I didn’t press for a translation this time. I just heard the words and said them back to him, assuming that the second half of the oath ran along the same lines the first.
“En temps de grand…danger,” he said.
“En temps de grand danger,” we repeated.
“…je serai dans…l’obligation…”
“…je serai dans l’obligation…”
He coughed once then continued.
“…de reveler…le lieu…”
“…de reveler le lieu…”
“…où…se…trouve…” he paused, coughing.
“…où se trouve…”
His coughing didn’t stop, so finally Lisa broke her position so that she could move behind him and whack him on the back. She was able to get him through it, but the cough started up again as soon as he tried to speak.
“…où se trouve l’angelus…et…le presenter…à…”
He couldn’t get any more of it out without bursting into a furious coughing spasm. As he had done earlier, he had so much trouble catching his breath that finally Lisa had to reach again for the oxygen mask. I watched as she did so, feeling more confident this time as to the rhythms of his care. Next, his skin would turn from blue back to pink, then he would relax, then his breathing would return to a more normal rhythm, and then he would take a little rest.
At least that’s what was supposed to happen.
When she put the mask on his face, however, his skin didn’t turn pink at all. Instead, it grew more blue, then a very odd shade of purple. Lisa kept looking at the tank, twisting the dials, checking his vitals. Then all of a sudden she ripped the mask from his face and lunged at his chest, slamming her hands against his diaphragm and pressing with all of her might.
“We need help!” she commanded. “Call an ambulance!”
Stunned, I just stood there, frozen.
Lisa put her hands to Willy’s mouth, pressed hers to it and exhaled loudly.
“Miranda! Now!”
At that, I jumped into action, running toward the door.
“Use my cell phone!” Lisa cried, and I looked back to see her gesturing toward the table with her head, counting loudly as she again pressed into Willy’s chest.
I threw open the door and yelled for Deena. Then I ran back to Lisa’s phone, picked it up, and with trembling hands tried to turn it on. Though it took mere seconds to come to life and prepare itself for dialing, by the time I was able to press in nine one one, it felt as though hours had passed.
“Willy’s in trouble!” I told Deena as she came rushing into the room. “I’m calling for an ambulance!”
Rather than heading for her husband, however, Deena ran toward me and ripped the phone from my hand, pressing the button to end my call before the connection even went through.
“No you’re not!” she cried. “He’s DNR! He’s under hospice care!”
She shoved the phone deep into her pocket and only then turned to see the state of her husband. He was a deep bluish purple, as lifeless as if he were made of stone despite the fact that his eyes were wide open. With a guttural yell, she rushed at Lisa and pushed her from her husband’s body.
“Leave him alone!” she cried. “He doesn’t want this!”
“Yes, he does,” Lisa defended angrily. “He wasn’t finished. He didn’t say all that he had to say.”
The two of them argued over Willy’s lifeless body, Deena accusing Lisa of being selfish and cruel, Lisa accusing Deena of being cheap, of refusing to call an ambulance just because at this point it wasn’t covered by Medicare or insurance. Both women were adamant, both were furious. Neither seemed to understand that it was a moot point now anyway. Willy was already dead.
From the looks of things, no matter what anybody did, I had a feeling he was going to stay that way.
THIRTEEN
Sweet was the light of his eyes; but it suddenly sank into darkness,
As when a lamp is blown out by a gust of wind at a casement.
The next hour passed in a blur of activity and emotion. When Lisa finally saw the situation for what it was and understood that Willy was gone for good, she broke down and sobbed. Deena’s grief was more internal than that, though I could tell that for all her blustering and cruelty while he was alive, she was devastated as well now that he was gone.
I couldn’t imagine how they must feel. I just tried to stay out of the way, a quiet figure against the wall, as they both said their farewells to the lifeless figure in front of them. Listening to their grief, their sobs and whispers, I thought of Nathan. For a moment I wished I was with him, just holding him, holding on as tightly as I knew how. How cold and final death was! It left no room for second chances.
When I thought I could hear Charles and Tess coming up the hall, I quickly excused myself to catch them before they came into the room. As I stepped into the hot hallway and pulled the door closed behind me, I gave Charles a look so that he knew to turn around and go back the way they had come. When we reached the kitchen, I told him what was going on.
“Willy has, uh, passed,” I said, glancing at Tess to make sure she didn’t know what I was talking about. “Just about ten minutes ago.”
Charles looked surprised. He sat, landing tiredly in the chair.
“Well, that’s a shame. Though probably a blessing, considering how sick he was.”
“Deena and Lisa are both in there now, saying their goodbyes.”
“Was he able to finish telling you everything he wanted to say?”
“No,” I replied. “Not at all. We were barely halfway through.”
I didn’t know much about the way that hospice worked, but I assumed that someone needed to call in and make some sort of arrangements about the body. When I mentioned this to Charles, he nodded and said that he would go to the ladies and help do what needed to be done.
“With Willy gone, I’m not sure what you want to do next, logistically speaking.”
“Don’t worry about us,” I said. “Right now I’d just like to get out of the way. If you can tell me where to find one of those spare vehicles you mentioned, Tess and I will help ourselves to a car and maybe run to town for a while.”
I didn’t add that what I most wanted to do right now was get to a library where I could look up the Cajun myth of the angelus.
“All right,” Charles replied. “I understand. But remember Deena’s got a bedroom ready for you here at the house when you want to come back.”
Charles went to the door and called out for the driver. He was sitting in the shade of a big tree near the limo, and I felt bad that he’d been stuck outside all this time without air-conditioning—not that coming inside this house would have been all that cooler.
“Emmett, did you pick out a vehicle for the ladies?” Charles said.
“Yes, sir, I sure did. It runs fine, and I got it all cleaned up and waiting over there.”
He gestured toward an old blue Buick that was parked along the driveway under a shade tree.
“It’s not exactly new,” Emmett said to me, “but it was a real nice car in its day. Has all the bells and whistles, power windows, power brakes. I just had to give it a jump start and ride it around a bit. Should be fine now.”
“Thank you.”
Charles instructed his driver to give us the maps and directions, and then he told me he would be in touch later. Outside, the driver gave me the information I needed to make my way around town. After showing me the maps, he gave me a key ring that was full of keys, which he said were for the car, the house, and every single one of the buildings on the property.
I felt the weight of those keys in my hand, thinking how weird it was to look around and know that I owned every single door they opened; in fact, I owned every bit of buildings and land within sight. Incredible, especially for this city girl.
I buckled Tess into the backseat, started up the old car, and drove away, glad to leave behind all of the grief and sadness inside Twin Oaks, at least temporarily. Using the map
, I headed back to town and straight to the library, which turned out to be a cute brick building tucked on a shady street near the municipal complex. The place wasn’t huge, but it was well organized, with a nice kids’ section and a row of Internet-access computers. I got Tess settled with some books on an orange vinyl bean bag chair, and then I signed up at the desk for a library card and logged onto a computer.
For a while I simply gathered information, searching for websites that could tell me more about Cajun myths, Colline d’Or, and, of course, the word “angelus.” According to an online encyclopedia, an “angelus” was either a prayer or a church bell. The bell was so named because in many places it was rung three times a day to remind people to say the angelus prayer. That made sense to me. When I searched for “angelus” and “Cajun myth” together, all sorts of hits came up that I could slog through, but in the end none of them seemed relevant to my search.
After forty-five minutes Tess was bored and whiny and ready to go, but I still had found nothing useful at all. I was about to throw in the towel when a woman came in with two children, sent them over to the kids’ section, and headed straight for the romance novels. Like a moth to flame, Tess forgot her whining to me and made a beeline toward the little girl and boy, eager to make new friends. My child was nothing if not gregarious.
Heeding the librarian’s warning that they would be closing in fifteen minutes, I switched from the Internet to the card catalog and actually had what I hoped was a little luck. In the end, I checked out seven different books on Cajuns, myths, and local lore, hoping that surely I would find something of help inside one of them, something about the Cajun myth of the angelus. Now I just needed to go somewhere quiet and safe where I could pore through these books and find the answers I sought.
I was afraid that I would have trouble prying Tess away from her new friends, but fortunately the mom finished her transaction at the counter and was ready to go when I was. We all walked out together, she and I smiling at each other over the heads of our chattering children.
“Mommy, that girl got her face painted,” Tess said, tugging on the hem of my blazer. “It’s a butterfly.”
“And we had cotton candy,” the boy added. “And pony rides.”
“Where’d they do all that?” I asked Tess as we headed down the sidewalk.
“At the booty festival,” Tess replied.
The mother laughed and corrected her.
“The boo-dan festival, honey. B-o-u-d-i-n.” To our blank expressions, she added, “Boudin is a sausage. Y’all must not be from Louisiana.”
“We’re from New York,” Tess replied.
“Well, in that case, you should definitely take in the festival. It really is a lot of fun.”
Directing her comments to me, she described how to get to the location of the fairgrounds, which were about fifteen miles outside of town. I listened just to be polite, knowing a country fair was the last thing on earth I had time for what was left of this day.
“Mommy, I wanna go ride a pony and get a butterfly on my face!” Tess cried, her plea tinged with a whine.
“I think it runs till nine,” the woman added as she unlocked their car. “But if you go, try to get there in time for the fais do do, which is a kind of a Cajun dance. I think that starts at seven.”
A Cajun dance.
I thanked her and waved goodbye, thinking who else would be at a Cajun dance but some real, live Cajuns—maybe even one who could tell me the Cajun myth of the angelus? If we went, might we also find someone who recognized the symbol or my drawing of Jimmy Smith, my mystery visitor in New York City?
Feeling a small surge of hope, I buckled Tess into the car, started it up, and then dialed the number for Twin Oaks to see if Lisa might want to go with us to help us ask around. She declined, sounding subdued and sad.
“If you’re going to the festival, you’ll probably be getting back here kind of late,” she added, saying that I should call her when we returned so that she could let us in and show us to our room and get us settled for the night. Though I had a key to the house, I accepted her kind offer anyway, because once we were inside I wouldn’t have known where to go.
As we drove out of town, I tried calling Nathan just to check in, but he didn’t answer the phone at his office or at home, so I left a message at both places, telling him only that we’d made it to Louisiana and that things were “fine” on this end. With Willy dead and so many questions still unanswered, that wasn’t exactly true, but I could give him the details later. Disconnecting the call, I knew I could have tried his cell phone as well, but I had a feeling that he was probably on the job site, and I didn’t want to disturb him. Driving down the straight, flat Louisiana road, I thought about tomorrow morning back home and the important event I was going to be missing.
Nathan was a junior architect in a big city firm that had been heavily involved for the last eight or nine months in the creation of a megachurch in Connecticut. Nathan’s boss had been in charge of designing the massive multilevel balcony system for the sanctuary, but halfway through the project the man had suffered a heart attack and had had to take a leave of absence from work. Seizing the unexpected opportunity, Nathan had asked the owners of the firm if they would allow him to step up and take charge in his supervisor’s stead. Skeptical that one so young and relatively inexperienced could handle such an important job, the owners had nevertheless given him the green light—albeit in a heavily monitored fashion—whereupon Nathan had managed to exceed everyone’s expectations.
The church was finished now, the balcony system even more elaborate and impressive than the original design, and word in the industry was that Nathan was a true rising star. Some of his superiors had been surprised by the depths of the skills he had demonstrated when given the opportunity, but not me. A big part of what had attracted me to Nathan when we first met in college was his intelligence, his creativity, and his architectural vision. Someday, I had no doubt, he would have his own firm, and his talents for concept, design, and execution would be legendary.
In any event, tomorrow was the big reveal, the church ribbon-cutting ceremony, and Nathan had been invited to go as representative of the firm and even say a few words to the congregation on their behalf. Though I had been looking forward to being there with him, I couldn’t be in two places at once. As I pictured him attending to those final details by himself and preparing to attend the ceremony all alone, I felt a deep sadness envelop my heart. He wanted a wife who was in the cockpit with him, but right now we were both flying solo.
Ignoring the loneliness that rose up inside and began to gnaw at my stomach, I continued to drive toward the festival, the late afternoon sun just dipping below the trees in the magnificent, multicolored Louisiana sky.
FOURTEEN
Gayly the old man sang to the vibrant sound of his fiddle,
Tous les Bourgeois de Chartres, and Le Carillon de Dunkerque,
And anon with his wooden shoes beat time to the music.
Merrily, merrily whirled the wheels of the dizzying dances
Under the orchard-trees and down the path to the meadows;
Old folk and young together, and children mingled among them.
On an ordinary evening, in an ordinary situation, the boudin festival would have been delightful. As it was, the longer we trudged around and flashed the drawing and tried to find out something, anything, the more I just wanted to go home, curl up into a ball, and cry.
Tess tried to be a trouper, but she was at the end of her rope too, cycling through pouts, tantrums, and tears at will. Just to keep her quiet and distracted and moving, I bought her whatever she wanted, every treat, every souvenir. The praline candy with a snowball chaser was not my finest hour as a mom.
Not one person recognized the symbol or the fellow in the drawing or knew the Cajun myth of the bell, though many of them looked at me strangely when I asked. One man patted my shoulder kindly and said that if he spotted the guy in the picture, he’d be happy to snap a
coon trap ’round his ankle and keep him there until he paid me every red cent of the child support I was owed. Taking my cue from him, I made that my story whenever Tess wasn’t listening, until half of the people on the fairgrounds thought I was a poor, abandoned single mom with a no-account runaway ex-husband. That led to several good-natured passes from eligible men and one short, stout lady to quip, “Honey, husbands usually leave their wives for women who look like you, not the other way around.” I wasn’t sure whether to take that as a compliment or an insult.
The fact that no one recognized the sketch was only half the problem. Making matters worse was the slow realization that although boudin was a Cajun sausage and a fais do do was a Cajun dance, the place wasn’t exactly crawling with Cajuns—at least not from what I could tell. I didn’t hear a trace of French spoken, and every booth or display that had the word “Cajun” in it seemed to be using the term merely as a brand or marketing tool, not a description of its vendors. Serving at the counters were mostly all-American teenagers or helmet-haired steel magnolias.
Near the bandstand I finally found a clump of old men speaking a guttural French among themselves, and when I asked if by any chance they were Cajun, one gentleman, the accordian player, acknowledged that yes, they were indeed. Excited, I tried to strike up a conversation, but his answers were mostly monosyllabic, and none of the others would even look me in the eye—not even when I said I was a transplanted Cajun myself, descended from the Saultier line.
They hardly glanced at my drawing. Ignoring me, they began tuning up their instruments, getting ready to play for the dance, so finally I decided they were distracted and busy with that and not in a position to have a conversation with a stranger. I told them to break a leg and walked away, rejected by my own kind. Only when their music began a few minutes later was I able to shrug off my hurt. Their zydeco beat was infectious, the strange combination of washboard, accordion, and fiddle positively electrifying. I stood and listened, wondering if the music was tapping into something deep in my soul handed down through the generations. But then I looked around at the crowd and realized that everyone else had the same stupid smile on their face that I did. It was the music itself, the universal language of a delightful art form, regardless of heritage.
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