by C. L. Bevill
THE WOMAN WHO was the focus of so much discussion, in part because of her successful occupation and in part because of the deeds of her mother, stood beside her rental car, which was parked in the middle of a rough, single-lane road that led through the pines to a little house. It was spitting distance from the Kisatchie National Forest, and on each side of the tiny road sweet gum, pine, birch, cypress, and fir trees stood thickly, reflecting its long uncut and unharvested status. Beyond the thickly forested lane lay a swampy bayou where she had once watched beavers build great mountains of wood in the algae-covered water and where the cypress trees dripped with moss and jasmine.
Mignon Thibeaux hadn’t been sure if she would remember the way, but she had. It had been many years, after all, since she had been here. Her last memory of this place was peering out the back window of her father’s old Chevy truck with the tree branches from the pines scraping the roof of the truck as they always did, and her father cursing under his breath as they drove away.
The road wasn’t blocked, but the parallel tracks seemed overgrown as if no one came down this way much anymore. The trees that bordered the road were taller and the shrubs thicker from years of being left alone, leaving a dimly lit path to the house. She had once trod the path daily, skipping her way down the road after the schoolbus dropped her off on the highway. Then, there hadn’t been that utter darkness of the massed trees that now seemed to block out the light from above.
She threaded her way through the woods, careful to stay in the ruts of the road, because she knew that there were snakes here, including some lethal varieties common in the area. Her shoes weren’t made for walking down a road like this, but she managed slowly and carefully. She would rather break a heel than damage the rental car she had driven here by testing its worthiness on a road with some holes that were knee-deep.
After a few minutes of picking her way down the furrowed path, she saw the house. It was a small place, not visible from the main highway. A single story, which included three rooms with a wraparound porch that curved around the front of the house and across the main bedroom. The kitchen and living room were one room. One bedroom lay off to the right of the kitchen. On the other side was another tiny bedroom, where Mignon had slept in a single bed that almost filled the room. She never understood until later that it wasn’t a bedroom at all, but a pantry; her father had removed the shelves in order to provide a place for his only child to sleep.
The house dated back perhaps a hundred and fifty years. If one crawled into the attic, the rough-hewn logs that were used for the frame could be seen. The house had existed when the Civil War was at its peak, when both Union and Confederate armies rode by La Valle in pursuit of each other. It had seen generations of people living within it, even born within it, although the Thibeauxs had come only recently.
Mignon stood in the front yard, which was overgrown with fledgling pine trees and brush, leaving little grass. The windows were whole and intact, but the house seemed to be sinking in the middle, as if some great giant had stepped on it and forced it to bow downward, on the edge of being precarious. She abruptly realized that probably no one had lived in this house since the last time she had stepped off the front porch, when she and her father had fled in shame. The outside was almost as rough as the interior logs that supported the house itself. The wood was worn gray in places. The incised tin sheeting on the tops of the walls near the roof had turned black with age, and only the rounded patterns were left shining in the light that reached this small clearing in the middle of all of these trees.
She stood in front of the house she hadn’t seen in so long. Upon discussion of her plans, her friend Terri, back in New York, had said, “Miggy, it’s a bad idea. You go back, but it’s never the same. Your home looks like a shack. Your neighbors don’t recognize you, or don’t care if they did. It just reminds you of how shitty it all was. It’s a bad idea.”
It was just like the old saying, “You can’t go home again.” Well, here she was, and she didn’t think of it as home. She had never thought of it as home. This was merely the place where she had been born, in that one back bedroom, with her mother on a four-poster bed. This was a place where she had learned how to talk, how to walk, how to run laughing to that tall, beautiful woman she called, “Mama.”
She walked around the house, studying its imperfections. The house did appear tiny, just as her friend had suggested. But the answer was that she had been five years old when she had last seen it, and now she was thirty, and had an apartment in New York City with a living room bigger than the entire house.
Around the back of the house about fifty feet was the outhouse. This was another reminder of how rural the area was. She had no doubt that other homes still depended on outhouses, or if not that, septic tanks. This house had no sewage system and no running water. In fact, Mignon had a very distinct memory of the house’s only source of water. She glanced back at the house and studied what was left of the gutter system along the eaves. It was designed to collect rain water into a tank mostly hidden by the brush at the side of the house. This tank was periodically emptied into a cistern somewhere behind the house.
Mignon glanced down. She could be standing over it right now. A large cistern made of cement, designed to hold water for the use of farming, bathing, cooking, for those areas that could not afford to dig a well.
She had a vivid memory of her father standing over her, near that very place. He had been tall, red-haired, brown-eyed, rough-hewn like the timbers in the attic. He had been a farmer, a laborer, like his father had been; a man with broad shoulders and large, callused hands. He had stood over her, shaking her tiny shoulders, saying loudly, “I told you, no playing near that cistern, Mignon. You might fall right in and break your little skinny neck. You hear me, child?” And there had been another shake of her tiny shoulders to emphasize the urgency of his command. “You hear me?”
Once, the cistern had been covered by a cement slab. The slab obviously was long lost in the shrubs and weeds growing rampantly in the area that was the backyard of the house. Try as she might, Mignon couldn’t see where it was, and she only had a vague recollection of where it was once located.
Then there was the old oak tree towering over the backyard, where she had once played endlessly. Her father had even carved her initials into the tree for her, with a heart surrounding it. “It’s your tree,” he had said, his Louisiana accent thick. “This here is Mignon’s very own oak.”
Her long fingers traced the M and the T as if she had never seen them before. The tree had grown. It was so thick around, she knew she couldn’t span it with her arms. As a child, it was the perfect size, small enough to climb, but tall enough so that a child pretending to be the queen of the world felt she looked down on her kingdom.
Or, she considered, the queen of her world for at least a little while. It had felt good to be in control of her little world then, even if had been for only a short time.
Another memory came to her, a vision of her father long before he had descended into the alcoholic stupor in which he lived out his last years, a man who had patiently taught his daughter the fine art of snapping flies with whatever piece of string or chain was available. He would flick his strong wrist, snapping the fly or mosquito with the end of the length of string and laugh like it had been the funniest joke of all. With the quiet tolerance of a loving parent, he had shown little Mignon how to hold her hand and how to whip her wrist about to aim for insects that dared too close. It was one of few memories that his daughter found pleasing to remember.
Finally, Mignon faced the house. She wasn’t concerned that she was trespassing. She hadn’t seen any posted signs, but there were a few shotgun holes in the outhouse. Hunters were discouraged from wandering through here. This property belonged to Miner Poteet, the man who had rented the property to her father years before. She remembered that Mr. Poteet was a kind soul, who had never complained when Ruff Thibeaux had been late with the rent, and sometimes took the price in trade
, work performed by Ruff or sewing by Garlande. She even remembered that Mrs. Poteet had often brought the leftovers from some dish or other that she had made, ever wanting to be the good neighbor. Both had been good-natured sorts, even at the bitter end. Mr. Poteet wouldn’t mind if Mignon wandered this property.
The back door had been broken long before, as if someone had pried it away from its wooden frame. It opened with a creak. She stepped inside the small house and walked through a door in time, where her mother made red beans and rice in the small kitchen, and the smell of baking cornbread was heavy and redolent in the air.
In the present it smelled like mildew, rot, and decay. It was a place where no man lived, and few ever visited. Her heels clicked on the wood floors, and she touched the walls for support where the floor began its precarious dip downward.
The old Ben Franklin stove remained in the living room-cum-kitchen, although it appeared as though someone had dragged it halfway across the floor in an attempt to steal it. The bottom was lined with bricks; Mignon had watched her father do this, in order to make the stove more heat-conductive. Consequently, it probably weighed a ton, causing would-be thieves to abandon their theft in mid-backbreaking attempt. There was an ancient refrigerator, and Mignon recalled that although the house had been wired for electricity, the Thibeaux family often used gas lanterns because the bill hadn’t been paid. In the main bedroom, there was a pile of wood and some newspapers on the floor. In the pantry that had been her bedroom, a hole in the floor indicated that rodents had taken up residence in this place where no humans would.
An old, cheap metal chair sat near a window by the stove. Mignon decided that it wasn’t too filthy, and it would hold her weight. She brushed off spiderwebs and sat carefully, gazing out the dirty window. She was vaguely surprised that hunters and children hadn’t broken out all of the windows. In fact, she was surprised that the house still stood, considering its age and the reputation of those who had last inhabited it.
Mignon was lost in her reverie of the past and all the memories that the house evoked until she felt a hand on her shoulder.
Chapter Three
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds.
A MAN OF WORDS AND NOT OF DEEDS
MIGNON BOLTED UP AND scrambled to one side, knocking the rusted metal chair onto its back. Two steps later, struggling to break into the bright light outside the blackened house, she tripped over something unidentifiable, tumbling onto the hard wooden floor amidst the debris and rubble that littered the place. A calm voice and gentle arm pulling her to her feet enabled her to regain a modicum of composure.
“You’re Mignon Thibeaux,” said a man in a sheriff’s uniform, looking altogether too official for this rural setting.
Mignon folded her arms across her chest and tried to look as formidable as she could. One moment she had been lost in a world of memories. The next moment a hand was on her shoulder, startling her out of her daydream in a way that had caused her heart to pound as furiously as an innocent man would hurl his fists against jailhouse walls.
Mignon looked at the man and saw that he was studying her from behind dark sunglasses. She glanced downward and swore as she surveyed the damage. Her knee was bleeding, her hose had run, there was soil on her skirt, and trash stuck to her suit jacket. She brushed her scraped hands together to shake off the dirt and debris, ignoring the fact that she was trembling. She carefully shook the edge of her skirt, taking the opportunity to pluck off a stubborn pine needle. Each gesture was calculated to give her a few more moments to gather her wits.
The sheriff didn’t object, as they stood just inside the back door of the house where the light poured in and she could see what she was doing. Mignon brushed herself off more vigorously than necessary and finally faced him. He was camouflaged under his glasses, but she saw very quickly that he was observing the length of her legs in a very masculine manner. This was something she was used to, that men found her pleasing and looked at her in that way. It was something she could hang onto in her mind to regain control. She saw that her seemingly quick return to full equanimity had surprised him, and took a moment to look at him in turn. He would never know about the tremor in her knees or the butterflies in her stomach.
She noted his crisp tan uniform and his name on the badge, as well as the polished black utility belt with holstered weapon and handcuffs. John Henry Roque, the sheriff of St. Germaine Parish, she thought, with a bitter taste in her mouth. They didn’t waste any time sending a lackey to kick my ass out of town, right out of the parish. Terri told me I couldn’t go home, for all kinds of reasons. And here’s one, standing right in front of me.
John Henry was a tall man, standing perhaps a half foot above her, a few inches above six feet. In his early forties, she ticked off in her mind. Brown hair, brown eyes, square jaw. A cop’s jaw, she added to herself. Broad in the shoulders, narrow in the waist and hips. He looked like a man who enjoyed a good run in the morning, all lean muscles and sinewy lines, a man with a few calluses on his hands, a man who wasn’t afraid of hard work.
At last Mignon decided that offense was the best defense.
“You scared me half to death!” she said.
John Henry took off his sunglasses and put them in the front pocket of his shirt. He regarded her steadily with those brown eyes. Brown eyes that were the color of warm sherry, she thought, a hint of ocher with a touch of gold. “I’m real sorry about that, ma’am. You were miles away.”
“You’re here to escort me someplace?” Mignon couldn’t hold back her sarcasm.
To her surprise, John Henry looked confused. “Where is it that I would want to take you, Miss Thibeaux?”
Mignon raised her chin up proudly, acknowledging that he already knew her name. “You must know the history. I understand the St. Michels are still pretty powerful around here.”
John Henry’s jaw tightened as he put a meaning to her words, and found it distasteful. “My name is John Henry Roque,” he said, using that same Louisiana drawl she associated with memories of her father’s voice. But there the resemblance ended. John Henry’s voice was a deep sound, full of character and individuality, qualities that escaped her memories of her father. “I’m the sheriff of St. Germaine Parish. I saw your car out at the road, and Mr. Poteet isn’t one to let hunters back here in these woods, or teenagers with nothing better to do. Not to mention that not many people know about the old place back here, nor the bayou and the quicksand to the south. I don’t care to have to put out a fire by hand because the fire trucks can’t get back here because of the bad road. Nor to rescue some fool who wandered off the road.”
Mignon stared at him, searching unsuccessfully for a hidden meaning behind his words. “I used to live here,” she finally said. “With my parents. Mr. Poteet used to rent this place to my father. I didn’t think he’d mind.”
John Henry’s face softened a bit. He gestured at the house. “It’s not in the best condition, as you can see. I didn’t care to think of a lady back here in the woods with no one to help her … in case something happened.”
Something? Mignon’s mind snapped back to the present and to the reason she was here. What could happen to me?
She knew that the St. Michels had their hands in the sheriff’s pockets. It was an elected position, and the man who could garner support from the richest family in the parish was almost certainly the winner of the position, like another sheriff had been when she was a little girl. Parts of Louisiana were as crooked as they could come, and Mignon was well aware of the present political system now.
In her mind she could hear the icy, condemning words of Eleanor St. Michel: “Find out why she’s back here. Find out what she knows. Find out what she wants.”
“I appreciate that you stopped to check on me, but I’m fine, as you can see.”
John Henry sighed, recognizing a stubborn woman when he saw one. “You’re bleeding.”
M
ignon shrugged. “Just a scratch.”
“Look, you obviously don’t think highly of the sheriff’s department, but I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” he said. “If you’ll come with me back to my truck, I’ll fix that knee right up. I’ve got a first aid kit in the cab.”
She had a sudden vision of his hands on her legs and shivered. Somehow, Mignon didn’t care to have his hands touching her legs, not someone who would have a loyalty to the St. Michels. But if she didn’t, then he might think she had something to hide.
She nodded quickly.
To her surprise, John Henry offered her his arm, holding it out like a Southern gentleman asking a lady to dance at a ball. She took it, her fingers grasping the breadth of his biceps, sensitive to the heat of his flesh under the tan cloth. “Work out, do you?” She almost winced at her words, but it was the first thing that popped into her head. He guided her out of the house, and they began the walk back toward the highway.
John Henry grinned. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a flash of white teeth in a full smile. Laughter lines radiated out from his eyes. He said, “Sure. Got to catch the bad guys. Every day.” He glanced at her, taking in her five-foot six-inch frame, lingering on the curvature of her thigh, the bend of her knee. He couldn’t see many flabby muscles on her and he was really looking. “So do you.”
“I run.” For all kinds of reasons.
“Me, too. A couple miles every day. Sometimes longer on the weekend.” He glanced at her knee again. “Although you might not be running for a few days. Looks like you bruised your knee cap.”
Why couldn’t the sheriff be a fat, pot-bellied man who chews tobacco and spits it out at my feet, like the one who was here when I was a child? A man who would leer at my legs and breasts, and think about nothing more than how to get me in bed? Mignon chewed on her lower lip in frustration. She hadn’t counted on this man. He showed a little ingenuity, a little intelligence, and perhaps a little too much individuality for her needs.