Feast of All Saints Read Online Free PDF Page A

toward her! Richard turned, darting through the stagnant stream of mules and wagons until he was rushing fast along the Place d’Armes, headed back to school the way he’d come.
    But it pounded in his head with every step: this is my fault, this is all my fault. I should have kept it till the right time. This is my fault.
II
    T HE RIVERFRONT streets were a quagmire that Richard detested, and the fact that he had to pass through them to return to an infuriatedschoolmaster weighed on him like the noonday sun. Already distraught, he stopped in the middle of one of these squalid alleys, hung with laundry and echoing with the harsh German and Irish voices, and considered for the first time in his life going into a public house and getting totally drunk.
    That he could get away with it, he had no doubt. He had long ago outgrown his father, and his grandfather, a wizened man who had been taller in his youth. But on the wall of the parlor at home was a portrait of his great-grandfather Jean Baptiste, a mulatto slave freed in the days before the Spanish took the colony of Louisiana from the French in 1769, and on his free papers, tucked in a mahogany
secrétaire
with other treasured records, Jean Baptiste was described as “a mulatto, servant to Lermontant, known also as ‘the titan’ on account of his uncommon height being full seven feet.”
    His portrait showed broad African features, more drawn than painted, the stilted landscape behind him darkening and cracking with age so that soon the few distinct traces of river and cloud would disappear and only Jean Baptiste’s brown face would remain, with the same gently slanting eyes that marked Richard’s face and a flaking white ruff at his throat.
    It was a precious thing to everyone, his industry having founded the family, his legend dominating its long climb. But Richard never looked at him of late without dreading that one morning, he would stand before the beveled mirror of his armoire at last unable to see his own face reflected there because he had gained the final inches to match Jean Baptiste’s height. Jean Baptiste’s mother, the African woman, Zanzi, had been a towering figure also. And after all, though Richard had not inherited Jean Baptiste’s broad nose or African mouth, he alone had his great-grandfather’s slanting eyes.
    And being one of those big velvet-voiced creatures who can quiet a screaming infant with a bare touch to the belly and a rumbling song, or reassemble silently the scattered works of a pocket watch and hand it back to you ticking, a faint smile on his lips, Richard dreaded becoming the local giant.
    But he could use his height well enough to get into the most dismal of waterfront drinking places where the free Negroes drank along with everyone else. And a wild anger drove him to it now, a passionate fear for Marcel, a dread of Monsieur De Latte, and
something…something else
, a tangle of thoughts and pain which he could not fully examine.
    He turned around in the street and went toward the levee. Monsieur De Latte was surely well into the day’s lessons. Certainly he wasn’t waiting for Richard. And if there was any one who was never suspected of anything, it was Richard. Everyone knew his father theformidable Monsieur Rudolphe Lermontant, had long ago measured the route from his home to the school with his pocket watch and that he allowed his son no more than five minutes variance coming and going for rainy weather. But the thought of this trust was hardly a comfort. Richard was a boy at heart, and never questioned authority, though he was often looking down on its embodiment, and deceit for its own sake had no savor.
    The mere thought of his father, looming suddenly amid these vague considerations made his head ache. Richard knew well what Rudolphe would say when Marcel’s latest disgrace was discovered. And the whole dreadful mess was too much suddenly, as he turned along the market (though much below where he had left Marcel), and