Rising Tides (34 page)

“No, and neither do you.”

She dried the glass. “He can be so charming. If he thinks you’re worth his time, he’ll give you his undivided attention. A lot like Uncle Hugh, actually. But when Daddy’s looking you straight in the eye, you can’t think about anything except how much you want him to approve of you. You know?”

He knew that he had never quite understood exactly how difficult and courageous her rebellion against Ferris’s stand on integration had been until now. “I understand. I loved my father, too.”

“Daddy hardly spoke to me for years after I went to the high school and tried to register. He never screamed or threatened to throw me out in the street. He just told me I would be going
to school out of state for the rest of the year, and then he made sure that we weren’t alone in the same room again.”

He sensed how deeply she had been hurt. “Maybe it would have been better if he’d screamed.”

“Well, he’s not angry anymore. I’ve been given a second chance, but I think I may be the exception. He feels things very deeply, Ben, and loyalty’s more important to him than anything. At some time in the future, if he thinks I’m disloyal again, I’ll be put out of his life for good.”

“And that would matter enormously to you.”

She set the glass on the counter and turned to him. “I needed that first break with Daddy. It helped me establish who I am. But I don’t want a second break, be cause it would be final. Our family’s like a fleet of ships, all sailing to the same port, but at different speeds and by different routes.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“We’re tied together, but the ties are so fragile. Uncle Hugh loves me, and I think, strangely enough, that he likes my mother. But he avoids my father and grand mother when he can.
Grandmère
loves everyone, and she’s hurt and bewildered that she can’t find a way to bring us closer. And Daddy? I don’t know if he loves anybody, but if he does, it’s me.”

He rested his hands on her shoulders. “Why are you telling me this?”

Her eyes didn’t waver. “Before you get involved with me, really involved, you have to understand. I’m caught between all of them. Sometimes I’m afraid I’m the prize.”

“Does your father know what you’re doing in Bonne Chance?”

“I haven’t told him anything. But he knows. He cultivates Largo Haines like some people cultivate sugar cane or cotton.
He thinks Largo’s the key to politics down in Plaquemines now.”

“Leander Perez is still very much around.”

“But he won’t be forever, and Largo’s smooth. He’s not nearly as loud about his prejudices. When Perez dies, Largo will carry on the tradition of dictatorship without the bad publicity, and my father will need his support. So they stay in close touch. And I’ve run into Largo twice.”

“What will you do when he asks you not to come to Bonne Chance anymore?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t know. I’ll have to balance everything before I decide.”

“You’re warning me.”

“I’m telling you that the world’s a pretty damned difficult place sometimes.” She didn’t smile.

“I trust you to do what you have to, Dawn. Whatever you have to.” He stroked the side of her neck. Her eyes drifted shut. He bent and kissed her eyelids, kissed her nose and the curve of a cheekbone.

She leaned against him, and her arms circled his waist. Her breath was warm against his cheek, and a lock of hair caressed his jaw. “I have to do this,” she said softly.

“This?”

“This. Us.”

His breath threatened to explode against his rib cage. He was hard, suddenly, where he hadn’t been, and his heart had softened to mush. “You’re sure?”

She played with the top button of his shirt; he could see desire and fear in her eyes. “Ben, I don’t need promises. Just tell me you won’t tug at me the way everybody else does. Tell me you won’t ask me to make choices.”

“Just choose me, here and now. That’s all I’ll ask.”

“Ben…” The button gave under her long fingers, then the next. Her hips moved against his.

Her scent enveloped him, and the flesh at her mid riff was satin against his fingertips. He felt her palm against his bare chest, felt the slow slide against his ribs and lower, to the catch of his dungarees. He kissed her then, pressing her slowly backwards until her breasts were warm and soft against him.

He felt no rush to complete what had begun so many years before. He celebrated each step as a victory against the circumstances that had almost separated them forever. When her blouse was on the floor and she offered her breasts to him, he revered them with his lips and hands. When they were naked and the damp marsh air was cool against their flesh, he willingly suffered the exquisite torture of her explorations.

When they lay on one of the cabin beds, aching for completion, he delayed final, perfect pleasure until he had slowly, utterly learned each flavor and texture of her body.

He kissed her and whispered the names of all the joys she had already brought him. When at last he accepted the gift she offered, he dissolved with pleasure in her arms.

He hadn’t lied. Dawn had chosen him, and that was more than enough. At that moment, and for all the rest of the moments of that day and the days to come, he was far too obsessed with her to ask for anything else.

O
ver the summer, Dawn had become friends with the Narrowses’ oldest daughter, eighteen-year-old Annie. Determined to get out of Bonne Chance, Annie had won a scholarship to a nursing school in Georgia for the fall, but she was badly needed at home now that Lester and his sons no longer had jobs. She worked for seventy-five cents an hour doing home care, which was slightly better than the four dollars a day Beulah made as a domestic. And Beulah and Annie were the only wage earners in the family.

As the summer progressed, Dawn watched the light go out of Annie’s eyes and heard the laughter leave her voice. She was strong-willed and determined, but that wasn’t enough to keep her dreams from dying. Annie didn’t complain, but she knew, as they all did, that her father and brothers had lost their jobs because the Narrowses supported civil rights.

Annie’s job would have disappeared, too, as well as her mother’s, if the families they worked for had given in to community pressure and fired them. Annie was still working because no one else would care for her patient at the same low pay. Beulah’s employers, Bonne Chance aristocracy from way
back, had kept her on because in their eyes she was part of the family, and they didn’t take to threats.

“Have you decided what you’re going to do?” Dawn asked Annie one day in mid-August. The two young women were languidly batting at the air with palmetto fans on the front stoop of the Narrows home. Dawn had been at a neighbor’s down the road since early that morning for another round of voter-registration classes. So far, not one woman in the class had successfully registered, even though by now most of them could re cite and interpret the Constitution backwards, sideways and upside down.

“School’s just going to have to wait,” Annie said.

“Have you thought about going ahead and getting a job there? You could send money home.”

“I’d need everything just to live. A scholarship doesn’t cover everything.” Annie was still wearing the white nylon uniform that her employer insisted on. She brushed an imaginary speck off the bodice. “You want to know the worst thing? Even if I stay here, we’re hardly going to make it. I need a better-paying job, and I might as well be asking for the moon. People ‘round here think I’m getting too much as it is.”

“A better job…” A job wasn’t the solution that Dawn wanted for Annie, but it might be a stopgap measure. “Would you be willing to go to New Orleans? To live in? Because the pay would be better there.”

“How’m I going to get a job in New Orleans?” Annie looked up. She had skin the color of wild honey and heavily lashed eyes just a shade darker. Now those eyes were staring straight through Dawn.

“Don’t be mad. I was just thinking,” Dawn said. “My grandmother might know somebody who’s looking for help. Or my
mother might. What could be wrong with my finding you a job? Wouldn’t you find me one if I needed it?”

“You couldn’t
do
any job I could find for you,” Annie said bluntly. “You’d die trying.”

“You think I’m just an old magnolia blossom?”

“I’ll settle this my way.” Annie stood and brushed off her skirt. “I know you’re trying to help, but I don’t want you to.”

Dawn watched as Annie walked through the yard and out toward the garden to disappear between corn stalks bleaching in the sun.

“She just wants you to be her friend.” The screen door slammed shut as Hugh joined Dawn on the porch. He was dressed casually, although he still wore his collar. There was absolutely nothing else priestlike about him. He was a handsome older man with eyes that just happened to penetrate clear to his niece’s soul.

Dawn hadn’t had a chance to talk to her uncle in weeks. She was glad to have it now. She had known he was expected for dinner. Several families were coming over to the Narrowses’ later to discuss strategy. The leaders always met this way, as if they were just drop ping in to visit. They were always watched, but although there had been some retaliation, for the most part the local officials were still biding their time.

She got slowly to her feet. “I thought I was Annie’s friend. What should I have done when she told me she needed a better job? I could probably find her one, and that’s not charity. I just happen to have some connections, and I’d like to use them for her benefit.”

“You’d do more good if you trusted her to work out her own problems. You try to help, that puts you one step above her.”

Unfortunately, she saw what he meant.

He gave her a bear hug, clasping her harder and longer than usual, then he took her hands in his. “How are you, Sunrise?”

“Fine. I was hoping I’d find you here.”

“I wouldn’t miss a chance to eat Beulah’s okra gumbo.”

Dawn had her own plans for the evening. She had asked Ben to come to her house for dinner, to meet her parents. She had wanted her grandmother to come, too, but Aurore was nursing her second cold of the summer. Dawn had debated whether to invite Ben. A part of her feared his opinion of her father, and another part wasn’t ready to share him.

“Did it go okay today?” he asked.

“Oh, it went fine. These women know more about the government than half of Congress, but when they try to register, they’ll probably be asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in Arabic, and if they can’t, they’ll be rejected again.”

“It’s got to end somewhere.”

“It’s going to end with Negroes voting.”

“You don’t sound discouraged.”

“It’s easy for me. No one’s threatening
me.
”

He waited, sensing, she supposed, that she had more to say.

He was right. “Uncle Hugh, are you in danger?”

“Why do you ask?”

Dawn knew that both her uncle and Ben worked quietly, which was still possible because none of the major civil-rights organizations had chosen to target Plaque mines Parish. She had worried about them at first, but when nothing happened, her concern had taken second place to her activism. Until this afternoon. “One of the women mentioned something today that got me worrying.”

“What did she say?”

“She said some people resent you. And they aren’t being quiet about it anymore. I remember what happened with those men in the pickups.”

He didn’t respond right away, and that worried her more than his words. “I watch my back,” he said. “I’d be stupid not to. But lately Ben hasn’t been as careful as he should be. Sometimes he almost dares people to confront him.”

“I care about Ben,” she said. “I’ll talk to him.”

“How much do you care?”

Enough that Dawn had just begun to realize that the other men in her life had been rehearsals. She had al ways looked for men with some of Ben’s characteristics, his easy smile, his wit, his commitment to change. But she had carefully avoided anyone who could capture her heart. Until Ben.

She looked away. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“Shall I talk like a priest or an uncle?”

“How about a friend?”

“They don’t come any finer than Ben Townsend. But they don’t come more idealistic or overbearing, either. Be careful he doesn’t break your heart.”

Dawn had the feeling that her uncle knew she and Ben were already lovers, and that she had fallen so deeply in love that his warning had come too late. Color rose in her cheeks. “I’m taking him home for dinner to night.”

Something danced in his eyes. “I’ll want a full re port.”

She slipped her arms around him. “I love you, Uncle Hugh. And if Ben’s even half the man you are, then I’ve done all right.”

He hugged her hard. “I’m not half the man you think I am.
Don’t ever think I’m a saint, Sunrise. I’m just a man with my own reasons for everything I do. But I’m glad you love me anyway.”

Ben wished he could have driven to New Orleans with Dawn. He would have enjoyed sitting beside her, watching the casual way she rested her fingertips on the steering wheel and her elbow on the open window. He liked to watch her hair when the wind swept through it. She had glorious hair, thick and undisciplined, and he liked to imagine his fingers taking the same liberties as the wind. But she had left earlier in the afternoon, and he was going to meet her at her parents’ house.

He had bought Mrs. Gerritsen half a dozen long-stemmed roses, as pure and cold a white as the first winter’s snowfall. He figured flowers might get him through the first minute or two, but he would have to think fast on his feet after that.

He’d also left the shop with a gardenia for Dawn to tuck in her hair. When he was a boy, gardenias had grown outside his bedroom window. Every year in late spring, he had tossed and turned in bed, aroused by their fragrance. He wasn’t sure it was the best idea to give Dawn one tonight, when they wouldn’t have a chance to be alone, but he had taken a nostalgic whiff when the florist opened the refrigerated display case, and he had been lost.

At about five o’clock, he placed the flowers on the passenger seat beside him and checked his gas gauge. Then, satisfied that he was ready to beard the Gerritsens in their den, he backed out of the rectory drive and started toward New Orleans.

He was later than he had intended, so his foot was heavy on the accelerator. He kept his eye on his rear view mirror, just
to avoid trouble, but trouble appeared in front of him in the form of a sheriff’s car parked across the road. He sped directly toward it, just slowing and stopping in time to avoid disaster.

He had never run into a roadblock outside of town, though he had heard stories about others who had. There were lots of ways to intimidate the Negro population of Plaquemines Parish, and roadblocks were just one of them. He knew his license would be checked, his destination questioned, his politics discussed at length. He doubted he would be roughed up, but it was possible.

Irritation turned to caution as a deputy from the sheriff’s office approached. He recognized the man, a stocky, squint-eyed bully with a forehead covered in sweat and a uniform with wide circles under his armpits. Ben had graduated from high school with little Davey Martinez. They had never been friends.

“How’s it going, Davey?” he asked, reaching under his sports coat for his license.

Cold steel pressed against the side of his head. Ben realized that Davey had pulled his service revolver.

“Don’t go doing anything you shouldn’t now, Ben. Just get out of the car and put your hands over your head.”

“I was just getting my license.”

“Sure you were.”

“I’m going to put my hands on my head. Then I’ll wait until you open the door.”

Outside the car, the sun burned hot against his neck as Davey thoroughly frisked him, then cuffed his hands behind his back. He could hear crows calling from the side of the road, and the murmur of men’s voices. He had caught a glimpse of others standing behind Davey’s car before he was slammed against his own. He didn’t dare look up and see who was watching. He knew that one wrong move might result in tragedy.

“He’s not armed,” Davey called to someone.

“Now that’s what I like to see. You one of those non violent agitators, Ben?”

Ben recognized the voice. He was a local boy, after all, and everybody in Bonne Chance knew Largo Haines. “I’m not agitating, Mr. Haines,” he said calmly. “I’m on my way to New Orleans to have dinner.”

Davey spun Ben around. Largo was flanked by two men, both armed and in uniform. He wore a wide-brimmed panama and a light blue suit. The sun had turned his florid complexion a brighter red. “Seems to me,” Largo said, “that even agitators have to eat, son. Then what are you planning to do?”

Ben struggled to keep emotion from his voice and expression. “Last I heard, there wasn’t any law that required an American citizen to report where he was going or what he intended to do when he got there.”

“You been away too long, and you’ve forgotten. We keep track of people here. We haven’t been given any choice. We’re vigilant, see? We’re careful not to let the wrong people in or out of our town.”

“Then you can let me go. I’m exactly the kind of people Bonne Chance needs more of.”

Largo laughed. He sounded genuinely amused. “I don’t think so, son.” He nodded at Davey. Davey smashed his fist into Ben’s abdomen, and Ben doubled over in agony.

“Now stand up like a man,” Largo said.

Nausea gripped him. For a moment, the universe tilted.

“Stand up!”

Ben struggled upright. “Aren’t you going to charge me with something before you beat me?” he gasped.

“That was just to get your attention, son.”

“I am not your son!”

“And you’re not your daddy’s, either. He was a good man. He understood that the world was made a certain way and it wasn’t supposed to be fiddled with. You’re fiddling. We know what you’re doing. You’re trying to change things here, and we like ‘em just the way they are.”

“I’m on my way to New Orleans. To have dinner. That’s all.”

“Search his car,” Largo said to one of the men be hind him. Ben watched as the man went around to the passenger side and searched his glove compartment.

“Nothing inside but a bunch of flowers,” the man said, coming back to stand beside Largo. He was carrying the roses, and the gardenia in its soft plastic wrapping.

“What have we got here?” Largo asked. He took the roses. “You gonna give these to some freejack girl in New Orleans, son? Is that where you’re going? We know how you love niggers.”

The men beside Largo laughed.

Ben didn’t answer. He watched as Largo pulled petal after petal off the roses, until the road at his feet was littered with them and Largo held nothing but stems in his hand. The deputy removed the gardenia from its pack age, dropped it in the road and ground it under one foot. The scent perfumed the air.

“May I go now?” Ben asked.

“I’m going to warn you, for your daddy’s sake. You’re not welcome in Bonne Chance anymore. I hate to say that about one of the town’s own, but we’ve got about all the trouble we can handle. So after you go wherever you’re planning to, you come back here and tell Father Gerritsen you’re leaving for good. Then you pack your bags and you get out of Plaquemines. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“I understand what you’re saying, Mr. Haines.”