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Life and Death and Love in the Bayou

by Stephannie Tallent

It was the February the rain fell so warm and hard the bayous swamped over old man Rochambeau’s gator curing shack and the whole parish smelled like graveyard mold and sour-smelling gator crap, even the houses built up on stilts above the high-water line, that I decided to help my mama once and for all. No matter the cost to my soul.

’Bout that shed . . . I knew old man Rochambeau would just hit up my mama to use the ham hut for his haul, and she’d say yes, so I didn’t feel too bad. Not for him, anyway.

Felt bad for my mama, who’d be stuck bumping up against log- shaped hunks of gator meat while she seasoned and cured the hogs. Touch one of those logs of meat, and it’s like the Spanish moss is dragging against the back of your neck, like the spirit of the gator is still there and pissed off and just waiting to chomp on you and roll you.

Those spirits are truly there, lurking to garner just a bit of power, enough to touch the living world.

I know ’cause I see them. Granny said I’m blessed, just like her, and her granny before, and I gotta keep it secret.

What we see we can touch, and what we touch, we can control.

And some men don’t like us women having that power. Call us witches, and do worse than call us names.

And sometimes, that power just ain’t enough to keep a body safe. Many a blessed woman’s been beaten or hung in this parish, either too weak or too despairing to fight back.

So, best keep it hidden.

The rains seem to feed the spirits, restoring them closer to life.

Made me itch to see them. Test them.

Mama didn’t make me help with slaughtering the hogs anymore, not after that first time when I was ten. I screamed for days, ’til my throat bled, then I sprayed blood just like those cutthroat hogs.

I get to go exploring on my own, now, when it’s butcherin’ time, which is fine by me. Don’t get me wrong. I know that I can’t afford weakness. Since that autumn six years past, I’ve learned to not flinch away from, well, nature red in tooth and claw. Death is part of life. Necessary for life.

Trying to build up my—I don’t want to say tolerance, but the way the world is, I need to be able to function in the face of violence. It’s so hard, sometime. Nature’s one thing. People hurting other people? Twists my insides around.

Why ain’t I in school, you ask? School’s for rich folks, not teenage swamp witches like me. Mama sent me through grade school. That was enough. I can read, and write, sure enough, so’s I can scribble down what I see and learn on my own, in a tattered red-covered spiral notebook, but they couldn’t teach me nothing about the spirits of the bayou, and that’s what I truly needed to learn.

Granny told me that I’d have to master my powers, else they’d master me, and I’d turn out like crazy old Calixte, half snake herself by now, undulating in the sulfur-smelling brown water, slipping through the roots of the mangroves, the little green flowers of the water spider orchids tangling in her long gray hair.

Secretly, I thought submersing yourself into the magic of the swamp might not be such a bad thing, after I saw what Mama’s most recent boyfriend Leroy Bobanchet done to her this last time, a week ago. Both eyes blackened and her slender nose crooked and one tooth lost and two more loose.

I puked for half a day, after that.

The swamps just take you as you are. They don’t lie to you, pet your hair and call you pretty, then beat the tar outta you.

Or come to your daughter’s room, once the moon’s set, with whiskey-soaked breath and sweaty hands. Delphine, you just so pretty, too….

The swamps ain’t safe, but they ain’t mean for the sake of meanness.

So, that Monday morning, once the rains slacked off from near hurricane to drizzle, and Mama headed in to cashier half a day at the Big Star thirty miles away, I hightailed it down to Bayou Mareau, riding my beat-up rusted bike around rainwater-filled craters in the dirt road ’til the bare cypress branches, festooned with trailing Spanish moss, formed a cathedral roof overhead and the road just drove itself into the swamp.

The day was cool enough the little droplets of salty mist tickling my face and back, soaking the white cotton of my blouse to see- through, felt good against my skin while I was pedaling along.

I got chilled pretty quick once I stopped, though.

Didn’t matter. I’d be sweating soon enough, slogging through the mud and weeds and water.

The last good man Mama had been with was Charlie Solet from the Isle à Jean Charles. He swore he’d be with her forever, then he died in an oil rig accident five years ago. After that, it was like Mama thought she didn’t deserve anything good in the world anymore.

I could take care of myself. Leroy Bobanchet hadn’t been any good for a woman for a solid two weeks after he done tried to rape me. His suffering was well worth the morning of cramps and diarrhea I paid.

I didn’t tell Mama what he tried. She’d just blame herself, like always. And I don’t think she missed what he had, anyhow, those two weeks. She just works so hard. She’s so tired all the time.

Mama… I had to do something to help her. If you have the power to help someone, you have to help. That’s just what’s right.

Today was Saint Valentine’s Day. I knew Leroy was coming over to see my mama.

Mama was a good Catholic woman despite her own heathen ma and daughter. I know that Saint Valentine wasn’t just one person, even, and all that love crap isn’t based on any sort of pious religion. And like with Christmas tying together capitalism and pagan rituals and Christianity (see, I told you I got some education), there were darker festivals, like the Lupercalia, predating today’s holiday of hearts and flowers and candy.

But when enough people believe something, it can become real, even if it was made-up stories about finding true love despite the odds.

Maybe I could do a little bit of bayou magic to knot all the threads, with all these things coalescing. Maybe I’d have the strength to make a difference, finally, with the rain-fueled spirits and the magic of the different beliefs all coming together.

The swamp was quiet as I rode up, hushed by the cold iron- based steel of my bike.

Soon as I got off it and laid it down in the poison ivy by the roadside, the chuckles and squeaks of a green heron broke the stillness.

That set off a cacophony of chirps, splashes, and grunts.

The bayou accepted me as one of its own once it realized who I was, away from my bike.

Bayou Mareau looked the same and different, like it always did, depending on the tides and time of year, storms present and floodings past. Verdant green everywhere, in the sunlight just breaking through the clouds—kelly-green swamp rose mallow leaves, dark green Spanish moss dangling from naked cypress branches, scums of acid green algae on the surface of the milk chocolate water.

It smelled of lush decay, sour and rich in my nose and on my tongue as I gulped in the thick air like a beached bass. Decay that gave life.

I was home.

I’d worn just the white blouse and cutoffs, over a faded black cotton sports bra and pink cotton bikini panties. I shucked off the blouse and jeans, baring my pale sunless skin, and waded into the knee-deep water, hoping any creepy-crawlies would just crawl on out of the way. Have you ever seen what lives in the mud? Larvae like miniature dragons and monsters, and worse.

A swamp moccasin glided on by, its thick body graceful in the water.

“Give my regards to Miss Calixte,” I told it, and it nodded gravely as it gaped at me, showing the snowy white of its mouth. Just a friendly smile, not a threat display. Not to me.

The snakes don’t bother me. Nor do the mosquitoes.

I’ve given enough blood, barking my shins on underwater branches, to sustain generations of bugs. And the snakes, and other critters? Politeness goes a long way, I’ve found. Kindness and politeness. You don’t have to be some sort of Christian to know that you should treat others as you would like to be treated in turn. Problem was, lots of those who called themselves good Christians think that applies only to other Christians.

Not folks like Charlie, working like a white man but living like his people, the Houma, or outright heathens like me and Granny. Let alone the snakes and crawdads and gators. Or the cypress, or the poison ivy, or even the most annoying mosquito.

Leroy Bobanchet goes to church every Sunday, dressin’ up in a cigarette-soaked black suit, with his stomach stretching a starched white dress shirt near to the seams splitting. And a black and gold fleur-de-lis patterned tie knotted around his thick neck. For the Saints, you know.

A half mile or so of wandering around the cypress, collecting a parade of curious animal spirits, pulling up some worm root and collecting some pretty white fringeless orchids, I came across what I was truly looking for.

The ruin of an old steamship hunkered under the branches, its flaking white paint mottled green with mold, the wood underneath ash gray. The iron fixtures at the listing doors and windows were rusted red and fragmented, staining the remnants of the white paint with the pale pinky-orange tears of their decay. Spanish moss draped over the broken railings. The hull glowed orange, pale sunlight reflecting off the brown water illuminating the layers of rust coating the steel. It smelled like a cast iron pan heated on the stove. Tall feathery-leafed cypress pierced the deck from below, pinning it in place to decay just in this spot.

Regardless, the sternwheeler listed in the water, more than the last time I’d visited. I didn’t know if it was safe to board, or if it’d taken more damage from yesterday’s storm. I could trust the swamp. I couldn’t trust something man-made.

Man-made, but unearthly for all that. No one else I knew had ever mentioned the old ruin. Bayou Mareau was isolated, but the folks who did live here knew it well. If anybody besides me had run across it, no one was breathing a word of it.

And the cypress impaling it were fully leafed out like it was the middle of June, not mid-February. That just wasn’t natural.

Sometimes the bayou does what it wants, not what people think or science says it should. Like keep a wrecked sternwheeler for itself, sharing it only with those folks who shared the bayou’s magic.

But, inside, in the top drawer of a small walnut inlaid dresser, in what used to be a bedroom, complete with an iron bed frame and a moldering horsehair mattress, was a tattered volume of Chaucer, with one poem still intact, still readable: “The Parliament of Fowls,” with its reference to Saint Valentine.

I like to think the book belonged to some young woman like me, before all the bad crap happened and I got all cynical. Maybe she was riding the river boat south to meet her beau, and simply forgot the book when she packed up to start her new life.

And yes, I know, that poem likely refers to summer. But stay with me, here. It all goes on belief, and what folks believe ain’t necessarily what’s true. I can use it to anchor my spell, because what folks believe is that February 14 is Saint Valentine’s Day.

I eyed the steamboat. Last time, I wrestled a log against the side, shinnied up it, and clambered over the railing. The railing was half gone, now, victim of the storm or time. And the hull just felt paper thin, like I could see through it to the innards of the ship. I didn’t think it could support the weight of a log.

Cypress grew ’round the ship, not just through it. If I climbed up one, that one leaning kissing close to the ship, then scooted along an overhanging branch, I could maybe jump to the deck.

Worth trying. I’d worry about getting off the damn ship, after.

I wished I’d kept my cutoffs on. Thick denim, they’d be chafing my thighs, but I could use a little protection from the rough bark. I gritted my teeth, stuck the orchids and worm root into my bra, reached for a low-hanging liana, and began climbing.

The pepper vine realized what I was doing and boosted me along.

“Thank you kindly,” I whispered as I scooted along the cypress branch, then let myself drop to the deck of the ship. The cracked floorboards let out an alarming creak in protest, though I don’t weigh no more than a year-old swamp doe, one hundred and ten dripping wet, which I nearly was after my hike to the ship.

I made my way to the front of the ship, skirting the holes in the deck and broken boards just wanting to become holes. I made it to the bedroom with just a couple splinters in my bare feet, leaving tiny droplets of the blood along my path for the ship to drink down. I’d have to get some elderberry leaves for a poultice to make sure they wouldn’t fester.

For now, the ship could taste me. I was planning on takin’ something away, and fair is fair.

The book was where I’d left it last, tucked away in the top drawer of the decaying walnut dresser. The cover looked and smelled damper than before, and the book exhaled little puffs of mold when I opened it to “The Parliament of Fowls.”

Still legible, if fuzzier, the print paling to moss-tinged sepia. Seven hundred lines of gods and goddesses and love and death and all the birds Chaucer could think of.

That didn’t matter.

What mattered was all those damn birds found their true love, with the help of good old Saint Valentine. And I’d found a score of references pointing to the poem as one of the first links of romance and love to Valentine.

So, folks believed it.

The spirits gathered around me. Gator claws tapping on the soft water-soaked boards of the bedroom floor; an osprey winging along by the ceiling, a mullet grasped in his feet; a swamp moccasin curling around my feet, belly full of frogs and mice.

And one more spirit, that I couldn’t quite see, but hoped I recognized.

The magic of the bayou, of life and death in a constant circle.

I asked, and the snake and the gator and the osprey focused on the book, a bit bewildered, but willin’ to help. “Life. Death. Love,” I whispered, and some of their strength flowed into the pages, their spectral forms dimming.

I carefully tucked the orchids in between the pages, then closed the book. That would do.

I hoped it would be enough. Leroy was an evil man, and my mama was too wounded inside to stand up for herself. “Thank you.”

Up on the deck, I let the pepper vines twine around my wrists and pull me up, off the deck, then drop me to the sodden earth.

Now to get on home fast as could be.

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Time runs funny in the bayou, and it was late afternoon by the time I reached the rutted gravel road to our cabin.

The gator and the swamp moccasin spirits had stayed behind in the bayou, but the osprey, spectral wings shining in the dwindling winter sunlight, had followed me home like a curious kitten.

And the other spirit, the one I couldn’t quite see, was hovering close by as well.

The pale blue paint was peeling off the front door of our cabin, and the tin roof needed patching, but the cabin was home, a home that my mama’d worked hard to keep as nice and clean as she could for raising me.

Mama’s rusty Ford pickup, its tires nearly bald, snugged up the shelter of the house. Mama was already home from work as a cashier at the Big Star grocery, a forty-five-minute drive away and the closest grocery store.

Leroy’s truck, a shiny new Dodge, was parked next to Mama’s.

Was I too late? My stomach clenched. I’d planned on getting back home before he arrived.

I stood up on the pedals, smashing down, bits of gravel rooster- tailing behind my back wheel as I pedaled up the driveway as fast as I could. A miasma of pain roped around me like the liana and squeezed me near to puking. The edge of the rusted steel pedal sliced my left calf as my foot slipped.

Spatters of blood trailed as I pedaled harder.

What had Leroy done?

Leroy Bobanchet threw open the screen door, banging it against the wall. Heavy handed as normal. He was wearing a stained wife beater over ripped-up jeans. Couldn’t even bother to dress up nice for my mama on Saint Valentine’s Day.

“Why, Miss Delphine, I’d’a thought you were out today with some beau,” he called, leering at me.

That man never did learn.

You can’t cure a rabid dog. All you can do is shoot him.

“I like to spend holidays with my mama,” I said, gritting my teeth against the knots in my gut.

“Well, you had best go on. Visit your granny or sumpin’. I’m staying with your ma tonight.”

I pushed my bike under the house, between the stilts. I’d clean up the blood and the mud later.

I marched on up the front stairs to the porch where he lounged against the door frame. I held my back so stiff I thought I’d break in two, then smiled pretty.

“Got a gift for you to say I’m sorry,” I said to him, my mouth so dry even stomach acid would be a treat. I reached behind where I’d tucked the book into the waistband of my cutoffs. I handed it to him, and he took it without thinking.

I don’t know what was worse—how sick I felt, and knowing how hurt my mama must be, or being terrified my spell wouldn’t work. No one cared when Mama showed up with black eyes or a broken nose. The laws of men favored Leroy Bobanchet, not my mama. It was up to me, and all I had was the love and magic of the bayou.

“A book?” he said, opening it, letting an orchid fall to the porch. “What the hell do you think I’m gonna do with a damn book? And what is that stink?”

“Death. Decay,” I whispered.

The osprey landed on my shoulder, cocked his head. His talons pierced the thin fabric of my blouse, drawing pinpoint drops of blood.

I could see the osprey clear as day, and by the widening of Leroy’s eyes, so could he.

And what’s more, Leroy could see the other spirit beside me, the one I couldn’t quite clearly see, though the form was growing more solid. Else I don’t think he’d look so scared.

I must admit, I enjoyed that look of terror, given what he’d done to my mama.

The osprey tightened his grip, my blood soaking up into his talons. I was happy to sacrifice that bit of blood, dripping out of me like innocence lost.

“Death. Decay,” I repeated, as mold stretched from the pages of the book to his hands and up his arms. He dropped the book as his flesh shriveled against his finger bones and his skin tore free. The mold reached his shoulders, and that’s when he started screamin’, fit to wake the dead.

I’m not ashamed to admit I joined in. The magic gave, but it took, too, and I felt the same agonies as that woman-beating piece of crap.

The screaming didn’t last long.

Just long enough for him to fall down, spasming against the warped floorboards of the porch, his flayed flesh in tatters.

Long enough for Mama to drag herself from the bedroom, cradling a broken arm against her chest. He’d laid into her once again. He would have killed her, I know he would’ve, and I don’t feel an ounce of regret for what I done.

Even if my soul felt heavy. Tinged with darkness and decay that the ebbing pain didn’t erase.

From the dullness in her dark eyes, outlined by raccoon bruises, as she stared at Leroy’s quivering body, I don’t think Mama felt any regret either.

We both watched as he gave one last rattle. Me with a dark satisfaction, Mama with a disbelieving relief.

Then she looked up at me.

And then, past me.

To the spirit of Charlie Solet, his lanky form clad in a white linen suit. No signs of the oil slick burns that took his life, too soon.

Absorbing the life force of Leroy to become solid enough to touch our world.

Holding out a bouquet of pink and white rose mallow flowers to my mama.

“I’m so sorry, Cécile,” he murmured, his voice a breeze of sweet honeysuckle. “So sorry.”

“Things happen, Charlie,” my mama said. “But I have missed you.”

He reached to her, stroked her broken arm. Her breath caught as the bones straightened and the flesh knit together. He stroked her face, and her nose straightened back to its elegant profile. Her dark eyes gleamed, the skin around them a tawny healthy sun- kissed tan instead of sickly yellow-purple, the swelling receding to show off those cheekbones I’m vain enough to be pleased to have inherited. Then he opened his arms and Mama went to him.

I shuffled my feet, looked down. It was clear Charlie still loved my mama, and she loved him. Everyone deserves a Valentine’s kiss from their true love.

“I think it’s time for me to go visit Granny,” I said, my sickness waning as my mama healed. I cleared my throat. “It may be you just have a bit of time.”

“I understand, baby girl,” my mama said, peeking around Charlie’s shoulder. “And thank you.”

Charlie looked back to me and nodded, his black eyes luminous.

“Don’t worry about that,” I waved a hand at Leroy’s remains, “I’ll just use his truck and dump him for the gators.”

I don’t know if they even heard me say that last bit. They just stepped back into the house, eyes locked on each other.

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The gators weren’t too sure if they wanted to eat trash like Leroy, but I coaxed them to do it by promising to bring some hamburger next time. They just love raw hamburger. Then I drove his truck all the way to the outskirts of New Orleans and left the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked.

I took a cab to a cheap motel and called Granny after getting settled in, tucking all the pillows against the flimsy headboard and laying back on the burnt orange flower-printed polyester coverlet. A clock, a real clock, not digital, hung on the wall opposite, over a scratched-up dresser. There was a stand for a tv, but no tv.

“I can’t tell you what I done, over the phone,” I said, taking a sip of the warm RC I’d picked up at a truck stop soon as my stomach felt settled enough for a coke. My skin still felt funny, loose on my bones, if I let my thoughts dwell on Leroy.

“Can I stay with you for a couple a days?”

Granny didn’t say anything for a few minutes. The clock ticked erratically. Sort of like my heartbeat, waiting for Granny to pass judgment.

“Did you do something that needed doing?” she finally asked, her rich voice rough in my ear.

“I did, ma’am.”

“Then as long as you can live with it,” she said.

“I can, Granny.” Taking a life, even one as despicable as Leroy’s, would carry a price, one I’d be a long time paying back.

If I even could. The taste of swamp decay filled my mouth.

“I can.” I had no choice but to, didn’t I?

“Then I’ll come get you first thing tomorrow morning.” She hung up before I could tell her the address. Hmph. She’d find me.

I rearranged the pillows and shimmied between the sheets. Scolded the bedbugs away.

And dreamed sweet dreams, of the sun sparkling on the bayou, frogs croaking and gators grunting, ospreys hunting. Spanish moss like garlands from the cypress branches, and duckweed floating on the still water. The sweet blooms of orchids and wild roses.

Of life and death and love.