Snatching up the wire cutters, I thrust open the piano lid and applied myself to the strings. One by one I clipped them, in spite of Roderick’s howling and wailing, in spite of his hands clawing at my shoulders as he tried in vain to prevent me from severing his heart strings. As I worked my way down to the bass register, the howling stopped, and I felt only a weak pawing at my ankles. And then there was nothing.
When I completed my task, I turned and saw what I had done. For a moment, a horror lay on my rug, the red and white and black ruin of the man I had loved. And then his flesh deliquesced in an accelerated process of decay as unnatural as his protracted life. A deep groan sounded, as of crumbling masonry and walls, and then my world was rocked with the slow collapse of Hawthorne House, falling in on itself like a house of cards, dissolving, like its master, into featureless dust and rubble.
I was rescued from the wreckage by my neighbor on the other side. He gave me strong coffee laced with rum and chocolate chip cookies for shock and called the police and the fire department. He is neither beautiful nor mysterious, and he made his fortune writing code for a computer game I had never even heard of. He prefers klezmer music to opera and South Park to the Romantics. He reads science fiction and plays video games. We were married in the spring, right after final exams, and moved uptown to an apartment in a modern tower with square white rooms and views across the river. We have no piano, no harp, not even a guitar. But sometimes in the deep of winter, when the dark comes early and the wind shrills at the bedroom window, I think I can hear an echo of the red piano.
The Fiddler of Bayou Teche
Come here, cher, and I tell you a story.
One time there is a girl. Her skin and hair are white like the feathers of a white egret and her eyes are pink like a possum’s nose. When she is a baby, the loup-garous find her floating on the bayou in an old pirogue and take her to Tante Eulalie.
Tante Eulalie does not howl and grow hair on her body when the moon is full like the loup-garous. But she hides in the swamp same as they do, and they are all friends together. She takes piquons out of the loup-garous’ feet and bullets out of their hairy shoulders, and doses their rheumatism and their mange. In return, the loup-garous build her a cabin out of cypress and palmetto leaves and bring her rice and indigo dye from town. On moonlit nights, she plays her fiddle at the loup-garous’ ball. The loup-garous love Tante Eulalie, but the girl loves her most of all.
Yes, the girl is me. Who else around here has white skin and hair and pink eyes, eh? Hush now, and listen.
Tante Eulalie was like my mother, her. She name me Cadence and tell me stories—all the stories I tell you, cher. When we sit spinning or weaving, she tell me about when she was a young girl, living with her pap and her good maman and her six brothers and three sisters near the little town of Pierreville. She tell me about her cousin Belda Guidry, the prettiest girl in the parish.
Now, when Belda is fifteen, there are twenty young men all crazy to marry her. She can’t make up her mind, her, so her old pap make a test for the young men, to see which will make the best son-in-law. He make them plow the swamp and sow it with dried chilies and bring them to harvest. And when they done that, they have to catch the oldest, meanest ’gator in Bayou Teche and make a gumbo out of him.
I thought Tante Eulalie was making it all up out of her head, but she swore it was true. It was Ganelon Fuselier who won Belda, and Tante Eulalie was godmother to their second child, Denise.
Ganie cheated, of course. Nobody can pass a test like that without cheating some. Seemed to me like cheating was a way of life in Pierreville. The wonder was how the folks that were getting cheated never learned to be less trustful. I thought if I ever went to Pierreville, and Ganie Fuselier or Old Savoie tell me the sky is blue, I’d go outside and check. And if Murderes Petitpas came knocking at my door, I’d slip out the back.
Tante Eulalie’s best stories were about Young Murderes Petitpas. He was like the grasshopper because he’d always rather fiddle than work, though ’Dres was too smart to get caught out in the cold. How smart was he? Well, I tell you the story of ’Dres and the Fiddle, and you judge for yourself.
Once there’s this old man, see, called Old Boudreaux. He has a fiddle, and this fiddle is the sweetest fiddle anybody ever hear. His old pap make it himself, back in eighteen-something, and when Old Boudreaux play, the dead get up and dance. Now, Young ’Dres thinks it’s a shame that the best fiddler in St. Mary’s parish—that is, Young ’Dres himself—shouldn’t have the best fiddle—that is, Old Boudreaux’s pap’s fiddle. So Young ’Dres goes to Old Boudreaux and he says, “Old Boudreaux, I’m afraid for your soul.”
Old Boudreaux says: “What you talking about, boy?”
Young ’Dres says: “Last night when you were playing ‘Jolie Blonde,’ I see a little red devil creep out of the f-holes and commence to dancing on your fingerboard. The faster he dance, the faster you play, and he laugh like mad and wave his forked tail so I was scared half to death.”
“Go to bed, ’Dres Petitpas,” says Old Boudreaux. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”
“It’s as true as I’m standing here,” says Young ’Dres. “I got the second sight, me, so I see things other people don’t.”
“Hmpf,” says Old Boudreaux, and starts back in the house.
“Wait,” says Young ’Dres. “You bring your fiddle here, and I go prove it to you.”
Of course, Old Boudreaux say no. But Young ’Dres got a way with him, and everybody know Old Boudreaux ain’t got no more sense than a possum. So Old Boudreaux fetches his fiddle and goes to hand it to Young ’Dres. But Young ’Dres is wringing his bandana and moaning. “Mother Mary preserve me!” he says. “Can’t you see its red eyes twinkling in the f-holes? Can’t you smell the sulfur? You got to exercise that devil, Old Boudreaux, or you go fiddle yourself right down to hell.”
Old Boudreaux nearly drop his fiddle, he so scared. He don’t dare look in the f-holes, but he don’t have to, because as soon as Young ’Dres name that devil, there’s a terrible stink of sulfur everywhere.
“Holy Mother save me!” Old Boudreaux cry. “My fiddle is possessed! What am I going to do, ’Dres Petitpas? I don’t want to fiddle myself down to hell.”
“Well, I go tell you, Old Boudreaux, but you ain’t going to like it.”
“I’ll like it, I promise. Just tell me what to do!”
“You give the fiddle to me, and I exercise that devil for you.”
Old Boudreaux so scared, he hand his pap’s fiddle right over to Young ’Dres. What’s more, he tell him to keep it, because Old Boudreaux never go touch it again without thinking he smell sulfur. And that’s how ’Dres Petitpas get the sweetest fiddle in the parish for nothing more than the cost of the bandana he crush the rotten egg in that make Old Boudreaux believe his fiddle is haunted.
Yes, that Young ’Dres made me laugh, him. But Tante Eulalie shook her head and said, “You go ahead and laugh, ’tit chou. Just remember that people like ’Dres Petitpas are better to hear about than have dealings with, eh? You ever meet a bon rien like that—all smiling and full of big talk—you run as fast and as far as you can go.”
That was Tante Eulalie. Always looking out for me, teaching me what I need to know to live in the world. By the time I could walk, I knew to keep out of the sun and stay away from traps and logs with eyes. When I got older, Tante Eulalie taught me to spin cotton and weave cloth and dye it blue with indigo. She taught me how to make medicine from peppergrass and elderberry bark and prickly pear leaves, and some little magic gris-gris for dirty wounds and warts and aching joints. Best of all, she taught me how to dance.
Tante Eulalie loved to play the fiddle, and she played most nights after supper was cleared away. The music she played was bouncing music, swaying music, twirl around until you fall music, and when I was very little, that’s what I did. Then Tante Eulalie took me to the loup-garous’ ball, where I learned the two-step and the waltz.
I took to dancing like a
mallard to open water. Once I learned the steps, I danced all the time. I danced with the loup-garous and I danced by myself. I danced when I swept and I danced when I cooked. I danced to Tante Eulalie’s fiddling and I danced to the fiddling of the crickets. Tante Eulalie laughed at me—said I’d wear myself out. But I didn’t.
Then came a winter when the leaves were blasted with cold and ice skimmed the surface of the bayou. Long about Advent-time, Tante Eulalie caught a cough. I made her prickly pear leaf syrup and willow bark tea for the fever, and hung a gris-gris for strength around her neck. But it didn’t do no good. At the dark of the year, she asked me to bring out the cypress wood box from under her bed. I opened it for her, and she pulled out three pieces of lace and a gold ring and put them in my hand.
“These are all I have to leave you,” she said. “These, and my fiddle. I hope you find good use for them someday.”
Not long after, the Bon Dieu called her. She went to Him and her friends the loup-garous buried her under the big live oak behind the cabin and howled her funeral mass. I was sixteen years old now, more or less, and that was the end of my girlhood.
It was the end of my dancing, too, for a time. When I saw Tante Eulalie’s fiddle lying silent across her cane-bottomed chair, I fell into sadness like a deep river. I lay in a nest of nutria skins next the fire and I watched the flames burn low and thought how nobody would know or notice if I lived or died.
Some time pass, I don’t know how much, and then somebody knocks at the door. I don’t answer, but he comes in anyway. It is Ulysse, the youngest of the loup-garous. I like Ulysse. He is quiet and skinny and he brings me peanut butter and white bread in a printed paper wrapper, and when we dance at the loup-garous’ ball, everybody stops and watches us. Still, I wish he would go away.
Ulysse sniffs around a little, then digs me out of my nest and gives me a shake. “You in a bad way, chère,” he says. “If Tante Eulalie see how you carry on, she pass you one big slap, for sure.”
“Good,” I say. “I like that fine. At least she be here to slap me.”
Not much Ulysse can say to that, I think, and maybe he will go away now and let me be sad by myself. But he has another idea, him. He sniffs around again and starts to clucking like an old hen. “This place worse than a hog pen,” he says. “Tante Eulalie see the state her cabin is in, she die all over again.” He picks her fiddle and bow up off her chair. “Where she keep these at?”
To see Ulysse holding Tante Eulalie’s fiddle gives me the first real feeling I have since it seems like forever. I get mad, me, so mad I go right up to Ulysse, who is bigger than me by a head, who has wild, dark hair and long teeth and sharp nails even when the moon is dark, and I hit him in the stomach.
“Tiens, chère! What is this? Why you hit your friend Ulysse?”
“Why? Because you touch Tante Eulalie’s fiddle. Put it down, you, or I make you.”
“Put it up, then,” he says, “instead of curling up like a crawfish in winter.”
I take the fiddle like it was an egg, and hang it on its hook over Tante Eulalie’s bed. And then I start to cry, with Ulysse holding my shoulders and licking my hair like a wolf licks her cub till I am calm again.
After that, I clean the cabin and make myself a gumbo. I string Tante Eulalie’s big loom with thread she spun and dyed, and I weave a length of pale blue cloth. The water rises to the edge of the porch and the nights get shorter. I set lines to catch fish, and make my garden with the seeds Tante Eulalie saved. The loup-garous still knock on my door, and I treat them for mange and rheumatism and broken bones, as Tante Eulalie always did. But I don’t dance at their balls. I take my pirogue out at sunset and paddle between the big cypress trees and listen to the frogs sing of love and the roaring of the ’gators as they fight for their mates.
One night, paddling far from home, I see lights that are not the pale feu follets that dance in the swamp at night. They are yellow lights, lantern lights, and they tell me I have come to a farm. I am a little afraid, for Tante Eulalie used to warn me about letting people see me.
“You know how ducks carry on when a strange bird land in their water?” she says. “The good people of Pierreville, they see that white hair and those pink eyes, and they peck at you till there’s nothing left but two, three white feathers.”
I do not want to be pecked, so I start to paddle away.
And then I hear the music.
I turn back with a sweep of my paddle and drift clear. I see a wharf and a cabin and an outhouse and a hog pen, and a big barn built on high ground away from the water. The barn doors are open, and they spill yellow light out over a pack of buggies and horses and even cars—the only cars I’ve seen outside the magazines Ulysse sometimes brings. I don’t care about them, though, for I am caught by the fiddle music that spills out brighter than the lantern light, brighter than anything in the world since Tante Eulalie left it.
I paddle toward the music like a moth to a lit candle, not caring that fire burns and ducks peck and the people of Pierreville don’t like strangers. But I am not stupid like Old Boudreaux. I am careful to hide my pirogue behind a buttonbush and I don’t come out in the open. I stalk the music like a bobcat, softly, softly, and I find a place behind the barn where I think nobody will come. And then I dance. I dance the two-step with my brown striped shawl, tears wet on my face because Tante Eulalie is dead, because I am dancing alone in the dark, because the fiddle is crying and I cannot help but cry, too.
The moon rises, the crickets go to bed. The fiddler plays and I dance as if the dawn will never come. I guess I keep dancing when the music stops, because next thing I know, there’s a shout behind me. When I open my eyes, the sky is pale and gray and there’s a knot of men behind the barn with their mouths gaping like black holes in their faces.
One of them steps forward. He is tall, broad-shouldered, and thick, and he wears a wide-brimmed hat pulled down low over his eyes, glittering in its shadow like the eyes of a snake in a hole. I throw my shawl around my shoulders and turn to run.
As soon as I move, all the men gasp and step back. I think that a little fear makes ducks mean, but a lot of fear makes them run. I give a hoot like a swamp owl, hold my shawl out like wings, and scoot low and fast into the cypress grove.
Behind me, there is shouting and lights bobbing here and there like lightning bugs. I creep to my pirogue and paddle away quiet as a watersnake, keeping to the shadows. I am very pleased with myself, me. I think the men of Pierreville are as stupid as Old Boudreaux to be frightened by a small girl in a striped shawl. Maybe soon I will go and hear the music again.
Next night, Ulysse comes knocking at my door. He sits down at the table and I give him coffee and then I go to my wheel and set it spinning.
“I hear tell of a thing,” says Ulysse over the whirr of the wheel. “It make me think.”
I smile a little. “Think?” I say. “That is a piece of news. You tell your friends? Old Placide, he be surprised.”
Ulysse shakes his head. “This is serious, Cadence. Up and down the bayou, everybody is talking about the haunt that bust up the Doucet fais-do-do.”
I look down at the pale brown thread running though my fingers, fine and even as Tante Eulalie’s. “There weren’t no haunts at the Doucet fais-do-do, Ulysse.”
“The Doucets say different. They say they see a girl turn into a swamp owl and fly away. What you say to that, hien?”
“I say they drink too much beer, them.”
He brings his heavy black eyebrows together. “Why you go forget everything Tante Eulalie tell you, Cadence, and make a nine-days’ wonder with your foolishness?”
“Don’t scold, Ulysse. The people of Pierreville for sure got more important things to talk about than me.”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” Ulysse says darkly. “What you doing at the Doucets’?”
“Dancing,” I say, still teasing. “Who is the fiddler, Ulysse? He play mighty fine.”
Ulysse is still not smiling. “He is a bon rien, Ca
dence, a bad man. Shake hands with Murderes Petitpas, you go count your fingers after.”
I almost let the wheel stop, I’m so surprised. “You go to bed, Ulysse. Tante Eulalie make ’Dres Petitpas up out of her head.”
“He real, all right. Everybody say he sell his soul to the devil so he can play better than any human man. Then he fiddle the devil out of hell and keep him dancing all day and night until his hoofs split in two and the devil give ’Dres his soul back so he can stop dancing. ’Dres Petitpas is the big bull on the hill, and mean, mean. You stay away from him, you.”
I maybe like Ulysse, but I don’t like him telling me what to do—Ulysse, who eats rabbits raw and howls at the moon when it’s full. I pinch the thread too tight and it breaks in two.
“Eh, Cadence,” he says, “you going to hit me again? Ain’t going to change what I say, but go ahead if it make you feel better.”
I don’t hit him, but I am maybe not very kind to him, and he leaves looking like a beaten dog. I hear howling, later, that I think is Ulysse, and I am a little sorry, but not too much.
Still, I do not go out again to dance. Not because Ulysse tell me, but because I am not a couyon like Old Boudreaux.
Two, maybe three nights after, I hear a thump against my porch and the sounds of somebody tying up a pirogue and climbing out. Not Ulysse—somebody heavier. Old Placide, maybe. I am already up and looking for my jar of fly blister for his rheumatism when there’s a knock on the door.
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