Rising Tides (36 page)

“Do you honestly think anything I could say to Hugh would make a difference? Would he call off this meeting?”

If he had insisted again that she obey him, she might have found the strength to leave. For a moment, she’d had heroic visions of walking away from him and all her beginnings. But how could she refuse him when his hand was warm and strong and his eyes were filled with fear? She had already caused him humiliation. How could she cause him worse? Tears filled her eyes. “I promised Ben I’d be there tonight.”

“You can’t tell him you’re not coming. Do you understand? You can’t.”

She realized that the choice she had been dreading was before her, and she was going to choose her father. She couldn’t dispute Ferris’s logic. Uncle Hugh, Ben, Lester Narrows—none of them would change their plans for the night, even if they knew about the arrests in advance. And the others were strong people, good people. They would go to the church anyway. Perhaps they even knew, deep inside, that tonight would be the first of many such confrontations.

The only person she
could
save was her father. He had risked his political career for her. He’d loved her enough to warn her, even knowing that she might go against his wishes and warn the others. He had loved her enough, and now she had to love him in return.

“I won’t go.”

He seemed to sag before her. “And what will you say?”

“Tomorrow, when it’s all over, I’ll tell Ben I wasn’t feeling well or I had car trouble. Something. I don’t know. Maybe I won’t even be able to get to him.”

“It’s not going to be like that. He’s going to be all right. Everyone’s going to be all right.”

She thought he believed his own words. If he was lying, wouldn’t she see it? “I’m going out for a while,” she said.

“Dawn, be home for dinner. Please. Be here. Don’t make me wonder where you are.”

“I’ll be here.”

Dawn turned to Ben. He was only a few feet away, just as she’d sensed. “We ate dinner early that night, be cause my father was going out. There’s a pendulum clock in our dining room. I watched it tick away the seconds, and I was so frightened. You’d called that after noon. Several times, I think, but I hadn’t taken any of them. That evening, I was sure I’d made the wrong decision. I thought about getting up from that table a hundred times and calling you to tell you what I knew.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I kept replaying my father’s argument. I couldn’t find any fault in it. I knew that no matter what I did, I’d be torn. You’d talked about getting arrested, about how that might be the thing that was needed to publicize the oppression in Bonne Chance. So the only thing I could do was keep silent and protect my father.”

“And you sat there all evening and waited?”

“I went to my grandmother’s.” She looked away. “I couldn’t just sit there, Ben. I thought I’d lose my mind. So I went to see her. I had to talk to someone. And I’d always been able to talk to
Grandmère.
”

Dawn didn’t phone to be sure her grandmother was at home. Aurore seldom left the house at night, and she was just beginning to recover from her cold. Dawn drove the short distance
and parked in her grandmother’s drive. She found Aurore in the study that had once belonged to Henry. Now the walls were lined with novels and biographies, and one corner was dominated by a television, which Aurore seldom watched.

“What a wonderful surprise.” Aurore held out her arms. Dawn was warmed by her hug, but not nearly enough.

Dawn sat across from her. They chatted about nothing for a few minutes, but Dawn couldn’t concentrate. She wasn’t allowed to talk to Aurore about what was happening, perhaps even at that moment. But she could talk to her about something that had happened before, something that was too much like this night.

“
Grandmère,
do you remember when I went to the public high school and tried to register? Do you re member that day?”

“Like it was yesterday, I’m afraid.”

“You never told me what you really thought. Every thing that happened right afterwards is a blur, but I don’t remember you telling me that you were proud of me.”

“Yes, I was proud of you,” Aurore said. “But I also wanted to spank your bottom.”

“Aren’t you the one who always told me I had to be courageous?”

Aurore still looked pale and tired from her illness. She was huddled under the folds of an afghan. “You showed courage,” Aurore said. “You also chose sides between your father and uncle. I had hoped…” She didn’t finish.

“Hoped what? That I could somehow be courageous and still make them both happy?”

“How could your father back down on anything after that, sweetheart? How could he even be reasonable? You focused attention on him, so he had to sound convincing when he
spoke against integration. He was forced to renounce what you did and blame it on Hugh. They grew further apart after that.”

“But what I did was about me, not them. I didn’t choose between them. I chose what I thought was right.”

“Everything you do affects others. One act can cause ripples a century wide.”

“Are you telling me that in a hundred years what I did that day will still affect this family?” Dawn wondered if the decision she had made tonight would have those kinds of repercussions, too.

“Come here.” Aurore patted the couch. “Sit down.” Dawn moved to sit beside her. “I’m not trying to tell you that what you did was wrong,” Aurore said, reaching for her hand. “But I’m a selfish old woman. I just want my sons to come together before I die. Our family…” She shook her head. “I’ve lived my whole life and done all the things I’ve done so I could leave something important and durable for my children and grandchildren.”

“Gulf Coast is thriving.”

“For a time, when I wasn’t much older than you, I thought Gulf Coast was important, too. But I paid a terrible price because of it. Gulf Coast isn’t the legacy I want to leave behind. I want to leave a family that’s united and strong.”

“And I ruined any chance of that?”

“No, dearest. I’m not trying to leave this burden at your doorstep.”

Frustrated, Dawn removed her hand from Aurore’s. “I don’t understand.”

Aurore’s eyes closed. “Of course you don’t. How could you?”

For the first time in her life, Dawn wondered if her
grandmother had grown too old to confide in. “All I know is that I did what I thought was right. I wasn’t trying to make Daddy and Uncle Hugh angrier at each other.”

“It’s so very easy to do the wrong things for the right reasons.”

Dawn had come for reassurance, but panic was growing instead. Had she made such a mistake tonight? Had she made the wrong choice for what had seemed like the right reason?

Aurore started, and her eyelids flew open. As Dawn watched, she grew paler and struggled to sit up. Her voice was no louder than a whisper. She gripped Dawn’s arm. “Something’s wrong.”

“
Grandmère,
are you ill?” Dawn leaned closer and touched her grandmother’s cheek. “Do you want me to call somebody?”

“Hugh…”

Dawn’s hands grew icy-cold. “Hugh?
Grandmère,
are you all right? Uncle Hugh’s not here. Just me. I’m the only one here.”

Aurore’s eyes met hers. Dawn had never seen such terrible pain. Then Aurore began to cry.

Ben looked at his watch for the last time. Dawn wasn’t coming. He had called her parents’ home, only to be told that she was unable to come to the phone.

He didn’t know why she had decided not to come to night, but he thought it was likely that he had scared her away. In the week since his encounter with Largo, there had been little room in his thoughts for her. When he
did
think of her, he had seen a gardenia ground into a dusty blacktop road. He had seen the woman who sat quietly across from her parents at an ornate mahogany table, trying to make small talk when there was no talk small enough to please them.

He loved Dawn Gerritsen. She sang in his blood. He had never expected to find a woman who could be so much a part of him. Even their careers fit together. His words and her images. He had begun to believe they might have a future, that instead of burning to ashes, their powerful sexual attraction might provide the steady fire for two lives joined in every way.

Then he had watched Dawn with her parents, and he had seen the forces that were trying to destroy her. They were the same forces that had battered him after his en counter with Largo until he vomited his fury, his pain and fear, at the side of Highway 39.

He didn’t know what was going to happen tonight. The people attending the meeting might just end up christening old Leander’s concentration camp down at Fort Saint Philip. Ben knew Father Hugh was expecting trouble. He had told Ben that he didn’t have to go, that there were a million battles left to fight and this didn’t have to be one of them. But Ben knew that he had to be there.

Ben couldn’t wait for Dawn any longer. Father Hugh was waiting for him in the church. He stepped off the porch and took a shortcut across the parking lot. He al ways felt a little uneasy entering Our Lady of Good Counsel. He had grown up a Baptist island in a sea of Catholicism, and not a day had passed without his hearing a hundred and one reasons why his papist neighbors were going to hell while he and his parents rose to heaven without them.

He had outgrown his parents’ conceits years ago, but the Catholic church still seemed strange and vaguely pagan to him, with its statues, its crucifixes flaunting an agonized Jesus, its altar where a plain, ungarnished pulpit should have stood. He respected Father Hugh, and he could see a kind of beauty here,
a tranquillity where God might like to dwell. But he had never felt God here himself.

Tonight there was something different about the feeling inside the church. He had rarely been here when sun light wasn’t flooding the simple stained-glass windows, but tonight Our Lady of Good Counsel was illuminated by the glow of candles and a lone vigil light. His eyes adjusted slowly. He smelled melting beeswax and ever-present mildew. A thrumming silence filled the room. His palms grew damp; for some inexplicable reason, he wanted to weep.

He moved down the center aisle, looking for Father Hugh. In the glow of the vigil light, he found him kneeling at the altar. Alone, or perhaps not alone at all. Father Hugh’s head was bowed. Ben halted. The meeting could come and go, but he would not interrupt Father Hugh now.

As if he had heard Ben’s thoughts, Father Hugh turned. He crossed himself; then he beckoned. Ben had never been up to the front of the church. For a moment, he was reluctant to go. He felt like an intruder. He started toward Father Hugh, his legs rubbery, not his legs at all. At the communion rail, he stopped. He could not make himself go past it, to an altar he didn’t understand and to the side of the man kneeling at it. Instead, he knelt at the rail and bowed his head.

He didn’t know how long he knelt that way. Time seemed suspended. Something warm touched his head, and he knew that Father Hugh was standing in front of him, blessing him. He could feel Father Hugh’s strength. Tears filled his eyes and spilled down his cheeks.

Neither man said a word. And when they left the church, they left in silence.

Dawn was crying quietly. Ben wanted to reach for her and pull her close, but he knew better.

“When we got to the meeting, I was struck by the difference between the two churches. The AME church was so simple and plain. But both churches had the same feeling that night. I walked in, and I felt the way I had when your uncle rested his hands on my head. We hadn’t had any trouble on the trip there, and no one was at the church who shouldn’t have been. But I think everyone knew that peace wasn’t going to last.”

Dawn turned away, and he let her. It was easier not to see her face. “It was all over quickly. The preacher of the church asked Father Hugh to open with a prayer. We were sitting in the front, and he stood up and faced us. It was so quiet. There were almost thirty people there, but it was so quiet. Your uncle began to speak, and then we heard a roar from outside. At first I didn’t understand. It almost sounded like the wind. In my nightmares, it still does.”

He stared at the wall, at the window, but all he could see was the horror of that night. “The doors of the church flew open, and men streamed in. At first I thought it was the sheriff and men he’d deputized, but then I realized no one was in uniform. Some of the men were empty-handed, some had clubs. One man was swinging a rifle butt at everybody who got in his way. Somebody yelled for us to put our hands over our heads, but the men I had recognized didn’t have anything to do with the law. I jumped up. Down the aisle from me, I could see a man beating Lester Narrows. I started toward Lester, but someone came up behind me and pushed me forward. I remember thinking that the last time I’d knelt had been a lot better than that.”

He could see Dawn’s profile. She had grown paler as she listened, but she didn’t say anything.

“Someone kicked me, but not hard enough to send me sprawling. People were screaming. The men had clubs and guns, and we had nothing. Everyone was trying to get away.
I looked up and saw somebody make a grab for Father Hugh. He was standing there quietly, not resisting at all. He hadn’t taken a step.

“Then someone blocked my view, and I heard a gun fire. I looked past the man in front of me and saw Father Hugh clutch his chest. I lunged forward. It was instinctive. I wanted him to get down on the floor. I don’t know if I even realized he had already been hit. I just wanted him out of the line of fire. I threw myself in front of him, and I felt something strike my shoulder. I thought someone had slammed a club into me.”

Ben couldn’t even watch her profile now. He didn’t know if he could finish if he looked at her. “Father Hugh sank to the floor. He didn’t seem surprised, or even alarmed. He seemed calm. He stretched out a hand, and I reached for him. I guess I was still trying to block him. I don’t know. But I fell to my knees at his side and grabbed his hand.

“There was no more shouting or screaming. The room was quiet, like everyone was waiting. I lowered my head, because I thought Father Hugh was trying to say something to me, but he pulled my hand to his cheek. I realized then that the front of his shirt was soaked with blood. He smiled, and he tried to say some thing. I leaned closer. By then I was begging him to hang on. I was praying. I heard a woman close by, wailing and wailing. And then I realized Father Hugh was gone.”