City of Refuge Read Online Free PDF Page B

they carry the casket along that pavement one halting step at a time, slowly at first, guided by the bass drum, with the trumpets wailing out the melody and the clarinets answering in liquid streamers of descant, and then, at thesignal, the drum tattoo and, like Christmas-tree lights switched on, the mourners jump and the street explodes in sliding, turning, prancing, strutting steps, men and women alone or in fleeting partnership, and maybe you are there with a bandanna wrapped around your head as you pull up the cuffs of your pants to execute a particularly intricate set of crisscross steps up on the sidewalk, up on the porch, up on the light pole, up on the car, and that song and that sound and that rhythm seeps into everyone’s knowledge of that street, and those houses, and of life and death and space and time itself.
    And in September it’s school and in October it’s the Jolly Bunch anniversary and November it’s Thanksgiving and the Fairgrounds open and December it’s Christmas and January it’s getting ready for Mardi Gras and February it’s parades and Mardi Gras, and in March you catch your breath, and then it’s St. Joseph’s Day and then Jazz Fest and then school-letting-out time and then it is the hot months and things get slower and thicker and oppressively hot, and usually in August or September you will have to deal with one or two storms.
     
    Nobody in the Williams family had ever evacuated for a hurricane.
    On Thursday evening Lucy leaned against the kitchen counter at SJ’s house, a half-finished can of cold Colt 45 in her hand, regarding the weatherman on the TV with antagonism. Across the room, SJ shook cornmeal from a bag onto three folded paper towels; on the stove oil was heating in a skillet, and in the sink a one-pound plastic bag of chicken tenders slumped against itself. Between the two windows over the sink hung a small crucifix, supporting a dry and faded bow of palm frond still left up from Palm Sunday.
    “That motherfucker better stay in Florida,” Lucy said, draining the can. “I’m supposed to start working over at the Hair Stop.” She set the can down on the counter. “Jaynell tell me I can help her with the braiding.”
    “When she told you that?” SJ said. “You didn’t tell me.”
    “Last week. She called and asked could I come and help her out.”
    “Is she still doing the dinners?”
    “Yeah, but that don’t pay nothing.”
    Lucy, like many others, pieced together a living for herself by keeping expenses low and weaving thin filaments of income into a web that could support her even when one or two of those filaments dropped out. On the first of each month she got a regular disability check from Social Security. She had worked for her friend Jaynell when Jaynell was serving plate suppers at her shotgun on Dorgenois, and she worked washing and folding at the Spin-N-Clean on Law Street, and she had worked in the booth at the parking lot all the way on Elysian Fields by the river until they put her on overnight the same week one of the other cashiers got held up twice. She waited tables for a year at the Coffee Pot in the French Quarter, and she had been a chambermaid at the Maison de Ville but had gotten fired for drinking on the job, just one little beer. She didn’t have to pay rent because they owned the house, and her income was too low for taxes and Medicaid paid for the medications that SJ insisted she get and which she never took.
    She walked to the refrigerator to get another beer, stopping to look at the photos attached to the door with magnets. Two different studio portraits of her niece Camille in graduation robes—one from high school and one from North Carolina State. Camille’s senior prom picture with the corsage on her wrist next to that boy who got killed; one of Wesley from three or four years earlier in a football uniform, kneeling on one knee and holding a football upright on the other, looking proudly at the camera; a sepia-toned photo of