by catt dahman
“Frank,” Emeline shouted, “can’t you do something?” She motioned to Marie and Nita who were climbing the stairs, “those girls are being disrespectful.”
“Are they?”
“They act…like they accept this outrage. They are going to hold her hand and ooh and ahh over that baby, and I just won’t have it. I want that girl and her spawn out of my house.”
“Your house,” Frank repeated dully, “we’re in the midst of a hurricane, Emeline.”
“What is wrong with you?” Emeline demanded.
“Indeed. What could be wrong with me?” Frank said. He felt heavy and full of poison, now.
“Gumbo is ready, and I made some fine corn bread for to go with it,” Abagail announced, “come eat while it’s hot.”
“Gumbo. Slave food,” Emeline grumbled. She always complained about the gumbo, but it was a favorite of Frank’s, and Abagail made it for him at least once a month. He had often explained that it was a food of many cultures and was good because of the contribution of each culture. Right now, that seemed critical for Frank to grasp, but he could hardly think about it as it cut to his heart.
How often had Emeline, Landry, and Trish said something like that in front of Abagail, Toby, or Theo? And Frank had thought himself to be above the drama and that it was better to ignore the rude remarks, but by allowing them to be said around him, he was somehow indicating it was okay.
“Emeline, we no longer have slavery. We have employees and good ones at that. They deserve respect,” Frank said clearly. His sons smiled broadly as Emeline spun away and went back to Landry so they could stare in unison at Frank with slack jaws.
Abagail ducked her head, but Frank saw a flash of thanks and pride in her face.
For some reason, the gumbo was important, Frank thought.
Frank, ignoring the raving from Emeline and Landry, went to the kitchen to sit at the granite counter and eat. Abagail half-filled a big bowl with rice, then heavily peppered it, and filled it the rest of the way with the steaming, chunky soup. He bit into the salty-buttered cornbread and thanked Abagail for the meal.
Jules, Remy, and Beau joined him, and he felt peaceful, sharing a dinner with his sons. The chicken was so tender it fell off the bone, and Frank scooped up the vegetables and a bit of sausage and okra, “No one can make gumbo like Abagail.”
“No, Sir, I always say that. Daddy, why is Landry so angry?”
“I don’t know how to explain, son,” Frank told Jules, “it’s as if he feels someone poached his land, see? He thinks Candy Lynn cheated on him or something.”
“This is good as always, Abagail,” Beau said, “did she, Daddy?”
“I don’t know. How could anyone know unless, like Nita said, there’s a scientific test done. I’ve always held that a birth of a child is a great event; it was with you all….”
“Can we see Candy Lynn and the baby?” Jules asked. He was just now a teen and excited by a new baby in the house. Of all the children, Jules was the kindest, most tenderhearted, and he thought the baby was no different than a new pup or a kitten. He liked Candy Lynn and went out of his way to always bring her flowers or listen to her talk about the bayou.
“You can soon. Ummm, you’d be kind about the baby, yes?”
Jules frowned and looked to his brothers, “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because Landry says it’s mixed…black and while, you big doofus,” Remy said, “Daddy, you know Jules wouldn’t be rude. You taught us better, and why would we care anyway?”
“Indeed. Why would you?” Frank smiled. The question lightened his burden. He had good children.
Marie came down for a tray that Abagail fixed up with bowls, cornbread, gleaming flatware, and perfectly folded napkins. Marie took the tray back upstairs; she and Nita ate with Candy Lynn. Marie and Nita thanked her, Frank noticed; Trish and Emeline always acted as if Abagail were a slave instead of a well-paid employee and a beloved member of the family.
Frank kicked himself mentally.
Toby, Abagail’s son, came in from the covered atrium with a frown. He took a bowl from Abagail and ate quickly, getting a second helping before the others were finished with their first bowl. He was unusually quiet. He did say his father, Theo, was still at watch.
“How’s it look, Toby?” Frank asked. Storms seemed to surround him.
“Not good. It’s bad. We should have evacuated, Mister Frank.”
That was unlike Toby to be so opinionated. Frank looked up, his mind still with Emeline and Candy Lynn and the baby, “What do you mean?”
“The levee is crumblin’. I guess we have about an hour before we’ll be swimming in that floodwater. The house has taken a beating, and I think part of the second wing is down and gone. It ain’t good.”
“Don’t say ain’t,” Abagail automatically corrected her son. Her Toby went to the best school with the Theriot and Terrabonne-Theriot children and was as well educated as they were, accepted and respected both, and she would lay a whoopin’ on him if he acted less than his station. Abagail and Theo had worked too long and too hard for their son to be trashy-speaking.
“Yes, Ma’am. I mean it doesn’t look good, Mister Frank.” He blushed. He enjoyed the good life with the mansion-born children and was treated as they were, but he worked, too, at the house, saving money for college. He knew better than to slip in slang with his mother in the kitchen.
“You think the water will come up into the ground floor?”
Toby sighed, “Mister Frank, that water is going to come up and wash everything away. This house can’t handle that kind of flooding, Sir.” He calmly finished his meal and thanked his mother for the fine meal. He felt pride that Mister Frank Theriot asked his opinion.
Frank raised his arms as if he were surrendering, “What will we do?”
“Mister Frank, unless we are good swimmers, we are going to drown is what we’ll do.” Toby shrugged, feeling a little down but still hopeful. To be honest, his mother’s cooking had lifted him up quite a bit.
“Well that’s a sobering thought. Abagail, may I have another bowl of that delicious gumbo? I swear you outdid yourself this time. It’s hot and full of fire, and it’s such a strong mixture of ingredients. I think I have finally appreciated what this is all about instead of just knowing it tastes good,” Frank smiled.
Abagail refilled his bowl, her eyes studying him.
She hoped he understood all her meaning.
She took time for another topic, “Mister Frank, I know you don’t have use for star tellin’ and card reading, but this ain’t that. I have a bad feeling in my soul. I feel pure evil is coming.”
“The hurricane feels that way.” He was amused she could use slang but her son couldn’t.
“It ain’t that storm,” she huffed, “you know that. It’s something far meaner and far worse than this ole storm, and it’s coming.”
“I won’t disagree. Things sure seem odd,” Frank agreed.
“Best be warned and watch for it because it’s the kind of evil what hides in plain sight and sneaks up to get you. You won’t see it, but listen to your heart, and feel for it.” Abagail stopped scrubbing at the counter with the cloth and rolled her eyes as she spoke, trembling a little.
When Frank’s wife died in a car crash but before the phone call came that delivered the news to him and to his children and caused so much pain, Abagail had shrieked while outside in the yard, cutting wild onions for a salad.
Clutching her chest, Abagail stood under one of the big oaks (that had fallen in this storm of the century), sobbing. Frank and Theo rushed to her as she fell to the lawn, shaking her head violently. She hadn’t been able to speak as she was so upset, but Theo carried her inside the house, and she clasped her head, moaning.
Abagail loved Frank’s first wife, Olivia, and Abagail wouldn’t stop rocking herself, holding her head, and crying. Frank answered the house phone, scared and concerned for Abagail and about to call an ambulance for her; the ringing of the phone caught
him halfway across the kitchen.
Frank heard Abagail whisper Olivia’s name before he took the call and knew what would be said.
Olivia’s head was crushed in the car accident.
That was neither the first nor last time Abagail had a bad feeling about something yet to happen. Frank patted her. She was getting worked up, but there was never anything anyone could do.
The eye of the storm and the calm were misleading; it only meant they had the other side to contend with next. The wind was steadily building again.
The evil was coming, but it was as sly as real evil always is.
Abagail steeled herself for the next barrage of Hurricane Harrison.
Chapter Three: The Audettes
“Ghislaine, I done told you to get dat chaoui out here on the porch and outta your chamber a choucher twice, now. Don’t make me come battre your zinzin.” Amadee Audette scratched his armpit and spat a stream of tobacco that mostly missed the porch. He was drunk and mixing Cajun with his English; his mind thought in both languages, and he often mixed poor English with broken French.
“Daddy, you said I could keep ‘em.”
Amadee glared at his teenaged daughter, thinking her backtalk and sass had about stretched him to his limits. Six girls and six boys, and none of the rest whined and showed as much macaquerie, or monkey shines as much as Ghislaine, “You can keep dem, but I wanted that there cage out here so I’se can watch the critters a while.” Having to explain to her made him grumpier. Dat girl was mal-eleve.
“Don’t you go tossing ‘em into the water,” Ghislaine whined as she carried the cage to the porch, fondly petting the baby raccoon through the bars.
“Leonie, yer girl has got a fresh mouth on her, and I’ma bout to knock some ‘a her pearly whites sideways. She’s makin’ a bahbin,” Amadee yelled. He hated pouting. The girl and the rest of them might think he was calmed down as the eye of the storm moved over and left the bayou calm, but flooding rapidly, and they might suspect he was too sober to feel mean, but that just weren’t so.
Ghislaine was a hand full of trouble.
His oldest, married off now, was an obedient daughter, always getting Amadee’s moonshine for him, washing and cooking, and doing female chores. Of Leonie’s boys, one was quiet and thought he was too good for the bayou, and the other was malleable and had possibilities. The rest, his children, hers, theirs were mostly dull and easy to train to act right. All but Ghislaine. The girl thought she had her own mind or something.
“I am gonna swat dat zinzin within my leather strop, Leonie.”
At the other end of the porch, Leonie stirred their dinner, cooked on the butane stove in a big pot: courtbouillion, which was a stew of creamed tomatoes and filled with fish, onions, and whatever vegetables they had around. She couldn’t leave her meal since it had to be stirred. She tried to use up what they had since it looked as if the backside of the storm was going to wash them all away. “Bon rein,” she whispered to herself. He was a pathetic, useless man, “Boo, you mind now,” she told her daughter, “Allons….”
If Amadee got angry, he’d yank off his belt and whoop Ghislaine’s backside black and blue as he had many times before. Amadee Audette didn’t spare the rod, and it was a rarity for one of the children or Leonie to go a full week without a severe beating.
She winced and shivered when one of the children got a beating, for that was what it was, getting stropped across the back, buttocks, and legs until Amadee’s arm tired out and he could no longer raise the leather. Sometimes there was a backhand (a fist, if we are honest) across the jaw for back talking. Leonie had suffered a broken jaw once and broken ribs twice, a broken hand, and a broken nose until she learned her lesson.
Why she had thought marrying up with Amadee Audette was a good idea she didn’t know, but after five years, a dozen broken bones, watching him go from an okay looking man to being a fat, lazy, slob, she could kick herself in the ass for being so foolish to think she needed a man. What had men done besides cause her misery? Why did bayou women not kick away the bayou men and band together?
There were some good bayou men, yes, but they didn’t look twice at women like Leonie, and she knew that.
She had two girls and two boys, the oldest, twenty-one, born when she was only fourteen, a year older than her daughter, Ghislaine. Amadee had four children, as well; the youngest, Clovis, was eight and not all there in his head. (It was said as haid). It was to Leonie as if the boy had thick cotton in his head because more times than not, he sat on the dock, drooling and staring out into the water.
Clovis spent all of his time staring into nothing, drooling, hooting at times, but always peering about with no light or intelligence in his eyes.
Amadee said the boy was a couillion, or crazy-headed. Still Leonie wasn’t too unkind to the boy since it was rumored that Amadee caused brain injuries to the child when he beat his pregnant wife, Clovis’ momma to death. He waited too long before cutting baby Clovis out of her belly, hoping the baby would come on its own.
Amadee beat the evil right out of her, he knew, because at the end, she was yelling for God. She had died, which he regretted, but she died cleansed. And he had at least saved his boy child and not allowed him to be infected with evil voodoo or die in the woman’s belly. He cut the baby out the same way as he would gut a deer.
Amadee claimed his former wife, Jennie, was practicing evil witchcraft, or a dark type of voodoo with blood sacrifices and dark chants that he had been trying to get out of her before the boy was born, and no law ever did care to investigate or do anything about the event. The woman was buried outside the holy cemetery in unconsecrated soil and mainly forgotten by everyone.
Amadee thought beating cured people of sass, voodoo, backtalk, and bad attitudes. He had an instant cure, and it was through his fists or a leather strop. Simple as that.
Once Leonie and Amadee were married, he wasn’t finished, oh, no, that was for sure. Leonie had four more children in the last five years, and she was getting tired of it, even if she did have a nice wide pelvis, but Amadee wasn’t going to let her use heathenry birth control or relinquish his rights to her body. She was worn out from birthing babies, cooking, cleaning, nursing, and caring for all the people in the house. Lord knew a shack on the bayou was hard to keep clean as the mud and kudzu crept inside all it could.
Earlier, the ouragan, or storm blasted their shack, the wind howled, and shook the boards. With the grown children and small children in the other two rooms, Amadee was amorous finishing fast so Leonie could cook before the eye of the storm arrived.
So considerate.
Drigaille man.
Leonie ladled up her concoction into cheap, cracked bowls bought at a swap meet and added some water-boiled-peppered cornbread on the sides, “Y’all had an ahnvee for dis hot hush puppies, and I made y’all plenty. Allons.” When Amadee was this way and speaking in broken French, she’d do the same so as to avoid his wrath at her taking on airs.
She imagined crockery that matched, maybe something white with no cracks, but little blue and pink flowers on the edges, all matched with spoons and forks that matched and didn’t bend. Cups, bowls, plates, maybe napkins of something soft and pale blue. She laughed to herself. Might as well wish for a washer and a dryer instead of a scrub board, tub, clothespins, and a taut line. Amadee would slap her silly for wishing for such things.
‘Wish in one hand and spit in the other; which one fills up fastest,’ he said. For Christmas, she’d gotten a new washboard.
“A la Mange,” Amadee yelled. He said it was time to eat.
Buford and Virgil took bowls. Ghislaine, Belle, Lougenia, and Tammany came next for their food, and they got bowls for the little ones: Maude, who was two, Clovis (of the cotton head) who was eight, Dempsey who was four, Eloi, three, and Gussie, barely one.
Leonie took Amadee his bowl, and everyone waited for him to taste it as always. He had to take a bite and declare it acceptable. The hot water cornbread was hard and tasty o
n the outside and soft, hot with red pepper and delicious on the inside. He nodded, “Ca c’est bon.”
Leonie relaxed, unaware that she had tensed tight as a wire. Anything hot with red pepper was okay with him, generally.
Leonie ate her food silently, getting up to refill Amadee’s bowl three times and buttering seven hush puppies for him. She had hot radishes, too, that she had grown, and he liked munching them although they made his rotting teeth ache a little. These pleased him completely as she had pickled the radishes, bright red and white, in a little vinegar, salt, a touch of sugar, red pepper, garlic, onion, and slices of jalapeno.
“Oohhh-ehhhh but them’s some good picked radishes, Leonie. I like dem just fine.”
She didn’t know if the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, but it was a way to avoid being beaten.
“We need to get on dis boat, Daddy,” Buford said calmly, “less than an hour, we’ll be flooded out, and them things is coming around, just nosin’ fer now.”
“Mo pa konmprann, boy.” Amadee said as he lit a stinky, hand-rolled cigarette.
“Dis we have is a tataille, but I knows what dey is in de waters; the bay done flooded up, and the lakes and the bayou done gone salty. Virgil and me seen ‘em, Daddy.” He referred to a monster or a beast; made a swimming motion with his hand, mimicking a fin swerving right and left; and then using his hand to indicate teeth chomping down.
“Barbue? Big boogers?” Amadee thought they meant big catfish. Monster catfish, maybe. In the swamps, things could grow big and mean. Some of them, the old grand dads, were not just massive and cantankerous, but were sly fellows as well. They were almost malevolent.
“Naw,” Virgil spoke, “they aren’t cats.”
Leonie watched her sons. Buford was born and blood of the bayou, would hunt gators, live in a slapped-up shack, marry some gutter trash putain, and roll out a dozen malnourished, pale children who suffered skin rashes and worms in their stomach and bowels and would cry when their teeth rotted in their receding, bleeding gums. It was his destiny because he wanted nothing more than that life. It hurt her all the way to her soul, but he was like his real father: content to fight the bayou, live on moonshine whiskey, and do things that he damned well shouldn’t.