The Witch of Bourbon Street

by Suzanne Palmieri

  “How about we go back to the Voodoo together and have a drink? We can sort out who or what put the sunshine back in your step.”

  “Isn’t it a little early for a drink?” I asked, crossing my arms playfully, an eyebrow raised.

  “Or a little late!” we both burst out at the same time, laughing. While most of the shared jokes had disappeared—along with the laughter—some remained.

  “Get in this damn boat, girl. And Danny called. Don’t you think it’s time for you Sorrows to get a phone line?” she asked while I got in and she tied off.

  “Hell, no,” I said. “What’d Danny want?”

  “Said something about a good haul out there in the Gulf with Old Jim. I think he was just checking in. Asked me to look in on Jack.”

  We both grew silent, staring out at the water. Of course he’d asked her to look in on him. It was the first time Danny left him to fend for himself, and everyone knew I didn’t leave the bayou. That morning, it hurt more than usual, because everything was turned on its head inside my heart. See, to Jack, Millie was the mama I was supposed to be. She went to town and cheered for him at his baseball games, then took him out for ice cream after. I only saw my son when he came down to the bayou. My self-imposed exile made sense while I was deep inside of it, but in moments where my thoughts were clear, I just felt foolish, especially when I considered what I was missing with Jack.

  We stayed quiet as we wound our way through the bayou. No matter how much faith I lost in myself or what those batty witches used to call “my destiny,” I never lost my faith in the land and water I lived on. Serafina’s Bayou is my safe haven, a warm, private place layered with magic and held together by tangled vines of crazy. It’s soft like the quilts we sew and sour like the pickled things we put away for the off-seasons. It echoes sweetly with shouts and screams of strange that make it the most wonderful place on earth.

  The Voodoo is our local juke joint and part of that comforting “strange.” A gathering place for wayward souls since the founding of Tivoli Parish. Some even believe it used to be a drinking den for pirates. Whatever its origin, the Voodoo is the source of so many pivotal changes in my life. A gateway from dark to light and back again, and, the only place in Serafina’s Bayou with running water, electricity, and a phone line. Millie was the current owner and lived in a small room off the kitchen.

  * * *

  “Why you gonna live there?” I’d asked her, years back.

  “You think you’re the only one who can run away without really runnin’ away? If you’re moving out of Sorrow Hall, so am I. And since there’s no room for me in your little ‘Killer Nun’ shack, I’ll just park myself close to the bourbon.”

  And there we’d stayed, for too long, separate but together. Quiet and loud.

  * * *

  I hooked my arm inside hers as we walked up the bank to the Voodoo and let my head rest on her shoulder.

  “Everything’s gonna be fine, Frances,” she said. “I’ll keep you safe, if you let me.”

  * * *

  We sat at the bar, listening to JuneBug haul in a shipment of bottles while he yelled at the band scheduled to play that night. “I told you, none of that newfangled modern noise. We like swamp blues here. Now get it straight or get out, ça va?”

  “He don’t never change,” I said.

  “He’s been sober for a good week now, that’s something,” said Millie. “Want some whiskey?”

  “Always.”

  “Now tell me, what’s goin’ on with you, Little Bit?”

  Little Bit was a nickname Old Jim gave me, and when Millie used it, I missed him with a fierce ache.

  When I was just a little girl, he’d take me on his pirogue to go exploring and tell me stories about up north where he came from, where people understood how to use those talents everyone said the Sorrows had. He said, “You women are just like this bayou, wild and untamable. Up north, those women who got the magic, they know how to use it. But then I guess you sacrifice all the fun, don’tcha? All I know, Little Bit, is on the day you were born, with a head full a’ hair darker than the bottom of Meager Swamp, the hopes and dreams of too goddamned many generations were pinned on you. And it worries me. Just know your grandpa loves you very much.”

  Whiskey cradled in one hand, a rolled cigarette dangling from the other, I felt tears prick my eyes, then begin to fall, as the memory of my grandpa’s comforting voice blotted out the noise of the band and JuneBug’s yelling. And I needed some comfort, much as I hate to admit it.

  “Now I’m really worried, Frankie, tell me, honey,” said Millie, breaking through my fog.

  So I sat there, slowly spinning the whiskey in my glass, and told her about how I was starting to warm up inside, how it was making me think about all the time I’d lost. Time with Jack, time with my family, time with her.

  “Because, Millie … if I can admit we have magic in us, the kind that goes beyond those little tricks of the mind, then that means I was wrong. And if I was wrong about that…” I paused, taking a long sip, then whispered, “I might have been wrong about … everything.”

  Millie sat there, the sunshine pouring through the windows changing the hue of her green eyes. Everyone always said we looked like twins. Even though she’s older than me. And right then, I wished I looked exactly like her, because her wild hair and glistening skin were all the lunchtime rush could see. Bayou folk, young and old alike, who came together at the Voodoo on weekends, crowded in and fell over themselves when they saw her.

  “Losing faith in something you held true is a terrible thing,” she said, pretending not to notice the stares. “But losing faith in everything you ever thought was good and right and safe … well, that’s a bigger problem. It all goes back to whatever happened when you ran off to New Orleans. We all know you came back different. Hell, you demanded we knew how different you were. Maybe it’s time you talk about it?” she prodded gently.

  “Millie, I just this very day decided to rethink this whole thing. If I let myself go back there, to that time … It won’t work. I can’t do it.”

  “You got to take baby steps, is all. Like one of them addiction programs or what have you,” she said, looking serious and silly at the same time. Something I loved about her.

  I was a little tipsy, so I laughed hard at that. She was so right, in all the wrong ways.

  “So, if your first step is trying to weed through all this witchy stuff, let me remind you that you can’t deny there are some pretty important differences between us Serafina witches and regular people. Not everyone can see spirits, or learn things so easily, or age a little slower. Not to mention the root work and healing skills that were handed down to you, and then to me when Old Jim brought me down here from up north all those years ago.”

  “You got a black thumb, Millie, you can’t do root work for shit,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been letting your magic wear down thin for all these years, and I’ve been letting mine flourish. How do you know what I can and cannot do?”

  “When the lady is right, the lady is right,” I said. “But, Millie, a stain is a stain, and when I start doubting one thing, that doubt casts its long shadow over everything.”

  “Look, cha, I’m just trying to be supportive. Truth is we been dancin’ around the whats and the whys of everything that either happened or did not happen to you when you ran off to Bourbon Street for ages. Sixteen years is a long time … so long I’m not even curious anymore! Besides, I already knew the whys.” she said, holding up her glass and looking at me all playful through its amber contents. “You can’t keep secrets from me. I know you too well.”

  My breath caught, trapped underneath the relief, the almost blissful terror, of being exposed.

  “And you changed before anyone else saw it. Before you even saw it. It was that summer, you were fifteen, I was seventeen … we went down to Saint Sabine Isle hoping we’d find a couple of pirate ghosts to fall in love with. Only you didn’t find a pirate g
host, did you? You found Danny Amore. Then he left for college, broke your heart, and you ran off. Simple.”

  “The worst things always are,” I finally breathed out, wondering if she knew more than she was saying. And wanting, after so many years, to tell her the whole twisted truth. I took another sip of whiskey, changing the subject slightly. “You remember how he made fun of us when we were little? Hell, everyone he ran with did. I could always tell you cared, that it hurt you. But I never let it bother me. He told us we were the dirty daughters of demons. Would practically spit in our direction. I see some of them from time to time, all fat and unhappy. You ever notice that? Everybody always gets what they deserve, don’t they?”

  “Not all the time,” she said quietly.

  I finished my whiskey and rested my head on her shoulder. I was a little drunk. “I want to call Jack, Millie.” I needed him to help me set a new course for myself. Just talking about it wasn’t helping. But Jack, he could help me by answering one simple question.

  “You gonna call him from out of the blue?” asked Millie.

  “It’s not like I never see him. Danny brought him by Sorrow Hall before him and Old Jim went offshore last week. Asked if I thought it was okay to let Jack stay on his own at the house. And you know, with Jack about to turn thirteen I thought … it’d be good for him to be on his own for a bit, show him how much we trust him.”

  Truthfully, Danny had come by to ask if Jack could stay with me, and I was gearing up for a whole summer with the boy, custody agreements and all that real-world dark magic. And I said no. Not because I didn’t want Jack two weeks early, but because I couldn’t stand the way Danny was looking at me or the way I wanted to look back. Our chemistry was toxic. We had two switches, on and off. When we were “on,” we made such a mess of things. And now that we’d been off for about two years, I liked not feeling my heart beat so hard in my ears. So I said no, because I knew Danny was really asking if he could come back to my bed when he got home from shrimping the Gulf.

  Maybe I shouldn’t call.…

  JuneBug pulled the phone out from under the register. “Here you go, Frankie.”

  Damn JuneBug. Always payin’ attention when you least expect it.

  I dialed slowly, my fingers tingling as the rotary phone clicked back over the numbers.

  Jack picked up quick. “Hello?” Just hearing that boy’s voice, free and clear from the cement heart I’d somehow shed, was heaven.

  “Jack!”

  “Hey, Mama! How you doin’? When you learn to use a phone?” He started laughing.

  “Shut that sass mouth … I got an important question. And the way you answer will help me out with a lot of new things I’m thinking of.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “Now, Wonder Woman, from those comics we read together … she’s all powerful, right? Like, the most powerful one?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. For a lady superhero. What about her?”

  “Well, she flies an invisible jet, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So if her plane is invisible … why can we still see Wonder Woman flying it? I mean, if she’s supposed to have all that power, why can’t she just … poof, make herself invisible, too? It makes me doubt she has any power at all. But I need your opinion, Jack, so what do you think?”

  Jack was quiet for a while. I could picture him scrunching up his face just like his daddy when he was thinking something over.

  “Maybe she wants to be seen, Mama. And if you’re that strong, you can do whatever you want. Seems to me, if someone like that doesn’t want to be seen, or have anything to do with life at all, they can disappear better than anyone. And, I guess, they make that decision themselves. Those are the lucky ones, right?”

  It was the perfect answer. It was the answer I needed. It confirmed what I was already reasoning out, that I could choose different. Things could be different. That they could be better.

  “I love you, Jack. You be safe now. I’ll see you next week,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  “Millie, will you take me home?”

  “Ain’t you got your own boat tied out there by Trinity Bridge?”

  “I do, but that whiskey made me lazy. And you invited me. So get your butt movin’!” I said.

  On our way back to my house, Millie looked out at the water and frowned. “Do me one favor, Frankie? In all this soul-searching you’re about to do, leave Danny out of it.”

  “Where did that come from?” I asked. “We haven’t played the ‘maybe we should be together’ game in two years. And I don’t intend to try again, that last time was brutal.”

  “Good. It’s just that, I feel like this is a really great change you’re trying to make, and I don’t want to see him come home and ruin it.”

  “That’s a load of shit, Millie. You like me better evil, and you know it.”

  “Well, that might be true, but if you’re gonna go through with this change of heart, maybe you’ll come back and help run Thirteen Bourbon? It’s a bear to run alone. And after all these years I still got tourists asking after Frances the Great.” She smiled at me.

  “Maybe,” I said, letting my fingers trickle in the water. Then my mouth found a little piece of courage and the most unexpected thing popped out. I swear I need to keep it under lock and key sometimes. “Millie? You ever hear anything about Eight Track?”

  Though she’d spent most of her life on Sorrow soil, Millie never did learn the art of being dead honest. She had a way of lying that I almost admired. She lied in a circular way, almost like she wanted to make it as interesting as possible while she was doing it. Some kind of self-entertainment or something.

  “Eight Track! Damn, that’s a name straight out the bad old, sad past.” She sighed heavily.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, trying to get my voice steady.

  “Well … Simone died. You remember how beautiful her voice was? Like silk. Well, that was about ten years ago now. After that, Abe said Eight Track’s drinking picked up something terrible. Sometimes I see him panhandling down on St. Mark’s, but he don’t talk to me. He just looks away. I tried a few times.”

  “Why didn’t any of you tell me that happened—” My voice broke. Simone died?

  “Have you lost your whole mind in one day?” she asked, giving me a weird look. “You knew Abe took over as bar manager, you could have asked about Eight Track back then. Besides, you told us never to speak of any of that. You go for weeks, months, not talking to any of us. And we were supposed to come on over here to your gypsy kingdom and talk to the deaf? Shit. Go on back to your sour self, Frankie. You were right; I don’t like this side of you.”

  “I wasn’t criticizing you, Millie. Really.” Millie never liked to be criticized. She glared at me as we reached my dock. I leaned out of the boat to pull in closer before climbing out.

  Millie could be mean when she felt cornered or neglected. Like, if Dida payed too much attention to me when we were growing up, Millie’d find ways to remind me that my mama was blind. It never really bothered me. I just knew it was her way, trying to hurt someone to take away a little of her own hurt. We always understood the worst in each other. It’s why we were so close. And that’s exactly what she was doing now as a grown woman. Trying to take away some of her pain by telling me about Simone like that. But why is what I didn’t understand.

  The only “why” I could conjure up was that she knew … she had to know my secret.

  “Anyone know what happened to her little girl?” I asked, meeting her eyes. Daring her to tell me she knew.

  “I don’t recall them having a child,” she said sharply, pushing off back down the dark waters.

  “You come back when you want to tell me the truth, Millie Bliss!” I shouted after her.

  “Ain’t my truth! That one is yours to tell, Frankie…,” she yelled back.

  “Crazy witch,” I grumbled, making my way back to my porch. Then I smiled, because at least someone knew. It made everything easier. And, lik
e Dida always said, “Everything happens for a reason. All the bad, mostly the bad, happens to teach us things we got to know. Like directions from here to there.” Millie’s mean little moment helped me understand my shift in heart and chart my course.

  It was the blues … the music Simone used to sing, that woke me that morning. Those notes must have strung themselves inside me as I slept, like stars waking up my instincts. Maybe even the very same stars I stitched on my baby’s quilt before I wrapped her—my beautiful little secret—up and gave her to Eight Track to raise. Whatever it was, luck, magic, maybe both, I didn’t care. My course was clear.

  I had to find my daughter.

  3

  Simone Sings the Blues

  New Orleans: Before

  “Life,” said Simone St. James, her breath magnified, echoing out from the small stage at 13 Bourbon Street, “is stitched together from a series of mistakes, some little, some big, like the patches on the clothes we wore growin’ up, you know?”

  The shadow people who filled the smoky bar nodded, laughing. She stood there, chin tilted, confidently gearing up to sing her set of Billie Holiday covers. A salmon-pink chiffon dress clung to her body yet seemed to swirl around her in a blur of feathers. It accentuated her dark, marblelike skin and showed off the only thing of real value she owned, an opal brooch she inherited from her mama.

  “But those mistakes…,” she continued, glancing behind her, cuing the small band to start playing the first song, soft and low under her words. “Well?” She laughed, deep and sultry, shrugging her thin shoulders. “They can also be lessons. I picked up a little of that … fi-loss-oh-fee from them drunken, half-assed conversations, you know the ones.…” The music got a little louder. “Only, we can’t have the blues if you think that way, noooo, sir.” She tossed her head. “You got to know a mistake is a mistake. And then, when those old blues come along, we get to sing ’em away … just like this … a one, a two, a one two three … ‘All of me, why not take all … of me…’”