by Eden Butler
I didn’t mind it so much, except for Joe Andres being up at the Simoneaux house. It was nice to be away from the trolleys and crowds, the wicked gleam in ole Ripper’s eye and the constant worry that my mama and Lulu would get found out for making drink no one was supposed to have. But having a fool like Joe Andres that close by meant I still had to keep at least one eye out for trouble.
I liked my Bastie’s farm. There were chickens pecking at the ground on the side of the house, next to the shotgun building with the pale blue door and cream walls where Bastie used to store her gardening tools and the feed sacks for all her critters. That led away from the old creole cottage my granddaddy Bastien had built for her with his own two hands some thirty years ago before the pipe he smoked festered his lungs like dry rot on a dock and killed him by the time he was sixty.
The house was cedar framed; the color of the wood had gone all dark like the belly of a rock settled on the riverbank and Bastie kept pretty green shutters on the two windows outfitted at the front of the house. There was a porch with five feet long steps and handrails, where she kept a whiskey barrel cut in the center to catch the water she pumped from the well. She’d use the washboard inside that barrel to beat and scrub out the laundry on Saturdays all day, if the weather was right.
But in front of the porch, just off the side of the cottage, hung an old swing, big enough for three people to sit on, swinging back and forth so that the rusted chain that hung from the oak above it squeaked and moaned in a sort of rhythm that made me smile. On that porch Bastie told me all her stories—how she’d worked with her mama in Atlanta, tending to some rich folk’s babies as her mama cleaned their fine house. She talked about those babies, a girl and a boy, Linda and Luke, like they’d been her own until she caught the eye of my granddaddy Bastien who she swore was the most handsome fella she’d ever seen her whole life. He took her away when she was twenty and brought her here to Manchac, where his people had lived for years. He’d spent most of their marriage working on the cottage and planting everything he could for his bride, promising her this small farm would be something straight from the heart of a fairytale.
I sat on that swing this morning, worrying and fretting over Dempsey, looking out through the line of crepe myrtles Bastie had planted to keep the outline of Simoneaux’s fancy house distant; she’d wanted a place hidden from the world and with all those trees, dozens and dozens of them and the lush fit of gardenia bushes and climbing roses that ran up and along the fence line, my granny had managed that well enough. But I could still make out the pitch of their roof and the small cottages peppered away from the big house. Dempsey said his daddy used those for his friends when they came to fish the Manchac, but Bastie had said once they’d been used for slaves, folk who never did have even a single choice where they lived or how they did their living.
“Run this up to Mr. Foster’s place, Sookie. Aron will take you but you got to meet him down at the crossways. He’s at that loose-tail woman’s house.” The heavy basket was in my arms before Mama stopped speaking and pushed me off the swing and down the drive and I headed in the direction of Clarice Dubois’, a girl my Uncle Aron had been sweet on since he was ten and too stupid to understand that following after a girl too old and too rich for him was a fool’s errand. Mama didn’t like Clarice, said she wore too much rouge and swung her hips on purpose. But then, Mama didn’t much like when her brother got played a fool and Clarice Dubois was aces at that game.
Behind me, my mother cleared her throat, finishing off the annoyed sound with a low, long sigh that made me get my feet moving faster. She never asked me and Sylv to do a thing. I reckoned she didn’t have to, but the order she gave just then came at me in a bark, something she said through the tight grit of her teeth. I was used to it, didn’t bother complaining that the cross ways was at least two miles down past most of the empty fields the Simoneaux’s let out to farmers. I hated walking past those fields and half wished I’d answered the knock that had come at my window the night before.
Dempsey wouldn’t trouble my granny and knew better to ask for me at the front door when Mama was at home. He’d knocked at my window a few times, whispering my name like he hoped no one would hear him. But I did, far as I could tell I’d been the only one, but still didn’t answer. Sylv’s warning had been clear and had me thinking things I didn’t like much. Things like telling Dempsey to stay well away from me. Things like he didn’t belong with us, but just thinking that made my stomach go all heavy.
Walking down the drive, glance veering to the Simoneaux’s place and further down to their empty fields made me wish I’d met Dempsey at the tree house this morning, like was usual any time we were home for the weekend. But I hadn’t, still keeping my brother’s warning in mind.
“Don’t drag your feet, neither.” I swear Mama’s frown had only gotten worse the further away I walked from her and when I looked over my shoulder, caught the small snarl of her top lip, I figured I’d need to save myself from her anger if I didn’t move faster.
My mama didn’t hate me so much, I knew that, but I also knew I had the look of whoever my daddy had been and that always had been a sore spot between us, not like I could help it.
“Nothing for it.” Bastie had blown off my question, the same one I’d asked a dozen times before I’d made twelve. “You don’t need to worry over that.” But every kid needs a family and ones like me, who grew up not knowing much about their daddies, needed them the most. Maybe that was why I took to Dempsey. Maybe I saw something of that missing family in him because he knew his daddy and still didn’t much have one.
Bastie told me not to worry about who had made me. Mama wouldn’t ever pay any mind at all to me all the times I’d asked her. But hanging out in Manchac and working in the city, you hear a lot of gossip. Me and Sylv didn’t look a bit alike. He was the spit of his daddy, a man called Dante’ Lanoix who mama married when Sylv was two. Bastie said Mama and Dante’ had been sweethearts in school but that he’d gone off to the Army when she had Sylv swelling her belly and came back changed. We got his name and Mama got some money from the government when the scaffolding Dante’ climbed at work gave way and he fell forty feet off a building. Mama buried him next to her daddy and then never spoke about him again.
But I was a Lanoix only by the name. Only because Dante’ didn’t much mind that Mama had already been pregnant with me five months when he came back after the war to call on her. He’d only wanted her and took what came with having her.
My daddy could have been anyone—some sweet stranger who flattered Mama until she got on her back, maybe told her how pretty she was on the rare times she laughed and smiled. Maybe he could have been one of the men who tipped their hats to her as she walked through the Square on Sundays, ready for Mass in her pretty yellow dropped waist dress and her hair finger waved all soft and close around her face. Likely though, if the gossip was true, my daddy was a white man Mama lost her mind over just a little. At least, that’s what Lulu had said to one of the new maids Ester brought in when she wondered why my skin was so much brighter than my brother’s.
I hadn’t had a good listen to all that Lulu said, but I know I heard her mention Dempsey’s uncle, his mama’s brother, Lionel Phillipe who had stayed with the Simoneaux’s years back before Dante’ stuck around for good. Back when Mama’s smile came easy and honest.
If Lulu wasn’t a liar, that might make Dempsey’s mama’s hateful looks at me, definitely at my mama, hold more sense. That would also mean that Dempsey wasn’t just my friend; he was my cousin. But I didn’t think about Dempsey the way I do Uncle Aron’s boy, Hank. I didn’t think of Dempsey any way except how his bottom lip curved up in the middle, making it seem like he’s always chewing his lip. I liked to think about his face and the small, faint freckle that sticks out from the others along his cheekbone. And his eyes, those big, bright eyes that look gray and blue and shades that remind me of the Gulf, way out in the deep when the dolphins and porpoise chase small boats, bobbing alo
ng the surf. I’d only seen it once, the Gulf, but you don’t forget something like that, not ever.
Whoever my daddy had been didn’t matter much now. Not to me and not to my mama. But sometimes when I was nodding off in the middle of Mass or when Bastie’s low, sweet voice hummed a hymn all soft, like in a whisper, and my eyes got all heavy and I started to fade away, I’d catch my mama watching me like she wanted to see something on my face she wouldn’t look for when I was full awake. Most days, that hard stare of hers was followed by a curved lip and a look of outright sick. Most days, it was all I could do from asking what sin I’d committed and how she wanted me to repent. After all, it wasn’t me that asked to get born.
But sometimes, I got the notion that Mama was looking for something of the man who made me in my features. My nose was long and small at the tip. The bridge was slender and maybe too long for my round face, but my eyes, Bastie always said, were like melted chocolate to match my skin. Sylv was darker than me, his nose wider, his lips plump and wide like his daddy and never once had I caught Mama looking at him with anything else but sweet love, maybe a little sadness for the man she’d loved and lost too soon.
So because I knew it so well, I didn’t waste much time thinking on the bad mood that came up on Mama when she looked too hard at me as I trotted towards the cross roads. Instead, my attention went to the wide field surrounding the Simoneaux property and the stalks of sugarcane that rose up taller than a grown man.
When we were little things, me and Dempsey would run out in that field, hiding and laughing like fools, chasing each other with the scratch of the tall grass and the thick stalks slapping against our knees, the sweet residue from the sugarcane making Dempsey’s britches and my thin cotton dresses sticky with dirt. Sometimes Sylv would play with us, tapping the tips of the stalks just to prove his stretch could reach, that he was bigger and braver than us.
Once, when we were twelve, Dempsey gathered several stalks and took the pocket knife Uncle Aron had given him for his birthday to the skins, cutting away the surface until only the meaty inside, sweet and satisfying, came dripping out in a slow, delicious trickle. We made ourselves sick that day and Dempsey’s daddy whipped him good for coming home in such a mess.
The memory stuck with me then, as I cleared the north corner of the field. I’d just about forgotten how that field, empty and still despite the spring wind coming up to push around the stalks and drying grass, and had come closer toward the end of the gravel road. I could make out the street sign ahead and glanced over my shoulder at Bastie’s little cottage that looked like a dollhouse silhouetted against the lowering light. It was Dempsey and that sweet juice that took away the fear that always came to me when I walked away from the farm, from the protection of my sometimes home. From Dempsey too. Good sense told me I should have remembered. Remembering, minding what you knew, good and bad, tended to keep you far from trouble.
It didn’t that day.
I smelled Joe Andres before I saw him. It was the bourbon-thick scent of his bottle along with the dirty odor of his sweaty body that rose up to spoil the sweet sugarcane perfume in the air.
“Hey gal…you come here a minute.”
They always called us gal, no matter how grown we were. Bastie was pushing upwards of seventy and every white man that came across her still called her “gal” and my grown-ass Uncle Aron got called “boy.”
I might not have been grown-assed myself, but I knew better than to let some piss drunk white man get his hands on me if I could help it.
Pretending not to hear him as he came out of the field worked for just about a minute. To my side, I caught the stumble of his shadow when he tried to keep up. It was a stupid wobble of a step broken something fierce by how many times he brought that sloshing bottle up to his mouth.
“Hey gal, I said come see me.”
That shadow got bigger the closer he came no matter that I was almost jogging. Joe Andres had a fat, giggling belly and one shot of a look over my shoulder told me he had his dingy white button up shirt open to show the dirty undershirt underneath. But he was a full grown man and could move a pace when he wanted to.
He wore a tan hat with the brim pushed up and his sweaty brown hair curled up to wet the fabric making a damp line form against his forehead. When I didn't stop, he took a sip, stopping for a second to guzzle the brown liquid in his bottle before he threw it to the ground. Then, he came at me.
“Get over here, you little bitch.”
I didn’t wait to hear what else that nasty man would call me. I took off running, moving closer and closer to the cross ways, praying like a nun that God would keep me out of this old man’s grip. I was so scared that it felt like someone had turned up the speed of my heart and started burning my insides.
There were a handful of steps between me and Andres, a few more that I kept adding to it, counting on the liquor he’d drank to keep him slower and his fat gut to make chasing me a stupid idea that he’d get tired of doing when he got too winded.
But that nasty white man kept at me, grunting and wheezing and he put his own speed into his steps and I swore I could smell the sick stench of his breath fogging in the air around me, getting closer until it was against my neck.
My moves went sloppy and the buckle from my t-strap shoe popped, slowing me into a stumble, the gravel from the road falling into my shoe until I couldn’t move much, until a hop or two to remove it had me falling on my knees just long enough for Andres to catch up.
“You listen to me…” His words were clipped, winded and came out in a rasp and he edged closer, reaching out his thick, short fingers toward me. “When I say you come to me, you better get your tail right in damn front of me. You hear me?”
He was drunk, I reminded myself, knowing that what I did just then, this bastard wasn’t likely to remember and then Andres took hold of my arm, pulling me up from the ground to shake me between his damp palms.
“I tell you to…to come…and you…” He shook me hard, fingers curling, grabbing onto the collar of my shirt until he had a fistful of fabric in his fist and two buttons popped from the movement.
He lunged closer and all I could smell was that hooch, thick and warm and wet and the dirty, sickening smell of his sweaty, round body. All I saw was those chapped, fat lips of his coming closer and closer. My sense returned and again I told myself this drunk man wouldn’t remember, and I did the only thing I could; I hauled back and socked Joe Andres one good time in his eye.
I think, maybe he was surprised. I was barely a hundred pounds and there wasn’t a whole lot of strength in that punch, I knew that and reckon he did too. But Andres still stopped trying to put his mouth on me. He made a small, shocked noise, something that might have been a belch, maybe the air sticking in his throat but the sound was wet and gurgling, something that would have made me laugh if he still didn’t have his hands on me.
Andres opened his mouth, reminding me a guppy sucking on the air around him when he jumped out of his bowl, but I wouldn’t let him speak. I jerked back, twisting away from him and I think, maybe, he was too surprised to move at first, that some “gal” had the gumption enough to fight back.
The gravel under my feet dug into the soft surface of my heel, and I pulled away from Andres, twisting my hips to get out of that tight grip, but he held on and I could hear a ripping sound as I moved. Four sharp steps back and Andres held part of my shirt between his fingers. I looked down, mouth hanging open and breathing hard as I pushed down that burning sweet anger that had me wanting to scratch this drunk bastard’s eyes out, and noticed that my skin was against the open air and my skimpy undershirt was showing. And when Joe Damn Andres looked down at my bosom, when he threw down the rip of my shirt and took to licking his lips and stepping toward me, I stomped my one-shoed heel onto the top of his foot and didn’t wait to see how bad I’d got him afore I was off in a scared rabbit run, back the way I’d come.
The sun was nearly gone now, except for the faint shadow that covered the gr
ound. I ran on and on until I’d cleared most of the empty sugarcane field, ignoring the rich smell in the air and the row of crows watching me thunder down the road back toward my Bastie’s cottage.
It wasn’t until I was past the cottage, back against the south fence line, past the tool shed and away from the house and the left section of the property where Sylv and I had mustered up the smarts enough to build a small tree house against one of the largest oak trees on the property. The tree house was no more than a few loose boards tied together with fraying rope in knots and what was left of the tin roof Aron had taken down when he repaired the tool shed. But it was secure enough, and we were still small enough that fitting inside wouldn’t harm us any. Now it seemed like the safest place to hide from Joe Andres case he still was after me. I was up the tree and in the back of the small shack before I even thought twice.
“Sookie!” It was a whisper somewhere around the back of my head; pushing past the blood pumping hard and heavy into my ears. The sound was barely there, lit with a dim light inside my head, coming outside of the tree house and I was safe, safe, but maybe he was still coming for me. There were too many things working around inside me just then, most of it fear and worry that Andres would find me or worse, that maybe he’d make up a lie that I’d attacked him and the police would come for me. That would be the end of me no matter what I said. They’d never believe me over that fat white man. Not ever.
Mainly, though, my own brain worked to do the biggest damage. It was more than the terror of being punished for hitting a white man. What went on and on in my brain was the possibility of what could have been—that sweaty, fat body sliding against me; those tubby short fingers rubbing all over me and the smell of his mouth and tongue and that burning liquor left on my skin when he’d finished.
