Father Jean Paul Eden gave thanks to God for such a beautiful morning, cleansed by yesterday’s rain. He was out for his morning walk, standing at the corner of Lafayette and Carondelet and waiting for the light to change. It was a little ways north from there to the Church of the Rebirth in the French Quarter. If he kept his pace up he could be back by nine.
The light turned green and Eden crossed the street, taking in his tattered city as he went. There was still so much work to do! In his unguarded moments, the sheer enormity of the task threatened to overwhelm him.
Although it was known as the Big Easy, New Orleans had always been hard for the rest of the country to fathom. Centuries ago, after the slaves in Haiti threw out the British and the Spanish, they finally threw out the French as well. The victorious freemen then came north to help their mainland neighbors do the same, and they brought their black magic with them.
New Orleans became a chapter in the American Storybook unto itself. To a white-bread country, it was a scandalous distant cousin of a city – a heady brew of voodoo and Catholicism and Mardi Gras, a gumbo of brothels and jazz and ragtime and gambling. The Devil’s playground. And yet, if the Devil’s best trick was to convince Man that he didn’t exist, then the people of New Orleans were one step ahead of the game, because they knew better. They knew that if the Devil didn’t exist, then neither did God.
The kind of people who thought like that were the kind of people Father Eden was honored to serve. To him, they were the very salt of the earth, and he had known them since the day he was born. He grew up dirt poor on the bayou, the adopted son of a querulous alligator poacher in an extended family of moonshiners and fishermen. His adoptive mother, bless her soul, never left her husband, although she had every reason to. She would take little Jean Paul in their flat-bottom boat on Sunday mornings to attend Mass and pray for strength. Her husband was superstitious enough to believe what his cousin told him. Catholic priests practiced voodoo, the man whispered over whisky, and if his woman was going to church every week he best not beat her so much, or it’d all come back on him in the afterlife.
Church-going probably saved the woman’s life, and it made a lasting impression on her boy. Sunday afternoons at the Church’s orphanage playing with the other kids was the highlight of his week, and it always broke his mother’s heart to take him home. When he was old enough, he volunteered whenever he could for whatever the sisters needed. At first it was mostly to get away from his father, but it soon became a calling. By the time he was twelve, Jean Paul Eden knew what he wanted to do with his life.
He became a priest because he wanted to continue doing what he had done while he was growing up – helping the children around him, wherever he found himself. He didn’t do it for a reward or for any sort of recognition. He wasn’t angling for bishop or for any kudos from the Vatican; he was simply doing what he thought needed to be done, with whatever resources were available. Eden was a natural priest, holding the children of God together when everything was falling apart around them.
He kept up his brisk pace, looking around as he neared the French Quarter. The Superdome was off to his left and the Convention Center was off to his right, twin memorials to the man-made portion of the Katrina disaster. Thousands of people huddled in the public buildings for days on end while the world watched on TV, including most of the Louisiana National Guard, who had been sent to the Iraqi desert along with their deepwater equipment. Not that they could have done much to save their city, but they wanted to be there to try.
The spectacle at the Superdome had been a piteous sight. The president’s mother even paid a visit to console the suffering hordes. She toured the building with a phalanx of stern secret service agents, and she didn’t utter a discouraging word. On the contrary, she allowed that since so many of the people were already underprivileged, living in a sports arena was working out quite well for them.
There was plenty of blame to go around. Government had failed miserably at every level, on both sides of the aisle. While the city drowned, the President was attending a sing-along at a campfire in Arizona, confident that his FEMA director was doing a heckuva job, while the mayor was spitting mad and blaming everyone but himself for failing to evacuate his own city.
Katrina tore the lid off the whole soggy mess, and the entire world got to see it play out on TV for days on end. When the President finally got a clue, New Orleanians had the unique privilege of sitting on their rooftops and waving as Air Force One flew majestically overhead, while federally dispatched mercenaries prowled the city streets below.
Police officers and bus drivers had shamefully abandoned their duties, leaving their fellow citizens stranded and dying. Tens of thousands who fled the storm had nothing to go back to and stayed wherever they wound up, destitute and dependent on the kindness of strangers. Those who stayed behind were castigated as ignorant, shiftless fools, even though many of them didn’t have the ways and means to flee. And even if they did, they worried that whatever they left behind would likely be looted, so they stayed and took their chances, and many of them drowned.
Eden spent three sleepless days in a rowboat, doing whatever he could to save whomever he could find. He teamed up with Mr. Silverstein, a secular Jew who owned the newsstand across from Eden’s church. They took turns paddling Mr. Silverstein’s aluminum dinghy through the low-lying neighborhoods surrounding the crescent of high ground on which the original city was built.
The Church of the Rebirth was Eden’s parish in the French Quarter, one of the original neighborhoods of the Crescent City. The church and its school became one of the many makeshift shelters that sprang up all over the region. Sister Nancy and her nuns tirelessly performed whatever first aid they could, referring to their old Girl Scout manuals and cutting up their habits for bandages when they ran out of clean bed sheets. Across the street, Mr. Silverstein had a dozen people camped out in his living room, who were fed three kosher meals a day by his Orthodox wife Sophie.
When Eden and Mr. Silverstein weren’t rescuing people from rooftops and attics, and when Eden wasn’t administering Last Rites, and when they weren’t weeping over what they found in the fetid rubble, they kept their minds off their weariness and hunger with a lively debate about God and Nature, and the nature of Man.
Though they agreed on almost nothing, they became good friends. Afterward, Mr. Silverstein sometimes attended Father Eden’s Masses, sitting in the back pew with his arms crossed in mulish skepticism, but he was consistently one of the biggest contributors to the Church’s many neighborhood drives.
Eden waved good morning to Mr. Silverstein, sitting in the shade under the awning of his repaired newsstand, and trotted up the front steps of the church alongside a sturdy construction ramp. The nineteenth-century granite walls had shrugged off the hurricane, but the roof hadn’t. The steeple was blown away, and after all these years the roof was still mostly blue plastic tarping that leaked whenever it rained. The ramp was almost as old as the blue plastic roof, a semi-permanent installation while they nudged their reconstruction efforts along whenever donations would allow.
He was about to step inside when he heard a flirtatious young lady’s voice behind him. “Hey, Father Eden.”
He smiled and turned back to her. Women had flirted with him all his life. It was the cross he had to bear, and they never let him forget it. Especially Britney and her mother Sharon. They were a pair of eye-popping mulatto beauties from a local family, who claimed that when God spoke to them, He had a French accent. And Eden didn’t doubt it a bit.
Britney and Sharon were dressed in crisp jumpsuits and ball caps. They were lucky to share a full-time job at the Campbell’s Soup food bank, and worked a weekly drop-off at their parish church into their rounds. Joyce guided her daughter Britney up the ramp, who was walking backwards, pulling a dolly stacked with canned goods. Eden eyed all the food and offered his weekly blessing: “Mmmm, mmmm good!”
Britney put her back into it like a pro, smiling over her shoulder at Eden as her mother steered her. Joyce had her daughter when she was barely out of grade school. Her boyfriend promptly made himself scarce and her family turned her away, but the Church of the Rebirth didn’t. She became one of their many orphans, and both she and her daughter grew up within the walls of the convent. Britney had a crush on Eden since she could walk, and her mother had long given up trying to discourage her. Eden was used to it by now.
They stopped at the top of the ramp and smiled at the priest, framed in the doorway. Joyce always suspected that it was God’s punishment for her past sins of the flesh, having to work alongside a priest who was so damn good-looking. She often wondered if he even realized it, but so far as she could tell, he didn’t.
“I got it,” he told them, and took over for Britney. She curtsied and giggled, and her mother grinned and smacked her shoulder. With a careful nudge of his foot, Eden jockeyed the dolly up the aisle, the women a step behind him. They all crossed themselves as they passed the altar and swung to the left, heading for a closed door.
Sharon scooted ahead and got the door. The hallway beyond was a temporary plywood corridor that led to the building next door, where the school’s kitchen was located. It was also where the altar boys prepared for Mass. The plaster ceiling of the vestibule behind the altar failed in the hurricane, and the room was still boarded up.
Eden rolled the dolly into the corner beside the walk-in refrigerator, carefully depositing the neat stack of boxes beside several others. The other boxes were crammed with rusty and dented cans of food, the things that most people, if they had a choice, didn’t care to eat. But Eden eyed the accumulated bounty with a grateful smile, and turned to Britney and Sharon.
“Thank you, ladies.”
They smiled back. “Always happy to help,” Britney said, and her mother Sharon nodded.
“Anytime you need us...” she added, but she blushed as Britney eyed her sidelong and jabbed her in the ribs.
Oh, Lordie! Sharon thought. There I go again, flirting with a priest. I’m gonna go to Hell for sure.
She peeked at Britney, but her daughter had her attention on something else. Sister Nancy was approaching from the classroom corridor. The old nun had been both of the women’s grade school principal, and she still had the power to make them nervous with little more than a glance. If there was one thing that all the students learned from Sister Nancy, it was how to watch their P’s and Q’s.
Britney and Sharon curtsied to her and Nancy nodded back, but her focus was on Eden. The ladies took the hint.
“We best be off, now,” Sharon said to him, and he grinned back, understanding. Sister Nancy had that effect on people, but that was why the students at the Church of the Rebirth had such good grades. No one would dare set foot in a Rebirth classroom without knuckling down, and when it came to lunch, they ate whatever was put in front of them. Sister Nancy wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Thanks again, ladies. Bless you,” Eden said to them.
Britney and Sharon smiled goodbyes, and curtsied to him for good measure before they went back down the temporary hallway and into the church. Eden watched them go and then turned to Nancy with a knowing smile, but she was occupied with other thoughts.
“What’s on your mind, Sister?” he asked, sensing her mood, and growing concerned.
Nancy cast about for the right way to tell him. “Well, the truth is...” She didn’t quite know how to put it. She glanced around, and Eden leaned a little closer.
“Yes...?”
She finally peeked at him, and her face crinkled in a crafty smile. “Your request! I just got the call!”
For a fraction of a second, Eden was puzzled, and then he remembered. His eyes widened in surprise. After all these years, he thought. No, it couldn’t be!
“Haiti?” he asked her. Nancy nodded, smiling at him.
Eden was stunned and delighted. It was like he just won the lottery. And in a sense, he had. His dream posting finally came through, years after he wrote it off as a childhood fantasy.
“My God, at long last...!” he breathed. But at the same time, his mind was racing. How could he possibly go now?
“Congratulations! I know how much it means to you,” she said to him, a gentle hand on his shoulder, but all he could do was nod as the implications set in. He was actually going to Haiti! It was unbelievable, but there it was.
“When do I leave?” he asked her.
“Soon. Next week!” she said.
He glanced around the kitchen. It was cluttered with stacks of donated food. It all had to be sorted and distributed. There was so much to do.
“How will I get everything done?”
“We’ll manage, Father. We always have, and we always will.”
He looked into her eyes and smiled. She wasn’t about to let him back away from his dream. She was a remarkable woman, he thought. One of the strongest souls he had ever encountered. He really had her blessing; he was free to go.
“It’s going to be so good to finally get down there,” he said. She nodded, understanding, and patted his arm.
“Closure, Father?” she gently asked him.
It had taken her a long time to warm up to that word, but if there was ever a time to use it this was the time. Eden’s past was an open wound for nearly as long she’d known him, and she’d known him since before he could talk. Eden nodded, but his smile waned a bit, thinking of the road ahead. “The mission comes first, of course. But it’ll be good to learn a little more about my family. My mother, especially.”
A sad cloud passed over Nancy, and she nodded. “It still grieves me to think what that poor young woman must have gone through, in that ramshackle old clinic.”
She shuddered at the thought, but Eden gently smiled.
“God has His own way of balancing our lives. That’s His job. And ours is to help Him.”
That brought her spirits back, and he winked at her, a gleam in his eye. “And if He needs me in Haiti, all the better, eh?”
He had a knack for making people smile. He always did. He would do well in Haiti, she thought. That poor country was in worse shape as New Orleans.
She grinned at him, and then her smile faded as she remembered something and her eyes drifted away from his. “He needs your help with something else, Father.” She looked back to him. “Do you remember the Aly family, the Coptic Christians?”
Eden nodded. The name was familiar to him.
“Fareed Aly jumped from his balcony this morning,” Nancy told him. “His brother and sister are in a bad way.”
Eden closed his eyes, pained by the memory. He saw the whole dreadful thing on the news, just the other day. Of all the sadness in the city now, it was something that even the newscasters were troubled by. It just didn’t make sense.
Eden crossed himself, and looked at the floor. “He was my age. Such a shame.” He finally looked back to Nancy.
“Of course, Sister. I’d be glad to visit them.”
“Thank you.” She took a deep, steady breath to calm herself. “I just hope someone catches that monster.”
Eden nodded in agreement. “Even God would be hard-pressed to forgive this one.”