We didn’t go far, at least not by the lights of Frank and me, resentful of being told we shouldn’t be playing with the project kids we ran with since now we’d moved up in the world. But Daddy was proud to leave the apartment in St. Bernard and move off Gibson Street not so many blocks to DeSaix Boulevard. He had enough to buy a small house there, a wood one painted pink with two bedrooms and a Queen Palm in the front and two Chinaberry trees in back.
“Little no-account niggers,” Daddy called the St. Bernard kids we weren’t supposed to play with anymore. Never mind they came in approximately the same good-to-bad ratio as everybody else in New Orleans, little or big. Never mind that Daddy and Mama and all us Massons have been called that same hurting word at one time or another; never mind that everybody else on our new block, save for the Spagnuolo family, had to sit way up in the balcony at the Circle Cinema.
So anyway, what was I doing there with a chainsaw?
It was hard enough years ago to haul that chifforobe and the rest of the bedroom suite out of Gibson Street and onto Daddy’s pickup for the short drive to Gentilly. Daddy called it a bedroom suit. It was even harder to get the whole cherry wood shebang jiggled through the front door and the narrow foyer of the pink house. Daddy and two of his work crew buddies from the parks department grunted clear through a Sunday on that job.
Now, thanks to that hellbat Katrina, there was no way of removing the family heirlooms out from the pink house. The cherry wood was all waterlogged, too swollen up to get through the door frames. Everything had to be cut into pieces, and the pieces carted out to the curb to wait a minor eternity for the garbage haulers to come fetch the mess.
The cutting job fell to me for two reasons. First, I’m handy. Second, the house was automatically deeded over to me as next of kin by the state of Louisiana when its previous orphaned owner was convicted and sent up to Angola for what he did to a white woman by the name of Eugenia Malreaux, who lived uptown on St. Charles Avenue in a big old place with her prize tulip trees in the back garden.
What in the name of Heaven I was doing hanging on to the pink house and the heirlooms these past years I do not know. I didn’t need a house. I have my own very nice little house uptown. And I didn’t need a suit for my bedroom.
Before Katrina, my wife Toni was after me to rent out the pink house. But I always managed to stall by reminding her about Mama and Daddy both dying there in the cherry wood bed, both blind and crippled up from the sugar and helpless to keep from soiling themselves. And then how Frank took over the house after Mama died, and moved into our parents’ own room at night to sleep in the big cherry wood death bed — leaving me to wonder what he might be cursing there in the dark...
... And how Frank took care of me in that house all the while I went through high school, then Xavier. And then on top of that, three years of law school at Loyola. No thanks to any of the cold relations who turned their backs on a pair of orphan boys. Just us two against the world, Frank and Walter.
I only worked part-time construction jobs in my school years, and I didn’t manage to get half what I thought I might in scholarship money. But Frank always came up with the rest, always on the promise that I would not ask where the money came from.
It was hard for Frank to be as responsible as all that. But not as hard as the rest of his life. This was a capital-B bone of contention between us.
Frank claimed he was halfway a regular citizen for bringing me up, and so anything outside of his role of being a big brother was none of my business. It didn’t sit well with me to be shut out like that. So to spite him, I did the meanest thing I could think of doing.
The day after commencement at Loyola, I marched down to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office with my law degree and got myself hired. I could just as easily have taken a job as a public defender. Frank never said anything about my spiteful choice, but I know I hurt him.
The white man who hired me at the D.A.’s office soon thereafter prosecuted my brother and sent him up to Angola, where they eventually put him down like a cat for stealing Miss Malreaux’s money and afterwards splitting her head open with an axe.
Even though the crime scene investigators never found that axe and had to rely on the coroner’s analysis at trial, the prosecution case against Frank was sufficiently solid. More solid, I admit, than a lot of cases I have prosecuted myself. People go to prison and get the needle for pitifully little evidence, really. All colors of people.
Frank had long been working handyman jobs at the big Malreaux house — earning money for my tuition at Loyola University School of Law, no less. So Frank had access to the place. The forensics squad came up with a smudged thumbprint they claimed was Frank’s, right there on the dial of a private safe in the brick shed where Miss Eugenia was known to keep large amounts of cash. Add to that, investigators found a considerable number of Miss Eugenia’s jewelry items inside a chifforobe drawer in the pink house.
They didn’t find the looted cash, though. Frank, of course, denied stealing money or jewelry from Miss Eugenia, just like he denied stealing anything else in his life. He’d wear that bad-dog look on his face when confronted on matters of theft, which was as close as he’d come to admitting his light-fingered predilection — until his last letter, that is.
Certainly he denied murdering Miss Eugenia. Which flew in the face of jewelry found in the chifforobe. Which Frank’s court-appointed lawyer might have said flew in the face of common logic, therefore constituting reasonable doubt in the mind of a juror. Because why would a murderer keep mementoes of his victim in the same place he kept his socks and boxer shorts?
At first, I thought it would be no problem to chainsaw the bedroom suit. Maybe in the past it was all worth some serious antique money. But the value was surely gone now — now that all that cherry wood was so nasty and swollen and probably full of termites, too. It was junk and nothing more. No problem.
But there I was in my dead brother’s house, in the room where he used to sleep as a free man. Sentiment hammered me. The rented chainsaw seemed as disrespectful to Frank’s house as Mother Nature had been.
Speaking of a hellish vandal woman, I took a long moment to gaze around the bedroom after a knock-down drag-out with Katrina.
Schaefer Skrip bottles by the dozen had flown around like stones in the hurricane, smashing into walls where splattered ink adhered to glass shards and blue and yellow labels. The floor was a carpet of Budweiser cans, crushed the way Frank crushed them with his big right hand, sodden Camel butts and moldy paperback books with underlined pages. Crime novels mostly. The door to the hallway was cracked in two and the plaster ceiling had gone pulpy like ricotta cheese.
Then I read the next parts of Frank’s last letter.
Evil and lowdown ain’t my view alone of Miss Eugenia Malreaux. It’s what the old bag son Philip call her. He told me things about his mama make you toss a meal. Told me when he was just a boy she’d come wake him up in his bedroom some nights wearing nothing but a peek-a-boo and she poke where she ain’t got bizness poking. Philip tell on her to his daddy one day. Then soon as daddy leave the house that lowdown Miss Eugenia take a strap to Philip and nearly skin him alive.
Oh yes, Philip he told me lots of things about the grand life up on St. Charles Avenue where it all look peace and quiet respectable. He said he like it better where we live in Gentilly on account of pain and awfulness can’t be hid away so easy.