Creole Belle by James Lee Burke

fought in France in the First World War. His best friend was killed on the last day of the war. He had eight children and raised us up against ever fighting in a war or doing harm to anybody for any reason. Now somebody taken my granddaughters from me, and a deputy sheriff tells me ain’t no evidence of a crime been committed. That’s why I say it ain’t fair.” He struggled to his feet with his two walking canes and went into the kitchen.
    “What are you doing, sir?” I asked.
    “Fixing y’all coffee.”
    “You don’t need to do that.”
    “Yes, suh, I do. I ain’t been a good host. I cain’t find the sugar,though. I couldn’t find it this morning. I cain’t concentrate on t’ings like I used to.”
    I had followed him into the kitchen to dissuade him from putting himself out. The cupboards, which had curtains on them rather than doors, were almost bare. There were no pots on the stove, no smell of cooked food in the air. He pulled a coffee can off a shelf, then accidentally dropped it on the drainboard. The plastic cap popped loose, spilling the small amount of coffee that was inside. “It’s all right. We still got enough for t’ree cups,” he said.
    “We have to go, Mr. DeBlanc. Thank you for your courtesy,” I said.
    He hesitated, then began scooping the coffee back in the can. “Yes, suh, I understand,” he replied.
    Clete and I walked out into the rain and got into the Caddy. Clete didn’t start the engine and instead stared through the windshield at the lamplight glowing in the front windows of the house. “His kitchen looked pretty bare,” he said.
    “I suspect he’s in the Meals On Wheels program,” I said.
    “You ever see the stuff those old people eat? It looks like diced rabbit food or the kind of crap Iranian inmates eat.”
    I waited for him to continue.
    “You think Mr. DeBlanc might like a warmed-up po’boy and a cold brew?” he said.
    So we took Clete’s foot-long sandwich, which consisted of almost an entire loaf of French bread filled with deep-fried oysters and baby shrimp and mayonnaise and hot sauce and sliced lettuce and tomatoes and onions, and carried it and the two longneck bottles of Bud inside. Then we fixed a pot of coffee and sat down with Mr. DeBlanc at his kitchen table and cut the po’boy in three pieces and had a fine meal while the rain drummed like giant fingers on the roof.
    A LICE W ERENHAUS LIVED in an old neighborhood off Magazine, on the edges of the Garden District, on a block one might associate with the genteel form of poverty that became characteristic of mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. Even after Katrina, the live oakswere of tremendous dimensions, their gigantic roots wedging up the sidewalks and cracking the curbs and keeping the houses in shadow almost twenty-four hours a day. But gradually, the culture that had defined the city, for good or bad, had taken flight from Alice’s neighborhood and been replaced by bars on the windows of businesses and residences and a pervading fear, sometimes justified, that two or three kids dribbling a basketball down the street might turn out to be the worst human beings you ever met.
    Out of either pride or denial of her circumstances, Alice had not installed a security system in her house or sheathed her windows with bars specially designed to imitate the Spanish grillwork that was part of traditional New Orleans architecture. She walked to Mass and rode the streetcar to work. She shopped at night in a grocery store three blocks away and wheeled her own basket home, forcing it over the broken and pitched slabs of concrete in the sidewalks. On one occasion, a man came out of the shadows and tried to jerk her purse from her shoulder. Miss Alice hit him in the head with a zucchini, then threw it at him as he fled down the street.
    Her friends were few. Her days at the convent had been marked by acrimony and depression and the bitter knowledge that insularity and loneliness would always be her lot.