Queen of the Mardi Gras Ball

by Lynn Shurr

  Pierre patted her awake when the boat nudged the levee. Roz sat up, still drowsy. “My mouth feels like cotton.”

  “Here, I saved the orange one for you. Cherie took the lime, and Claude got the last cherry.” Pierre offered her the lollipop.

  “Thank you, doctor. I feel better already. Where are we?”

  “Back at the levee. The surfboat on the other side is gone. Hopefully, the others we rescued made good use of it. Claude and I need to pull this one over to the other side. We aren’t home yet.”

  “Far from it.”

  Roz scrambled up the muddy bank and waited with Cherie and the baby as the men coaxed the bateau up the hill. It slid easily down the other side. Proceeding carefully so as not to snag the engine in barbed wire or clumps of vegetation, they made it halfway across the new lake before the gasoline gave out. The men took the oars and rowed. By the time they reached the end of the road where the Ford waited, the dead alligator, which Claude insisted on bring along, was giving off a ripe smell.

  “I feel bad that you killed it after it ate the snakes. Can’t we just ditch it here?” Roz suggested.

  “Claude, he say it a nice, unscarred hide, bring good money. Hey, don’t I say we eat his tail? Tonight, I make alligator sauce piquant,” Cherie said.

  “Tonight, you will have some soup, take a shower, and sleep in a clean cot.”

  “Okay. Mignon, she can make the sauce piquant, but I don’t go to bed ’til I have some, me.”

  With the women and baby crammed into the back and nodding off, and Claude in the front seat with his foot resting on the gator, Pierre Landry drove the Lizzie back to the camp where they found the welcome none too cordial.

  The guards at the gate marched the men, bayonets pricking their backs, to the commandant’s tent. The women and little Grandeau followed, protesting and wailing like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. They were stopped by guards before the entry and caught only a glimpse of the commandant wearing jodpurs, a slouch hat and very shiny knee-high leather boots. He raised his bushy gray eyebrows and opened the thin lips under his large, aristocratic nose. “Dr. Landry, you are under military arrest for stealing a boat, assaulting a soldier, and taking his weapon and canteen. If I had a brig, I’d lock you up, but we need your services, so you are confined to the camp for the duration of this crisis. As for your accomplice, he will work at hard labor restoring the levees.”

  “But I have patients in town who need my care. We borrowed the boat for an emergency rescue and had no time to do paperwork.”

  The general beat his fist against a portable desk that quivered beneath the blows. “In the military, we always have time to do the proper paperwork. You stole that boat!”

  “Sir,” said one of the lads guarding the prisoners. “The boat has been returned. A nigger and a white lady with two kids were picked up walking toward the camp, and they told us where we could find it. Said Dr. Landry and Mr. Arton, here, rescued them.”

  Claude Arton shouted and gestured. He stripped the canteen from his shoulder and threw it down on the desk. More reluctantly, he slowly unshouldered the rifle and tossed it to one of the guards.

  The commandant went purple in the face. “You greenies didn’t even disarm the man before you brought him in here? A translator, I need a translator.”

  Cherie pushed in front of a young man in uniform who was reluctant to manhandle a desperate woman in a dirty nightgown and bearing a squalling newborn. She called out over the cries. “Me, I speak for Claude. He say he hit da guard and took da canteen. He say he made Dr. Landry tie up da soldier and help wit’ da boat so he could come get me, his wife, and save da baby, his son. You let da doctor go. Him, Claude, he got no’ting better to do now da swamp flooded den fill da sandbags anyhow. Oh, and he only borrow da gun and canteen jus’ like dat boat what already been returned.”

  “Can’t you quiet that child? It’s destroying my concentration.” The commandant pressed his hands against his temple.

  Roz squeezed between the guards too busy listening to stop her. “I’ll hold the baby. I delivered him yesterday in a house swept away by the flood. We were stranded on a rooftop until Dr. Landry and Mr. Arton came to our rescue.”

  Roz took Grandeau and patted his tiny back, but he would not be comforted.

  “Mrs. Arton is still weak from childbirth and the ordeal she has been through. Now her husband is arrested for saving our lives. I wouldn’t be surprised if she went into shock.” Roz gave Cherie a sharp look.

  Cherie put a hand to her bony chest above her milk-swollen breasts and crumpled to the ground. Pierre scooped her up and placed her, filthy nightgown and all, on the general’s spotless, could bounce a dime on the covers, cot. He knelt by the woman and took her pulse. Roz thought the scene very affecting.

  A stentorian voice penetrated the canvas walls and made Grandeau cry all the harder. Nurse Strictland had arrived. “Let me by, I say. You have no authority over me!”

  The boys at the entry gave way. They had been raised to respect nuns and schoolteachers and other women with big voices.

  “See here, General Emory. Dr. Landry is a civilian volunteer who is free to come and go as he pleases. We badly need his services, and I would not be at all surprised if he refused them after the way he is being treated for merely borrowing a boat to save lives.”

  She put her hands on her broad hips as Pierre Landry stared at her, astonished. Cherie moaned pitifully, and Claude rushed to her side. Grandeau continued to cry.

  “My God, you remind me of my daughter. I haven’t been able to tell her a thing since she got back from the war.” General Emory raked a hand through his vigorous growth of steel gray hair.

  “You scoot on in, Virgil. Mama and brother are right behind you. Well, I got to go after my boy, don’t I?” a voice with an Arkansas twang explained to the guards.

  A tow-headed two-year-old with angelic blue eyes and a deformed lip stared up at the intimidating face of the general and began to whimper. Lizzie McDonald in her shapeless calico dress drew the boy against her hip where he hid his face in her skirt. Bald-headed baby Luther on her shoulder heard Grandeau screaming and wailed in sympathy.

  “There now,” Lizzie said, “don’t you cry, Lutie. We’s safe now ’cause of Dr. Landry and Mr. Arton and that nice nigger man. Silas, nicest nigger I ever met, rowed us right to the road in that borrowed boat. He’s down in t’other camp, but I’m just sure he’d like to say thankee, too, for being rescued. And pretty soon, Dr. Landry is going to fix brother’s lip so he can talk better. Then, he’ll say thankee right clear to these good, brave men who saved our lives.”

  “Water,” Cherie said faintly. “Water.”

  Claude snatched a canteen hanging from the back of general’s chair and put it to his wife’s lips. The general appeared both shaken and embarrassed now.

  “Brandy, dat’s more better.” Cherie smacked her lips. “I feel stronger now. Doctor, can you take me to my tent?” she asked weakly.

  General Emory threw up his hands. “You are dismissed! You are all dismissed! Don’t come to my attention again in any way. Do you understand?”

  A round of yessirs, oui-ouis, thankees, and of courses issued from the crowd as they filed out of the tent. General Emory called in his guards for a good chewing out to let them know he was still totally in charge.

  “What next?” Roz asked rhetorically, but she got an answer.

  “Soup, shower, and the sack. That’s an order,” said Nurse Strickland.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Roz slipped her practical spare white uniform over pink silk undergarments that felt wonderful against her newly washed flesh. She drew a comb through her cropped, damp hair. In a moment, she’d lay down fully clothed except for her shoes and veil, just in case someone needed her in the night. Most of the camp refugees were still up, sitting around small fires, having a last cup of coffee, swapping escape stories, puffing out tunes on a harmonica or playing checkers, but she was exhausted. Someone scratched on t
he tent flap that she’d lowered while changing her clothes. Another woman had gone into labor, no doubt.

  “Come in.”

  “I came to examine your cuts and bruises. Medical professionals are notorious for neglecting their own health.”

  Pierre Landry entered the twilight of the tent. He lit a camp lantern and beckoned Roz to sit on a cot. His dark hair was slicked back and still damp like hers. He wore a fresh white shirt and one of his many dark jackets, but no tie. He smelled of soap and a lime-scented aftershave, like a boy come courting.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sit. Let me look at your knees. You have several small splinters that are going to fester.”

  He plucked them out with tweezers and, all the while, Roz felt the warmth of his breath on her thighs as he knelt by her feet. The sensation distracted her from the pain as he probed her wounds and painted them red with a stinging tincture of iodine. Pierre took her hands and turned them palm up, dabbed on more iodine. He raised her chin and coated the raw scrape on the tip.

  “Now I look like a red Indian about to go on the warpath. That’s what my mother used to say. I was constantly getting scraped up doing things I shouldn’t have done.”

  “I think you look beautiful. I haven’t seen your hair for a long time. It’s still so short but back to its natural color.” His dark sheik’s eyes shone in the lamplight.

  Self-consciously, she patted her hair with her fingertips. “I can’t afford the hairdresser, and this style is more practical.”

  “I always thought the color resembled sunlight shining through a jar of honey. Sit still. There is another abrasion on your forehead. Then I’m finished.”

  She hissed as he dabbed on the iodine. “What, no lollipop to take away the pain?”

  “I gave them all away today. No more lollipops until I can get into town again. This will have to do.” He applied his lips to hers as thoroughly as he had the iodine to her wounds.

  Roz grasped his face between her hands, staining his cheeks with the red solution as she held him tightly and reveled in the softness of his moustache and the heat of his tongue gliding across her lips and entering her mouth. They paused for breath.

  “Three times today, I thought you were dead and gone from me. Now, I know I can’t give you up. I will always find you, Roz, no matter how often we are parted,” he said.

  “Six months ago, I was a silly girl who thought she could get over a bad marriage and a lost love by going to a party and getting drunk. You told me I had to heal myself. I think that I have. But Pierre, I will always want you no matter how strong I become. Stay with me tonight.”

  “The other nurses will be coming in soon.”

  “Then just hold me while I go to sleep, the way you did after I lost the baby.”

  “The way I did all night after I took you from Broussard’s Barn.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t need to.” He drew a second cot close to hers and lay as near her side as he could get. Again, he kissed the nape of her neck, her hair, and matched his breathing to hers. They slept.

  ****

  “Dr. Spivey, I need to bring a matter to your attention.”

  Nurse Strictland bore down on him in the mess tent where Leonard Spivey sat fortifying himself with more coffee. He was determined to allow young Landry a full night’s sleep after today’s ordeal.

  “Please, come with me at once.”

  Doc Spivey brought his tin cup of dark roast along as they passed among the tents and came at last to the one used by the midwife and several other nurses. Nurse Strictland raised the flap with her fingertips and held it up so Doc could get a good long look at Roz Boylan entwined with Dr. Pierre Landry. Landry’s face rested against the midwife’s pale neck. His arms encircled her, and her hands lay atop his as if to keep him right there, pressed against her as tightly as possible. Nurse Strictland dropped the flap and stepped back a few paces.

  “One of the other nurses said she wasn’t comfortable coming to her own bed when they were in here like that. I knew the first day something was going on between those two. I warned her about propriety, about moral behavior in the camp.”

  “Nurse Strictland, I’m sure you did, but they are both fully clothed. Pierre still has his shoes on. I suspect they are both so exhausted the tent could fall on them, and they wouldn’t notice. Why don’t we let them have a few hours sleep, then I’ll go in and wake them.”

  “We should do that now!”

  “Nurse Strictland, I don’t know your first name.”

  “Judith.”

  “Judith, you served in the Great War, did you not? I was too old to volunteer and the only doctor in Chapelle. I couldn’t desert my patients, and my wife would have killed me, no battlefield wounds necessary. As it turned out, she was the first to go. Breast cancer—I didn’t find it in time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I, but we were speaking of the Great War. You must have been in your early twenties then.”

  “Late twenties.”

  “The war was a huge disaster, even greater than this one.”

  “Yes, it was. Bloody and terrible.”

  “And during those terrible times, didn’t you ever give the comfort of your body to a soldier far from home or to an overworked surgeon?”

  “I was much younger then.” Nurse Strictland’s cheeks burned red in the light of a campfire they passed as Leonard Spivey guided her away from the midwife’s tent.

  “You blush like a redhead. I’ve been wondering what color your hair is beneath that veil,” Doc said smoothly.

  “Not red, heavens no! Just plain brown—though some people have told me I have auburn highlights.”

  “I’m sure your hair is as lovely as your compassionate brown eyes, Judy. I share a small tent with Dr. Landry. Perhaps, we could go there and wait. You could tell me about your experiences in the Great War, and I could tell you what I know of Pierre Landry and Roz Boylan. A few months back, I had a hand in tearing them away from each other. Now, I’m beginning to see that giving another person comfort in times like these is not so bad. What do you say, Judy, shall we go to my tent?”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “What a pissant little burg!” Burke Boylan proclaimed as he steered the mud-splashed, white Mercedes toward Mt. Carmel Academy. “I can’t believe you convinced me to risk my life driving up the River Road and crossing the Mississippi in full flood on the ferry so you could visit Rosamond’s brat of a sister. I thought we were going to be washed out to sea.”

  “I paid you to bring me here, Buster. Don’t pretend you didn’t need the money. If the St. Rochelles hadn’t given you that house outright as a wedding gift, you wouldn’t have a roof over your head right now. Since they kicked you out of the law firm, your clients haven’t been exactly the cream of society,” Artemus Delamare shot back.

  “Besides, the town of Rainbow is holy ground. Miracles happen here every day. If you don’t want to attend the tea, you can visit some of the shrines and pray for your blackened soul,” Artie continued.

  “I make my own fate, Artie. I may be finished in New Orleans, but once I get my hands on Rosie again, I’m going to drag her back to Philly and show my family there isn’t going to be a divorce. She’ll stay home and crank out babies and write letters to her family saying how happy she is to be my wife.”

  “Give it up, Boylan. Even the servants couldn’t be bribed to tell where Roz is hiding out. I know you tried. Most of them have worked for the St. Rochelles for three generations. They aren’t going to let you beat up their Mardi Gras queen any more.”

  “Oh, I know where she is—with lover boy Landry. His hometown is Chapelle, just down the road. All that tender care he gave her in the hospital, and then he threatens my life. I know they slept together while I was out earning a living, so Roz deserved what she got. The baby was his, I’m certain. Maybe we’ll pay the doctor and the adulteress a little visit after we finish here since we’ve come this far.�
��

  “Look, if you don’t want to visit the Academy, fine. I didn’t pay for any side trips. Here’s a ten-spot. Go find some gas for the trip home, and buy yourself some lunch.”

  “You’re up to your neck in dough since you passed the bar exams,” Burke replied resentfully.

  “My success did open the parental purse strings. Too bad I hate practicing law. Let me out at the gates, Boylan.”

  “I’m not your fuckin’ chauffeur, Artie.”

  “Today, you are. Get lost for a few hours. The poor kid is going to have to stay here all summer getting the spirit knocked out of her by the nuns because her parents don’t feel it’s safe to have her come home. After three months of good works and Latin study, they’ll have Roxie all softened up for the convent, and that would be a damned shame.”

  “I always said you were a pervert, Delamare.”

  Burke skidded to a stop before the tall iron gates of Mt. Carmel Academy, open today for Saturday visitation. The marigolds and red cannas surrounding the statue of the Virgin Mary centered in front of the ancient columned buildings glowed through the miserable drizzle. Holding his gift for Roxie tightly under his arm, Artie pulled his hat down and the collar of his trench coat up as he trudged the gravel path toward the visitor’s reception room where he had visited his numerous female cousins in the past.

  “Meet me back here in two hours, Buster,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Yeah, your wish is my command.”

  Burke revved the engine and sped off toward the nearest and only gas pump in Rainbow. Red and rusting, it sat before a false-fronted frame general store that named itself Plato Grocery in flaking yellow letters. The owner had shoveled a pile of oyster shells into the wheel ruts by the pump, but Buster had to slog through the mud, sullying the cuffs of his white linen suit, to reach the two board steps leading up to the entry. On the sagging porch running the length of the building, he removed his hat and shook the rain droplets from the pristine vanilla-colored felt.