Death by the Riverside (23 page)

Sundays were my only reprieve, because Sunday after Mass, I would spend the day with Aunt Harriet. Ostensibly I was to help her clean and do shopping, but we would go out and explore. To the zoo and Audubon Park. My dad had taken me to ride the little train that travels through the park, and we would do that and she would tell me stories of him as a boy my age. She let me order coffee in the French Quarter and feel very grown-up, and wouldn’t notice when I choked. Or we would ride the St. Charles streetcar all the way up and back and look at the beautiful homes and try to pick the one we wanted to live in. We went everywhere that public transportation and the slow steps of an eighty-year-old woman could take us.

I was so happy on those Sundays. It made the rest of the week bearable. Bayard, Mary Theresa, and Augustine treated me as an interloper in their lives. With the savage innocence of children, they thought that if they were mean enough to me, I would go away.

Sundays became my oasis, the water to wash off the spite and despair of the rest of my days. Then one day, I learned to hate even more that whimsical god that Aunt Greta forced me to believe in.

I was fourteen and I let myself into Aunt Harriet’s apartment with the keys she had given me. She was sitting in her favorite chair, a large green, overstuffed antique. There was a stillness in the room, as if there had been no motion, no movement, not even the simple act of breathing, to stir the air.

I sat with her for a long time, talking to her like I always had, holding her cold hand, hoping for a miracle that could not come.

I didn’t get back to Aunt Greta’s house until late, almost ten o’clock, bedtime. She spent several minutes scolding me, telling me I should have called, that I was wearing poor Aunt Harriet out, running her around, that she had a hard enough time with three kids of her own, without worrying about me, and what had I been up to all that time?

When she finally finished, I said, “Aunt Harriet’s dead. Uncle Francis forgot to bring me home and I had to get the bus.”

Then Bayard, nineteen, said (and this is one of the reason why I despise him), “Whad’ya do to her? It was probably your smart mouth that killed her.”

I punched him.

Aunt Greta told me that I was a horrid child and to go immediately to my room and that I wouldn’t get anything to eat until I apologized to Bayard. I didn’t apologize. I turned on my heel without a word and went to my room, a converted storage space over the garage that I couldn’t stand up straight in. Mary Theresa had refused to share a room with me. She and Aunt Greta had nagged Uncle Claude until he had thrown some boards across the rafters for a floor and sheet rock and a door at one end.

I never apologized. I didn’t get anything to eat until the next day, when, after the visitation, we went to Uncle Charlie’s and Aunt Lotty’s for the usual Southern mixing of food and death. I loaded my plate while Aunt Greta glared at me. She even made an attempt to stop me, but Aunt Lotty told her to leave me alone, that no one went hungry at her house. Aunt Lotty believed in the consoling power of food. I piled her ham and potato salad and tuna casserole high and told her several times how good the food she had cooked was. I didn’t touch anything that Aunt Greta brought. Spurred by my praise, Aunt Lotty urged me to seconds and even thirds. Toward the end of the evening, I was eating, not out of hunger, but to defy Aunt Greta.

Why was I thinking about them? I always did everything possible not to think about Aunt Greta or my despised cousin Bayard. Including, I had to admit, drinking myself into oblivion every now and then. That realization did not make me feel comfortable. It meant that I wasn’t as in control as I thought I was. I had learned so well in that house to be calm and controlled. If I let them know when they hurt me, they would have known to always hit that spot. And when I left, on my eighteenth birthday, I was sure I had beaten them.

They never saw me cry, not for my dad, not for Aunt Harriet, not for Smoky, the dog, who used to wait for me, with her tail wagging madly across a grease spot. Stupid dog, I would think, as I wiped off her tail, with her barking and licking my face. Then I would take her to the park to play and run about and I would talk to her. I told her about my dad and missing Aunt Harriet and she would listen. I was the only person in that family to give her any attention. In return, she gave me her steadfast loyalty (even to the point of growling at Bayard on several occasions), two shaggy brown ears to listen, and the only love I could trust anymore.

I will always wonder if Bayard left the backyard gate open to get even with her (get even with a dog?), or if it was just Mary Theresa being stupid again. Smoky got run over by a pick-up truck.

I didn’t cry when some neighbors gathered around to say what a shame and these drivers got no respect these days and thank God, it wasn’t a child. I cried much later, in the dark of my stifling room.

But here I was, more than ten years later, trying not to think of them, and thinking of them. Or drinking them away. My victory suddenly seemed very hollow. What had I gained? My soul chained and barricaded in a deep part of myself? And I was no longer sure where the key was or if I even cared to find it. Like a hunted animal, there was no victory, only reprieve. I had been foolish to think there was. Instead, I now lived with the knowledge that even if I escaped them, there would be other hunters with other guns.

I came to an old pier. Some of the boards were crumbling and looked rotten, but there were others that were newer and had only been touched by a few seasons of weather. I walked out to the end. The river gave off a chill, compounding the cold of the gray day. I hadn’t dressed warmly enough for a hike, hurrying as I had out of Ranson’s. Still, I sat down, not willing to leave the river.

That was why I hadn’t loved Danny. I had been too intent on listening for the rustling in the bushes, the chase. When I couldn’t stand waiting any longer for the trigger to be pulled, I had left her.

Aunt Greta had won after all.

Shortly after Aunt Harriet’s funeral, I got a job at the local burger place after school. I still had my paper route in the morning. I had to work to pay the taxes on the shipyard. Aunt Greta tried to get me to sell it, but I always refused. It was the only thing I could touch that had touched my father. I had to keep it to remember him. I was so afraid he would slip away. I asked for as little as possible from them. Every request gave Aunt Greta the power to refuse it.

I later found out that Aunt Greta charged me twenty dollars more than the actual taxes were. When I demanded to know why, she told me it was for her expenses. I had to give the money to her and then she wrote out the checks for me. The twenty was to cover the cost of two checks, two envelopes, two stamps, and the time it took her to write the checks. I addressed the envelopes myself. When I did point out that at maximum, fifty cents was spent on materials and that nineteen dollars and fifty cents seemed like a lot of profit to me, she lectured me on learning responsibility and not expecting other people to cater to your whims. It wasn’t the money, but the lesson in responsibility that mattered, she finished.

I didn’t argue further. It would have been pointless. Aunt Greta was going to charge me extra no matter what I said. If I argued too much, she would just raise her rates. A lecture fee, I noted sardonically.

I worked through high school, taking an early morning shift at the burger joint after Bayard “borrowed” my paper route bike one day and forgot to return it. Stolen, he said. I had to bite my tongue not to tell him to be more responsible, particularly with other people’s things.

First he told me he had locked it up and it had been gone when he came back; then he told Mary Theresa that he had seen the thief, but had been too far away. By the time it got to Aunt Greta, he had been attacked by a gang and was lucky to get away with his life, let alone my bike. It was too small for me anyway. I had gotten it when I was nine years old. I was going to give it to David when he got old enough. He would have been eight that year.

I shivered, a chill wind picking up and slicing through my jean jacket.

“Ain’t you cold, chil’?” said a voice from behind me.

I turned and looked. There was an old man standing on the pier behind me. He was wearing old clothes, clean but faded after years of washing, and carrying a paper sack that had creases from being used over and over again.

“Cold and sad, looks to me,” he finished as he sat down a few feet from me.

I tried to ignore him and hoped he would go away.

“Yeah, what happen that you be so sad and so far ’way from home? You never sat on this pier before ’cause I know all pier sitters ’round here,” he continued.

“A friend died,” I decided to answer him.

“That be sad,” he commented, nodding his head. “How he die?”

“Suicide,” I answered tersely.

“Why?” he asked. “You know?”

I sat and thought, wondering why I should talk to this old man. Why not, I finally decided. A man this old had surely seen trouble.

“Twenty years ago today, his wife, eight months pregnant, and three-year-old son died. Murdered. Ben started drinking and got in trouble and went to jail. In and out for a while, I think. Then in, until a few weeks ago,” I told the story. “I guess what he lived for, from then to now, was revenge.”

“He got it?”

“No. He couldn’t. The murderer was also killed twenty years ago today. But Ben didn’t know that.”

“You tell him, I s’pose, and now you be thinking you kill him.”

I looked at him. He was very old, at least in his eighties, with the creased and weathered skin of a man who had worked his life outdoors.

“I had to tell him. He might have hurt someone who…” I trailed off. Someone whom I was beginning to care for.

“I get you, chil’. The problem with revenge, it sometime hard to aim. Like any ugliness, it splatter all around.”

Barbara. Frankie. Ben.

“How do you live with it?” I suddenly turned to him, wanting an answer, hoping for one.

“Here, chil’. Warm yo’self up.” He handed me a worn silver hip flask. I stared at it for a minute, before finally taking it from him. I uncapped it and took a swallow.

“Long time ago; this be a long story, so I figured you needed a drink first,” he started. “But long time ago, my brother Abraham tell me, ‘You got to endure. You just got to endure for as long as you got. No choice there. Choice is, endure happy or endure sad.’ Abraham endured happy. Couple years older ’n me. Laughing, happy, smiling, always a joke with us younger kids. He got lynched.”

I jerked. Other hunters with other guns aiming at other people.

“Yeah, they strung him up,” he continued. “Somewhere during the War, First that be. Bunch of white boys, maybe men, not fighting over there, so they fight over here. Somehow Abraham turn into the enemy.

“I’s born in 1899, so I be maybe fifteen or sixteen when he taken from us. And I start enduring sad after that. Sad and angry, like you now. I stay that way for a while. One day, I visit Abraham, the grave he be in and I hear a voice. Abraham’s. And he say, ‘Isaac, why you endure sad? Why you visit me and be so sad? Didn’t I teach you nothin’? Look at them pretty flowers growin’ on my grave. Them birds singin’ like the sun never stop shinin’. The one thing you can’t let go of is joy. ’Cause once they take that from you, they taken everything. When you come by this grave, don’t you be rememberin’ me swinging from that tree limb. You’d better remember me laughin’ and happy. ’Cause they might of killed me, but they never got to my joy. As long as you still got yours, then I be alive.’”

The old man paused. He took his flask back and took a swig, then handed it to me. He continued. “He was right. Pretty yellow and blue flowers growin’ on his grave and them birds just sing and sing. Trees growin’ high to the sky and I got to smile. And I ain’t stopped smilin’ since. Sometimes, of course, a little while. Sadness happen and you be a grinnin’ fool to smile at it. But Abraham be right. We all, all of us, gonna die someday. Your choice with a smile or a frown.”

He paused again, took his flask and took another drink. “This,” he said, indicating the flask, “was given to my great granddaddy by the man that owned him. My granddad was born just before the Civil War. Born into slavery. After the war was over and we was freed, the owner come back and ’cause my great-granddad and granddad and others stayed and looked after his wife and kids (nowhere else to go, my granddad said. You want to be runnin’ around with a war goin’ on?), he gave them things to help. A horse, some money, a gun. Things he didn’t need. This owner be kind. Kind to dogs and slaves, my granddad say, he can’t tell the difference.

“This flask go to my granddad, my dad, now me. After me, it go to my granddaughter, ’cause she be my favorite and I be old enough to have favorites. She a teacher. She teach white and black kids. T’other day she send a white boy to the principal’s office. She call and tell me this. His name be Henderson, she tell me. Same name as the name of that man that owned my grandfather. Maybe they not related. Probably, like she say. But maybe they be so.”

He stopped and opened the bag and pulled out something wrapped in brown paper. He unwrapped it slowly, spreading the paper out like a table cloth.

“You hungry?” he asked. “I got me a pile o’ crawdads. Don’t know I can eat this many. Don’t know ’bout you, but crawdads always help me when I be sad. Don’t always make me happy, but at least get me pointed in the right direction.” He picked up a big, dark red crawfish and offered it to me.

“Thanks,” I said for both the crawfish and the story.

We cleaned them, watching the shell pieces disappear in the eddying river. He sucked the juices out of the head, so I did the same. I hadn’t done that since I left the bayou. Too rude for Aunt Greta. I watched the thick red head disappear into the dark water.

“Feed some skinny lil’ catfish down in the Gulf,” he said as he tossed some shells into the current.

“Skinny? There’s no such thing as a skinny catfish.” I threw another head in. We were probably violating all sorts of pollution laws.