“I wish I knew. Lately I’ve been hearing that sound in my dreams, and even while I’m awake.”
“Sometimes that’s the way of it,” Louise says, walking to the sink. “I got a lot of things inside me I don’t understand.” She runs tap water into a carafe. “I got to make some coffee. It can be a hundred degrees outside, but I got to have my coffee. Addicted, I guess.”
“Louise, what can you tell me about the orange pickup truck by the bridge?”
She switches on the Mr. Coffee, then comes and sits in a Naugahyde recliner on my left. “That old rusted wreck by the shed?”
“Yes.”
“That was Dr. Kirkland’s truck back in the old days.”
“I know. But did my father ever drive it?”
She closes her eyes. “Yeah, Luke drove it some, when Dr. Kirkland wasn’t around. Dr. Kirkland used to brag all the time about how long that junker had been running. He said it had never quit on him and never would. Finally did, though. Why?”
“I think I saw something when I was in that truck. I have this dream where I’m riding in it with Grandpapa. We’re on the north end of the island, riding up a hill in the cow pasture, toward the pond.”
Louise nods. “I know where that is.”
“In the dream, we never get over the hill. We get closer and closer, but we never get over it. Lately, the closer we get, the more afraid I get.”
“How long you been having this dream?”
“A couple of weeks, maybe longer. Do you know of anything that happened up there? Something bad I might have seen?”
She leans back in her chair and looks at the porch window. The storm clouds have brought a premature darkness, and the wind rattles the glass in its frame.
“Gonna get worse before it gets better,” she predicts. “Lots of bad things happened on this old island over the years. But the pond…you think you saw somebody get beaten? Killed, maybe? Something like that?”
“I don’t know.” A different thought strikes me. “Did you and Daddy ever do anything at the pond? Sexually, I mean?”
A deep stillness comes over Louise. “We swam there sometimes. But not while you were on the island.”
“Did you ever make love when I was on the island?”
She averts her eyes. “We tried not to. But sometimes we did. I’m sorry if that upsets you, but I don’t want to lie.”
“No, I want the truth. And I know how it is when you love somebody.”
“Well…you could have seen us swimming naked in the pond. But I don’t think you did.”
Sensing discomfort in Louise, I change the subject. “Did Daddy ever talk to you about the war?”
“Not with words. But he let me see the pain in different ways.”
“What do you think happened to him over there?”
Her large eyes fix on me, an earnest passion in them. “He got poisoned. That’s what happened. Not in his body-in his soul.”
“Louise…I’ve been told that his unit committed war crimes. Atrocities. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She nods solemnly.
“They tortured people. Kidnapped women and raped them. Do you think Daddy could have done anything like that?” This is as close as I can bear to come to asking Louise if she thinks my father could have molested me.
She stands suddenly and goes to a drawer, then takes out a pack of Salem cigarettes and lights one with a kitchen match. Despite the passage of time, Louise still has a slim figure, with taut calves that a lot of women would kill for. I can only imagine what she must have looked like as a young woman.
“Luke had some problems, okay?” She exhales blue smoke. “When he and I first got together, he couldn’t make love.”
“You mean physically?” A strange excitement awakens in my chest. “He was impotent?”
She tilts her head as if unsure how to reply. “He was and he wasn’t.”
“What do you mean, he was and he wasn’t?”
Louise looks at me skeptically. “I don’t see a ring on your finger. You ever lived with a man?”
“A couple. Or they lived with me, rather. You don’t have to pull any punches with me, Louise. I know men.”
She chuckles softly. “You know how when a man wakes up, lots of times he’s hard down there from having to go to the bathroom?”
I nod, my curiosity making me grip the arm of the sofa.
“Well, Luke would be like that in the morning. But if I tried to make love with him, he couldn’t stay that way.”
“I see.”
“I knew something in the war had done that to him. Not his wound. Something in his head. It took more than a year to get him where he could be with me. Where he could trust me. I think that’s what it was, trust. But I’m no doctor. I don’t know. He may have done or seen things over there that made sex something terrible to him.”
Wild thoughts are spinning in my head. If my father was impotent, could he have abused me?
A blast of wind makes the windows shudder, and the rain drives against the roof like hail. I focus on the drone of the air conditioner to block it out. “What did you say about you coming between Jesse and my father?”
Louise pours herself a cup of still-brewing coffee. “Jesse always wanted me. Watched me from the time I was a little girl. Always talking to me, bringing me presents. Following me around on his horse. But I didn’t want him.”
“Why not?”
“I just didn’t feel right about it. I didn’t know what I wanted, but it wasn’t Jesse. Then I started seeing this white boy wandering around the island. He was a man, really-like Jesse-but he seemed more like a boy. Always off by himself, like me. Him and Jesse talked sometimes, but I think all they had in common was the war. Anyway, I’d figure out ways to get ahead of Luke on his walks, so he’d stumble on me, like it was an accident. I liked talking to him. I hadn’t been nowhere but here and to school in West Feliciana Parish. And that was just an old country school for black people. Didn’t learn nothing there. I’d just sit and listen while Luke talked. Which was funny, ’cause people who met him wondered if he could talk at all. But he could when he wanted to. He talked to me all the time.”
“I did the same thing,” I tell her. “I used to go into his studio every night to watch him work. He didn’t talk much to me-because I was so young, probably-but he let me sit with him. I was the only one he’d let in.”
Louise is smiling at me. We are sisters under the skin.
“How old were you when all this happened?” I ask.
Her cheeks darken in embarrassment. “I was fourteen when I started following Luke around. But we was just talking, like I said. We didn’t do nothing till I turned sixteen.”
There’s a faraway look in her eyes. “You want to know if he was in love with me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“He told me he was. I know that probably hurts you. But I’ll tell you this, he wasn’t ever gonna leave you to come to me. He hated that place, that Malmaison. Hated your grandfather, too.”
“And my mother?”
Louise gives me an intense look. “He loved your mama, now. She just didn’t understand him. But when I’d talk to him about leaving-and don’t think I didn’t. Lord, I begged him sometimes-he’d say, ‘I can’t leave my Kitty Cat, Louise. Can’t leave my baby in that house with those people. So I can’t come to you.’ And he never did.”
This confirmation of my father’s love warms my heart, despite what I heard from my grandfather today. Yet as soon as I feel this emotion, something clenches in my chest. “Did he say anything else about my mother?”
She looks hesitant.
