The Sound of Building Coffins Read online

  Remembering: A message to deliver.

  “Un petit,” Malvina says to her sister, her daughter by default and by proxy. “It’s time for you to go home now. Someone been waitin’ on you. Someone you been waitin’ on, too.” She considers before adding: “And someone waitin’ on me, too.” There is joy in the realization.

  “Time for us to get on now.” She feels Frances tremble in her arms, just as she’d trembled in her arms as a small child so many years ago. Frightened of the dark, of things unknown. “Shhhh,” coos Malvina. “None of that, now. I’ll be with you shortly. That’s a promise, and one I intend to keep.”

  A whisper in return:

  “Chanson tanpri, Mer?”

  Malvina holds Frances ever tighter, stroking her sister’s hair as she sings:

  Mo pap li couri la riviere,

  Mo maman li couri peche crab

  Dodo, mo fille, crab dans calalou

  Dodo, mo fille, crab dans calalou

  Chapter fifty-two

  Clippings

  March 15, 1906--New Orleans Item—page 9, column3:

  VOODOO QUEEN MALVINA LATOUR DEAD AT AGE 100

  Body remained undiscovered in Treme neighborhood for 10 days, says coroner

  THE BODY of famed Voodoo Queen Malvina Latour was discovered in her Sixth Ward home on Monday. Badly decomposed, the Orleans Parish Coroner estimated that it remained undiscovered for up to ten days.

  At 100 years of age, Miss Latour had become reclusive during the latter half of her life due to failing health. Malvina Latour had gained mild fame as the successor to the better known and more flamboyant Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, Marie Laveau. Miss Latour was the last of the great Voodoo Queens, an institution which has contributed significantly to the city’s tourism trade.

  Miss Latour died with no surviving kin, her last living relation being a sister, Frances Latour, who died 53 years previously during the great yellow fever epidemic of 1853.

  Services for Malvina Latour were carried out on Wednesday by Father Tony McFee, a Catholic priest, before a small group of neighbors and tourists at the Girod Street Potter’s Field. A light brunch was served afterwards featuring regional performers who donned Mardi Gras masks, danced with snakes, and played drums to commemorate the passing of this celebrated regional character.

  *

  March 28, 1906—New Orleans Item—page 8, column 4:

  STRIKES MOTHER WITH PITCHER

  Thinking that he was being drugged by his mother, Charles Bolden, a negro, living at 2302 First street, jumped out of bed yesterday afternoon while in a state of dementia and struck her over the head with a water pitcher.

  Bolden, who is a musician, has been sick for some time. His mother was by his bedside yesterday afternoon giving him what succor she could when suddenly his mind was carried away with the belief that she was administering some deadly drug to him. Grabbing the water pitcher, he broke it over his mother’s head, inflicting a scalp wound, which was pronounced not serious.

  Chapter fifty-three

  The Sound of Building Coffins

  In all his years on this earth, Marcus Nobody Special could not remember a more beautiful sunrise.

  Deep orange clouds hung low in a frozen swirl to the east, with elaborate spatters flung overhead like wisps of disembodied flame, the sky itself bruised and yellow in streaks as if from the brush of a brilliant madman. The swirl of clouds did not look natural to Marcus, or perhaps looked too natural.

  As natural as the hammer of God?

  He pondered the question mightily and continued to do so until a sudden tug at his fishing line gave him a start. Getting jumpy in my old age, he thought.

  “Trouble comin’,” he said aloud.

  Marcus was suddenly aware of the sound of hammering, relentless and orderly as it echoed off the water from both sides of the river, combining into an uneasy rhythm, somehow familiar—

  Bap. Bap-bap. Buh-bap, bap, buh-bap.

  —and that rhythm caused his heart to sink. He knew it was only the sound of concerned fathers and husbands nailing boards over glass windowpanes, but to his tormented imagination it was the sound of building coffins.

  He fixed his gaze purposefully on the salient clouds, paying no mind to the gentle but urgent activity at the other end of his fishing line. Just then, a wind began. The speed and force of it was mild like a breeze, but there was a heavy firmness to it, a certain change in atmosphere heralded by it, a change in the air itself associated with it. An electricity. A static warmth. It felt good on his cheek, like a mother’s caress.

  “Trouble comin’. Lord, Lord.”

  Time to move on. He had to get back to the potter’s field and make certain preparations. The tug at his line urged him to stay; just for a little while, just long enough to reel it in and have a look, check to see if it was his fish. After all these years he knew the possibility was slight. But there was still the possibility.

  He pulled a small knife from his hip pocket and cut the line. “Sorry, son, if that’s you. Gotta go tend yer ma now. Gotta make sure she stay put if the water come.” A pause and a sniff. “Can’t risk losing you both.” The fish dived down deep with Marcus’ hook still in its mouth, the cut line trailing behind it like an endless tail.

  When Marcus was a young man, before the War of the States, he’d seen his first flood in the Parish. The dead had risen that time—he among them—and for once the resurrection of water had been a blessing, not a curse. This time there would be no blessing. Today and tomorrow the dead must stay down. If not all, then at least one. He must tend to Maria’s grave, the mother of his only child. He must be there for her as she had been for him.

  Marcus Nobody Special walked as briskly as his old legs would carry him towards the cemetery, his head hung low with worry. The storm was coming up fast with the rising sun, the wind gaining enough force that he nearly took a tumble once or twice along the way. By tomorrow afternoon, he reckoned, this city might be a different place altogether. By tomorrow evening, he reckoned, this place might be gone.

  When he reached the cemetery’s lip he tipped his head to take one last glance at the sky. The strange turnings of his mind had melted the clouds into a screaming mouth—but no scream issued from its center, just the gentle hum of steady wind from all around.

  And the sound of hammering.

  *

  Before the troubles, Malaria Morningstar had prided herself on being an early riser. Before the troubles, she’d witnessed each and every sunrise, had watched every morning fog lift with the rising sun. These were not things she missed now that she had discovered the drink.

  The drink had turned her routine on its head—late to bed, late to rise. But also, the drink had protected her from the treacherous workings of her own mind. So much had been lost in one week, her family now removed from her completely. It was just too much.

  Nearly noon, she stepped outside to discover a thick gray sky that retained a dim swath of orange; a gentle reminder of past sunrises, of who she once was. The same sky that had been wild and beautiful in the eyes of Marcus Nobody Special was unremarkable to her own—the inoffensive hue of an old dirty peach. What she did find remarkable was that the fog had remained kissing swamp so late in the morning, silently and stubbornly unlifted. The air was warm and moist against her skin, but she felt a dry chill. There’d been a time not long ago that she’d wished for a morning like this to come along; a morning that would begin a series of new and different mornings, no morning ever again the same—and she’d imagined that such a morning would be marked by unlifted fog. She shook the thought from her mind and went back inside.

  The home she’d loved all her life had acquired new weight in recent days that now pressed down hard upon her soul, and so she found herself frequently leaving early for work; parking herself downstairs at the Eagle Saloon for long afternoons, sipping short glasses of rye till five o’clock rolled around and her shift upstairs at Odd Fellows began.

  Today would be no different. S
he methodically folded and placed her work clothes in a canvas sack—short red dress, black high heels, a pair of six dollar stockings (one of nine pairs left behind at the Arlington House by Diphtheria)—-then put on her mud-walking boots and left for the district, trudging through muck and unlifted fog, focused only on the thought of how wonderful the touch of a glass to her lips would feel once inside the bar.

  She did not make note of static wind that scattered and swept away settled fog behind her as she walked, a wind that would soon erase everything she had ever known.

  Chapter fifty-four

  Keep My Baby Down

  It was too late for Marcus to reinforce the brickwork covering Maria’s grave. The mortar of it had long since crumbled in places, many bricks loosened by time and a few missing altogether. He had some supplies stored in the small caretaker’s shack at the cemetery’s edge, but there would be no time for mortar to dry and take hold—large raindrops had already begun to slap the earth at a steep angle.

  The wind whipped ferociously and the rain intensified in kind. A pecan tree thirty yards off creaked against a howling gust, shedding pecans that shot like bullets through the air alongside sheets of horizontal rain that stung Marcus’ neck like wasps. He lowered to his knees but didn’t fall. Stone and wooden markers toppled or flew from graves and water began to collect in animated puddles that indicated where the ground lay lowest. Marcus placed his hands upon the hard red clay above Maria, kissed the brick nearest where her head would be. “Stay down, baby,” he whispered.

  There was not much that he could do, but he could not do nothing. Crouching low, he hurried to the caretaker’s shack, the wind ushering him along with such power that his legs barely kept up with his body. Relative calm inside was short-lived, as the shack’s lone window, blurry and shaking from pounding rain, suddenly exploded—a two-foot plywood crucifix crashing through and spraying Marcus with hard water and shards of glass. Quickly regaining his bearings, Marcus grabbed the can of white paint he’d come for and pushed through the door once more, walking into and against the direct force of the storm.

  Returning to her grave he noted a few bricks had already broken free and tumbled away, but the water had not yet risen to cover her. Kneeling with the can between his legs, he pulled a small knife from his hip pocket, the same one he’d used to cut the fishing line. As he pried open the lid the knife flew from his grip.

  He plunged his naked hand into the thick white paint, then withdrew it to smear a rough diagram over the bricks. The diagram was a veve, a Vodou symbol representing Erzulie Dantor, the spirit designated by Jesus Legba as protector from deadly storms. Upon its completion the paint can slipped free of him, flying over his head and streaking his face with white as it passed to join the knife.

  Ten yards to his left was another grave, a newer grave, one with no bricks protecting its occupant from unwelcome resurrection. The marker was a rectangle of plain concrete:

  Malvina Latour

  1806-1906

  Sister. Daughter. Mother to Many

  Marcus leaned his hands into the mud above the mambo’s heart, let his soul feel all the rage he’d held in through the years. Shouted above the din of wind and rain:

  “You listen to me, old woman. You done took my nose, you took my son, you made my life a shambles and done got even with me a hunnert times over. All that, and I never cursed your name, never bothered you not-one-damn-time, never sought revenge when I coulda done plenty, never spoke ill to or about you and never asked you fer nothin’. Well, I’m asking you this one time for just one thing, so listen up and listen good. Keep my baby down in this comin’ flood. Hear me now, old woman. You do this thing and we’re even. You don’t and I’ll curse yer name to the heavens, God as my witness, till my dyin’ breath and after. Keep my baby down. She my baby but she your kin by blood, so do right by her. I already lost my son’s body to the water—ain’t found him yet and might never do—but not her, oh no, not her. I won’t have it, you hear? Not to the water, not her. Keep my baby down. I’m beggin’ you to please keep her down, keep her down, keep her down….”

  The grave next to Maria’s, slightly lower and without bricks, was already topped with a half-inch sheen of moving water. Its stone, freshly slanted from push of wind, stated simply:

  Frances Latour

  1818-1853

  Beloved Mother to Maria

  Chapter fifty-five

  How Long to Return?

  By twenty past five Malaria was stone drunk, the storm outside humming smoothly like a seashell in her ears.

  “C’mon, papa. I’m good fer it,” she said with a flutter of lashes to the bartender who’d cut her off, a dapper fellow known to regular patrons of the Eagle Saloon as Gary the Gent. “Y’know I’m good fer it, Gary.”

  “Yeah, you good, baby. But no cash, no flash. Can’t go runnin’ this tab straight up to the moon, now.”

  “Hell, Gary, you ain’t no gent.”

  “You know you love me, baby,” he laughed. “All wounds heal with time, as they say.”

  A strong gust slammed something heavy against the side of the building.

  “Damn,” flinched Gary. “Don’t sound like this shit anywhere near ta passin’.”

  Malaria wrinkled her nose nervously. “Guess I should get on up for my shift.” A flash of perfect teeth. “See you in ten hours, baby.”

  “Knock ’em dead, sweetheart. Knock ’em right on out.”

  “You know it.” Malaria blew him a kiss as she staggered towards the stairs, offering a drunken ass-wiggle to make up for not having tipped. Gary knew about Malaria’s hard luck this past week and so never-minded the stiff, but he did appreciate the show.

  “Damn, baby,” he said with a grin. She smiled at the compliment.

  At the top of the stairs she gave Black Benny a touch on the shoulder and a peck on the cheek. “What’s shakin’, sugar bear?”

  Benny grunted. “What’s shakin’ is you been downstairs all day gettin’ yerself shitcanned and still can’t help but drag yer ass in late as usual.”

  “Oh pooh,” she deflected with a pout, as she kept on towards the bar. Black Benny grunted once more before directing a worried eye to the pounding of water against glass.

  Buddy’s band was up on the platform, sans Buddy, stomping out a lowdown gutbucket gospel blues called “Don’t Nobody Go Away” for a sparse crowd of degenerates and a scattering of whores that played cards and sucked back shots, defiantly hooting like hyenas each time the storm crescendoed menacingly outside with a slam or a bang or a wail.

  Buddy had tried a few other horns since losing his old one, but when he couldn’t make any of them sing or shout the way he liked he lost heart and quit playing altogether. Sitting at the bar now with an early drunk on, Buddy winced into his glass at the noise made by some kid called Tig, his replacement, chosen seemingly at random from a legion of wanna-bees by that lousy turncoat bastard Frankie Dusen. Frankie had been Buddy’s longtime trombone player, a good old pal and partner for all those years, but had taken over the band a mite enthusiastically in Buddy’s opinion. Almost like he’d been hoping for the chance.

  “Step it up, dammit!” Buddy bellowed from the bar. “I learned y’all better ’n that. Keep it poppin’. This ain’t no fuckin’ funeral.”

  Frankie grudgingly obliged, stomping out a quicker rhythm till the band caught up.

  Buddy spotted Malaria from the corner of his eye, turned to give her a timid smile and wave. She smiled back.

  Malaria smiled back because she didn’t know Buddy had killed her sister. Couldn’t conceive of it. The cops hadn’t done much, their investigation amounting to a shrug of shoulders over another dead whore killed, presumably, by another rogue sailor on shore leave. These things happened. There’d been rumors about Buddy’s involvement, but Diphtheria’s best friend Hattie Covington had supplied his alibi—telling the cops he’d been busy fucking her six ways from Sunday on the night in question. That was enough for the cops and enough for Malari
a, too. No way Hattie would tell tales out of school about the murder of her very best friend. Even Buddy wasn’t that charming, or so she believed.

  Malaria shoved herself quickly behind the bar to make change and pick up her tray. “Refill, Buddy?” she sang, noting his empty glass. But he didn’t hear her, his eyes staring hard toward the line of windows that overlooked Perdido Street. Following his gaze, she determined the distraction.

  There sat the kid. That lowdown dirty scoundrel brat, Jim Jam Jump, soaked to the bone and sitting at a table with Buddy’s old cornet in his lap, wiping off stormwater with a dirty cloth, grinning defiantly and directly into the line of Buddy’s glare.

  “I never consented to the sale of that horn, kid,” Buddy said, loud enough to turn most heads in the joint.

  Black Benny readied for trouble, focusing on the path of electricity that crackled between the two.

  “Ah, g’wan, ya big sore sport. Took my money without complaint if I recall. Ain’t my fault you done spent it up already on some whore. Higgle biggle wutch and such.” Jim licked the cornet’s mouthpiece like a lollipop, the ugly intimacy giving Buddy cause to shudder as he turned his face back towards the band. Downed the rest of his glass in a gulp.