Rising Tides (28 page)

She stared at the man and the woman, and she could no longer block out the happenings of that morning. As a child, she had witnessed a death—some might even call it a murder—and she had been scarred for life. And when her past was returned to her in the form of Pelichere’s story, Ben had been the one to comfort and guide her through her own pain.

“I like what you’ve done with the place.”

At the sound of Ben’s voice, Dawn realized that she had expected him to find her. She looked up and saw that he was standing in the doorway, watching her. She had been so deep in thought that she hadn’t really heard his footsteps, although she must have registered them some where deep inside, because he hadn’t startled her.

She turned her back to him. “Sweeping the floor was a big help.”

“I was thinking more of the decorations in the corner. You’d look great in that hat.”

“Think so?”

“Was it your grandmother’s?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

He had moved so quietly that she hadn’t realized he was now standing in front of her. “Are you all right?”

She met his eyes. “I’m trying to be.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“First tell me why you’re here.”

“I was worried about you.”

“Not now!” She had been playing a game with him since the moment he arrived at the cottage. She had been clever, snide, brittle. But the last had been a mistake, because now she was ready to shatter.

Her emotions were so close to the surface that she didn’t have a prayer of keeping them from him. “I mean here at the cottage. You’re an outsider. What right do you have to watch us all squirming under
Grandmère
’s secrets? How can any of this be at the central core of your life?”

“Maybe your grandmother understood what we meant to each other once.”

“I’ll tell you what you’ve meant to me, Ben. You’ve meant pain, and betrayal so deep that I had to cross an ocean to find any respite from it.”

“And did you?”

The answer stood squarely in front of her. There was no ocean wide enough. There never would be. “I wish you hadn’t come. You didn’t have to come.”

“What else do you wish? How far back would you like to go to strike me from your life? Back to the be ginning? To the day Father Hugh introduced us?”

That day was as clear as if she were living it again. Perhaps it was even clearer. Because now she knew what could result from a beginning that had held nothing but promise.

“I can’t strike you out of my life, because then I’d lose Uncle Hugh, too.”

“He adored you, you know.”

“And I adored him.” She looked away. “But you’ve never believed that, have you?”

“Maybe it’s time you changed my mind.”

“Maybe I don’t want to waste my time.”

He touched her cheek. “Tell me what happened the night Father Hugh died, and I’ll believe you.”

But it had all begun long before that. She could hear the Gulf beyond them, the same Gulf where her uncle had patiently tried to teach her to swim. The sultry air was no different from the way it had been on the summer days when she went with her uncle to Bonne Chance to learn about a Louisiana different from the one she had always known. And the feeling of shame inside her was the same feeling she had lived with since the night of his death.

D
awn had few memories of her childhood except a pervasive fear that left her bewildered by even the most commonplace experiences. By the time she was a teenager, fear had sometimes danced around the edges of her life, but the nightmares, terrifying visions of hands reaching for her, had disappeared long ago.

If her relationship with her mother and father wasn’t everything she could hope for, her relationships with her grandmother and uncle were more. Her uncle Hugh was lean and distinguished, with eyes that never wavered and long, graceful hands that passed easily for God’s when he celebrated mass. He rarely laughed, but when he did, he infused everyone around him with the conviction that the world could really be the kind of place he talked about on Sunday mornings.

He had come into Dawn’s life relatively late. She had always adored her father, although he had little time to spend with her. Unlike Cappy, Ferris had carefully cultivated her love, but he was busy establishing himself in state politics, and she never had his full attention. When they were together, he managed to watch every thing else going on around him, too.

Dawn had always known she had an uncle who served a church in Plaquemines Parish, but it was not until she was older that she spent any significant time in his presence. No one ever spoke of it, but even as a child, she had realized that her grandmother and uncle weren’t comfortable being in the same room. When they were together,
Grandmère
watched Hugh and seemed to ask silently for understanding. He, in turn, rarely spoke to her.

Her father and uncle were brothers, but there was no affection between them. They spoke when they couldn’t avoid it, and Hugh was always warmly cordial to Dawn’s mother. But there was a mystery there, some thing more complex than two men who were merely different in personality and mission.

Hugh began to appear regularly at her parents’ house just a week after she, a pigeon-toed fourteen-year-old with a poodle haircut, went to stay there permanently. Cappy had finally insisted that Dawn live at home, and she had moved everything into her decorator-perfect bedroom on Henry Clay. But she wasn’t happy. Some how, her uncle seemed to know.

The first time he came to see her, he told her to put on her prettiest dress. Then he took her to a restaurant in the French Quarter with delicate china and a man in formal dress in the corner playing classical guitar. Years later, she could still hum one particularly haunting se lection.

That night, Hugh talked to her like an adult. They discussed books the sisters had forced her to read and music she listened to on her own. He didn’t seem like a priest or an uncle, just a friend who enjoyed her opinions and company. He kissed her on the cheek when he said goodbye, and she went up to bed thinking that, in the unlikeliest place, she had finally found someone other than Aurore who she could talk to.

They went out often after that. Sometimes they went to
others of the city’s fine restaurants. Sometimes they bought po’boys at a corner bar and ate them on a bench at Jackson Square while they watched portrait artists haggle with potential customers and children chase the pigeons. There were visits to Pontchartrain Park to ride the notorious Zephyr, and trips across the river to the Oak Alley and San Francisco plantations.

If once she’d thought of Hugh in the same category as the old father who heard her confession, now she quickly began to think of him as the other kind of father, the kind that Ferris didn’t have time to be.

Their times together weren’t always fun. Hugh was the shepherd of a struggling flock in Bonne Chance, a poor town on the east bank of the Mississippi, made up of farmers, fishermen and trappers who had watched oil companies drain off the parish’s resources and gained little in return. Although the parish was racially mixed, his church, Our Lady of Good Counsel, was largely white, and the few Negroes who did attend sat in the back pews. At one time, Plaquemines, isolated from the rest of society’s prejudices by its geography, had been well integrated and racial mixing had been accepted. But oil had changed that. Competition for jobs and the bigotry of oil workers from other parts of the state had ended the days when neighbors cared less about skin color and more about passing the time together.

The rigorous segregation of Bonne Chance didn’t stop Hugh from worrying about living conditions or jobs for the Negroes, who had gained even less from the wealth of sulfur and oil leases than anyone. He quickly got a reputation as a man who stood for fair treatment, regardless of color. Suspect at first as a sanctimonious do-gooder or a spy for local officials, Hugh eventually gained the trust of the Negro community. He listened to their stories and promised to help.

On one Saturday before Thanksgiving, Hugh introduced
Dawn to a life she had never experienced. He had come for her early that morning, but instead of the picnic or riverboat excursion she had envisioned, he had gotten on the highway leading back to his home. Along the way, past desolate stretches of marsh, past cows dining on verdant levee grass and weathered shacks advertising hot boiled crabs and cold beer, he had described a little of what she would see that day.

“Not everyone lives like you do, Sunrise,” he said, calling her by the nickname only he ever used. “If you’re going to make the world a better place, you have to know a lot more about it.”

Since this was the first time anyone had mentioned that she might be able to make a difference someday, she gazed at the white tips of her saddle shoes and wondered exactly what he meant.

“Some people are so poor they don’t have a bed to sleep in,” he said. “Can you imagine what that’s like?”

“Isn’t that because they don’t want to work?”

She listened as he exploded that theory, along with all the others she’d heard expressed by the parents of her friends and by her father. “How come you and my father don’t believe the same things?” she asked.

“Have you spoken to your grandmother about what she believes?”

“All the time.”

“And what does she say?”

“That when the world began, God created everybody equal, and that ever since, Satan’s been trying to convince us otherwise.”

“Pretty words. But words won’t be enough in the next years. They won’t be nearly enough.”

By the end of the day, she had begun to understand what
he meant. Bonne Chance was nothing like she had imagined. No good luck dwelled here, none that she could see, anyway. What town there was sat along the riverbank. Plaquemines Parish was a hundred miles of river bordered by thin strips of rich soil built up along its banks. Solid ground thinned quickly into marsh where drainage canals and droning pumps battled constantly for the land that was inhabitable.

Delivering holiday boxes of food at Hugh’s side, Dawn saw poverty unlike anything she had ever imagined. There was poverty in the city, too, but here there was no place else to look. She saw homes with no water and heat. Food was kept on open shelves, and anything in need of refrigeration had to be eaten immediately. Even though the weather was pleasantly cool, flies swarmed everywhere, except for those trapped and dangling on strips of flypaper.

She spoke to dirty, runny-nosed children and vacant-eyed grandmothers staring into pasts no one should have to remember. Others clung to hope and talked in low voices of better schools and the right to work and vote. She listened as Uncle Hugh passed out compassion with the groceries and promised to do what he could to help.

When they were finally on the road back to the city, she knew she had seen the world he’d said she would have to change. But she was frightened. “Maybe nobody realizes how bad it is for those people. Maybe if they just knew, they’d help.”

“Some might,” Hugh said. “Most don’t want to know, and when you try to tell them, they aren’t going to listen.”

She heard the “when,” and knew it could have been an “if.”

“Do they listen when
you
tell them?”

“A better man than me tried to tell them. They hung him on a cross.” He glanced at her and smiled. “Don’t worry now,
Sunrise. Just put it away somewhere and let it grow. You did something today. That’s enough for now.”

It hadn’t been enough for long. He had taken her back to his parish many times after that. After a while, the people no longer seemed merely poor to her. She learned their names and their strengths. She found that the girls her age had the same hopes she did, and that, despite her superior education, they knew more about life. While she and her Sacred Heart classmates were still trying to figure out exactly how babies were made, the girls in her uncle’s parish were having them, raising them and fighting for the resources to keep them fed.

As the months went by, the trips to her uncle’s parish meant more and more to her. Then they stopped abruptly.

On a sunny May afternoon, she and Hugh were re turning from a day with a family she especially liked. Lester and Beulah Narrows and their eight children were always fun to visit. Lester and his three oldest sons made a steady, if small, income cutting grass along the Mississippi River levees. Additionally, the family was lucky enough to own several acres of nearly solid land that had been handed down from Lester’s father, and Beulah and the younger children kept chickens and a large vegetable garden to feed the family.

Some of the neighbors had visited that afternoon, too. Beulah had served the freshest chicken Dawn had ever eaten and vegetables Dawn had helped to pick. The meal had seemed symbolic. Until that day, she had never seen herself as part of the community. But now that the people knew her, their attitudes had subtly altered. They were blunter about what they needed and what they weren’t getting. Conversation no longer stopped when she entered a room.

Her attitudes had changed, too, and plucking chickens and picking vegetables had confirmed it. She no longer thought
the people she visited were different from her. She saw them as individuals who weren’t get ting a fair deal, intelligent, courageous individuals who needed the freedom to help themselves. She heard their stories with increasing anger; she was no longer revolted by their poverty—she was infuriated by it.

On the way back to New Orleans, she tried to express this to her uncle. They were driving along a narrow dirt lane shaded with ash and cottonwood, and as she tried to put her feelings into words, she watched the sky, an endless progression of narrow strips of blue ribbon, through the trees. They were almost to a highway leading out of the parish when she felt Hugh’s hand on her shoulder.

Surprised, she turned to find that he was still staring at the road, but the car was slowing to a halt. “We’ve got company,” he said. “You stay in the car.”

She looked straight ahead and saw that the lane was bordered by two pickups. Standing directly in their path were three large white men. The middle one was carrying a shotgun.

“Hunters?” She wanted him to say yes.

“In a manner of speaking.” He gave her an encouraging smile. He didn’t look frightened at all.

“Maybe you should stay inside, too.”

He opened his door. “Don’t worry. I know these men.”

“Then maybe they’ll let us by once they know who you are.”

“They know who I am.” He swung his legs over the seat; then the door slammed behind him. She watched him walk toward the men. He didn’t hurry, but there was nothing hesitant about his stride. He stopped just a few feet from them.

Her windows were open, and the men weren’t far away. She could hear every word they said.

“Have you been waiting for me, gentlemen?” her uncle asked.

The spokesman, the man with the shotgun, stepped forward. “You been off plotting with those niggers again, Father?”

“I’ve been enjoying the hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Narrows and their neighbors, if that’s what you mean.”

“What kind of man takes a white girl to a place like that?” One of the men spit on the ground. Dawn guessed it landed on her uncle’s shoe, but he didn’t move.

“The girl is my niece, and the place you’re referring to is a Catholic home. I don’t see a problem.”

“You’re the problem.” The spokesman tapped Hugh on the chest with the butt of his gun. “We don’t need your kind ‘round here, Father. Our people were happy until you started stirring ‘em up. This is a good place to live, a beautiful place. Everybody was happy till you came.”

“I think there are people who would argue with that.”

“Not anyone who counts.”

“Everybody counts.”

“The only kind of counts that’s gonna matter to you, Father, are body counts when we have to declare war down here because of you.” He wielded the shotgun butt once more, and this time Dawn watched her uncle step backward. “Take a lesson. This is the wrong end of a shotgun.” The man propped it against his thigh and aimed it into the air. A shot exploded; then the barrel slid through his hand until the stock was in the dirt and his fingers were wrapped around the sight. “Now this, this is the right end. I don’t want to have to use either end on a white man, ‘specially not on Ferris Lee Gerritsen’s brother.”

“But you will?”

“You learn fast.”

“And you?” Hugh’s foot shot out so suddenly that Dawn didn’t even see it move. He knocked the shotgun to the ground, then, before anyone could recover, he slammed his elbow into
the belly of the man the gun be longed to. As the man doubled over, bellowing in pain, Hugh scooped the shotgun off the ground and, stepping backward, pumped another shell into the chamber.

“Which end did you say was the right one?” he asked.

The man who had spit on his shoe moved toward him, but Hugh took aim squarely between the man’s legs. “This one?” When the man didn’t answer, Hugh’s finger moved to the trigger. “I asked you a question.”

The man stopped but didn’t answer.

“I must have gotten it right,” Hugh said.

“Put the gun down, Father. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Sure I do. I learned my lesson. Did you gentlemen learn anything yet?”

“What the hell kind of priest are you?”

“The kind who’s always had trouble turning the other cheek.”