Gods Go Begging (38 page)

“I know I was,” whispered Margie.

“If she refuses to name him, we may have to put this case in front of twelve people. If the prosecutor is hardheaded, you might have to take the stand. A jury will have to decide which of the two eagles has savaged little girls——this one or the one on Bernard’s chest. To my mind, this bedstead is enough for a reasonable doubt. I know it’ll shatter Minnie’s world into a thousand pieces, but it may be a world that needs shattering. It won’t be easy, but you can help her make it. You are her family now, Margie.”

Jesse smiled at Margie.

“Have you ever eaten at Chez Panisse?”

Margie shook her head but smiled. To her, Chez Panisse was Mecca, the farthest place on earth from Chez Boeuf. Jesse reached into his coat for the tiny recorder and began by entering the day and date, location, exact time, and those present. Then he began to describe the bed.

“It is a handmade, queen-size, pine bed—a four-poster. The bedspread is a quilt made from pieces of American flags. The large headboard is hand-carved and hand-painted in red, white, and blue. There is a globe that is crossed at its center by a banner that reads ‘U.S. Marines, Semper Fidelis.’ On the surface of the globe is a map of Vietnam. Above the globe and clutching it in its talons is a huge American eagle in bas-relief. The wings of the eagle span the entire headboard, the white wing tips touching the twin posts. A child lying on this bed, her father’s bed, would see an eagle spreading its wings over her head. She would see this eagle whether or not her father was present….”

The recording ended abruptly as Margie ran sobbing from the barn. The cold specificity of Jesse’s description had summoned up old and painful memories.

“Margie … was on this bed, too,” said Eddy who slapped his right palm against his forehead. He had finally grasped the meaning of Jesse’s comments to Margie. He winced with disgust, then turned his face away from Jesse. There were tears in his eyes. Suddenly recalling that little Minnie had stated that she could not see the eagle during the rapes, Eddy blurted out a sentence filled with pain. “She couldn’t see an eagle because his big perverted ass completely covered her tiny body.”

Jesse nodded his agreement.

“They ought to hang that son of a bitch from a telephone pole—by his nuts.”

“That would be too good for him,” said Jesse as he walked toward the bed. He placed his hand on the quilt. It was a bed of living, waking nightmares, a mattress of cold fusion, a machine built to destroy the budding hippocampus and create girls who have no memory—girts who live in an eternal present that is their only defense against a terrible past, little girls devoid of romance.

Jesse’s voice dropped down to less than a whisper. Girls like Margie and little Minnie had seen war and would live to share the nightmare.

“Besides, the perverted bastard might like it.”

Jesse and Eddy dismantled the bed and strapped the eagle to the roof of the car. Then both men walked to the side of the barn, where they found a water faucet. Ten minutes of vigorous rubbing beneath the spigot could not wash away the vileness that clung to their hands. The ride back to San Francisco would be a quiet and painful one. A hellish wooden harpy would be flying just above their heads, and in the back seat, where Margie lay silently, the world would be turned upside-down.

For the first time in years she was once again lying beneath Southeast Asia, the odd pain of familiar blood pinning her to the sheets, the pain of rambling and senseless consanguinity pelting her thighs, battering her small legs, stunning her ears with the misshapen drek that rode upon her brother’s breath.

“Are you ready?”

As the car left the Modesto city limits, Margie writhed and shivered in the arctic wastes of the backseat. She bit her wrist to drive her brother Richard’s voice from her mind. A warm flow of blood across her palm was just enough warmth to keep her from freezing solid. Even after her memories were suppressed, the weight of the wings above her head forced tears to her eyes. Wings like those lifted no one, carried no one to heaven. It had been years before she learned that those strange, upside-down, and reversed words meant “always faithful.”

Nothing more was said on the trip back to San Francisco. As Jesse drove, Eddy chewed absentmindedly on his Spam musubi. ‘l’he odor of seaweed and pork shoulder began to fill the car. Just a few miles from the Bay Bridge, Jesse thought he heard the high-pitched voice of a little girl coming from the blackness of the backseat.

“God is watching.”

fEight eyes and seven breasts—Persephone and her three sisters gathered together at the family home perched on the outskirts of Alexandria. None of the women lived in town anymore. It was 1978, and all four had taken husbands and were living elsewhere. The house was
une trés petite maison,
a small wooden house filled with tiny, warm bedrooms and a single great room: the kitchen. The women were seated in a circle near the stove, the chairs having been purloined from the huge table in the center of the room.

The home was set in a quiet neighborhood with narrow cobbled streets completely shaded by maple trees. Each shade tree was flattered by the cloying, loving arms of a Chinese wisteria. Each wisteria vine was caressed by bees.

The chorus of women sat in the great room surrounded by memories and photographs of their magnificent mother. Though all four sisters were powerful women in their own right, none of them could hold a candle to their mother. It was she who had turned the tide in the thirties, when it looked as though the Depression would wash them all away.

Lysistrata, a small Creole village on the fringe of Alexandria, had been named by Lizzie Boudreaux, their mother. It was she who had seen that the town had been mapped out and incorporated, that a proper library had been built, and that the patch of land was named after her favorite Greek play. It was she who had the strength to demand that all the new husbands refrain from joining the military. It was she who had given the sisters unity and direction when the foolish men enlisted anyway. If each sister had been a point of the compass, she had been their magnetic north.

On every wall of the great room was a photograph or a painting of Miss Lizzie, her long arms outstretched and so lithe and blithely weightless, her toes ever en point. She was the only Creole or black woman ever to dance prima ballerina at the Atlanta Ballet. Here she is a sylphid in flashing white; there she is a sloe-eyed gitana in somber red and insolent gold; here she sits, surrounded by daughters; there she is flanked by the entire corps de ballet. In one small photograph, she is sleeping in a casket, her once weightless legs now leaden. There are flowers enough—cast onstage by wild and inconsolable admirers—to hide the metal bier and the gaping hole beside it.

The four women sat quietly in the kitchen, readying themselves for the strange task at hand. Their father, Priapus Boudreaux, was seated—stiff and erect—in a wooden chair in the middle of the room, surrounded by his daughters. Out in the parlor, a group of their father’s friends was waiting to see the final product. A chorus of old men, they were bedecked with medals and ribbons from the Great War. Nostalgia sagged from their faces like a second layer of old skin.

Shy and sheepish now, Priapus was once the largest man in the county, a man who could outpull a mule. Gray and bent and self-effacing now, he was once the proud consort to terpsichorean royalty. His dinner jacket, tattered and passé, is covered with a pink towel, and the old man has removed his thick glasses. Without his lenses, he had no power whatsoever. Tonight, as he did on every other night of his married life, he had surrendered to the women of his family.

One of the sisters, Cleonice Fontenot—the one with a single breast—began to cut the old man’s graying hair, while the other sisters remarked, one after another, upon the still-handsorne man who was their father.

“Leave enough hair for me to work with,” said the fourth sister. Her name was Lampi Le Jeune. Her full first name was something that she will never disclose.

“Just because they cut your left breast off don’t mean you have to cut off all of the hair on that side of his head! You’re not the reason that the world is tilted on its axis.”

Cleonice laughed, then squinted to inspect her work. It was true. She had ignored the entire right side of his head. She sighed with the realization that she was not as strong as she had thought. She cared what the world saw when it looked at her chest. She cared that her husband’s fondling hands had one less option. Lately she had been using her left hand more and more. She laughed a sinister laugh. Her comb and snapping scissors moved reluctantly to the other side of his head.

The second sister, Myrinne Thibideau, walked to the sink and began mixing the ingredients for the elixir that would restore the old man’s lost youth and his sexual desire. When the thick compound was thoroughly mixed, she rubbed some of it on her finger and tested it for color against her own dark hair. In moments she was spreading the concoction over Priapus’s scalp and newly trimmed locks. As she did, she realized that it had been decades since she had touched her father. She rubbed his scalp thoughtfully, feeling the memories just beneath her fingertips and the single foolish hope that was sequestered among them.

Her father groaned under the wet weight of anticipation. There was discomfort in his eyes as his second daughter worked. Could she feel the deception beneath the deception? The second sister wrapped a towel around her father’s newly blackened head, then returned to her seat. The gray hairs would be invisible for a few months. Her job was almost done.

The old man sat quietly though impatiently in his chair; the linoleum tiles around his feet were littered with flecks of his grayness here and with whole clumps of his grizzled years there. Specks of age had fallen onto his precious brown wingtips. The kitchen floor beneath his chair resembled a fossil bed. He looked down at the proof of autumn on his very own boughs and prayed silently for just one more printemps—a single hard-legged spring; for another warrior’s summer to come invade his life and conquer this impending winter.

He swooned in his chair as a lovely Frenchwoman from out of the distant past threw her arms around his black body as he and his colored comrades marched through Normandy. He had been walking behind a Sherman tank when she burst out of the crowd and ran toward him. For an instant there were flowers at his feet and loose petals clinging to his youthful sweat. Why was the nearness of death so much like the nearness of love? he wondered in enraptured confusion.

Persephone Flyer, the third sister, rose from her chair and with a treezers began to pull the disgusting hairs from her father’s nose and ears. With each disinterment of a follicle the old man’s right leg kicked out reflexively from beneath his chair. How he hated those hairs and the efforts required to remove them. Each violent kick was followed by a wail of relief that contained within itself odd-order harmonics of pleasurable pain. It had been the same in 1944—the wonderful pain of illicit, forbidden love.

The Frenchwoman’s husband and every member of the local resistance had been exposed by traitors and executed by the Germans. On a single blissful evening, all of her terrible grief and exulting joy had been impaled upon Negro corporal Priapus Boudreaux in the grassy field behind her home. Creole sweat had met with perfume and sat glistening in commingled beads upon Alsatian skin.

So the old man sat in the kitchen, a feeble partner among four prima donnas. He sat denying
le tempspassé,
denying the passing years, and longing fervently for the turgid power of war.

“Ayez soin!”
he screamed at his daughter. “Be careful with those damned tweezers,
ma fille!”

“Taisez-vous, mon père,”
hissed Persephone. “It’s a shameful day when a veteran of World War Two is wounded by tweezers. Each hair means one day discarded. Look at all of the days scattered around your shoes. Count yourself among the lucky,
mon vieilliard.
Each discarded hair is one day that can be lived again.”

“Listen to your daughter, you old fool!” shouted the men from the parlor.

Even as the chorus spoke, the fourth sister rose from her chair and began preparing for her solo. First she swept up the hair. In a few moments, in response to the subtlest cue, she would take her turn to perform. As a cosmetologist, she would be the one to remove the excess dye from his hair, to sculpt a new, more modern hairdo, and to soften the scars that time and concern had left on his face. It was a formidable task.

She stood back for a moment, looking carefully at her father. Had she ever really seen his face? She walked toward the doorway and flicked on another light. To her amazement, his eyes were deeper than she remembered, more shadowed with need than she wished to acknowledge. She turned away to avoid the inevitable, to keep from thinking the next thought: a living person had been buried in this home. Now his daughters were preparing his body for the next life.

He had always lived in the shadow of his wife. In time the man had been completely eclipsed by his own love—by his choice of lover and eventually by his female progeny. But Miss Lizzie had been dead for years now, all but one set of her costumes and toe shoes had been put up in the attic.

What a night that had been, that long night at the mortuary when all four daughters had dressed their mother’s body. They had put her in her favorite costume, that of the dying swan, even as they passed that long night telling stories of her vital beauty and grace. Now the girls were all married off and had moved away. Now it was time for their father to find a companion for his last years, perhaps an old maid or a widow to cook for him and to walk with him in the evening. This house had become a tomb, a mausoleum, and he had become its doddering caretaker. Enough was enough.

The old man had evolved a plan to cure his loneliness, to reverse the direction of his life. He would buy a new double-breasted suit and new shoes. He would dust off his bronze star and his purple heart with clusters, and take a bus over to Savannah, then hire a motorboat to one of the small sea islands just off the coast. It had all been arranged and paid for in advance. On that island were rising hills of sand and stands of tall, verdant grass that hid enfeebled, elevated walkways and tiny, wood-plank houses held up by rotting stilts.