The Value Of Rain (16 page)

But the old woman said nothing, letting her smoke fill the void of silence and space between us.

“You ain’t figured it out yet?” she asked after a time.

“No, I…,” I raised my hands and shrugged in defeat. “I’m sorry. She never told us anything about the family. I was hoping you could help me.”

“Not surprising.” She bit down on the pipe, almost as if gnawing on the stem, and splashed out a little cloud of smoke on each forward thrust of the rocker.

I was entranced by this for a moment. “She claimed to be descended from southern aristocracy,” I informed her.

The woman grunted and waved her hand dismissively. “Her mouth is filled with nothing but lies and accusations, young ‘un. ‘Course, you probably know that already or you wouldn’t be here, would you?’

I smiled, but said nothing.

“Fact is, the family was mouse poor. Never had nothing in their whole lives other than the fact that their skin was lighter than the rest of ours.” Her eyes challenged me suddenly as I looked up at her from the step. She was waiting for my reaction, but my brain didn’t process what she was telling me and I allowed my gaze to fall to the step in front of me so she would explain.

“I’m your mother’s aunt; your great aunt. Your grandmother’s maiden name was Montmarre, born of Claire Montmarre, a slave hand on one of the sugar plantations and kept for the sexual escapades of her master and his sons,” she said.

“Charlotte came looking some years back but couldn’t partake of having nigger blood in her veins and called me a lying nigger bitch and ran out of here.”

I was stunned. “But how?” I asked.

“Marie could have passed for white, and did. As soon as she was old enough, she ran off to New Orleans, found her a white man named du Clerque, and made like the rest of us never existed. Might have been her who put them notions into your mama’s head.”

“So I’m black, or part black?”

She looked at me. “You were, once.”

I burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it. The thought of that knowledge slapping Charlotte across the face left me in tears. The old woman, Rose, chuckled throatily, as if it hadn’t happened in so many years that the phlegm was making a mad dash for escape. Soon we were both in tears, her banging on the armrest of her rocking chair me pounding on the steps.

Manual moved up beside me and smiled at my fleeting contentment. Rose studied him through her laughter and wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress as she sobered.

My laughter stopped when I noted that her eyes were not as quite as humorous as before. It seemed our conversation wasn’t finished.

“Now, what’s your problem?” She asked me, a shrewd eye inspecting every crevice of my posture.

“I’m gay.”

She scanned Manuel for a moment and looked at me again, her gaze somewhat softer this time. “I guess she wouldn’t partake of that too much either,” she said.

I said nothing, my eyes falling to the front of her porch, littering her steps.

She watched as I got up and Manuel put his hand on my back to guide me back to the hydroplane.

“Young ‘un.”

I turned to look at her.

“Don’t worry none. Charlotte’s just like her mama. Nobody was ever good enough for her except her. She spent so much time trying to hide who she was, that she never really lived at all. Don’t you make that mistake too.”

I escaped New Orleans much, much sooner than I had expected and left my promise to Manuel unsworn. But I didn’t return to Potsham with that secret, not yet. I couldn’t. Manuel had opened me up to too much vulnerability; left me too susceptible to the possibility of abandoning my quest for revenge and living in his fairytale dream.

Charlotte had to pay. How could I simply walk away from what she’d done and leave her without any punishment at all? I couldn’t. So, trying to rid myself of Manuel’s charms I used the money Henry had left me and fucked my way through the Midwest; hop scotching from one gay community to another until I fully tired of the scenes of debauchery and returned to the tidal marshes of Caufield’s Connecticut house two years later.

His house was a fine white frame of Puritanism from the 18th century, surrounded by sea grass and cropped in by the dunes that splashed up two hundred feet from the front door. If you wanted an uninterrupted view of the Sound, you had to climb to the uppermost deck of the house and witness it’s majesty from afar, which I did often in the three months I was there.

When the sky got low and the open space of the ocean got small and grey, I would stand on the widow’s walk with my back pressed to the windows and face the sea, the incoming wall of rain calling out to me as in rushed in to shore.

I knew I would not stay long. My days were a derelict addiction to my planned vengeance and my nights a rattling spree through the dry leaves of my past, and it drove Caufield crazy. Especially after I told him about New Orleans.

“I expected you to be touring the world once you retired,” I told him one morning as we walked the tide.

Caufield stopped to rake a quahog from the mud for our supper. “For what?” he asked me. “There’s no escaping yourself, Charles.” He looked up at me. “Yes, true, there’s all that beauty in the world, but eventually the vacation is over and you have to come home and look at yourself in that dirty old worn out mirror.”

“Personally,” he said as he looked down to pull the clam loose from the rake, “I’ve seen enough of humanities suffering. It’s my time now.”

“That sounds kind of selfish,” I told him as we resumed our walk.

“Does it? Any more than returning after all this time with the same stupid delusions of revenge?”

“It’s not a delusion Caufield. I want to look at Charlotte across a room full of people and watch her fall when I spill out her heritage. I want to smell her fear when she’s dying. I want to pay her back for everything she’s ever done to me, including my name.”

He squatted for another quahog but stopped and looked out over the receding waves with a weighted sigh. “You’re not a killer Charles. You never were. If I had even remotely thought that I wouldn’t have helped you out of there.”

“You would have left me there, despite the fact that what I told you was true?”

“Yes.”

I ran a hand through my hair and drew a breath. “What are you saying Caufield?”

His voice was low and resigned. “Except for Manuel, you wasted your trip to New Orleans, Charles. It wasn’t her racial heredity, I’m sure of that. You wouldn’t be able to convince anyone of that anyway, why would she worry about it? Something else is behind her, Charles.”

“What?” I was frozen by the thought that he might be right.

He shrugged and started walking back toward the house. “Only Charlotte would know that.”

“I don’t believe you!” I called out to his back.

He shrugged his whole body and kept walking; apparently my opinion was my problem.

“God damn you too, Caufield. God damn you too!”

In a rage I flung my quahog rake into the waves and watched it disappear without a bit of satisfaction.

I was weary of this. Like all else in my life I had made an expectation that Caufield’s knowledge of the causes of my narrow focus would allow us conversation where neither of us had to fight for advantage. I had made an assumption that we could just pluck up our old friendship and make no demands on each other. What I got instead was a return of the confusion and pain I had abandoned when I buried Henry.

“Fuck.” I screamed aloud. “Fuuuck!”

He picked up the same theme when we sat down to dinner that night, advising me that I had put myself in a box and let Charlotte seal it shut. He didn’t deny my sexuality but he didn’t believe I had really lived it either, never once stepping into the mires and peaks of a real relationship, as he said.

“You forget Snow,” I told him.

He shook his head. “No, Snow was an extension of Robert. A pain you couldn’t heal.”

“Manuel,” I countered, already feeling defeat fall on my shoulders.

He looked at me directly. “Nope. You ran away from him just as you’re about to run away from me.”

Anger and denial slid across my chest, would he never stop this relentless bombardment of my emotions?

“Tell me about the dream you had last night,” he said as he ripped a piece of bread from the French loaf he had bought earlier in the day. “I heard you thrashing,” he replied to my expression.

The anger was weakening, that had to be what it was that made me want to beg him to understand my inner rage; to plead with him to drop his façade of contempt and indifference.

“Why are you doing this to me, Caufield?”

“Because that’s my goddamn purpose in life!” he stood, banging his fist and upsetting the table.

I was too shocked to respond.

“You’ve got your entire life ahead of you still but you do nothing but make asinine plans that you think might somehow change your past. They won’t change shit; no matter what you do you’re still going to be that same broken little boy if you don’t pull your head out of your ass first.”

He sat back down; seeming surprised at himself, pulled his chair in and softened his features. “I see what Manuel saw. What everyone sees except you. You want to hate but your hate is really pain; pain and the fear that it could all happen again. Wasn’t that the dream you had?” he asked me.

I nodded, and without looking at him attempted to explain the verge of bubbling insanity my dream entailed; how it was lurid in despondency.

I failed. The passion could not be recounted in words; the demons that had tormented me had left only the sweat stained contours of my body on the sheets. There was a betrayal, a massive sense of loss, and a cloud of self pity so huge that had I let the tears escape it would have been a flood, but I could not readily express any of it.

“What was it?” I asked Caufield, awash in that same feeling of utter desolation.

“Death,” he answered his face open and honest.

I sat staring at him.

“The moment of decision has come and gone, Charles. You’ve made it, but you haven’t consciously acknowledged it, in spite of what you’ve told yourself. I think the dream is you weeping for yourself while you can still pity your own loss.”

“You think I’m suicidal?”

“Not at all.” He looked down at his bowl; still half full of uneaten quahogs. “I think the wrong side is winning in the battle that’s going on inside of you. It’s killing all that’s beautiful about you.”

He looked up at me suddenly and made me realize just how badly he wanted me to free myself from Charlotte’s fetters. “You’re welcome to stay the night but I’d like you to leave in the morning. I can’t watch you do that to yourself.” He shook his head and got up from the table.

“I’m sorry, Caufield.”

He nodded reluctantly and left the room, leaving his sad fury behind.

*****

Sleep was a long time in coming that night. Caufield was right. I had already made my decision, I just hadn’t figured out how to tell him. In spite of his hospitality, in spite of his open warmth and constant reassurance of other possibilities, I had chosen vengeance.

I wanted to kill Charlotte slowly, with words, since they were her most potent weapon. The slow blunt trauma of ghost laden dialogue gouging a flyspeck of flesh from her skull; peeling back hair, skin and meat until every nerve was exposed and I could strum across them at my leisure. It was a fair repayment for the humiliation and degradation I had suffered at the hands of her debtors at Sa
nctuary and the Birch Building.

And if, as Caufield claimed, the death of all beauty within me had occurred, then that was her fault too. It could only be added on to the enormous tally I held against her.

I got up from my bed and went out on the walk to look out across the moonlit sea. I saw it clearly. I would watch Charlotte crumble to the ground under the cudgel of my words, her brittle frame melting under the weight and culpability of the deaths she was responsible for. And if, since I had to assume that Caufield was right, that her heritage was not the tragedy of New Orleans, then I would have to sit back and watch her until I found the true reason. No matter how long that took. And that’s just what I planned to do.