Clarice held both babies as two uniformed orderlies helped Marie out of the house—the house Paul began building with pine the day after he talked with Marie’s pa. The babies didn’t cry. They didn’t know their mother’s voice, hadn’t grown acquainted with her touch. But they knew Clarice’s warm tone, her precise, melodic French that caused them to giggle when she humored them after dîner. They knew her small, soft hands that changed their cotton diapers and bathed their bottoms and held their little lives to her bosom under the Evangeline sky and deep green Acadian forest of the little home fifty yards from the bayou.
No, they did not cry, nor did she, Marie Boudreaux, who lost her sense of self, space, and time the minute Paul strummed a note on his beloved fiddle. By the time he realized that the fiddle was driving her crazy, it was too late. He figured she was just being ornery about his fiddling—a complaint that he believed wasn’t anything but a show for attention from a new wife. Other married men told him to expect that from her once they made the sacrament at St. Augustine’s. But when she stopped talking, doing, he knew something was wrong.
Paul jumped out of the wagon and ran to his wife. The orderlies stopped.
“Cher catin. Mwa regrette, ma catin,” he said slowly as he caressed her shallow cheeks and kissed her lips for the last time.
They took her to the asylum in Pineville, where she died months later.
But that night, as he sat on the porch smoking his pipe, he pulled out the fiddle that he wasn’t allowed to play around her and stroked a heartfelt lament while Clarice rocked the babies to sleep.
Clarice LaChapelle never left.
* * *
1. “Are you ready?”
2. “Play the old-time songs!”
twenty-nine
saint lo
Houston, Texas, c. 1990
I was starting to feel a detachment from South Park that was growing day by day, but it was difficult to break free without feeling some sense of betrayal. No more school days in better parts of town. My high school, Jesse H. Jones Senior High School, was ten minutes away from my house on St. Lo Road. St. Lo—Capital of Ruins. The high school was no exception. However, the school district planted an accelerated program at the site amid the ruins, calling it “Vanguard.” And somehow, I was in this program. Smart kids were bused in from all over town for small classes taught by those same highbrow white folks who taught at St. Andrew’s. Many, though definitely not all, were liberally educated rednecks who got hip and high at Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Yale, Barnard, and the like, then returned to Texas in the 1970s with long hair and doctorates, versed in Ginsberg, Rimbaud, TM, granola bars, Acapulco gold, yoga, and muthafuckin’ cowboy boots. Just like the folks who taught at St. Andrew’s, sans the New Testament Christian proselytizing. Don’t get me wrong, they were well-meaning teachers and administrators, but many carried an air about them that they passed down to many of the Vanguard students, mostly white kids who had never been to South Park. Sure, we were the smartest kids in school and kept the overall GPA pretty high at Jones, but we (all of us, regular and Vanguard) were there to get an education on equal footing. And because some of these teachers were promoting a pejorative view of the kids in the “regular” program, kids from South Park, I began to detest those teachers although they would never know it. There was no reason for them to know. I mean, fuck, they were deciding my grades and I was on a mission.
Despite certain Vanguard teachers’ efforts to segregate Vanguard students from the regular students, at least in spirit, their attempts were futile and a bit of a farce. Architecture was the equalizer. We, the Vanguard program, were not sequestered off in some random annex building sitting on cinder blocks. No. We were right in the main building with the rest of the students, sharing the same hallways, water fountains, cafeteria, restrooms, and locker rooms. These coveted Vanguard students were forced to mingle, which worried those certain teachers and administrators in the Vanguard program, not to mention more than a few white Vanguard parents who didn’t want their golden savants mixing with the natives. The irony was hilarious.
But for me, it made school days at Jones feel like some strange musical theater of the absurd. Mr. Boret, my history teacher of pure Cajun breeding, constantly blasted classical music from his room with the door open before school, after school, in between classes, and during lunch, which turned the entire black inner-city public high school, at least on the north wing of the first floor, into an insistent cinema verité with illuminated nigga moments that would have brought James Evans back from the dead to electric-slide to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. In fact, it made everything at school kind of strange. Troubled students who had problems with each other usually planned their fights around the stairwell across from Mr. Boret’s classroom for the musical accompaniment of whatever type of drama was scheduled. Fight over a stolen chain—Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2, in E flat major. Talking shit after shooting dice in the bathroom—Verdi’s “L’onore! Ladri!” from Falstaff. Boy breaks up with girl—Orff’s “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana. Girl breaks up with boy—Bach’s Suite for Orchestra No. 3 in D major. Good grades after cheating on a test—Vivaldi’s Concerto for Violin in E major, RV 269, Op. 8, No. 1, “Spring”: I (Allegro) from The Four Seasons. And a well-publicized fight practically required Peer Gynt’s Suite No. 1, Op. 46: IV, “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” It didn’t take long for Mr. Boret to figure this out. By the time I matriculated in his homeroom, I’d learned that he occasionally looked out the small window in his door to check the stairwell so that the right song was playing. I mean, he’d been at Jones for over twenty years, back when it was white, so he had the program list. I mean, those songs listed above weren’t random. Sure, he’d hit the intercom and call campus security if things were getting messy, but he was never in a rush, even that time when Peanut shot that gun in the air. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67—“Fate”: I (Allegro con Brio). I mean really, who’s gonna turn that off once it gets going. Certainly not Mr. Boret, even when the police were trying to take a statement minutes later.
Inside the classroom, though, I was somewhere different with different people, a foreign land with foreign people all around me, including the beautiful dark-haired girl of Venezuelan origin with gorgeous brown eyes that were making me think of Noelle as a righteous boner arrived in the middle of Dr. Levy’s lecture on Richard Wright’s Native Son. A car passed by on St. Lo blasting Mantronix’s “Fresh Is the Word”—all bass—vibrating the windows. Fluorescent lights hummed above. The Mexican American kid sitting behind me wore too much cologne—eyes melted on the Venezuelan girl, probably. Meanwhile, the class was trying to figure out why Bigger killed that white girl, the Venezuelan girl was blushing because she knew I was looking at her, and I couldn’t stop thinking that something was probably not kosher about getting a hand job in public while watching children’s repertory theater.
“Aah. Mr. Boudreaux, would you care to add?” asked Dr. Levy, with his heavy Woody Allen New Yorker accent. Boy, he must’ve been lost, I thought when I first met him, until, that’s right, somehow by the grace of the Almighty Albino in the sky, Dr. Sol Levy had a connection with somebody in my family. Naturally, he took a special interest in me. I played it cool, but I didn’t read the CliffsNotes.
“Just ’cause you poor don’t mean you just gonna kill a white woman,” I spouted with a hint of good ole Public Enemy–inspired black nationalism. And he read right through it.
“What does that have to do with what we’re talking about?” he asked.
“I’m just sayin’, white folks treated black folks bad back in the day,” I continued.
Some of the white kids in class tensed a bit, then squinted their eyes slightly to appear compassionate and interested in the black struggle, bless their hearts. Hell, they were surrounded. Miss Venezuela smiled again. Fuck, I should’ve worn the beret. Me and La Morena. Sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-
“Mr. Boudreaux, while I’m sure we’re all interes
ted in your recitation on race relations back in the day, I assure you my times in Mississippi during the sixties with your cousin were . . .” he drifted.
Who? Nonc? Hell no, it couldn’t be, I thought as Levy explained that as a student he’d marched with one of Mother’s cousins. I, of course, had to bring in a full book report on the entire ridiculous episode of the fine Mr. Bigger Thomas. But I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop thinking about Noelle.
I loved kissing her. It was intense immediately, and I knew that I was going to fuck. We never talked about it on the phone like I’d done with girls before, slow-jam tape playing in the background waiting to see who would fall asleep first. No. We talked about art. She knew way more than me and I was the docent. We talked about jazz (particularly Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew) and being free and Thomas Meloncon’s stage plays with “How Do You Love a Black Woman?” and Nikki Giovanni poems and finger painting and Paris and Rome and Diana Ross’s Mahogany, and, of course, the ballads of the artist then known as Prince. Oh yeah, I knew I was gonna fuck. I could smell it like July Fourth barbeque in someone’s backyard when you pull up in the front driveway and take a whiff. Cher bon Dieu!
We started going everywhere together. I was happy to follow. My heart was open for the first time. A young flower blooming, petals tasting life’s sweetness with gentle, virgin lips still fresh off life’s titty milk. The only thing was that I didn’t know when or how to get it, waiting on the man with the green flag or a whistle or something. I asked Sonnier for advice over a game of dominoes. He stopped.
“Leave her alone,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I said leave her alone. And that’s all I’m going to say. Don’t play with me, Ti’ John.”
“Johnny. They call me Johnny.”
He grabbed my throat.
“Don’t make me hurt you, Nephew,” he said. “This ends with blood. Real blood. Are you prepared for that? Huh? You got an envie1 for blood?”
“I ain’t scared of shit,” I answered.
He released me and stepped back to examine me.
“Don’t you hear what they’re saying about her? Aren’t you listening?” he asked.
“You know as well as I do that they lie a lot. Always with that bullshit. Most of them. I’m not gonna jump just because they’re trying to fuck with me,” I answered.
“You done got cocky. And ain’t even done shit yet,” he said, then backed up and took a deep bow. “There may be hope for you yet.”
“That’s all you got to say? Huh?” I asked.
“You’re still clean, Ti’ John. Remember this time. Hold it tight in your secret place, ’cause it’s not gonna be that way for long,” Sonnier said.
“I play by the rules, Nonc.”
“That’s what you think? You ‘play by the rules’? Shit, Nephew, you don’t play at all.”
* * *
1. A hankering or desire.
thirty
repast road
A month later after studying all night at the downtown library, I drove Noelle home. We pulled over at Hermann Park for a makeout session.
I got deflowered. Cher bon Dieu.
It felt better than the time I kissed Royal. The whole world suddenly made sense and I felt like a man, but that feeling wouldn’t last long.
She killed herself a few weeks later after her mother discovered she was fucking her dad too. I was shattered.
• • •
We are not promised angels. We are not promised jubilee. The first Noël, the angels did sing but not for me. No, we are not promised angels, only fortunate to catch a glimpse of their fluttering wings.
Red Nigga Witch
A roach is such a brave, stubborn creature. Reckless but committed. Maybe too committed. Crawls the inches, pulled by a desire to know, to gain. Sometimes they die. Other times they live. But not the one skittering across my kitchen floor. Crunch. That’s what it sounds like when you step on a big, fat, dark brown Houston roach. Crunch . . . like the muthafucka got bones or something.
She was dead but her mother never said anything to anyone about what she discovered. Noelle overdosed on her mother’s Nembutal—Marilyn style. My little darling went out like a movie star. And now I had an envie for blood. Mr. Auzenne’s blood.
Lil’ Ant was the first to tell me, but I ignored him. Then Cookie and Adelai Green. Lying, all of them, I thought. I was too busy being in love with her to accept it even though she gave me a few signs. Your first love is always blind because the emotion is so new. Nonc did tell me that the dead don’t lie, and I told him to stop sounding so cliché. But Boudreaux men have to learn things for themselves, that’s what Father always said.
Now I sat at the dining room table staring at the dead roach on the kitchen floor, contemplating my next move. Father came home.
“Ain’t you supposed to be at school?” he asked.
I ignored his question and told him what I knew. He listened, then I asked—
“Can you do this for me?”
He stared at me for a bit, probably feeling sympathetic, then answered—
“Son. I’ve given you everything I know and now you’re gonna have to work with what you got. But I can’t do this for you and I advise that you leave well enough alone. That business right there don’t concern you.”
Then he left.
I couldn’t ask Nonc because he’d already warned me. Mother was no help either, too consumed with comforting my grief with Rosaries. I hadn’t spoken to hardly anybody since the funeral except for Father.
I remembered the first person I treated by myself. It was an old man with eye disease who was going blind. I cured him in thirty minutes. And I was so proud. But Father told me to never take pride in the work because it was Bondyè’s doing, not mine. “God works through us, Ti’ John. It ain’t you,” he said.
But Nonc said that the left hand was our personal doing, but not to mention it to others lest we be burned at the stake. I figured if God let Noelle die because of her father’s actions, then . . .
I went to the dirt for her father. He killed himself three days later. I hoped God wasn’t watching. Black Jesus quit talking to me for about two weeks.
Noelle came and went like Joe Turner, but now her story would be my story, transferred to my psyche—a new employee of my personality. I hurt.
• • •
Kinda pitch-black.
Aramis cologne.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Olde English 800.
“Ti’ John. You been drinkin’?”
“Yeah.”
“Ti’ John, I’m really sorry for your loss but drinking isn’t the answer.”
“You should talk.”
“I’ve been prayin’ for you, Johnny.”
“Oh yeah. Prayin’ to who?”
“Who do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, who do you pray to?”
“I pray to my gotdamn self, Father Jerome. Me. Johnny-muthafuckin’-Boudreaux. And guess what? I answer my prayers. How ’bout you, Father Jerome? Huh? The big man answers your prayers? Your horse ever come in?”
“You’ve lost your way, Ti’ John.”
“Fuck you, man.”
• • •
Pitch-black.
I never considered myself a tough guy, let alone a killer. But that’s what I became in the spring of 1990. It wasn’t difficult, merely suggestion placed in a troubled mind—a slight push over the cliff—but I felt like a monster nonetheless. The stench, I could smell. My hands, heavy with blood. It happened in the woods behind my house. I hadn’t been back there since Booger and I scoured the trees for the red cicada years ago. We found the rare insect that afternoon. It called to me.
Who are you?
“I’m John Paul Boudreaux the Second,” I said aloud.
“Who you talking to?” Booger asked.
I pointed at a branch on a sickly oak. Quiet. Static. Regal. A red cicada. Boo
ger moved closer, but he didn’t want to catch it, but, rather, witness its beauty, hold the memory against uglier thoughts for balance.
Am I in danger?
“No,” I answered.
Near a creek I found a low bush planted in moist dirt. No weeds or grass. Three fifteen in the morning. I cut off the flashlight and felt the soft forest floor. I trembled. God’s watching you, boy, Paul Boudreaux chided. I smelled burning wood, intensely.
“Nonc! That you?” I yelled.
Silence but for the hum of the train on Mykawa Road. I was still here in the woods. I still smelled him, burning wood.
“Nonc, where you at?” I yelled but no response.
Thou Shalt Not Kill.
I made the first mark on the moist ground, then traced it with Mother’s cornmeal.
What we do is secret.
A fiddle sang “Blues de Basile.”
“Pépère! Is that you?” I yelled. He doesn’t know my voice.
My children gonna believe in God the Father and the Holy Trinity.
I smelled his pipe.
Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.
“I’m dead, Ti’ John,” his voice wailed.
“No, you’re not, Nonc. You’re here with me,” I answered.
Tithonus’s lament for love. We don’t die. My hands were hot. The gun and the fire. No burning bush saying don’t do it. No appearance from Nonc explaining the repercussions. I thought of her on that particular morning when we skipped school to watch dragonflies in Adair Park. We waited until the park closed and walked hand in hand through the woods until we saw small dancing lights.
We sat on the ground and watched them until we fell asleep. At dawn, she arose and put her head on my chest. The first thing I saw was my reflection in her deep pools of black-brown eyes. We listened to each other breathe until our breath whistled in unison, feeling out heartbeats until they were one.
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