by Rod Davis
Corina’s Way
a novel
Rod Davis
NewSouth Books
Montgomery | Louisville
NewSouth Books
P.O. Box 1588
Montgomery, AL 36102
Copyright 2003 by Rod Davis. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is unintended and purely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-129-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-058-5
LCCN: 2003003685
Some fragments of song lyrics in this book are excerpted from
“Oh Happy Day!,” Hawkins. Oh Happy Day!, Pair records, 1969; and from “Love and Happiness,” Green/Hodges. I’m Still in Love With You. Hi records. 1972.
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
to
Jennifer, Moriah,
and Peace
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
1
It was those Cubans again. Twice this morning and two more times this afternoon. If they drove past her botanica one more time Corina was going to make ebo against them in her back yard. She didn’t like to feed the spirits out of malice, because if you used your powers to harm people it might eventually come back on you. But Corina had begun to look at spell-making the way the NRA looked at handguns.
It came to her the day the phone solicitor called, probably on account of her being listed in the book as “the Rev. C. C. Youngblood III,” which she thought made her sound more official and therefore more like a man and therefore more likely a potential new member of “America’s largest voluntary organization dedicated to the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.” But if the NRA “friend” was surprised to be talking to a woman he hid it pretty well.
She listened because it was a slow day and she was bored. While the man talked, she tucked the phone between her shoulder and cheek and straightened up the votive candles on one of the sale racks. The man was saying something along the lines that as a minister and leader of her community and a woman, emphasizing gender now that he knew it, she should be especially concerned about criminals and liberals and gun control. About then is when it came to her—as if from the saints themselves. He didn’t need to sell her. She already had a gun. Better than that. She had a palo pot.
As though the power of the revelation had burst from her very soul, Corina turned from the shelves, grabbed the phone in her right hand so hard the grip turned her fingers white, and began talking without even waiting for the NRA man to stop. Fast, almost breathless, she launched the tale of her own armaments—voodoo and palo and the santos and the power of Ogun and how maybe she’d get a .38 revolver from her sister Eddie and put it inside the pot for extra strength and deploy the pot and all that it contained against her enemies just like you’d point a Smith & Wesleyan (he didn’t correct her) at a burglar coming into your house at night. She felt elated—like testifying. The man coughed a couple of times and said he could “see her point” and tried to get back to his speech but it was like he couldn’t and then he sort of excused himself and got off the phone.
She was sorry. She wanted to thank him. He was only a strange white man from Maryland or somewhere calling on an 800 line but he had clarified things. How often had she preached to her congregation that the Spirit chose its own ways in its own time? What had the man said? “Concern”? As an ordained minister she was very concerned about criminals. About good and evil. About protection.
All this had been on her mind for some time now. But she had been unable to fuse a connection. You could never get to the bottom of the great conundrums, of course, or solve the riddle of good and evil or even clarify the basic human confusion, such knowledge being the way of the Lord and not of a preacher woman from the projects. No, you could not. God knew all. God was all. But He works in mysterious ways. Truth was, all manner of solutions and insights were open to a steadfast seeker and quick study and she wouldn’t be where she was today if she was neither of those. So she was tired of messing with the Cubans.
They’d started out small, years ago, with a little Uptown grocery store mostly for the Spanish and then opened a small botanica across the river in Gretna, which was the first botanica Corina had ever been to. One thing you could say about the Delgado brothers—they knew about money and deals, which Corina hadn’t learned as much about, coming up through the church and not being a man and therefore not let in on all the rules.
By last January Elroy and Julio Delgado had two more groceries and another botanica and then, to top it all, they built a brand new warehouse over in the east. Nobody was sure why until Elroy sent out word they were opening something called a SuperBotanica. And then maybe another one after that. A chain. They said it would be like “a Wal-Mart for spiritual supplies.” They’d sell candles and incense and even iron pots for Ogun and metal crossbows for Ochosi and orisha statues so cheap they’d run all the other botanicas in town out of business. Then they were going to open SuperBotanicas all across the South, maybe even in Chicago and New Jersey.
Since Corina had once dated Elroy Delgado, before she knew what a waste of time that man was, even though now he was her padrino, she considered the entire SuperBotanica plan a personal attack. Also a kind of anti-black thing. It was her oldest boy, Jean-Pierre, first told her that. He taught social studies over in Metairie and was prone to overthinking everything, but there was more than a grain of truth in what he said.
When Elroy and Julio and the other Cubans had first come in, and set up their stores and their botanicas, they said their santería was a “real religion”—different from hoodoo and root doctors and the other sort of things Corina had grown up around. And Corina had gotten sucked into it, in a way. Until she’d seen the thing Jean-Pierre was talking about, that santería was for the Cubans and they were really just ripping off the Africans, who invented voodoo in the first place, which santería really was, and now the blacks in America were having to buy back their own damn religion. That was what Jean-Pierre said, and he’d studied on it. And that didn’t even get into the thing about the marielitos in Miami selling coke out of their botanicas and feeding the santos to protect drug dealers. They’d go to hell for that. Corina knew it from the bottom of her soul. They couldn’t twist the spirits that way.
Not that Corina’s Cubans were selling drugs. What they were selling was what she sold, and they were going to drive her to ruin. They were going to take all her customers. They were going to dry her up. They would destroy her, her botanica, and her church, and never look back. She would disappear. She would never exist, nor anything of her works.
Corina made up her mind then and there, peering through the glass front door at the street full of rusty-butt children and old women in bonnets on porch stoops and at things only a minister and prophet could see, to fight the Cubans. They would take neither her botanica nor her basic rights as an Ame
rican.
The hell with Elroy, she thought, and rebuked herself for swearing. And then said it again, smiling. Then she called her sister Eddie and asked her to bring the .38 by because she sort of owed it to the NRA and she knew both Ogun and the pot would like such a fine implement to savor.
Next time the Cubans cruised down Beauchamp Avenue in front of her store—they didn’t even drive an American car, it was a big, new dark blue Nissan sedan—they’d see. Corina turned to her youngest son, Paulus, and told him to go down to market and get a goat, because the pot she was going to sink needed blood to start it up, and a goat was about the heaviest mammal you could get, at least in New Orleans, though she’d heard in Haiti and in Africa they used a bull for the most powerful ju-ju.
Then Corina said a silent prayer to Jesus, the Redeemer, to gird her loins in this battle but she wasn’t going to use him for fixing the Cubans because there was a part of her that knew He wouldn’t understand the fight the way she did, though she wasn’t sure if it was because He was white or because He was a man.
2
Gus Houston hated the city when it rained, which gave him a bad attitudinal backdrop a good part of the year, rain being to New Orleans what snow is to Montana. On the other hand, rain allowed him a certain morose, even melancholy stance, which he occasionally indulged. He’d been indulging for about an hour, waiting for the sixth-period bell. He wasn’t thinking big or deep thoughts, especially. Nagging, perhaps. He stared absently out the white-paned window in his office. Splat, splat, splat. Funny how rain seemed poetic coming down, until it was all the way down.
He glanced at the clock on the book shelf. Five more minutes till his first customer. He wondered if he should do anything special—get out a Bible, dust off the couch, fix his tie, something. But he wasn’t wearing a tie, the couch wasn’t dusty because he’d napped on it after lunch, and he’d forgotten to get a Bible from the library even though he’d made a Post-It note to himself to do so last Wednesday. All he could do was wait.
It was true that saying he had a year of seminary training in order to get a job teaching English at Miss Angelique’s Academy for Young Ladies could, in some circumstances, be considered a falsehood. But last spring the long-term implications of lying had seemed irrelevant. What the school needed, according to the classifieds, was someone on very short notice to teach fiction and composition to New Orleans’ “most exclusive” female teenagers.
What Gus needed was a paycheck. When Mrs. Hapsenfield, the owner and headmaster, had mentioned they were also looking for a part-time chaplain, Gus had just gone over the line. The funny thing was, it had taken less than a second. He’d barely even paused to catch a breath when the entire fabrication occurred to him. Having occurred, and having seemed dangerous and irresponsible, it was impossible to restrain.
Right there in Elizabeth Hapsenfield’s office, toasty warm in the soft glow of bleached blond furniture and Santa Fe rugs, Gus had invented as he spoke a story of having dropped out of seminary training at St. Sebastian’s Men’s Bible College, a small church-run institution, now closed due to declining enrollment, in San Marcos, Texas. He left, he said, because he really didn’t feel he could devote himself fully to the religious life. On the other hand, he said, he had come away from the experience with a true understanding of the human condition.
Then he kind of waved the whole episode off, as if to indicate it probably wouldn’t be of any help to the Academy, but he had seen a gleam of a budgetary nature in Mrs. Hapsenfield’s blue eyes. It matched the gleam of financial desperation in his own and he left the interview convinced he would be given the call. And though many were summoned—it being a time of recession across the land—he got the job.
Yet not until today had it occurred to (Acting) Chaplain Houston that the Academy could in any way be serious about needing a backup counselor for “our young ladies with particularly intractable problems,” as Mrs. Hapsenfield had put it. Not until today had the semester “walk-in” sessions been reinstated. He could definitely expect visitors. The girls loved to go to Chaplain to get out of classes, which was why the Academy had discontinued the service last year, that and the Rev. Daniels’s sudden decision to leave. Over the summer, the girls had pressured their parents to get Chaplain hours back. The headmistress had graciously acceded.
In the few weeks since school had started, Gus had become increasingly aware of the small part he was playing in a larger script. It wasn’t that Elizabeth Hapsenfield had been gullible enough to believe his seminary story; she had been conniving enough to. If Gus were later found to be a fraud, it was his neck, not hers. And in the meantime it was he, not the Hapsenfields, who would have to listen to all the complaints, sad stories, freak-outs.
That aside, Miss Angelique’s was pretty decent as jobs go, especially for somebody whose last meaningful employment had been night manager at a Tennessee theme park called the Garden of Dixie. And there was Mrs. Hapsenfield. The day she hired him, she’d been wearing a white silk blouse that came open at the third button. When she turned sideways, a little silken viewing tunnel opened to reveal a very robust cleavage neatly framed in a thin bra of ivory lace. She was a natural blond with a good tan. She liked to wear turquoise. Was it possible the brown rim of her aureole had inspired him to bear false resumé?
Perhaps that was poetic, too. Trying to get your head into being a phony man of God to minister unto the young by musing about your boss’s bosom. A shrink, on the other hand, might say Gus at that moment was engaged in avoidance, or denial, or whatever it was shrinks liked to say. Bonita, the woman he loved, the woman he lived with, the woman who would kill him for straying, would have a simpler explanation. She believed most men “think with their dicks” and would fuck a tractor if they could find the parts.
Not to mention they are engineered to endure short attention spans. How affirmed would Bonita be to know that his thoughts were as of that very second no longer applied to the convex fullness of Nordic lace but to a lush Cajun triangle of thick, curly, black hair? That in the very throes of avoidance and denial, Gus’s mind had stampeded to a fervent wish. At that moment he wished to be not at the school, in the school, nor anywhere having anything to do with the school, but in some faraway mountain lodge, on a goose down mattress, sweating buckets, looking up through the teacup breasts of his squirmy bartender, his life’s love, fire of his loins, etc. Her taut thighs astraddle his pelvis. Him about to explode. He could see that image as clearly as its complement: Bonita standing over his dead, cheating body with a shotgun.
The sixth-period bell trilled, as it does in the finer schools. Gus emerged from escapist sex and settled in behind his huge antique desk. The mass of dark oak was like a moat, protecting him from invaders. Agon, Elizabeth’s crane-like, blue-blood husband, had boasted that the desk and matching leather couch had once belonged to an Old Family on Henry Clay Street. The Academy had come into its possession after the Oil Bust, when priceless heirlooms often found new currency covering the tuitions of the daughters of proud gentry.
In the fraction of a second before the door opened, and with it the dread he had been awaiting—some young student thinking Gus was in any way competent to deal with her—the acting Chaplain had a comforting, though fleeting thought. Not a revelation. A revelation would be too Biblical, and Gus knew, if nothing else, he had to be secular, or at least ecumenical, in his approach if he were to fool anyone. His thought was that maybe his presence wasn’t entirely without function after all, for when it came to counseling young women, or anyone else, about wrongdoing, who could be more qualified?
“Hi, Mr. Houston.”
Gus recognized Angie Ballew, a tall, brunette senior. She was a medley of the times: jet-black jeans, black silk blouse, copious black eye-liner. “Can I come in?”
“You already are.”
“Yepper.”
Leaving the door ajar, as if it were not her custom to deal with such bothers, she
half-slithered, half-bounced to an overstuffed vinyl armchair. A funny whump of rapidly compressing air escaped from the thick seat cushion as she dropped onto it. She sniggled somewhat gratuitously, and passed an official counselor’s pass across to him. Since he hadn’t given her one, he assumed she had stolen it. He looked it over, not unlike a blackjack player contemplating the first hit from a fresh deck.
“I guess you wanted to see me about sleeping with Mr. Hapsenfield.”
Gus smiled back and got up to close the louvered glass door. Outside, the second bell had rung and 367 young women were moving noisily through the resonant, oak-floored hallways of the converted Greek Revival mansion. Angie fastened her dark-lined doe-eyes upon him with something very much like amusement—or possibly malice. Gus tried to imagine himself in a job interview with St. Augustine. “Maybe you’d better fill me in.”
3
She killed the goat efficiently and without pain. Once across the throat with the white-handled cuchillo, then drip the blood over the shrines to Ogun on her back porch. A small amount she let run from the wound into a small salad bowl that had been in the family for years but not until recently used for this purpose. She and Paulus drank two or three mouthfuls of the warm liquid each. Then Corina praised Elegba and Ogun and Ochosi and all the santos.
Elroy said in Cuba they were called orisha. He said they actually called them “voodoo” over in Africa, which was why that name was over here, the slaves and all, but voodoo was a word Corina didn’t like. Jean-Pierre called it voodoo anyway because he wouldn’t use the Cuban names. But she had got used to calling the spirits santos, because she had learned from Elroy and even if she hated Elroy now that didn’t mean he owned the names and she couldn’t say whatever she wanted. Like she said SHANG-o while Elroy said CHANG-o and she said O-SHOON while he said O-CHOON, like he was sneezing. And the Africans spelled the orisha version of the names different than the Cubans did the santo version, Jean-Pierre had told her. Which she didn’t care about either. Didn’t any of the spirits or their names belong to anyone on this earth, any more than Jesus Christ himself did. Corina felt very strongly about that.
