Feast of All Saints Read Online Free PDF Page B

land grants, their rights. He remembered birthdays, visited widows and chatted from time to time with other old men in the parlor.
    And on long winter evenings, when the family lingered at table, the children given brandy in crystal glasses, he would leave the lovely warmth at the stroke of nine always, wrapping his cravat around his neck, and begin his long walk to say his rosary. Beads clutched in his right pocket, he wound slowly through familiar streets, never failing to nod at this neighbor at her window, or that man passing, collar up against the wind, though his lips moved only with his prayers. He ran the family investments, told the little ones history before they were old enough to go to school. And up before everyone at dawn, it was he who lit the fires and woke the slaves.
    His only son, Rudolphe, Richard’s father, a booming man who slammed doors if the soup was cold, had greatly expanded the business,buying a tombstone yard and fostering his young colored sculptors. He had long ago delegated the actual tending of the dead to his nephews Antoine and Pierre. And spent his time in the parlors with the mourners, seeing they had the best black to wear and nothing to worry them of future or finance till the dead were laid to rest. A bear with his family, he was gentle with the bereaved, thought them worthy of the only real patience he could muster. And over the door of the prosperous establishment in the Rue Royale hung the name of the white man who had freed the long dead Jean Baptiste: Lermontant.
    Richard raised his eyebrows listlessly over his whiskey glass, his vision pleasantly blurred, and noticed with a slight twist to his generous mouth that the glass was dirty. It had the fingerprints of others, and, if he was wont to speculate, the stench of others’ spit. Beyond the open door, the blue sky exploded over the market, and squinting, he bowed his head. He wondered for the first time in his life if Hell were not a filthy place, unpurified by fire, and quickly drank the whiskey down.
    The sweet aroma of damnation was enough. And then came the tension as before, the fear for Marcel which was compelling him to do this to himself. And that
something
, that
something else
, that morbid tangle of neglected thought, a needle suddenly in his brain. He wasn’t meant for this kind of felonious activity. That the Irishmen at the bar were all staggering drunk before noon amused him vaguely.
    He thought of how his father would shake him by the collar if he knew he had gone to this place. And that vaguely amused him too. His last spurt of height had apparently conferred on him an immunity from being beaten senseless. He was too big and too heavy to shove around. He smiled to himself and drank another glass.
    But he knew that he could not endure this long. He did not have Marcel’s capacity for it. Even if the entire Lermontant heritage had been swept away in one blast, Richard would always be the same. He was formed and obedient and possessed of a constant and incurable anxiety that made it impossible for him to remain in a room that was not straight, or to begin a job without finishing it, or to put down a book that he did not fully understand.
    But one thing saved him every day of his life, as he sprang from bed before the light, and only lay down when his clothes had been smoothed on their hooks in his armoire, and his lessons laid out flawless on the dining-room table. He knew somewhere in his heart of hearts that nothing could ever really be perfect, and that this tension which was his daily companion was never actually meant to end. Does that sound simple?
    He thought sometimes his father did not know it, or that his mother, Suzette, bustling back and forth from kitchen to supper table, her sleeves pinned back, her brow moist, really thought the day wouldcome when she might rest. But Richard understood in some wordless way it was the manner in which life was to be constantly lived, and so often he seemed possessed