Bayou, Whispers from the Past: A Novel
Page 26
As I opened the last moon pie I’d smuggled from the motel, I was hit with a flash from years before.
Vergie and I were sitting on a quilt in one of the old cemeteries, back in a corner under an oak tree with limbs that undulated along the ground like tentacles. She was telling me ghost stories while we had tea and beignets, the powdered sugar clinging to our noses. We sat still as tombstones while a funeral procession passed, the people dancing as music filled the whole sky.
“Why are those people having such a good time?” I asked. “Isn’t that a funeral?”
“That’s the grandest way you can say goodbye to someone,” Vergie said.
Vergie’s own funeral had been tame compared to the scene that day, and now I felt bad that we hadn’t given her a send-off like that one. She would have appreciated that, and I would have remembered if I hadn’t stayed away so long.
Why had it taken me fifteen years to come back?
I turned my thoughts back to the house as I crossed the state line. Six weeks wasn’t much time.
I pulled off the interstate onto a smaller highway. From there on, the roads would get narrower until they carried me into the little community of Bayou Sabine. I vaguely remembered the way, but with all the canals out here, the roads start to look the same. It’s beautiful—don’t get me wrong—but if you were to turn me around three times and plop me down in the middle of this marshland, I’d likely never see North Carolina again.
I checked the GPS on my phone, but the road wasn’t showing up.
“Oh, come on,” I said, swiping my thumb across the screen. The red dot that was supposed to be me was now off the nearest named road. According to the GPS, I was in a bayou. I glanced up at the road, trying to get my bearings and not swerve into the water for real.
Signal lost, it said. I groaned, restarting the app. When I looked up, an alligator was lumbering across the road—all six feet of him stretched across my lane.
“Oh, hell!” I slammed the brake to the floor, flinching as the tires squealed and the Jeep fish-tailed. I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood, and I called that gator everything but a child of God. I expected to hear a terrible thud at any second. Swerving, I missed him by just a few inches, but I was close enough to see his catlike eye as I shot across the opposite lane and onto the shoulder. Off to my left, there was nothing but swamp and black mud. I gripped the wheel, fighting to stay on the hard ground.
The Jeep stopped on what felt like solid earth, the weeds as high as the door handle. My heart hammered in my chest. Vergie used to tell me old voodoo legends about alligators, how they were tricksters, always causing trouble.
Please don’t be stuck. Not out here.
My foot eased the gas pedal down, and the Jeep inched forward. The tires spun as I pushed harder. “This is not happening.”
A rusty pickup rumbled toward me. The driver gave me a long look, but he hardly slowed down. I nudged the Jeep into four wheel drive and turned the tires as I hit the gas. It rocked a few times, then lurched forward and caught hold of the grass before crossing onto the pavement. I glanced back to where the alligator had crossed, but it was gone.
“Welcome back,” I muttered to myself.
~~~~
The old two-lane highway cut the land in half, with swamps on one side and pastures on the other. With the black water so close, I felt like the earth might open up and devour me at will. The trees were full of moss, the water creeping up their trunks like it was swallowing them.
I passed Vergie’s driveway the first time, not recognizing it until I caught a glimpse of the pale blue goose she’d left by the mailbox like a sentinel. The paint was peeling, but the goose stood firmly in a patch of daylilies, just as it had since I was a girl. I turned around and eased onto the dirt drive. I felt the hollow in my chest expand, the void Vergie had left.
Cypress trees lined the road to the house, their limbs curling toward the ground. The breeze tickled the drooping leaves of the trees, and in the distance I heard the faint clink of glass, like a wind chime. Just beyond the house stood a spirit tree, bottles hanging from its branches like Christmas ornaments. It had been there long before Vergie, but she had added a few herself after drinking pints of bourbon and gin. She used to tell me those bottles captured evil spirits, kept them from roaming through the bayou and attaching themselves to good folks that lived nearby. I’d never really believed they held ghosts, but I liked the sound of the wind whistling over the lips of the bottles. Now, as the light glinted blue and green in the leaves of the tree, the sound felt more melancholy than soothing.
This place had a wildness that was hard not to like. It smelled sweet like magnolia, bitter like the swamp. Egrets dotted the trees like blooms of cotton, preening themselves in the slivers of sunlight. The driveway wound back into the woods, hidden from the main road. Patches of gravel mixed with the soil, packed hard from the heat and drought. When at last I pulled into the yard, I was surprised at how small the house seemed compared to my memory of it. It was still plenty big at two stories high, but it was a paler shade of blue than I remembered, and the roof was missing some shingles. The porch was cluttered with potted flowers, strings of lights hanging from the eaves, and a hammock strung between two corner posts. I could almost see Vergie’s silhouette in the rocker, and I knew then that I was going to prove my father wrong.
I had to. I owed it to Vergie. This place was a part of her, and it was a part of me now too. I had to do this right.
It wasn’t until I saw a pair of feet dangling from the hammock that I noticed the truck parked under a tree at the edge of the yard. A small dark pickup with patches of rust like spots on a horse. I squinted at the feet, thinking surely I was seeing something that wasn’t there. But there was no mistaking the shape in the hammock, the lazy swinging motion.
I leapt from the car and slammed the door so hard that a head rose above the banister. My father had dealt with squatters once or twice, but I hadn’t thought they’d move in so fast. Striding toward the steps, I cursed myself for not coming by when I was in town for the funeral.
I tried to cool my temper and concentrated on the sound of my boot heels pounding the dirt. There was no turning back now, because the man had definitely seen me.
He sat up in the hammock, and I swallowed hard as I reached the steps.
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