days a week, or stripped the bones from the fish she bought the other three days.
Her mother meant the men who walked casually into the yard from the road, a few men from the canefields but sometimes strangers. Men who smiled and grinned while they talked to her mother about cutting some wood or fixing a fence. They wanted free food.
Between Heaven and Here Page 17
