Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

  He swallowed several times, blinking, as he seemed to gather his thoughts.

  “Now dat you here,” he said. “I ain’t…quite sure…how to begin. It’s a long story…and I’m a…an old man. My mind ain’t…it ain’t so clear these days…” his voice trailed off. I glanced at his niece, who winked at me in return.

  “You might be having a little trouble with your breathing, you old goat, but your mind is sharp as a tack. Go ahead. Spit it out. Stop keeping everybody in suspense.” She looked at me and added, “He’s been making me wait to hear what he has to say until you got here. For some reason, he wants to tell us both together.”

  “What if I hadn’t come?” I asked.

  “We’ve been taking it day by day,” she replied. “I guess there would have come a point where he had no choice, but so far he wasn’t willing to go there.”

  “It’s time now…to bring it all…into the light,” Willy rasped. “There’s been…too much darkness…for too long.”

  The room was silent for a long moment after that, and finally he looked at me again, eyes full with tears. He blinked, sending twin lines of liquid down each withered cheek. In response, Lisa’s smile faded. Quietly, she reached for another tissue and dabbed at his face to wipe them off. He didn’t even seem to notice.

  “How do I…begin to explain…what I done?” he finally implored between breaths, in a voice thick with emotion. “To make…you see my… actions was…justified? To be sure…that everything will be…taken care of? To be sure that…the secret, it don’t…die wit’ me?”

  “Secret?” I asked, glancing at Lisa, who seemed intrigued.

  Summoning his strength, Willy lifted his head from the pillow and spoke more clearly and emphatically than he had since I came in the room.

  “I’m sorry for what I done, Miranda…for what the circumstances made me do. I hopes one day…you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”

  I started to respond but had to hold my tongue as he kept going.

  “More importantly…you mus’ learn the reason why I done it. The secret…it cannot die wit’ me, no. It cannot! I swore that I would take the responsibility…Now it’s time for the two of you to do the same.”

  The effort of speaking so intensely sent him into a new round of coughing, though he resisted this time when Lisa tried to help, holding up one spotted, bony arm to keep her at bay. Finally, when his coughing spell was over, he put his head back against the pillow with his eyes closed, sweat beading along his pale and wrinkled forehead, despite the chilly air that filled the room.

  “What secret, Mr. Pedreaux? What do I need to forgive? And what kind of responsibility do you want us to swear to?”

  “I’m sorry…” he whispered, his voice so soft that we could barely hear him. Lisa and I both leaned even closer to the bed. “It was for…the angelus. We had to be able to get to the angelus.”

  He exhaled in a ragged, sour breath, his eyes still closed.

  “What’s the an-jell-us?” I asked.

  “It’s a prayer,” Lisa replied. “You know, the Hail Mary? You’re supposed to say it three times a day.”

  “No.” Shaking his head, Willy opened his eyes and looked up at Lisa. “Pas la prière.”

  “Not the prayer?” Lisa asked him. “What, then?”

  “My Boo…Don’t you know the chucotement du bayou…’bout l’angelus?”

  Lisa shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Uncle Willy. Maybe. Why?”

  “L’angelus!” he cried, the urgency apparent in his voice. “Is not a chucotement de bayou at all! Is la vérité! And I am the last surviving gardien.”

  I looked to Lisa for a translation, but she was leaning toward Willy, focused on him.

  “Uncle Willy, we’ll say the Hail Mary for you, the Angelus, whatever you want. Do you want me to call in a priest? We can probably get one here pretty fast.”

  Poor Willy looked as though he might explode. He started shaking his head, eyes bulging,

  “No, no, no,” he cried. “ L’angelus! Ne pas la prière, la cloche!”

  “What’s he saying?” I asked Lisa.

  “ ‘Not the prayer, the bell.’ ”

  The bell. My eyes widened as my hand flew up to the back of my head. The gesture was not lost on Willy.

  “Miranda, you know what I’m talking about…You were marked for this…destined for it…”

  “Who did this to me?” I demanded, pulling the clips of my hair so it could fall loose to my shoulders. “And why? What does it mean?”

  “We had to make sure you would return…We had to make it clear…the… enormity…of the task…”

  Lisa looked at me.

  “What is he talking about?”

  Feeling a surge of anger, I turned my back to the nurse and lifted the top part of my hair. She reached up and helped move it out of the way, gasping when she saw it.

  “Uncle Willy! It’s like yours.”

  “Like his?”

  She dropped my hair, reached for the covers, and lifted them from Willy’s feet. She pushed up the leg of his pajama pants, and there on his skinny white calf was the same tattoo, though not distorted from growth like mine.

  At the sight I felt panic stir in my chest and bile rise in my throat. I had seen this symbol somewhere before. The memory of it popped vividly into my mind: It was on skin. As a tattoo. Not the white, shaven skin on the back of my head. Not the hair-covered skin of an old man’s leg. Somewhere else, on lovely skin, on skin that was soft and sweet-smelling and kind. I closed my eyes, swallowing hard, envisioning my own hand, a tiny hand, reaching out to trace the image with my finger.

  “Stop!” I cried, standing up to pace, my hands clutched at my ears. Was this it? Was this my first childhood memory dredged up from what was supposedly that blank slate inside of my head? I wanted to see more, remember more, but as hard as I focused, the scene faded away, sliding into black. The more I tried to pull it up again, the further away it felt. Finally, I just stood there, eyes closed, and waited for my racing heart to slow down.

  I had done it. I had remembered something. Though it hadn’t sprung full blown into my mind until now, stirrings of the memory had probably begun yesterday morning, the moment I first pulled out my magnifying glass and spotted the tiny version of the symbol that had been painted into the busy street scene on Jimmy Smith’s canvas. On someone’s skin. That’s where I had seen it before.

  “Miranda, are you okay?” Lisa asked.

  I opened my eyes to see the concern on her face. Behind her, Willy was watching me as well, but with curiosity, not necessarily compassion.

  “Willy, who else had this tattoo?” I demanded, stepping toward my chair. “It was someone I loved very much.”

  He nodded, his eyes twinkling. “Your grandmere. On her left shoulder.” Stunned, I sat, my breathing under control. Again I had averted a full-out panic attack. Though I wanted to keep going, I was also scared.

  Suddenly, more than anything, I wished that Nathan was there by my side, holding my hand, keeping me strong.

  TEN

  Sometimes a rumor, a hearsay, an inarticulate whisper,

  Came with its airy hand to point and beckon her forward.

  “Willy,” I asked before we proceeded, “did you have anything to do with the man who came to see me at my office?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Jimmy Smith. The guy with the painting.” I turned to Lisa. “This weird guy came to my office yesterday under the pretense of having a painting restored. This cross-inside-a-bell symbol had been painted into the scene, and he was asking me questions about it.”

  Reluctantly I went on to explain about the subsequent attack in the alley and how the two thugs searched my body looking for the tattoo.

  Willy pushed himself up from the bed, gasping for air.

  “Oh, cher, I don’t believe it. Did…you tell them…anything?”

  “What could I tell them? The symbol looked familiar, but I wasn’t
sure why. I didn’t even know this tattoo was here until later in the day, when my aunt showed it to me.”

  Willy made me repeat my story, going through the full sequence of events. When I was finished, he collapsed back against the covers, air whooshing out of him like a deflating air mattress.

  “Who were they?” I pressed.

  “I don’t know. There could be so many…This ain’t good. Not good at all, no.”

  Lisa held up both hands, palms outward as if to call a stop to the conversation.

  “Is Miranda in danger?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think about this. I don’t know.”

  “Then let’s deal with that in a minute,” she said. “Right now, tell us more about the symbol.”

  Willy stared at the ceiling for a long moment, as if to pull his thoughts together again.

  “What does the tattoo mean, Uncle Willy? What does the symbol stand for?”

  “It is the mark of Le Serment,” Willy said slowly, almost proudly.

  “Le Serment?” I asked, looking to Lisa, but she looked as though she was as lost as I was.

  Willy looked back and forth from Lisa to me, pleading in his eyes.

  “The two of you…it’s your time…your turn to take Le Serment and carry it forward for a new generation. There’s always two, you see, in case one die, the other will still be alive to do what must be done. For many year, it was me and Ya Ya. When she got the fou…I found another…to replace her. He was younger than I wanted, but I was desperate. Then he die…in Katrina…All them Guidry boys die together, trying to ride out the storm…on their…shrimp boat, the stupid têtes duré…Now the only Colline d’Or left that can do this is me and the two o’ you. Since Katrina, I been so scared…what if I die without never telling you…or explaining why I done what I done…Pour les gens de Colline d’Or…”

  “Look, I’m having a lot of trouble understanding your words,” I said. “And you’re speaking a lot of French or Cajun or whatever it is. Maybe I should go get Charles to help translate for me.”

  At that, Willy’s eyes opened wide.

  “No!” he cried, stirring up his lungs into another spasm. “Charles ain’t Colline d’Or!”

  He clutched at his throat, coughing and gasping for breath. This time he didn’t resist as Lisa lifted him and whacked him firmly on the back. Once she got him through it and set him back against the pillow, she asked him if he wanted to take a break and let us try this again a while later.

  “No,” he whispered. “There’s not enough…time…to wait. We mus’…do this now.”

  “What’s ko-lean-door?” I asked, thinking of what he’d said about Charles, wondering if I should be concerned that my daughter was off somewhere with the man right now. “Is my daughter safe?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Benochet…’cept he ain’t from Colline d’Or…it’s a place.”

  Feeling utterly confused, I let out a slow breath and wished there was just some way to pull the words out of this man’s brain without him having to use his mouth and lungs.

  “Uncle Willy, how can we make this simpler for you?” Lisa prodded. “I really don’t think you’re up to this.”

  “The two o’ you,” he rasped, “you gots to take Le Serment first, and then I can tell you everything.”

  I looked at Lisa, who seemed to be running the word through her brain.

  “Le Serment…” she mused, squinting in thought. “Oath? You want us to take an oath?”

  He looked from her face to mine, nodding his head, his rheumy eyes filling with tears. If this poor old man, for whatever reason, had brought me all the way down here just so I could make some sort of stupid pledge before he died, then I only hoped we could get through it before his final ragged breath, lest I have nightmares of him being tormented throughout eternity, his final piece of earthly business left undone.

  “The Serment, she’s long,” Willy said, “and en Française. But we can’t get to…the next part of…what I have to tell you till that’s done.”

  “Maybe we could save your voice by having you write it down instead,” I suggested.

  Lisa nodded.

  “What do you think of that, Uncle Willy?” she said. “You think you’d be able to write the oath down?”

  He grunted in frustration.

  “Is not ’posed to be writ down…ever. Is all up here, dans la tête.”

  “Yeah, but desperate times call for desperate measures,” Lisa said.

  Willy hesitated, and then he reluctantly gave his assent.

  “I’ll do it…but den you gots to burn it. Promise you’ll burn it, soon as we done here.”

  “We promise,” Lisa and I said in unison.

  She hopped up and went to the nearby table, looking in the drawer for pen and paper. As she did, Willy continued speaking.

  “I never had no childrens of my own, you see,” he said to me tiredly, “but I didn’t worry cause them Guidry boys was all…young and strong… trustworthy…And I knew sooner or later…you would be back, Miranda… if I sent the message to your aunt. Then after Katrina, everything change. Them Guidry boys was dead and I was so sick, so fast.”

  I glanced at Lisa, who had procured the pen but was now digging around elsewhere for a blank sheet of paper.

  “The two o’ you,” Willy continued, “you gonna be good gardiens. Lisa, I don’t know Miranda’s heart, but I’m praying she’s got…her mamere’s good sense, her noble character. And Miranda, I knows my Lisa is honnête, aimable…”

  Lisa found a spiral notebook and flipped it open to a fresh page.

  “But Lisa, you mus’ promise me, not a word a dis to Junior. Not one word. To the day you die.”

  “Here you go,” Lisa said, ignoring his comment, handing the notebook to him along with the pen.

  “Don’ act like you not hearing me,” her uncle scolded as he took it from her. “That boy is a bon rien, yah. Canaille, he is.”

  She sat in the chair and adjusted her headband with strong brown fingers, finally agreeing to his request. Watching her, I remembered my own loose hair and reached up to return it to the French twist.

  “You either, Miranda,” Willy said tiredly as he began to write. “I don’t know your husband, but this has to stay between Lisa and Miranda and no one else. No husbands. Just one Pedreaux and one Saultier, both Colline d’Or.”

  I was so lost, but at that point I was willing to say or do almost anything to move the conversation along. Lisa and I both waited in silence, the only sound the urgent scratching of Willy’s handwriting upon the page. He managed to scribble down a few lines before he stopped and closed his eyes, exhausted from the effort.

  “Is this it?” Lisa asked, leaning forward to read what he had written. “That’s not so long.”

  “No, I have barely begun,” he said. “There’s jus’ so much…”

  “Can’t we just skip this part, Uncle Willy?”

  Willy opened his eyes and looked at me, his expression grave, and he spoke between labored breaths.

  “I did not…give my life for this…only to fail in the end. We will…do it right or not at all.”

  He picked up the pen and again continued writing, speaking as he did.

  “Once you both take le Serment des gardiens de l’angelus…then I can tell you…where to find it.”

  At that, a sob caught in his throat. He looked at me, something like guilt mixed with panic in his eyes.

  “Then you will know the terrible thing I did, Miranda,” he cried, barely able to suck in one more breath. “And once you do, I jus’ pray God you will forgive me!”

  Willy’s outburst sent him into a new coughing spasm, this one so severe that even Lisa’s whacking him on the back didn’t help. He could barely bring in any air at all, and when his face began to turn blue, Lisa changed tactics, twisting the knob on a big oxygen canister behind the bed and placing a clear mask over his mouth and nose.

  “Can I help?” I asked. “Should I go get Deena? Call a
doctor?”

  Lisa didn’t answer but merely shook her head as she remained focused on her patient, checking his pulse, adjusting the knobs on the canister. After a moment, he stopped struggling, and then his body relaxed as he just lay there, eyes closed. Soon, the bluish tint of his skin gave way to a more normal pale pink and the sound of his breathing became regular and strong.

  “I think he just needs to take in some oxygen and rest a bit,” she said finally. “He needs a break. This is hard work for him.”

  Lisa grabbed the notebook from his lap and read what he had written so far, which looked to me to be in French, and barely legible at that. She translated it for me slowly, struggling to make out his handwriting.

  “ ‘As a guardian of the angelus, I promise to…protect it with my life, um, care for it against harm—and hide it from evildoers until’…”

  “ ‘Until’ what?”

  “That’s where it ends. Until.”

  I sat back, as stumped as I had been before. Hide it from evildoers? Certainly, I had encountered more than one evildoer since all of this began.

  Lisa gently placed the notebook, facedown, on Willy’s chest, looking as frustrated as I felt. Had I flown all this way just to say some ancient French oath and learn that my tattoo really was in the shape of a bell? I pinched the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes, and went over the entire conversation in my mind. If only his words hadn’t been so confusing, with so many in a language I didn’t understand.

  “So basically, what do you think he was saying?” I asked, opening my eyes to look at Lisa. She didn’t answer right away but instead sat there for a while, watching the slight rise and fall of Willy’s chest as he was breathing.

  “Something about an old myth being truth,” she answered finally.

  “What? How’d you get that?”

  “He asked me if I remembered the chucotement du bayou about the angelus. A chucotement du bayou is an old Cajun folk tale, like a myth.”

  “So what’s the myth of the angelus?”

  She shook her head.

  “I have no idea. I don’t remember one having to do with an angelus—not the prayer or a bell.”