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Authors: D. Y. Bechard

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BOOK: Vandal Love
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C’étaient toutes les choses de ma mère —my
mother’s things, she said. She told him her grandmother had been Creole and her father mostly Indian. She’d learned midwifery from her mother and grandmother, and French —
un français bien différent
, she added.

She paused, the persistent music of crickets and night insects filling the space. She told him that her mother had died not that long ago, too young, and that she herself had had to take over and do all those things she hadn’t felt ready for.
C’est …
she began, but not finding the word, finished in English—lonely, she said.

Later they went walking. She spoke of what her mother had taught, things she’d alluded to, unsure herself of a tradition already lost. He and Louise followed a sparse woods, ancient trees around a collapsed house, pecans and oaks immense. They came out from the trail to power lines, a swath through the countryside, the galaxy so bright they could see the cables high overhead. The thrum of electricity was that of the fields above his
childhood home. She touched his corded wrist. They pressed onto the ground. Her palms turned up to starlight. He dug his fingers through grass and root, throwing up clods like a running horse.

Later she asked about his life. Her breasts touched softly against his chest, her hand on her belly. She closed her eyes as she listened. She was the first person he told about Isa-Marie, about her death and the journey south and not remembering what had become of her, and his wandering and even his dreams of her bones. He lay recalling the feeling of emptiness when he’d decided to leave, that wide gulf night on the mountain, fields and wind and standing against the cold. What had happened to that world and what should he strive for in this one? He saw the farm, the coast, the rugged sea. He wanted that simple work. He wanted Isa-Marie as when they were children, to carry her along the road and feel himself given over to this good. His terror was something he’d never known in the ring. Suddenly unable not to, he leapt up and ran. He rushed along the dusty lane between the fields and jumped a fence into a farmer’s yard. Behind a shed, barefoot and naked, he grabbed an axe and swung into the woodpile. The farm was silvery, moon shadows beneath trees. Blood buzzed in his ears. He didn’t want to stop now or think. He split until sweat released the heat from his body, until a dog barked and houselights came on, and then he ran away.

Those next months Carney and Watson conspired to book a string of fights. Too many, Carney admitted, but said it would make Jude tough and no matter, there was money in it. To Jude it seemed he was fighting every American who weighed in at over a hundred seventy-five. A few had beer bellies. One was covered with burn scars and missing an eye, another fresh out of prison, his back tattooed with the lewdest naked women Jude had seen. All went down fast, though a few show managers bribed Carney to make Jude draw out the fights then finish hard.

Despite the cat-and-mouse matches Jude was relieved. He needed time. He saw Louise between fights. When he visited, she was waiting in a bright dress, a meal on the table, rice and gumbo and fried okra, fragrant shrimp soufflés. They ate for hours. She put some giddy music on and later they relaxed on the sunny bed. He liked the familiarity, the brassy stretch marks at her hips, the bud of keloid on her arm from falling onto broken glass when she was a girl. Sometimes she made him talk and his few words felt so exposed that he pictured the curé next to him. But on buses or airplanes to Vegas, Reno, New York, he struggled against her within him. Before each fight, he stared at the elegant women in the audience, though when he went into the crowd, everyone withdrew, even grimaced. Afterwards, in the locker room, he faced the mirror. His broken features held nothing of Isa-Marie or even Hervé Hervé, and, ponderously, he considered his ugliness and whom he should look like, a mother or a father. His rage and frustration
hardly felt expended. The pipes in the wall groaned, and he realized he was clutching the sink, dragging it from the concrete fixtures, trying, it seemed, to hold himself in place.

Those months, when he returned to Watson’s ridiculous club, he reluctantly admitted his desire to see Louise. Though Carney kept the money from the fights, he’d bought Jude a side-swiped Falcon at the auction and had forked out a few dollars for driving lessons. Jude used the car to go only to and from Louise’s house, crammed at the wheel. She spoke of her people, the journeys they’d made by or against their choice, of the mysteries that so many ignored and that ruled them. But one evening, back from an extended trip to New York, Jude saw that her belly had, as if in a day, grown round. He wondered how he hadn’t noticed. After lovemaking he again walked out on the road. He knew the way she opened and touched. She’d said she’d learned from her mother to comfort the dying as if they were children, just by holding and touching. The dying longed for their mothers, she’d said, and this had scared him, had made him wonder how he could long for someone he’d never known. What had happened to all those who’d left the village—aunts, uncles, his mother, his father even? When he was a boy, men had discussed towns in the States where everyone spoke French, where curés and businessmen lived as they had in Québec, just wealthier, better. It seemed he’d followed in their footsteps but had found nothing. He thought of the village, the St. Lawrence. That world had ceased to exist, though at
times he recalled it so clearly, without him, that it seemed he was the one who’d vanished.

In the humid dark he followed slowly along the road. The seasons here confused him. It was another magic altogether, the warm winters, the hot, ugly summers. He no longer knew how old he was.

Louisiana–New Jersey–Virginia
1968–1970

It looks like Ali’s out of the picture for a while, Carney told him the next day—still stripped of that dang belt for draft evasion. But if you show good on your upcoming matches, we can probably risk putting you in with Joe Frazier. After that it’s history, sonny.

Jude hardly heard. He boxed but didn’t follow boxing. Carney said it would be the money he needed to retire. He’d become thin in recent months, the bones of his face prominent, his eyes yellowish. But Jude could think only
of Louise’s belly, a line down it like that on a peach. The girl was gone. She was bright and strong and beyond his grasp.

One evening they walked the familiar lane between grown-up ditches and fields, a few pecans along the way, the shells of previous years in the gravel.

I know you’re not happy, Jude, she said. I can feel it. You don’t hardly speak and I don’t expect you to, but … I am just trying to understand this. Is it because I’m pregnant—
que je suis enceinte?
Or is it me?

He watched his shoes scuff in the dirt.

Peut-être j’étais …
I don’t know … just lonely, she said.
J’ai pensé …
I thought I knew.

They came to a farm where they’d walked often. They passed the gabled plantation house at a distance. The night sky shone in the groomed pond. Near the barn he smelled horses and fresh alfalfa.

She paused. I love barns, she said. It’s the lofts. I wished I had one when I was a kid.

The bay doors were open. A horse nickered and stomped somewhere inside.

Do you want to go up? she asked and looked at him. Her eyes shone. He regretted having ever met her.

T’es trop grande
.

Non
, she told him. Women used to do a lot pregnant.

Just inside she found the ladder. She tested the rungs and began climbing. He stared at her thighs, then followed.

The vaulted room was half-full, bales stacked along the ceiling. She lowered herself on one, and he sat next
to her. If he’d never left Québec, he’d have been a farmer or a fisherman. He tried to think of what he was. A boxer. The muscles of his shoulders coiled.

It’s normal to be afraid —
c’est normal
, she said. My grandmother once told me that accepting love or having a child is like accepting that you’re going to die.

In the drone of sawing crickets something scuffed in the rafters, the sound followed by a resonant birdlike fluting. As she spoke she leaned close. She smelled of cut grass and the sweet soil in the roots of pulled weeds. Listening, he felt as he had leaving home, forcing himself towards a dream of sunlight that came only in flashes, knowing already that what he’d loved was dead. A pale shape moved in the air, and it took him a second to realize. It was an owl swooping, its spread wings catching the ambient moonlight. Louise called his name sharply. He struck out and the bird and his hand appeared briefly joined, and he struck again and it fell too softly onto the hay.

Jude, she said and took his hand. Blood shone darkly on her fingers where she touched him.

When he returned to the club and Carney saw the swelling hand, the torn meat of the palm and the gouged muscles, he just stared.

Well, he said. I guess I was pretty close to retiring.

They went to a doctor this time. After the sewing and the shots Louise gave her own treatment. Carney cancelled a few fights. Watson was concerned, his face red, the hair at his temples wet. The club hadn’t been
drawing. Some thought it wasn’t competitive enough, others no more impressed with the white brutes than with the blacks.

The next night Carney died in his sleep. It was probably his heart. Maybe a stroke, the doctor said. No reason for an autopsy. Jude felt cut loose.

Those next days he stayed with Louise. He couldn’t grasp the loss of Carney, the only constant in his life for the last seven years. Carney had just appeared, ready to take him in. He’d hardly asked questions, yet had chosen Jude’s age and name, and neither of them had considered it—Jude desperate and half mad, Carney too used to the unexpected. Boxing, he’d once told him, is a world of what you can’t see coming. Here today, gone tomorrow and sometimes good things, too. You can’t make nothing happen. It’s all got to be in you from the start.

But Jude had never fought for himself, except perhaps on that windy day when he’d met Boss at the clothesline. He’d fought for his grandfather or Isa-Marie or Carney, and now he wanted to understand what his reason was. He closed his eyes and tried to calm the pain in his hand, but he could grasp only loss, that he’d wanted to fill empty spaces. All that he’d loved had been there from the beginning and was gone. He saw no other choice but to fight and, fighting, to get himself somewhere where things were supposed to be better than before.

Three days later at the club he answered the phone. A man with a Jersey accent asked him to confirm a booking. You got it in you, kid?

Okay, Jude told him. Later, Watson, still sweating, offered to be his manager.

Those Garden fights do pay, don’t they, he said. Both seemed to have forgotten the ballooning hand, the penicillin shots. Louise said it didn’t want to heal. There’s a spirit to everything, she told him, even cuts and scrapes.

The night after his injury she’d had a neighbour’s boy climb into the barn rafters and bring down hatchlings. There were three of them, covered in down. She fed them grubs. Jude sat on the couch and feigned sleep. He’d tried to make love once after his injury, something he’d wanted in the night, but his hand had throbbed and he’d stopped.

Those weeks before the fight he didn’t train.

You can’t box with this for at least two or three months, Louise told him. He looked at her fawn irises, her lips. Écoute —listen, Jude, don’t be crazy. You’ll ruin your hand.

He studied his thick, corded fist. He couldn’t understand how anything had cut through. He took to not answering her. He went days without speaking.

I was lonely, she told him.
J’étais seule
. I couldn’t let the girl in me grow up, and you looked scared and alone. I didn’t care you were white.
Ce n’était pas important
.

She waited to see if he would reply. When he didn’t, she put his hand in a bowl of infusion and stood to leave.

I have others in my life, she said.
C’est assez
.

He’d never noticed anyone, but now that he was around more and the baby was due, the others became apparent, young black women, wiry men who passed without looking, as if they, like himself, couldn’t figure
out why he was there.

That Thursday, on the way to the airport with Watson, Jude gazed at the passing subdivisions near the city. There were a few clouds like strawberry blossoms in a deep blue sky and, on a cement driveway, a girl waving in the sunlight to someone he hadn’t seen.

In New York he fought an Italian. The man attacked sloppily, had sticky feet. Jude didn’t use his right hand. His heartbeat alone made it ache. He dodged and jabbed. The commentators said that though Jude had a powerful left, did he think he could take a seasoned opponent with one hand? They said he looked like a man practising his jab in the gym. The Italian landed a few mean shots but Jude took these lightly. It had never occurred to him that someone might knock him out or really hurt him. When the scores were tallied, Jude had landed far more punches. The Italian was in sore shape, and the judges agreed that Jude’s was the stronger fight. The sportswriters claimed this insistence on the left was an act of defiance, of what, they couldn’t agree.

During the match, Jude’s stitches had torn. Back in the locker room he was sick. The wounds that refused to heal had opened. He wanted to slow down. Carney had been right to die.

Jude told Watson he would hang on to the money, maybe wait a year. Watson sweated, tried to make him see the possibilities of boxing left-handed. Jude barely heard, distant with pain. The next day, when he returned to the
club, padlocked chains and signs from the bank were on the doors. Only a note, from Watson, that the club was ahead of its time: People aren’t ready for the plan. Watson had absconded with the money from the fight. As for what Carney had left, a few days after the funeral, his son, Champ, a flat face Jude had never heard of, had shown up with a truck, loaded everything and left. Jude agreed to his last fight. Later, in the booker’s office, contracts scattered on the desk, Jude struggled to make sense of all these words. He recalled Isa-Marie writing his name for him to trace, and he signed where he was told.

BOOK: Vandal Love
10.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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