Red Now And Laters

by Marcus J. Guillory

  “Lil’ Frenchy. What yo’ momma cookin’ for supper?” Charles Henry asked, rubbing his belly.

  “Gumbo.”

  “Daaaamn.”

  “They from Louisiana, they be cooking that shit,” Charles Henry explained, then added, “Tell her I’ll be around there after I wash my nuts. I still got that soap she gave me.”

  The guys laughed. I did too. It was funny. Charles Henry always had jokes, meant not with malice but with pure humor.

  Booger looked at Raymond Earl and said softly, “Man, they havin’ gumbo. I want some.”

  Raymond Earl fidgeted with the football, then blurted, “Me too.”

  • • •

  I would love to report that Father and I kept a new secret, that we had developed a bond from the rodeo that was enduring by witnessing death together and sharing a Schlitz. But that would be some bullshit. Mother tore my ass up and then went into Father for letting me drink beer at the rodeo, arguing that I was picking up bad habits from his cowboy friends.

  Back and forth it went all night as I sat on the bed making Darth Vader pistol-whip Han Solo. And Father just took it, telling her to calm down and not to get excited. No decent rebuttal whatsoever.

  It was good to hear Mother having her way in an argument with Father for a change. Normally, he’d curse her out, slap her a few times, then storm out of the house for friendlier company. But it’s kind of hard to leave the house with a belly full of gumbo and in bad spirits.

  Gumbo has a magical quality and is not to be confused with the satiated “itis” found in many black dishes. Gumbo is about being together, community and love. Gumbo is meant to be shared with no judgment. Your bowl or spoon is never too big. Your napkin is never too greasy. You can spill a little on the table or TV tray without criticism. And you can usually bring some home in a container if you’re visiting. The idea of greediness doesn’t exist when talking about eating gumbo. As long as there’s rice in the cooker and gumbo in the pot, anyone is welcome to as many bowls of the intoxicating ambrosia as their gastro mechanics will allow. Believe that.

  The following morning a Cajun ballad jingled from a radio in the backyard. Tee Pee’s Cajun music show on 90.1 KPRC. Father sat on a patio chair methodically shining a worn pair of oxblood cap toes, which, judging by the size of the shoes, didn’t belong to him. He mumbled to himself as he shined the shoes. I joined him.

  “Hey, Daddy. Whose shoes?” I asked.

  He stopped mumbling.

  “Grab a chair,” he ordered.

  I pulled up a chair. He handed me the shoe and a rag. An old half-empty whiskey bottle rested next to his shoeshine box with a faded label reading “Dixie Boy.”

  “See that part where it’s dull? Buff that part,” he said.

  Since I was five he had been teaching me how to shine. Mother said that all men should know how to shine their shoes, but with Father it was different. It was an art, a serious act.

  “Now, I want you to keep shining, clear your mind, don’t think about nothing, and repeat after me,” he said.

  Notre Père qui es aux cieux;

  que ton nom soit sanctifié;

  que ton règne vienne;

  que ta volonté soit faite

  sur la terre comme au ciel.

  Donne-nous aujourd’hui notre pain quotidien;

  et pardonne-nous nos offenses,

  comme nous pardonnons à ceux qui nous ont offensés;

  et ne nous induis point en tentation,

  mais délivre-nous du mal.

  Amen.

  Mother had already taught me the Our Father in French, the Creole way, but Father wanted to be certain that I enunciated it perfectly. He watched my lips while I repeated after him. His eyes appeared anticipant—showing the same bated joy one has while opening a wrapped present. What was in the box?

  Thirty minutes later, he and I pulled up to an old shotgun house off Collingsworth Street in Frenchtown (a Creole neighborhood in Fifth Ward on the north side of town). An old man moved an orange pylon that had been placed to save a parking spot for Father. On the porch, several old Creole folk watched as Father and I exited his truck. He had the shined shoes in his hands. We approached the porch. They greeted Father in Creole. I didn’t know any of these people, although they looked like they could be family. They smiled profusely with a strange hint of deference. They were happy that he’d arrived, and the slight nervousness of some of their grins suggested that they hadn’t been sure he was going to come.

  At the front door, they made way, leaving the door closed. I smelled burning wood again and looked at the people staring at us with this strange, nervous grin. Father handed me the shoes, then said—

  “Open the door, Ti’ John.”

  I opened the door and stepped in. Father followed behind. Inside the humble living room–den, several older women watched a TV evangelist and drank coffee but quickly made a sign of the cross when they saw Father. The matriarch of the house emerged from the kitchen in an old work skirt and apron. Her olive skin was aged, with liver spots and moles, juxtaposing crystal blue eyes and white hair plaited to her waist. She took hurried, short steps to Father, holding up her coarse, ankle-length skirt.

  “Eh, Coon. Ki ça dit?” she said and gave Father a deep hug.

  She was overjoyed, and I noticed tears in her eyes.

  She led us to a back bedroom. The door was closed. She stepped aside.

  “Ouvri la porte,” Father said, pointing at the doorknob.

  I opened the door.

  We entered a stuffy, messy bedroom. An old man rested in a large bed with posts; antiques, both man and bed frame. The old man was sick. You could smell it, along with the undeniable scent of burning wood.

  “Presentez les chaussures,” Father said while motioning for me to bring the shined shoes to the sick man.

  I was nervous and had no idea what was going on. I took timid steps toward the bed, then held out the shoes. The sick man raised trembling, wrinkled hands and took the shoes. I stepped back toward the door as Father approached the man.

  “Comme ça-va, Monsieur Rideau?” Father asked gently.

  “Mal. Très mal,” he responded in a raspy voice.

  I stuck my nose in the hallway. All of the people had gathered on their knees in the living room–den—saying a Rosary in French.

  “Ferme la porte, Ti’ John,” Father asked.

  So I closed the door.

  Who is my father?

  six

  judgment of the pecan

  Basile, Louisiana, c. 1941

  “Where’s Coon?” Paul Boudreaux asked his teenage son, Evariste, as he approached his cypress-planked house nestled deep in the woods of Basile.

  “He probably playin’ by the creek,” Evariste answered. “And Mama mad ’cause the blackberry dumpling is missing.”

  Paul winced. He loved his wife’s blackberry dumplings. Coon was in hot water.

  John Paul Boudreaux, or Coon as he was called in the 1940s, was by all estimations a peculiar rascal—elusive, secretive, and completely engaged in his own world. A world where he either couldn’t or wouldn’t make distinctions between humans and animals, animate and inanimate objects, spending both public and private moments engaging chairs and birds with similar expectations, asking questions of squirrels and plant life, oftentimes getting back a response, or so he’d say. His mother, Clarice, paid no mind to his behavior, figuring, “That’s just his way. Long as he don’t hurt nobody or hisself.”

  Most in the area turned a blind eye to Coon’s behavior since he was a Boudreaux, a family that had a certain penchant for mischief and scandal that dated back to the night of “La Grande Promesse,” in 1877. They were by all accounts a quintessential anomaly in Evangeline Parish. Rice farmers who didn’t care much for farming even though their rice was celebrated throughout southwestern Louisiana. Catholics who didn’t regularly attend Mass even though they provided the stolen bricks and timber used to construct the local church. Moonshiners who didn’t
grow corn or sugar yet their stills had run nonstop for over eighty years. And a family that usually operated as a loose-knit collection of single-minded individuals who shared a name, land, and a bad reputation, but not much else.

  But not every Boudreaux was a misfit. In fact, many were God-honest farmers. Yet it was the few bad apples that sullied the name with exceptional success that cast the entire lot of them into infamy. This bad reputation, well earned by a few, placed a veil on the family, burdening each generation with unearned contempt and constant gossip. However, it wasn’t the family’s less than pious behavior or nonchalant attitude that promoted the pattern of less than glamorous events that plagued the Boudreauxs; rather, it was the rumored presence of their blood relation in the woods of Evangeline Parish that prompted the scuttlebutt. A relation who was part legend and part fact—the legendary traiteur1, Jules Saint-Pierre “Nonc” Sonnier. And it was Paul’s suspicion that young Coon had been in contact with ole Nonc Sonnier.

  So with both Coon and the blackberry dumpling missing, Paul decided to personally investigate the matter. Grabbing his coveted gunnysack by the fireplace, he headed out to the woods to find his young son.

  Minutes later he spotted little Coon, face covered in blackberry juice, sitting on a log with a tattered white baby doll. He moved closer, careful not to make a noise. The young child was talking to the doll, his small voice carrying into autumn’s wind with moaning dried leaves clinging defiantly to spry spring branches and chatty chickadees. Paul listened as Coon suddenly began to sing—

  O kwa, o jibile

  Ou pa we m’inosan?2

  Paul panicked. He had heard this strange song before.

  “Coon! Ça suffit! Veniz ici!”3 he yelled at the boy as he rushed to the log by the creek and picked up his child.

  “Who taught you that? Dis-moi!4” Paul barked.

  Now most children at any age would become frightened by such a display by their father, but not Coon. Instead, he smiled generously at his angry father and kissed him on the nose. What could Paul do? He forgot that his young son did not speak a word of English even though his sister, Catiche, had been trying to teach him for the past two years after she graduated from the nearby Eunice School for Colored Girls.

  “Qui!” he yelled.

  But Coon just giggled and pointed at the scruffy doll on the ground and replied, “Bébé blanc.”

  Paul relented and put the young jokester down.

  “Aiye, mon garçon. What am I going to do with you? Huh?”

  Coon yanked at the gunnysack, then sang—

  J’ai fait tout le tour du pays

  Avec ma jogue sur la plombeau.

  Et J’ai demandé à ton père

  Pour dix-huit piastres, chérie.

  Il m’a donné que cinq piastres.5

  Paul couldn’t resist. He quickly put the boy on his shoulders and headed home, singing the refrain—

  O mam, mais donnez-moi les haricots.

  O yé yaie, les haricots sont pas salés.6

  Coon left Bébé Blanc by the creek.

  Weeks laters, Coon convinced his siblings Alfred and Belle to take him to the picture show in nearby Eunice even though he hadn’t taken his morning bath. Coon fancied the shoot-’em-ups on the silver screen as much as his mother’s blackberry dumplings and counted the days before he could see Hopalong Cassidy, the Scarlet Horseman, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, or the local favorite, native-born Cajun Lash LaRue and his famed bullwhip. Six cents for the colored section. Cowboys versus Indians. Coon was in high cotton.

  Walking back home after the show along a dirt road, he spotted a herd of horses grazing. Alfred didn’t stop him and Belle cheered him on. In a flash, Coon was atop a palomino, holding its mane as reins, kicking the horse’s ribs and flying across a burnt-out sugarcane field into the sunset. He knew God wouldn’t let him fall off. Nobody ever fell off their horse in the movies unless they got shot or hit by a tree branch. At least not the Indians, and they had good hair too.

  Just hold on and you’ll get there, he thought.

  You’ll get there, nigger boy, the horse agreed.

  He released one hand and formed a six-shooter. He pointed at the tree line and shot the bandits. One by one.

  Coon got his six cents’ worth. Nothing mattered more than the rush of wind through his dirty long hair as he rode the horse in every imaginable direction. The wind irritated his long eyelashes, causing his eyes to tear as he descried Alfred and Belle waving and hollering from afar, but he refused to succumb, willing to steer the animal with closed eyes if he had to. Willing to be led but more willing to lead. His teary eyes remained open. Nothing mattered more than that moment. Nothing nor nobody. Not even the fact that today was his fifth birthday and nobody remembered except for Bébé Blanc and, of course, Nonc Sonnier.

  Coon’s love for horses was undying and unflinching throughout his childhood. He possessed a natural gift and command with horses that surpassed physical ability and leaped well into the ordained. Soon enough, nobody really looked for Coon when he went missing. “He in the woods,” they’d say, or “I saw Coon riding bareback on a wild mare by the bayou.” No one questioned what Coon was up to and, since he was a middle child in a family of thirteen children, no one really noticed his absence.

  How Coon actually became a traiteur was a mystery to most. Perhaps it was the extensive amount of time he spent alone with Bébé Blanc—trekking the woods of Basile listening to leaves while his siblings shucked rice and picked peas. But it was when Arnaud Papillon (Old Man Papillon’s brother), from a neighboring farm, took ill that everyone soon learned what Coon had been doing in the woods.

  M. Papillon had been suffering from a horrible stomach virus for a week, not able to hold down any food. Various traiteurs in the area had visited him, making teas and baumes to relieve his troubles, but to no avail. By the second week, Mme. Papillon had enlisted a regiment of devout Rosary sayers to make a nine-day Novena—no effect. Yet on the last day of the Novena, as weary women rose from the cedar floor with beads in hand, one of the women caught Coon peeking from the window. The woman was his mother, Clarice, now widowed. She brought her curious son inside to reprimand him, but he wasn’t present, as some would say. He immediately entered M. Papillon’s bedroom and placed his hands on the sickly man’s belly . . . and mumbled underneath his breath. No one had told Coon that the man was having stomach problems. And no one understood the language that Coon mumbled with intentions. It wasn’t French or Creole or even Haitian Kreyol, which some of the old-timers in the area spoke on rare occasions. Whatever Coon spoke was older, ancient and powerful. Arnaud Papillon made a full recovery by the cock’s next crow, and Evangeline Parish had a new traiteur, skilled in the mysteries of secret prayers and barely seven years old.

  By 1949, months after being kicked out of St. Paul’s Catholic School for cursing out a young nun from Mamou, Sister Marie Thérèse, Coon spent his days treating the area’s sick with secret prayers, shining shoes for nickels at the train depot in Lafayette, and smoking Chesterfields. Coon’s older siblings had moved to larger towns for work as severe drought pummeled the Boudreaux farm. Coon moved in with an aunt in Lafayette who didn’t care much for him but took a liking to his monetary contributions every week. He saved money, coins mostly, in an old sock that he secreted under his mattress.

  One day his uncle found the money and bought a gray Stetson and a bottle of white lightning. When Coon returned and learned what had happened to his savings, he found his uncle passed out under a pecan tree with the new Stetson resting on his brow. His aunt said that he had no right to protest because they were housing him regardless of his rent payments. But Coon didn’t give a damn about what they thought was right. Couillon stole my money, he said. His aunt slapped him in the mouth for calling his uncle an idiot, then returned to her dishes. Coon, being Coon, quietly walked to the backyard and sat down right under the tree in front of his inebriated uncle. He didn’t look at the man—au contraire, he cracked a pecan and ca
refully extracted its meat with the expertise and guile of a surgeon, then chewed the sweet meat with brown, neglected teeth. He looked around the backyard. Not much there. A half-empty bottle of white lightning rested in his uncle’s lap.

  If Coon was pissed, nobody knew, not even the blue jay that sang sweetly above in the pecan tree. Coon looked up and smiled at the bird, then whistled, trying to mimic the bird’s melody. But the bird didn’t fly away—rather it smiled with appreciation that this little black boy with long hair like an Indian thought enough of its song. He grabbed more pecans in his right hand, then crushed them. Some of the pecan meat clung to the hard shell. Other pieces rested naked and alone, out of the shell, exposed to the world and its secrets. And the birthed pecan meat revealed its own mysteries too, presenting itself to the sun. Why did the pecan hide? The baby bird breaks from the shell. The butterfly emerges from the cocoon. All leaving behind the dirty, harsh carapace, the dried teat of the jilted mother who curses her young with a warm smile. Several rotted pecans lay on the ground around him, never able to kiss the sun, parched after the teat gave all it could.

  Suddenly, he dropped the pecans. Something caught his attention in the yard.

  “Go on, get away. You ain’t supposed ta be here,” Coon said low but forceful and angry.

  Anyone watching would tell you that no one was in that backyard with Coon and his uncle. Of course, the warbling blue jay sure wasn’t gonna say anything.

  Coon looked at his tattered clothes and small, delicate hands smudged with Shinola. His mother used to say that his hands were soft like a girl’s and he didn’t like that too much, but it made his mother smile when she said it. And that, he did like. But now his hands were getting dirty. He picked at a few recently formed calluses with dirty fingernails. He was too young to have regrets, but it seemed that he just wasn’t getting to where he was trying to go. And he wasn’t quite sure where that was. He reflected on his situation as he peeled off the painful calluses, then lit a Chesterfield.