Chapter 1 of
The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur
© 1996 by John Gregory Brown, Houghton Mifflin
John Gregory Brown, Associate Professor of English

WATCH NOW. It's my hands that speak, not my voice. Just picture a child who, lacking words for his thoughts, flits and flutters his moth-soft fingers before your eyes and asks you to see. This is what happened to me, the child's hands say. I'll show you.

Of course I'm not a child but an old man, and a frightful-looking one at that, more skeleton than skin, face like a weatherworn stone, my body casting the shadow of some half-starved animal on the verge of collapse. You'd guess, just looking at me, I was eighty-five or ninety. You'd guess I was about to slip, in a single shalow breath, straight from this world to the next. Maybe you'd even swear you'd seen the likes of me on the porch outside some falling-down old folks' home, my body bound to a creaking cane walker, spit clinging to the corners of my mouth.

No, that's not me, though it might as well be. The fact is, I'm only seventy. I just look older. I feel older.

Even so, inside this body there's a child's story stirring, waiting to break free. Watch, my hands say, and I'll show you the story of that child, a child made strange and silent by circumstance, a beautiful dark star of a child who sixty-two years ago dropped to the ground as though he'd fallen from the sky.

In truth, the fall was from the great swinging branches and thick rustling leaves of a single tar-patched and withered Audubon Park oak. As he fell, the child's body crashed from branch to branch, and for those quick few moments he didn't know up from down and could hardly tell which limbs were his own and which the tree's, feeling only the sharp kick and swich and wallop of tumbling, a tumbling that would leave his body bruised and broken and wrecked.

Sixty-two years later and the ruin of that child's body, now an old man's remains. With the passing of one slow year to another, one creeping day to the next, that body grows more burdensome and debilitating and frail, as though the fall from the oak occurred not just once but again and again, each fall worse than the one before it -- swifter, more painful, more difficult to endure.

Even my dreams, though they've got a lifetime from which to take their stories, have now become dreams of falling. Mornings I wake, as often as not, with the sensation that I've just landed there in that bed after plummeting through the air, my body pressed so deep into the mattress it seems buried in the earth.

I feel chilled and nearly take myself for dead. I run my hands across my arms for warmth and wonder how it is I've sprouted these two frail twigs so coarse and insubstantial. They hang down from my shoulders as if some farmer has stuck them there to scare the dimwitted crows from his corn.

How, I ask myself, do this sunken chest and bent back manage to contain a beating heart. The same one that pumped inside a young man, a child, an infant? Such a change seems so improbable, so devastating.

Sometimes it feels as though my body has set about becoming the tree that, sixty-two years ago, if found itself falling from. Skin of bark and hair of moss -- I practically scare myself.

But my hands. Watch as I raise them up, as I place them in view of my swimming and searching eyes. See the fingers swollen out to their knotty, arthritic joints. See how the nails have gone cloudy and cracked. See how the crescent dash shaped blisters bubble out at the base of each thumb and jagged creases cut through the palms as though my fingers have just peeled open, after years and years, from the clenched fists they first formed.

You'd never guess that these hands have provided for my long life a measure of strenth that my body has otherwise lacked. They've put food on my table, earned me livelihood as real and true as any man has a right to expect. They've offered themselves in forgiveness and friendship and longing.

They've done more, though. They have. Keep looking and you'll see how they've waved grace over from its hiding place, waved and waved until something has finally swooped down as if from heaven or shot up from the ground like a pale new shoot. You'll see how each time I wwaved, there grace was, found where and when it was least expected.

Look: There's Minou Parrain, come to save the child.

Look: There's Edward Soniat, there's his frail daughter Margaret.

There's Genevieve Simmons, small and scared and terrifying.

There's proud Isabel and shy Adrienne.

There's Olivia and Elise, just children.

They've all got a gift for the child, don't they? They've all got a place in shaping the child's life, waving and waving to grace for the child's sake, for their own.

Who's going to save the child's life? Who's going to save his own? Who'll take the broken wings the child's limbs have become and show him the when and where and what-for of setting them in motion?

Well, it's been grace, nothing more or less, that has made its great good appearance before my eyes, taking on the most surprising of shapes. And I've made of it only a single request -- that I be allowed, when my voice can't or won't, to speak. Time and again, grace has answered. Time and again, it's said yes.

Go on, it says now. Tell your story while there's time.

I will, I answer. I will.

And so my hands start their trembling, start their shaking, and speak.

*** Sixty-two years ago, then, a child fell as if he'd fallen from the sky, and when he landed, he landed not just in the dirt and oak leaves and roots and not just beyond the hearing of family ears and the sight of family eyes but in a place beyond everything he'd ever seen or heard or known, and for the first time in his eight-year-old life the child realized, in the midst of his pitiful wailing, that he was utterly alone.

In fact this child had wailed like this before, still streaked with the blood of his birth, while two dark hands held him with the greatest of care, raising him high like Abraham raising Isaac in the forest's moonlit clearing, his mind full of heavenly fire. And then the child was set down, those two hands clutching him tight, thumbs crossed against the child's chest, fingers joined tip tot ip on the child's back, those two hands barely able to let go but letting go nonetheless, letting go forever.

At the time the child didn't know, couldn't have known, but only a few hours old, he'd been left like anohter of the Lord's early children, like Moses among the rushes, though not at the windswept banks of a gurgling stream, not wrapped in fine cloth or resting on silky cornthread leaves, not destined to be found by a maiden who'd make him a slave-freeing king.

No, he'd been left in a wood-and-wire banana crate, sticky paper peeling off its ends, at a certain Garden District doorstep in the city of New Orleans in the dripping summer's heat of 1926, a year when -- for the lucky and rich, I mean -- high times still swirled like a straw in a cold tall glass, a year when the turmoil and crisis and ruin that lay ahead had yet to step forward and show their faces. One war was done, and who knew there was another to come? Who knew the rich would soon turn poor and the poor turn desperate? Who was looking and listening not for the here and now but for what lay ahead?

And here was this child, left alone on the very day and hour of his birth, come from a a world those swirling high times hadn't touched, hadn't thought to pay any mind. Here was this child. Here was this single, inexplicable abandoning.

No, it's worse, my hands tell me. Not just abandoning.

This transaction.

This purchase.

Well, whatever its name, it was there, beyond that doorstep, past the white marble halls and floral wallpaper walls, through a patio garden of wisteria and oleander and persimmon, on back to the leaning white clapboard structure that had served once as rank and rotten slave quarters, now as the neatly appointed rooms of an unfortunate, privileged daughter -- it was there that the child would be looked after, cared for, loved.

His mother was to be -- and what difference could this screaming newborn infant discern? -- not the dark, desperate, secret woman who'd given birth to him but a crippled white girl of seventeen, a girl who wanted what she otherwise would never have: a child of her very own.

And look who has stepped up to give his daughter just what she's asked for. It's the widower Edward Soniat, adoring father and devout Roman Catholic, importer of fine European furnishings, sole proprietor of Edward P. Soniat International. He's got one office on Canal Street in New Orleans. He's got another in Paris and one more in Florence. He's got fingertips so fine they know in an instant what's oak or ebony or pine, what's the crinoline inside a woman's skirt, what's the cotton picked in a white-hot sun. Yes, his hands, just by the touch of his fingertips, know all that, for he's got arms and legs that stretch, like a Roman god drawn across the sky, from one continent to the next.

Don't be fooled, though. Edward Soniat knows the very insides of pain as if it's an animal he's hunted down and split open. He's watched his wife die from a sickness that spread like fire from her womb; he's watched the child that womb produced grow into a girl who for twelve years was happy and healthy and whole but who in the thirteenth year was not and would never be again, the doctors, one after the other, explained. Over time, they said, every muscle in that sweet girl's body would cease the give-and-take that allows a leg to bend, an arm to reach, a mouth to swallow, an eye to blink. Over time, those muscles would grow brittle and course, would stretch tighter and tighter, as if they'd been twisted, would bend the child's bones they way a string bends a bow, curling her limbs until they became useless for walking or reaching, for pulling the blankets over her body, for turning the pages of a book.

Over time? the girl's father, Edward Soniat, asks. How long does that mean?

But the doctors say their guesses are only as good as his own.

How long? He asks again.

Ten years, they say, and one adds, If you're lucky, Mr. Soniat, it might be fifteen.

But the father shakes his head, quiets his sobbing by closing his eyes, covering his face with his hands.

If you're lucky. If you're lucky.

But luck, he knows, has made its home in a foreign land, in some distant place where, though he'd go anywhere, he'll never go again.

So Edward Soniat, as age overtakes him -- swift as an arrow, sharp as that arrow's sharp point - finds himself transformed as surely as his daughter. He's become, through the years of her suffering and his own, a man as much of progressive temperament as of considerable means, believing as he does in nobility and decency, in women's suffrage, in mankind's equality, in christian determination and forbearance and responsibility. Edward Soniat presides, doesn't he, over a not-so-secret society that gathers in his grand New Orleans home, drinking the drinks that sailed back from across the globe in his sole possession, pondering questions of immense and impressive difficulty. They've promised, every one of these men, to entertain, then undertake, certain affirmative measures; promised to improve the earthly lot of one and all, black as well as white.

And so Edward Soniat is busy, this summer of 1926, devising his life's single greatest act, an act of devotion and love and grand charity.

Watch.

Soon enough, with all care and good speed, he has provided precisely what his daughter has asked for, the only thing she truly wants, she has said. Yes, he's provided it. Provided him. Provided this Negro child. Shelton Gerard Lafleur.

I'm an old man now, yes I am, but there's still time to consider, is there not, the manner in which such charity as Edward Soniat's might have taken root and grown, fueled by a daughter's sad, sweet longing, by a a father's christian mommitment, by one mighty, daring scheme.

Did this man, good as his gold, devise his plan among the books and green-glass reading lamps of his nut-wood and tapes-tried library? Or did he simply hunt, street by street and door by door, through the sity's ramshackle Negro neighborhoods in serch of a woman expecting a child she didn't want and couldn't feed, a woman in need of a few folded dollar bills more than this helpless body, this hungry mouth?

It's no matter, really. What's done is done.

Watch. Here it is. A child.

And here is Edward Soniat, good Christian soldire, ready to call this new child from the ragged blankets and clinging dirt of a bloody bed, ready to give that child a clean and shining home, providing not just the clothes for that child's body and not just teh food for that child's mouth but much more, much worse: his very name. Shelton Gerard Lafleur.

The child, that dark flower, was named out of nowhere, was he not? It was the very same nowhere from which he had appeared, only to land on that Garden District doorstep. Let's be clear: There were no Lafleurs in the Soniat lineage, no Sheltons or Gerards. And there was not, one can be certain, a note pinned to the crate granting the child a Christian name. Tasty and delicious, the peeling paper might well have declared. Try some today!

Look. There he is. Just a wailing child.

Well, here's two guesses in answer to a lifetime's question. Maybe the child was named by the young girl herself when she first took him into her arms, looked down into his dark but squeezed-shut eyes, held his thrashing body tight against her empty breasts, the girl crying with joy, shedding no end of tears, the name apearing on her lips as if it had come to her in a blinding white mometn of divine intervention.

That's his name, Daddy. I just know it, she says, looking up at her father through her tears.

Or maybe her father, Edward Pfister Soniat, is the one to speak. Isn't it his voice, after all, more than his daughter's, more sometimes than my very own, that still rings in my ears this many years later, one fine rich voice in a lifetime's mighty chorus? So maybe it's Edward Soniat who provides the name, just as he has provided this child.

Yes, he would have named the child, wouldn't he? I don't have to listen long or hard to hear his voice rising above the mighty chorus: I've given my daughter a child.

Watch, and you'll see what I see: There's Edward Soniat lowering his head as if in prayer, his oiled hair flopping down like a wave against his forehead, the wave's crest pricking at his eyes like a thorn. He pushes his hair back, runs the comb of his fingers over his head, runs it down to his neck, sweeps the palm of his hand across his brow. He frets, sweats, and worries, then rexolves that sure enough, he has done the right thing, has done a good thing, proper and just.

Keep looking and maybe you'll see Edward Soniat that same evening, alone now, staring at the green-glass library light, the great question he has put to himself hanging in the air, surrounding him, like it's been woven into the lingering cloud of his sweet tobacco smoke. doesn't he hear, past the patio and garden, from his daughter's bed, the child's cry, the quiet that follows? It's her wish but mine also, he declares. I am a man, God knows -- and he frets, sweats, and worries -- whose aim is goodness and grace and charity.

Again Edward Soniat runs his hands through his hair, lets his fingers come to rest at his neck. And mine, he goes on, is a charity that flowers with twin blossom, taking from one who can bear but cannot provide, giving to one who can provide but cannot bear.

Even so, this many years later, the question stands: Where'd the name come from? A tribute to some dead friend? To some secret, treasured association, some deep affinity or affiliation, some personal affair? Maybe he chose the name at random, guided by a certain unacknowledged disquiet and hesitation, by a reluctance to wholly confirm the trick he'd performed, the transaction he'd undertaken and now, having handed the child over to his daughter, completed.

This purchase, say these hands.

Years later, when tht child had become a young man, his wrecked, blessed hands painted a self-portrait with fierce, angry strokes, finished it with green lines running up and down the dark throat, swipes of white and red and yellow cut into the dark eyes, cut throughout the dark face, then named the work, the pen's point scraping on the course, painted paper the way Edward Soniat's must have scraped on his own years before: The Final Flowering of Shelton Lafleur.

I didn't know anything then, did I, for I'd go on to paint other self-portraits, a dozen of them, and each seemed to me a final flowering, with my right hand raised between the self I was and the picture I'd set about creating, my fingers pinched so low on the brush I could feel, or imagined I could, each bristle stick, bend, and then give as it spilled color onto the canvas. And each time I was done, when the work ws finished, I'd lower my hand and discover not what I'd made of myself but all I still didn't know, all I couldn't even guess at or, having guessed, comprehend.

And is it too much to suggest that I felt this not-knowing most fully when I raised my hand again to sign there the name I'd been given, the name that still sounded in my ears like a small, nagging question? Where'd I put that shiny nickel? Shelton Gerard Lafleur?

There I am at eighteen, at twenty, at twenty-seven, at thirty-five, gone north to make a name for myself, that name remaining the question it would always be.

There I am at forty and forty-one, forty-six and forty-nine, folks marveling at the gentle touch of my hands, swearing how it must be a miracle for one such as me, a poor, crippled Negro from New Orleans, to paint works that swing so wide of the primitive, far beyond what those works ought to be.

And there I am at fifty and fifty-three, at sixty-one and sixty-nine, back in the city of my strange, unfortunate birth, my terrible fall from the sky.

There, each and every time, the oil paint cracked, run through with lines, thick and swirling or thin and fine - there's that quesiton, my question: Shelton Gerard Lafleur?

Call that name and it's me who answers. Say, Hey, take a look, straight over there. The crippled one, the one leaning on those two canes, the one in that baggy coat and too-long tie, the one whose eyes trail off into nowhere, the one who looks, sure enough, about ready to die. That's that painter, that's that artist. Shelton Gerard Lafleur.

Well, that's me. It is. Still, there's that question; there's that child.

*** Seventy years old now, my body bruised and broken, but like a never-satisfied, ever-inquiring child, I'm still full of quesitons, one after the other in a steady line. So here's one more question for good measure: Doesn't truth, whether grim or glorious, always manage to provide a witness, one who sees and knows and understands, one who'll bear the news to all others?

Not always, maybe, but this one time it did, for there was, on that sweltering summer morning in 1926, another body there in that room, though it was pressed into the corner like a frightened mouse, like the smallest of the earth's creatures, eyes alight. It was the nursemaid, Genevieve, quiet and small but unable to disguise, had anyone looked to see, her trembling at this transaction, at the handing over of this child, the giving to this child a name.

Genevieve, ashen and ancient, would have been old enough, wouldn't she, for such a moment as this to spark some dim recollection or at least call to mind some frightful story she'd once heard.

A child pulled off his mother's breast and sold.

A man and woman divided.

A family torn apart.

How could she not have wept at such a sight?

So she did weep, invisible and silent though that weeping might have been, with remembered sorrow, with hidden rage. Yes, she wept and she thought and she prayed and finally, who knows how much later, she dreamed and imagined and plotted, holding the child's life in her hands as surely as the others, who passed him around from crate to doorstep, from charitable Christian father to grateful crippled daughter to that pair of untouched breasts.

So everyone in that white, bright, sunlit room -- father and daughter and child and nursemaid -- was, each to his own ends, weeping. somewhere else another voice was joining theirs, though no one heard it, though no one could. That voice, don't you see, was weeping too.

Well, it takes a lifetime for such a picture as this to show itself, to take its true shape in memory. The worst of secrets are left to unravel inch by inch from the cloth into which they've been woven. And then, so many years later, who's left to weave those secrets into something new?

You are, my hands say.

I'm too old, I say back. And anyway, I've already tried. Look at my pictures. Look how I've tried.

And besides, this is only a child's story, and isn't every such story, every child's, just a sad, pleasing fable, a tale of wonder and surprise, of mystery and miracles and coincidence, of people and places and incidents that appear before the child as if they've fallen, like the child himself would fall, straight down from the open sky?

So here he is, here's the child Shelton, a child who couldn't see, wasn't told, and so didn't know that the was born in some other house, to some other mother, that somewhere beyond the rough and tumble and tears and joy of early childhood was another woman weeping.

But I did try. My hands tried, I mean, though they had to imagine it and could imagine so little that my painting showed only the crown of the child's head cradled in his mother's arm, the child's head a large, mottled orb, the mother's arm sinewy and splotched, the perspective so magnified and close that my hands were able to depict, running through both the child's head and the mother's arm, the flow of blood, the purple, branchlike veins, and nothing more.

Mother and Child the width and hieght of my two hands, framed in old, chipped, gilt plaster but kept hidden in some dust-filled attic or drawer. The work of a sentimental, unskilled apprentice, the work cherished.