The Devil in Canaan Parish

by Jackie Shemwell

  On the morning of Ash Wednesday, Sally and I awoke, covered in blood. The sheets were soaked through with the loss of her pregnancy. When Sally realized what was happening, she collapsed in hysterics. I pulled her up out of bed, carrying her in my arms to the tub where I stripped her down and began rinsing off the blood. I yelled for Ruby, who came running in, frightened and panicked. She stifled a scream when she saw our bed. I told her to go and get the doctor and then to find the Bordelons. By the time I had wrapped a robe around Sally and was carrying her back to our bed, Ruby had returned with Doctor Collins.

  The doctor went straight to our bedroom, calling for Ruby to help him. When Sally’s parents arrived, her mother went to her bedside, and I paced back and forth outside the door where her father waited. I was irritated to have been banned from the room.

  “Palmer,” said my father-in-law, “you might want to clean yourself up.”

  I looked down and realized I was still in my pajamas, soaked in blood and water from washing Sally. I went into the bathroom to change. When I returned, Dr. Collins was murmuring something to my father-in-law. He straightened up when he saw me and said that Sally would be fine, but that she’d lost a lot of blood and needed absolute rest. I agreed.

  “Bram, there’s something else,” said the doctor, hesitating.

  I was confused. He glanced at Sally’s father, who abruptly excused himself. After Bordelon had gone into the bedroom and shut the door, the doctor turned back to me, closed his eyes, and then heaved a sigh.

  “There was a . . .baby, Bram. I had to deliver it just now. Ruby has it.”

  “A . . .a baby?” I stuttered. I felt as though I had been punched in the stomach.

  “Well, not viable, I mean, there won’t be any kind of birth or death certificate, Bram, but I am not sure how you want to. . .dispose of it.”

  I cringed at the words.

  “Alright,” I mumbled, “thank you, Doctor Collins.”

  I found Ruby in the kitchen, clutching something to her chest in a bloody towel. She was seated in a chair near the back door, humming and rocking back and forth. I placed my hand on her shoulder, and when she raised her head up to me, there were tears in her eyes.

  “It’s such a shame,” she whispered. “Folks say you cain’t have a soul till you’re really born, but I don’t believe that. Seem like something this precious has to have one too.”

  “Thank you, Ruby,” I answered, holding my hands out.

  I took just one look at my child, a girl no bigger than my hand, and then wrapped her back in the towel. I took her to the town’s only funeral parlor where the director brought out a small pine box with grim courtesy. She was buried that day, in a plot near the Landry family. The marker simply said: Palmer, d. 1950.

  Over the next weeks, Sally did not leave her room. Ruby waited on her day and night, patient and kind, but Sally grew more and more annoyed by her. She could not abide that Ruby knew. One day I came home and found Ruby sitting on the front porch, her hat and gloves on, her one bag packed and sitting next to her.

  “Mr. Bram,” she said. “Mr. Bram, I’m sorry but I just cain't stay here no longer. Miss Sally just ain’t happy with me and there ain’t nothing I can do.”

  I tried to change her mind, but the attempt was half-hearted. I knew she was right. Sally would not be comforted until Ruby was gone.

  Once Ruby left, I began to manage Sally myself -- feeding her, bathing her and dressing her. She was still very depressed, but she began to spend a little time each day sitting on the back porch and staring into the yard. Soon she was up and about again, and one day I came home to find her digging a garden.

  “I’m planting a rose garden,” she said when I asked. “There’s not much to look at out that back porch. If I’m going to spend my time sitting there, I want something to look at.”

  Over the next few months she transformed the plot of yard behind the house into an impressive rose garden. This was difficult, as the heat and humidity of Southern Louisiana tends to encourage black spot and mildew. As the years went by, she added more varieties, some with beautiful names like Madame Antoine Mari and La Marne. Her favorites were the Souvenir de St. Anne, a white rose with the palest hint of pink, like the blush on the cheeks of a porcelain doll. Sally told me that Saint Anne was the mother of the Virgin Mary, a barren woman whose endless prayers for a child were finally answered. She became the patron saint of my wife who, if she wasn’t out in her rose garden, was in church, attending mass and praying for the child that never came.

  There were no more miscarriages. There was nothing. As time moved on, there was only the drugstore, the rose garden, mass on Sunday, the annual Christmas party at the Landry mansion and all the endless social affairs in between: birthdays, cotillions, engagement parties, weddings, anniversaries, funerals. There were also the endless trips to the doctors in Lafayette and the specialists in New Orleans -- all of them unable to tell us why Sally could not get pregnant, or give hope that it would change. Dr. Collins would receive the reports from them, and he and his wife would shoot sad eyes at us across the aisle at church on Sundays and over the bridge table on Wednesday nights.

  Sally’s younger sisters were married and soon had children of their own. No one asked any more if we were expecting, or when we might be. My wife’s friends began to hide their pregnancies from her as long as possible, and would avoid inviting her to baby showers out of pity. Even my father-in-law ceased to bring it up, although he continued to insist his daughter had a maid, and would send over a new one, each time my wife’s patience with the old one wore thin.

  Time also brought distance between us. As the years rolled by, my wife became more and more like the roses she tended: delicate, beautiful, and painful to touch. I could not go near her any more unless it was our monthly attempt to produce offspring. It was done mechanically, with no joy or anticipation. She would lie there cold and stony, reminding me of the Virgin Mary statues my father used to sell. I would do my duty only because if I didn’t she would tell her mother, who would tell my father-in-law, who would call me into his office yet again and scold me for my failed manhood. It would take me hours of heavy drinking before I could steel my nerves to the task, and when it was finished, she would push me off of her, disgusted by the stench of my breath.

  Time passed in this manner for several years. I did my best not to upset Sally and be the cause of the terrible migraines that would inevitably come. There was nothing I could do to comfort her. For whatever reason, I could not give her the one thing that she wanted, and so nothing I gave her mattered. Like her father before me, I allowed her to make all the decisions, to have everything as she wished, and never to put forward an independent opinion that I thought she wouldn’t agree with, which was why as I walked up the back steps with Melee holding my arm and sharing my umbrella, I began to panic at what Sally might say about this surprise visitor I had decided to bring to our home.

  Chapter Three

  I reached the top of the steps and shook off the rain under the shelter of the porch. I took my soaked hat and coat and threw them on a rocking chair near the door and placed my umbrella open on its side to give it a chance to dry. I put Melee’s bag down and turned toward her. She had not moved or made any effort to dry off. It was as if she wasn’t sure if she needed to bother. As if she wasn’t sure if she’d actually be staying or would have to go back out into that dark pounding rain.

  “Wait here,” I whispered, with what I hoped would be a reassuring smile, but was probably more of a grimace. I was not eager to have the conversation I was about to have with my wife.

  I opened the kitchen’s screen door with care, trying to minimize the screech of its hinges, making a mental note that I needed to ask Gabriel, our yard boy, to oil them. Sally was still sitting at the table, reading the newspaper spread out in front of her, the long ash of her lit cigarette dangling where she held it in her right hand. She didn’t look up at me.

  “Honey, I’ve brought someone here
to meet you. Someone to help us out a bit,” I said, thinking it best to cut through the pleasantries and just be out with it.

  “I know,” said Sally curtly. She clipped the end of her cigarette off in the ashtray and crushed it out. “Daddy called and told me.”

  “Oh, he did, huh?” I said, breaking into a sweat. I should have known.

  “Yes, and you needn’t have bothered,” snapped Sally, beginning to fold up the newspaper. “There is no way under the sun that I’m going to have a back-woods Cajun girl with no manners and no references running my house.”

  “Sally, honey, be fair,” I pleaded. She was standing up and straightening the folds in her dress. I could tell she had been furious, waiting for me to get home so that she could send the offensive girl back where she came from.

  “Bram, I mean it. I declare I don’t know where you got the notion that I’d be happy with this. . .this. . .arrangement. I do have a reputation in town to uphold, whether or not I’m your wife.”

  The last part hurt, and I knew what she meant by it. The pure blood line of the Landry family had already been diluted by Alice Landry’s marriage to a middle class shopkeeper the likes of Charlie Bordelon. Sally’s marriage to me had brought down the family name even further. She could no longer call herself Sally Landry Bordelon. She was now Sally Bordelon Palmer, and it was only her constant appearance on the social circuit and reminders about “Grandma and Grandpa Landry” that kept her from being just another middle class housewife. We had no real money of our own; nothing that had not been given to us. Our membership in the local country club, the domestic help, all the trappings that kept us floating in her grandparents’ social sphere were paid for by Bordelon, or more specifically by his wife Alice with the money she received from her parents. We still had the car we’d gotten for our wedding, nearly ten years old now, and no money or plans for a new one. We were still living in the same “starter” house her grandfather provided us, and I knew that we would be there for the rest of our lives. If by some miracle we ever did have children, we had no money to give them. My son would have to join me in the drug store and my daughter would not have the means to be a debutante. I could tell from the smirk on Sally’s face, by the way her upper lip curled in disdain, by the anger smoldering behind the controlled tone of her voice, that she had lost all respect for me. In another time or place perhaps she would have left me, but in Canaan Parish, a good Catholic girl descended from French nobility did not get a divorce.

  My usual reaction to her disappointment in me was guilt and regret that I could not make her happy or be the man that she wanted. I had always known I didn’t come from good stock, and had no business being with a woman of her worth. Sometimes I thought I should never have asked her to help me with my homework that day back in college and should have known my place and stuck to it. But that evening I felt differently. Perhaps I was still buoyed by the small victory over her father I had tasted back at the drugstore and knew that I could not, would not, be able to face Bordelon in the morning only to report that he had won the war and that Sally had made me send the offensive girl back to the swamp she came from. I looked around me, trying to gain some strength and happened to hear a faint sigh behind me. It was Melee, and it was the first sign of emotion she had shown. I could tell that she understood she would not be staying and that my wife did not want her. It was just enough to make my spine tingle. I straightened my posture, took a deep breath and did something I had never really done: I stood up to Sally.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I began, “It would be difficult if you were to be rude to our new employee during her first week with us.”

  Sally had been pushing her chair in, thinking that the conversation was over when she froze, her hands locked.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, meeting my eyes for the first time.

  “I mean,” I said slowly and quietly, moving closer to the table. “I mean that I am hiring this girl. I am paying for her, and I am making the decision that she will stay.”

  I was shocked at myself when the words left my mouth. I could feel the momentum of the anger caused by my bruised ego building.

  “You. . .” Sally stammered. “what money would you use?” I could hear the disbelief in her voice.

  “Sally, I do make money in my job, you know. I do earn a salary. I do pay for some things around here, including your hair and nail appointments, your cigarettes, and that pretty little dress you’re wearing,” I said the last part eyeing her up and down and something about the way I was glaring at her made her blush. She lowered her chin slightly and smoothed the folds of her dress again. I took advantage of her moment of weakness and drove in a final nail.

  “Besides, I’ve sat back for years and watched you and your parents make a mess of this situation. Obviously the three of you aren’t qualified to choose our domestic help, and I am going to try my hand at it this time. I couldn’t do any worse than you have already.”

  Sally had nothing to say in return. I think the shock of my resistance was already getting to her. She put a hand to her temple and began to massage it.

  “Alright, dear,” she murmured, the years of social etiquette taking control. She was going to do her best to be polite. “But I’m not well. I’m going to bed.” I could tell she had one of her migraines coming on. In the past this would have made me capitulate to her wishes, but this time it merely irritated me.

  “Fine,” I said. “You do that. Tomorrow morning you can meet her and let her know what it is you’ll be expecting from her.”

  Sally stood still frozen for a moment. I watched as her eyes glanced from my face to the screen door behind me and back to my face again. She was trying to get a read on why I was so adamant. What was it about this particular girl that would make me act this way? But I didn’t even know myself. All I knew was that as I regained my strength, it began to get easier. I was happy she was going to bed, yes. I hoped that she would take a valium or two and go to sleep and not speak to me any more this evening. I stood unmoving, my fists clenched at my sides, waiting for another volley from her, but she seemed to have given up, at least for the moment.

  “Goodnight then,” she said, walking over to me and brushing her lips against my cheek.

  I watched her go into our bedroom and shut the door, then I turned and opened the screen door for Melee to come inside.

  “Well,” I said to no one in particular, “that went fairly well.”

  Melee stepped just inside the door and began to peer around the kitchen. My wife had had it painted yellow. We had the latest appliances: a dishwasher, icebox, and electric stove, all in buttercup yellow. The Formica counter tops and the kitchen table were mint green. I rubbed my hands together and went over to the icebox, suddenly liberated with the fact that I could decide what to have for supper.

  “Is there anything I can get you, Melee?” I asked, over my shoulder.

  “Uh, yes sir,” she said quietly. “A towel, please?”

  I looked back at her. She was still soaked through, I had forgotten, and was beginning to drip a bit on the floor.

  “Oh, yes, sure, of course,” I sputtered. I went to the linen closet and pulled out some towels and washcloths.

  “Here,” I said, “let me show you where you’ll be staying.”

  She grabbed her bag and followed me up the narrow staircase that led from the kitchen to the garconniere. At the top of the stairs, I reached up and pulled the string of a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was beginning to get dark outside, and the light swinging from the end of the string threw strange shadows on the walls. The north end of the garconniere was really used as our attic, and so she had to wade with me through the piled up trunks, the unused and broken furniture, the boxes of old photo albums and childhood keepsakes; things my wife and I had brought with us to our marriage and many things we had accumulated over the course of the past ten years. There was a central aisle that led through the general chaos to the door of a tiny roo
m that had been walled in from the rest of the space. This was where our maids slept. As I opened the door, I felt for the first time that it was entirely inadequate. On one side of the room was an ancient bed with a tattered quilt and pillow. Next to it, a bedside table and reading lamp. Across from the bed, on the other side of the room was a rickety chest of drawers, and directly under the window a waist-high stand with a washbasin and pitcher.

  “Well, this is it,” I announced, attempting to make as much room as possible for her to walk inside. “It can get pretty hot up here in the summer time, so you’ll want to leave the windows open up here, and you may want to leave your door open too so you can get the cross breeze.”

  She stood next to the bed, clutching her bag and taking in the room. She said nothing, and I filled the silence by walking over to her window and opening it up. The rain had died down to a gentle patter and I could feel the heat of the July day beginning to subside.

  “I’ll just go bring you some warm water so you can wash up a bit,” I muttered, grabbing the pitcher from the stand.

  I immediately felt stupid for saying it. The poor girl had been drowning in rainwater all day, probably the last thing she wanted was to get wet again, but she only nodded as I turned and left, crossing back through the attic. I opened the other window at the top of the stairs and then made my way back down to the kitchen. Instinct drove me to switch off the light. I had very little occasion to be up there, and it was automatic for me to turn off lights whenever I left an empty room.

  At the kitchen sink, I stood trying to get the right temperature for the water and hoping it wasn’t too hot or too cold for her liking. Again, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I wanted to please her; that I hoped that she would like it here and that she would stay. All of the other hired girls had not mattered to me at all. I didn’t know the names of most of them. I only knew that they wouldn’t be there long, that there would come a point when Sally would tire of them, either from an imagined failure in the kitchen or some other domestic duty or just from sheer boredom, and so I felt that it didn’t really matter whether I knew their names or not. This time, however, I felt that somehow Melee needed to succeed. That somehow I needed her to do what no other house girl had been able to: keep Sally happy. Perhaps it was only because this time it had been my choice and I wanted to be right for a change. I wanted to be right.