Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

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СКАЧАТЬ through the racket in a basket, which had been set on top of the icebox. A pot of red beans bubbled on the stove.

      Tulie sat at the pine table with its blue-checked oilcloth and the yellow crock of lard and the shaker of Morton salt that always sat in the center of it. The girl was nursing Daman for her, and her baby son’s pink lips were pulling on the girl’s nipple. His tiny hand grabbed at her breast, which was round and brown and soft, like a baked apple.

      “I’m that sorry I’m late,” Maeve said. “I hope he wasn’t fussing too badly.”

      Tulie smiled. She had a big gap between her front teeth, and one day she had shown Maeve how she could whistle through the hole like a boy. And she had beautiful dark eyes, like wells, that always seemed to have been carefully emptied before she raised her thick-fringed lashes to let you look into them. Maeve thought the slaves had probably met their masters’ stares with such an emptiness in their eyes.

      “Now, never you mind takin’ your time, Miss Maeve,” Tulie was saying. “I’s milk enough for both our boys.”

      “I went to the cathedral,” Maeve said. “And then I went for a walk on the levee. In my bare feet.” She held up her shoes so that Tulie could see. She had almost forgotten them, almost left them lying there on the levee. He had run back to the willows for her, to get them.

      Tulie smiled to see the shoes, but whatever she thought of them, she kept it to herself.

      Maeve’s breasts were aching something fierce now and leaking milk. She wanted to take her son back from Tulie, to hold his weight heavy in her arms and feel his suckling, to breathe in his baby smell of milk and talcum and soft, moist flesh. Yet she stood there, saying nothing, watching the way his lips moved in and out as he nursed at Tulie’s breast, how his little fist clenched and unclenched. Paulie took after her, but Day was all his father’s son: fair, with that ready, dimpled smile. His eyes, too, came from his father. Midnight blue, people said they were, though she’d never understood the expression, since every midnight sky she’d ever seen had been black as pitch.

      Later that evening, when her Mike came home for supper, she saw how his eyes were very nearly the same color as his policeman’s uniform, and she wondered why she hadn’t noticed such a thing before.

      As she set the plate of red beans and rice and fried sac-à-lait down in front of him, she told him she had gone for a walk on the levee. She asked him what he saw when he looked at the river.

      Mike Rourke shook his head at her. “What kind of a question is that?” he said around a mouthful of beans. “I see water. Muddy water.”

      She stared back at him and she hated herself for what she was thinking, what she was feeling. He was a good provider and a good man, kind to her most of the time and affectionate with his sons. He was always touching the boys, cuddling up to them.

      She turned away from him without another word and went into the bedroom. She lay down on the bed but got right back up again. She went into the bathroom, ran cold water in the sink, and splashed it on her face.

      Mike’s shaving things were laid out neatly on the shelf above the sink: the porcelain mug, the badger-hair lather brush, his warranted Perfection razor.

      She stared at her husband’s razor and thought of how she would come awake sometimes at night with her husband sleeping heavy beside her, and she would feel such an aching, echoing emptiness inside. Hot tears would overflow her eyes and roll down the sides of her face, into her ears, and she would wonder when Mike Rourke had become, with no warning and with no reason, this thing to run away from, like her da.

      She picked up her husband’s razor, hefting it in her hand as if to feel its weight. Her mother had killed herself with Da’s razor. Mike had told her once that most people didn’t do it right—they cut across instead of up. But her mem had known how to do it.

      Maeve pulled open the razor and ran her finger along the blade. Her skin split open, and the pain shocked her, and the way the blood welled up so fast and dark. The razor slipped from her hand, clattering on the tile floor.

      She looked into the mirror above the sink and saw a strange woman with dark hair and dark eyes and a white face. She said the strange woman’s name the way he had said it at the market that morning, rolling it around on her tongue.

      “Maeve … Maeve … Maeve …”

      She walked into the kitchen with blood dripping from the end of her finger.

      “Sweet Jesus!” Mike shouted when he saw her, jumping up from the table, snatching his napkin off his neck, wrapping it around the small, bleeding cut. “What have you done?”

      “I wanted to see what it would feel like,” she said, but that wasn’t exactly true. She had wanted to see if she could feel it at all.

      He stared at her. He looked frightened.

      “It hurts,” she said.

      “Aw, darlin’.” He tried to kiss her, but she jerked away from him. For a moment she thought she might retch. “I want to be alone,” she said.

      She went back into the bedroom and lay down on their bed. She brought her knees up to her chest. She took the key out of her pocket and pressed it between her palms, and then she pressed her clasped hands between her bent knees. She thought she would get up later and go out into the yard and throw the key into the cistern, where it would be lost forever.

Chapter Five

      From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, extra edition, Wednesday, July 13, 1927:

       PROMINENT NEW ORLEANS LAWYER MURDERED

      Wife Discovers Body

      In Pool of Blood

      Mr. Charles St. Claire, Esq., a criminal defense attorney known for mounting zealous, if unorthodox, cases on behalf of his clients, was found brutally slain last night in an outbuilding of his plantation house, Sans Souci, in the Faubourg Bayou St. John.

      Mr. St. Claire, 30 years old, was married to a famous star of the silver screen, Remy Lelourie St. Claire. It was Mrs. St. Claire who first heard screaming coming from the old slave shack at the rear of the property and went to investigate. There she found Mr. St. Claire lying in a pool of blood, expiring from a cut in his throat. The police recovered the murder weapon, which is said to be a common cane knife, at the scene. No motive has yet been ascribed to the crime, and no arrests have been made.

       Grieving Widow

      Mrs. St. Claire, who emerged briefly from seclusion early this morning, spoke to reporters with her eyes full of tears bravely held back. “I, this city, and the world have lost a great man in Charles St. Claire,” she said. “I loved him with all my heart and I can’t believe he’s gone.”

      Mrs. St. Claire, the 29-year-old daughter of Mrs. Heloise Lelourie and the late Mr. Reynard Lelourie, is a native New Orleanian who has enjoyed considerable success of late as a motion picture actress. In February of this year, Mrs. St. Claire returned to New Orleans from her home in Hollywood, California, for the premiere of her latest endeavor, Jazz Babies, whereupon she became reacquainted with Mr. St. Claire, a third cousin once removed and a childhood friend. After a whirlwind courtship, they married in a small, quiet ceremony СКАЧАТЬ