Me and Julio Down by the Boneyard
But it turns out, I have to tell you twice.
Part One
Fifteen years ago, I moved to New Orleans with my friend, D.
We spent three days in a rental car with my mom, cold calling apartment listings out of the Gambit weekly, visiting one wrong place after another. We briefly considered a big two bedroom near campus, across from a graveyard. We thought: it’s New Orleans, the whole city is a graveyard, why be picky - but kept looking anyway.
Then we found the Palmer Avenue house: one side of a shotgun, about half a mile up from St. Charles. It had a low front porch with a swing, up the steps and inside to a living room, a den with a brick fireplace, a bedroom, the bathroom, another bedroom, the kitchen, all in a row. A shotgun: open the front door and shoot, your bullet sails right out the back without hitting a (living) thing.
It didn’t happen right away. We got there before the movers, and there were no disturbances that first week. It wasn’t until after we had settled into our own beds, when, in the middle of the night, the doorbell rang. Not just once. Over and over, like there was an emergency on the porch.
We were young, which means we were fearless even if we didn’t realize it. We got up, huddled together in the doorway and turned on the porch light.
The front door was original: a fifteen-light single French door, just a single pane of glass between us and the front steps someone would need to be standing on in order to ring the bell. But when we turned on the light, there was nothing. No silhouette, no retreating step.
We opened the door and peered outside. Nothing in any direction. Just New Orleans in late August, so humid you could reach out and paw the air aside.
It was unsettling, but we went back to bed. You can explain away anything that only happens once.
But the next night, it happened again. And the one after that. Doorbells, a litany of them. We stood in the swampy porch light at 2am and looked up and down the street. It was so quiet we could hear the streetcar clang.
We asked our neighbors on the other side of the house, but they hadn’t heard a thing. Maybe check the wires? We checked the wires.
And that’s how we found out that our doorbell didn’t work. Not when we rang it.
The whole city was a graveyard, right?
That weekend we decorated the apartment. D took some of her candles - the tall glass kind, filled with white wax and printed with pictures of the saints - and lined them along the mantle of the fireplace in the den. We put some inside the hearth. It looked great. It also looked like an altar.
And that night, the doorbell didn’t ring.
So we named the ghosts: Julio and Esmerelda. We thanked them for their hospitality. The doorbell stopped ringing.
Life got busy and we’d forget about the doorbells. Once we used them to flatten out rolled posters to hang on the wall. That night the doorbell exploded, rang like it had been hotwired. We threw the door open and the porch was empty, just thick Louisiana air and the mosquito trucks spraying quiet down the streets.
We put the candles back and used books instead.
The doorbell didn’t ring again that night, or the next. I never heard it ring again.
When my brother visited, we set him up in the second room. In the morning, as I asked whether I’d woken him up coming home late the night before, I noticed the candles askew. My brother said he slept fine, and he was just glad I got in okay.
When I looked confused, he asked if that hadn’t been me, ringing the bell in the middle of the night.
Part Two
When I had the idea to write this in two parts, it was because I didn't trust myself. Retelling this over years, I’d worn away the actual memory, like a piece of paper refolded too many times.
When I checked with D, her version expanded mine but didn’t change it. I’d condensed it enormously over time, and every one of her details was one I’d lost, including the fact that the doorbell was broken. Almost immediately the forgotten version merged with my memory, and the experiment failed. I just had the story, again.
Next, I figured if I researched the house I’d find some evidence of the ghosts. But it wasn’t as easy as I thought. The cities I work in are nearly entirely digitized, I can reach into their pasts from my living room. Should I have been surprised that it was not so in New Orleans, that unearthing the real story would require reimmersion in the only world where it made sense? So I cobbled together what I could - it was hard to find even routine information, but the details were marvelous.
In 1930, 2418 Palmer Avenue was occupied by a widow named Dorothy and her 19 year old son, John, who rented it for $40 a month . I never found the owner’s name, but they had dropped the rent to $25 by 1940, when that two bedroom floor-through housed no fewer than seven people: Louis and Bernice Henton, their three children (Louis Jr., Eugene, and Valerie), a sister in law, Ina Lenois, and a 28 year old brother in law with the delightful name of Guy McGehee. Ina was the only one with a college degree; she worked as a stenographer. Louis was a salesman, and Guy worked as a collector. I assume a collector of bills, although a professional collector of things - jewels, shells, umbrellas, anything, really - would be more worthy of that name.
And that's all I found. The rest of their stories had been swallowed up by time and piled on the heap of history. But I'd lived where they'd lived. I’d slept where they slept. I could imagine their lives in that space we shared, and it made them so real to me I could feel the fabric of their shirt collars between my fingers. But that was it.
I kept looking long after I knew I wouldn’t find anything. I clicked on map after map. 1910s, 1920s, I watched Tulane’s campus go up, 30s, 40s, I watched the street names change. Eventually the map settled into a configuration I knew by heart, once. The rush of the forgotten and the familiar made my heart ache. I hadn’t toured these streets since before Katrina.
For a long time, it felt like that hurricane blew my whole life off course. I took it personally. But when I zoom out, it looks a lot more like a coincidence. The way I was, I didn’t need more than a strong breeze. And it wasn’t that dramatic, what happened to me: an ordinary life that I intercepted with one perhaps slightly less ordinary.
All those houses, all those lives, just lines on census records. How ordinary, all of us.
We always need a ‘reason’ for a haunting, a great tragedy, a lost love. But what if you just miss the way your sister’s kitchen smelled. Or the way the leaves of the great oaks lining the street rustled in the night wind, the soft metal roll of the streetcar in the distance.
I left no mark on that city. If I researched my time there, I’d come up just as empty. But I can’t tell my story without it. No other place in my life has felt quite like that porch at night. Maybe a little part of me never stepped back inside, is forever scanning up and down a balmy deep south avenue in the dark.
And then it sat me up in the middle of the night. A salesman. A collector.
Just the sort of people who’d ring the bell.
Comments
Post a Comment