“I’m sorry about the tea,” Meg said.
“Tea?”
“I told her you didn’t drink it sweetened.”
“Oh, that’s all right, honey.”
“She was making it after lunch and I said, ‘Don’t put sugar in it, Mama likes hers with just lemon.’ But she said, ‘Oh, everybody likes their tea with sugar, it’s so refreshing.’ I said, ‘But—’ ”
“Meg, I don’t care,” said Justine.
“I said I would mix a separate glass then,” Meg told Duncan, “but she doesn’t really like me in her kitchen.”
Duncan studied her. Grandfather Peck stroked his chin.
“She does everything, even makes our bed up. She says I don’t know hospital corners. You never taught me about hospital corners, Mama.”
“I’m sorry, honey.”
“I wanted to have you for lunch today, I said I would cook it myself. You know I can cook. Simple things, at least. Fannie Farmer. But she said it wasn’t possible because her group was coming over for supper, these people in her healing group. She had to have the kitchen to herself. The people in her healing group are all old and strange, they have chronic illnesses and they think she helps, and then sometimes they bring her someone new and they all pray together holding hands.”
“Does it work?” Justine asked.
“What? No. I don’t know. I thought when I got married we would be so—regular. I thought finally we—I didn’t know all this would be going on. When I met her she was like anybody else. Except for wearing white. She did wear white all the time. But I didn’t know then about this healing. She wants Arthur to learn healing too and she even wanted to look at my hands, she wondered if I have the gift.”
“Do you?” Justine asked.
“Mama! I wouldn’t go along with a thing like that.”
“Well, I don’t know, at least it would be a new experience.”
“I don’t want new experiences, I want a normal happy life. But Arthur just won’t stand up to her, really he—and now she wants him to develop his gift because hers is going. She thinks it’s because of her age. At the meetings they pray and cry, you can hear them everywhere in the house. She reminds God of what she used to accomplish: once she stopped a man in the middle of a heart attack.”
“She did?”
“She says she has so much left to do, she should be allowed to keep her gift. She says it’s unjust. There are people sick just everywhere, she says, and blind and crippled and suffering pain, and there she is powerless and she can’t even stop her own son’s headaches any more. She goes on and on about it, calling out so everyone can hear: just because a little time has passed, she says, that’s no reason to let her dwindle down this way.”
“Well, I should say not,” said Justine.
Meg paused and gave her a look. “Are you listening?” she asked.
“Certainly I’m listening.”
“I live among crazy people!”
“You should leave,” Duncan told her.
“Oh, Duncan,” said Justine. She turned to Meg. “Meggie darling, maybe you could just—or look at it this way. Imagine you were handed a stack of instructions. Things that you should undertake. Blind errands, peculiar invitations … things you’re supposed to go through, and come out different on the other side. Living with a faith healer. I never got to live with a faith healer.”
“That’s what you’re going to tell your daughter?” Duncan said. “Just accept whatever comes along? Endure? Adapt?”
“Well—”
“And how would people end up if they all did that?”
Justine hesitated.
“Never mind, Mama,” Meg told her. “I didn’t mean to mention it, anyway.”
So Justine got into the car, but untidily and with backward glances because so much seemed still unsettled. The troubled feeling was nagging at her mind again. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She felt as if she had mislaid an object somewhere, something important that would thread through all her thoughts until she found it. But she sat forward briskly and called out the window, “Meggie darling!”
“What is it?”
“If you do have to do bazaar work, you know, if you need any help, I’ll be happy to drive down any time and tell fortunes.”
“Thank you, Mama.”
“You know I have a lot of steady clients here.”
“Well, that’s very nice of you, Mama,” Meg said. But Justine could tell that she had made a mistake. She should have offered something plainer and sturdier—anything but more gifts from heaven.
By the time they reached Caro Mill it was night, and the streets had a dismal abandoned look. The only place open was the diner, eerily lit and vacant except for Black Emma swabbing the counter. “Maybe we could stop for coffee,” said Justine. But the car slid by, and neither Duncan nor her grandfather answered. (They had not spoken all the way home, either one of them. Only Justine had chattered on and on until she wondered herself when she would shut up.) “Duncan?” she said. “Couldn’t we stop for coffee?”
“We have coffee at home.”
“I don’t want to go home,” she said. “I have this peculiar feeling. I wouldn’t mind staying the night somewhere, even. Duncan?”
But he said, “Endure,” and turned sharply down Watchmaker Street. She blinked and looked at him.
In front of their house, when the engine had died and the headlights had faded, the three of them sat motionless for a moment gazing through the windshield, as if being borne along on some darker, more silent journey. Then Justine touched her grandfather’s arm. “Here we are,” she said.
“Eh?”
He stumbled out, latching the door inconclusively behind him, and Justine slid after Duncan out the driver’s side. They went single file up the walk between looming rustling cornstalks. At the porch, they stopped short. A shadow unfolded itself from the steps. “Eli!” Justine said.
“Eh?” said her grandfather.
And Duncan said, “Well, Eli. What have you found for us?”
“Caleb Peck,” said Eli.
13
Eli Everjohn drank his coffee white, preferred Jane Parker angel food cake to taco chips, and was perfectly comfortable sitting on a chrome-legged chair in the kitchen. He had to make all that clear before they would let him get on with his report. “Listen here,” he kept saying. “Listen. It struck me right off—” But Justine would interrupt to ask, couldn’t she take his hat? wouldn’t he be cooler in his shirtsleeves? And old Mr. Peck trudged around and around him, thinking hard, occasionally offering interruptions of his own. “I believe I ought to fetch my notebook, Justine.”
“Yes, Grandfather, I would do that.”
“I believe that windowscreen is torn. Where else would these mosquitoes be coming from?”
“I’ll find the swatter.”
“Oh, leave it, leave it. Mr. Everjohn here has something he wants to say to us.”
But when Eli took a breath Justine halted him. “Wait, I’ve been wanting something sour all day. Don’t start without me.”
“Justine—” Duncan said.
Eli Everjohn was a patient man. (In his business, he had to be.) Still, he had been dreaming of this moment for a good long time now. He had come over on a Sunday evening expressly to bring this news, which he thought might cause him to burst if he left it till Monday: in just under three months, he had accomplished what a whole family could not do in sixty-one years. He had performed a spectacular piece of deduction, and now he wanted to tell about it in his own slantwise, gradual way so that everyone could admire how one clue had built upon another, one path led to the next, with sudden inspired leaps of the imagination to bridge them. True detective work was an art. Finding was an art. He was grateful to the Peck family for handing him this assignment. (How could he ever again settle for guarding anniversary gifts or pretending to read Newsweek in front of beauty parlors?) So he cleared his throat, and pushed his coffee cup a certain distance away, and plaite
d his long fingers on the table before him and began as he had planned. “It struck me right off,” he said, “that there was one thing the same in all accounts of Caleb Peck.”
“You’ll have to speak up,” said the old man.
“Oh. Sorry. It struck me—”
“Justine, I think my battery’s going.”
“Will you let the man speak?” Duncan said.
So that Eli, with the last of his patience worn away, ended up blurting it out after all and ruining the moment he had planned for so long. “Mr. Caleb Peck,” he said, “is in Box Hill, Louisiana, alive and well.”
It had struck Eli right off that there was one thing the same in all accounts of Caleb Peck: he was a musical man. To his family that was only a detail, like the color of his eyes or his tendency to wear a Panama hat just a little past the season. But to Caleb, wasn’t it more? Eli pondered, sifting what he had heard and endlessly rearranging it. He traveled a few blind alleys. He scanned the alumni lists of several well-known music schools, including Baltimore’s Peabody Institute. He checked the family’s old phonograph records for performers whom Caleb might have been moved to seek out. He inquired as to Caleb’s piano teacher—someone young and pretty, maybe? Someone inspirational, to teach him those Czerny exercises he found crumbling away on top of the piano in old Mr. Peck’s Baltimore parlor? But no, the Czerny was Margaret Rose’s, said Mr. Peck. Caleb had not liked Czerny. He was not, to tell the truth, very fond of the classical mode. And he had never had a music teacher of any kind. Only little Billy Pope passing on his fiddle lessons, and a leatherbound book telling how to play the woodwinds (which in those days were really made of wood—see the ebony flute in Caleb’s old bedroom?) and for the piano, Lafleur Boudrault, who taught him ragtime.
Was this Lafleur Boudrault young and pretty, by any chance?
But Lafleur Boudrault was the Creole gardener, not pretty at all—a scar down one cheek and a permanent wink. Long dead now. Survived by his wife Sulie. He wouldn’t have helped out anyway: a cross-grained sort.
Eli traveled once again to Baltimore and sought out Sulie, who was moving a dustcloth around and around the attic. Nowadays all she did was dust. She would not give up her cloth, which had to be pried from her fingers in her sleep as you would pry a pet blanket from a child in order to wash it. And what she dusted was not helpful at all—never the furniture, which Lord knows could use a dusting, all those bulbs and scallops and crevices; but only the hidden places that didn’t count, the undersides of drawers and the backs of picture frames and now these trunks and cartons in the attic, which she had been on for weeks and weeks. They couldn’t get her to stop. They wanted to pension her off; didn’t she have family somewhere? They were almost certain there had been a daughter. But Sulie only laughed her cracked, rapid laugh and said, “Now you wants to do it. Now you wants.” Oh, she was mad, no question about it. But Eli needed Caleb’s contemporaries and there were not all that many to pick and choose from. He climbed the narrow, hollow, pine-smelling steps to Laura’s attic, submerging first his head and then his shoulders and then his wool-wrapped body in a heat so intense that it seemed to be liquid, and at the last he was merely floating upward in a throbbing dull haze. He swam between crazed china hurricane lamps and slanted portraits, across rugs rolled and stacked like logs, toward the spindly figure briskly polishing an empty Pears soap box down where the dusty light fingered its way through the louvers. “Mrs. Sulie Boudrault?” he asked, and without looking up she nodded and hummed and went on polishing.
“Widow of Lafleur Boudrault?”
She nodded.
“You wouldn’t happen to know where Mr. Caleb Peck has got to.”
Then she stopped polishing.
“Well, I thought they wouldn’t never ask,” she said.
She settled him on a china barrel, and she herself sat on a stack of St. Nicholas magazines with her dustcloth clutched daintily in her lap. She was a very small woman with stretched-looking skin and yellow eyes. Her manner of speaking was clear and reasonable, and her story proceeded in a well-ordered way. No wonder: she had had over half a century in which to arrange it.
“When first Mr. Caleb had left us,” she said, “I told Lafleur, ‘Lafleur, what do I say?’ For I know where he had went to yet I would hate to give him away. ‘Lafleur, do I lie?’ ‘That ain’t never going to come up,’ he say. ‘Them folks don’t think you know nothing.’ Well, I was certain he was wrong. I waited for old Mrs. Laura to fix me with her little eyes. She the one to watch for. Mr. Justin the First couldn’t do nothing, maybe wouldn’t have anyhow, but he had that Mrs. Laura so scared she would do it for him and more besides. She was one scared lady, and it had turned her mean and spiteful. Watch out for Mrs. Laura, I told myself, and so I watch and waited and plan how to answer what she ask. But she never do. Never once. Never even, ‘Sulie, do you recollect if you served Mr. Caleb breakfast that day?’ Never a word.”
Sulie set her skirt out all about her—a long draggled white eyelet affair that hit halfway down her skinny calves, with ankle-high copper-toed work shoes swinging below them. After thinking a moment, she dug down into her pocket and came up with a handful of Oreos, mashed and limp. “Have you a cookie,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Eli.
“She never ask. Nor none of the others. Took me some time to see they never would. ‘Why, looky there!’ I say to Lafleur at last, and he say, ‘Told you so. They don’t reckon just old us would know nothing,’ he say. So my eyes was opened. That was how. I made up my mind I wouldn’t tell till they say straight out, ‘Sulie, do you know?’ And Mrs. Laura I wouldn’t give the time of day even. I never did. She live forty-six years after Mr. Caleb had went and I never spoken to her once, but I don’t fool myself she realize that. ‘Sulie is getting so sullen,’ was what she say. Even that tooken her five or so years to notice good.”
Eli finished the Oreo and dusted off his hands. From his pocket he took a spiral notebook and a Bic pen. He opened to a blank page.
“Now,” said Sulie.
She stood up, as if to recite.
“Mr. Caleb was a musical man,” she said.
“I had heard he was.”
“He like most music, but colored best. He like ragtime and he copied everything Lafleur do on the piano. He like stories about them musicians in New Orleans, which is where Lafleur come from. Lafleur had got his self in a speck of trouble down there and couldn’t go back, but he would tell about the piano players in Storyville and what all went on. Understand this was back long time ago. Didn’t many people know about such things.
“Then times got hard and Miss Maggie Rose left us. I had to move on over to Mr. Daniel’s house and tend the babies. I was not but in my teens then. I had just did get married to old Lafleur. I didn’t know much but I saw how Mr. Caleb was mighty quiet and maybe took a tad more to drink than was needed. But I never thought he’d leave. One night he come down cellar to our bedroom, me and Lafleur’s. Knocks on our door. ‘Lafleur,’ he say, ‘this fellow down at the tavern is talking about a trip to New Orleans.’
“ ‘Is that so,’ say Lafleur.
“ ‘Wants me to go along.’
“ ‘That so.’
“ ‘Well, I’m thinking of doing it.’
“ ‘Why, sure,’ Lafleur tell him.
“ ‘Permanent,’ Mr. Caleb say. ‘Unannounced.’
“But still, you see, we didn’t have no notion he was serious.
“He ask Lafleur was there someplace to go, to stay a whiles. Lafleur mention this white folks’ boardinghouse over near where his sister live at. Mr. Caleb wroten it down on a piece of paper and fold it careful and left. We didn’t think a thing more about it. Come morning he arrive for breakfast, sometime he would do that. Eat in Mr. Daniel’s kitchen. ‘Fix me a lot now, Sulie,’ he say. ‘Can’t travel far on an empty stomach.’ Well, I thought he meant travel to town. I fix him hotcakes. I set out his breakfast and when he had done finished he thank me politely and left. I never
did see him again.”
She considered her fingernails, ridged and yellowed like old piano keys.
“Could I have that boardinghouse address?” Eli asked her.
“Yes, why surely,” she said, and she gave it to him, slowly and clearly, having saved it up on purpose all these years, and he wrote it in his notebook. Then she faded off, so that Eli thought she had forgotten him. He rose with care and tiptoed to the attic steps. He had already dipped one ankle into the coolness below when she called him. “Mr. Whoever-you-are!”
“Ma’am?”
“When you tell how you found him,” she said, “make certain you put in that Sulie known the answer all along.”
* * *
So now he had an address, but it was sixty-one years old. He knew he couldn’t expect too much. He caught a plane to New Orleans that night. He took a cab to where a boardinghouse had stood in the spring of 1912. All he saw was a supermarket, lit inside with ghostly blue night lights, hulking on an asphalt parking lot.
“I reckon there’s no sense hanging around,” he told the cab driver.
Eli registered at a small hotel from which immediately, despite the hour, he called every Peck in the telephone book. No one had an ancestor named Caleb. He went to bed and slept a sound, dreamless sleep. On the following day, he set out walking. He picked his way past suspicious-looking hidden courtyards and lacy balconies, secret fountains splashing, leprous scaly stucco, monstrous greenery and live oaks dripping beards of moss, through surprising pockets of light where the air seemed to lie like colored veils. In various echoing buildings, archives both official and unofficial, he wandered gloomily with his hands in his pockets peering at yellowed sheet music, clippings, menus, and sporting-house directories under glass, as well as cases full of dented trumpets and valve trombones that appeared to have come from the dime-store. In the evenings he attended nightclubs, where, wincing against the clatter of brass and drums, he sidled between the tables to stare at the curling photographs on the walls and the programs once handed out during Fourth of July celebrations. There was no Caleb Peck. There was never that stiff, old-fashioned white man’s face or Panama hat.