Black Sheep Boy

by Martin Pousson

  Before I reached high school, Mama told me other tales about her father and his people, the Sabines, impossibly poor half-breed shrimpers and swamp-dwellers who—legend had it—were swindled by a pack of strangers bearing gifts. Men with smooth suits and smooth hair walked onto their land but with a rough speech that confounded the Sabines. The strangers spoke with no tone, even when their words ran into knots. At their feet, the Sabines saw overfilled baskets of rich meats and rare fruits they couldn’t grow or buy on their own. They knew the taboo of foreign food, knew the sin of greed. Their tables already were laden with thick gumbo, giant shrimp, and blood sausage. Yet with hungry eyes, they quickly took the baskets and signed a stack of contracts without ever looking straight at the faces of the strangers. After feasting off the food, they grinned with satisfaction and rubbed their stomachs. Then their grins widened, and their eyes widened too. Soon, a fever broke out. Whole groups of men dove into greasy pig pits, ran manic cochons de lait, and donned bird beaks and corn silk wigs. Women leapt over boiling pots of crawfish and crowned their heads with glistening king cakes. At first, the mêlée seemed no more alarming than Mardi Gras. Everyone was someone else; everyone was a figment. Before long, though, the carnival upended. Beaks turned into snouts, cakes turned into sow’s ears, and hair fell out like fur. Finally, the feasters became meat, as the delirious Sabines spun on their own spits roasted by the strangers, who shed their gentleman’s masks, and they looked too late at the saw-tooth faces of the real tatailles, the oil tycoons who now laid claim to their swampland and to the glistening black pools under their feet.

  Late one night, after I turned thirteen, marks appeared on my skin like a sudden rash. By then, there was talk in Louisiana about the damage of the oil derricks, all the sulfur and minerals drilled out of the ground and into the air. Industrial silos rose up all around us, issuing smoky gray clouds like uneasy brain lobes that hung in the sky longer than any thunderstorm. The bayou water took on a sick look, too, with a bilious green that oozed like a running sore. Water needs to breathe, everyone said through tight lips. All the talk was of an evil poison. Over a stretch of Cajun country, in a crescent-shaped alley, cancer blossomed like kudzu in lungs, in stomachs and colons, in glands and tissues with names no one could pronounce. Tumors, seizures, fits that got chalked up to the nerves, and odd skin rashes.

  Yet mine wasn’t a rash. Instead, like my outlaw grandfather, I was a vein-hunting warrior, only I wanted to let the juice out not in, let it burn not cool. In a fever dream, a thick line of twisting blossoms crept over my arms as if the nerves beneath were flowering. One tiny bud opened in my hand, in the crook where a pen would go. Others burst open in radiating zigzag lines. A little cluster of roses, each a shade darker than the next. The petals grew blurry at the edges with an anxious halo. To no good end, I burned each mark into the skin with the cherry glow of a cigarette. The ash raised the hairs then turned them black before the ember raised a scarlet ring and a plume of sulfur reached my nose.

  As smoke rose around me, hot words filled my head, hot names too. A pack of boys in roper boots had gotten my scent that year. I smelled of flowery cologne and fruity hairspray. I smelled of sweet mouthwash and pretty soap. Growing deaf to Mama, I flipped up my collar and feathered my hair. I scrunched up my sleeves and flashed a wristband. I double-looped a knot in my belt. First year in high school, I pushed against my uniform. The pack of boys delivered warnings with their eyes. In the gym, they curled lips, flared nostrils, stamped heels. At recess, they swaggered and swore. In fluorescent hallways, they thrust out their tongues like a wedge of swans to imitate my speech. Then, in unlit bathroom stalls, they shoved their hands in my pants, shoved their fingers in my face. After school, they fed their knuckles to my mouth. I swallowed it all, the oily saliva, the fleshy blood, the feverish words and hot hot names.

  Yet I badly wanted to shift shape. I wanted to flick a magic finger in the air like my papère, to make buildings explode, to gnash teeth, crunch bones. I wanted to stretch my neck and soar through the clouds. So I leapt from the roof of Divine Redeemer, with birds singing in my ear and lights flashing in my eyes, until I crashed and crunched my own bone—a fractured femur. Just a dizzy ballerina, the boys said, a flightless fairy.

  Still, the pain shook me into relief. After that, I burnt my arms again and again with a cigarette, burnt my chest too. I started slapping my head with my hands, snapping my wrist with a rubber band. Then I drew a finger across the edge of a steak knife. Something in me wanted out, so I punctured a vein. No matter how hard I tried, I never shifted shape. I never became a champion of any kind. I never fought that pack of boys, never even tried to outrun them. Instead, when cornered and faced with another meaty fist, I opened my mouth and closed my eyes, ready for the tongue of fire, the revelation of names. Ready to eat words, swallow blood. Ready for the lesson, the chokehold of redemption.

  Late in his life, when I met my papère, he’d lost all speech. All words had left him. He grunted, and his wife brought him a can of pop rouge with a bent straw. He groaned, and his sons smacked his remaining leg while the phantom one seemed to shiver. He wore dark sunglasses, even inside, like a mask over his eyes. If he could’ve spoken, what would the outlaw have said to his grandson? Would he have greeted him as a fellow rebel, a renegade fairy? If he had both legs, would he have raised the sissy-boy onto his shoulders and paraded him through town, shouting his pride in French? Or would he have slipped off his belt to deliver a carnal blessing?

  Late, very late at night, in my own version of the Sabine story, my werewolf papère stands at the mouth of the den, fending off all predators. We may be hungry, our tongues may be sickly white, but when a basket of food appears, my grandfather lifts a leg over it, sprays, and kicks it away. He stands his ground and keeps constant watch for any change in the air, any sudden noise or movement. His eyes are black as bayous. From rocks, he draws water, clean and clear. From dirt, he pulls cakes, sweet and moist. From his neck, an endless chain of zigzag teeth swings like a second jaw. He moves without caution and knows no taboo. He’d frighten any tataille into the woods, chase any pack of animals into the dark. He’d terrify the words out of any boy’s mouth, chew the mask off any villain’s face. Yet his breath is perfume. At midnight, with his long tongue, he licks the wounds on my skin until they seal and form gray scabs. In the morning, he clicks them each with his champion toe and the scabs fall off. A shock goes through me, and my face breaks into a troubled smile. All around, the smell of roses.

  II.

  ACCOUNTS OF

  THE RECKONING

  “As the Acadians became Cajuns then Cajun-Americans, they began to lose their words and ways: forgetting the French word for the thing in their hand or fixing crawfish étouffée from a can. Yet the music, they kept that. They kept the fiddle too, but now they played with split-tongue harmonicas and push-button accordions, and they sang in English with hard lyrics and a manic pace. The change in tempo and words made them no difference, long as they could play. Still, something was lost. Maybe for good. One thing’s for certain: that language is gonna die. All the gumbo ya-ya of Cajun talk is dying. Soon, there’ll be no one alive with that tongue. And I ask you: how will we receive Communion then?”

  —Beausoleil Canard on KJUN Radio

  “If the swamp was whiskey and I was a duck,

  I’d dive to the bottom and take me a suck.

  But, hey, I ain’t no duck,

  So, c’mon buzzard and pick,

  Pick a hole in this sad old lonesome head.

  Pick, buzzard, pick

  Keep on picking ’til I’m dead.”

  —“Acadian Two-Step”

  Louis “La La” Lejeune

  8.

  Father Fox

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he said, before he told me the story.

  My father’s tales starred cheats, thieves, and priests, and he figured at thirteen I was old enough to hear one of his f
avorites. It began like this: once he knew a long-nosed priest who got bounced from so many parishes that he wore running shoes instead of clerical loafers. Père Renard, or Father Fox, as the kids called him, operated church bingo like a game of casino craps, barking out numbers and taking much more than petty change as bets. At the end of a good night, he might walk out with a wad of sawbucks, a set of cast-iron pots, the keys to a riding lawn mower, and a couple of roosting chickens, to boot.

  Father Fox never got busted for the bingo, though. What arrested him in the end hung from both arms. That priest possessed a magic set of hands, the kind that could sink anything in the soil—a sorry-looking seed, a dried-up root, or an old bulb from a dead plant—only to watch it sprout overnight like a Cajun version of Jack and the Beanstalk. Lilies at Easter, of course, irises too. Marigolds, crèpe myrtles, even a magnolia tree. Yet another plant raised a stink, a tall thin weed with leaves like tangled palms. Ladies in mantillas fanned themselves to a fury when they heard the priest not only grew marijuana behind the rectory but sold it to their teenagers through the lattice of the confessional.

  After the word spilled on his unholy church business, rumors filled the air about Father Fox and his long-fingered hands, which possessed another kind of magic. Those ten fingers divined their way into the purses of older women and the pants of younger boys. During Mass, heads nodded as he broke the sacred host but not in reverence for the liturgy. As my father put it, all those lace-headed ladies nodded in disbelief. Who had let un renard fou out of another troubled house and into their own den? When would the bishop or the pope strip his black cassock right off him?

  Father Fox just sniffed at the air with his long nose and ignored the birds circling overhead. He blamed the gossip on the idle words of another priest, another parish. Or he shrugged away the rumors like any false merchant or true politician. One of his favorite quotes came not from the Bible but from Louisiana’s longest-running governor, a man who also might be found at a game of craps.

  “The only way I can lose,” he boasted before election season or a court session, “is if they catch me in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.”

  In the end, that governor got nabbed in a casino scheme then sent to the coop, while the priest got trapped in a drug sting then bounced free after a call to the bishop. Parishioners claimed even if Father Fox got nailed to a cross, he’d hotfoot his way to freedom and a profit. Hell, he’d sell tickets to his own wake, stuff his coffin with loot from the rectory, play poker with the devil, fault God for any debt, and still take bets on his resurrection. After all, if anyone knew the wages of sin, it was a priest.

  As my father finished the story, he slammed his beer down, opened his mouth wide and let loose a wild howl of laughter.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” he said as he opened the door.

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said in a hush. My voice sounded singsong, birdlike, even in my ear, as I hesitated at the threshold of the confessional. The priest was on the wrong side of the booth, the side where the penitent would enter. Where would I sit? Where would I kneel?

  “Don’t tell anyone,” the priest said again, as he held out a hand to muzzle my mouth. His black cassock parted to expose a crooked pant leg. His fingers stretched in the air while that leg shifted. In the dark of the booth, the velvet curtain whispered and the wood bench whined. The gruff voice of the priest grunted in my ear, and his eyes blazed before mine. “A secret,” he commanded, tapping his shoe on the floor. Then one more sound: a zipper. His hand pulled me to his waist, fingers slipped into my mouth. The cassock tangled up in his pants, and he crouched to step out of it, like an animal shaking off an extra skin. His long nose sniffed at the air around me.

  What I had to confess: impure thoughts, lust for other boys, nightly self-abuse. I let a boy yank down my pants and rub against me under the bleachers, it was true, I locked lips with a yearbook picture of the football star and prayed he’d lay me on the field, I lingered in the gym shower until my skin turned red and the boy at my back tugged off then turned away, and I laughed aloud at the word “homo,” as if it was the punch line to a joke not aimed at me.

  In the confessional, though, there was no punch line, no joke. There was only a half-naked priest with furry red patches and yellow eyes daring me to leave the booth, betting I’d stay. “A secret,” he repeated. His eyes shone like mirrors, as if waiting for me to drop to my knees like a real penitent. Did he count on me to play along because he was holy? Because I was homo? By thirteen, I knew how the story went. I’d learned the theater of church and the gamble of faith. I’d learned to take the host between my teeth, to let it sit on my tongue and let it melt there. I’d learned to genuflect, to kneel, and to pray for a reason to kneel. And I’d learned once already the hard blessing of a priest’s hand on my legs, the heat of false mercy and the fire of mean grace. That other priest had opened his arms in the confessional too, had held a finger to his mouth, then pointed that same finger in catechism, joking with the boys about my swishing hips, my flapping hands and stammering lips. A secret, I understood, was a cross. Sooner or later, you were nailed to it and the only way free was down.

  So when the priest sunk into his chair and parted his legs, at first I rose. My back arched and my shoulders widened, while I lowered my mouth down to his waist, shut my lips tight, and summoned my own kind of magic. He jerked his hips and grabbed my ears as I sank lower and lower, my face buried in his skin. Then a light burst in my eyes, and I rose up again. My arms spread to the walls, wide as wings, my head scraped the vault, high as a hawk, my mouth split open and I finally answered him with a loud and sharp tongue.

  “One may keep a secret,” I said, “but not two.”

  He opened his jaw, flashed his teeth and sank back on his legs, as if to leap up, but my mouth split open again and this time I said, “No need to tell anyone what everyone already knows.”

  Suddenly, the priest gekkered and gasped before his nose shriveled into his face, and his fingers drew into his hands, and his arms and legs grew smaller and smaller in the confessional, small enough that his whole body fit on the kneeling rail. From there, he bowed his head and offered to sell his lush fur for a pardon, his lavish tail for a prayer. Then he reversed himself and denied all sin, calling out accusations and excuses in a low growl, his tongue a flame of fire. It was the true beast, it was the false lamb, he said, it was not him. He faulted his red pelt, his sharp teeth, and his curled fingers. He faulted his long pointed nose and the odd perfume of boys. He faulted his tongue and the maker of his tongue until his voice hoarsened into a howl empty of all words, just a choking sound and a dimming echo.

  In the end, the priest disappeared in a foam of yeast and wheat, a desecrated host. Through the lattice of the door, a terrific peal of thunder rang over the pews into the organ of the choir room. The pipes bellowed the chords to a hymn sung for the Fraction of the Eucharist. I ran first toward the sound and the light raining through the stained-glass windows then out of the church and into the empty parking lot before saliva shot across my teeth and I spat a medallion, shiny and round, in a crack of pavement. In that spot, a lily shot up, a stargazer with gold filaments, a bright orange stigma, and a crown of purple petals. At last the church bells marked the hour, and I headed home with a fire in my chest, a new story in my head, and a wild chorus of laughter rising in my wake.

  9.

  Most Holy Ghost

  Down in the tail of the parish, where the bayou emptied all its secrets, I grew certain my grandfather lurked, waiting for me to find him. Since I’d only met him once before he disappeared, the odds were long that I’d ever catch his scent or follow his trail. Yet by thirteen, I was hell-bent to try.

  Unlike most men in Acadiana, my papère claimed neither a medieval French name nor legal standing in any court. No paper certified his birth, no deed titled his property, and no child carried his name. He harvested no crop, from the land or the gulf,
and never carried a wallet, much less cash. Sabine not Cajun, Pentecostal not Catholic, he stood on the other side of any wall. Yet for a while, as part-time minister and full-time traiteur, Rex held a world in his hands. He controlled the revival tent and the medicine cabinet. He ruled the roost and the range, cooking up food and faith in the same cast-iron skillet. He knew no rules and saw no reason to stay on one plot of land or in one kind of body.

  His legend filled my head as I grew up, from the stories Mama told me at night. His restless eyes saw further than any man’s; his wild hair ran longer than any woman’s. His skin was dark as roux and rough as cypress. From Mama, I heard how he could raise a soufflé in the kitchen of a moving train and a spirit in the body of a half-dead man. From others, I heard how he could lift the blood in any woman and a flaming dove in the air. Then too, he could lie with steady eyes and summon hell on the dance floor with a fiddle under his chin.

  In tale after tale, he’d vanish through the Vermilion into the mouth of the gulf only to shift shape and reappear in a new body. One time: with a crew cut and clipped nails, he surfaced reed thin, clean-shaven, atop a gray mare. Another time: with a bushy ponytail and brawny arms, he showed a beard down his chest and trailed a mangy bluetick coonhound. Every time: a cloud of mist rose about him, the kind that blurred the horizon at the marsh and made dawn look like dusk.

  To hear people tell it, my grandfather was a one-man band. His skin was a leather drum; his lungs were accordion bellows. He made music with nothing but a single cattail and a set of wet lips. What’s more, he wrestled a brown bear for breakfast and barbecued a green gator for lunch. He raised a wood-shingled home on the bayou in less than a month and took it down with hot breath and a match in one day. Afterwards, he slept in a duck blind—or claimed to—hunted from a pirogue, and was seen indoors only if there was an open bar under the roof. The Last Outlaw, they called him.