Rising Tides (16 page)

“I don’t know if anybody can bring anything around,” Hugh said. “The world’s going crazy.”

Ferris lay back to gaze at the stars. “What are you talking about? The economy’s better.”

“Don’t you read the papers? Haven’t you heard of a couple of guys named Hitler and Mussolini?”

“Yeah, and one named Stalin, too. They’ll keep each other in line. One of ‘em gets too crazy, we’ll stick ‘em in the ring and let ‘em slug it out. Winner takes Joe Louis, then somebody can shoot
him
when it’s over.”

“It’s not a joke. Any time so many people are sure they’re right, there’s a war.”

“So? Wars are good for the shipping business. We’ll supply everybody and stay the hell out of it. Besides, no body wants to fight for a bunch of peasants who don’t even speak good English.”

“Sometimes I wonder why Mother let you out of her womb.”

“Yeah? Well I wonder why Pop didn’t drown you at birth.”

Neither of them really needed reminders of the division in their family. Although Henry always found fault with Hugh, he had kept Ferris close to his side, separating the boys so often that only during their brief summers on the island had they really had the chance to know each other.

Hugh got to his feet. The surf was churning against the sand. A storm was in the wind, probably one of those thunder-curtain, ground-jolting tempests that made life on the coast interesting. He stripped off his shirt and savored the warm wind battering his naked chest.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ferris asked.

“We’re going for a swim. Come on.”

Ferris held up a bottle. “Nah. I’d rather have a drink.” He lifted it to his lips. Hugh grabbed for it and poured the contents over his brother’s head. As Ferris sputtered and swiped at his eyes, Hugh dashed for the water. He surfaced yards from shore.
The water was only slightly cooler than the air, comforting, not bracing. Something splashed just yards from his feet. Ferris was right be hind him. “You idiot!”

Hugh dived again and headed for deeper waters. Time stopped. For that moment, he was cocooned in the source of all life. For the first time since the rector at the seminary had delayed his ordination, he almost felt alive.

With an accomplished frog kick, he propelled him self through the water, holding his breath until he thought his lungs would explode. When he finally surfaced, his brother was nowhere to be seen. Hugh bobbed on the waves, blinking salt water from his eyes. He scanned the area closest to him. When Ferris didn’t appear, he called his name.

A seagull answered, the waves roared, but Ferris was silent.

“Ferris!”

Something brushed his leg. Instinctively Hugh swam a short distance toward shore, looking for his brother. Sharks were sometimes spotted here, and it paid to be careful. Just when he thought he’d imagined it, he felt something brush his leg again. He splashed the water around him. “Ferris, cut it out! I know it’s you.”

He didn’t know. And Hugh wasn’t sure Ferris had the stamina or determination to hold his breath so long. When something brushed him again, he started toward the beach with his fastest stroke, looking frantically for Ferris.

Something grabbed his toes; something that felt like a hand, not razor-sharp teeth. He kicked hard, then circled to dive low. It was too dark to see under the water, but his hands found flesh. In a moment, he and his brother were above the waves.

“Got ya,” Ferris said. “You thought I was a shark!”

Hugh grabbed him by the hair and shoved him back under the water. He had hardly turned back to land be fore he found himself skimming the bottom of the Gulf. They dunked and shoved, flailing arms and legs and sputtering water, until they were both too tired for more. On shore, they collapsed side by side on the sand again.

“You thought I was a shark.” Ferris panted. “You did.”

Hugh hardly had the breath to laugh. “Maybe.”

“You were swimming back here. I scared you.”

“I was trying to find you so I could warn you.”

“You’re a stupid fool. I’d have flown back.”

“Liar. You’d have gone off to find me. I’m the only brother you’ve got.”

“That ain’t much.”

“We’re brothers,” Hugh said. “More alike than any one’s noticed.”

“Forget it. You’re nothing like me. You’re better in school. This church stuff is right up your alley. You smile at people and flash those scary blue eyes, and they’ll do anything you want. Damn, Hap, sometimes it seems like you’re some kind of saint.”

“Pass the beer.” Hugh lay still while Ferris went to bring the beer and the crabs down the beach to their new location. He stretched out his hand when Ferris returned and felt the cool slide of glass against his fingertips.

“Is that really the way you think it is?” he asked, when Ferris was on the ground beside him. “Saint?”

“Too good to be true. Listen to yourself. You’re in the water. You think there’s a shark after you, and what do you do? You head off to find me.”

“I was heading back to solid ground.”

“You’d give up your life without even thinking about it. I remember that night over on the chénière. I might have been a little kid, but I remember.”

“I thought about it at first that night.”

“Maybe being a priest suits you.”

“Maybe it doesn’t.” Hugh took a long swig of his beer. “Maybe Monsignor’s right. Maybe my vocation’s questionable.”

“Maybe Monsignor needed money.”

A moment passed before Hugh comprehended what his brother had said. “You’re saying somebody paid him off?”

“Not him, necessarily. But think about it, Hap. You’re the seminary’s star, but you’re the only one Monsignor sends away.”

“Because my commitment was questioned!”

“Horseshit. That decision was made by the same guys who snatch kids out of high school before they’ve even used a razor and lock ‘em in the seminary, where they get their heads stuffed twenty-four hours a day with God and service.”

“It’s nothing like that.”

“No? Before those poor creeps have time to think about what’s happening, they’ve got collars around their necks, off in some little country parish saying mass for wild bulls and mosquitoes. Anybody telling ‘em they don’t have a vocation? No, they’re telling you. Hell, you were celebrating mass with sticks and pinecones when you were eight. I remember.”

“None of that means somebody was bought off.” But Hugh got a sick feeling in his stomach even as he said it.

“Sure. But add in a father who’s got no more use for the church than he has for Republicans and niggers, and a mother who wants you to be her little boy forever. Mix in a Depression that even the church feels, and what do you have?”

“Are you guessing, or do you know something?”

“I know Pop. I know he’s sending you as far away from the seminary as he can. What are you going to do, sail home from Europe in a year to see if the church is going to reject you again? He’s betting you’ll find a different life. He wants us both at the helm of Gulf Coast when he’s gone, or even better, he wants me to be governor or president while you run the company.”

“I don’t believe it.” But even as he said it, Hugh knew the seeds of doubt had been planted.

“A couple of words to the right people. A father’s concern for his oldest son, backed up with a hunk of cash. Nobody’s hands would have to get dirty, would they? Everybody could be sure they were doing the right thing. It’s done all the time in politics. Why should the church be different?”

Hugh wasn’t sure what surprised him more, the idea that his father would bribe church officials or Ferris’s analysis. All through high school, Ferris had been a mediocre student who spent more time cutting the rug to one of the local big bands and souping up his car than he spent studying. He rarely seemed to think about any thing important, accepting whatever philosophy their father fed him as nourishing enough.

He finished his beer before he spoke. “When did this occur to you?”

Ferris handed him another bottle. “When I heard.”

“You mean the minute you heard, you suspected something underhanded?”

Ferris cracked a crab and sucked on the claw. “Yeah.”

Hugh shook his head. “The difference between us.”

“And just a little while ago you were trying to convince me we were exactly alike.”

“Maybe we need to be more alike. Maybe I need some of your cynicism.”

“Yeah, we’d be something if we were working together, wouldn’t we? We could take over the world.”

“Too many men are trying that now. They don’t need us.”

“You don’t sound mad.”

Hugh paused in the midst of a long swig. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m not.”

“How come?”

“I’m not sure.” But an answer was growing. If Ferris was right, Hugh had failed no one. Not God, certainly not his parents, perhaps not even himself. If Ferris was right, an imperfect church hierarchy had refused him ordination because his father, and perhaps even his mother, wanted it that way. The church might be imperfect, but he was growing less so by the minute.

“I’d be angry, and I’d get even,” Ferris said.

“What exactly would you do?”

“Nothing expected, that’s for sure. The expected’s for idiots. I’d think of something that grabbed ‘em by the short hairs. Since money’s their weakness, that’s where I’d hurt ‘em. Lie about something important, steal some thing they’d be forced to replace at a huge loss. I don’t know. Something like that.”

“No. That’s what King Henry would do. You’re subtler than that. You’d wait. I think you have more patience than you let on. You’d wait, but when you finally got even, you’d let them know. And you’d be sure they couldn’t hurt you by then.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“You told me this tonight for a reason. What was it?”

Ferris was silent so long the tide had inched closer before he spoke. “Maybe it was a goodbye present.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you want something in return.”

“You catch on quick, Hap. Maybe in that way we are alike. I catch on, too. Only I’m not as nice about what I do with what I find out.”

“You wanted me to know. Why?”

“Because you were eaten up with it.”

“And that mattered?”

“Nobody can do anything to me for telling you.”

“You’re not such a bad brother.”

“Do you ever think about that night on the chénière?”

“Sometimes.”

“I thought I was gonna die.”

“If a Gulf Coast ship hadn’t been supplying those bootleggers, we might have.”

“You stepped in front of me.”

“Sure. I was bigger than you were.”

“You’re always gonna be bigger than me, Hap. Even when I’m your size. Just once, I wanted to stand as tall.”

The night was inky black and vibrant with the music of the swamps. Aurore heard the gallery door close be hind her. Since Ti’ Boo was the only one left in the house, she knew who had come to join her. “Couldn’t you sleep, Ti’ Boo? Neither could the boys. I heard them go down to the beach a while ago.”

“I don’t sleep so well anymore. I dream till my head is heavy in the morning and I don’t want to get up.”

“Not good dreams, then?”

Ti’ Boo sighed. “What have I ever done to make bad dreams, me? I married young, had all the children
le bon Dieu
planned for me to have, and now I’ve seen them all married. What have I ever done to make bad dreams?”

“But you have them anyway.” She turned and found Ti’ Boo beside her. She was wearing the flowered silk wrapper
Aurore had given her for her birthday, and her gray hair was loose around her shoulders. She was short and big-boned, but the flesh that had always softened her frame seemed to hang in folds now.

Aurore reached for her hand. The years had never really affected the depth of their friendship. “I have them, too, but not so often anymore.”

“I dream of the hurricane. Do you?”

Aurore had only been five, but she nodded. “Some times.”

“I dream of it when something is about to happen. Something terrible.”

“Nothing’s going to happen. Your children are married, and now some of them have children of their own. We’ve all survived the Depression. My children are just starting out, but they’re happy, too—at least, Ferris is, and Hugh will be when he adjusts. I think they’re even becoming friends.”

“I still dream of the storm, of water rising and winds so fierce I can’t stand against them.”

Aurore squeezed her friend’s hand. Ti’ Boo had been twelve that terrible summer, and their friendship had been forged by the winds. “We’ve come so far together. We’ve both lost people we loved. We’ve both gone on somehow. I haven’t told you often enough what you’ve meant to me.”

“In my dream I’m swept away. And just before I’m sucked under the water, I see you clinging to the branch of a tree. We can’t help each other anymore, but I think that somehow, the water is a better place to be. I close my eyes, and the dream ends.
Quoi à veux dire?
”

“I don’t know what it means.” Aurore didn’t want to know. “I just know that things are as good as they can be now. For us both. Can’t we leave it at that?”

Ti’ Boo stared into the darkness. “When you were
une
petite jeune fille,
I came to Grand Isle for one summer to care for you. It seems I’ve cared for you all our lives. You can’t remember, but the weather was cool that day, and the tide was low. Watch for the storm, Aurore. When you least expect it, it will come.”

Louisiana Gulf Coast, 1965

P
hillip stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dungarees when he realized they weren’t quite steady. Nicky, who hadn’t told anyone where she was going, was just ahead of him at the water’s edge. She had disappeared sometime before dawn, leaving a vacancy beside a slumbering Jake. Jake was in his car now, cruising the island roads for signs of his wife.

Nicky had obviously walked a long way in weather not fit for it. Phillip hadn’t expected to find her so near the water while lightning flashed a strobe-light warning on the horizon. He hadn’t really expected to find her outside at all, because Nicky liked her creature com forts. He was already soaked, although there was only a light rain falling. Depending on how long she had been outside, he figured she was bucking for pneumonia.

Except for his mother’s lone figure, the beach was deserted—which spoke for the good sense of the natives. Phillip caught up to her easily. She wasn’t walking with visible purpose. She
was wandering, as if one step were no more important than the next.

“You scared Jake to death,” he said in greeting.

“I took care of myself for a long time before I met him.”

“Sometimes you forget how much he loves you.”

“I see your father in you sometimes. You’re so sure the world’s been revealed to you exactly the way God made it. Gerard was like that. He knew what was right for everybody but himself.”

“Then there’s the part of me that’s like you. The part that tries to protect the people I love if they’re heading for trouble.”

“Not trouble. Just something I’ve been trying to run away from for most of my adult life.”

He took her hand and linked his fingers with hers. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. Do I have to talk about it? Yes. Because you have to hear it. And so does Jake.”

“This is about Father Gerritsen, isn’t it?”

They walked a hundred yards before she answered. “I never knew anyone named Father Gerritsen. I knew a man named Hap. Hap Gerritsen. And so did you.”

“There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t already know.”

“You can’t remember that much.”

“What I don’t remember myself I learned from Aurore.”

“So…” She breathed the word like a sigh.

“Jake doesn’t have to know anything more than you want to tell him.”

“It’s in her story, the story you wrote for her, isn’t it?”

“The only thing I’ve set down on paper is that you met Hugh Gerritsen in Morocco, and that was how Aurore came to realize that you hadn’t been killed in Chic ago at all.”

“Maybe I’m as tired of keeping secrets as my mother was.”

“You have a chance to tell him about it now.” Phillip pointed. Jake was coming toward them, walking just at the edge of the waves. He had finally found his wife.

“Give us some time,” Nicky said.

He squeezed her hand before he dropped it and headed back toward the cottage. The last thing he saw when he looked behind him was Jake gathering Nicky into his arms.

Nothing she could tell her husband would change a thing between them. Jake Reynolds was the best thing that had ever happened to his mother.

A man named Hap Gerritsen was the worst.

“All this wind makes me uneasy,” Jake said. “I’ve got a notion to just keep driving till we’re home.”

Nicky thought about the house she and Jake had built together in the city. He wasn’t a man who needed to prove what he had become. He had shunned pretension for substance. The brick walls were so thick she had teased him about building a fortress. But Jake had learned every lesson the world tried to teach him, and he knew sometimes protection was more important than style.

“We’d be safe there, even if the hurricane turns,” she said.

“First sign that’s what it’s doing, we’ll beat it home and settle in.”

“What do you think of the others?” she asked. “Dawn? Ben?” She paused just a heartbeat too long. “The Gerritsens?”

“I like Ben. Don’t know about Dawn. I can’t figure out how much like her father she is. And the senator’s never going to have my vote.” He smiled at her.

“You ever sorry we came back here?”

“Every day. And if I wasn’t here, I’d be sorry about that, too. Because this place gets into your blood. You know it.”

“Yes…”

“You’re sure you want to go prowling around this place we’re going? You’re already soaked. You need—”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.”

She sat back and watched the scenery as they crossed Grand Isle. There wasn’t that much to see. Her mother hadn’t chosen to retreat here each summer for lush tropical beauty or a flawless climate, yet there was some thing compelling about it. She tried to imagine what the island had been like during Aurore’s childhood.

And her father’s.

As they crossed the bridge to the mainland, she gazed at the turbulent water below them. She could imagine the waves rising higher and higher, devouring the land until no land was left. She could imagine her father, and his sister and mother, in a small skiff pulled by a man who wanted them dead.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Jake asked.

Chénière Caminada was no longer a solitary stretch of land, as it had been for decades after the storm of 1893. Houses and fish camps dotted the palmetto-adorned landscape. But the thriving fishing village that had been destroyed that night had never been rebuilt. More than seventy years later, those who weren’t afraid of the ghosts were still concerned about the winds that had created them.

“I don’t know exactly where anything is. Phillip says there was a graveyard here at the time of the storm, but there were so many bodies…”

“The dead were probably buried where they were found. Or maybe in mass graves.”

“I don’t care where we go. I just wanted to come here.”

Jake seemed to understand. “I don’t want to go too far, but the rain’s letting up. We can get out and walk a little, if you want. You’re already wet.”

“Never melted yet and don’t intend to.”

“Caught a cold or two in your time, though. You gotta take care.”

She smiled for the first time since he had found her on the beach. “Just stop somewhere and we’ll see what’s here.”

He chose a spot where the roadside was solid enough for them to pull over and park. The rain had nearly stopped, although no guarantees existed that it would stay that way for long.

“We’re not straying far from this car,” Jake said. “And that’s all there is to it.”

“This is where my father was born.” Nicky opened her door and stepped out into the rain-softened air. “My grandmother and my aunt are buried here. And I’m a stranger.”

“You
feel
like a stranger.”

“I feel like a stranger most places, Jake.”

He came around the car and held out his hand. She grasped it tentatively. “Let’s walk down to the water.”

“I wonder where my grandmother’s house was. Phillip says it was nothing more than a shack strung together out of palmetto and driftwood.”

“She was a woman alone, with nothing and no one. In those days, maybe she was lucky to have that.”

They walked to a small stand of trees, trees that were more stunted, if that was possible, than the ones on Grand Isle.

“What took you out to the beach this morning, Nicky?” Jake asked.

“Which particular part of everything I’ve discovered?”

Jake leaned against a tree and pulled her to stand in front of him. He kept his hands on her waist, as if he were afraid she was going to run away again. “Yeah. Which part?”

“I’ve been trying to understand it all, Jake, and trying to decide how much to tell you.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“What don’t I know? I know a white woman gave birth to you and gave you away, and now she’s confessing it all from the grave like she did something so terrible bringing you into the world that she could never look you in the eye and tell you herself.”

“No.” Nicky looked him in the eye. “There’s more.”

“Don’t know if I can stand any more, considering how much it’s hurting you.”

Nicky remembered the first time she had ever seen Jake. She had been at the lowest point of her life. She and Phillip had survived the war together in Morocco, but afterward, even though the world was suddenly open to her again, no country had seemed more appealing than any other.

She had found a wonderful school in Switzerland where Phillip could finish his education, because by then it had been apparent to everyone that his multiple gifts needed encouragement and the best education she could afford. In order to stay close to her son, she had gone back to France and found a job singing with a small orchestra in Paris.

“Do you remember the first time we met?” she asked.

Jake smiled. His smile had always captivated her, be cause it
conveyed so much about the man. His warmth, his discretion, his concern.

“Oh, I remember,” he said. “Like it was yesterday.”

“I walked into my first rehearsal, and there you were, telling everybody what to do, only nobody could tell that’s what you were doing but me. You could charm the fuzz off a caterpillar in those days.”

“You were always hard to fool.”

Nicky hadn’t loved Jake at first. By then she had been far too wary to love anybody, particularly a man who was as smooth-talking as this one. Jake had man aged and promoted the orchestra, and she had never seen anyone work harder at his job. He had discovered every useful connection in Paris and exploited each one for all it was worth.

But he had never exploited her. Not in any way, and that, in the end, was what she had come to love about him most.

Jake pulled her closer. “I saw you that first time, and I thought, ‘How am I going to get a ring on her finger?’ I bet myself I could do it in six months.”

“You lost big-time. It took years.”

“Didn’t lose a thing. You’ve been wearing my ring ever since. All that matters.”

“They’ve been good years, Jake.”

After a year in Paris, Jake had negotiated a record contract for the orchestra back in the United States. Nicky’s career had blossomed rapidly, and while Phillip was in college at Yale, she had divided her time between Europe and the U.S. By then she had known that Jake would never hurt her, that she could feel safe with him and cherished for the rest of their lives. She had never regretted a moment of their marriage, and in the years since, she had never longed for another man.

But that hadn’t always been so.

Nicky rested her hands on Jake’s shoulders. “I want to tell you about Morocco, and the things that happened there.”

He seemed surprised. “Morocco?”

“You’ll see why. I want you to know this, Jake. It’s important.”

“All right. But do we need to do it here?”

“Let’s walk.”

He seemed to understand. “All right.”

“The things I’m going to tell you about started here, in a way. Things go on and on and on when they’re kept secret.”

“Maybe that’s what the old woman’s doing. She’s trying to keep that from happening again.”

Nicky didn’t want to feel close to her mother. But in that instant, she did. Because she understood, better than anyone else ever could, exactly how poisonous secrets could be.

The things she was about to tell Jake had been seen from many different eyes. Some of those eyes were closed forever now. Some were narrowed and watching cautiously. But even those people who were gone now had left records, and Aurore had scattered the truth in pieces for her descendants to assemble. Nicky began with her own piece, and wondered as she did whether others at the beach house were remembering or discovering more at the very same moment.