“Sheriff.” Morris nodded. His wife gave a nod that seemed civil enough, though her unblinking eyes didn’t leave Omar’s face for a second.
“We’ve got a lot of refugees in the parish,” Omar said. He turned, scanned the cars lined behind them on the road. “You can see that yourself. We’ve got to put them somewhere until they can be evacuated. I thought that the land where you hold your camp meetings might be suitable—you have facilities there, yes? Toilets and water and such?”
Dr. Morris nodded. “Yes. And we have grills for outdoor cooking, and a kitchen to serve hot meals. Though I don’t know whether the cookhouse survived last night.”
“Can you open the property on short notice, Doctor? We’ve got to put these people somewhere before they start keeling over of sunstroke.”
The preacher nodded. “I can do that, Sheriff,” he said.
“Thank you, Dr. Morris. I’ll tell my men to give you an hour or so before they start sending people over.” Dr. Morris nodded. “Very well, Sheriff. We’ll have the place open, and we’ll do what we can for the people.”
Omar touched his hat to Mrs. Morris again, then returned to his car.
All summer long, the A.M.E. ran camp meetings at their site north of Shelburne City. Whole families of black people from all over the South-Central U.S. drove to the meetings, pitched their tents, and spent their money at the Commissary and the local BBQ and burger joints. It was one of the few mainstays of the local economy that hadn’t gone to hell in the last twenty years. Even the Klan was happy for the addition to the revenues of the parish.
Camp sites, toilets, running water. Exactly what the situation called for.
Omar was less happy with the subject of his next visit. Mrs. LaGrande Davis Rildia Shelburne Ashenden, the last member of the family that had run the parish for the last nine or ten generations, and—he suspected—a far more dedicated and skilled political opponent even than Dr. Morris. The river was all over the goddam place. Stars flashed in Jessica’s left eye as she peered down at the flooded Atchafalaya country from her seat in the Kiowa. She was on a personal reconnaissance, and it was as bad as it could get. It was 1927 all over again.
And on her watch. She tried not to think about that.
Before M6, Jessica had every expectation of penning the runaway river in its proper banks somewhere north of Vicksburg. Except for a few places like Poinsett Landing where the river had found a new channel, the levees were mostly intact from Vicksburg south, and Jessica had made certain they were inspected to make certain they would hold, and any weaknesses shored up or repaired. Any water that got behind the levees could be siphoned off by the various winding bayous, like LaFourche or Boeuf, that paralleled the Mississippi, then drained off into the Mississippi or the Red. But M6 had wrecked that. Jessica had to get the river back in its banks somewhere south of the Old River structures in central Louisiana, which meant that the whole focus of her effort had shifted a couple hundred miles south of where she’d intended.
Goddam goddam goddam. She’d had to give up everything north of Baton Rouge. Her jurisdiction—the part of the twenty-three-hundred-mile river that actually obeyed her commands—had shrunk to the two hundred and fifty miles north of its outlet. A little more than one tenth. The rest was flood and swamp, refugees and ruin.
“Please sit down, Sheriff Paxton,” said Mrs. Ashenden. “May I offer you some tea?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” He hitched his gun out of the way and sat carefully on an antique rococo armchair.
Mrs. Ashenden sat opposite Omar on a matching loveseat. Its curved legs were in the shape of animal legs, each clawed foot holding a carved wooden ball. Mrs. Ashenden was in her sixties, with white hair, a soft, languorous voice, and piercing blue eyes that glittered like diamonds. Her age had not dimmed her mind, and Omar imagined that her control of Garden Club politics had not weakened at all.
“We have our own blend that’s come down from the Rildia family—we have it mixed in San Francisco and shipped here. Would you like to try it, or would you prefer Earl Grey or, ah, something else?”
“Whatever you’re having, Miz LaGrande,” Omar said.
Mrs. Ashenden turned to her maid, an elderly black woman named Lorette, and said, “The Rildia blend, then. And some of the macaroons, please.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lorette said.
While Mrs. Ashenden spoke to the maid, Omar glanced over Clarendon’s front parlor. The big house, with its heavy post and beam construction, had survived the two big quakes very well—Miz LaGrande’s ancestors—or the two hundred slaves they owned—had built for the ages, had hauled huge cypress-wood beams to the building site and dug them deep into massive foundations. Other than broken windows and a couple of fallen chimneys, Clarendon had done very well. Even the front portico, with its four mis-matched pillars—why did he remember the term distyle-in-antis?—still stood to proudly greet Omar as he drove down the live-oak alley toward the house. The oak alley itself had not done nearly as well—at least half the trees were down.
The interior appeared to have come through the quake intact. The mantelpiece and tables seemed a bit bare—presumably they had been cleared of breakables, either by the quake or by the housekeeping staff. But the furniture looked unscarred, and the cut crystal of the overhead chandelier seemed to have survived without a scratch.
“I wanted to say,” Mrs. Ashenden said, “how much we enjoyed your Wilona, when she called the other day.”
Omar looked at his nemesis and smiled. “She told me how much she enjoyed the visit. It was very kind of you to invite her.”
Mrs. Ashenden tilted her head, gave Omar a birdlike look. “I’m surprised we haven’t seen you here, Sheriff Paxton.” Her ice-blue eyes glittered.
“I’ve had no reason to take your time, Miz LaGrande,” Omar said. No reason to crawl to Clarendon for favors when he could take what he wanted by other means, he meant. He let Mrs. Ashenden absorb this for a moment, then glanced deliberately around the parlor.
“You seem to have weathered the quakes very well,” he said.
“Yes. Mr. Oliver Shelburne built well when he built this place.” She smoothed her lap. “I won’t be able to serve you off the Wedgwood, I’m afraid. We had too many pieces of the creamware broken in the first quake, and some of it is impossible to repair, so we put everything in storage until the danger is over. It is fortunate that the pre-1830 Waterford came through all right, though some of the more modern crystal was damaged.”
All our McDonalds cups came through just fine, Omar was tempted to reply. Even the Darth Vader. But he just smiled and told Mrs. Ashenden that she’d been lucky.
“Yes. Particularly during last night’s horror. I understand many in the parish have lost their homes.”
“Yes. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Ah. Here’s our tea.”
Lorette arrived with tea on a tray and poured. Omar asked for sugar, no cream, and got a sugar cube dropped into his cup with silver tongs. He stirred the dissolving lump into his tea—he knew from Wilona that his silver teaspoon was to a pattern made exclusively by a firm in Vicksburg since the 1840s—and he glanced at his cup as he raised it to his lips. Even if this was the second-best china, it was still impressive enough: thin and delicate as the petals of a flower, gold-rimmed, with a design of a shepherd frolicking with a shepherdess. Omar could crush it to powder by closing one hand, and for a moment—
only a moment—he was tempted to do so.
Mrs. Ashenden had seen him study the cup. “It’s Sevres,” she said, “but it’s soft-paste, not porcelaine royale, and our set is incomplete.”