Black Sheep Boy
Page 1
Black
Sheep
Boy
a novel-in-stories
Black
Martin
Sheep
Pousson
Boy
Barnacle | Rare Bird
Los Angeles, Calif.
This is a Genuine Barnacle Book
A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books
453 South Spring Street, Suite 302
Los Angeles, CA 90013
rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2016 by Martin Pousson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
Set in Cochin
ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-61-9
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Pousson, Martin, author.
Title: Black sheep boy : a novel in stories / by Martin Pousson.
Description: First Hardcover Edition | A Barnacle Book | Los Angeles [California] , New York [New York] : Rare Bird Books, 2016.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-37-4. Subjects: LCSH Gays—Fiction | Bayous—Fiction. | Louisiana—Fiction. | Bildungsroman. | Family—Fiction. | Cajuns—Fiction. | Magic realism (Literature). | BISAC FICTION/Literary. Classification: LCC PS3616.O87 .B43 | DDC 813.6—dc23
For Odd Ducks, Strange Birds, and Queer Fish
Table of Contents
I.
TALES OF THE DÉRANGEMENT
Night Song
Revival Girl
Wanted Man
Masked Boy
Altar Boy
Flounder
Skinwalker
Revelator
II.
ACCOUNTS OF THE RECKONING
Father Fox
Most Holy Ghost
Black Sheep Boy
Feathers
Makeup
Two-Headed Boy
Dawn Chorus
I.
TALES OF THE
DÉRANGEMENT
“In response to Le Grand Dérangement, their mass exile and exodus from L’Acadie by the British, the Acadians began to sing sad songs of upheaval and loss but also strange songs of frogs and other creatures. These songs confused Les Américains, and that was part of the point.”
—Beausoleil Canard,
Cajuns: Three Countries, Two Continents
& One Weird Trunk
“Saute, crapaud, ta queue va bruler;
Mais prends courage, elle va repousser!”
“Jump, frog, your tail will burn;
But take heart, it will return!”
—“Saute Crapaud”
Columbus “Boy” Frugé
FOREWORD
Night Song
At the end of the long hot day, the wires snapped overhead, the power dropped in the house, and the air conditioner died again. Through the open window, bayou fog wound around my neck like a cottonmouth snake, with its breath of wet smoke. Cradled against my mother’s side, my wild head of hair rained sweat down my arm to a pair of twitching hands. The sweat bonded my mother to me as I looked to her face for a sign of recognition. We lay in her bed with a hurricane lantern, my left side propped up by her arm as her steady finger moved across the page of a book, tracing the black lines, the marks she called words. Out loud, she read each sentence with added stress, her face a dramatic mask of sound.
They haunted me, my mother and that book. The Blown-Around Room starred a white-cheeked boy who, in just a few pages, turned red as a crawfish. He’d been ordered to straighten his bedroom, but the pictures revealed him sleeping instead of cleaning. Or else throwing a ball at an imaginary basket until it bounced to the side and overturned all the boxes in his closet. Suddenly, everything that should’ve been hidden, everything that belonged in drawers or on shelves was sitting like an angry squall in the middle of his room, out in the open for anyone to see. At the sound of the crash, his mother pried open the door and—before her vigilant eye—he turned into a little monster. Red in the face with a wild bush of hair on his head, he no longer resembled the cherub of the opening. There was only one word for what he’d become at that point, and my mother called it out loud: “Devil!”
When her wide eyes turned to me, I knew what to do: I repeated the word and looked for her recognition. She nodded, letting me know that I got it right, then pointed again to the stormy face of the boy and the disaster that surrounded him.
“See,” she said, “see what can happen.”
In her view, every story had to have a point. She wanted to know the outcome, so she sometimes read the last page first, letting its revelation ring throughout the whole tale.
“Of course, he had to turn into a devil,” she declared, “for it said so in the end.”
At that, she clicked her tongue with vindication. The blown-around boy was locked in the tale by my mother, who was now the author, and I was his shadow.
I would make a mess of things too. I would knock over boxes meant to be shut, stumble over a tangle of clothes on the floor, fall down with a red face and a flaming bush of hair. The whole book—every word—was a sign of what would happen, of the horror ahead.
1.
Revival Girl
Under the fluorescent glare of the kitchen, Mama sang a gospel tune and shelved groceries to an imaginary beat. Each can, bottle, and box faced forward, like votive offerings. Lined in straight rows, the pantry rack collected a religious order, only missing gold leaf and stained glass. Food was hallowed in Louisiana, its magic put to work in all manner of faiths. Not just herbs for hexes but roots, leaves, seeds, bones, and skins. Spells, cures, omens, all called for some piece of a plant or part of an animal that might also land on a dinner plate. If you wanted to quell the nerves, you stuffed a bag with the hairy flower of frog-foot. If you wanted to hinder the heart, you stewed the hooked fruit of devil’s claw. And if you wanted to predict the sex of a baby, you swung a meaty tailbone over the pregnant belly. A steady swing meant a boy, a gyrating swing meant a girl, and an in-between swing meant a third kind of baby, the kind no one wanted to name.
There I stood in Mama’s tall shadow, the no-name kind of baby. The light from the fridge radiated a halo around her dark cloud of hair. A carton of eggs glowed in her hand. Her long legs shifted back and forth, like a crane at dawn. Even though she tapped her heels to the song, I knew better than to tap along with her or, worse, to twirl across the linoleum flapping my hands in the air. By three, I’d learned penance for the jitters when Mama strapped down my restless hands with duct tape then ordered a doctor to fit braces on my twisting feet. By five, I’d learned sacrifice for the stutters when another doctor cut out a flap of flesh to correct my tangling speech. Mama showed me the horn-shaped piece to prove a point: the devil had me by the tongue. So I did my best to walk straight and talk steady.
Still, my feet pranced and my arms swung more than any boy Mama had known. At first glance, my body seemed drawn into the right shape, but my walk swished and swayed, and my hands flapped in the air or flitted at my side. A tremor in my chest pushed my ribs out when I grew anxious, as if I might burst. At times, I stared at a point between my eyes before boxing my ears with two fists or slapping my face with an open palm. Just what brewed inside me? Mama wondered. Just what made up my tailbone? Soon, she’d open that carton of eggs in her hand. Soon, she’d test that boy on the floor.
Cousins, blood relat
ions, were the only boys Mama had known before marrying at sixteen. Short boys smelling of foul ditches, with loose tongues, rough hands, stiff lips, headed for the half-life of the oil patch. And the only man she knew, her towering father, had gone by the time she hit her teens, leaving her to tend two baby sisters and, as she put it, a baby mother. The girls made monstrous faces from the floor, crying for milk, syrup, toys, solace.
Her mother, my mamère, was an angry baby too, full grown, with three daughters and half a husband, but prone to pouting for days on end and pulling at her face until marks and stains rose on her skin. Jaundiced, with an odd yellow cast and a flame-red mark near her left eye, she frowned and winced and usually wore what the frosted-wig Cajun ladies called le grimace.
“That woman is marked,” they said, while rubbing their hands over a set of rosary beads. As soon as they heard she was from Sulphur, they knew the cause. That place looked, smelled, and tasted yellow. Water streamed with colored bits, soil crumbled into colored chunks, and air choked with colored clouds. Oil derricks clotted the town like metal birds boring for food. Tanker trucks rocked the roads leaving a tail of exhaust fumes and a crest of mineral traces. Who could look at all that and see anything but the devil?
Mama had heard the legends about her mother’s town and her father’s cove, where Sabine men dug into the swampy ground with their own homemade drills and bits to raise houses on piers. Or else they pushed off the land altogether to float in house boats on the Vermilion or the Teche, the phantom limbs of the Mississippi. Any oil drilled out of the ground, any minerals pumped into the air, didn’t belong to them. They owned no land, only boats, no farms, only fishing nets. And they did their best to outrun the changing tides and shifting coast of the gulf.
A girl in that place was her own dowry. With sable-black hair and a body that swayed like a cattail reed, Mama could’ve had any Sabine man. The center of her irises flashed a speckled green and her skin flushed with a copper flame. She was true Cajun on one side, la vraie chose, but Sabine on the other, an odd mix of French, African, and a dying Indian tribe. The wolf-faced boys opened their mouths in a howl when she passed. But she wanted no half-life, no half-husband, no near-man. She wanted no floating home. So she sang to herself and waited for a boy from another town and the exit sign.
And what had she learned before she left the cove, before she married? That the devil lurked everywhere, in drinking water, in mud under your shoe, in the wrath and cholera of family. That faith had to be conjured, cooked up with a powerful hand. That women snapped at each other like crawfish in a boiling pot while men ran like horses through wide open fields.
Her father had galloped in and out the front door for years, sometimes with another woman at his side. He reared back, dropped her on the couch, then hollered into the kitchen for a tall girl. He laughed at his own joke, calling his tall daughter to bring him a tall can of beer. Mama got the joke but didn’t laugh. She worried how he magically pulled a six-pack from a paper sack while she rationed lost bread for her sisters, spiked off milk with syrup, and shaved slices from the block of gray cheese. Yet if the bread, the milk, the cheese, and—yes—the beer rankled, her father’s women impressed Mama with their light hair and light eyes and elevated him above their lot.
He was elevated in other ways too. As part-time minister in the church of the Pentecost, and as full-time voodoo traiteur, my papère soared even before his crane of a daughter. In a tent revival, he stood head and shoulders above the penitents when he walked the aisles waving the Holy Bible. He leaned over weeping women and called foreign words out of their mouth. He shouted down stooping men and pulled ailments out of their body. Throughout, he smiled wide, his forehead glistened, and even the fillings in his teeth gleamed in testament to his word. Then at home, he raised his hand to the porch ceiling to hang black chickens, their guts dripping like yellow rain. From his seat on a wingback chair, he cured a baby’s deadly whooping cough with a rabbit’s belly and the milky sap of a tala tree. He ground up stinging nettle to make a gullet-scorching brew for a man who cheated him in cards. He burned onion skins for money and peanut shells for luck. He rubbed his hairy hand over a doll with a worried cross-stitched mouth while Mama’s cousins collected at his feet and called him Chief.
Her father could work magic both ways, the white voodoo and the black. The rumor was, given some moolah, a shot, and a pair of dice, he could solve any predicament. He’d throw the numbers on the ground, slam the shot down his throat, then strut around like a rooster with his tail on fire until he finally slapped his hands together and shouted, “Sweet Jesus!”
And, like that, he could tell you in exactly what part of the woods to find a thirty-point buck or how to exhume a dead skunk from under your house with nothing but a chain of beer tabs, a fish hook, and a free hand. He knew from whose backyard to steal the best sassafras root, which herbs needed rubbing together to cure a child’s croup, and how to boil chicken gizzards and bayou gum to induce an immobilizing pox or a severe case of the runs for whoever dared to cross you.
With shoulder-length hair, a hawk-like nose, and a chin so sharp it could work as a nutcracker, in her stories Mama’s father was the one man who could hold the entire world, steady and straight. Once, he spun an egg in his hand before her very eyes without it ever falling or hitting the ground. With a single tap, the whole shell fell away like brittle candy and there stood the perfect egg.
Yet she also saw her father crack. She watched him heat up a spoon with black tar before sticking a needle into his skin. Or else he rolled up tin foil and stuck a straw in a line of smoke. Soon she smelled it—the sulfur in the air—and with that whiff, she knew he’d become the other man. He might, with a single horse kick, put a hole through the bedroom door. He might run outside and send a fruit tree sailing through the front window. He might tear the whole house in two.
Just before she turned thirteen, Mama saw her father lifted in his wingback chair by a sheriff and two deputies. He refused to budge when they showed a summons, so they carried that chair off the porch and onto the lawn where they dumped him into a net. He let loose a howl as they slapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrist then laughed and shouted a streak of hot words in French. Her mother emerged from the bedroom, suddenly an old lemon-faced woman, crying that she had married a werewolf, while women in wigs stood at the edge of the ditch, clucking their tongues. The red lights flashed and the siren shrieked as they drove her father away.
Yet they couldn’t drive him out of her mind. Her eyes saw him everywhere: in passing cars, in big-armed trees, in a waking dream. He stood onstage under a tent wide as a sugar cane field. His feet floated above the ground and his hand reached out to heal a congregation of writhing people all at once. A young girl sang at his back, a raucous number that made the tent shake from side to side. He slapped his hand on the Bible then turned up a palm with an egg in the center, a brilliant white. Then the dream flickered and went dark on a single dancing flame.
Within weeks, she found a tent, filled with rolling bodies and a tall minister hoisting the Good Book overhead. A girl was pulled onstage to sing lead on a gospel song. When the words left her mouth, the tent billowed and the poles buckled. “He’s got the whole world in His hands,” she sang, as if each syllable were followed by an exclamation mark. People lifted their heads to the sky, shook their lips open until words tore out, and yanked their own hair until their scalps bled. Those with shoes tossed them onto the stage and joined those without. Together, they dug their feet into the muddy soil making a greasy floor. In the middle of all that grease, they danced faster and faster, more and more furiously, sawing their legs in and out to the beat of the gospel song. Some ripped at a sleeve or a collar, others were left standing in their underwear before the minister shouted a foreign word and promised to drop them in the water. When she caught his eye, though, she saw a ring of yellow and knew his magic was phony. His smile was too tight, his forehead too dry, and his hands too small
. That minister had none of her father’s power, none of his fire or faith. No man did. Not any minister anywhere, not one of her cousins or uncles then, and not her husband now.
When she made her move out of the dark roux of the swamp, Mama headed for the light grain of the rice field. She traded the Pentecostal faith for the Catholic one. She donned a mantilla and gloves, gave up the week-long revivals, the robed choir, the stamping feet and overturned chairs, and even the language of tongues—all for a man with a job in another town and a car to drive her away. To her, away meant another world. It meant a new life. It meant the promise of anywhere but here.
Even so, she made a gumbo faith, a jambalaya religion. During Mass, she wondered at the mortification of the saints, the bloody Crucifixion of Christ, and the seven swords in the Mother of Sorrows. She endured the boredom of the liturgy and the drone of the homily. Yet at home, she turned on the AM radio to hear the storm of a gospel song break out in her ears, a chorus of voices rising in a ferocious wind, lifting her higher and higher, on a soaring bird, a galloping horse, carrying her further and further away.
The man she married—my father—had a dry forehead, like that phony minister, she said. Small hands and a small quiet chest too. He’d taken her no more than half an hour from the bayou cove and gave her no more than half a house. A duplex apartment with plastic counters, plastic floors, and plastic lights overhead. It was brick, she had to admit, not cinder block. And the walls weren’t stuffed with bousillage. But still she wanted out.
Her mind rattled with maps and compasses and a spinning wheel of direction. Her ears echoed with the hum of old women and old stories. Her eyes burned with flaming creatures and the yellow sign of a dead-end. And now in the altar of the kitchen, she wanted to know: could I deliver? Could I direct her out of here?
Mama raised her hand to testify, playing minister, choir, and congregation all at once. She sang louder and higher than the radio, her voice rocking the air around us until it shook like a thunder cloud. Half the words drowned under the raining clap of her hands, while the other half tore out in a lightning flash.