Things went on this way right through the first part of the winter. Chris was in Japan. He sent Lena a silk kimono — green, with a red dragon embroidered across the back. He didn’t write much, and then it was just a line saying that he was fine. Along toward the middle of January, I think it was, one of the letters mentioned fighting. It wasn’t so bad, he said; and it wasn’t noisy at all. That’s what he noticed most, it seemed: the quietness. From the other letters we could tell that he was at the front all the rest of the winter.
It was March by this time. And in New Orleans March is just rain, icy splashing rain. One afternoon I ran the dozen or so blocks home from school and all I wanted to do was sit down by the stove. I found Ma and Pete in the kitchen. Ma was standing by the table, looking down at the two yellow pieces of paper like she expected them to move.
The telegram was in the middle of the table — the folded paper and the folded yellow envelope. There wasn’t anything else, not even the big salt shaker which usually stood there.
Ma said: “Chris got himself hurt.”
Pete was sitting across the room with his chair propped against the wall, tilting himself back and forth. “Ain’t good enough for nothing around here,” he said, and rubbed his stump arm with his good hand. “Ain’t good enough for white people, but sure good enough to get killed.”
“He ain’t killed,” Lena said from the next room. The walls were so thin she could hear every word. “He ain’t got killed.”
“Sure, Lena, honey,” Ma said, and her voice was soft and comforting. “He going to be all right, him. Sure.”
“Quit that,” Ma told Pete in a fierce whisper. “You just quit that.” She glanced over her shoulder toward Lena’s room. “She got enough trouble without you adding to it.”
Pete glared but didn’t answer.
“You want me to get you something, Lena?” I started into our room. But her voice stopped me.
“No call for you to come in,” she said.
Maybe she was crying, I don’t know. Her voice didn’t sound like it. Maybe she was though, crying for Chris. Nobody saw her.
Chris didn’t send word to us. It was almost like he forgot. There was one letter from a friend of his in Japan, saying that he had seen him in a hospital there and that the nurses were a swell set of people and so were the doctors.
Lena left the letter open on the table for us all to see. That night she picked it up and put it in the drawer of her dresser with the yellow paper of the telegram.
And there wasn’t anything else to do but wait.
No, there were two things, two things that Lena could do. The day after the telegram came, she asked me to come with her.
“Where?”
“St. Michel’s.” She was drying the dishes, putting them away in the cupboard, so I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell from her voice how important this was.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll come. Right away.”
St. Michel’s was a small church. I’d counted the pews once: there were just exactly twenty; and the side aisles were so narrow two people could hardly pass. The confessional was a single little recess on the right side in the back, behind the baptismal font. There was a light burning — Father Graziano would be back there.
“You wait for me,” Lena said. And I sat down in the last pew while she walked over toward the light. I kept my head turned so that she wouldn’t think I was watching her as she went up to the confessional and knocked very softly on the wood frame. Father Graziano stuck his gray old head out between the dark curtains. I didn’t have to listen; I knew what Lena was asking him. She was asking him to pray for Chris. It only took her a minute; then she walked quickly up to the front, by the altar rail. I could hear her heels against the bare boards, each one a little explosion. There were three or four candles burning already. She lit another one — I saw the circle of light get bigger as she put hers on the black iron rack.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Father Graziano had come out of the confessional and was standing watching us. He was a small man, but heavy, with a big square head and a thick neck. He must have been a powerful man when he was young. Chris had a neck like that, muscled like that.
For a minute I thought he was going to come over and talk to us. He took one step, then stopped and rubbed his hand through his curly gray hair.
Lena didn’t say anything until we reached the corner where we turned to go home. Without thinking, I turned.
“Not that way.” She caught hold of my arm. “This way here.” She went in the opposite direction.
I walked along with her, trying to see her face. But it was too dark and she had pulled the scarf high over her head.
“We got to go to Maam’s,” she said and her voice was muffled in the collar of her coat.
“To what?” not believing I’d heard her right.
“To Maam’s.”
Maam was a grisgris woman, so old nobody could remember when she’d been young or middle-aged even. Old as the river and wrinkled like it too, when the wind blows across.
She had a house on the batture, behind a clump of old thick hackberries. There was the story I’d heard: she had wanted a new house after a high water on the river had carried her old one away. (All this was fifty years ago, maybe.) So she’d walked down the levee to the nearest house, which was nearly a mile away: people didn’t want to live close to her. She’d stood outside, looking out at the river and calling out: “I want a house. A fine new house. A nice new house. For me.” She didn’t say anything else, just turned and walked away. But the people inside had heard her and spread the word. Before they even began to fix the damage the flood had done to their own houses, the men worked on her house. In less than a week it was finished. They picked up their tools and left, and the next day they sent a kid down to spy and, sure enough, there was smoke coming out of the chimney. Maam had moved in: she must have been watching from somewhere close. Nobody knew where she had spent the week that she didn’t have a house. And everybody was really too scared to find out.
She was still living in that house. It was built on good big solid pilings so that floodwaters didn’t touch it. I’d seen it once; Pete had taken me up on the levee there and pointed it out: a two-room house that the air and the river damp had turned black, on top a flat tin roof that shone in the sun. At the beginning of the dirt path that led down to the house I saw a little pile of food people had left for her: some white pieces of slab bacon, some tin cans. Pete wouldn’t let me get close. “No sense fooling with things you don’t understand,” he said.
Maam didn’t leave her house often. But when she did, when she came walking down the streets or along the levee, people got out of her way. Either they slipped down into the batture bushes and waited until she passed by on the top of the levee, or, in town, they got off the banquette and into the street when she came by — an old woman with black skin that was nearly gray and eyes hidden in the folds of wrinkles, an old woman wearing a black dress, and a red shawl over her head and shoulders, a bright red shawl with silver and black signs sewed onto it. And always she’d be staring at the girls; what she liked best was to be able to touch them, on the arm or the hand, or catch hold of a little piece of their clothes. That didn’t happen often, everybody was so careful of her.