Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (37 page)

He’d vaguely remembered the truck driver, a tall, muscular black man in his sixties, balding, with a face like a country preacher’s, his big rig as bulky as a train at the truck stop. A firm handshake, a barreling bass voice. Talking as the truck cruised miles of Louisiana highway. And when they parted, only about fifteen miles from the Fortier cabin at Silver Creek, he’d walked from the highway seven miles toward the nearest gas station.

That was the last thing he remembered.

And there was a couple? And they had brought him here in their car? And if they were coming tomorrow…

“That’ll be fine,” he said, smiling, and doused his steak again in hot sauce.

He took a bite. Wasn’t as bad as he thought. If they served it again before he left, he’d ask for some garlic powder and a little butter.

The couple arrived the next morning around 8:30. He was a tall, scholarly looking man with a blond beard flecked with gray, she was olive-toned (fair-skinned black he thought at first, but then decided she was Indian, like the people in India), with hair like blackbirds’ wings and the largest eyes he’d ever seen. They were both dressed the way young folks had dressed back in the seventies: sandals, khaki, loose cotton shirts tie-dyed in bright patterns of color.

The woman, soft-spoken, smiled broadly, reached over to peck him on the cheek.
We’re so happy you’re doing so much better!
And the man, her husband, thin, angular, long-necked with a protruding Adam’s apple bobbing as he spoke. Both teachers, they said, she a teacher of math at the high school, he a professor of literature at the community college.

They had watched the news reports of the flood every day, horrified. How awful it must have been. Could they do anything to help him?

It was not long before he asked them, nicely, but with a spark of desperation.
I need to get home, I got a place just up the road a piece, Silver Creek. My son and I planned to meet there in case something like this happened.

Of course they would take him, as soon as the doctor released him.

No, I need to go now. My son, he’s probably worried sick. I’ve got to see him. I’ve got to go home.

But if you’re not well…

Silence. He tried again.
I lost my house when the levees broke. The whole neighborhood’s flooded out. The only house I got now is at Silver Creek. No flood there. My house there is safe.

I need to go home, you understand. I need to go as soon as I can.
They looked at each other, then looked back at him.

The early morning rain had lifted and thinly parted clouds revealed patches of blue by the time they rounded the last bend of the Creek, and Simon was full.

The fullness began deep inside him, climbed up from his heart to thicken his throat and then the back of his tongue before it climbed higher to spill over, a pool of joy, from his eyes. He was almost home.

Sitting in the back seat of the couple’s car, he grabbed the cuff of his sleeve into his fist and rubbed the water from his eyes the way he had done as a boy on the day his father, Jacob, died. It may have been the knowledge that the New Orleans house his father had built was ruined that brought on the flood of emotion. Well, that house may be gone but Silver Creek, his father’s true love, was right here before his misting eyes. The sixty years that had passed since he was a boy here, swimming in the creek, plowing the land, cooking in Auntie Maree’s kitchen, had done nothing to whittle down his child-wonder at its magic beauty. As they rambled down the packed-dirt road, a shallow breeze stirred the pine needles into a perfume he knew so well; the branches of willows bowed to greet him and the egrets lifted their wings in salute. Sunlight danced on the wave-tips of the creek water as they passed, and the woman in the front seat brushed black hair from her eyes as she turned around to speak.

“This is quite beautiful. Are we near?”

Simon suppressed the giddy joy in his voice. “Be just another mile or so.”

When they reached the ruins of the old stone church in the open meadow and the old cemetery that held his wife’s remains, and where Jacob, Moses and all the others slept, Simon placed two fingers on his lips, floated a kiss on the breeze.

The road narrowed to a path shaded by majestic pines and the tunneling arms of cypress trees. When they passed the barn, he pointed ahead. “There, right there.”

It had taken a while to figure out that the couple would not take him, without a doctor’s release, to his home. When they had finally agreed to at least talk to Dr. Singh, Simon’s young Indian physician, Simon listened with his heart in his throat. The young doctor insisted, in an accent similar to the young woman’s in the front seat:
You’re still a little weak, you were out of it a long time. I’m going to prescribe another transfusion—

Simon had said, a little too loudly.
I told you, I feel fine. I’ll feel better if I can just get out of here, get back to my own cooking.

He regretted saying that. Insulting the hospital’s kitchen did nothing to help his case. Besides, he knew the folks down there sweating over those hot gas stoves were probably doing their best, and underpaid to boot.

Still, he had to make his point.
I promise I’ll come back. Just let me go and see my home.

A compromise. The doctor agreed to let him go if he would come back as an outpatient in three days. So after a complicated rigmarole involving Medicare forms, written prescriptions, and future outpatient appointment dates, the Letinskys agreed to drive Simon to Silver Creek.

When they pulled up to the yard of the cabin, Simon wanted to open the door and run. He believed he could, he felt so young now, as young as he did when his father, tall and thick-muscled with arms like steel, had picked him up and tossed him into the creek so he could learn to swim. As young as when he plowed these very fields after his father had taken ill. There was something in this air, he thought, that gave a man back years of his life.

He did not run. Rather, he opened the door gingerly and reached back for his Bible, the white bag containing three plastic bottles of pills, and the cane they had given him at the hospital. He thought about the beautiful, hand-carved cane Julian had brought back from Africa, still in the house, no doubt ruined by water with all the rest of his things. The thought of Julian forced an uneasy feeling; things had not been left well between him and his son. The boy had told him not to stay, to get out of the city, and the disrespect in his tone had bristled like barbed wire against Simon’s thin skin. But the boy had been right. No question now, the boy had been right.

Out of the car, Simon arched his back fully to stand upright. When Stanley Letinsky tried to help him to the steps, he shooed him away.
Oh, I’m all right now,
he said, smiling broadly.
Y’all can go on. I’m home now. Thank you. And God bless you.

He made it to the steps slowly, then looked back as the car pulled back onto the gravelly road. Waved his hand in the air.
Thank you, thank you so much.

He peered into the screen door of the cabin, too dark to see inside. He pulled one of the rockers away from the window, and sat, his spindly knees popping as he lowered his body into the chair. Put the cane down next to him on the cedar floor, rocked, and smiled.

A cooling breeze swept up and soundlessly stirred the leaves of the closest magnolia tree. Quiet here. So quiet. Sweet air, good to breathe. Genevieve would be so surprised, he thought, and wondered where she was. That old Buick she tooled around in was nowhere in sight. The woman never stayed at home anymore. Church, work, and whatnot, and didn’t she say she was seeing somebody? A younger man, ain’t that something. He smiled and clicked his tongue. Her husband Jack had been a good twenty years older. And now she had herself a young thing—probably five, six years younger. Maybe even ten, knowing Genevieve. He couldn’t wait to tease her when he saw her.

When he gathered himself and felt fairly rested, he got up to go inside. But something stopped his steps. A note pasted to the window. Not a note, a notice of some sort.

He read the yellow slip of paper as best he could. His glasses didn’t work so well—got to get a new prescription.

Eviction?

This was some kind of mistake. He’d straighten it out, now that he was here. He opened the door, looked inside. Some of the furniture lay under white sheets, like large stone ghosts. He went back outside onto the porch.

He sat in the rocker, his heart racing, his head a little light. Something was wrong. Genevieve was not staying here. Something had happened. He took off his glasses, rubbed his hand along the back of his head.

Aw, Daddy. No. This can’t be.

Tears burned his eyes. Genevieve had tried to warn him what was going on. They had lost Silver Creek. It was somebody else’s place now.

When he awoke an hour later from a bone-deep and weary sleep, still sitting in the rocker, the sun was high above the cabin. He looked out over the tall pine trees, behind which lay the meadow and the cemetery. He wondered if he could walk that far. He needed to talk to Ladeena, to Jacob, needed their counsel and the comfort of their company. But he felt weak now. Weaker than before.

The notice was still in his lap. He wondered if there was anything he could do. He hadn’t talked to Genevieve since the night of the storm. She’d been talking about the Parettes. Had she known this could happen? She must have suspected something. Something had happened since that night of the storm.

Well, he would just have to fight to get his land back. Hire a lawyer. Genevieve and he would put their heads together. And maybe Julian could…

Julian. He heaved a deep sigh. Julian did not want this land, and had produced no children who, someday, might. And it occurred to Simon that no matter what he did now, eventually his son would let the land go anyway. Of that he was certain. And how many more years would he, Simon, be on this earth? There was no reason to fight.

He got up from the rocker, reeling a little as he stood on his feet.

He was hungry. He had barely picked at that hospital breakfast of hard dry toast, hard dry egg, runny oatmeal, and lukewarm tea. They had to be joking, calling that a breakfast for a grown man. Surely Genevieve would have left some food in her freezer he could heat up and eat. She always did. Whoever this house belonged to now would just have to wait for it until after he’d eaten.

He was about to go back inside the house when the distant sound of a car engine broke the quiet.

He turned to see a small car making the bend from the main road. Genevieve? No, it wasn’t big enough, Genevieve always had to have herself a big car. This looked like one of those little rental jobs the tourists in New Orleans would cruise around in.

The car didn’t turn at the bend like most cars did, headed down to Local. It seemed to be coming right towards the cabin, but it stopped in the middle of the road. A young man got out. Darn these glasses; they just didn’t work the way they ought to. He strained to see better.

The young man stood in the road for a moment looking his way, shading his eyes with his hand, then broke out into a run, legs kicking high, right toward him. And in that moment, Simon recognized the same gangly stretch of his own legs when he was a young man, and the tilt of head that had always reminded him of his own father, and the long, ropey arms that had marked every man in his family, as he walked to the edge of the porch, smiling, heart thumping wildly, to meet his son.

H
e had stopped the car in the middle of the road.

Once he had spotted the figure on the porch, he had to stop, get out, and see without the barrier of the windshield, had to be certain what he was seeing was not just what he wanted to see, had to be sure that it was real. So many times before he’d dreamed of his father in a scene much like this—Simon in the distance, smiling, waving toward him—and then awakened from the dream.

But he had not been sleeping this time. Simon was there, sitting on the porch of the cabin the way he had each summer when Julian was small, calm as you please. As if there had never been a storm.