Anne Tyler - Searching for Caleb

"You'll have to speak up," said the old man.

"Oh. Sorry. It struck me-"

"Justine, I think my battery's going."

"Will you let the man speak?" Duncan said.

So that Eli, with the last of his patience worn away, ended up blurting it out after all and ruining the moment he had planned for so long. "Mr.

Caleb Peck," he said, "is in Box Hill, Louisiana, alive and well."

It had struck Eli right off that there was one thing the same in all accounts of Caleb Peck: he was a musical man. To his family that was only a detail, like the color of his eyes or his tendency to wear a Panama hat just a little past the season. But to Caleb, wasn't it more? Eli pondered, sifting what he had heard and endlessly rearranging it. He traveled a few blind alleys. He scanned the alumni lists of several well-known music schools, including Baltimore's Peabody Institute. He checked the family's old phonograph records for performers whom

Caleb might have been moved to seek out. He inquired as to Caleb's piano teacher-someone young and pretty, maybe? Someone inspirational, to teach him those Czerny exercises he found crumbling away on top of the piano in old Mr. Peck's Baltimore parlor? But no, the Czerny was Margaret Rose's, said Mr. Peck. Caleb had not liked Czerny. He was not, to tell the truth, very fond of the classical mode. And he had never had a music teacher of any kind. Only little Billy Pope passing on his fiddle lessons, and a leatherbound book telling how to play the woodwinds (which in those days were really made of wood- see the ebony flute in Caleb's old bedroom?) and for the piano, Lafleur Boudrault, who taught him ragtime.

Was this Lafleur Boudrault young and pretty, by any chance?

But Lafleur Boudrault was the Creole gardener, not pretty at all- a scar down one cheek and a permanent wink. Long dead now. Survived by his wife Sulie. He wouldn't have helped out anyway: a cross-grained sort.

Eli traveled once again to Baltimore and sought out Sulie, who was moving a dustcloth around and around the attic. Nowadays all she did was dust.

She would not give up her cloth, which had to be pried from her fingers in her sleep as you would pry a pet blanket from a child in order to wash it. And what she dusted was not helpful at all-never the furniture, which Lord knows could use a dusting, all those bulbs and scallops and crevices; but only the hidden places that didn't count, the undersides of drawers and the backs of picture frames and now these trunks and cartons in the attic, which she had been on for weeks and weeks. They couldn't get her to stop. They wanted to pension her off; didn't she have family somewhere? They were almost certain there had been a daughter. But Sulie only laughed her cracked, rapid laugh and said, "Now you wants to do it.

Now you wants." Oh, she was mad, no question about it. But Eli needed Caleb's contemporaries and there were not all that many to pick and choose from.; He climbed the narrow, hollow, pine-smelling steps to Laura's attic, submerging first his head and then his shoulders and then his wool-wrapped body in a heat so intense that it seemed to be liquid, and/at the last he was merely floating upward in a throbbing dull haze.

He swam between crazed china hurricane lamps and slanted portraits, across rugs rolled and stacked like logs, toward the spindly figure briskly polishing an empty Pears soap box down where the dusty light fingered its way through the louvers. "Mrs. Sulie Boudrault?" he asketf, and without looking up she nodded and hummed and went on polishing.

"Widow of Lafleur Boudrault?"

She nodded.

"You wouldn't happen to know where Mr. Caleb Peck has got to."

Then she stopped polishing.

"Well, I thought they wouldn't never ask," she said.

She settled him on a china barrel, and she herself sat on a stack of St.

Nicholas magazines with her dustcloth clutched daintily in her lap. She was a very small woman with stretched-looking skin and yellow eyes. Her manner of speaking was clear and reasonable, and her story proceeded in a well-ordered way. No wonder: she had had over half a century in which to arrange it.

"When first Mr. Caleb had left us," she said, "I told Lafleur, 'Lafleur, what do I say?' For I know where he had went to yet I would hate to give him away. 'Lafleur, do I lie?' 'That ain't never going to come up,' he say. 'Them folks don't think you know nothing.' Well, I was certain he was wrong. I waited for old Mrs. Laura to fix me with her little eyes.

She the one to watch for. Mr. Justin the First couldn't do nothing, maybe wouldn't have anyhow, but he had that Mrs. Laura so scared she would do it for him and more besides. She was one scared lady, and it had turned her mean and spiteful. Watch out for Mrs. Laura, I told myself, and so I watch and waited and plan how to answer what she ask. But she never do.

Never once. Never even, 'Sulie, do you recollect if you served Mr. Caleb breakfast that day?' Never a word."

Sulie set her skirt out all about her-a long draggled white eyelet affair that hit halfway down her skinny calves, with ankle-high copper-toed work shoes swinging below them. After thinking a moment, she dug down into her pocket and came up with a handful of Oreos, mashed and limp. "Have you a cookie," she said.

"Thank you," said Eli.

"She never ask. Nor none of the others. Took me some time to see they never would. 'Why, looky there!' I say to Lafleur at last, and he say, 'Told you so. They don't reckon just old us would know nothing,' he say.

So my eyes was opened. That was how. I made up my mind I wouldn't tell till they say straight out, 'Sulie, do you know?' And Mrs. Laura I wouldn't give the time of day even. I never did. She Live forty-six years after Mr. Caleb had went and I never spoken to ht9r once, but I don't fool myself she realize that. 'Sulie is getting so sullen,' was what she say. Even that tooken her five or so years to notice good."

Eli finished the Oreo and dusted off his hands. From his pocket he took: a spiral notebook and a Bic pen. He opened to a blank page.

"Now," said Sulie.

She stood up, as if to recite.

"Mr. Caleb was a musical man," she said.

"I had heard he was."

"He like most music, but colored best. He like ragtime and he copied everything Lafleur do on the piano. He like stories about them musicians in New Orleans, which is where Lafleur come from. Lafleur had got his self in a speck of trouble down there and couldn't go back, but he would tell about the piano players in Storyville and what all went on. Understand this was back long time ago. Didn't many people know about such things.

"Then times got hard and Miss Maggie Rose left us. I had to move on over to Mr. Daniel's house and tend the babies. I was not but in my teens then. I had just did get married to old Lafleur. I didn't know much but I saw how Mr. Caleb was mighty quiet and maybe took a tad more to drink than was needed. But I never thought he'd leave. One night he come down cellar to our bedroom, me and Lafleur's. Knocks on our door. 'Lafleur,' he say, 'this fellow down at the tavern is talking about a trip to New Orleans.'

" 'Is that so/ say Lafleur.

" 'Wants me to go along.'

" That so.'

" 'Well, I'm thinking of doing it.'

" 'Why, sure,' Lafleur tell him.

" 'Permanent,' Mr. Caleb say. 'Unannounced.'

"But still, you see, we didn't have no notion he was serious.

"He ask Lafleur was there someplace to go, to stay a whiles. Lafleur mention this white folks' boardinghouse over near where his sister live at. Mr. Caleb wroten it down on a piece of paper and fold it careful and left. We didn't think a thing more about it. Come morning he arrive for breakfast, sometime he would do that. Eat in Mr. Daniel's kitchen. 'Fix me a lot now, Sulie,' he say. 'Can't travel far on an empty stomach/