Feast of All Saints Read Online Free PDF

spied a nice dark filthy place in which to commit mortal sin.
    He had a pint in no time and seated himself at a wooden table that threatened to collapse, the chair dark with grease, and poured himself a glass. Irishmen were raging at the bar, and the black laborers kept apart. But he had trouble understanding what the Irish raged against, and no trouble whatsoever shutting them out. He tried to understand what had happened to Marcel, and more than that, this confusing tangle of thought which was causing him pain.
    It had begun with occasional absences, Marcel’s daydreaming in class. And then Richard could hear in the too carefully constructed explanations that Marcel was merely implying his mother had kept him home, and soon Monsieur De Latte realized this as well. Marcel refused to tell a lie. Very soon he refused to do almost anything, his vague and fragmented murmurings only calculated to bring down the teacher’s wrath.
    And then there was the death of old Jean Jacques, the carpenter, when Marcel stole wine from his mother’s cabinet and got drunk so they found him sick in the morning at the cistern. Marcel’s mother was in tears; Richard held his hand while he retched. And then slumping against the steps, Marcel merely murmured, “I am a criminal, give up on me,” which thereafter became a slogan. That all this had to do with Jean Jacques seemed clear, but even this was a mystery. A fine cabinetmaker he had been, an old mulatto from Saint-Domingue who’d kept a shop ever since they could remember, but hardly a man to incur the devotion of an educated boy like Marcel.
    Even Anna Bella Monroe, the dearest of Marcel’s childhood friends, could not account for the changes in him. He had always come to her in the past, but she shook her head now, with a desperate click of the tongue, to hear of his vagrant wanderings. And these things did not stop with the passing of grief, but went on.
    But Marcel at home could easily read the works he neglected in school, translate verses which confounded others, and whenever heand Richard exchanged their poems, Richard knew without pain that Marcel’s were incomparably the best. They had a sharp vitality within the honored forms that made Richard’s flat and stilted by comparison. It seemed at times that Marcel, once so perfect and now so wildly bound to destroy himself, was cursed with the ability to succeed at whatever he chose.
    Richard leaned his head against the wall of this dingy place feeling delightfully anonymous in his misery, eyes lowered against the smoke that hovered in the motionless air, and felt the whiskey burn his chest.
    His way had always been one way, and that was aiming for excellence through constant striving. He knew nothing else. It had been bred into him not only by Rudolphe, but by his grandpère, Jean Baptiste’s only son, whose example was the prevailing spirit of the home now, the warm flame that illuminated the ancient portrait on the parlor wall.
    Richard had seen Grandpère’s guns crossed beneath that picture all his life, proud symbol of the War of 1812 when Grandpère had fought with the Light Colored Battalion under Andy Jackson to save New Orleans from the British. And men of color had proved themselves loyal citizens of the new American state. He’d been decorated, and had come home to buy with Jean Baptiste’s savings a failing undertaker’s shop from a white man, shutting down the old tavern in the Tchoupitoulas Road in which Jean Baptiste had made his fortune. And nursing the old man in his dotage, Grandpère had made a name in this business from which he had only retired in recent years when arthritis so crippled his hands that he no longer cared to keep the books himself, or tend to the dead. Yet even now he read the papers daily, in French and English, and spent the afternoons, hands warmed even in summer over the coal stove, writing painstaking letters to the Congress on the subject of the colored veterans, their pensions, their