The Tangled Bridge

by Rhodi Hawk

  Leave me to the ghosts, he’d said.

  Ferrar said, “What do you want with that place?”

  “Just a little commerce, that’s all. Want to expand my business. Cut out the middle man, or the … middle woman. Go straight to the im-port.”

  “That would be up to Francois. I can bring you there to talk to him, but what happens after that is up to him.”

  “That’s all I’m asking. Get me the signal so’s I can get in there, and you put in a good word for me. Remember I ain’t done y’all no harm when I had the chance. I been straight.”

  Patrice looked at Ferrar, and Ferrar hesitated, then nodded.

  He said, “I’ll take you on the next run. No signals. You come on out there with me. We can go next week.”

  Simms nodded, too. “Alright then. That’s all I need. Your word. I’m gonna trust you on that because I know how you do. So now all this is just between us. No need to tell your mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “So here’s what it is. Ole Hutch spent the night at the doctor’s, but doc ain’t know what to do for him. They say he talkin to God, so they called for a priest. A sister came instead. She sat with him all night long. Prayed on him. Then she figured he had something he was trying to say, so she wrote it all down.”

  “Wrote what down?” Patrice asked him.

  “What you think? All that stuttering and spitting he do. He talk in between that. Went on for all night, all morning. The sister wrote down what he said. Most of it didn’t mean nothing.”

  Simms handed Patrice a bundle of papers. She glanced through them, and her gaze fell on the words:

  holy holy holy holy holy holy holy mercy full mighty early early early early and the moan moan moaning sunrise toothy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy holy …

  Patrice knew at once what she was reading. Trigger was using the song, “Holy, Holy, Holy” as a pigeon exercise. Just practicing on Hutch, that’s all, and if the nun were Baptist instead of Catholic she might have recognized the song as she transcribed it.

  Forming thoughts for other people was difficult enough. The trick was to understand their manner of thinking, so you could disguise your thoughts as theirs. But causing a man to speak words for you was extremely difficult. Patrice could do it, but she’d been the only one of the four who’d ever mastered it.

  Patrice scanned the pages until she found:

  tell trees not dead tell trees not dead tell pa trees not dead not dead mama got me mama got me don’t let mama lie she has two she has two let them go now she must let them go for me to go …

  Patrice took a step toward Simms. “Where is she?”

  “Your mother? I don’t know. I’m supposed to take you with me, that’s all. You come with me, we go for a little walk, then you’ll get to see your brother and sister.”

  “You tell me where she is!”

  His face grew hard. “I don’t know that.”

  Ferrar pulled on Patrice’s arm. “He doesn’t know. Look at him. He’s telling the truth.”

  Patrice said, “Now she’s got all of them. All three of them!”

  Ferrar said, “Maybe she’s going to try to capture you, too. So she’ll have all four.”

  “She made a bargain with us!”

  “It might have been a trick to get you out of Bayou Bouillon, where you were protected.”

  Simms said, “Look here, doll, I don’t know what her game is. I took a big risk by telling all this. She find out she gonna cut me off, you get me?”

  “I’ve got to talk to her myself. Face to face.”

  “She don’t see you go off for a little walk with me, she ain’t gonna let’m go, is what she told me. You just s’posed to walk along with me and someone out there’ll be watchin. Then they let the other two go and bring you in. She don’t trust you and your voodoo, I guess.”

  Ferrar looked into Patrice’s face. “She will trap you, you walk with him. She wants you if only to punish you.”

  In the papers that were now shaking in Patrice’s hands, she saw the words the nun had transcribed at the very end:

  she has my ghost but not my body she can’t get to my body I will keep my body

  Patrice longed to slip into the briar, just for a moment. Glimpse Trigger. Locate Maman, and Rosie and Gil.

  She knew she couldn’t recede into the briar, but she could use its tricks.

  Simms was pointing at Ferrar. “I done my part. No matter what happens here, we got a deal.”

  Patrice turned and looked at the faces lit up in the early evening glow, intensifying with every moment that brought the sun deeper onto the horizon. It filled the dark circles under the people’s eyes, and the hollows at their cheeks and necks and collarbones—softened every hard line. Mother was not among them. She wouldn’t be here, no, but she’d likely be nearby.

  “Mother,” said Patrice.

  And she closed her eyes, but not to will the thorns. She had to invoke this without briar. She felt it. Cultivated from Ferrar’s presence. Something that reflected back from somewhere within her own being.

  She said again, “Mother.”

  “Mother,” Simms and Hutch both echoed back.

  They gave her a strange look.

  “Be careful,” Ferrar whispered to her.

  “Mother,” Patrice said again.

  And she heard the people in the next camp, and Simms and Hutch once again, say, “Mother.”

  Patrice said the word again, letting it filter through all those people, and from the other camps she could hear the word echoing back.

  Mother. Mother.

  It rippled across the lips of every person at every camp, floating from this one to that. She let it ride beyond the clearing to elsewhere. Every woman, every man, and the children all said it: Mother.

  “Come speak to me, Mother,” Patrice said.

  The words washed from one end of the camp to the other, and across the thicket to the road beyond. The people on the ferry. The people across the water. Patrice felt that Gil and Rosie were saying it. Maybe even her own mother said it, too. It washed over New Orleans. They were all saying it. And after half a minute passed, they all said it again.

  From somewhere off to the north beyond the trees, there came a blast of car horn. Patrice turned toward the sound.

  sixty-five

  LOUISIANA, NOW

  MADELEINE SAT WITH GASTON in his tree. After she’d returned to her body, the tide had been high and they’d had to move fast in order to get back. No tar creature had been waiting at the base of the whirlpool. That thing existed in the briar only. She’d wanted to demand an explanation from Gaston but the return through the corridors of the tree had sapped their energy.

  Now, they sat silently in wet clothes, Gaston wrapped in his secrets staring out into the night with tears streaming down his cheeks. She wasn’t sure whether she should love him or hate him. He seemed so gentle and yet he’d killed Cheryl. And he tried to prevent her from saving … whoever it was below the boardwalk of the floating village. A boy who wore Gaston’s likeness, if not his beard.

  She put her head in her hands and vowed not to care. Her heart longed for Ethan. She loved him and she wanted him back. And she was going back, hell or high water. Now that she was healthy again she’d get back to him. Even if she had to trek through this godforsaken backwater for months. She’d find her way to civilization and she’d get back. She and Ethan would live a quiet life in a home they made together.

  They’d just have to find a way to neutralize Zenon, that was all. And Chloe, too, if she was still alive.

  And protect Cooper and his mother, and Bo and his. And poor Ray.

  And the first step was to get out, out, out of these stupid woods.

  “Dammit!” Madeleine said aloud.

  Gaston looked at her. His face showed near-shock, like he’d thought himself alone and was startled to realize Madeleine was still sitting there.

  She glared out the opening in the wood, beyond which the cypres
s trees hovered in shades of slate. First light. She would set off at first light. No matter what.

  “My name is Guy Gaston LeBlanc,” Gaston said.

  She looked at him. The name meant nothing to her, of course, except for the surname she shared.

  For the next few moments he said nothing further. Fine. She wasn’t going to prod him. She’d had enough. Though dawn was not far off, the creatures who lived in the cyprière were singing their night sounds. Madeleine recalled the evening when she’d heard their voices coalesce into the single pulse. The horrible manipulation of their dissonance, of Severin’s rhymes, of Madeleine’s own breathing. Now the creatures of Gaston’s cyprière sounded natural and easy, just like the ones of her childhood out on Bayou Black.

  He spoke again. “My brother and sisters call me Trigger, though.”

  “Alright.”

  He cleared his throat. “Far as I can figure, I’m your great-uncle. One of my sisters is Marie-Rose LeBlanc.”

  Grandma Rosie. Madeleine nodded. Gaston seemed ten years younger than Madeleine, and here he was claiming to be about the same age as her grandmother. So this was an absurd claim. But if Madeleine had learned anything over the years, it was to accept the absurd with neither doubt nor belief and move the hell on.

  “And just how old are you?” she asked.

  “Depends on what year this is. I’s born in 1914.”

  “That would make you ninety-eight years old.”

  He snorted, bringing a smile to his eyes though not his mouth. That expression—along with the beard that made him look like a teenager trying to pass for drinking age—for some reason it broke her heart. And then she realized she’d seen that expression on her brother, Marc, so many times over the years.

  Gaston said, “Seems like an awful long time.”

  “So should I call you Uncle Gas?”

  This time he let loose an actual laugh, that kee-hee-hee thing of his. “Up to you. Call me knucklehead if you want. Back when I found you in the shanty, once I got a good look at you I knew you’d come from her. My baby sister Rosie.”

  “I loved her.”

  “God, I do too. My brother and sisters been all I got even after they gone.”

  And then he gave her a shrewd look. “You takin all a this pretty easy. I mean, ain’t this a shock to you, it isn’t? Not at all?”

  “I only half-believe you. Makes it easier to digest.”

  “That’s good. Real good. Just hear it, don’t have to accept it as gospel or heresy. Not for this and not for anything in your life.”

  “You want to tell me about what happened in the floating village? Bayou Bouillon?”

  “Uh-yeah. This might be harder to understand.”

  “Try me.”

  sixty-six

  HUEY P. LONG BRIDGE, 1933

  THE AUTOMOBILE WAS A long scrolling line. A gleaming thing. It looked like it belonged in a parade. Nothing like the car Patrice had driven to New Orleans with her siblings.

  Standing in front of the car in a gray linen skirt suit with a cloche hat and white leather pumps, arms folded tight across her chest, was Maman.

  Jacob Chapman was there, too. Patrice first noticed the missing left hand and only recognized him after. He stood near Maman and looked as though he didn’t know what to do with the hand he still had left.

  Trigger was not here, of course. Not in body. It comforted Patrice to know that his spirit was here.

  She kept walking toward the car, never slowing her pace, and Ferrar kept right alongside her as though he had no idea that he may not ever walk away from this meeting.

  As she drew nearer, Patrice could see into the car. In the back sat Tatie Bernadette, flanked on either side by Gilbert and Marie-Rose. There they were, not in the briar but in true flesh and blood. Older, lengthened bodies looking worn down by cruelty. Patrice felt a wave of emotion. She wanted to run to them, throw open the door and put her arms around them. She knew she couldn’t do that.

  “This isn’t how you said it was gonna be,” Patrice could hear Chapman saying.

  “Hush,” Maman told him.

  “Never liked the way you did with those young-uns.”

  “I said be quiet, you drunkard.”

  Patrice walked with Ferrar to where her mother stood waiting by the automobile. Jacob Chapman kept his gaze on the thicket. The sun drenched the landscape in orange and scarlet.

  Patrice said to her mother: “Let Gil and Rosie go.”

  Maman nodded. “Very well. You come along with me, Patrice, and your brother and sister will be free to go.”

  “I know you have Trigger, too. I mean, Guy. You sent your bullies to Bayou Bouillon to kill him. Your own son! Only he’s not dead. You’ve captured his mind somehow.”

  “He has contacted you?”

  Patrice said nothing, her fury building. Ferrar grazed her arm with his fingertips.

  Maman regarded Ferrar, then smiled at Patrice in the way a teacher smiles at a dull student’s disappointing essay. “I take it this lumen is your companion, and not a goodwill offering to me.”

  “Leave him out of this.”

  “He has stained you.”

  “This isn’t about him.”

  “This has everything to do with him, Patrice. Him and his kind, that’s precisely what this is about. Because you turn your back on what you are. On me! You make his kind stronger.”

  “I’ve never done harm to you,” Ferrar said, and then: “Not yet.”

  Chloe regarded him, his last words seeming to interest her. “So you see now it is the only way. Your kind and our kind cannot coexist. And still you have no idea what you are.”

  Patrice said, “It doesn’t make any sense. He’s not that different from everybody else.” She paused, looking from Ferrar to Maman. “Is it just the quiet inside him?”

  Chloe said, “You have no idea what it means. He drains your power. What good is a gun if you have no nerve to shoot it?”

  “That’s ridiculous! Whatever it is that’s different about him is so small. It’s practically unnoticeable. That people like him are quiet inside? That’s all? It’s worth all this? Killing your own children!”

  “You think I want that! You think I ever really wanted that! I would have made a queen of you, Patrice!”

  “And yet you’d just as soon see us all dead.”

  “I would prefer you dead, yes, than to watch you become common, stupid pigeons.”

  Patrice closed her eyes. Even after all that had happened it still gave her a shock to hear it. So much ruin.

  “Let Gil and Rosie go.”

  Chloe stared at Patrice, a long, measured look. “Your instructions were simple. You walk along the road alone with Mr. Simms. A light scratch, that is all. You would have barely felt it. And it would have been easier on you, to release yourself to me and take your place in the world of the thorns for me.”

  Patrice searched inside her mother’s intentions, being careful not to encourage the briar to come forth, but borrowing instead from the still, blissful reflection she drew from Ferrar. She saw what her mother had truly meant to accomplish.

  She said, “You would have killed him. After you trapped me, you were going to kill Simms.”

  “Why does it matter to you?”

  Ferrar stood silently by Patrice’s side. If she agreed to this, would he survive? She knew her mother and the river devils wanted Ferrar dead. Patrice had come here ready to kill her mother. But Maman held all the power, and there was no bargaining with her unless Patrice was willing to sacrifice lives.

  The car door opened. Marie-Rose was pulling herself out though Patrice could hear Tatie Bernadette protesting from inside. Rosie’s body was stretched long and thin. No sign of baby fat. She spilled out of the vehicle and onto the ground, pulling herself toward Patrice with her hands.

  Patrice rushed to her side.

  Rosie’s gaze was roaming like she was blind. Her skin color had gone to ash—clearly she hadn’t seen the sun in years. But something
else was off. Sores and scales covered her face and arms, and her lips were the same color as her skin as though she were very cold. She smelled like vomit.

  “You’ve poisoned her!” Patrice said.

  The other back passenger door had opened and Gil was working his way out the other side. Also moving slowly and awkwardly. Tatie Bernadette was fretting after him. Both Gil and Rosie were lost deep in the briar. And only a matter of time before her mother’s poison, already coursing through their veins, would finish them off.

  “Listen to me. You fix the poison in Gil and Rosie’s blood right now. And then you let them go.”

  “Remember, Patrice, that you are the only one who can save your brother and sister. You can still be a queen. You can save their lives. No tricks. Simply accept the scratch. I will remove the death from their blood and let them go with Bernadette.”

  “What’s she sayin?” Rosie asked from where Patrice cradled her.

  Patrice was shaking. She had no idea what Rosie saw there in the briar. The girl was so feeble.

  From somewhere on the other side of the car, Tatie Bernadette was weeping and pleading with Gil. Ferrar put a hand to Patrice’s shoulder.

  Rosie spoke again. “Can she hear me now?”

  Patrice squeezed her sister. “We hear you Rosie. We hear you, honey.”

  Her voice caught on the words. Rosie looked so grown-up and yet so helpless lying here in Patrice’s arms. She knew it was fruitless to speak directly to her. Though Patrice could hear Rosie, Rosie couldn’t hear anything Patrice said. Unless Patrice went into the briar. Or …

  Or someone else did. Someone who could see past both layers.

  When Rosie spoke again, her tone changed. It didn’t sound like she was talking to somebody in the briar. This time it sounded like she was repeating something, like the way she used to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “This is what you get, Maman. This is a message from your son, Guy. I am here with Marie-Rose and Gilbert. We got them away from the tar devils. We did that.”