Echoes of a Distant Summer (49 page)

Elizabeth put her hands on her hips. “That’s all you have to say? Some stiff-necked gallantry? That’s it?”

“What more is there to say? I want to get to know you better. I’ve already said that I thought we could have something very special.”

“Special? What does that mean?” Elizabeth threw up her arms in frustration. “God! I want to argue with you! I don’t want to argue with you! I want you to leave! I don’t want you to leave! We’ve spent one day together and I feel like I know you, like we’re old friends. It’s like getting in the car with you tonight. I didn’t have to tell you I didn’t feel like talking. You knew it and complied. I just needed to be quiet and the ride in the car really calmed me down. I’ve needed a friend and partner for a long time, much more than I’ve ever needed a lover. I want you to be that friend. I don’t want to stop seeing you, but I feel I have no choice.”

Jackson rose and went around the table to where Elizabeth was standing. “I don’t know what to say, but I think about you all the time. I thought about you in Mexico. I wanted to be with you tonight. I don’t want to stop seeing you. Frankly, I was looking forward to you being the love affair of my life.”

“Oh, Tremain! We seemed so right for each other!”

Jackson moved forward and took her in his arms and kissed her lips lightly, brushing his lips back and forth against hers. She did not resist,
but lifted her face to his. After the kiss they stared into each other’s eyes for several moments. Her arms moved around his waist and they kissed again, this time passion was more prominent as their bodies molded together. When their kiss subsided, they stood cheek to cheek in a tight embrace for several minutes.

Elizabeth said softly, “I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted to feel this.”

“It does feel good,” Jackson confirmed as he caressed the nape of her neck and then allowed his hand to trace the line of her spine.

When his hand touched her behind, Elizabeth pushed him away and took a deep breath. “Well, it’s nice to know our connection isn’t just platonic.”

“You knew that before we ever touched.”

“I definitely knew it when you put your hand on my butt.”

Jackson laughed. “I tried to resist but there was an intense pull.”

“Listen, Tremain, I don’t want to be any more invested in you than I already am. I don’t want sexual intimacy until we’ve figured this thing out. As long as you haven’t committed any crimes in this country, we can go on. If you just stay and eat, will that present a problem to you?”

“No, as long as I know where your butt begins, and other such off-limits areas are identified with posters.”

“If you make the right decisions and don’t push your luck, you just might get enough answers eventually to satisfy your curiosity.”

Jackson bowed in a courtly fashion and said, “Let’s eat.”

E
lroy Fontenot put down the phone and chuckled cynically at the fate that had kept him from his blood family for sixty years. Now, when he was more aware of his death than his birth, when the fires had burned low within him, suddenly the forces were aligned and conducive to the meeting for which he had sorely yearned in his youth. His eagerness to meet the family that had abandoned him in his infancy had faded, and an abiding bitterness had taken its place. All the long
years of wanting, desiring to be part of a family had eaten away at him, leaving caverns of disappointment that no future action could ever hope to fill.

Elroy was sixty-one years old and a retired policeman. He had long been divorced from the mother of his two sons. He bore his ex-wife no malice. She had not possessed the makeup of a policeman’s wife. She hadn’t been able to handle the long hours that he put in at the job or deal with the frustration that he often brought home from work. It had been extremely difficult for him, enduring for years the racism and injustice of the whites who didn’t want Negro officers in their department, while on the opposite side having members of his own race call him everything from an Uncle Tom to the worst they could imagine. He had walked that tightrope for many years. He had taken umbrage from both sides and kept his course. But he took no one into his confidence. He was self-reliant and strong. No one could tell that he was going through hell.

Elroy looked around his apartment and saw nothing that indicated his life had been special. He possessed nice furniture and a few paintings, but nothing that couldn’t be bought in any of the nicer furniture showrooms. His medals and awards were for fleeting moments, for actions taken many years in the past. His apartment, like his life, was empty of true valuables, absent of the objects that symbolized success, void of the emblems of romance and affection. It could have been a hotel suite, for all the meaning it had for him. He had no family life, no one to share the lonely moments of the day, no one to warm up the shadows of the night. One son was dead in Vietnam, the other was estranged and hadn’t spoken to him in nearly five years. Thanksgiving and Christmas were ominous, terrible holidays that emphasized everything he didn’t possess.

He hadn’t realized how much his life in the orphanage had shaped his ability to love and be loved until his children were born. In the marching, metered, organized chaos of an institution run by women, none of whom were mothers, he had not learned how to nurture, how to express disapproval constructively, how to compromise without resentment, how to show love in little ways. By the time he came to understand what he did not know about love, a wedge had been driven in his marriage and his sons displayed only anger and rebellion in response to him. He saw himself as a negative force, the Midas touch in
reverse, in all serious exchanges with his wife and sons. No matter what he intended, their communication ended either in unhealthy silence or in shouted words. He lacked the ability to communicate the hard lessons that experience had taught him. Elroy knew himself to be a failure as a father; his sons grew up in spite of him and in reaction to him, not because of him.

What could he say to this man who was coming tomorrow? Was there any reason to acknowledge a blood relationship after all this time? Elroy went to his refrigerator and got a can of beer. He popped the lid and felt the bubbling burn of the cold liquid flowing down his throat as he walked into his den. A desk, where he had finished so many police reports, stood in front of the window, along an adjacent wall was a leather sofa and against the opposite wall was his television. The bookshelves above the TV were lined with books about law enforcement administration and tactics. He had spent many lonely hours in this room, days of processing paper, nights spent studying for promotional examinations in which there was no chance of his appointment, wasted years watching forgotten TV programs. This room where he had spent so much of his life had the warmth of a padded cell. What did he have to say? Why had he agreed to let Elizabeth bring the young man over?

There would be no surprises. Elroy already knew the name of his family. He had done his own detective work. In 1960 he had taken two weeks off and researched the Port Arthur archives for the orphanage’s records. He had unearthed the notes of the mother superior who in 1927 actually met with the woman who annually sent money to the orphanage in his name. Her name was Serena Tremain, which was consistent with the initials on the overcoat she had left behind. Elroy still possessed that coat. It took no great effort to discover the owner’s whereabouts. He had known for over twenty years about the Tremains and his relationship to them. His close resemblance to King had often been brought to his attention by fellow officers. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to put the facts together.

The main reason Elroy never contacted the Tremains himself was that during his time in Port Arthur he uncovered some disturbing and confusing information. From the records that he was able to piece together, he had been brought to the orphanage as an infant by a Captain LeGrande from the New Orleans Sheriff’s Department. The captain had left certain instructions that the child in question should never under
any circumstances be released to the custody of King Tremain. According to the captain, King Tremain would kill the baby if he ever got his hands on the child. If he was truly King’s child, it didn’t make sense, but there was much about his origins Elroy didn’t understand. The other reason that Elroy never initiated contact was that King Tremain was a legendary crime figure in the corridors of the San Francisco Police Department. Special squads were assigned to put a stop to his operations. The city’s law enforcement practically ignored the depredations of the Mafiosi while they were dedicating their resources to fighting King. The unspoken order was that administration wanted him dead, a feat they were never able to achieve. Elroy’s only face-to-face meeting with King occurred before Elroy knew his relationship to him, but King had certainly known who he was. This was another confusing piece in the abstract, nonrepresentational puzzle of Elroy’s life: Elroy had long since given up trying to fit the pieces together. He had accepted that the logic and progression of his life were beyond his reasoning, and that some pieces were doomed never to fit together. Perhaps, in the giant wheel of life, he was not meant to be happy, not meant to enjoy the precious gifts of family; perhaps he was meant to be among the broken and pulverized, who like aggregate lie crushed and faceless beneath the feet of human activity.

It would have been different, perhaps, if Elroy had never known the loving warmth of a family, if he had never known how a mother and father were supposed to act, or how a brother and sister knitted together for support, but he had tasted that life. For four short, wonderful years he had lived in the bosom of a family. He had been adopted two years after Serena had visited by a family that had lost a boy his age to the venom of a cottonmouth moccasin. Four short years, long enough to taste but not long enough to learn.

The Caldwells had a boy and a younger daughter. Their nine-year-old child had not been in the grave six months when they came to the orphanage. They were poor, God-fearing folk who had sufficient love and food to adopt another child. When they selected him, Elroy couldn’t believe it. It made him think that there might really be a God hidden up in the sky, someone who really watched over the lost and forlorn. He left the orphanage with only the clothes he was wearing, but he felt like royalty. He was going to have what had been denied. He was going to be part of a family. The first year in the Caldwell household, he had gotten down on his knees every night and secretly
thanked God for blessing him. Little did he know at the time that it was a blessing soon to be revoked.

Elroy crushed the beer can in his still-powerful hands. Just the thought of the Caldwells brought a sudden rage. He knew that the anger and bitterness he felt could not all be directed at the Tremains. It was fate, what the Hindus called karma, that was the true enemy. It had predestined him to a life of loss, a life in which the important lessons were learned at great personal cost. He opened the blinds of the window above the desk and stared out at the dark windows and aged brick facade of the building across the alley. He threw the crushed beer can into a wastebasket and closed the blinds. The view out the window was void of life and color. There was nothing memorable about it, yet it was etched in his mind from all the years he had looked out upon it; etched in his mind like the night his life with the Caldwells had ended. He could not stop his thoughts once he began thinking of that night.

It happened in 1933, during the Depression, when he was thirteen, during the early morning hours when he had gone eeling with his adoptive older brother and father. The evening had started off so well for Elroy’s family. Dinner was hoecakes and mustard greens cooked with ham hocks followed by molasses pie, then Elroy’s father had read from one of the two books that the family possessed. The first book was the Bible and the other was
Lyrics for the Hearthside
by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Most times his father read from the Bible, but this particular night, he chose to read Paul Dunbar.

Of course, Elroy’s younger sister, Ruthie, wanted her father to read “Little Brown Baby” and Elroy remembered how his older brother, Judah, who had just turned sixteen, called out for “How Lucy Backslid” and there was a moment when his father had looked over the small book of poems with a stern expression, but then it changed into a smile. What made the evening so special is that none of the three children had to practice their “recitation.” His father took time to read everyone’s favorite poem and finished with the “Warrior’s Prayer.”

Elroy went to bed with a full stomach and stanzas of Dunbar’s poetry dancing in his head. He was shaken from sleep early the next morning by Judah. He struggled into his clothes in the flickering darkness of candlelight. The sound of Ruthie’s even breathing on the pallet next to him made him think about returning to the warmth of his blankets, but his mother offered him a steaming cup of black coffee and after the first few burning mouthfuls he was wide awake.

All the gear had been packed by the door so as to make their departure in the darkness easier. So, as they loaded up to walk down to their canoe his father asked, “Where’s the bait I asked you to put out, Elroy?” Elroy was immediately ashamed for he had forgotten to do the task. There was a moment of silence before Judah spoke and said, “It’s here, Pappy.” Judah was holding up a pail full of live earthworms and minced meat. He winked at Elroy in the darkness and there was a brief flash of uneven white teeth. Elroy sighed with relief. His older brother had come through for him again. As he followed the dark silhouettes of his father and brother through the pines and palmettos along the half-mile trail that led down to the water, he waved to his mother standing in the dim light of the cabin’s doorway. She was the one who truly understood how intensely important it was for him to have people he could call sister, brother, father, and mother. It was the happiest period in his young life. He had no idea that it was the last time he would see her alive.