Dufresne - Deep in the Shade of Paradise

Deep in the Shade of

PARADiSE

by JOHN DUFRESNE

FOR CINDY

What do we know but that we face One another in this place?

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Contents

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awokeAye, and what then?

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

The Loudermilks

(from Alvin Lees Bible)

Family Tree of the Documented Fontanas As Near As Grayson Berard Can Figure It.

(Dates Approximate in Some Cases.)

Deep in the Shade of

PARADiSE

If I write it down, then I dont have
to remember it. I write to forget.

BOUDOU FONTANA

E arlene Fontana did not name her baby Willie Fox or George Jones. She named him Bergeron Boudeleaux deBastrop Fontana, and she calls him Boudou, rhymes with Who do? And, naturally, weve kept our eyes on this final Fontana. Hes got all his physical parts. Hes a handsome boy, in fact. Reddish hair, dark brown eyes, freckles. Hes got all his mental apparatus as well, and then some. He can taste sounds, smell words, things like that. When Boudou was six, he could put together a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle in two minutes. There are no cloudy days for Boudou, but there is the day the cumulonimbus clouds in the southeast blew up into the shape of a sleeping armadillo. And he can tell you that that day was a Tuesday, September 24, or whatever. And he can tell you what he ate for breakfast that day and how it tasted. He can tell you what was playing at the cineplex, and if he happened to have read the business page of the News-Star while eating his grits, he could repeat every quote from the New York Stock Exchange. Some folks here in Monroe think, Well, thats it, then, isnt it? Thats the Fontana curse, that reckless memory. Others of us think, How can recollection do a person harm?

In case you were not around for our earlier story concerning the ill-fated Fontana clan, you need to know a bit of what we have chronicled: that ever since the sudden appearance in the Delta of Peregrine, the first Fontana, in 1840, the family has suffered a magnificent history of mischance, misfortune, miscarriage, misadventure, and ruination in Ouachita Parish. Now, granted, some families will swim the occasional woeful lap in the gene pool (like the Hippolytes over to Solomon Alley, who had the several hydrocephalic babies in a row), but what has befallen our Fontanas surpasses understanding. For generations, nothing but illness, depravity, reckless and fatal bravado, improbable accident, all manner of tragedynatural, manufactured, and, some contend, divinely inspiredhas visited the children of Peregrine. Clever Fontana, dim Fontana, graceful or clumsy or sorry-assed or enterprising Fontanano differenceall of them star-crossed, doomed. Like these:

Ajax. When Le Terre des Leperaux opened in Carville in 1894 to treat what weve come to call Hansens Disease, hospital administrators decided it prudent to have the patients delivered on river barges at night. Ajax was the pilot in charge of the operation, and, as fate would have it, he fell in love with a member of his cargo, a delicate young woman from east Tennessee named Birdie Rodale, who was in the early stages of infection. Ajax, charmed by her delightful and self-deprecating wit and keen intelligence, convinced himself that beauty was skin deep, that love did not enter through the eye, but through the heart. However, as Birdies disease progressed, as her nose collapsed, as she lost the blinking reflex, developed corneal ulcersher eyes now dollops of glazed meringue on her nodulous and swollen faceas her hands curled and her toes blackened, Ajax found himself repulsed by her and sickened by his own repulsion. Unable to face Birdie or to face his own ugly and abhorrent behavior, Ajax filled a croker sack with stones, tied the sack to his waist, and stepped off the barge into the Mississippi.

Alvin and Clement were identical twins and were in love with each other. Yes, in every way. Early one summer evening, after inspecting the mulberry trees in their garden, after cocktails on the veranda, the gentlemen climbed to the roof of the Layton Castle, held hands, and leaped. They landed face down in the oyster-shell drive. Clement, unfortunately, lived, lived to be ninety-five, and ended his days counting cockroaches on the ward ceiling at the North Louisiana Hospital for Mental Diseases.

Doak loved persimmons. He was eighteen when it happened, bald, chunky, and wearing thick, wire-framed spectacles. Doak shinnied his way out a persimmon branch, reached for a ripe persimmon, heard a crack, grabbed the fruit just as the branch split and dropped him onto the spear point of a wrought-iron fence below, impaling him through the gut. They found Doak with his eyes opened, the spectacles dangling from one ear, his lips puckered, the persimmon half eaten.

Wythe died when he swung the butt of his rifle at Faxon Mendinghalls coon dog and shot himself in the face. Ransom treated his luxuriant hair with camellia honey and egg yolk one evening and then made the mistake of setting his sleeping bag beside a fire ant mound. James in Flames got his name when a carnival fire-eater he was standing too close to swallowed a bit of fuel or accelerant or something and then belched, spraying James with fire. Luckily James got stopped, dropped, and rolled by the bearded lady and the pinhead. He died two years later while grouse hunting out by Cheniere Break. He got the bright idea of flushing the birds with dynamite. He lit the fuse and tossed the tube toward the thicket. His bluetick, Blaze, fetched it and chased after James in Flames till he caught up with him, and they both exploded.

And so on and on. And were not only talking unusual deaths here. The Fontanas have been the sickest and the most executed white family in the history of Louisiana. Why? we ask. Why such relentless catastrophe in one family? And heres the thing: We will not accept an answer like Just acause or No reason. We wont accept the premise that nothing is responsible for something. Life may, now and again, seem implausible, but our understanding of it is not. Nothing is random. Everything connects. Not chaos, incongruity, and agitation, but design, significance, and harmony, thank you very much.

And so in trying to understand the seemingly incomprehensible Fontana experience, we come to rely on theories which resonate with our particular awareness of this world, like the aforementioned theory of the curse (an idea supported by our mainline Christiansas you will hear) or of tremendously bad karma (by our New Agers, who sometimes confuse coincidence with cosmology) or of genetic mutation (by our medical communityhomeopaths excepted [and which is really a variation of the bad-seed theory posited by our Holy Rollers]) or of improper diet (our nutritionists, both at the Ouachita Parish Family Health Center and Wellness Clinic and at the mall) or of simple perversity (our atheist)well, theres no end to it. You all, of course, are free to believe whatever you wish to believe (if you honestly believe that youre free of your syntax and your vocabulary). Anyway, its not important what we all make of the Fontana calamities, but what Boudou makes of them. His two half-brothers, Duane and Moon Pie, came to early and violent ends, and their daddy, Boudous daddy, Billy Wayne, died on the very day Boudou was conceived. Whats the boy to think? His momma told him you only find what youre looking for. If youre looking for a curse, well then, youll sure enough find you a curse.