But to Who?
Or to What?
Terrence Hathaway had been commander of the National Guard since he had retired as a full colonel in the United States Army Military Police. Although he had been technically promoted to brigadier general for pension purposes upon retirement, he preferred to use the rank he had actually earned, because it seemed to him more honorable, less pretentious, and more resonant down here in Dixie.
He had been born on a farm in northern Alabama, far from the famously sin-sodden politics of Louisiana and particularly of the Devil’s playground, New Orleans, and had been Born-Again as a Christian at West Point. But his years as the Commander of the Louisiana National Guard and the necessary habitation in the state had educated him in how far down the sides of the Pit people could slide and still remain standing on the Earth.
Buying and selling votes for money, or proclaiming that Jesus Christ was on your side in order to win them, was no big deal in the environs with which Colonel Hathaway was now all too familiar. But for actual demons to demand the electorate pray to them for salvation and require the voters to vote for a candidate for governor admittedly possessed by the minions of Satan or else, was a level that no Louisiana politician had previously plumbed.
Save your state and your city at the price of your souls.
And it seemed that a multitude of the Hell-bound were willing to do just that.
The television broadcasts of the woman in star-speckled black robes in the prow of the airboat approaching the Hurricane Tornado across flooded swampland cut away briefly to scenes of frenzied dancing harlots, voodoo ceremonies featuring headless chickens flapping away from bloody knives, crowds of worshippers not falling to their knees before Jesus Christ, but dancing in full demonic possession by and for the pleasure of the Prince of Darkness. And all the while, above crawls showing the projected vote count for Mama Legba rising, while those for the Republican candidate sliding downward a bit and those for the Democrat falling precipitously as Election Day wore on.
Terrence Hathaway had crossed himself repeatedly through all of this, on his knees at home with his wife, praying good Christian prayers not to Satan but to the Lord that these very sights would not tempt his heart.
For as the camera boats and helicopters following Mama Legba’s airboat maintained a more or less safe distance from the vortex that rose through the heavens, the airboat itself inched slowly toward it during the afternoon as the exit poll projections showed Mama Legba drawing even with Harlan W. Brown.
By the time the sun began to go down and she had moved slightly into the lead, the live coverage became fixated on the figure of Mama Legba, so perilously close to the Hurricane Tornado, her arms raised and outstretched like the Christ of the Andes and seeming to hold it back as if performing a miracle, Hathaway could not help it—as a Christian he might loathe her as a slave of Satan, but as a soldier, his heart could not keep from going out to such martial bravery.
Mama Legba had a sound feed from a microphone on the boat, yet there was nothing to be heard above the monstrous hissing roar of the storm. But as the sun came down and the talking heads began to call her narrow victory as the polls began to close, someone did a remixing trick, and the Hurricane Tornado was reduced to accompaniment to her mighty amplified voice.
“I am Papa Legba,” she boomed in a powerful male voice. “I stand at the crossroads of your destiny. I have offered you a choice and you have made it.”
“I am Erzuli,” she said in a female voice. “Y’all have spoken, and I hear you, and I love y’all.”
Terrence Hathaway took to crossing himself obsessively as the voice of Mama Legba became a satanic chorus, the Babel of a demonic multitude, merging with that of the roar of the Hurricane Tornado itself, blasphemously becoming akin to the whirlwind from which the Lord Himself had spoken to Moses.
“We are Mama Legba. Who you have elected governor of Louisiana.”
And then a single voice spoke from the Whirlwind.
The voice of he who had called himself Baron Samedi. He who a good Christian knew by another name.
Did he not?
“I am Baron Samedi. I am Mama Legba who now rules. We all are.”
Mama Legba tipped a phantom top hat to the cameras as she did a little bow, and the move put a wink in the next voice that spoke.
“I am Papa Legba. I stand at the crossroads of your destiny. Roll the bones my way, and you don’t crap out.”
Mama Legba turned to the Hurricane Tornado and snapped her fingers.
once—
And the whirling corkscrew cloud reversed its spin and begin twisting upward—
twice—
And the tip of the vortex left the surface of the waters.
thrice—
And the Hurricane Tornado screwed itself into the sky like a film of its birth run backward and disappeared.
Colonel Hathaway had then been certain that, though it had saved New Orleans and much of the rest of Louisiana from destruction, he had seen the work of Satan on television. He had then turned it off and prayed to Jesus for understanding that did not come. And as he entered the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge to confront the price that the Devil had extracted for that salvation in the flesh, he crossed himself and prayed wordlessly for he knew not what now.
Huey Long, a cynical egomaniacal, demagogic governor of Louisiana during the Great Depression of the 1930s, had caused a new governor’s mansion to be erected as a half-assed half-scale replica of the White House, because, he had said, “I want to feel at home in the one in Washington when I move in.”
For reasons Colonel Hathaway found impossible to morally comprehend, the Kingfish, as this unprincipled mountebank had been affectionately called, was still a blackguard hero in this blackguard state, perhaps because he was the image that the political varmints who infested Louisiana like the nutrias infesting the swamps prayed to during elections.
And his White House was still there, though even the Kingfish might be outraged at its being occupied by the Voodoo Queen Governor. Huey Long might have stolen chickens, but there were no tales of him having slit their throats as sacrifices to Satan.
Like everyone else, Terrence Hathaway had seen plenty of Mama Legba on television, far too much as far as he was concerned, but now that he was actually entering her gubernatorial lair for his first meeting with her in the flesh, he realized that, like everyone else, all he really knew about Mama Legba was just that: a electronically graven image on television.
A demon herself? Possessed by demons from Hell? A direct manifestation of Satan Himself? He knew nothing about Mama Legba’s soul at all.
Assuming that she had one.
Did the demons of Hell have souls? Did Satan? Did these so-called loas? Did evil spirits have evil souls or were they soulless creatures? This was too much theology for a simple Christian to truly comprehend, but Terrence had the feeling he was about to find out anyway.
Mama Legba received him in a bureau mercifully unlike the Oval Office in the full-scale Washington White House, and wore a businesslike dark blue suit befitting a female governor rather than a Voodoo Queen. But she didn’t really look right in it. She looked like the street busker she had once been uncomfortably stuffed in a uniform she knew she did not deserve to wear, a pathetic shadow of his own daughter Annie in her West Point cadet’s uniform, shrunken in stature, in awe of her own office.
As he soon learned, she indeed was.
“What do I call you?” Hathaway ventured. “Ma’am? Madam Governor…?”
“Can’t bring yourself to call me Mama Legba, can you, Colonel?” she said. “Not that I blame you. Governor Boudreau, Miz Boudreau, or even MaryLou will do, because that’s who you’re talking to now.”
“And may I ask why you ask … summoned … me here today … Governor Boudreau? Just to get acquainted…?”
Governor Boudreau sighed. “I suppose you could say that,” she said in a sad little voice. “Or maybe just to hear someone in this damn st
ate government call me that. Or say anything to me at all. Both houses of the legislature are still Republican and as far as they’re concerned I’m a creature of the Devil, and the Democrats won’t have anything to do with me because I screwed Elvis Montrose out of sitting in this office. The old Republican cabinet is still in place and I can’t fire them because no one will serve in a government headed by Mama Legba, so if I do, there won’t be any government.”
She shrugged and sighed again. “Look, Colonel Hathaway, who’s kidding who? I never expected to be elected, I’m totally unqualified for this or any other political office, I mean I didn’t even vote for myself. And the only advisers I have willing to talk to me are my agent Harry Klein, who knows no more about this job than I do, and J. B. Lafitte, the saloon owner and bordello keeper who sweet-talked me into running for governor as a publicity stunt by assuring me I was in no danger of winning.”
Colonel Hathaway was surprised and somewhat undone by the sympathy he felt for MaryLou Boudreau, who in person seemed less the satanic Mama Legba, and more like an innocent kid not much older than Annie and way over her head in other people’s satanic machinations. And the well-being of the state of Louisiana with her.
“What are you asking of me?” Hathaway said gently. “I’ll do what I can. But I have to admit than I’m no politician either.”
“But they say you’re a real Christian. I admit that I’m not, but I think I’m glad that the commander of the New Orleans Natonal Guard is, because I hope it may help me get the right answer to my question.”
“Your question…?”
“Would you obey an order to send the National Guard into New Orleans to forcibly evict people from their homes because the New Orleans police won’t do their sworn duty?”
“A bitter question, Madam Governor,” Hathaway told her uncomfortably, “and likewise a bitter answer. As an army officer I have often enough had to enforce orders that as a Christian I found repugnant. But to disobey orders I was sworn to obey would be oath-breaking, equally repugnant, and punishable by court-martial.”
“That’s not what I was wanting to hear. I’m not going to give any such order. But it would help if you made it public that you wouldn’t obey it.”
Colonel Terrence Hathaway found himself staring at her in naked befuddlement that needed no words.
“I can at least watch the news and while Lafitte may be just a saloon keeper and what you would probably call a whoremonger, he does have plenty of what anyone who worked the Quarter as a street act would call street smarts or he wouldn’t still be in business and he wouldn’t have been able to have conned me into running for governor…”
“So…?”
“So I may not be qualified to hold this office, but I’m able to inform myself, and I’ve got some down-and-dirty advice, and a human heart too, which is more than you can say for the heartless bastards who control the state legislature and the Republican lieutenant governor, who are demanding that I order the Guard into New Orleans to not only enforce evictions under martial law gunpoint, but also to take over enforcement of the laws against victimless crimes from the New Orleans police who refuse to arrest people breaking them, and maybe even arrest the instigators like Luke Martin.”
“I read the papers and watch the news too, Madam Governor.…”
“Then maybe you also know that the legislature is already drawing up a resolution to give itself the power to order it themselves over the head of the governor.…”
That was indeed shocking even for Louisiana! “But wouldn’t that be unconstitutional?”
“Only if the State Supreme Court said it was, and seeing as this is Louisiana, even they know which side their bread is greased on. But if you declared you wouldn’t obey any such order no matter where it came from, it would be a lot harder for the legislature to get away with it politically.”
“You’ve quite lost me, Governor Boudreau,” Colonel Hathaway confessed distastefully. “I’m a military man, not a politician.”
“You think I am? This is Lafitte’s scheme, not mine. I need you to go public with this, Terrence, if I may, and you are a true Christian, are you not?”
“I try to be.”
The voice changed, became insinuatingly seductive and supplicating, the voice of the loa Eruzli as heard on television, and the eyes fixed upon him turned MaryLou Boudreau’s face into an unholy mask of Mama Legba.
Terrence Hathaway would have crossed himself but for the words it spoke.
“Then tell me as a Christian, luv, could you really throw innocent families out into the muddy streets to make the rich richer? Would you want to stand before your Maker and try to walk through the eye of that needle? Would you really arrest fellow officers for refusing to commit such a sin in order to obey an order from the servants of Mammon?”
The words.…
How could such words not touch his Christian heart and his officer’s honor?
“What are you asking me?” was all he could say.
“Could you do it? Would you do it?”
Colonel Hathaway prayed for an answer. None was forthcoming. “I will pray that I never have to find out, and that believe me, is the heartfelt truth!”
“Oh, I do,” crooned Mama Legba. “And so do we all, hon’. An’ all you gotta do to stay straight with your Jesus is let it be known that you won’t obey an immoral command to send the National Guard into New Orleans. How’s that gonna offend your, whatya call it, warrior’s honor?”
Such … honorable words … such … Christian words.…
But that which spoke them.…
And then, as if his mind was easily enough read, the next words were spoken by a male voice, the voice that called itself Papa Legba, speaking like a fellow officer in another country’s army.
“We both know that we’re not each other’s choice of allies. You believe in Jesus Christ, you believe that I either don’t exist or you’re talking to Satan. I know I’m Papa Legba, guardian of crossroads and standing at a fork in your destiny. You’re the traffic cop at the crossroads this time, as an MP, you’ve been here before, now haven’t you? And as a Christian, you must believe your God will guide you. It’s not the singer, it’s the song. So you can’t trust the speaker, but can’t you know a Christian truth when you hear it, no matter who’s doing the talking?”
Terrence Hathaway trembled in his chair. Terrence Hathaway’s head began to pound. Terrence Hathaway’s heart had never been more deeply troubled.
“How can I trust what you say? How do I know I’m not hearing it from the Prince of Liars?”
“You can’t,” said the voice of Erzuli, “and half the time we all can’t trust Papa Legba’s words as gospel either. He is the Trickster too, after all.”
And the face, the mask, of Mama Legba gave him a lubricious wink. “But come on, hon,’ if you can’t trust your friends, you should at least be able to trust your enemies. And Christian or otherwise, isn’t what’s right what you feel good after?”
“I’ll allow myself to be asked whether I would obey such an order, and refuse to answer one way or the other, at least I can go that far for now,” Colonel Hathaway finally found himself saying.
Having to say, for that was all that the conflicting demands of sworn duty, officer’s honor, and Christianity could allow him to do.
Stand there and execute a holding action for as long as possible at the current … crossroads.
And pray long, and hard, and regularly, that he would never be forced to choose one path over the other.
And pray that if the Lord did lay that burden upon his shoulders, Jesus would at least grant him the knowledge of which was right before he condemned himself to whatever he was fated to feel afterward.
22
How, you may ask, did J. B. Lafitte, saloon keeper and bordello impresario, end up as the Voodoo Queen Governor’s chief and only political operative? Well, I could claim it was a matter of guilty conscience aroused by that phone call from her agent Harry Klein and it would be
true. Up to a point.
“Listen Lafitte, you bullshitted her into running in the first place, she’s up there in Baton Rouge all alone, and no one one with any kind of political job or hope for one will touch working for her with a barbecue pit fork.”
“Including you?”
“I don’t know jack shit about Louisiana politics, Lafitte, and I don’t want to.”
“And you think I do?”
“Come off it, Lafitte, you knew enough to get the poor kid into this mess, now didn’t you, and the way I see it, you owe it to her to try to get her out of it,” Klein told me, and I could hardly deny he had a moral point, the sharp end of which did penetrate what passes for my heart.
“Or else…” Klein continued in a threatening tone of voice that I did not like at all.
“Or else what?”
“Or else the word might get out that you were the guy behind the Mama Legba candidacy, which would not exactly put you in good standing with the Democratic party honchos who are still the power in our fair city, now would it…?”
I didn’t like it, but I had to admire it.
As long as Mayor Bradford, New Orleans’s next mayor Elvis Montrose, and Big Joe Roody didn’t know that, I wasn’t in bad odor, but if they found out the part I had played in innocently costing Montrose the governorship, I’d stink like a very dead redfish, and maybe be one besides.
“Pretty good for a guy who doesn’t know jack shit about Louisiana politics.”
So I took MaryLou Boudreau’s call less than an hour later, listened to her woes, realized that if the National Guard did take over they’d be mine too, seeing as how my whorehouse and saloon were among those under foreclosure, and put through a call to Big Joe Roody.
Roody had no particular loyalty to Montrose, Bradford, or the Democratic Party, and was happy as a clam who had avoided being served on the half-shell with the way the police union he headed had been making inroads with local upstate forces, thanks to the use he had made of Luke Martin during the campaign.
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