It had been a winter night like this one. His father poured him a glass of hot milk, and told him about an old city where the streets were filled with water, and that for years experts claimed it was sinking, and someday would be gone.
They might be right, Simon told his son.
“But they tell me Venice is still there.”
Early May, and all arrive at the hour Julian has set, 9:30, and the day’s heat is just beginning. A small gathering of friends and family, they didn’t come to celebrate death (even though it was on all their minds), but life itself, since each death affirms the eternality of all things living, each life as eternal as the trees whose roots run deep into seasons past, the sky above, the creek, or the land itself.
Kevin Larouchette and his new bride, Raynelle, a pixie-like brunette with an effusive smile, along with their two-year old, Suzy, and their two Labradors, Jack and Ruby, rambled up the road to Silver Creek in the slightly used Caravan he’d bought his first year at Piaget and Foster, a small law firm in Local. Genevieve and Pastor Jackson, now living together at the Silver Creek cabin (since a fire at Pastor Jackson’s near Elam C.M.E. nearly destroyed the house) ate a quiet breakfast, then dressed in their finest for the occasion, the Pastor in his gray Lord & Taylor Sunday suit and Genevieve in a new summer frock of bright blue silk.
Julian and Velmyra, who’d driven from New Orleans, had been living out what Genevieve called “one of those newfangled relationships,” traipsing back and forth between New York and New Orleans and anywhere else they cared to go, “jumping around the country like a couple of rabbits,” as she put it. (Who did they think they were—Oprah and Stedman?) Unable to define their place in each other’s lives, but unwilling to accept that no such place existed, they carried on like many a modern couple: him flying from New York to New Orleans to visit her, her flying from New Orleans to New York when he wasn’t on tour with his band. Spending summer months together at the European jazz festivals while Vel’s school was out, spending winter months in New Orleans when the New York cold was too much for either of them.
They had just returned from Europe when Velmyra, sitting across from Julian at one of their favorite coffee shops in SoHo, gave him her news. Julian listened, not believing her words at first, then, dumbstruck, closed his misting eyes and let a wave of joy wash over him. “I hear that twins,” she said, reaching for his hand, “are usually easier to raise than people think.” Julian felt like he’d been given a second chance. “Thank you,” were the only words he could manage. This time, he would be there. The whole world, finally, seemed right again.
Their wedding, a no-fuss New York courthouse affair with Velmyra dressed in white and lavender linen and Julian attired in the same deep blue suit he’d performed in the last night of the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam (to great reviews), lasted all of nine minutes, with Julian’s young drummer, in a blue blazer and slightly baggy jeans, serving as a witness. And after that, they were only somewhat more settled; they set up housekeeping in the St. Charles place after Simon’s house was completed, sold half the antiques and other furnishings, and occupied the cavernous, empty rooms for half the year, meanwhile keeping Julian’s apartment in New York as an East Coast base. In New Orleans, they gradually converted many of the unused, light-filled rooms of the mansion into a nursery, a music studio, a recording studio, a painting studio, and an activity room for a nonprofit they formed called Living Dreams, a program for teaching art and music classes to the returning but still at-risk children of the struggling city.
Julian stood in the dust-covered yard at the foot of the cabin steps looking at his watch, wondering what is keeping the others, and had begun to regret asking everyone to dress up a little, even though they were only going to the cemetery a few yards away. Their spirits high on this auspicious day, no one would have suspected the somber nature of the occasion, and it had been decided this would not be a typical funeral, no New Orleans style fanfare, no brass band or second line, simply a graveside ceremony with family and friends at Silver Creek.
It had been Julian’s idea, this kind of ceremony, and Velmyra and all the others agreed.
That morning, he’d awakened early in their spacious, almost empty bedroom on the second floor of the St. Charles house and watched Velmyra snoring softly, wondering if he should fix her coffee or herbal tea before the drive (she loved both), and wondering what he’d been thinking all those years, choosing a life without her. He’d stroked the side of her face with the backs of his fingers, and decided it would be coffee, if there was any CC’s left. She’d slept anxiously the night before, and he wondered if she had been thinking what he was thinking—about the day ahead and what might be in store. Funerals were a tricky business; you never knew how the occasion would affect you until you were there. But this one had a certain rightness to it; they were laying one of their own to rest in a place where he belonged.
It had been early still, not quite light, and oak-lined St. Charles Avenue, visible from the sheer-covered French windows of the bedroom, still wore the glaze of the night’s rain. He’d peeked into the bedroom down the hall; satisfied, he scuffed his bare feet across the polished hardwood of the hallway and descended the grand mahogany staircase down to the huge kitchen. He’d fixed a full pot of coffee, and after sipping from his cup, carried another upstairs.
She was waking as he sat on the bed, leaned over, and kissed her temple.
Her eyes opened wide.
“I love you,” she’d said reaching up to touch his cheek with one hand, rubbing sleep-heavy eyes with the other. She’d smiled, said, “What time is it?”
“Time to get going, babe. Big day.”
“Is that for me?”
He’d handed the cup to her. She’d sat up, sipped.
“Are they awake?”
He’d smiled. “Not yet.”
“Good. There’s time.” She’d lifted the spread for him to climb back in.
He’d held her close. It would be a long day, but they would get through it. They’d survive, just as they had survived everything else—this death (the one that would take them to Silver Creek today), a flood that changed all their lives, a city almost lost and a love all but dead, rekindled from glowing ash. In the coming years of their lives together there would be more times like these. Because when it came down to it, living was just that: walking headlong into the wind and coming out on the other side. Surviving the storms, the trials, the comings and goings, and then doing it all over again.
They had decided to walk the short distance from the cabin to the graveyard, rather than take cars, as the weather was perfect, dry and crisp, with the faint odors of honeysuckle and wisteria sweetening the breeze.
At 9:45 they were to assemble in the yard to begin the walk across the dusty road and through the clearing toward the place where all the family had been buried since Silver Creek began. The children—Kevin and Raynelle’s daughter Suzy, and Julian and Velmyra’s eighteen-month-old twins, Christina Maree and Jacob Lawrence Fortier (both born with perfect hearts), had been left at the cabin with a sitter, Pastor Jackson’s niece, Gloria, a wide-eyed, surprisingly responsible marine biology major at LSU.
But at 10:05 they were still straggling onto the porch, each preening and pulling and straightening their clothes as if the dirt road before them were a red carpet teeming with paparazzi. (It had taken Genevieve two hours to find her new dress for the occasion at a Macy’s in a Baton Rouge mall, and Pastor Jackson a half hour to find the right polish for his shoes.) Genevieve came out on the porch first, adjusting her V-neck to allow a tasteful bit of cleavage to show, followed by Pastor Jackson, Velmyra, Raynelle, and Kevin.
More than a few minutes later, Sylvia emerged from the porch onto the yard, her hair perfectly coifed in tight red curls, her lemoncolored linen pantsuit shimmering in the late morning sun.
Julian walked back from the car, new camera in hand.
“Forgot this,” he said, checking the battery.
“Mornin
g, baby.” Sylvia reached a hand to straighten his tie. “You look just like your daddy,” she said, a motherly smile playing around her eyes. “You know, I see why you always made him feel so proud.”
He kissed her cheek. “You look beautiful.”
She hugged him. “I know this isn’t easy for you. I’m proud of you too.”
Velmyra walked up behind her husband, touched him gently on the back.
Taking a deep breath, she said, “Everything OK?”
He smiled, leaned down to kiss her cheek. “Yeah. You look great.”
He turned to the others, all looking at him. “Everybody ready? OK. Let’s go.”
Taking Velmyra’s arm, he began walking toward the road.
“Wait a minute.” Genevieve looked behind her.
“Where’s Simon?”
Sylvia looked around, sucked her teeth. “Still in there gettin’ pretty. That man will be late to his own funeral.”
And finally, Simon came out, his new black suit elegantly framing his slender shoulders, his black Florsheims polished to a farethee-well, his hand-carved African cane, rescued from his flooded house, in hand.
“Somebody call my name?”
“We just waiting on you,” Genevieve said.
“Well, you coulda started without me. It ain’t like I don’t know my way over there.”
“Now you tell us.”
So they walked, Julian and Velmyra in the lead, Velmyra holding tightly to the small brown urn of mottled glass carrying the remains of the couple’s first child, Michael (named Davenport, but, in truth, the first in the new generation of Fortiers), to be buried alongside a century of his forebears.
When Julian had suggested the idea to Velmyra, that the cremated remains of baby Michael—stored in a tiny urn in a cool room at a New Orleans mausoleum all these years—be buried in the Fortier cemetery, she had smiled and hugged him.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s a perfect idea.”
And when they had told Simon what they had in mind, a tear sat suspended on the ridge of his eyelid before it fell, unabashed, down his cheek. “My first grandchild,” he said. “He was a Fortier, too.”
And so they planned it for May, when the pecans and cypresses begin to bud, the egrets and spoonbills begin to nest, when the dying time of winter has finally ended and the cycles of life begin anew.
They took high steps across the weedy grasses and the unpaved road, the women deftly lifting their pump-clad feet over the ruts and divots in the road and between the cattails and dandelions and wildflowers of the clearing, as the creek breeze ruffled their hemlines. When they reached the cemetery near the ruins of the old stone church, they held each other’s hands and formed a circle around the small opening already dug into the earth, next to the headstone of Jacob, and just above where Ladeena lay.
The sun, slipping from behind a cloud, splashed golden light across all the headstones, including the newest one, reading: Michael, Beloved Son, April 1, 1999-June 12, 1999. Pastor Jackson stepped forward to read from the book of Ecclesiastes about time and purpose and the seasons, and then, eyes closed, prayed a traditional prayer, beseeching God to watch over the couple’s first born child, and imploring the ancestors to “hold this infant’s spirit gently with both hands.”
He knelt to the ground, gathered red dust into his hands, and sprinkled it over the urn, as Julian placed the remains of Michael Davenport Fortier into the ground, and everyone sang the first verse of “Amazing Grace.”
Stepping forward to the center of the circle, her hands clasped together beneath her breasts, Sylvia began a soulful “Nearer My God to Thee.” Her silvery soprano, unrestrained, effortless, accompanied by the soft strains of the nearby creek, slipped along the air above their heads, and brought mist to every open eye.
When she’d finished there was a resounding ‘Aay-men!’ from everyone, including Kevin and Raynelle, who, though white and Catholic, had spent enough time in black churches to understand the customary response to a thing well done.
When the ceremony ended, Julian took his wife’s hand as they began the walk back to the cabin.
“You did well,” Julian said, leaning over to her and whispering. “You didn’t cry.”
“Are you kidding? I cried all last night while you were sleeping,” she said with a self-mocking smile. “I didn’t have any water left.”
The walk back along the creek, through the clearing again, and onto the dust-packed road, was not as somber as the walk over had been, for what could have been a sad occasion had become a joyous one. They had taken one of their own from a cold city vault to the shade of the lives oaks, cooled by the breezes of the nearby stream. There was laughter and light-hearted banter as the notion of the picnic lunch of red beans and rice with homemade andouille sausage, crawfish pie, collard greens, peach cobbler, bread pudding, and sweet mint tea awaiting them filled everyone’s minds. And Sylvia, unable to contain the music stirring inside her any longer, broke into the chorus of “I’ll Fly Away,” and everyone joined in as they walked. And while it wasn’t exactly a second line, it was as close as they could get to it, dressed in their finest, stepping along the rutted earth near the piney woods.
In the evening, when fading light deepened the colors of the creek, the earth near the cabin, and the shady spaces between the trees, they all sat on the porch, rockers aligned and creaking in odd meters, digesting Simon’s incomparable meal.
“Well, Simon,” Pastor Jackson said, “You did it again, brother.”
Simon nodded, wiping a crumb of crawfish pie crust from his mouth with a napkin. “Yes, I ‘spect I did.”
Kevin and Raynelle sat rocking in opposing rhythms in the two larger rockers, while their daughter played in the dirt. The two dogs, Jack and Ruby, frolicked back and forth while Kevin tossed a beat-up tennis ball out on the dirt a hundred times as they took turns catching it and bringing it back for him to throw it again.
Julian sat in the blue rocker, Christina Maree on one knee, Jacob on the other. Christina chatted noisily, her hands in constant motion grabbing her father’s nose and ears, while Jacob, the younger of the twins by eighteen minutes, suddenly teared up and began to cry.
“He’s sleepy, as usual,” Velmyra said, getting up from her rocker on the other side of the porch next to Genevieve and Pastor Jackson.
She leaned over, kissed Julian, and took the crying child from him. “Come on, sweetie,” she said. “I’ll take him in and put him on the sofa.”
Julian started to get up to follow her with their daughter, but she said, “No. Stay. Enjoy.”
As the sky drew darker, Kevin and his clan piled into the Caravan to return to their new house in Local. The van kicked up dust and Kevin waved, pointed and yelled to Simon—“Don’t forget. Six a.m!”—and made the turn toward the road.
“You going fishing tomorrow?” Sylvia asked Simon.
“Yep. Can’t wait.” He rubbed his hands together.
Sylvia looked up at the sky, the gathering of stars in the twilight.
“How does it feel, finally having grandkids?” Sylvia asked.
“Makes me think about gettin’ old.”
She laughed. “Simon, you been old.”
“Not as old as I used to be,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean? “
“Means I think I got more years left in me than I thought before.”
“Yeah? How many?”
“No tellin’. Twenty. Twenty-five.” He smiled, looking across the road. “Be a while before I join the rest of’em over there. Being back home, I feel a little younger. Shoot. I am younger.”
Sylvia leaned back in her chair, folded her hands across her lap. “Remember that question you asked me a couple years ago?”
“What question was that?”
“You know the one.”
“Oh, you mean the one where you shot me down after?”
“That one. Why don’t you ask it again?”
“Why should I do that?”
>
“The answer might be different this time.”
“How do I know that?”
“Ask and see.”
“Ask so I can get shot down again?”
“Maybe you won’t this time.”
“How do I know?”
“Ask and see.”
“Well, I ain’t asking if I don’t know the answer.” This went on for a while, until Sylvia, realizing she was being teased insufferably by a master, slapped Simon’s shoulder and said simply, “Marry me, you silly man.” And he laughed and put his arm around her, and said, “When?”
When the bread pudding was all gone, and Genevieve and Pastor Jackson had turned in for the night, and Simon and Sylvia had gone to check in at the bed and breakfast in Local, and Velmyra had laid her son on the sofa to sing him to sleep, waiting for her husband to come to the roll-away bed Genevieve had set up for them in the living room, Julian rocked his daughter against his chest, wondering when she would fall asleep.
Between the two, this child was the liveliest—like her mother, forever alert, looking up and around her, fascinated with everything in view. He’d never be able to get up in time for fishing if this little one kept him up all night. He decided to play the word game with her. It was the best way he knew to bring sleep to those bright, busy eyes.
“Tree? Tree?” he said, taking her tiny finger and pointing to the live oak next to the house.
She said nothing, fascinated with his shirt button.
“Dirt?” he said, pointing to the yard.
Again, nothing.
“Car?” He pointed again, knowing she knew this one, but was being stubborn tonight.
He rocked her again, and finally she opened her mouth wide, her eyes dancing.
“Mine!” she said, gleefully, both arms flung out wide toward the treetops, as if encompassing the whole world around her.
Julian smiled, looked out at the land, the tall pines, the live oaks, the yard toward the road as it disappeared before making its way to the creek.
Wading Home Page 31
