The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  Marie nodded, smiling like a Cheshire cat.

  Like lightning, EI shouted, “Hallelujah,” then turned, berating a lab technician for moving too slow.

  Sweat gathered beneath her shoulder blades, beneath her T-shirt, her lab coat. She worked like a fiend. Nurses couldn’t keep up with her. K-Paul tried. Huan just offered help.

  EI kept the patients flowing.

  Marie loved every minute of it.

  They’d sent the gangbanger home, but not before he’d brushed his hand against her breast. She’d slapped his hand. Told him to “Keep safe. Be good.”

  The boy had grinned. “Sucker bait.”

  She whispered a prayer.

  Four in the morning. Two hours to go.

  JT and Rudy sat in the waiting room. Looking like old pals.

  Inexplicably, the ER was almost deserted. Sully, his feet on his desk, snored. The homeless were sprawled on chairs. Flu patients were still waiting to be called.

  “Hear from Parks?” DuLac handed her mud-thick coffee.

  “No.”

  “That’s good.” He drank from his mug.

  “It isn’t over.”

  “Not good.”

  “No news means a lull. JT and Rudy still haven’t left. They’re still needy.”

  “Still here?”

  “Two chairs down from Sully.”

  DuLac started, squinted at the folding chairs.

  “Sight,” she exhaled. “Not always a blessing.” She pretended not to hear DuLac murmuring, “I’d give up my career.”

  The ER doors slid wide, letting in a warm blast of early morning air.

  “Don’t she look pitiful,” said EI, coming to stand beside Marie and DuLac. “Barefoot and pregnant.”

  All three moved toward the girl, in a floral-print dress, with red, flyaway hair.

  It was Marie’s hand the girl took. “Baby’s coming,” she said, her voice soft as a cloud. “Been rolling, heaving, all day.”

  K-Paul offered a wheelchair.

  Marie mouthed, “Thanks.”

  “Exam One is open,” said El. “Need help?”

  “I’ve got it,” said Marie.

  DuLac nodded, walking away, sparing a glance for the empty ER chairs.

  Marie pushed the wheelchair through the green curtains, then closed them tightly. “I need to examine you. Let me help you up.”

  The girl had saucer eyes. Hazel. Something about their dullness made her look dumb. No, that wasn’t it. Disinterested. Passive.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Have you ever had a GYN exam?”

  “What?” For the first time, the girl moaned. Lowing—the deep distress sound of laboring mothers.

  Marie touched the girl’s belly, feeling a contraction. “How many months?”

  “Don’t know.” She moaned again and Marie stroked her loose hair. It was heavy, thick with grease.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sue.”

  “Sue what?”

  “Just Sue.”

  “Let me help you up.” Marie extended her arm. “Just lie down and relax. Good.” She extended the stirrups. “Put your feet here. That’s it. One by one.”

  Sue’s bare feet were cracked and dirty. She carried no purse. She must’ve walked to Charity. A bayou backwoods girl. During rural volunteering, Marie had seen such girls. They gave birth unaware of professional midwives, doctors. When nothing went wrong, there was sheer beauty—a young girl, birthing, surrounded by wiser women. When the birth was breech or the umbilical cord strangled the baby, the too-young mothers writhed in pain, often dying with their babies.

  “I need you to relax,” said Marie reassuringly. “See how far you’ve dilated.”

  “What’s die-lat-ed?”

  “It lets me know if the baby’s fully engaged in the canal.”

  Sue frowned.

  “Tells me how fast the baby’s coming.”

  “It’s coming. I know it.” Sue turned her head, staring at the wall, her body limp. Like she’d given up resisting. Knees parted, her belly rippling, she looked like a beached whale. Her pink belly button hyperextended.

  “You can sit up now.”

  Freckles dusted Sue’s nose. Stubborn, her lips puckered. “I want it born in Charity.”

  Marie nodded. “It,” Sue had said, not “he” or “she.”

  “Better than the back bedroom. Tommy says we ought not to pay for what comes natural.” The girl clutched her belly, looking every bit her age.

  “I’m scared.”

  “Where’s your mother? Is there no woman to help you?”

  Strangely, Sue’s eyes closed. Like she’d drifted to sleep, sitting upright. Just shut down and left.

  Marie swung back the curtain. “EI, call Social Services.”

  The girl started screaming, “No. Just a doctor. For my baby.”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  Sue trembled. Pushing her thin shift over her abdomen, trying to slip off the exam table.

  “Stay, please.”

  “I need to go upstairs to have my baby. Babies are born upstairs, ain’t they?” Sue clutched Marie’s lab coat. Fading, orange-purple bruises marked her arms. Someone had pinched, shaken, maybe slapped her.

  Marie clasped Sue’s hands. “Listen to me. You’re having Braxton Hicks. False contractions. The baby isn’t ready.”

  “It is. It has to come out.” Sue’s mouth puckered, like a baby bird’s.

  “Not yet. The baby isn’t ready. You’ll have to trust me.”

  Sue cried big, silent tears, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “There’ll be trouble.”

  “From who? Your mother? Tommy?”

  “What about my pains?”

  “They’re real. Just not effective.” When Sue didn’t answer, Marie added, “Social Services can help. My friend Antoinette can help.”

  “That’s the trouble. Social Services. I was told not to truck with them.”

  “By Tommy?”

  Suddenly, the girl’s eyes were sly. She’d stopped crying. “I feel better now.”

  “Where’re you from? Have you had prenatal care? Seen a doctor?”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “Yes. Dr. Laveau.”

  The girl surprised Marie by embracing her. On her tiptoes, she whispered in Marie’s ear, “Can you help me get rid of it?”

  Then the girl stepped back, her mouth a wide O. “That’s a sin. I’m a sinner.”

  “What’ve you got, Marie?” Antoinette, in a tailored suit, looking like a banker rather than someone who cared for people at their worst, their most helpless, glanced between the two.

  Sue bolted.

  “Catch her,” shouted Marie.

  K-Paul, notating charts, reached for Sue, but his hand caught air.

  Sue, eel slippery, dashed outside the automatic sliding glass doors.

  Marie called, “Wait.”

  Outside, Marie looked left, then right. Already the air was hot, damp, smothering breath.

  Then she saw Sue, near visitor parking. Preternaturally still. Stopped on the sidewalk’s edge.

  “How’d you get here?”

  Any second, she’d flee, across the street.

  Marie knew she had only one chance for success. “I’ll deliver the baby, Sue. See you safe.”

  “Promise? Hope to die?” She trembled, like a doe ready to dart.

  “Hope to die.”

  The streetlamp snapped and buzzed, ready to expire. Sue looked up, smiling at the moths fluttering against the glass. She shaded her eyes, looking toward the horizon. An orange-filled haze was heralding the sun.

  Marie walked slowly, deliberately, toward Sue, holding out a twenty.

  The girl snatched it. “Thank y’all.” Then, looking neither left nor right, she dashed across the street.

  “Sue,” Marie yelled. “Sue.”

  She didn’t stop.

  “You’ll come back? Please?” Her voice was strained, ra
w. “Please.”

  Sue turned. Her shift, tight across her abdomen, fell below her knees. A bayou girl’s dress.

  Sue held up her hand. The white palm, delicate, small, high in the morning air. Her hand fell, clasping her belly. Then she turned, running like a ghost. Racing into a shadowed alley.

  Marie went back inside the ER. It was too bright. Her head hurt. “Not now, Antoinette. Not now.”

  Antoinette responded, “She’ll be back.”

  Marie wasn’t sure.

  Maybe Parks could help her track a backwoods girl? How many pregnant thirteen-year-olds could there be? Marie grimaced. In New Orleans, plenty. But not many like Sue. Possibly rural Acadian. A runaway? And who was Tommy? Another youth? Lost in the city.

  Marie felt worn and wrung out.

  “El. DuLac. I’m going home. I’ll do better tomorrow. No, today. Tonight.”

  She looked at the folding chairs. Sully was looking worriedly at her.

  JT and Rudy had disappeared.

  She walked out of Charity, almost sprinting, her lab coat billowing. Her stethoscope cradled her neck. Past the ambulances. Cars. The shift workers. Past new patients arriving. She ran, tracing Sue’s path.

  Stopped dead at the alley’s mouth.

  She suddenly feared Sue and her baby would be drained. Killed.

  DuLac was right. She needed to prepare. Stop the monster.

  Marie yelled into the alleyway, “Sue. Sue.” The sound was guttural.

  “Sue.” Her voice changed into a scream, roiling, exploding from her gut. Filled with all her anguish, uncertainty. Fear and frustration.

  A cat, startled, scooted by. Street-corner boys, on the southeast corner, hailed her, clapping. Two of them started howling, their tenor voices urging each other to a new high.

  A taxi cruised by.

  New Orleans was stirring awake. An in-between time. Night still claimed the streets but building tops were starting to lighten.

  A bus hissed and stopped. Weary casino cashiers, hotel maids, and bellhops trudged home. To some, Marie was just another drunk hollering “Sue.” To others, she wasn’t crazy enough for them to pay her any mind.

  Marie felt staggered by fury.

  Her work in the ER mattered. She did and would do good. She might, one day, save the young man she patched up, might, one day, help Sue birth her baby.

  She blinked.

  JT and Rudy were glimmering before her. Oddly comforting.

  Marie listened for clues in the night air:

  Sounds intensified: a strain of music from far off; rubber tires slapping against the road; the soft roar of the Mississippi. She thought she even heard the wings of a bird, trolling the water for fish.

  She heard, too, the sound of no sound—a pregnant stillness, the creature waiting in the night.

  For now, Sue was safe.

  Her raised hand had been a promise. Hadn’t it?

  She’d avenge JT and Rudy. Wouldn’t she?

  Marie yelled, this time a warrior’s cry, filled with rage.

  And she hoped everyone, every creature in New Orleans, below and at sea level, heard her. Heard her violence hiding, stirring inside.

  It heard her. The sound moved through water. Distinct from ordinary sounds. Primitive. Raw.

  Just as it sensed memories in blood, it sensed feelings in sound.

  This sound. Assertive. A call to battle.

  It felt kinship. Remembered battles. Struggles for power, control. It had won until . . . until. . . . It couldn’t remember. It remembered pain, dying.

  It stirred in the warm water, still gathering itself, rising despite the bones pushing it down, the underwater sea god thwarting it.

  It was waiting to be reborn. Resurrected.

  Waiting for the other sound that called it ashore . . . waiting for when it would make its own sound and rise from the water’s realm to live again. On land.

  SIX

  LILA’S YARD

  WEDNESDAY, LATE EVENING

  Marie danced, twirling in her white shift, praying for spirits.

  Drums resounded. One hard beat, then two. No drumsticks, only a focused sputtering of palms, cupped and flat, articulations of fingers pounding on cat skins.

  Boudom.

  Wire’s face was drenched in sweat. He played as if his soul depended upon it. The twins, Renee and Raoul, drummed on either side of him. Sometimes she’d see the twins on a street corner: baggy pants, gold chains swinging from their necks. They’d be playing on trash can tops, shouting insults at street dancers, cigarettes dangling, like magic wands, from their mouths. They never acknowledged her, nor she them. Street toughs who had the magic to summon gods. Tonight their power was magnified by Wire’s relentless drumming.

  But, still, the gods didn’t come.

  DuLac had been right. She should’ve spent more time preparing. But doing what? She’d done everything required.

  Except she’d worked the ER—a shift that had left her restless. Unable to sleep. She should’ve conserved her energy.

  Marie swayed, stepping and sliding within the circle marked by votive candles grounded in dirt.

  She prayed: “Agwé, don’t forsake me.”

  Rituals followed a specific pattern. Offerings at the altar. Beans. Rice. The drummers call to Legba, an old man with a walking stick, to open the spirit gates. Once Legba possessed a parishioner, then other spirits arrived, the drummers playing their rhythms . . . until one spirit above all reigned. Tonight she dedicated to Agwé. God of restless seas. She had his favorite foods: okra and oysters. His saber and admiral’s hat.

  She’d drawn his symbol on silk.

  Nothing happened. No response to the drummer’s call.

  “Spirits will come,” DuLac murmured, his voice encouraging her, blowing softly across her ear. She twirled away from him, contracting her back, letting her arms flail wide. Dulac watched. Like she was a cell under a microscope. Except, she was an organism—a mammal—that spirits could ride. A channel between the living and the dead.

  Like hell, she thought. Feeling slightly embarrassed. She was only the medium, yet she couldn’t open the gate.

  Parks was leaning against the fence, watching, skeptical, as parishioners dressed in white danced. Parks probably thought he was on an abnormal psychology field trip.

  Sometimes, she was skeptical, too. Like tonight. After hours of drumming. No signs; no grace. Just heat rising from the small bonfire. Gas torches lighting the backyard’s four corners. Christmas lights twinkling in ancient willows.

  But when miracles happened, Marie felt like the most powerful woman in the world. Felt more a healer than medicine had ever made her feel.

  She felt her followers growing wearier. Disenchanted.

  Most of them were elderly, mainly women. Some gap toothed, some rail thin, some, graying; others, with hair as white as cotton. Frail elders who went to Mass on Sunday, confessed venial sins, and said their evening rosary. But they all remembered their youth, their passion . . . the dancing, chanting call to gods. The thrill of spirits entering their bodies. They all remembered seeing or hearing tales of spirit loas entering their mother, their mother’s mother, their mother’s mother before . . . all the way down through the generations. To a distant time when a woman could walk on water. When a woman was the most powerful figure in New Orleans. When a woman could inspire fear, conjure miracles by whispering the words, “Je suis Marie. I am Marie Laveau.”

  Marie’s body swayed to the timbre of drums. Boudom. “Please,” she whispered. “Please come.”

  DuLac gestured grandly at the sky, as if he could call down grace. Parks lit another cigarette.

  Lila, a ninety-year-old ex–blues singer, always offered her yard. Marie suspected it was because she was infatuated with DuLac. Eyes, cataract, Lila could hardly see. But she never failed to preen whenever DuLac was near; her near-blind eyes always found him.

  Marie felt the drum rhythm change. A syncopated urging in six-eighth time.

  Wire wa
s offering up his soul.

  Boudom.

  Flames flickered from unexpected wind. The silk with Agwé’s sign fluttered high, then floated downward, like a waterfall.

  Parks was alert. His body leaning forward, like he could sense what she sensed.

  Something in the air. The intangible made tangible. Electric.

  Marie’s heart raced. She surveyed her small band. She knew them twice over: as a doctor and as a priestess.

  Madame Yvonne, hands stretched high, waited for spirits to rain upon her. She had hypertension. She was lonely. Her children all lived North.

  Petey, known for binge drinking, slept on sidewalks, in alleys, beneath freeway ramps. Wherever he dropped. Tonight, he was stomping his feet, patterning the drums.

  Erma, at least eighty, called Auntie by everyone, shuffled gingerly. She had healed fractures—arms, legs, ribs, and face. Auntie had been abused as a young girl plying her sex trade in the Quarter. Some of the damage was done by pimps; some by drug-addled johns. But of all the parishioners, she was the most trusting, believing.

  Desiree, sixty-two, visited Charity each month insisting she was in labor. She’d had a hysterectomy when she was twenty-one.

  Marie chanted:

  Legba, remove the barrier for me

  So I may pass through.

  Legba, remove the barrier

  So I may pass through to the spirit world.

  Others joined her. Paul’s shout was fierce; he’d worked construction, “paid under the table” all his days. No social security, no pension. He hunted trash for lunch, begged the hospital for vitamins.

  Her followers were part of the city’s dispossessed. Unloved, unappreciated, forgotten.

  Marie moved toward the altar. Magic would happen. DuLac was grinning. Parks watched, expectant.

  The drums grew louder, insistent.

  Boudom. Followers shouted and moaned. The spirit gate was opening.

  Sandlewood, tallow, scented the air. Marie stroked the altar: statues of Saint Peter; the Virgin, smiling benignly; paintings of Legba, the guardian; and Ezili, goddess of beauty and love.

  Old bodies seemed young again. Followers moved as if their bodies were water—languid, smooth; others moved as if their bodies were fire—jerking, striking at air.