“It was the vitamins. I never should’ve taken them,” she’d say to Henry in a nervous voice. “I was afraid I’d lose another baby. So many lost babies. The doctor said the vitamins would help.”
“And they did. Because here I am, Maman,” Henry would say.
“She sent me a letter and told me I have to hide the bird,” she’d say, worrying the black beads between her frantic fingers.
Flossie would come out and lead Henry’s mother back to the big white house. “Come on, now, Miss Catherine. The saints won’t mind if you have your lunch.”
Henry would sneak away to Louis once more, and the two of them would hop the Smoky Mary out to the West End of Lake Pontchartrain, where they could fish from a pier in Bucktown, take a picnic near Old Spanish Fort, or play music in the Milneburg resorts and camps.
Louis never called him Hal. It was always Henri, said in a drawl as sultry as the air over the Quarter: “Let’s get us a mess of crawfish, Henri.” “You hear the way he laid out that line, Henri?” “Henri, don’t be a slowpoke. Ever’body’s waitin’ on us down at Celeste’s.”
And Henry’s favorite: “Moi, je t’aime, Henri.” Henry never wanted the summer to end.
Then, on a terrible, still day in August, Gaspard died. Before Louis could stop him, the sweet hound tore after an alley cat and was struck by the ice man’s truck as it rounded the corner of Rampart. There was a screech of wheels and one awful yelp. Louis and Henry pushed their way through the crowd. With a howl of his own, Louis sank to his knees and cradled his dead dog. The driver, a kindly man with a jowly face, removed his hat and patted Louis’s shoulder like a father, sorry as could be. “He just come outta nowhere, son. Wadn’t time to stop. I’m real sorry. Got three dogs, myself.”
Louis was inconsolable. Henry bought a bottle from the Italian widow and they took refuge in the attic garret, Gaspard’s body wrapped in a blanket on the bed. Henry held Louis while he cried, feeding him sips of strong drink till Louis was glassy-eyed. Later, Henry borrowed a car from one of the patrons at Celeste’s, and they buried Gaspard out in bayou country under a lacy willow tree and marked the grave with a roast bone stolen from Flossie’s kitchen.
“She’d kill me if she knew I took her best soup bone,” Henry said, taking off his sweat-drenched shirt.
“He was a good dog,” Louis said. His eyes were red and puffy.
“The best.”
“Why do all the things I love gotta leave me?” Louis whispered.
“I’m not gonna leave you,” Henry said.
“How you gonna get your father to let you stay?”
Henry chewed his lip and stared at the freshly tilled earth. “I’ll think of something.”
“Promise?”
“Promise,” Henry said, but he had no idea how.
Late August settled in, bringing a bank of hazy clouds that promised but did not deliver rain. After a day of stifling heat, Henry and Louis sat on a blanket beside a cascading vine of morning glories, their mood tense. There’d been a cable: Henry’s father was returning from Atlanta the next day. School would start the week after Labor Day. Henry would be miles away from Louis.
“Why don’t you just tell your father you don’t want to go?”
Henry laughed bitterly. “No one says no to my father.” He yanked a morning glory from the vine and crushed it between his fingers.
“What that plant ever do to you?”
But Henry wouldn’t be joked out of his misery. At boarding school, Henry would be stuck in a regimented, colorless life of morning chapel, Latin, bullying upperclassmen, and innuendo about the way Henry walked and talked. There’d be no jazz or crawfish boils or fishing from the pier. There’d be none of the eccentric characters they knew from their haunts in the Quarter, men and women who looked after the two boys as if they were delightful nephews. There would be no Louis. Henry felt it as a physical ache.
In the dirt, Louis scratched a heart. Inside, he wrote L + H. Henry went to erase it before someone saw. Louis stayed his hand. “Don’t.”
“But—”