Queen of the Mardi Gras Ball

by Lynn Shurr

  “I don’t got much cash money, me, but I do got dese, a nice otter fur or dis alligator hide tanned soft as butter. Which you want?”

  Roz ran her hand over the thick winter fur of the otter, but the long tail and little paws put her off. She accepted the alligator hide. Perhaps, she could send it to her mother and have a purse or shoes made in the city. People paid good money for that sort of thing. Maybe, Anaise would buy them. She tucked the rolled hide under her arm and slung her bag over her arm in preparation for leaving.

  “What, you not stayin’ for dessert?” Ursin asked.

  She stayed and ate a bit of the taffy-like candy made from the milk and listened to Ursin play a lullaby on his squeezebox. When his wife had gone back to bed and the baby slept in his crib, Ursin sent his sons to the loft and settled his girls in the rear bedroom. “Now, we go,” he announced.

  The long road hemmed in by ditches and trash trees was dark as a tunnel. The dim lights of the truck scarcely penetrated the night as Ursin drove much more carefully than he had coming. Despite his caution, he ran down a slow-footed possum, stopped the vehicle, and slung the carcass into the rear of the truck.

  “Makes good stew, you know how to cook it,” he remarked as they went on their way.

  Where the road turned onto the hardtop an obstruction sat in the way—a car, big and black. Two white men lounged against it and passed a bottle back and forth.

  Ursin got down. “Come, come, Bubba, Gaston. What you blockin’ da road for, eh?”

  They pointed to Roz sitting the cab. “Dat midwife. Tell her come out.”

  “What your business wit’ her? She jus’deliver my new son.”

  “She cost us a whore, dat’s what. Mayor DeVille come out to our place and carried off dat little yeller gal. ’Course, he paid off her debt and promised da Old Man, he get one of us on da Police Jury some day, but we don’t want her meddlin’ no more. Got da mayor’s belle-fille all upset over some quarter-nigger baby, dat midwife, and we paid her to get shut of it.” Bubba pointed the neck of the bottle toward Roz.

  “Won’t kill her, jus’ teach her a lesson, eh,” Gaston added, reclaiming the bottle.

  “You don’t touch her, you. Dere’s jus’ as many Landrys as dere is Broussards ’round here. You don’t want to start no feud wit’ us. Y’all got soft makin’ your livin’ on whiskey and whores. I can take you bot’.”

  “All you Landrys is soft on your women. But, she ain’t no Landry. Dis not your quarrel, Ursin.”

  Gaston took a blackjack from his pocket, smacked it into his palm, and started toward the truck. He jerked open the door and looked right into the barrel of a very small pistol. Something prodded his belly, the tip of a pair of scissors.

  “No man will ever beat me again,” Roz said steadily. “Tell your brother to move the car, or I’ll shoot your eye out and gut you on the way down.”

  “Wooo-eeee.” Ursin rocked back on his heels. “Bubba, I put you in da driver’s seat, me.” He opened the door to the sedan and heaved Bubba up by the back of his shirt.

  “Don’t go nowheres, Bubba, I can take her,” Gaston called.

  “It’s your eye,” Roz said and shrugged. “The bullet is small, but it might go right through to the brain.”

  “You know, she shot her husband, no?” Ursin said casually. “He beat her, and she shot him down. Bang, bang.”

  Gaston jumped. He stepped away from the scissors pricking his stomach. “Merde,” he swore.

  He shook a finger at Roz. “Jus’ you don’t meddle again, you hear?”

  “I hear.”

  “C’est bon, no?” Gaston stomped to the car, slammed the door, and motioned to his brother to drive.

  Ursin climbed in beside Roz and waited for a few moments to create some distance between them and the Broussard brothers. The frogs resumed singing in the ditches, rejoicing in all the rain.

  “Thank you, Ursin. You didn’t have to stick up for me.” Roz rewrapped her sterile scissors and packed them in a pocket of her bag. She left the pistol in her lap.

  “You know, Pierre, when he was a boy, he bring home everyt’ing hurt and watch over it ’til it strong and ready to go free. Mama and Papa, dey always say, wring dat bird’s neck, shoot dat deer for da gumbo pot, but no, not Pierre. Den, he take dose creatures far, far out in da swamp where we don’t hunt and let ’em lose when dey better. Me, I don’t t’ink he want to set you loose, but you gettin’ plenty strong.”

  “Pierre set me loose some time ago.”

  “Me, I don’t t’ink so, or he wouldn’t have said for me to watch out for you, and all my fam’ly, too.”

  Roz started to say she didn’t need their help and no longer needed Pierre to lean on, but instead, she simply said, “Merci.”

  ****

  Her wristwatch showed nine p.m. As far as Roz was concerned, it could have been midnight. She tried to slip quietly past the parlor, but Edna, enjoying an evening smoke, turned her way. “Roz, where have you been! You missed dinner. Come see Faye’s engagement ring.”

  Bernie and Faye, appropriately cuddled together on the Victorian love seat, called to her also. She had no choice but to enter the room and admire the tiny diamond, ornately set to make it look bigger, on Faye’s freckled finger.

  “We went this afternoon and picked it out at LeClerc’s jewelry shop. I’m paying for it on time,” Bernard announced proudly.

  “I’ll have to wear it on a chain until school lets out, or the School Board will fire me outright for getting engaged.” Faye blushed. “But come June, I want you and Edna to walk in my wedding.”

  “Congratulations to both of you. I’d be honored to be in your wedding,” Roz replied, going through the motions. Completely exhausted, she still felt pumped full of adrenaline from her encounter with the Brothers Broussard.

  The widow entered with a coffee tray and set it on the low claw-footed table sitting between the love seat and the single chairs. “Your mother called, Roz. She wants you to call back no matter what the time. I’ll be expecting repayment for the cost.”

  Evidently, coffee was still free, but out-of-town telephone calls were not. “Thanks, Miz Purdue. I’ll do that immediately.” Before I collapse on my ass.

  “Here, dear. Take the coffee with you. You look all done in.”

  Roz nodded her thanks, stoking her cup with sugar before she took on her mother. The telephone in the hallway wasn’t the best place to converse with her family. She knew all the ears in the parlor would be tuned her way.

  “Hello, Mama. Yes, I did get your gift. Henri must have brought it over. I found it on the doorstep last night… No, I find country people to be very honest. This isn’t the city, you know… Yes, I’m sure I’ll enjoy the novel when I have the time to read it… Yes, I noticed the chocolates were from my favorite shop. One can always use stockings… No, Mama, I’m not unappreciative or lacking in manners. I’ve been very busy and would have called tomorrow.”

  “Busy doing what?” her mother said shortly. “Too busy to call your family when the river is threatening to burst the levees at any minute and flood the city?”

  “The newspapers say there is no need to worry. The levees will probably breach to the north and drain off the excess, but if you are worried, why don’t you come and stay with Loretta?”

  “My home is one-hundred-fifty years old, Rosamond. I have never lived anywhere else, and I will not abandon it to flood waters and looters. I am grateful that my children are in safe places, however. We aren’t allowing Roxanne to come home for Easter. She’ll stay with the nuns at the Academy. The Teche area is supposedly out of danger as well. You can loll around eating chocolates and reading without fear, Rosamond, or go to Mass and pray for us.”

  “Mama, in the last twenty-four hours I’ve delivered two babies and prevented a miscarriage. I’m about to go to my drafty room, pull the sheet over my head and sleep until I feel like waking up. I have no intention of going to Mass, either. But please, if your situation is dangerous, leave th
e city.”

  Madame St. Rochelle sniffed. “People are fleeing New Orleans like the proverbial rats from the sinking ship, but your father will handle the matter. He’s been meeting with the politicians and business leaders. Say nothing, but they will approach the River Commission on the eighteenth about dynamiting the levee in St. Bernard Parish to take the pressure off the city.”

  “What about the fishermen and trappers who live there? How terrible!” Roz exclaimed.

  “The city will reimburse them for their losses and see they are given time to evacuate. Rosamond, you have no idea. I’ve never seen the river this angry. It’s shored up with sandbags, and still the water leaks through. I’ve seen whole trees, dead cows, and pieces of houses washing by. If action isn’t taken soon, New Orleans will be gone. Do you want that?”

  “Of course not. The solution seems drastic, that’s all. I have to hang up, Mother, the widow doesn’t like us running up her bill. Please, you and Papa take care. Good-bye.”

  As Roz set down the receiver, she glanced toward the parlor. Her friends were no longer in their seats. They crowded in the archway listening to every word.

  “What’s happening in New Orleans? I thought the city was safe,” Edna said.

  “Let’s just say if you have friends there or in Plaquemine and St. Bernard, urge them to leave. Be grateful the flood isn’t coming here. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.”

  It occurred to Roz as she went to her room that no one had asked about the babies delivered to poor folk. Now, the concern was all about the city and the coming flood.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  While the citizens of New Orleans bargained to save their city and desperate men with shotguns patrolled the levees of St. Bernard Parish, Roz gained her first real client, one she could counsel and prepare for birth. Ursin Landry stopped by and drove her along the top of the Bayou Bouef levee to the home of Cherie Arton, his sister-in-law.

  Cherie, unlike her big and bountiful sister, probably had been pretty and petite in her youth. Now, she’d turned stringy, thin arms and stick-like legs supporting her pregnant belly. She possessed a shy smile already becoming gap-toothed from the bearing of so many children, and big, dark eyes that still held a certain beauty. She wore her dark hair pulled back severely in a bun and was graying young.

  Clearly, Cherie had married poorly. Her two-room cabin with an overhead loft stood upon rickety posts on the swamp side of the levee where squatters weren’t required to pay property tax because the land belonged to the state. A boardwalk, also raised on stilts, connected the house to the crest of the levee. A wide gallery, boxed in all the way around with weathered gray boards to keep the children from tumbling off, gave the place the appearance of a houseboat that had grown legs. Ursin said that was actually the case.

  Cherie insisted that her husband, Claude, stop roaming the Basin when the first of the children grew old enough to attend school. He’d put his houseboat up on stilts for her. A boat came by daily to pick up the students and deliver them to the classroom for an elementary education.

  The oldest child, a skinny girl of twelve with her mother’s shy smile and long, dark brown hair that hung in her eyes, had finished with schooling and stayed home to help her mama with the babies and scrape hides and scale fish for her papa, Ursin explained. Muskrat skins stretched on hoops dangled from the eaves like soundless wind chimes and fishing nets draped the railings where the youngster bounced a three-year-old on her bony knees so her mother could have some peace to talk to the midwife.

  Coffee was offered and poured. Roz sat at the homemade table aged as gray as the outside of the place and felt foolish talking about rest and good nutrition. Her eyes took in the reality of a twenty-pound sack of rice sitting in a corner next to a ten-pound sack of cornmeal, and a five-pound container of coffee beans. The shelves held canned goods—cane syrup, condensed milk, and peaches packed in sugary juice. The family had no china, only tin plates and cups stacked in an open cupboard by the wood stove. She suggested Cherie purchase tomato juice and canned vegetables and perhaps get a cow that could graze for free on the levee grass.

  “Oh, I make da coffee-milk each day before da boys leave for school, cornbread and syrup, too. We get plenty milk. Claude, he say a cow too much trouble, always getting lost, always stuck in da mud. Canned vegetables, dey too dear. Mignon, she give me extra from her garden when she have it. Claude, he bring home fish and game. We got plenty meat.” Cherie gestured to smoked venison haunches and strings of dried fish hung from the rafters.

  “I can see that. He must be a very good hunter and fisherman. Well then, do you have old sheets for the bed? They should be boiled and very clean.”

  “Cher, everyt’ing I got is old, and I try to make it clean, but I got t’ree boys, you know. Mostly, we sleep right on da mattress.” She gestured toward a bag of striped ticking stuffed with Spanish moss rolled up in one corner.

  “I’ll bring a rubber sheet and some old linens if you call me in plenty of time. Please don’t wait ’til the last second like your sister did. Toussaint was a breach birth. She might have lost him if she’d waited much longer. I don’t mind sitting with you.”

  “Mignon, she always t’inks it’s gonna be bon, bon, bon. Me, I seen some bad in my time. Dat spring Claude lost his leg to a gator, t’ought we was gonna starve, but da Church and da fam’ly seen to us. Le bon Dieu watch out for us, and we take care of our own. More café?”

  “No, thank you. Do you have lots of clean water?”

  “We catch da rain water in da barrel outside. I boil it up. And, we got da indoor commode.”

  “Really?” Roz looked around the small space and saw no indication of a bathroom.

  “Come see.” Cherie led the way into the second room where the moss mattress lay on a bedframe covered with a blue and white striped cotton blanket. A corner of the bedroom had been boarded up and hung with a door. Cherie opened it with a flourish. There sat a porcelain toilet in all its glory. By its side hung a bucket of water to provide the flush and a Sears catalog hanging from a hook to supply the wipes.

  Roz raised the lid and looked down. She could hear the water lapping against the stilts. She had no doubt where the sewage went. “You keep it very clean,” she said.

  “Dat I do. Put da lid back down. Wit’ da water so high, da snakes come in.”

  Roz dropped the wooden cover with a bang, and Cherie laughed. “Heard Pierre Landry was fou for a city girl. Must be true.”

  “It’s true I’m from the city. Snakes are not my favorite creatures.”

  “Oh, we got plenty snakes here.” Cherie cocked her head. “Da school boat comin’.”

  She led the way out on to the deck where the girl urged the baby to wave to the children on the canopied launch. The boat nosed into the levee and lowered a plank. Three boys, aged ten, eight, and six, scrambled across the board and raced each other for the house. Roz noticed the oldest lad hung back and let the little ones win. “Nonc Ursin,” they shouted in passing as they thundered across the deck past the man and into the kitchen.

  The boys clapped down tin lunch buckets and schoolbooks on the table and clamored for food. Their mother brought out a plate of cold biscuits covered with a checkered cloth and placed a knife and jar of fig preserves beside it. The boys reached out.

  “No, no! We got a guest. Miz Roz, will you eat a biscuit?”

  “No, but thanks. We’re almost finished talking. I have to get back to town.”

  “Elise,” Cherie called to her daughter. “Make a biscuit for da baby before da boys get dem all.”

  She poured four tin cups half full of coffee and punctured a tin of condensed milk to fill the rest of the cup. “Elise, you give da baby a sip of yours. Come outside. We can’t talk wit’ all dat noise.”

  Roz followed her. “You think you’re in the eighth month, and the baby is due at the end of May. You have five living children. Any miscarriages, stillbirths, or difficulty with past labors?”

  “N
o, no. We miss a year when Claude lost his leg, but den da one between his legs, it grow back when Claude see he can still trap and fish.” Cherie pointed to her own crotch. “Da new leg and da old one, bot’ made of wood, eh? Pierre, his like wood, too, no?”

  “I can’t say,” Roz managed to get out as Cherie laughed some more at her flustration.

  Ursin heaved himself off of a coil of rope where he had been sitting and enjoying the rare sunny afternoon with a smoke and his own cup of coffee. “Don’t tease, Cherie. You finished? I got a delivery to make to Broussard’s Barn today.”

  “Yes, we are. I’ll come back and check your progress in a few weeks and see if you’ve begun to dilate.”

  Cherie raised her eyebrows. “No comprendre.”

  “To see if the baby is getting ready to come, to see if the head is in position.”

  “Bon. We talk. We have some café.”

  Cherie seemed totally unconcerned about giving birth in a cabin far from the nearest neighbor. Considering her own experiences, Roz admired the hardiness of the woman. Evidently, her husband had delivered all the others.

  As the truck with three casks covered in burlap sloshing in the back turned toward Chapelle, Ursin ran through a list of relatives who were in some stage of pregnancy. Roz figured if she developed a clientele among all the Landrys, their in-laws, and more distant kin, she’d never want for rent money or alligator hides again.

  When they arrived at the boarding house, Roz let herself out and leaned across the cab. “Will you be okay out at the Barn?”

  “Sure. We got us a deal. Wally can’t make enough hooch his own self to keep his customers happy. My cousin, Putt-Putt, he make da best white mule in da Atchafalaya Basin. Me, I deliver it. Dey ain’t gonna do me not’ing, but you, stay clear of dem Broussards.”

  “I will. I have more serious things to worry about right now.”