The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  Marie felt like Sisyphus, measuring her success in final minutes, giving kindness, succor to those who didn’t expect any.

  She even made peace with Severs. By her third month, she understood that understaffed or not, Charity provided more service to the uninsured than any other hospital in the city, perhaps the entire state. She purchased two boxes of Tide, taped red bows on them, and handed them to Severs.

  He winked. “Much obliged.” Then he turned around, his nasal voice blaring, “You can donate your paycheck, too.”

  “I was thinking I’d do that next month,” she hollered at his retreating back.

  “Careful,” murmured Bill, a lab technician, working his fourteenth hour of a twelve-hour shift, “He’ll take you up on it.”

  By month four, Marie finally got it—everyone on the staff gave to Charity, working more hours than they were ever paid for . . . working hard and lean. “Reuse, refresh, recycle, when you can,” demanded Severs. Linens were patched and mended; days-old leftovers became soup; even gauze was cut to a perfect fit. Still, every day, the hospital struggled to provide twenty-first-century care on a nineteenth-century budget.

  Marie loved it, loved beating back the odds.

  * * *

  Tonight, the Emergency Room was filled. Marie felt the familiar adrenaline rush. Fluorescent lights buzzed, threatening to go out. Floors were dingy. Bathrooms were worse: urine that missed the tank, vomit that didn’t.

  Despite DO NOT signs, people smoked. Some even drank gin out of a paper cup. The languages were amazing: Spanish, Latin, Cambodian, a Creole patois, staccato Cajun, even the drawl of a backwoods South. A multilingual world punctuated with grunts, whimpers, and moans. No suburban crises here. No fingers sliced from cutting a bagel. No broken collarbones from peewee hockey.

  In Charity, Marie felt useful, alive. Nearly happy.

  Her hands itched. She buttoned her resident coat, gathered her tools: stethoscope, thermometer, reflex hammer, tongue depressor, light. She loved Sunday shifts. “No rest for the Devil,” her mother would say. A lapsed Catholic, Marie hoped to beat Him back. Fight Him off a few rounds.

  * * *

  “Had your pincushion stuck, your cork popped?”

  “Ellie, hush.” Ellie, “El,” for short, was head nurse for the night shift. She had purple eye shadow and red nails that curved inward like a witch’s. But Marie had seen El’s tenderness. Seen her hold a stranger’s hands for hours while he died, change an old woman’s bedpan with grace.

  “Well, you told me not to be blunt. Not to say ‘laid.’”

  “It’s wrong to say anything. Haven’t you any shame?”

  “No.” El handed her a chart. “Well, did you? Get laid?”

  Marie smiled.

  El cooed, “Now that’s what I’m talking about. Doctor, heal thyself!”

  Marie jutted her elbow into El’s ever-expanding waist. “What’s cooking?”

  “Everything.”

  It was true—internal bleeding (trauma from a baseball bat), concussions, broken jaws, cancer (mainly lung), third-degree burns, and gunshot wounds. From six to six, dusk to dawn, they’d be on their feet. El could’ve assigned another nurse to her but most times stayed close to Marie. They made a good team.

  Once Marie had asked boldly about El’s love life.

  “Child, I’m sixty-eight. Been married five times. Got me a cat. A snake. A dog. That’s all I need. I’m living vicariously through you.”

  Marie’d been shocked. Not by the lack of sex, but by El’s agelessness. Skin unlined, fresh like a girl’s. Maybe it was the humidity?

  “Magnolia blossoms.”

  “What?”

  “My beauty secret. Magnolias.”

  Marie just shook her head and went back to stitching a hand that had been caught in a steel fishing net.

  Marie and El never left the first floor. They sent patients upstairs, never to be seen again, or downstairs to the morgue. When they were lucky, they got to send a few home.

  * * *

  By 2:00 A.M., the Emergency Room had quieted some. Huan, a Vietnamese from California, was laying out bandages and alcohol swipes; K-Paul, a local boy and the best diagnostician, slept, softly snoring; and Pretty Meredith, who only had to look at her patients for them to quiet, awestruck by her blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Minnesotan beauty, was meticulously filling out paperwork. Then, herself: Marie, average height, more lean than voluptuous. Her hair, thick, wavy, and nearly black, was her crowning glory but she kept it confined in a careless ponytail. She wanted to sleep, to dream about Jacques. The supervising doctor, Pierre DuLac, was already drunk in his office, weeping into a shot glass. Everybody said he desired to be a houngan, a voodoo priest, but he lacked the gift. Being a doctor was second best. Technicians, nurses, even other doctors told her this in all seriousness. As if DuLac were a tragic figure, a would-be saint. No one reported him to the oversight board. Everyone was waiting for his redemption.

  She’d been warned: “Crazy folks down South.” And they were. But somehow she felt at home with these folks. Inside the hospital, she felt safe.

  * * *

  K-Paul woke, shouting, “Shit’s hit the fan.”

  Persistent whines, like cats being neutered, kept spiraling, drawing closer. Even DuLac stumbled out of his office. Three? Four? Maybe five ambulances? None of them sent uptown.

  “Here,” “Over here,” medics were shouting, slamming through the swinging doors. “Bust-up at Breezy’s.”

  “What’s that?” asked Huan.

  “An old slave shack turned into an illicit bar,” answered DuLac. “Brew isn’t bad.”

  “You should know,” scowled Marie.

  Meredith coughed.

  K-Paul whispered, “Way to go.”

  “Let’s go to work,” hollered El.

  “I’m sorry,” said Marie. But DuLac had already moved on.

  El and her nurses began sorting the seriously injured from the less so.

  “Assault rifles. Some gang shit,” a medic said, awed, as if everyone didn’t already know. Blood dripped like Kool-Aid.

  But it was El who noticed the give in the medic’s knees, the unfocused gaze, the weary, hangdog face.

  “You’re in shock. Sit down. Head between your knees.”

  Many had multiple wounds—some dead; some dying; some sent upstairs to die on the operating table. Marie’s mantra: “Don’t get emotional.” Check pulses, plug holes, stitch, add hemoglobin. But she still cried when they died. Just seemed there ought to be more healing in her hands.

  Just as it seemed she ought to have been able to stop her mother from dying. She swayed, nauseous. Mother?

  “This one’s for the morgue,” said George, one of the ambulance crew.

  The shrouded body was small, almost dwarfed by the gurney. A hand dangled, forlorn and exposed.

  “Wait.” Marie pressed her fingers to the frail wrist. No pulse. The ribcage didn’t move.

  “Go ahead. The morgue.”

  She smelled honeysuckle. Her mother’s scent.

  “Wait.”

  “Dead is dead,” said the paramedic.

  “Did you do CPR?” Marie knew it was hopeless. Too much time without a pulse. She caught up the hand again. Odd, it was still soft, warm.

  “What is it, Marie?” DuLac asked, applying pressure to a chest wound, a gaping hole in a young man’s side. The man was trying to speak; red foam bubbled out of his mouth.

  “What is it?”

  No stains, Marie thought. No blood. The sheet was pristine.

  “Marie, what is it?”

  “I don’t know.” The ER was chaos—noisy panic; crying, whimpering; doctors shouting, a man gasping, wailing like an infant. She was needed elsewhere. Still, she couldn’t move.

  She heard singing. A nursery song. Words too quiet to understand.

  “Take the body to the morgue.” El was beside her.

  George nodded, slipping on his headsets, blaring Queen Ida singing, “Bad Moon Rising.”r />
  “No, wait.”

  “It’s done. Over with,” El said bluntly.

  Marie looked across at DuLac. His fingertips were closing the dead man’s eyes.

  “DuLac,” she whispered, not knowing why. He looked up, startled.

  Marie lifted the sheet. She sucked in air. An angry, red mark was on the girl’s forehead.

  The girl was beautiful. Sixteen, maybe. Skin, pale; lashes, golden-tipped and damp. Like she’d been crying before she died.

  Quickly, Marie checked again for life. Pulse. Heart. Her hands roamed the girl’s limbs, her breasts.

  “My God.” She took El’s hand and laid it on the girl’s abdomen. The protrusion wasn’t great, but it was there. Hard. Something curled inside.

  “C-section,” DuLac yelled. He peered at the mark. “Fast.”

  “Call upstairs,” said El.

  “No time. Doc Marie,” DuLac rolled the r in the back of his throat. “Sainte Marie will do it.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Non.” DuLac held out his hands. A slight tremor. “I’m not fit. The babe will die before it reaches the operating room.”

  Marie nodded. “Huan, help me.” The Vietnamese girl was at her side with a tray of surgical instruments. Marie mouthed “Thanks.” In seconds, she and El backed the gurney into a station. El closed the curtains. “She looks like a bride,” breathed Huan, before cutting into satin, exposing the girl’s abdomen.

  Marie sliced deep, yet not too deep. There was the babe, fist-sized, barely alive. A blue-red membrane covered her face.

  “Cut it off. Now. Cut it off.” DuLac scared her. Where’d he come from? Marie sliced at the membrane; it was fibrous, thick, slippery with blood. Tiny lungs were barely expanding. Frantic, Marie tore the covering from the child’s head.

  “A caul,” said El.

  “Evil,” said Huan.

  “The gift of sight,” answered DuLac.

  The babe was gulping air. “Sssh. Mon piti bébé. Fais dodo,” Marie crooned, her finger clearing mucus from the baby’s mouth.

  “When did you learn patois?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Leave her be, El. She has a baby to see to.”

  El looked from DuLac to Marie. “Huan, do you mind calling upstairs? Tell them we need a crib in intensive care.”

  “I think she’ll be fine,” said Marie, counting fingers and toes. She leaned toward the mother. The child was tinged brown, so either the mother was a Creole, a mixed blood, or the father was black. Marie held the squalling baby near her mother’s face. “She’s beautiful. Like you. Very beautiful.”

  The dead woman’s hand clutched Marie’s elbow.

  “Reflex,” said El.

  “Just passing over,” said DuLac.

  “You’re both crazy,” answered Marie, trembling, ashamed of her fear.

  “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  DuLac shrugged. “El, take care of things.”

  “Sure,” El said, more submissive than Marie had ever heard her.

  “I’ll check on the others.”

  “Not get a drink?” As soon as she said it, Marie felt ashamed.

  DuLac placed his palm on the baby’s head, murmuring, “She’s going to be fine. Remarkable, Sainte Marie.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “Sainte. Doctor. Physician. Mary Levant—isn’t that what your foster parents called you? What’s in a name?”

  “Stay out of my business, DuLac.”

  “Doctor, if you please.” Then, he smiled gleefully, clapped his hands, “You saw what no one else did. I think you will again.”

  Marie was confused. She didn’t know why she was rude to DuLac. Oddly enough she sensed he liked her. That he was testing her. Telling her something he felt she needed to know.

  The curtains swayed shut.

  Marie turned her attention to the baby, cleaning its skin with a towel. She avoided the mother’s limp legs, the split-open abdomen.

  El smoothed the dead girl’s hair. Covered her body with a blanket. Still the blood seeped through.

  Without looking at Marie, El said, “DuLac did the surgery. Not you. You’d both be in a world of trouble.” She lifted the caul from the tray, wrapped it in a towel.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Need to bury it.”

  “Why?”

  “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?” It was the same question DuLac had asked.

  Marie closed her eyes. She could almost hear her mother, telling her to hide: “Shadows be good. Good for staying safe.” Then, her mother murmuring into her ear: “You’re special, don’t let anyone tell you different.” Almost as though her mother knew she was going to die.

  “Pray to the Virgin,” her mother told her over and over. “Be a good Catholic.” But Marie knew she’d never been baptized. When pressed, her mother snapped angrily, “You don’t need another blessing.”

  Marie opened her eyes. El was staring at her. Marie answered flatly: “I told you my mother died when I was ten.”

  “Mmm,” clucked El. “But not before she taught you Creole. How do you explain that? Miss North? Chicago? Or wherever it is you claim you from?”

  “El, you don’t understand.” Marie felt hurt, deep and unfathomable. The baby started crying, her head and mouth searching for Marie’s breast. “I’ll take her upstairs.”

  “You do that.”

  “El, please, don’t be mad at me.” Marie felt she was a child again, living with foster parents, trying to keep the peace, promising to be good.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?” Her voice was a lament.

  El smiled. “Never mind. Take the baby upstairs. Let her suck your thumb. It’ll keep her satisfied for a while.”

  Marie smiled, feeling the world was all right again. She held the baby close, singing, “Mon piti bébé, mon piti bébé. La lune toute jaune, se lève.” All the flurry of activity fell away. No bodies, no voices urgent and panicked. No odor of death. Only the smell of fresh leaves and honeysuckle as she held the baby close, crooning over the perfectly formed face.

  * * *

  El swung open the curtains. “Medic,” she yelled, swift and sharp. “Morgue.”

  She watched Marie enter the elevator like a proud mother. Then, she crossed to DuLac, stitching an unconscious man’s leg in the corridor.

  “Your hands seem fine to me.”

  DuLac shrugged.

  “You know whose girl that be? The one who died.”

  “Oui,” sighed DuLac. “Trouble on the way.”

  “I’ll call her mother.”

  “Her mother knows.”

  El touched a nail to her cheek. “You think she’ll come?”

  “Non. Not to bury the daughter.”

  “Or claim a grandchild?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “You mean you don’t know or you can’t see?”

  “I can’t see.” He tied off the suture. “When the time comes, she will.”

  “Our Marie?”

  “Oui. She’s got a mouth on her.”

  El laughed, then gulped, swallowing a cry. “But is her heart big enough?”

  DuLac stood, towering over the tough Miss El. He caressed her cheek. “Que penses-tu? What you think?”

  El inhaled. She looked back at the small, blanketed body on the gurney. “That was one pretty girl.”

  “Dammit to hell. Someone get this body out of here. Get it out of my sight.”

  THE BEGINNING

  Two Thousand and Five

  How was I to know they were all in my blood?

  Seven generations. All of them—whispering, punishing, crying to get out.

  —Marie’s journal, February 2005

  arie could recall a time when it felt good to be held, rocked—daytime, nighttime, “all around the town time” in her mother’s honeysuckle arms. No one else had had the sw
eet scent. She didn’t recognize it until she came to New Orleans. Where did her mother ever get it? Honeysuckle during Chicago winters? Year after year? In and out of season?

  In the South, honeysuckle bloomed year-round. The scent was cloying, overwhelming. Even the bees seemed irritated by the smell.

  But this newborn baby smelled like the flower. Delicate. Like her mother.

  Sometimes Marie had felt their roles were reversed: she, the grown-up; her mother, the child. Sweet, withdrawn, her mother often seemed in another world. Humming off-key in a distant place where it never snowed, money wasn’t needed, and where she didn’t clean houses, collect bottles for pennies, and didn’t sew or patch their clothes.

  When Marie hurt most, when school kids taunted her about her worn shoes, ketchup sandwiches, and her crazy, muttering mother, it was the memory of her mother’s sweet aroma that calmed her.

  Saturdays, when her mother went to St. Teresa’s Retirement Home to wipe tired bodies, change bedpans, sheets, and listen to old nun’s stories, Marie would lie in her mother’s bed, inhaling her warm scent, whiling away the hours pretending her mother was home, rich enough to put her feet up and be bored on a Saturday.

  Her mother said she went to St. Teresa’s for penance, but, afterward, she was always pleased when the nuns gave her beans, rice, a can of Spam. They’d have a feast on Sunday. Her mother, stirring red beans, smelling of honeysuckle; she, Marie, reading a book, and they’d pretend they were safe, secure, and happy.