Rising Tides (33 page)

She would never be queen of carnival, but she found that, whether she cared or not, she was accepted again. Despite her peculiar notions, she was one of the chosen, and worse disgraces had been lived down. School integration was now a fact of life, and everyone preferred to forget that New Orleans had made such a fuss. The City That Care Forgot hated to be reminded that at least this once it had cared—and shouldn’t have.

Uncle Hugh had been overseas during her first weeks at home, but he returned at the beginning of the third. He called
her immediately and invited her to go down to Bonne Chance to see him. Her mother agreed, but with a warning.

“Things are worse down there than they’ve ever been,” Cappy cautioned. She nervously rearranged books on Dawn’s bedside shelf as she spoke.

Dawn brushed her hair, which was a little shorter and neater now than it had been when she came home—thanks to Cappy’s nagging. “What things could be worse?”

“There’s been some trouble.”

Dawn paused, brush in midair. “What kind of trouble?”

“Hugh hasn’t written to you?” With the books in perfect order, Cappy drummed her fingers on the chenille bedspread. “There was a problem a couple of years ago. The archdiocese announced it was going to begin desegregating the parochial schools, and Plaquemines Parish wasn’t happy about it.”

Dawn faced her mother. “Is Uncle Hugh all right?”

“Yes. They tried to integrate a school farther down, in Buras. There were some ugly scenes. The priest stood up to the crowds, but in the end, someone poured gasoline down the chimney and blew the windows and a wall out of the school and damaged the roof. The school’s been closed permanently.”

“Has anyone been hurt?”

“I guess some colored people have been burned out of their homes. Another priest had an eye blackened. Leander Perez has been about as outspoken as you’d expect. Archbishop Rummel excommunicated him.”

“Uncle Hugh never said a word.” Dawn sat on the bed beside her mother. “He didn’t want me to worry. I was too far away to do a thing.”

“Plaquemines is an armed camp. It’s not unusual to encounter a roadblock on the highway down there, and the ferries are watched every single trip to see who’s coming and going. Hugh
says the commission council passed a law requiring permission for any public meetings.”

“Hey, I thought this was America.”

“Plaquemines has always been a law unto itself.”

“Have there been problems in Bonne Chance?”

“If there have been, Hugh hasn’t discussed them with me.”

“What does Daddy say?”

“As little as possible.” Cappy covered Dawn’s hand with hers. Dawn felt as if she were being held in place, more than comforted. “Leander’s retired now, at least officially, and his sons have taken over. But Largo is the real heir apparent. When Leander dies, there’ll be a fight for control, and your father says that Largo’s the man to bet on. No matter what office your father decides to run for in the future, Largo’s cooperation is going to be essential.”

Dawn heard the message behind her mother’s words. She was not to involve herself in Plaquemines politics, or the truce that had been struck with her parents would dissolve again.

“I’m here to enjoy the summer,” Dawn said. “I didn’t come home for anything else. But I can’t shut my eyes, and I can’t believe you’d want me to.”

“You’re too much like your uncle. Why do you and Hugh keep insisting I’m a fan of integration?”

Dawn rose from the bed and went back to the mirror. “Maybe we’re two of the few people in this world who think you could have an opinion different from Daddy’s.” She regretted the words immediately, but it was too late to take them back.

“It doesn’t sound like you really think so.”

Dawn struggled for a way to make peace, but when the door closed behind her mother, she was still struggling on.

The drive to Bonne Chance was familiar but not com forting. Highway 39 was an endless vista of gas stations and littered drainage ditches punctuated by the occasional dead possum or armadillo. She passed fields of rice and sugarcane as she tried to ignore Old Man River rushing toward the Gulf with a million acres of fertile soil snatched from midwestern farmers.

Bonne Chance hadn’t changed at all. In fact, if Cappy hadn’t warned her, she wouldn’t have known that any thing was different here. She hadn’t run into roadblocks or deputies taking license numbers by the roadside. There were still just a million things that needed changing.

The rectory was more dilapidated than she remembered it. The grass grew in unmowed clumps with stretches of sand in between, and the shrubs were taller than the window tops. The sun beat down on a tin roof that was more rust than shine. The brick church across the parking lot showed the same disrepair.

Dawn was surprised to see that her uncle’s car was gone, and she wondered if a parish emergency had taken him away. She knocked on the door as she mentally pre pared herself to wait.

She was just turning to sit on a weathered bench under one of the two live oaks when the door opened. She whirled to throw herself into her uncle’s arms, only to stop and stare. “Ben? Ben Townsend?”

He leaned against the door frame, wearing a white T-shirt and low-cut dungarees. “Dawn Gerritsen.”

“I didn’t know you were here. Uncle Hugh didn’t say a thing.”

“I asked him to let me surprise you.”

“Well, you did a good job.”

“You’re a surprise, too.”

She watched his gaze move over her, cataloging changes. His eyes were admiring, and she felt his approval. “So what brings you here?” she asked. “Are you still at the
Globe?
”

“Not anymore. I’m moving to San Francisco in the fall to work on a new magazine.”

“How about that? We’ll be neighbors.”

“I know. I thought of that.”

She hadn’t heard from Ben in three years; three years of experiences separated them. She had thought of him sometimes, looked for him in the men she dated and most especially in the few she slept with. But she warned herself that she didn’t know this new Ben Townsend, and that, perhaps, she had never even known the old one.

“Your uncle’s coming back in a little while,” he said. “Come on inside.”

He held the door for her, and she brushed past him when she entered. The rectory was neat, but shabbier than she remembered, as if nothing had been done to it in the years she was away.

“Are you just visiting?” she asked, once they were standing in the living room.

“I’ll be here for the summer.”

“Me, too.” She was glad once again that she had made that decision. “But I have family here. What’s your reason for coming back? Most people try to get out of South Louisiana in the summer.”

“Do you know anything about what’s going on down here?”

“Just a little. I haven’t been home since high school.”

“A lot of Negroes in this parish need a hand. And it’s about time they got one.”

She watched as he searched her face. She wasn’t sure what he
was trying to find. “Are you really down here to try to change things?” He didn’t respond. “Then I’m scared for you.”

“Did you know that Perez built a concentration camp down in the swamps in case any civil-rights workers find their way down here?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. He unveiled it for the whole world to see a few weeks ago.”

“But that’s crazy.”

“Is there anything about this place that isn’t?”

“Come on, Ben. There are good people here, just like any other place. It’s just that none of them are in charge.”

“Do you know Congress is trying to pass a voting-rights bill?”

Dawn was beginning to feel irritated. He wasn’t giving her credit for much intelligence. “We have papers and television stations in California. And you’d be surprised how often the news from Washington travels that far.”

He smiled an apology. “It’s time for Negroes in this parish to try to register to vote. If they can’t—and they won’t be able to—it means we’ll have proof that the federal government has to intervene.”

“But aren’t the rolls enough proof? There can’t be many Negroes registered now.”

“Ninety-seven out of six thousand or more potential Negro voters. But we need proof that the others have tried and failed.”

She felt the way she had the day she walked to the high school. The South had undergone some of its most important crises while she was away in California. There had been rioting and deaths in Mississippi; four little girls had died in a church in Birmingham, and colored and white together had rallied in
Washington to listen to Martin Luther King tell them about his dreams. While she watched from a safe distance, those events and more had changed the face of an entire region. But now she was home, and she knew that once again she was in the middle of that change and the ground was shifting under her feet.

“What about Uncle Hugh?”

“He’s working with leaders in the Negro community. They’re holding voter-registration classes. It’s hard to find the voter registration office. It changes from day to day. And it’s hard to know which of a million technical questions are going to be asked when a Negro goes in to register. But your uncle’s working on it. I’m working with him.”

“Has either of you been threatened?”

“We’re keeping a low profile. That’s the way to get things done right now.”

She realized he hadn’t answered her question directly. Ben didn’t reach out to her, but Dawn felt as if his hand were outstretched. She realized it was no accident that they were having this conversation while her uncle was gone. He wouldn’t have put her on the spot this way, but Ben had no reservations. He was asking her to make a commitment.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. But you’re Ferris Gerritsen’s daughter. You have a certain immunity. The time may come when we need you down here.”

She was Ferris Gerritsen’s daughter, but she was also Hugh Gerritsen’s niece. Dawn realized that, once again, she stood squarely between them. And, once again, she was being asked to choose.

“I could never resist being needed.” She lifted an ash tray of
ruby-hued glass from a table near the window and turned it in her hands.

He moved closer. “Does that mean there’s a man somewhere who you just couldn’t resist?”

“From politics to lovers in a sentence?” She held the ashtray up to the light and watched the world change colors.

“I’m not sure how different they are. You take your chances with either. You make the best choices you can, and hope for a favorable roll of the dice.”

“Let’s just say I haven’t found anyone who needed me enough.” She lowered the ashtray again. “Or any one I needed that badly.”

“I was glad to hear you were coming back for the summer.”

“I never expected to see you again.”

“Are you glad you were wrong?”

She set the ashtray on the table. Her smile was reluctant. “We’ll see.”

B
en avoided being alone with Dawn when possible. He wasn’t in Bonne Chance to begin an affair, and certainly not with Father Hugh’s niece.

He didn’t need distractions. He was learning community organizing by the seat of his pants, and the job was tougher than anything he had ever done before. He had come in, a white boy on a white horse, ready to teach the people of Bonne Chance how to improve their lives. And he had learned, after just a few days, that he knew absolutely nothing worth teaching.

He had grown up in Bonne Chance, but he had never completely understood the kind of fear—intelligent, well-reasoned fear—that pervaded the Negro community. Three years ago, when he returned, he hadn’t listened closely enough to stories of country roads and cars being driven directly at Negro children. To stories of men and women who had spoken out about the simplest things and found their families homeless the next day, their possessions smoldering.

He could pick up and leave anytime, and would leave for certain by the end of the summer. But he had come to town and asked people who couldn’t leave to risk their lives. He had
learned humility and even shame, and, finally, he had learned that he wasn’t in Bonne Chance to lead at all. He was a pair of legs and arms with an education. The day he put himself at the disposal of the people he wanted to help was the day he became an effective civil-rights worker.

But sixteen-hour days and a whopping dose of Plaquemines Parish politics still hadn’t helped Ben forget his attraction to Dawn. He saw her frequently. She came to Bonne Chance to spend time with her uncle, and despite Father Hugh’s warnings, she came to lend her support for the voter-registration drive.

She had begun working with a group of women organized by Beulah Narrows. All the women were liter ate; some were teachers with college degrees. Together they devised strategies for answering questions on the registration forms. The questions, as well as the necessary proofs of age and citizenship, changed from day to day; they were as fluid and murky as the Mississippi River. But Dawn helped Beulah and the others struggle to second-guess the registrar of voters, who at one time or another had disqualified every one of them.

Dawn genuinely liked and respected the women she visited. She had done exquisitely beautiful photographs of each of them, and Ben thought the photographs were proof of her sensitivity.

No matter how hard he struggled to prevent it, Ben went to sleep each night with his own pictures of Dawn in his mind. Like an ongoing slide show, the picture changed each time he saw her. The first was Dawn at her uncle’s door, a California coed with chorus-girl legs and a smile that told him she hadn’t completely filled her years in Berkeley with textbooks and Free Speech demonstrations.

The second picture was Dawn at their next encounter, an
avenging angel in raspberry-colored shorts rolled to the tops of her thighs, chastening the rectory shrubs. Then there was Dawn in a Dodgers cap, playing soft ball with the Narrows kids, a barefooted Dawn with Mississippi mud squashed between every toe, a Dawn picking roadside weeds for a bouquet. The slide show went on.

Ben had known he was lost when he saw her standing at Father Hugh’s door. He had felt an electric response when her eyes, once ingenuous and defenseless, met his. He had seen that she was no longer defense less. She guarded her secrets now, but there were hints, provocative hints, of deeply felt emotion.

In the three and a half years since he last saw her, Ben had only rarely wondered about her, and then with an almost brotherly affection. But the woman Dawn had become was not one a man could easily forget. Gone were most traces of the high school senior who had dared him to kiss her. This woman had been kissed, and thoroughly, and the visions of some other man with his lips on hers, his hands at her breasts and hips, were tough to ignore.

Ben knew all about double standards, and he considered himself above that kind of bourgeois morality. His three years in Boston had been spent in high-flying explorations of himself and the female sex. He’d had one serious love affair and a number of casual flings. For a Baptist preacher’s son, he was all too taken with matters of the flesh. So he didn’t expect or even value chastity. He just found the thought of Dawn in another man’s arms disturbing. She aroused feelings of protectiveness in him. She aroused feelings of possessiveness.

She just plain aroused him.

By the time the Fourth of July dawned, a day so steamy that drops of water seemed to hang suspended in the air, Ben knew that he had almost reached his boiling point. When Dawn
arrived in the late morning with a loaded picnic basket and an appealing flush on her cheeks, he realized he was in trouble. He told himself that she was Father Hugh’s niece, and that once she’d had a schoolgirl crush on him. He even told himself that if there was a heaven, his daddy was watching from somewhere up above, waiting for him to screw up again. But he looked at the tanned length of Dawn’s legs, the swell of her breasts, and suddenly his jeans needed an embarrassing adjustment.

“Is Uncle Hugh here?” she asked.

Her smile was as bright as the sunshine, and nearly as impersonal. Ben had analyzed Dawn’s attitude to ward him. At their reunion a month ago, she had seemed genuinely glad to see him again, and since then she had been casually flirtatious when they were together. But there was enough reserve in her manner to confirm his initial impression that, with maturity, had come a kind of caution. She had thought about all the ways she could be hurt and discarded as many as possible.

He ushered her inside. “I’m sorry, but he’s gone. He was called away early this morning. Someone from the parish went in for emergency surgery, and he’s waiting with the family.”

“I knew I should have called. I told him last week end that I’d bring a picnic. He didn’t tell you, did he?”

“It’s been a tough week. I’m sorry, but I think he just flat-out forgot. He was going down to Buras afterwards to visit another priest.”

She set the basket on the kitchen table and leaned against it. “What’s wrong, Ben?”

Unfortunately, not much was right. On Monday, Lester Narrows and his two oldest sons had learned that their jobs cutting grass no longer existed. On Wednesday, another man who was prominently involved in the efforts to register voters had been told that the outrageously high rent he paid on his home—four
rooms with outdoor plumbing—had been doubled. And on Friday, Ben had gone to see the pastor of the church that had once been his daddy’s. It had taken weeks to pin the good pastor down for an appointment, but only moments to be told that the devil was behind integration and the church had no intention of doing the devil’s work.

Ben was bone-deep discouraged. Hadn’t he known there would be problems? And hadn’t he been ready for a flamboyant display of bigotry and hatred? But he was finding that the small setbacks wore the Negro community down in a way that more outrageous ones wouldn’t have. The small defeats were insidious; they sapped energy and hope without providing a rallying point. Each small, individual act of racism, each tiny tear in the fabric of a community already tattered from centuries of oppression, made liberation more unlikely.

Dawn stretched out her hand when he didn’t answer and touched his cheek. His eyes closed, and he let her touch him. Her fingertips were cool, healing. When he was afraid she was going to stop, he covered her hand and held it against his skin.

“Ben…”

He brought her hand to his lips and kissed it.

“You’re exhausted and worried,” she said. “You’re working too hard.”

“I only think about two things. I dream about two things. The terrible things that are happening here, and you.”

“Ben…”

He opened his eyes. She didn’t look startled or distressed. She looked as if believing him would open the door to places she was afraid to go.

“I don’t seem to be able to do anything about what’s happening in Bonne Chance. Are you a hopeless cause, too?”

“What a way to put it.”

“You’re Father Hugh’s niece. This almost feels like incest. If it feels that way to you, too… If this is all wrong for you, I’ll pretend this conversation never took place.”

She looked as if she were struggling to be honest and yet save a part of herself. “I’ve already had my share of relationships that don’t go anywhere, Ben. They’re kind of pleasant, but I think I’m done for a while. I’m tired of skimming the surface of somebody else’s life, you know? I don’t want you using me. I don’t want you leaving Bonne Chance and telling yourself you may not have registered any voters, but you registered me in a big, big way.”

He smiled, because she was perfectly serious, and he was touched to his very toes. He pulled her gently to ward him. She didn’t come easily. “I think I’m in deep water. I think I have been since the first time I saw you. I’m afraid I’ve just been waiting for you to grow up. And you went and did it in a big, big way.”

Her eyes widened, and her lips parted. He kissed her like that, with her eyes still open and her lips soft and warm under his. She tasted like summer rain, a fertile mixture of warnings and possibilities. He had planned to be cautious, to woo her with casual, gentle charm. In stead, he buried his hands in the thick fall of her hair and drank from her lips like a man perishing of thirst.

Her arms circled his neck, and her hips nestled against his. He could feel the length of her legs, and the soft mound between them. He had always been an enthusiastic lover, but never an unquenchable one. He kissed her harder and realized that even when she was finally his and he was in the throes of release, he would think about beginning again.

“This is not the place.” She put her hands on his chest.

A groan started somewhere deep inside him, but she was right. This wasn’t the place, and probably not the time. A small part of him still wanted to conform to some cultural norm. He clasped her to him and held her until he was sure something like his voice would emerge. “I’m sorry.”

“For what? For wanting me? It’s the most wonderful gift.” Her eyes shone. “But I think we’d better concentrate on that picnic about now. Unless you’d rather we didn’t go without Uncle Hugh.”

“Maybe we’d better not go anywhere too private. Maybe we ought to take this one step at a time. I have this vision of your father on one side of me with a shot gun and your uncle on the other.”

She laughed. “Daddy has a camp about an hour’s drive south of here, on the other side of the river. He hardly ever uses it. He likes to hunt and fish, but he never has time, so he keeps it more for a place to entertain his cronies than anything. I’ve been there once with him. I think I can find it again.”

“Are you sure you want to?”

“Well, we’re not under any obligations just because we’re alone together, are we?”

The trip took longer than an hour, frustrating minutes spent behind dawdling pickups with deer rifles mounted prominently against the back windows. They took the ferry, and on the west bank of the river they stopped once for soft drinks and ice, and once so that Dawn could take a photograph of an egret perched on a stump twenty feet from the road.

The camp was mounted on a sprawling cypress plat form set on stilts in the midst of waving saw grass. A summer of heavy rain had washed away what path there was, and they waded to the stairs. He was surprised how tightly she clasped his hand when the water at the deepest point surged to their knees.

“I actually don’t like this place very much,” she confessed, once they had found the hidden key and let them selves inside. “The one time I was here, I stayed awake all night wondering if the whole place was going to sink into the marsh. I was afraid I’d wake up buried under swamp ooze.”

“Delta folks have swamp ooze in our blood.”

“I think there’s a generator in the back for the fans and pump. Do you want to see if you can get it going while I open windows and sweep out the cobwebs?”

Ben had the generator going in minutes. Senator Gerritsen might not use the camp very often for his own pleasure, but he had made sure that anyone who did would lack for nothing. The house was informal in de sign, but well constructed and maintained. By the time he returned, the cobwebs were gone and clean air swept through the rooms.

“How hungry are you?” Dawn asked.

He watched her opening cupboards and setting out crockery and glasses. When she stretched to reach the top shelf, her crisp white blouse, tied in front, rode up her back and gave him a perfect view of her waist. “I’m starved.”

“You’re always hungry. Nothing seems to fill you up.”

He knew something that might. He joined her at the counter. “You’ve only been here once? When was it?”

“The summer before I was sent away in disgrace. I came with my father. Just him.” She paused in the midst of rinsing a glass. “We almost never spend time alone together. I can remember every single detail of that weekend, it was so unusual.”

“You weren’t disgraced.”

She smiled wryly. “I’m afraid you were one of the few people in the state of Louisiana who thought so.”

“Why did you come down here? Do you remember?”

“Just to get away. Daddy’s not usually the kind of man who likes to spend a lot of time by himself thinking.”

Ben suspected that for someone as politically experienced as Ferris, thinking would be a liability, but he kept his thoughts to himself as she went on. “I think he was tired of politics, and he wanted to get away from everything for a little while. So we packed up and came down here so he could fish. I thought it would be a chance to get to know him a little better.”

“Did you?”

“He’s a very hard man to know.”

“What did you learn about him?”

“Why are you so interested?”

“Well, on the surface, at least, he and your uncle are as different as two people could be. You’re different from him, too. I just wondered if you figured out what made him tick, or if you found out that you weren’t so different underneath.”

“You don’t like my father, Ben. I know you don’t.”

“I’ve never met the man.”

“But you don’t like what he stands for.”