what the blood remember

Chapter One: Fourth Period

Elijah Freeman had exactly eleven minutes between the second bell and the moment Denise Arceneaux’s hand shot up with a question that had nothing to do with fractions, and he had learned to spend those eleven minutes praying, though he never called it that out loud. Praying that the air conditioner in Room 14 would hold through June. Praying that the boy in the back, Marquis, would eat the breakfast the school gave him instead of pocketing it for his little sister again. Praying, some days, for something he could not name, a low hum of wanting that lived beneath his ribs and had nowhere in particular to go.

He was twenty-eight years old and had been teaching fourth grade at Fannie C. Williams for four years, ever since he had come back from Baton Rouge with a degree in education and a stubborn refusal to leave New Orleans a second time. His mother, Yvonne, said he had the city in his blood the way some people had sugar in theirs — inherited, inconvenient, permanent. His grandmother, Mother Odessa, said the city did not so much run in Freeman blood as Freeman blood had once run the city, back when her people owned a funeral home on Dryades Street and half of Central City had passed through their hands on the way to glory. She still had the ledger books somewhere, water-stained and half illegible, names of the dead going back to 1911, and she liked to remind Elijah that a Freeman had been keeping careful record of this city’s grief for longer than most of its churches had stood.

His classroom told the story of who he had decided to become when he came home. The walls were papered with a hand-drawn map of the Ninth Ward that his students added to every year — corner stores, second-line routes, a star over Mother Odessa’s church because three of his kids attended it too, and he had let that count as extra credit once and never quite lived it down. He kept a jar of butterscotch candy on his desk that he refilled out of his own pocket, told himself it was for good behavior, and privately handed out pieces to anyone who looked like they had had a hard morning, behavior or no. Denise Arceneaux, nine years old and already convinced she was going to be a lawyer, asked him more unrelated questions in a single class period than the rest of the room combined, and he had long since stopped trying to redirect her. Instead, he built fifteen minutes of buffer into every lesson plan to accommodate her curiosity.

He lived alone in a shotgun double off Elysian Fields, the kind of house that had belonged to some family or another since before the flood, with high ceilings and a long straight hallway you could see clean through from the front door to the back. He had painted the porch a blue his grandmother called haint blue and swore kept trouble from crossing the threshold, whether or not either of them fully believed it. He worked Thursday and Friday nights bartending at a place on Frenchmen because a teacher’s salary in Orleans Parish did not stretch as far as rent did, not even close, and he had made an uneasy peace with the exhaustion of it — up at six for a room full of nine-year-olds, on his feet behind a bar until two, home in time to sleep four hours and do it again. His mother worried about that schedule more than she worried about almost anything else concerning him. He told her, every time, that he would rather be tired and solvent than rested and behind on the light bill, and she would click her tongue and let it go, the way she let go of most arguments she knew she was not going to win.

He had not been in love — not really, not the kind that rearranges furniture in your chest — since a boy named Terrence had broken his heart clean in half back in undergrad at Southern, packed a U-Haul for Atlanta without so much as a real conversation about it, and left Elijah with the private theory that maybe some people simply were not built to keep another person. That he had some quality, some inherited restlessness or unremarkable ordinariness, that made staying feel to other men like a chore rather than a choice. He did not say this theory out loud, not even to his closest friends, but he carried it the way people carry old injuries — mostly forgotten, until the weather changed and it ached again. He had dated some since. Nothing that lasted longer than a season. More than once, standing behind the bar and watching couples order drinks for each other without having to ask what the other wanted, he had told himself he had made his peace with being the uncle who spoiled everybody else’s kids, the friend who hosted the crawfish boil, the good-hearted single one who filled his hours with other people’s Sunday dinners and called it enough.

He did not know, that Tuesday in late June, while folding graded spelling tests into a folder and listening to the window unit rattle its familiar complaint against the heat, that the theory was about to be tested in ways no breakup ever could — tested and, eventually, unmade entirely, though it would take him the better part of a year to believe it.

He did not know anything yet.

That was the last truly ordinary week of his life, and he spent it the way he spent all the others: grading papers with the ceiling fan turning lazy circles above him, calling his mother on Sundays to hear about her garden and her knees and whichever cousin had gotten into whichever trouble, avoiding his grandmother’s questions about when he was going to bring somebody around to Sunday dinner, and closing out the bar at two in the morning to the sound of a trumpet three doors down that never seemed to stop — not really, not even after the player himself had packed up and gone home — as if the street kept the notes going on its own out of sheer habit. He fell asleep most nights to that ghost of a sound, half music and half memory, and never once thought to wonder whether it was waiting on something, or someone, the way he sometimes suspected, in the loneliest hour before sleep, that he might be waiting too.