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The coat of arms involved a shield, a gladius or sword a Roman legionnaire would have carried, the cross of the Crusades, and the visored helmet of a medieval knight errant.
"The family name comes from the Battle of Chalons. My ancestors got rid of their own name and substituted the name of a great event," he said. He removed his arm from my shoulder and gazed benevolently into my face. I couldn't tell if he was feigning humility or actually offering up his family history to inspire awe in others.
"Your ancestors fought against Attila the Hun?" I said.
"We probably didn't do a very good job of it. We had to fight his descendants in that delayed Teutonic migration known as World Wars One and Two."
I looked at him blankly. He had just lifted a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby and used it as though it were of his own creation.
"You're not impressed?" he said.
"I had a long day. I'll be seeing you, Val."
When I shook hands with him, I felt his fingers wrap around my skin and squeeze, his eyes lingering on mine, as though he were trying to read my thoughts. "I like you, Dave," he said.
Out in the yard, I unconsciously rubbed my hand on my trousers.
The black man named Andre was picking up litter that had blown into the drive from the highway. He waved at me and I waved back. Then, in the easy sweep of wind through the trees, I heard someone behind me. I turned, expecting to see Valentine Chalons again. But it was his sister, Honoria, her black hair curved under her cheeks, a gold chain and cross askew on her chest.
Her eyes were liquid, almost luminous in the shade, her facial skin smooth, without a wrinkle or crease. She continued to look at me strangely, without speaking.
"Could I help you?" I said.
"Do you remember the night you drove me home from the dance at the country club?" she asked.
"No, I don't remember that."
"You probably wouldn't. I had to put you to bed rather than the other way around."
"I used to have blackouts, Honoria. I did a lot of things that are still inside a dark box somewhere. I don't know if I want to revisit them."
Her eyes went away from mine and came back. "My father and brother aren't afraid of you. But they are afraid of the nun," she said.
"The nun?"
"The Buddhists believe the dead don't know they're dead. So maybe some people die and go to hell and never know it. It's just another day. Like this one, now. Do you think that's true? That hell is just a place you step into on an ordinary day?"
The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria's face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a windowpane.
Honoria's eyes remained fixed on mine, expectant, somehow trusting, the redness of her mouth and the mole next to it as inviting as a poisonous flower.
chapter SEVEN
When I got back home later that evening,, Jimmie had already arrived from New Orleans and installed himself in the spare bedroom. Jimmie was a funny guy. He had earned the nickname "Jimmie the Gent" for his manners, intelligence, and sharp dress, but his success in the world was also due to the fact that, like my father and mother, he could do many things well with his hands.
As a Depression-era family we worked from what people used to call "cain't-see to cain't-see," which meant from before first light to well after sunset. My father was a natural gas pipeliner and derrick man on drilling rigs out in the Gulf, but he considered industrial work, with regular hours and paychecks, a vacation. Real work was the enterprise you did on your own, with nobody to back you up but your family. We broke corn together, butchered and smoked our own meat, strung "trot" lines baited with chicken guts through the swamp across the road, milked cows and hoed out the vegetable garden before school, calved in the early spring, trapped muskrat in the winter, sold cracklins and blackberries off the tailgate of a pickup for two bits a quart.
In the summer, Jimmie and I built board roads with our father through tidal marshland where you plodded all day through ooze that was like wet cement. In the spring, we caught crabs and crawfish by the washtub with chunks of skinned nutria, and sold them to restaurants in New Orleans for twice the price we could get in New Iberia or Lafayette.
Before she fixed our breakfast, my mother would return from the barn smelling of manure and horse sweat, a pail of frothy milk in one hand and an armful of brown eggs smeared with chickenshit clutched against her chest. Then she would pull off her shirt, scrub her hands and arms with Lava soap under the pump in the sink, and in her bra fill our bowls with cush-cush and make ham-and-onion sandwiches for our lunches.
Jimmie and I both had paper routes in New Iberia's red-light district. We set pins in the bowling alley and with our mother washed bottles in the Tabasco factory on the bayou. My father hand-built the home we lived in, notching and pegging the oak beams with such seamless craftsmanship that it survived the full brunt of a half dozen hurricanes with no structural damage. My mother ironed clothes in a laundry nine hours a day in hundred-and-ten-degree heat. She scalded and picked chicke
ns for five cents apiece in our backyard, and secretly saved money in a coffee can for two years in order to buy an electric ice grinder and start a snowball concession at the minor league baseball park.
Our parents were illiterate and barely spoke English, but they were among the most brave and resourceful people I ever knew. Neither of them would consciously set about to do wrong. But they destroyed one another just the same — my father with his alcoholism, my mother with her lust and insatiable need for male attention. Then they destroyed their self-respect, their family, and their home. They did all this with the innocence of people who had never been farther away from their Cajun world than their weekend honeymoon trip to New Orleans.
Jimmie's suitcase lay unopened on the bed in the spare room, but through the kitchen window I saw him in the backyard, wearing shined shoes, pleated dark slacks, a pomegranate-colored tie, and dazzling white dress shirt, his Rolex watchband glinting on his wrist. He had folded his sleeves up on his forearms and was screwing down a new brass hasp on Tripod's cage door. He stepped back and tested the door, then began pouring from a bag of Snuggs's dry food into Tripod's bowl.
