Moth

we didn’t want any part of it. Wrote once or twice.”

“LaVerne really turned things around, later on. She helped a lot of other people get their lives together, too. You both could have put all that behind you.”

“Maybe we could have. Maybe not.” She eyed the chickens again, looked up at the sky. Darkness had begun working its way in at day’s edge. “Things had changed here too.”

“So Alouette came here because you’re her grandmother?”

“You have the kind of troubles that girl had, you just naturally go to a woman. From what I know about down there where you-all are, there wasn’t much of anybody she could go to.”

“Her mother was trying to get in touch with her, before she died. That’s why I’m here now.”

“Girl didn’t know that. Didn’t say much about her mother ever: Not that I cared to listen.”

“How did Alouette find you here? Or even know about you, for that matter?”

“Long time ago, right after Vernie had her, I sent that girl a book of stories I came across in the back of a cabinet, something that was Vernie’s when she was little. Thought she might make some use of it. Envelope had the address, and she says her mother cut that out and pasted it in the front of the book. Never sent another thing to that girl. But I ain’t moved, of course. And she still had it.”

“Where’s Alouette now, Mrs. Adams?”

“Couldn’t tell you that, I’m afraid.”

“But she is here? With you?”

Her eyes were as lifeless as locust husks abandoned on a tree. “Stayed here a few days. Then when it looked to be some trouble, I had Mr. Simpson drive that girl over to the Clarksville hospital. I did midwifing back in the old times. You don’t forget what birthing trouble looks like.”

“Did you visit her at the hospital? Did anyone?”

“Haven’t seen her since the day Mr. Simpson came by to get her.”

“Didn’t you wonder how she was doing? Think she might need you?”

“Don’t waste much time worrying and thinking. I figure the girl found me once. If she wants to, she can do it again. She’d be welcome enough.”

“You know about her baby?”

“Mr. Simpson told me it’s still alive.”

“Mrs. Adams, I have to ask you something. Please don’t take this wrong. Was your granddaughter using drugs when she was here?”

She thought for a moment. “Wouldn’t know how to tell you. She wasn’t normal. Laid around half asleep most of the time, didn’t have any appetite. All that could be what was going wrong inside her.”

“You don’t have any idea where she might have gone, then, after leaving the hospital?”

“Didn’t know she left.”

“Well, I’ll be getting on, then. Thank you for giving me so much of your time.”

“Didn’t give it. You helped yourself.”

“You’re right, but thanks all the same. When I find Alouette, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

I started back around the house to the car.

“Boy?”

“Yes, m’am?”

“You be heading over to Clarksville now by any chance?”

“Yes, m’am.”

“Going to see that baby.”

“Yes, m’am. And to ask more questions.”

“You figure you might have room to give an old lady a ride over there? Sounds like that baby’s going to be needing someone.”

“Yes, m’am. It does sound that way. And I’d be glad to take you.”

“You wait right there.”

She went into the house and came immediately back out with a Sunday-best purse, probably the only one she had. It was covered with tiny red, blue and green beads.

“Let’s go, boy,” she said. “Dark’s coming on fast.”

It always is.

Chapter Sixteen

So, midnight, raining, miles to go, I arrived at the berth bearing Baby Girl McTell to whatever ports awaited her.

In the car on the way Mrs. Adams asked me to tell her about Verne’s last years, offering no comment when I was through. We passed the remainder of the trip, just over an hour, in silence, watching the storm build: a certain heaviness at the horizon, rumbles of thunder in unseen bellies of clouds, lightning crouched and stuttering behind the dark pane.

Mrs. Adams had me drop her off on the highway outside town, at a cinderblock church (Zion Redemption Baptist) where, she said, her sister lived, adding “pastor’s wife,” her toneless voice (it seemed to me) implying equally scorn and acknowledgment of status. She would go on to the hospital first thing in the morning.

Closer in, I stopped at one of those gargantuan installations that look like battleships and seem to carry everything from gas and drinks and snacks to novelty T-shirts, athletic shoes and the occasional Thanksgiving turkey. You could probably pick up a TV or computer system at some of these places. I pushed a dollar over the counter toward a teenage girl wearing a truly impressive quantity of denim-shirt, pants, boots, jacket, even earrings-and poured my own coffee from a carafe squatting on the hot plate (One Refill Only, Please) beside display cards of Slim Jims, snuff and lip balm. Then I pulled the car to the edge of the lot and sat there breathing in the coffee’s dark, earthy smell, feeling its heat and steam on my face, sipping at it from time to time. New Orleans coffee makes most others seem generic, but I was at this moment far, far from home, a wanderer, and could make do. Besides, for the true believer coffee’s a lot like what Woody Allen says about sex: the worst he ever had was wonderful.

Back at the hospital years ago, later at AA meetings, coffee would disappear by the gallon, as though it were getting poured down floor drains. These people were serious coffee drinkers. Someone or another was pretty much always at work making a new pot, draining the urn to re-up it, dumping out filters the size of automobile carburetors or measuring out dark-roast-with-chicory by the half pound. Antlike streams of porters to back doors, fifty-pound sacks saddling their shoulders. They should have just pulled up tanker trucks outside, run a hose in.

So the mind, weary from the day’s travel, released for a time even from purposeful activity, wanders.

To a dayroom where a youngish man sits staring fixedly at reruns of Hazel, Maverick, I Dream of Jeannie, Jeopardy, swathed in the dead, false calm of drugs, mind all the while sparking and phosphorescing like the screen’s own invisible dots.

To a still younger man waking against a heap of garbage bins, loose trash, half a burned-out mattress, on a New Orleans street, shotgun houses hardly wider than their entry doors in dominolike rows as far as he can see looking up from the pavement there, wondering how last night bled over into this bleary, pain-filled morning, how he shipwrecked here, wherever here is, finding what little money he had left, of course, gone.

To a teenage boy then, spine bent in a question mark above Baldwin or Notes from the Underground as flies buzz the screen and morning nibbles dark away from the window, a boy just beginning to sense with fear and elation how very large the world is and to believe that, turning these pages, naming things in these mirrors, he’ll discover secret doors and passageways few other of the castle’s inhabitants suspect.

Forward suddenly to a man in his forties as he sits over a drink and the final pages, proofing them, of a novel titled The Old Man, wondering if he’ll ever be able to do what he has just, amazingly, done, to create so vivid and reflective a world, ever again.