“There are no more DeLaCroixs. Only the one bloodline, down through the generations of Laveaus. Blood will out. Le sang se manifestera,” insisted Marie. “Comprenez-tu? One family, one name.”
“Oui. J’comprends.”
“Bon. Je suis Marie.”
“What will happen to me?”
“What do you think should happen to you?”
Sirens loudly complained; tires crunched on gravel. DuLac must’ve persuaded the police to send help.
Marie stood.
“I didn’t intend to kill her. Just make her undead.”
“Death would’ve been preferable.” Kind Dog rubbed against Marie’s leg. “You’ll never be forgiven. Even if you die of natural causes, you’ll wander for eternity without a home.”
Madame DeLaCroix inhaled and gracefully rose. The burning plantation house was her backdrop.
“Marie,” DuLac called.
Police yelled, “Stand down. Stand down.” Gunshots sounded. DuLac moved forward, a policeman, gun drawn, at his side.
Severs raised his hands in submission.
Madame smiled ruefully: “I’m a Voodoo Queen. A woman of unnatural feelings.”
Marie watched as her aunt glided toward the altar, watched as she calmly drained her potion, watched as she collapsed like a marionette doll.
“Eh, yé, yé, Mademoiselle Marie,” said the jockey man, startling Marie, his mouth close to her ear. “Madame has always been a bad one. She used to steal your mother’s dolls. Cut their plastic necks.”
“Comment t’appelles-tu?”
Policeman handcuffed, chased after worshipers. Severs looked small and insignificant.
“You’ll find out soon enough. Take care of your cousin. The great-grandchild.” Nimble and fleet, he moved to the back of the altar and into the wild.
The Guédé clapped their hands.
Kind Dog barked.
“You can see them, can’t you, boy?”
Glass shattered, exploding outward, floorboards collapsed, a great billow of smoke rose over the bayou.
“Marie.” DuLac stepped forward, embracing her.
“Reneaux’s dead.”
“Ah, ma petite. He was a good man.”
Another explosion. The staircase crumbled, came shuddering down.
“Every goodbye ain’t gone,” said DuLac.
“I know. His ashes are in that house but his spirit is everywhere.”
“So you understand.”
“A little. One step at a time.”
“Women hand sight down through the generations. Mother to daughter.”
Marie nodded. “Let’s find my child.”
Kind Dog limped badly. DuLac supported an unsteady Marie. The moon glowed red. The three Guédé walked behind them.
Marie looked over her shoulder. The Guédé blew kisses. Behind them, women chattered, laughing gaily, as if they were in a parade. The plantation house was a burning wood-frame skeleton. A centuries-old cycle had ended. Spirits and secrets were set free in smoke. A quadroon girl—Laveau’s Marianne?—curtsied deeply, her hand pressed to her heart.
“Let’s go home,” said DuLac. “El’s worried sick.”
She smelled honeysuckle. Somewhere in the wave of spirits was her mother. She stopped, searching the joyous crowd of ghosts.
“See. I told you. You have the sight.”
“You don’t see them?”
“Non. I leave all miracles to you. Your heart’s big enough.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
Kind Dog barked twice.
Marie echoed the words: “Heart big enough . . . like my Maman. Like my daughter will have.”
As the spirits danced away into the distance, Marie’s heart overflowed with love, with Christian and Voodoo charity.
She knew where she belonged: in Charity Hospital—her hospital—carrying on the faith.
“Come on, Kind Dog, let’s go home.”
any New Orleans residents claim that Marie Laveau lies in a tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, where to this day the faithful bring offerings and prayers. In St. Louis Cemetery No. 2 there is a crypt covered with crosses scratched in red brick by followers who believe Marie rests there. Others claim that Marie Laveau never did die.
Author’s Note
always planned to write a sequel to my first novel, Voodoo Dreams. Voodoo Dreams has a special place in my heart, because the novel helped me grow up and taught me, like Marie Laveau, to appreciate truly the glory and wonder of being a woman: powerful; spiritual; in control of her life and body; valuing ancestors, family, and community.
Season is the first novel in a contemporary trilogy in which Marie Laveau’s descendant grows stronger and also more vulnerable.
What’s the sense of living if we don’t open our hearts to love . . . accept our imperfections and recognize that life is a journey, never ending? Our spirits never die . . . and each of us has a responsibility to leave a legacy of grace, kindness, and mentoring to our children and the next generation.
Read Voodoo Dreams, the novel that started the journey; enjoy Season; and look for Marie, healing and loving, in the next novel of the trilogy, Moon.
Washington Square Press
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Jewell Parker Rhodes
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-7434-8327-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-1706-1 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4165-1037-6 (eBook)
Previously published as Voodoo Season.
CONTENTS
PART I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
PART II
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
PART III
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
PART IV
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Author’s Note
About Jewell Parker Rhodes
Dedicated to the citizens of Louisiana
and to the New Orleans Public Library Book Club
PROLOGUE
The Ibo say, “All stories are true.”
Conjure women say, “Truth flies on the wings of dreams.”
NEW ORLEANS
NIGHT TERRORS
Bodies were everywhere—limp, bloated, tangled in bushes, trees, floating in water.
Men, women, and children bobbed in the muddy current, interspersed with upside-down Chevys, shredded trees, snapped power lines, and mangled street signs.
Rain added to the river’s rise. Hot, humid rain. Rain that tasted metallic and fell, like blades, pricking skin.
Marie was dry, parched. Awake inside her dream.
For weeks, she’
d been having the same dream; she’d been trying to interpret it, break the horrific spell.
“Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” The phrase kept rewinding in her mind. Coleridge. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
“Not a drop to drink.” Just dead, infested waters.
She moaned. Her legs were tangled in the sheets; sweat blanketed her skin.
She dove back down into her dream, through layers of thought, anxiety, and consciousness.
Inhale, exhale. Breathe.
The river was widening, swallowing, then spitting up more bodies.
The Guédé, the death gods, in top hat and tails, were standing on a bridge, pointing at the dead. No—at something else. Something within the water.
“Let me see,” she murmured. “Let me see.”
The Guédé heard her. In unison, they shook their skull heads and pressed their white-gloved hands across their hollow eyes.
“Show me,” she demanded. “I am Marie.”
The Guédé opened their mouths. They didn’t make sound, rather, Marie felt their howling—an obscene absence of sound that terrorized, rattling her bones.
Both inside and outside her dream, Marie wanted to run, hide, burrow into a hole so deep, no one—tangible or intangible—could ever touch her.
Each night, this was when and where her dream ended—the Guédé howling, refusing to look deeper into the water.
If the Guédé were afraid to look, why should she?
Her body constricted; her respiration quickened; her legs grew rigid, tight. She rasped, “Let me see. I am Marie. I need to see.”
She fell, hard, fast. Screaming, she clawed at the sheets. Her body jerked; the freefall stopped.
Parallel, weightless, she floated inches above the river water.
She recoiled.
Bodies bobbed so close she could touch them: a woman, her lips locked in a grimace, her arms flung over her head; a blue baby, covered in algae like a desolate infant Moses; and a man, twisted onto his side, insects burrowing into his exposed cheek and nostril.
Snakes greased through brown water. A baby crocodile perched on a dead body like a log.
She smelled waste—human and inhuman. She smelled decomposing rot and withered leaves.
In the polluted waters, there were layers of deepening darkness, darker than mud, darker than earth. Darker than any sin.
She heard: “Rise.” It wasn’t the Guédé—but the other spirit, the one, camouflaged, deep inside the water. She saw an outline—a face, human?—ascending. Then, it stopped; the spirit still cradled by deep waters.
“Rise.”
Streams of white smoke rose from the dead, billowing like foam waves in the sky.
“Rise.”
The dead were transformed into flying birds. Blackbirds. Thousands of blackbirds were flying south, escaping, soaring above the landscape, above cities, parishes, levees, and marshes. Flying toward a horizon split with orange, red, purple, and gold. Flying toward the river’s mouth.
“Mama!”
The scream pierced sleep.
“Mama.”
Marie jolted awake, stumbling out of bed, running. “Marie-Claire? Marie-Claire, I’m coming. Mama’s coming.”
The blue revolving lamp had stopped, its silhouettes of birds were dim and static on the ceiling and bedroom walls. The nightlight, in the wall outlet, flickered, its power waning.
Marie-Claire lay facedown on the pillow.
“Baby.” Fearfully, gently, she turned Marie-Claire over.
Marie-Claire was asleep; her lids closed tight, her eyelashes fanning long, delicately. She was hot, her face flushed, her brown curls matted on her brow and neck. But no fever.
She was asleep.
Wind lifted the bedroom curtains like birds’ wings. Marie trembled with relief.
“Women hand sight down through the generations. Mother to daughter.”
She and Marie-Claire were bound by tragedy, bound by love and blood.
They were imbued with sight, spiritual gifts carried from Africa into the New World, through Marie Laveau, New Orleans’s famed, nineteenth-century Voodoo Queen.
Maybe Marie-Claire, too, had been awake inside some dream? Maybe she was still dreaming?
Marie prayed her daughter’s dreams were sweet. No bloated bodies. Only rainbows, magnolias, and friends at play.
“Marie-Claire,” she whispered, gently shaking her.
Marie-Claire’s eyes fluttered, her breath smelled like almonds.
“Mama, go bye? Go bye-bye.”
“Marie-Claire?” She held her daughter’s limp hand.
“Bye, Mama. Bye-bye.” Still slumbering, Marie-Claire turned, onto her side, her tiny fists curled beneath her chin.
Marie kissed the tip of her nose, then quickly turned, sensing a presence.
Baron Samedi, the Guédé leader, was solemn, all skeleton and shadow.
Cocking his head, he pointed a gloved finger at the night-light. It glowed, strong and bright, like a lighthouse guiding lost sailors home. He touched the lamp. The birds continued their kaleidoscopic flight across the ceiling and walls. Then, Samedi waved his hand.
“South. Birds flying south,” she whispered.
In the Sleeping Beauties case, she’d learned the Guédé despised those who interfered with death. She learned, too, that if the Guédé refused to dig your grave, you wouldn’t die.
Asleep and awake, the Guédé were guiding her.
“You coming?” she asked the baron softly.
Baron Samedi tipped his hat and shook his head. He sat on the bed, then leaned forward, his gloved fingers stroking Marie-Claire’s hair.
The hair on her skin rose. From her medical training, she knew it was a chemical reaction spurred by fear, the fight or flight response. Adrenaline was raising her blood pressure, making her heart beat faster.
It was startling to see Death touching Marie-Claire.
Baron Samedi smiled, a grimace of a skeletal jaw, lost and rotten teeth.
“You won’t hurt her.” It was a statement, not a question. The Guédé were encouraging her to follow her dream to its source.
“You don’t do oatmeal, do you?”
Samedi sat, cross-legged, at the foot of the bed.
Marie smiled. What better babysitter than Death itself?
She suddenly wanted to wake Marie-Claire. To see her smile and see herself reflected in her daughter’s eyes. She bent, pressing her lips against Marie-Claire’s cheek, inhaling her sweet scent.
“Thank you, Baron. I’m grateful.”
Samedi kept mute.
Marie walked quickly out of the room. She needed to call the hospital, rearrange her shifts. She needed to call the sitter, Louise. She’d take care of Marie-Claire’s temporal needs: fix her food, keep her warm, and read her a story. Without question, Marie-Claire would be safe. Baron Samedi himself would refuse to ferry her to the afterlife, the other world.
Marie let her drawstring pajama pants fall to the floor. She slipped on underwear, jeans, and buttoned a black shirt over her cotton tee. She pitched extra panties, shirts, a comb, and a toothbrush into an overnight bag.
What did it mean? Any of it?
The Guédé were telling her that the bodies in the river were only part of a mystery she needed to solve—there was still more to discover, more to dream.
She’d drive south. And pray she’d stay alive, her spirit whole.
She saw herself reflected in the mirror: thick brown hair pulled back in a ponytail; lean rather than voluptuous; bags beneath her eyes from working too hard as a mother, a doctor.
If the Guédé were here, her daughter was at risk. The balance between life and death was unsettled, unraveling.
Her life’s calling was to heal—and her dream, even though it didn’t make any sense, was, somehow, a call for her skills.
She snapped her overnight bag shut.
The river’s mouth, the river’s mouth.
There was only one place in Lo
uisiana to go—the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf was where the Mississippi drained.
South. Drive south.
I
Old ways, country ways,
Haints fly,
Everyone has southern roots.
ONE
A BAYOU ROAD
LATE AFTERNOON
As soon as she hit the road, her bravado faded. That was the problem with having spiritual gifts. She was still ordinary, only extraordinary when need demanded it.
But wasn’t that true of any woman?
Marie pressed hard on the gas—her new Mustang, top down, carrying her into the unknown.
She was following the birds. Except they weren’t black—mainly gray, brown, and mottled pigeons, some swallows. But as she traveled farther south into a landscape infused with water, streams, inlets, and tributaries, white egrets soared, pelicans arched bony wings, and hawks glided.
Her gift was following signs. Believing that all things animate and inanimate had life.
Still—some of the time, she thought she was crazy.
She worried she was becoming just another southern gothic—an “eccentric”; a “haint”; a “black magic witch”; or “a Lilith demon,” as some folks liked to call her. Once she heard, “Ju-ju Whore,” shouted by a French Quarter drunk who hadn’t been sober in over two years.
She looked into the rearview mirror.
El.
“Damnit, El.” She was chauffeuring a ghost.
Her palm slapped the steering wheel. That’s it. She might as well get it over with—break down, lose her mind, and live in a padded cell.
El’s ghost rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Whatever.”
Marie laughed, releasing strain, the tension gripping her neck and back. She pressed hard on the gas, feeling the car adjust gears, gathering speed.
Bayou air flowed over her, layering her skin with sweat.
No more self-pity. No regrets.
Marie had always found salvation in her work. But in the months since El, Charity’s head nurse, and Dr. DuLac, the head of the ER, had been murdered, being inside Charity Hospital had lost some appeal. As a medical resident, she’d been drawn to New Orleans, and hadn’t known why. It had been DuLac who’d explained her legacy, and tutored her in the voodoo arts. DuLac—who’d become both her beloved mentor and father figure. El was the mother who encouraged her.
The Legend of Marie Laveau Mystery Trilogy Page 41