Queen of the Mardi Gras Ball

by Lynn Shurr

  “Would you happen to know their names?”

  Nurse Strictland flipped over several sheets on her clipboard beneath the listing of pregnant women. “Laverne, Kiki, and Eloise. They claim to be waitresses from a local establishment that has taken on some water. Evidently, they live on the premises.”

  Without admitting that one name sounded familiar, Roz nodded. “Yes, I’d keep an eye on them.”

  ****

  Roz didn’t lack for customers. Despite camp conditions, the women she assisted resisted being separated from their families in order to give birth in a hospital ward. They hid their pains until transport to Lafayette became out of the question. Most of the mothers were multipara, giving life to their sixth or seventh child with admirable stoicism and relatively short labors. The worst case so far had been a fourteen-year-old girl who had hidden her pregnancy for months. During the climax of her labor, female relatives quizzed her on the identity of the father. When the agony of transition hit after a long, grueling night, the girl finally cursed the boy by name. Before the newborn exited the birth canal, the male relatives had rounded up a wild-eyed seventeen-year-old and found Father Grainger. As soon as the girl could stand, the couple married. At the direction of the family, Roz waited until after the brief service to fill in the birth certificate.

  Roz made time for a visit to the colored camp down the hill. She and Beulah Senegal sat on overturned buckets near the entrance and exchanged birthing stories.

  “So business is good then?”

  “Dey droppin’ like fruit from a chinaberry tree, Peep. Sorrow brings ’em on.”

  “The body of the mother needs to be lightened to deal with crisis.”

  “Never heard it put so befo’, but we sho’ got our crisis now. De old ones is dyin’ of de damp as fast as de new ones come.”

  “I bring them into the world. Dr. Landry sees them out of it.”

  “Y’all makes a good couple.”

  “We rarely see each other with more and more people crowding into the camps. It’s for best.”

  “The Lawd gonna work his will wit’ you and de doctor, Peep, one o’ dese days. Jus’ you wait.”

  “For what—my husband back in New Orleans to vanish?”

  “Maybe so, Peep, maybe so.” Beulah looked up at a sight on the hill. “Look like you needed again. Dat a scared papa sliding in de mud if I ever seen one.”

  The wiry form of Claude Arton moved toward them so fast every other step he took on his wooden leg slipped in the mud. Beneath his walrus moustache, a steady stream of French burst forth, pebbled with curse words each time he lost balance.

  “Chasse-femme! Chasse-femme! Merde, merde, merde.”

  “Monsieur Arton, is Cherie having her baby? Have you brought her to the camp?”

  “Bebe, oui. Cherie no come. She tetu. You come.” Claude Arton tugged on her elbow.

  “Better go, Peep.” Beulah shooed her away. “Dey droppin’ like chinaberries, didn’t I just say?”

  Roz hurried up the hill dislodging clumps of soggy grass as Claude hastened her on. At the gate of the camp, his old truck sat, its bed holding the skinny Elise who gripped the toddler and three wide-eyed little boys pointing excitedly at the tents and the soldiers. Their father rattled off French faster than Roz could translate it in her mind.

  “Please, speak slowly. No comprendre.”

  Claude looked over her shoulder and then pushed Roz aside. He latched one callused brown hand on to the dark-suited arm of Pierre Landry and gestured wildly with the other.

  Calmly, Pierre translated. “He says Cherie wants to give birth in her own bed, not in some teepee like a wild Indian, but the water is still rising under their house. He brought the children to safety, and now he will take you back to his wife to deliver the baby. He has three good muskrat hides set aside for your fee, but you must come now.”

  “Tell him if he will trust me with his truck, I’ll go persuade Cherie to come or deliver the baby, whichever seems best. He should stay here with his children and be assigned a tent so we can get his wife settled as soon as possible.”

  Pierre didn’t repeat the message to Claude Arton. “Are you sure about this? The roads could be flooded by now. I didn’t know you could drive. Even if you can, crossing a muddy levee won’t be like cruising through City Park on a Sunday.”

  “I badgered our chauffeur to teach me when I came home from the Academy. Papa never knew. I may be rusty, but I’m sure I can do this. Claude should stay with his children in case anything goes wrong. No sense in making orphans of them. Tell him what I said.”

  Beneath his olive complexion, Pierre Landry paled. He repeated the words. Claude Arton, however, gripped her shoulders and kissed both of Roz’s cheeks. He hoisted her into the driver’s seat and shouted to his children to get down. They jumped to the ground and clustered around their father like a flock of chickens when a hawk flies over.

  Claude pushed the children back and cranked the truck. Roz worked the gears. The chassis bucked forward and stalled. Roz began the process all over again until she was able to make a wide circle turning the vehicle toward the distant levee road. Her white veil fluttered in the windowless cab, and she shoved it behind her. Biting her lip Roz headed down the hill, picking up speed. Pierre Landry ran along side.

  “Let me go with you,” he shouted.

  “They need you here, Pierre. I’ll be just a few hours. Take over my deliveries, will you?” Roz didn’t hear his answer. She clung to the wheel and rolled so fast she nearly missed the turn onto the main road. Afraid that stopping or slowing would stall the engine Roz sucked in her breath and pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The closer Roz got to the levee road, the higher the water in the roadside ditches became. In some places, huge puddles covered the blacktop or packed shells making it impossible to judge what lay beneath. She bullied through them all in the same gear she’d been using since leaving the camp. Roz thanked God when she finally reached the high road running along the spine of the levee and could set the truck into the wheel ruts that would prevent it from sliding off into the high water of the swamp on one side or skidding down into the tilled farm land to the west. She was even more grateful when the weathered cabin came into view. The stilts on which it rested could no longer be seen beneath the flood.

  With the sagging boardwalk awash with an inch of muddy water, Roz made her way across to the porch. Inside the cabin, Cherie groaned and called out for Claude. An iron pot of hot water had been left on the small stove. Roz ladled some into a metal basin and scrubbed with homemade brown soap while she told Cherie that she had come to take her back to the camp.

  “The bebe, he come now,” Cherie cried.

  She knew. The crown of the baby’s head bulged from the vagina when Roz lifted the covers. She had barely enough time to rotate the torso for the delivery of the shoulders before the infant, already screaming and flailing his fists much like his daddy, slipped into the midwife’s hands. Roz placed Cherie’s fifth son on his mother’s hip and scrambled for the scissors and thread to tie off the cord. The afterbirth followed, quickly and easily falling into the pan.

  Roz cleaned the blood and cheesy vernix from the child, pinned him into a diaper, and pulled a tiny, hand-sewn shirt over his head. With the baby well-swaddled in a blanket Cherie had laid out along with the other clothes Roz placed the boy in the mother’s arms. This was always the midwife’s favorite moment of the birth, one that brought her a sense of peace and worthiness.

  Roz bent to clean the mother. In the distance, she heard the noise of a freight train. The train moved closer as if someone had recently built tracks along the levee.

  “Cyclone?” Cherie asked, holding tightly to her baby.

  “I don’t know. Let me go see.” Roz moved toward the front door, but the sound overtook her.

  Cherie screamed, “Crevasse!” as the wall of water hit, splintering the stilts beneath the cabin like the breaking of bones. Water
skittered across the floor and into the bedroom, growing deeper by the minute. Clinging to the door, Roz watched the levee disappear beneath a force that made water run uphill. The wave topped the earthen barrier taking Claude’s truck with it—and then the water returned, slamming the small house from the opposite side. The cabin, as if remembering its former life as a houseboat, rode the crest away from the shore. Roz waded to the bed. “We must go up to the loft. There’s too much water down here. Can you walk?”

  “Oui. I will do this.”

  Roz took the baby from the weakened woman and as an afterthought, snatched up the iron pot of hot water. Its weight anchored her as she crossed the swamped floor. Cherie, holding her nightgown above the filthy water, followed. They made their way to the outside stairs. Roz helped her patient up the first few steps, and when she was above the water, handed her the baby and made her own way into the loft. The house rode the surge.

  In the dim garconniere, Roz settled Cherie on to one of the three pallets filled with cured Spanish moss. Small louvers set into either end of the loft to let in light and air allowed only a patch of gray sky to show and didn’t block the terrifying sounds of the houseboat colliding with uprooted trees and bawling cattle trying to find footing before they drowned. The infant, feeling its mother’s fear in her tight clutch, howled. Helpless in the flood, two women and a child rode the waters at the mercy of God.

  The cabin came to a stop with a jolt that knocked Cherie off the pallet and Roz from her feet. Like Noah and the ark coming to rest on Mount Ararat, they could do nothing more than wait for the waters to receed and thank the Lord they were still alive. Roz made her way down the staircase as far as the water would allow.

  The house had been caught in a copse of young cypress trees inundated up to their lower branches. Boards from barns and huge tree limbs ripped from live oaks piled up around them. Horrified, Roz watched the body of a black man floating facedown snag on their artificial island, then tear loose and spin away with other pieces of flotsam. They were no longer moving, it was true, but the pressure from debris pushed their refuge lower into the water. The waves lapped up the steps and licked at her toes.

  Roz retreated into the loft. “I’m sorry, but we have to go up to the roof soon if we can find a way to get there.”

  “La hache,” Cherie said from her pallet. She gestured toward the far wall of the loft. From hooks and nails hung an assortment of traps, nets, and knives ranging in size from a big machete to blades thin enough to fillet small fish. Muskrat furs lay stored in one corner and in the other leaned an ax.

  “The boys sleep in the loft with all of these dangerous things?” Roz questioned when she should have been grateful Claude did store his his ax here.

  Cherie gave a wan smile. She stilled her newest son by giving him a tit. “Papa say don’t touch, believe you me, dey don’t touch.”

  “Well, thank you, Claude.” Roz drew a three-legged stool to a space between the roof beams. She dragged the ax, heavy enough to split logs, from its corner. The awkward slant of the roof, the weight of the ax, and her own weak muscles made the task go slowly, one chip, then another. Glancing at Cherie, who seemed amused by a woman who couldn’t chop wood, Roz noticed the first trickles of water enter the loft.

  She moved her hands higher up on the ax handle, drew back and swung a mighty blow into the small crack she had made. A gap opened in the shingles wide enough for her to chop downward, letting the weight of the ax do the damage to the roof. Roz gestured to Cherie who raised herself carefully from the lochia-stained pallet. She took the baby and placed him on the stack of furs, then boosted Cherie, thin as the wand of a willow tree except for her sagging belly, through the gap.

  Roz surveyed the loft and snatched up a pile of cotton blankets before the spreading water reached them. She pulled a tarp from the gear along the wall and hung the machete from her wrist by its rawhide cord. These things, she shoved through the hole to Cherie. The cauldron of boiled water went up next, and then the tender newborn, wrapped for extra protection in the largest of the muskrat hides. Last of all, Roz clambered onto the roof. As her weight lifted, the stool floated away from her feet.

  Cherie ruched down the roof ridge to give Roz some room to lay out the blankets and open the tarp. The rough cypress shakes destroyed Roz’s white stockings, but her tennis shoes were a blessing on the slick shingles. She slipped only once, grazing her chin and having to scramble back up the roof before she slid into the sloshing mass of debris. The women settled on the blankets and wrapped themselves in the tarp. A light rain fell.

  “Here, drink your fill. Then, set the pot out to collect rainwater. Both you and the baby need fluids.” Roz scooped up a handful herself carefully making sure any spillage went back into the pot. No telling when help would come if it came at all.

  Cherie, dehydrated by the birth, drank deeply and set the iron pot to one side when she finished. Its stubby feet straddled the peak of the roof. She knotted the skirt of her bedraggled nightgown near her thighs and placed her baby, muskrat hide and all, in the pouch formed by the bodice. Tired from being born, he snuggled against her breast and slept. Roz spread the tarp over the three of them.

  “If you want to rest, lean on me. We’ll take turns keeping watch for help.”

  “Our men, dey gonna come for us. You see.”

  “I haven’t got a man,” Roz said with some bitterness.

  “Pierre, he come for you, and Claude for me. Dey come.” With that certainty voiced, Cherie leaned against Roz and closed her eyes.

  Roz had no intention of waking her patient to take a watch. As the gray light dimmed and turned into darkness, she tried to stay awake. She knew she dozed. Once, the whimpers of the baby made her sit up straighter. She heard Cherie say softly, “Dodo, mon cher ‘tite bete,” as she switched the child to her other breast.

  The filmy light of dawn and the cries of swamp birds rising from a nearby roost woke Roz a second time. As the sun rose, the space beneath the tarp grew too warm, and she folded it back. Cherie opened her eyes. “You sleep. I watch.”

  “I don’t think I can. We have company.” Roz pointed a finger toward the mass of boards and branches below them.

  Two thick, dark-scaled water moccasins stretched out along a broken limb to take in the morning sun. A stiff breeze came up and ruffled the surface of the endless lake into wavelets that doused the resting snakes. Disturbed, they sought higher ground. Curving and straightening, curving and straightening, the belly scales of the serpents propelled them along to the edge of the roof and up over the rough shakes.

  The women sat still. Roz slowly moved her hand down to grip the handle of the machete whose rawhide thong had bitten into her wrist throughout the night. She was very glad she hadn’t given in to the urge to toss it aside. One snake took a horizontal path across the shingles. The other kept climbing toward the roof ridge.

  Reeking of musk, a muscular five feet long, the moccasin arrowed its triangular head toward the women. Its forked black tongue flicked in and out, sensing their presence, their size, their warmth. They were prey too big to devour but a definite danger.

  The baby awoke with a wail and beat his small fists against the front of Cherie’s gown. That quickly, the huge snake went into its coil, rose up and flashed the white lining of its mouth—cottonmouth, its other name—so appropriate, so apt. Cherie moved her hands to cover the child, and the serpent sprang.

  Roz struck down with a two-handed grip on the machete, severing the reptile in the middle of its thick torso with the heavy blade. The broad head, lidless cat-like eyes staring, tumbled down the roof trailing two feet of torso. The tail end of the snake, oozing stinking brown feces from its pierced intestines, thrashed and curled, drawing the attention of the second moccasin.

  The smaller cottonmouth turned, its body flowing in a wide U-shape as it slithered up the shingles. Roz didn’t wait. She struck before the snake had a chance to go into its coil and heaved it off the roof with the tip of her knife. As the
snake splashed into the water, a small log on the edge of the debris opened wide jaws and crunched down on the meal that had unexpectedly come its way. The alligator took its prey beneath the gray waters. Watching for the gator to resurface, Roz kicked the reeking body of the first moccasin into the branches below.

  “What you doing? We coulda eat dat,” Cherie protested.

  “Maybe you could have.”

  The young gator crawled up on a broad board making up part of the raft of debris. The tail of the snake dangled from its mouth. With a few jerks of its head, reptile swallowed reptile. The alligator, content with its snack, stretched out in the sun and lowered its eyes to slits.

  “I’ll tell you what, Cherie. If that gator decides to come up the roof, you take the knife. Just save me a piece of the tail.” With that comment said, Roz draped the tarp over them to provide a sun screen, surveyed the horizon, and seeing no sign of help, rested her head on Cherie’s shoulder and went to sleep.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “What do you mean they haven’t come back?” Pierre Landry said as he set the leg of a man who had been trapped beneath a fallen tree. “I had to go into Chapelle to tend some of my patients there and didn’t get back until very late. I thought Roz and Cherie would be asleep in their tents.”

  His arms gesturing, Claude Arton rattled on in rapid French. Nurse Strictland got between them and said loudly and slowly, “You can’t be in this tent unless you have a medical emergency. Emergencies only. Do you understand?”

  Dr. Landry smoothed the last layer of plaster bandages. “He says he understands, Nurse Strictland, and that he isn’t deaf. His wife and Midwife Boylan did not return to the camp last night. Incoming refugees say there have been breaks in the levee near Henderson, more in Ste. Jeanne Parish. We need to go look for the women.”