by C. L. Bevill
Finding the Honores’ residence wasn’t as easy as Mignon had envisioned. She had thought about simply opening up the white pages and looking up an address. Then she would drive out there and ask questions at her whim. But there was no address for Noel or Apolline. There were no addresses for N. or A. Honore. As a matter of fact there were only three Honores, and they all lived in areas north of Natchitoches which pretty much eliminated them. Earlier she’d asked for directions from Gail Harper, after her art class, but Gail didn’t have a clue. Sister Helena would have known, but she was nowhere to be found.
Why, she asked herself, talk to the Honores? What was the point of that? Mignon didn’t find a definitive answer waiting on the tip of her tongue. But it was something to do with those rhymes, those deeply troubling rhymes. It was as if there had been two Daras, the one who would fight valiantly for herself and her child, and the one who took pleasure at taking vicious potshots at those who were different from herself. Like the Gullahs? Like Sister Helena? But the one rhyme Mignon had heard about the sister had been mild in comparison to the ones written on the torn-away note pages.
Two Daras. One is a heroine. One is a bigot. Which one had been real? And had it had anything to do with her murder? That was the gist of why Mignon wanted to talk to Noel and Apolline Honore. She waited until late in the day on Monday afternoon and surmised that she could probably catch Apolline at home with her children. Then possibly she could talk to Noel when he returned from his work. If they would speak with her.
Mignon had attempted to find their residence by herself but was forced to call Miner Poteet. Miner knew much about the area and knew most of the residents and wouldn’t restrict the information based on the amount of trouble she might get herself into.
The phone rang five times before Miner picked it up with an abbreviated grunt.
“Mr. Poteet,” she said. “It’s Mignon Thibeaux.”
“Little Mignon,” Miner said cheerfully as if he’d forgotten their earlier conversation. Mrs. Poteet had been Creole, she recalled. For him distasteful things were best left in the past. “You want to go find some perty place in the bayou to paint, mebe?”
“I do need to find a place in the bayou,” she admitted. “But it’s actually someone I need to speak with.”
There was silence on the phone while Miner digested that. Then he said, “Oh, you do try to get yourself in the biggest trouble, don’t you, chère? First, the little Honore girl in the bayou, then you gets lost in the bayou. Lord above knows what will happen to you next. I don’t know your young man real well, although I seem to remember I did vote for him, but I reckon he’s going to wring your neck like a spring chicken.” Miner considered. “Unless someone else gets to it before he does.”
“Maybe we should not talk about someone strangling me,” Mignon said.
“Oh gracious Lord, I’m sorry, Mignon. I forgot about how that little girl died.” Miner clucked his tongue at himself. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Except, of course, your John Henry is going to be right mad at you, no?”
“John Henry is already mad at me,” Mignon said ruefully.
Miner made a low sound of astonishment. “He can get madder. Just keep pushing.”
“Okay, Mr. Poteet, I get the point. But will you help me, please?”
“I cain’t never say no to such a perty young lady,” Miner sighed dramatically. “It were my one downfall in life. Missus Poteet would have clobbered my head with a bucket full of molasses. But next time you come visiting, it’s just to hear about my arthritis and lumbago, no?” There was more than a hint of humor in his voice.
“I swear,” Mignon vowed solemnly.
•
Miner hadn’t been happy with the thought of Mignon going out in the bayous by herself. Furthermore, he had been coldly acquiescent once she told him it was the Honores to whom she wanted to speak. After giving her explicit directions, he was insistent that she call John Henry or someone to accompany her. After assuring Miner she would call him, she hung up.
So she called John Henry. His private line rang three times before it turned over to the answering machine. She said, “John Henry, it’s Mignon. Just thought I’d call.” Then she’d hung up, idly wondering what his suspicious mind would make of the ultra-short message.
“There,” she muttered. “I called John Henry and I don’t have to lie to Miner.”
Dressed for the murky nature of the bayou in her oldest jeans and a plain baseball jersey, she left the farmhouse. She drove off in the Explorer before anyone else could interfere, before John Henry appeared mysteriously to thwart her, and before a meteor came streaking out of the sky and crushed her SUV to unusable scrap.
Miner’s directions were precise. A hundred yards past Newt Johnson’s old hog pen on Bayou Blue Road, there was a dirt road turnout. She hadn’t been sure that she would recognize what an old hog pen looked like, but the cavorting hogs inside it gave it away. Two miles down the dirt road turnout, she passed two houses. One was painted lime green. The other was painted hot pink. Then she was to go past the houses and turn at the very next right, which was a well-traveled dirt road. Once she made it to the end of that road, she was to park the Ford and grab a pirogue.
“Find one that don’t leak,” Miner had advised gravely.
“I’ve been in a pirogue before,” she’d told him, sincerely wishing that the Honores lived in a place where a road led to its front doorstep.
“Follow the bayou out toward the west and keep to the markers in the deepest part of the channels,” Miner had told her. “You’ll find it about a mile or so away from where you parked.”
Mignon found the end of the road and parked her SUV alongside a battered Chevy truck and a newish Nissan Altima. At the edge of the bayou was a dilapidated dock with several pirogues propped along its length. She got out, locked the Ford with her key fob, and hoped that Robert was right in his statement about the pirogues being considered communal property.
Thinking about Robert made her remember his suspect status. She didn’t want to think of him as someone who could have murdered a young woman for some horrid reason. She wanted to think of him as a possible family member, someone she could learn about her own heritage from. He was friendly and amicable and going through his own set of trials. The truth was that she liked Robert. And because she liked him, she certainly didn’t want him to be a murderer. He’d even left a concerned note on her door the previous day while she’d been at Blessed Heart, making sure she was alive and in one piece.
Not that liking Robert was any kind of logical reason that he wouldn’t be a murderer. The contradictory thoughts in her head made Mignon want to groan. She had meant to ask Sister Helena about Robert. She wanted to know if he’d been to Blessed Heart lately or if any of the girls had seen him or someone who looked like him hanging around there in the time before Dara was murdered. All those girls playing outside. One of them must have seen something or someone. Perhaps they were afraid to tell Investigator Caraby. Perhaps they were afraid to say anything to Caraby because he might have been the one hanging around up there.
Then there was a niggling thought. John Henry wouldn’t have forgotten to ask Sister Helena about Robert. Certainly the sister had already been asked about strangers hanging around the school grounds. Caraby must have asked and then asked again. But neither Father William nor Sister Helena was omniscient nor did they have eyes in the backs of their heads. But twenty-odd girls had all kinds of eyes that most likely saw everything and everyone.
Mignon found a colorfully painted pirogue, one with yellow and black squares like a taxicab. She looked it over and decided that it was serviceable. Not only that, but its paint job encouraged her to use it above all others. She untied the rope and tipped it into the water, but getting in was a whole different ball of wax. It didn’t seem like it wanted to stay in one place long enough for her to climb down, and she enviously remembered the illusory ease with which both John Henry and Robert had stepped into theirs.
> After she fell in once, soaking herself from head to toe with the musky bayou waters, she wrung out her clothing with her hands and tried again, grateful that the March weather was mild. The third time, she thought, with no little amount of determination after the second drenching, will be the charm. And it was.
•
Once Mignon was in the pirogue she began to paddle toward the west. However, it took her a concerted effort to determine which way was west. There were some marked channels with little red floats for the larger vessels that came through some of the channels. The whole area was mixed up with parts of the Kisatchie National Forest. It was hard to tell without a surveyor which parts were which. Private lands that had been owned by Creoles since before Louisiana was purchased by the United States were liberally intermixed in the area.
After a while, Mignon got the hang of it. Her previous anxiety dripped away along with the excess moisture on her clothing. A little effort and the aid of bright sunshine left her merely damp and mildly uncomfortable. However, a mile in a pirogue seemed to take forever. She kept thinking that she had to have gone further than a mile, but there was nothing in sight. Then she started to hear a distant noise that was the combined sounds of children playing, a radio blaring, and dogs barking.
If she weren’t at the right enclave, then she could ask for directions. Hopefully the inhabitants weren’t unfriendly. Mignon thought about the moonshine and illegal alligator skins that John Henry had mentioned. Random visitors probably weren’t encouraged. As a matter of fact, they might even be discouraged.
The series of little shacks came into sight and Mignon sighed. It was much like the Dubeauxs’ complex. They enjoyed the communal living. It gives them protection from all kinds of things, she realized. Man and beast alike.
All the little houses were built on stilts, and some had boats on trailers parked under them. A large tractor sat to one side and explained how the boats got from the water to under the houses and back again, but it didn’t explain how the tractor had gotten here. The land itself was a large hill rising out of the bayous that surrounded it. There was a large common area at the dock with a few more pirogues resting along the edges. A group of children of varied ages played with each other. Two pre-adolescent girls had a long jump rope and were swiftly turning it for a third one while cheerfully singing a rhyme for her.
The paddle in Mignon’s hands stilled for a moment. Rhymes again. It was a simple game and inexpensive. All one needed was two sets of hands and a length of rope to spin for another. An active imagination like Dara’s helped. As Mignon let the pirogue skim over the water toward the dock, she listened to the girls’ song, “Blue bells, cockle shells. Here comes the teacher with the big fat stick. Now get ready for your arithmetic. Two plus two is four. Now get ready for your spelling. C-A-T spells cat. D-O-G spells dog. Now get ready for your hot dogs. How many did Rachel have? One, two, three, four…”
Rachel, the one in the middle of the jump rope, tripped on ten when she looked up and saw Mignon step out of the pirogue and into the water beside the dock. All of the children abruptly halted their activities to stare at the stranger in their midst. Mignon tugged the little boat onto the shore and well out of the water, trying not to stare back.
They all had halted in various positions and stared at her as if she were the oddest thing. Mignon glanced down at herself and saw the damp wrinkled mess that she was. She had run fingers through her auburn curls, but she knew that her hair wouldn’t look any better than the rest of her. Plucking a bit of Spanish moss off of herself, she thought, Guess I must look very strange.
Then, one of the jump roping girls opened her mouth so wide that a Mississippi barge could have dropped inside it and shrieked, “MAMA!”
Apparently, that was the signal for the children to dissipate. A toddler was the last to vanish in a mad scramble to escape the voracious alien who had obviously come for nefarious purposes. Mignon stopped herself. This is what their life is like. This is what they had to do to survive. This is what they learned to do. How many generations would have to pass before they wouldn’t run at the sight of a stranger? And is that such a bad thing? And Jesus, why aren’t they in school?
A woman stuck her head outside one of the doors of the little houses on stilts and surveyed Mignon from the top of the ragged mess of her hair to the bottom of her dripping Nikes. Evidently, she decided that Mignon wasn’t a police officer or a DEA agent or someone else there in an official capacity. “Whachoo want?” she called in a neutral voice.
“Looking for Mrs. Honore,” Mignon called back.
“Apolline be in the last house on the right,” the woman called right back. “Who you be?”
“My name is Mignon Thibeaux,” she said loudly. Mignon hadn’t moved because she saw the shotgun loosely cradled in the woman’s arms. It wasn’t pointed at her, but it wasn’t pointing all the way down either.
The woman made a face and suddenly relaxed. The gun’s barrel went all the way down so that it was directed at the ground. “Of course you be. Dint recognize you all like that.” She smiled at Mignon. “I seen you at Dara’s funeral, but you look a little…different now. You go on now. I reckon the chillen have done told Apolline you be here.” She went inside.
Mignon blinked and started to move slowly through the enclave toward where she had been directed. There were children hiding behind trailers and brush. Their eyes stared guardedly out at Mignon as if they were frightened animals. Curtains in windows moved as others took an opportunity to see what was happening.
A man in his late forties was chopping wood with an ax at the second house from the end. His dark brown hair was streaked with gray, and his frank brown eyes studied her. He nodded at her with a brief pause in his activity, but he didn’t smile.
Listening to her tennis shoes slosh, Mignon winced. If John Henry could see me now.
Apolline Honore came out of the last house and stared down the steps at Mignon. She was dressed in blue jeans and a white blouse and had an embroidered apron around her waist. “Good God,” she said. “Did you fall in?”
Mignon nodded. “Those pirogues are a little trickier than I would have guessed.”
Apolline looked a hundred times better than she had at her eldest child’s funeral. The bags were still under her eyes, but she had obviously gotten more sleep. Her hair was neatly French braided down the middle of her back, and her hazel eyes were bright with interest instead of dull with grief. “I’ll get you a towel. And maybe a cup of coffee. Oui?”
Mignon nodded with relief at her obvious acceptance. “That would be wonderful.”
A few minutes later, on the side of the little house with stilts, Apolline was sitting at a homemade picnic table with Mignon balancing the other side. One of the toddlers came within about ten feet and then stopped to stare at Mignon with large green eyes. The brilliant green color of the child’s eyes made Mignon think of the vividness of her mother’s eyes, and she was reminded that she was distantly connected to the people in this area.
Dry socks had first been handed to her with stern instructions to immediately take her wet shoes off and put the socks on. Then Apolline had given her a set of rubber boots. “You wear these back out. Leave them with the pirogues. Someone will get them back to us.” Then she had handed Mignon the cup of coffee and a towel.
Mignon drank the black coffee before taking the towel and rubbing briskly at her hair.
Apolline glanced at the toddler who was still rapt in his attention to Mignon. “It’s the hair,” Apolline said to Mignon. “Ain’t never seen someone wit’ hair that color. Wait til he sees what it be like after it dries. It’s sparkling now, but it glows when the sun’s hitting it.”
Mignon glanced at the toddler and smiled gently. He immediately stuck his thumb in his mouth and turned his glance bashfully to the ground. With a sigh she turned back to Apolline. “I came to speak with you,” she said frankly. Mignon didn’t like the idea of expressing compassion about Apolline’s loss of her daug
hter and then to start asking intrusive questions. It would sound as though she was the most-insincere person and that she didn’t care Dara had died. She did care, probably too much in the case of someone she didn’t even know. That was what John Henry thought, but John Henry didn’t understand what was motivating her. Mignon barely understood it herself.
Apolline sighed, as well. “I hear things,” she said. “They say Tomas Clovis took you off to the bayous last Sat’day to tell you that he be innocent, and he dint have nothing to do with Dara’s death. They say you asking all kinds of questions like you don’t think John Henry Roque doing a good job. And John Henry ain’t too terr’ble happy with you.”
“Do you really think Tomas did this horrifying thing?” Mignon asked honestly.
“Noel say yes.”
“She had other boyfriends,” Mignon said. Robert’s handsome face popped into her head. She didn’t want Apolline to get the idea that she suspected her own cousin of the deed.
“Sure. Not only that, but Noel trying to get her to marry up with a boy, too.” Apolline cracked a weary smile. It was a smile that spoke of warm thoughts about her eldest child. “Dara be…Dara was as willful as any child. She tell him that she no marry up with his choice. She marry up with the boy she wanted, and damn him straight to hell.”
“And would Noel have allowed her to do that?”
Apolline appeared surprised. “You don’t know my husband. I guess that’s right easy to forget. When it came to Dara, Noel’s all bark and no bite. He loved that girl. He would have walked to the edge of hell for her. Dara and I done figured he’d come around when his first grandchild presented itself afore us. Don’t matter about the color none.”
Mignon froze into place. “The color?” she repeated.
“Some folks mighty upset with Dara. They say we worked so hard to get us as light as we am. Some of ‘em like to be like you.” Apolline reached out to touch Mignon’s arm, and her fingers stroked the skin longingly for a brief moment. “White as roaches, they say.”
