Living ... surviving

Measured blessings

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin?
Christina Georgina Rossetti


Ian had a hole in his heart, Charles instinctively knew. Like most orphans there was a missing piece that Ian – and others like him – were constantly trying to fill by different measures: Introverted determination, acute shyness, heightened sense of bravado – all offensive mechanisms while searching for a connection, a bond, with another human being. Even strangers were not excluded. It was not uncommon for a charge of St. Mary’s or the girls’ orphanage near the levee, slipping in and out of shadows, to follow strangers, to make up stories about how they were related. To many, that was better than the alternative: No family and no one to care whether they lived or died.

A vast majority of orphans had a common need: To find or claim missing family members. Many found comfort, at least at some point, by finding a relative to two, even if the person or persons existed only in their minds.

Charles, too, had a heart hole that was large. At times it seemed so big he would swear he could hear the wind blowing through it. The sound it made . . . dreary, soulful, low . . . seldom left him, even in sleep. And the mournful sound always hinted at the same unspoken questions.

Family? Why don’t I have a family?

Sister Bloody knew the hearts of most of her charges, and tried to compensate for what was missing in each. She was a tender mother figure to those that needed special attention. She played the role of ritualistic matriarch when called upon to do so. To others she was religious instructress, giving plausible options to what some youngsters believed to be unanswerable questions. To Charles she was more of a big sister or young aunt than a religious scion or mother figure.

His quietness troubled her, exactly why she could not fathom. She watched him as he approached everyday life at the orphanage with a methodical sameness – eyes on the goal, hands at the ready, back bent to the task at hand. Whatever she wanted done, he did. Not happily. Not grudgingly. He just did it. When she praised him (which was often), he would smile or nod, or both, his eyes fixed on her face, so she could see the glassy reflections of the scene before him.

Only when she scolded him, or when one of the sisters or brothers did so, did emotion show in his face. Hooded eyes. Furrowed brow. Thin lips crushed thinner still. Anger, perhaps? But she didn’t really believe that. Disappointment for letting others down, she decided. Her, the other nuns, or the brothers? she wondered. Hard way to go through life, she thought more than once.

She often marveled at the bond between Charles and Ian. Due to circumstances that placed the boys in similar life-scenarios – needy youths, authority-figure helpers, and older sibling role models – they had been inseparable for several years. At first, Ian detested the slight, quiet introvert with the wiry hair and funny eyes. The initial feeling was mutual. Charles thought Ian a bombastic, blow-hard who worked aggressively at being annoying, rude, and profane.

Over time – working hip-to-hip scrounging for scraps of food and usable items in the dank, dark city alleyways – without even realizing it, they began looking out for one another. Ian was street smart, wise to the whims and waves of the cobblestone pathways and dirt alleys that crisscrossed New Orleans; Charles was just plain smart, a reader, more studious, but much more naïve about the human heartbeat and bloodstream of the city.

He was always surprised about the human nature aspect of aberrant situations in which the two often found themselves. Ian reacted immediately to such situations; Charles liked to study on things for a bit before taking action.

It was more than a partnership, more even than a kinship. It was an existence born out of individual desires for survival . . . and to be needed. On some level. By someone.



Life at the orphanage was like a woodpecker’s tapping: Repetitive, with no apparent change in rhythm or purpose. For most of the older charges at St. Mary’s, each day was a mirror image of the one before: Get up by six o’clock, roll up a thin blanket-pallet, help the little ones any way that was needed, eat something – pieces of cold hoecakes, flour milk, stale bread, coffee boiled with old grounds for the older charges, water or watery milk for the younger ones – go to the school room to practice reading and penmanship, listen to monotonic recitations on every subject from French history to simple principles of mathematics by sleepy-eyed priests, and do chores assigned by the priests and nuns.

For the older orphans the time spent in the classroom was diminished, the number of chores escalated. “Teaching responsibility,” one grizzled brother intoned, after ordering Charles and Ian to remove the filled privy buckets, dump them in a nearby ditch, and give each a thorough washing before placing them again under the three irregular holes.

After chores, the charges went off scrounging, in pairs or organized packs.

For the most part, the priests at St. Mary’s – Brother Vincent, the director, and Brothers Basil, Theodule, De Sales, Aloysius, and Gonzaga – assumed the role of harsh taskmasters and stern, by-the-rote teachers. The boys quickly learned any coddling (or, simply, kind words) would come from the nuns. One, actually: Sister Bloody. Holding forth a stern demeanor and a foreboding attitude were not in her.

Ian had come to like Charles’ company because the slight, dark boy didn’t talk much. Talking was Ian’s forte, the one thing at which he excelled, despite his stammer, despite his disinterest in book-learning, or learning anything that didn’t have to do with minor adventure and survival.

Over time, Charles found a familial contentment in listening to his stammering friend talk about nothing and everything. But then, again, he seldom listened with a full ear as he was always watching his surroundings, listening for out-of-place noises, looking for opportunities to make survival more of a certainty.

As Charles walked, his eyes constantly flitted side to side, like a swamp panther harried by a passel of hounds. His peripheral vision was passable, but was limited by the wide-brimmed hat he had heard some refer to as a Messkin Gigolo. The hat was a rather fancy affair with short rear brim and longer brim in front. Six months earlier he had slipped it off the head of a dead man of undetermined heritage slumped in an alleyway. Charles circled the body and thought the man was probably a robbery victim or, perhaps, the end result of botched kidnapping by a crew of hard billys looking for seamen – willing or unwilling – to crew-out a whaling ship set for a voyage around the tip of South America and then head west across the Pacific Ocean.

The man had been beaten severely about the head. Charles took the hat without a single negative thought; he certainly didn’t consider himself a thief.

You can’t steal from a dead man.

That thought and others of a similar vein bounced around his head as he rescued the hat from under the man’s blood-encrusted head. Water from a spitting summer shower, a little saliva, and elbow grease removed much of the stains congealed in the crown and sweat band.

Even thought Ian constantly made fun of his odd-looking hat, Charles liked it. It kept the sun and rain out of his eyes; and few people had one like it. While the hat kept him from seeing the entire world around him, it also prevented the world from seeing details of his face, which was in a constant shadow.

It’s not that there was anything wrong with his face. It was, for lack of a better description, an ordinary face bordering on pleasant . . . serene even. Like most faces, it was a face of parts: Fleshy nose, a bit large for his small features; small ears, standing at attention at a forty-five-degree angle to his head; soft, brown eyes partially hidden beneath heavy lids; a straight mouth with thin lips; medium-brown hair hacked off short with a kitchen knife to hold lice at bay.

What most people saw first when they looked at him were his eyes. Highlighted as they were by a prominent forehead and cheekbones with abrupt angles, their color (light cocoa, like the underside of a well-washed brown flannel shirt) was emphasized by the subdued, outside teardrop eyelid folds; golden flecks of color radiating from the edges of the cornea. His natural dark complexion, wiry, unruly hair, high cheekbones that hinted of Basque or Indian influence, and, again, those distinctive eyes, caused people to stare. Those eyes. That dark coloring. The dominant cheekbones. More than one person immediately thought of him as a mixed-breed, a blending of races. French Cajun-Oriental-Negro? Negro-Caucasian-Indian? Mexican-Oriental-Caucasian? While the possibilities seemed endlessly suspect, the truth, which he did not know, was quite simple.

What he was or where he really came from, he didn’t know for sure. Charles, like many of the St. Mary’s charges, didn’t remember his parents or the two brothers a nun told him he was supposed to have had. He didn’t have a middle name, as far as he knew. It stressed him that he could not remember the names of his family, that when he tried to visit them in his dreams, most of the time their faces were blank slates. He was four when the dreaded Yellow Jack descended on the city like a swarm of viral locust. More than two thousand residents died from the distinctive smothering, choking, and agonizing death of the mosquito-borne disease in less than four months.

Sister Bloody had picked up a short, and quite unsensational, tale from a well-meaning neighbor woman who had delivered the mewling toddler to the orphanage. When Charles was eight and had started asking questions, the nun said his father was a doctor who came to this country a few years before Charles was born. He and his wife and his brothers died in a wave of the creeping sicknesses that hit the Crescent City every couple of years.

Although she did not know for certain, Sister Bloody felt sure that his family (like the French-born nuns and brothers at the orphanage) only knew that the “Port of New Orleans” was as close to living on French soil as you could get anywhere in the world.

Charles believed he was born several years after his family came to New Orleans. He was told he was four when he was dropped off at the orphanage but he thought he must have been younger.

At four, wouldn’t you remember the names of your parents and brothers?

He tried to remember his family, to recall a name, any detail of his life before St. Mary’s. He thought he could remember his father laughing and wearing a funny little hat. He thought he remembered two brothers, one bigger than the other.

Memories of his mother were different. Occasional vivid visions of his mother holding him tight, nuzzling his neck, swarmed his thoughts. She had brown hair, like his own, with a face of angles and light. Small eyes, assuredly, also like his, and clean hair as thick and unruly, tied up in a swirling topknot. In dreams and stray thoughts, she was called Josephine; her smile was small, yet captivating; flickering candlelight danced in her eyes.

In his mind, she was always looking kindly at him, smiling.

Always.