Little Altars Everywhere

  Chauvin said, This is all beside the point. There is no legal ground on which to defer him. The boy would make a fine soldier.

  I said, Hold on, don’t we have any give-and-take in this thing?

  And Chauvin said, If we bend the rules for a boy like Vanderlick, we set a dangerous precedent in this parish.

  So Albert got put to a vote, and the boy was in uniform before his daddy’s cotton had grown another four inches.

  We weren’t escalating, though. It was just action over and above what had been taking place, is how they put it.

  It got to where I had to pour me a quick drink before every meeting, then wash out my mouth with Listerine. Then—I don’t know what it was, but I started waking up with the worst nightmares I’d had since Daddy died. I’d walk around the house, step out on the carport, try not to think about lighting a cigarette, pour myself a drink, try to read. Then the asthma would start up and I’d spend half the night sitting up in the E-Z Boy trying to keep my chest from closing up. You can breathe a little better if you’re leaning back in that chair instead of flat out on the bed.

  From where I sat, it seemed like we were talking two different wars. The one we were losing on the TV, and the one the Guv’ment said we were winning. But listen, I’m not a soldier. After that bowel thing, Daddy got me out of the Navy somehow. I didn’t even ask what kind of strings he pulled. I was just so glad to be back home. We had a big cookup in the yard and he never said word one to me about it. The man handed me a lot of shit in my life, but he never said a word to me about leaving the Navy. My people never have been peaceniks or what-have-you. If somebody invaded Garnet Parish, you better believe we’d whip some butt. We just don’t like the idea of traveling halfway around the world to fight when we got crops in the ground.

  Come to think of it, Daddy never put on a uniform himself. He always said, The fat gonna stay fat. They don’t need me to help them do it.

  Then don’t you know it, Lincoln Lloyd got called up. Chaney’s younger brother. Chaney’s been my right-hand-man since who laid the rail. Damn, Chaney’s daddy worked for mine when we wasn’t nothing but titty-babies. Lincoln was living down on Lower Levee Road with a sister of his who didn’t amount to much. Chaney and Willetta were the ones who got the boy to stay in school as long as he did. When you first met the boy, you thought he was slow because of his stutter he had. I thought it myself till I heard him talking to Chaney in the barn one day. Boy didn’t know I was around and there he was, talking clear as any child of mine, not one stutter spitting off that tongue.

  Later I asked Chaney about it and he said, I don’t know, Mister Big Shep, I think the boy just be scart of white people.

  Chaney and Willetta went up to the school one time to talk to an evaluator about Lincoln because of all the notes the teachers kept sending home. And this white evaluator and Chaney and Willetta and Lincoln himself sat up in that office, and the lady said, We have got to try and figure out whether to classify this boy as an idiot or a moron.

  Chaney tried to laugh when he told me this but I knew he was mad. I know Chaney. I’ve spent every one of my working days beside the man and they don’t come any better. He’s a man who keeps his own counsel, a man you can count on.

  Far as I’m concerned, Lincoln wasn’t a idiot or a moron neither. He just had trouble getting his words out. He worked for me in the fields since he was ten, and I can’t say I knew the boy good, but he rode Shet-land ponies with my four kids and I’d recognize that donkey laugh of his anywhere. Yeah, he dropped out of school, but he wasn’t as dumb as they thought. Lots of times people make the mistake of underestimating you on account of the way you talk. I’ve seen this in my own life. That stutter might of made him sound stupid, but it’s by a man’s eyes that you know his intelligence. And Lincoln Lloyd had some smart eyes. He was as good a worker as you could of asked for. Talked slow and worked fast. Little and wiry, but muscular like Chaney.

  I’d never known Chaney to ask a favor before. But one Sunday afternoon he came up to the house and asked for me. I put on my slippers and went out on the carport, and Vivi said, Chaney, let me get you a Coke.

  The two of us stood there and stared out at the rice. Chaney drank that whole Coke in silence. Then he said, Boss, I been with you since my daddy worked with Mister Baylor Senior and I ain’t never axed you for nothin.

  That’s right, I told him, you’ve pulled your load.

  Well, I gotta ax you for somethin now, he said.

  Chaney wrapped his arms around his chest, the way he does when he’s thinking. Rubbed his hand across his face and kept staring out at the fields.

  Mister Shep, don’t let them take Linc to the army, he said. He done got that stutter and he ain’t never been nowhere. Boy ain’t never even been as far as Mamou. He ain’t gonna make it through no war. I know it up in my joints. See can you do somethin for my baby brother, could you please sir, Mister Shep?

  He didn’t beg. Just handed me the Coke bottle and said, Thank you for the cold drink. I gotta get on back, or Willetta’ll be wonderin where I run off to.

  This is what I got to live with. I didn’t do a goddamn thing to keep Lincoln out of the draft. McNamara said the army was the best thing going for your disadvantaged Negro youth. The man stood up there with those glasses on and explained how they were going to give boys like Lincoln special classes to bring them up to par. Teach them skills so they could land jobs they’d never get without the army. Lincoln passed the entrance test, which I guess proved he wasn’t no moron. And ain’t nobody ever said a thing about the boy’s stutter getting in the way of him shooting a gun.

  I said to Chaney one day when he was working on the combine, Chaney, the army just might be that boy’s ticket out of here. Give him opportunities you ain’t never had.

  Chaney didn’t answer me, just kept on working. I stood there a full minute waiting for him to say something back, but he acted like I wasn’t even there.

  One day around in that time, I remember I went downtown to Weinstein’s Men’s Store and bought me a brand-new goddamn suit. The thing was brown with little flecks of green in it. Had the thing tailored and then wore it to the next draft board meeting. I thought: Your uptown crowd are not the only people in the world who can put a decent set of clothes on their backs.

  I was walking out the kitchen door and Vivi said, Oooh, Mister Walker, I’d fight a war over you.

  I was the first board member to show up at that particular meeting. Me and the draft clerk had to wait fifteen minutes for the others to get there. Well, we all get busy, I thought. But when the bastards waltzed in, they were all wearing madras slacks and topsiders and running on about their golf game. Every goddamn one of them had been out at the country club. You could smell it on them, that sun smell that comes from being outside without breaking a sweat.

  The orthodontist looked at me and said, Hey, Shep, sorry we’re late. Couldn’t take the office one more afternoon. You know how it is.

  Neal Chauvin looked at me and smiled. Said, New suit, Walker?

  Then Chauvin sat down in his sissy-ass alligator shirt, and we proceeded to see a whole slew of college boys whose student deferments had lapsed.

  One of them, the Jarrell boy, was in pre-law. And he actually sat there in front of us and said: If you gentlemen force me to leave school, my father might as well pour $12,000 down the drain. My education is costing him a lot of money. I’m going to be a damn fine district attorney one day.

  Later, discussing his case, Chauvin said: You can’t send a boy like that to die in the trenches. He’s the kind of man Louisiana needs. Then he laughed and said, Besides, I’d never win a case in his father’s courtroom again if that young fellow doesn’t end up on the Louisiana bar.

  And the others laughed along with him, like it was so funny, like it was all so goddamn funny.

  Nineteen sixty-eight. Swatting the years away like flies. They kept saying we were winning. Westmoreland and old Ellsworth Bunker—what the hell kind of name is that
anyway?—they kept on swearing things were fine. My rice was looking pretty good, but the price of everything you needed was sky-rocketing, and you had to read up every day on all the new pesticides and herbicides. Farming was changing fast, but I was there with it.

  I ended up in the hospital for a couple days with the asthma, had to get on the oxygen. Lung guy told me, It’s the dust.

  I said, Great. I’ll just farm without breathing any dust. That oughta be real easy. I’ll just sit around and grow rice in a air-conditioned room. Listen, Doc, I got kids to raise. What you want me to do?

  He said, Well, have you ever considered a change in professions?

  I said, No, buddy, have you?

  Chaney and Willetta got them a framed picture of Lincoln in uniform. The boy looked shipshape. They were so proud of him that Chaney gave me a wallet-size picture for myself. That Chaney has always loved his snapshots. Sits out under the mimosa tree on Sunday afternoons and pastes them in his scrapbook.

  Sometimes I wonder if any of us are cut out for the lives we lead.

  In the middle of the goddamn Tet New Year truce, we had to fight a VC assault against the Saigon embassy. They rained down enemy mortar on all those little towns and dropped napalm on the Mekong delta. We lost over a thousand boys.

  Jesus! We are the United States of America, I thought. What the hell are we doing? We’re talking a piss-ass little swamp! Can’t we get in there and finish this thing off? I found myself getting in arguments with my buddies at Rotier’s. Got to where I’d hear the sound of my own voice and think it was somebody else’s.

  I’d yell, If we’re fighting a war, then let’s get it the hell over with!

  What in the world is happening here? I’d think while I watched things from my E-Z Boy. We tore up South Vietnam, the damn peanut-size country we were supposed to be saving. Dropped so many defoliants, that soil will never be the same. Now, I know defoliants. I been around them every day of my life.

  I watched it all on the goddamn color TV—little Vietnamese girls running out of burning huts, carrying babies in their arms, squealing high-pitched like rabbits in a trap. They ran across the screen until I thought they were gonna run straight out of the set into my bedroom. I swear to God one evening I thought I saw the Vanderlick boy on the news, thought I recognized his hands.

  Man, we beat the whole world and we couldn’t even take that little swamp! We trained half those boys down the road at Fort Polk because Louisiana has the same heat and humidity like Vietnam. I know what a swamp is.

  LBJ said, Now there will, of course, be nervous Nellies who will buckle under the strain.

  I am an American farmer, I thought, I’m not a communist. What do you want from me?

  I didn’t want to be drinking as much as I was. Then even the bourbon quit working and I was up at 2:07 every goddamn night. I don’t know why, but I bolted awake at exactly 2:07 A.M. If I hadn’t already had a little problem with the whiskey, I would of gotten me some sleeping pills.

  Then we fought back. This time we were really going to do it! Lost 2,000 boys pushing back the Tet Offensive. And it took three-and-a-half goddamn weeks to find out here at Pecan Grove that Lincoln Lloyd was one of them. Willetta’s the one that told Sidda. And Sidda told Vivi, and Vivi told me.

  Four solid days and Chaney didn’t come to work, didn’t say a word. Willetta took off too, and our house went to pot. All we ate was grilled cheeses. I left for the duck camp and went on a three-day drunk for the first time since Daddy died.

  My son, Little Shep, finally drove out there one afternoon and said, Daddy you got to come on home. You’re gone, Chaney’s not working. I don’t know what to tell the rest of the workers to do. We got crops in the field.

  I looked at my son, dressed in his jeans and a starched white shirt. Trying so hard to be a man. Freckles, even on his eyelids. I wanted to pull him to me and say, Don’t let them take you, Shep. The fat gonna stay fat. They don’t need your help.

  He dripped us some coffee and I showered and followed him on back home. Vivi thawed out some crayfish étouffée and I ate it with some french bread and two glasses of milk. That étouffée smelled like the best of everything in this state. The crayfish was from my own bayou. I sat there at the table and ate it, all hot and spicy, and smeared some more butter on the french bread. You can travel to Paris, France, and not do any better eating than we do here in Louisiana.

  We were all sitting down together at the table for the first time in I don’t know how long.

  Sidda had on that goddamn eyeliner she wore back then. And I told her, Get up and wipe that shit off your eyes if you want to eat at my table.

  She said, This is not just your table. Don’t take it out on us because you’re upset about Lincoln.

  I went to slap her upside the head, but she ducked and ran down the hall. War, it was hanging up in the air, crawling on the ground, swimming in the sea. It was rolling across my supper table.

  I screamed: IT’S NOT MY GODDAMN FAULT! YALL HEAR ME? I DIDN’T START THIS. I DIDN’T WANT TO SEE LINCOLN LLOYD GET HIS JAW BLOWN OFF! I’VE KNOWN THAT BOY SINCE HE WAS A BABY.

  I had to fight from crying. Couldn’t catch my breath. The kids were staring at me, open-mouthed. I could feel the tight fingers squeezing my chest in.

  Then Sidda was back in the room, holding something out to me. It was my inhaler. She put it in my hand and I reached out and pulled her to me. My boys looked confused. Lulu stared down at her food.

  Vivi folded up her napkin and said, I will shoot my sons’ big toes off before I let them go off and fight in a war.

  That’s the thing about my wife—she is crazy, but sometimes the woman can nail things right on the head.

  She was the one who eventually drove me down to the Negro funeral parlor. It was drizzling slightly, and there were little lamps on either side of the entrance to the building that made it look like something from long ago. It’s funny—Chaney, Willetta, all of them came to Daddy’s funeral, but I don’t believe I’d ever set foot in their funeral home before. Going to that section of town at night was like being in a foreign country to me.

  I asked her, Please Vivi, would you go in there and tell Chaney I’m out here, that I’d like to talk to him?

  Then I waited in the Thunderbird with the window rolled down watching all the Negroes walk in and out. Dressed to the nines, some of them carrying umbrellas. Holding onto each other, handkerchiefs in their hands, hats on.

  Everyone used to wear hats, I remember thinking. When did they stop? Are the Negroes the only ones who wear hats anymore?

  Vivi stepped out of the funeral parlor and came back to the car. She sat in the driver’s seat and stared straight ahead. She wasn’t acting like her normal self, but who the hell was? She told me, Chaney says if you want to talk to him, you’ll have to go inside.

  I took out my pocketknife and started to clean my fingernails. Finally I said, Vivi, what should I do?

  Her hands were on the steering wheel, gripping it and letting it go, gripping it and letting it go. Then my wife said, I am dog-tired of all this, Shep. It’s got to stop somewhere.

  This was the first time I’d ever seen Chaney in a suit. It was tight on him and the pants pulled across the front. He was sitting down holding Willetta’s hands, and a little group of women was hovering around them. Their hands together looked so brown and wrinkled. Those hands looked for a minute like the earth itself.

  And for the first time, I thought: Rice. Those people over there grow rice.

  I was frozen. Couldn’t take a step. I just stood there, staring at Willetta and Chaney. The man saw me, saw I couldn’t move. He whispered something to Willetta and they both looked over at me.

  If you’ve ever done a kind act in your life, Chaney, please get up now and walk over to me and help unglue me from this spot. I am paralyzed. I’m in the middle of battle and I can’t move.

  Somebody was humming and it was sweet and warm in there. You could smell how dressed up they all were. I felt a d
izziness come over me and I thought, Lord, I’m going to faint in this funeral parlor full of grieving colored people.

  And then there was Vivi slipping in the door. She had on her chapel veil like the Catholics used to wear back then. She took my arm and we walked across the room to Willetta and Chaney. I was standing right in front of him.

  Vivi said, I came to tell you how very sorry I am, Chaney. I’m so sorry, Willetta. I want yall to know you are in my prayers.

  Chaney looked at her and said, Thank you, Miz Viviane.

  He did not include me in the thanks. I couldn’t believe Vivi didn’t say: We are sorry. She should of said We are sorry. For God’s sake, I thought, she’s my wife.

  Why was she saying, I’ll be waiting in the car?

  I looked down at my hands. I was left totally alone in the middle of those people. Tiny flecks of dirt up under my nails. Can’t a man ever get his hands clean enough? Chaney’s fingers were twined up with Willetta’s. His palms had a pinkness to them I never noticed before. I had tears dripping down my face. I don’t know where all the tears come from. My sinuses are going to be swole up for hours, I thought.

  Chaney, podnah, I finally said. Can you forgive me, buddy?

  He lifted his eyes, locked them on me, and left them there. I don’t think Chaney had looked at me for that long since I’d known him. And all I could do is stand there and bear it. If he’d stood up and punched me in the stomach, I could not of lifted an arm to defend myself.

  He didn’t punch me. He reached up and handed me his handkerchief. It smelled like Clorox. I can still see that old white cannon handkerchief passing from his hand to mine. His bloodshot almond eyes, his full face, that big chest of his bulging out of what I realized was one of my old suits. I couldn’t use that handkerchief until he spoke.

  Until he said, Yeah, bossman, I forgive you.

  He said it like there was a bunch of others who wouldn’t forgive me. I kept on looking at him. Finally he said, Go on now, blow your nose.