Half of Paradise (2 page)

The great-grandfather was killed in a duel in 1870 by a Spanish aristocrat who made a profitable living as a scalawag and who had tried to buy the Broussard land at one-third of its value. Rebuffed, he had joined forces with the carpetbag government in an attempt to prove that Mr. Broussard was the leader of the night riders which terrorized the Negro voters. The Spanish aristocrat won his duel, but he was shot dead two weeks later on Rampart Street in New Orleans. A witness to the shooting said that a well-dressed Negro had approached the Spaniard, asked his name, then pulled a dueling pistol from his vest and fired from three feet. No one knew the Negro, nor did they ever see him again in New Orleans, but some believed him to be the servant of the man whom the Spaniard had killed in a duel sometime before.

Over the years the land was lost in pieces until Avery’s father, Rafael Broussard, owned only twenty acres of the original two-thousand-acre tract. Now there was no one left save Avery and his father and a Negro named Batiste who was the grandson of the servant the first Broussard had brought with him from the West Indies in 1850. The twenty acres of land was mortgaged, and it no longer produced enough cane to pay their expenses.

The truck stopped and Avery climbed down and thanked the old man. He started down the lane through the wood gate towards the house. The gate swung back on its hinges over the cattle guard and clacked against the fence post. He could see his father standing on the veranda looking out over the barren fields in front of the house. Mr. Broussard wore the same black trousers and coat he always wore when he wasn’t in the fields. His thin hair was steel-gray, and the red veins in his cheeks showed through his gray whiskers, and he had on a wide-brimmed planter’s hat that was slanted over his eyes. Batiste was sawing logs and putting them in a cord by the side of the house. The house was built in French colonial style with red bricks covering the bottom half of the building, and a balcony ran completely around the second story. The banisters on the veranda were broken, and the paint was cracked and peeling, the roof sagged in places, and the outbuildings had weathered gray. To one side of the house there was a pecan orchard, the trees barren and twisted like broken fingers held in the air.

“Hello, son,” Mr. Broussard said. “Hi, Papa.”

“I’m glad you came home.”

Avery looked about him and felt the emptiness of his home press in upon him.

“Did you quit your job?” Mr. Broussard said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Batiste said you would come home. All the time you were away he said you would be back. It’s been a little hard since you’ve been gone.”

Why does he have to talk like that? Avery thought.

“Aren’t you planting this year?” Avery said.

“I have to get some money from the bank.”

“The oil company owes me some in back pay. They’ll send it in a couple of weeks.”

“That’s fine, son. Maybe we’ll have a good year.”

Batiste came over and shook hands with Avery. His hair had begun to turn white, and his shoulders were bent; he wore suspenders and a collarless shirt, and the leather was cut away from the toe of one of his shoes.

“He’s looking fine, ain’t he, Mr. Broussard?” he said.

“How’ve you been?” Avery said.

“Been waiting for you to come home. I didn’t have nobody to go hunting with.”

“We’ll go frogging tonight.”

“I reckon you grown into a man,” Batiste said. He was smiling with his hands on his sides.

“He looks older,” Mr. Broussard said.

Avery felt embarrassed.

“Yes sir, you grown into a man,” Batiste said. “It’s sure good to have you back. I ain’t had no fun hunting by myself.”

“We’ll get plenty of honkers this year,” Avery said. “Going to fix the blind up so we’ll be ready for them in the fall.”

Avery remembered when he and his father used to go hunting together. They would get up early in the morning and put on their waders and quilted hunting jackets. They used the outboard to cross the mouth of the river, and Avery would sit on the bow, letting the cold spray sting his face, and listen to the gulls that cry over the water before dawn. They would stand waist-deep in the freezing water, waiting for the ducks as they flew over the willow trees to feed in the rice field, then fire when the lead ducks dropped through the mist to land, he with the pump and his father with the double-barrel. The ducks would fold and fall heavily through the air, making a loud crack and splash when they broke through the thin sheet of ice. Avery would keep firing until his gun clicked empty, pumping the smoking shells into the water. The dogs would bark and jump off the levee into the reeds and swim towards the fallen birds. Then his father would break the double-barrel and wink at him as the empty shells plopped into the water. Keep shooting like that and we won’t have any birds for next season, he would say. They would wade to the levee and sit on the bank, drinking black coffee from thermos jugs, and listen to the geese honking in the marsh.

But that was then and not now. Mr. Broussard didn’t hunt anymore, and the double-barrel stayed over the fireplace. After his father quit hunting Avery went with Batiste, but it wasn’t the same.

“We’d better go in and have supper,” Mr. Broussard said.

“I’ll carry your duffle for you,” Batiste said.

Inside, Mr. Broussard and Avery ate at the kitchen table, which was covered with a red-and-white checkered oilcloth.

“How much do we owe the bank?” Avery said.

“There’s no need for you to worry about it, son.”

Why does he have to speak to me like that?

“How much is it?”

“Three hundred dollars,” he said.

“We can take another mortgage,” Avery said.

“Yes, we might be able to.”

“What do you say it like that for?”

“I’ll go see them about the mortgage tomorrow.”

“There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“I couldn’t meet the land taxes this year. The farm will go up at the sheriff’s tax sale unless I pay them soon.”

“My check from the company will pay the taxes.”

“It’s good of you to offer the money, but you know I didn’t approve of you taking that job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“There are all manner of men on those oil crews. You should always seek your own level in associating with people.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Those men are from a different background than you.”

“What difference does it make?” Avery said, and then wished he hadn’t.

“When you associate with people of a lower social class as an equal, they bring you down to their level. You don’t bring them up to yours.”

“All right, Papa.”

“I let you take the job because you were old enough to make decisions for yourself, but I never approved of it.”

“I’m not on the job any longer.”

“I know that, but you must always seek out your equals.”

“All right. I’m not going to work on any more crews.”

“I wanted to go to sea when I was a young boy, and my father wouldn’t allow me to. At the time I thought he was wrong, but as I got older I realized that he had done the right thing.”

“Let’s finish dinner, Papa.”

“Why did you take that job to begin with?”

“I thought I might like working on the water.”

“Try to understand, son. I’m not attempting to keep you at home. You can get a job in town or go to the college if you like. But you should do something suited to your background.”

“I’ll help with the farm this summer.”

“Would you like to go to the college? I had hoped you would.”

“Maybe next year.”

“There’s something else I’d like to talk with you about. When you unpacked your clothes I thought I saw a bottle. Are you still drinking?”

“Not too much. Just once in a while.”

“You’re older now and you make your own decisions, but I don’t like to see you drinking,” Mr. Broussard said. “It killed your grandfather.”

“I’m all right.”

“Maybe it’s in your blood. They say the odd generation gets it. Henri started drinking early, too.”

“A friend of mine left the bottle with me.”

“I hope I haven’t raised you wrong. I brought you up the same way I was brought up. That’s the only way I knew.”

Avery began to wish he hadn’t come home.

“I leave it alone now. I haven’t been tight since I went to work.”

“I want to believe that’s true.”

Avery felt guilty for lying, but he had learned long ago that it was better to tell his father certain things, whether they were true or not.

“You know how disappointed I was in you the night the sheriff had to bring you home from that bar,” Mr. Broussard said.

“That was a long time ago, Papa. Let’s don’t talk about it.”

“He had to carry you up the front steps.”

“Yes, sir, I know. I told you I was sorry for it.”

“Well, it isn’t worth talking about now. I just don’t want to see you let liquor ruin your life.”

Avery got up. “Batiste and I are going frogging.”

“Will you get rid of that bottle?”

“All right.”

“Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

Avery put his dishes on the sideboard and went upstairs to get his flashlight and frog gig.

The next week Mr. Broussard paid the land taxes with Avery’s oil check and took out a second mortgage on the twenty acres. They bought seed, rented a tractor, plowed and planted. They worked hard, six days a week from dawn to nightfall, and Avery became aware of how badly his father had aged. Mr. Broussard was losing weight and his face became more drawn. He would not listen to either Avery or Batiste when they asked him to take things easier. He worked in his long-sleeve undershirt without a hat, and his face and neck became coarsened by the sun, and in the evening he went to bed right after dinner, sometimes with his clothes on. Once he stayed outside and continued working during a rainstorm. He caught a bad cold which almost developed into pneumonia. Three weeks later he was back in the fields. He did more work than Avery thought him capable of. Sometimes he spoke of the good year they were going to have, and how he would repay the bank and possibly improve the farm. Then during the next years they could repair the house (he never once considered living in another house), buy new farm machinery, and rent pasture land for the stock. The summer was hot and the rains were like steam, and the cane grew tall and purple and gold.

In September they began cutting the cane. They were working in the fields behind the house when it happened. Mr. Broussard stepped up on the running board of the truck to get into the cab, then suddenly his face whitened as he tried to hold on to the doorjamb, and fell backwards into the stubble and the broken stalks of sugarcane. He held his hands to his heart and gasped for breath while Avery tried to loosen his collar. Batiste and Avery put him in the cab, and the Negro folded his coat into a pillow. On the way to the house Mr. Broussard’s eyes remained glazed and staring.

That afternoon the doctor and the priest came. Avery stood on the veranda while they were inside. He looked off into the distance at the oil wells. The gas flares were red against the rain-clouded sky. Across the meadow a wrecking crew was tearing down the remains of the old Segura home. The roof was gone and the board planking was being stripped away with crowbars to be stacked in a large pile for burning. Two men were attaching chains to the brick chimney to pull it down with a bulldozer. A new highway was coming through, and a filling station was to be built on the site of the Segura house.

The doctor came out and walked past Avery to his car. Avery went inside and met the priest in the hallway. “Your father died in a state of grace,” the priest said. “He is in heaven now.” Avery went into his father’s bedroom without answering. The room was dark and smelled of dust. His father lay in the big mahogany tester bed with the ruffled and pleated canopy on top. Avery looked at the outline of his body under the sheet. He walked to the bed and pulled back the sheet. Mr. Broussard’s face was gray, and the flesh sagged back from the skull. The skin was tight around the eye sockets. He seemed much smaller in death than in life. Avery turned his head away and pulled the sheet over his father. He sat down in the chair and cried.

It rained the day of the funeral. It rained all that week. The freshly dug earth was piled beside the open grave among the oak trees. Water collected in pools and washed over the side of the grave. Batiste stood bareheaded in his only black suit with the rain streaming down his face. Avery watched the men lower the cloth and pine board casket with the pulleys. The priest read aloud from the book opened in his hands. Both of the gravediggers kept their hats on. The men from the funeral home coughed and sneezed and wanted to get out of the rain. A few people stood on the other side of the grave under umbrellas. Most of them were Negroes who had worked on the Broussard land in the past. The dye in the cloth on the outside of the casket ran in the rainwater.

J.P. WINFIELD

He was twenty-seven years old and he had a seventh-grade education, and he had never been more than sixty miles from his home. J.P. sat in the corridor outside the audition room and smoked cigarettes. The fans were off and he was sweating through his clothes. The Sears, Roebuck suit he wore was light brown, almost the color of canvas, and the sleeves and trousers were thread-worn and too short for him. Some people went by and he put his shoes under the chair so they wouldn’t be noticed. They were unshined and the stitches were broken at the seams. His polka dot clip-on bow tie was at an angle to his shirt collar. He took his guitar out of its case and tuned it again to pass the time. It was the only thing he owned of value. He had paid forty dollars for it in a pawnshop. It had twelve strings, and he kept the dark wood shined with wax. His fingertips were callused from practice.

He looked at the secretary behind the desk. She had on high heels and hose and a white blouse. She held her back very straight and her breasts stood out against the blouse. He thought how he would like to sleep with her. She went inside the audition room and came back out again.