The House on First Street by Julia Reed

Author:Julia Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

10

DURING THE NEXT several weeks, I made a regular loop from Baton Rouge to Greenville to New Orleans and back, with the odd trip to New York thrown in between. Natchez is on Highway 61, between Baton Rouge and Greenville, so on the morning after my birthday, I stopped to see Rose for the first time. It had been two weeks and two days since we’d had the conversation about evacuating, but since then I’d talked to her on the phone enough to know that she had no privacy in the house with Thomas’s cousin, whom she did not know, and she’d spent whole days standing in line applying for FEMA money.

She couldn’t tell me exactly how to get to the cousin’s house and I don’t know Natchez well, so we agreed to meet in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart. I had barely made it out of the car when she ran over and picked me up off the ground. Thomas is a proper, reserved sort, so he stood by the car smiling slightly with his arms folded while we whooped and hollered and carried on. I was brimming with promises and enthusiasm—I’d blithely assumed that as soon as it was possible, she’d want to return to New Orleans just like me. But when I mentioned finding them an apartment in the event that theirs had been damaged, I could tell she was terrified at the thought of coming back. And then I stopped for a minute: Of course she was. All she had seen for the last two weeks was television footage of people—the great majority of whom were members of her race—wading through the floodwaters, waiting on rooftops, perishing in front of the convention centers; members of her own family had come terrifyingly close to being among them. Then there were the warnings of typhoid and cholera, and, after that, of toxic mold spores from the dried sludge (which Brobson had already characterized as more of the same alarmist hooey). In the best of times, as Roseanna reminded us whenever they got into it, “Rose’s nerves are bad.” The first thing she had asked me was if I had seen any snakes.

Unlike me she had a lifelong history in the city, but no financial investment. Even if I’d dreaded the thought of returning, I would need to get pretty chipper pretty quick, on the assumption that there was not much market for a half-finished house in a hurricane-walloped city. But Rose and Thomas rented their apartment; their neighborhood was in far worse shape than mine. Thomas had worked as a mechanic in the same garage for years, but his boss had never given him benefits of any kind, not even health insurance. The only reason for either of them to return would be the tug of roots and family (I knew without asking that Roseanna, who owned her house, would not stay gone for long), but I could tell it might be a long hard pull and I couldn’t blame them.

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