Crimson Bayou

by C. L. Bevill

  “As roaches?”

  “It’s a Creole saying. It means when people used to powder they’s skin to make it look whiter. It was like when cockroaches used to come out of flour barrels.” Apolline withdrew her fingers with a rueful expression.

  There was a sudden vision of Apolline insisting that her children use sunblock at Dara’s funeral. They still had a longing for that paler skin. It was as if it was to be the honored prize at the end of an arduous journey. Mignon tried to keep the horror of realization from her face.

  “You don’t approve,” Apolline said, reading Mignon’s face anyway. “I reckon I understand that. Miz Prudhomme said you might not understand our ways at first.”

  Leelah Prudhomme, the unofficial mistress of the community, the elder among elders, and the one set up to try and judge Mignon for herself. Mignon had managed to put the elderly woman out of her mind for the time being. There was already a load of stuff rattling around there without worrying about being received into a family that she didn’t even know if she wanted acceptance from.

  “I don’t,” Mignon admitted. “I want to understand. Your husband didn’t approve of Tomas because of his skin color?”

  “When you put it like that,” Apolline said, “it sounds wicked bad, don’t it?”

  “Did Dara think like that?”

  “What?” Apolline’s expression was surprised again. “Was she thinking like the Gullahs be bad people on account on them blue gums?”

  Mignon nodded.

  “God no,” the other woman exclaimed forcibly. “I done raised that chile better than that. Respect her elders. Treat others as she would be treated.” She paused and quoted, “Who judges others, condemns hisself.” Then she added, “or herself.”

  There was a “but” coming. Mignon could hear it in Apolline’s significant pause.

  “But that girl thought she knew what was best for herself. After what happened with her papa and me, she went to the school to have the baby and then give it up. But Dara done changed in those weeks. That pretty little girl who said please and thank you was gone.” Apolline viciously wiped a tear away from her eye. “She wanted what she wanted and wasn’t going to let no one get in her way.”

  Another insight came to Mignon. “You don’t think that Tomas is responsible.”

  Apolline met Mignon’s eyes with a sad shake of her head. “No. I don’t.”

  “I have to be straight with you, Mrs. Honore,” Mignon said quickly. “I don’t know how else to say it, and I hate to repeat it, but was Dara a racist? Was she bigoted against others who were darker than herself?”

  Apolline stared at Mignon. “No. She got hard in the last weeks. She got…determined. But she ain’t never said a bad word about another Creole unlessin’ they had it coming. It dint surprise me she took up with a Gullah. As far as I know that boy, Tomas, ain’t a bad chile. He be in love with Dara something fierce.” Her eyes dipped to the rough surface of the picnic table. “Ain’t no one else thinks that.”

  “I don’t think he’s bad,” Mignon said slowly. “But what about other boyfriends? Who else would be angry with her? So angry they might…”

  “They might murder her in a powerful rage?” Apolline finished in a shocked tone. Her eyes stared at Mignon, and after a long moment, comprehension dawned. “You be asking about Robert, ain’t you? You worried he might be involved?”

  Mignon didn’t know how to answer that. But a firm grip came down on her shoulder and startled her out of any answer that she would have made.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Monday, March 17th

  My schoolteacher is a very nice man. He tries to teach me all he can.

  A-reading, a-writing, a-rithmatic, and he never forgets to use his stick.

  When he does he makes me dance out of England into France,

  Out of France and into Spain, over the hills and down the lane,

  Down the lane and into school. In that school there is a stool,

  On that stool there sits a fool, and her name is Marie Lavigne.

  - Children’s ball-bouncing rhyme

  Mignon saw an expression of dismay pass rapidly over Apolline’s face. Her worried hazel eyes were staring up at the person who had determinedly grasped Mignon’s shoulder. Then she was spun about by the hand and tumbled off the picnic table.

  Catching herself on one hand, Mignon looked up and saw Noel Honore, his face set like a granite statue on a distant Pacific island. “Choo don’t need to be here,” he said grimly.

  Deliberately taking a moment, Mignon tried not to let her anger rush over her. With the exception of a cheap suit, Noel appeared much as he did at his daughter’s funeral. Well over six feet tall, he towered over Mignon, glaring down into her composed face. His hair had been cut, shorn closely to his head, and his hazel eyes burned with constrained vehemence. Wide shoulders and brawny arms were encased in a plain white work shirt smudged with dirt. A tool belt hung loosely around the waist of sturdy blue jeans. He wore steel-toed boots. It took Mignon a second to realize Noel had just returned home and that he worked in some kind of construction job.

  “I dint hear the boat,” Apolline said.

  “No, choo dint. Gas line’s clogged up again. Carl Picquery’s got it in ten t’ousand pieces, him. I called him dis morning to come get dat piece of crap.” He didn’t move away from Mignon but loomed over her and stared down with intent eyes. “I took a pirogue.”

  “You dint have to…” Apolline started to say and then clamped her mouth shut when Noel shot her the exact same blistering expression.

  His gaze returned unerringly to Mignon. “Whachoo you want here, woman?”

  Mignon broke the combined set of stares and brushed herself off. She stood easily and didn’t back away from Noel. It was possible she was going to get a beating, but she wasn’t going to take it sitting down. “I wanted to talk to you and your wife about Dara.”

  A brief moment of confusion flitted over Noel’s face. He had been expecting her to say something else. “Dara?” he repeated.

  Nodding, Mignon brushed a little dirt off her hands to cover up the fact that she was suddenly trembling. Noel had been like a skyscraper to her one-story house when she had been sitting on the ground, but even standing up he made her feel like a child. He was big. His hands were the size of platters, and his biceps were the size of one of her thighs. He could literally pound her like an aluminum can, if he had a mind to do such a thing, and he just might.

  The façade changed like a rapacious ocean current. It became furtive. “Choo want to know about Dara. Why for choo want such a t’ing?”

  Mignon’s hands went palm up at either side of her body, appealing for cooperation in the form of non-threatening body language. “I’m not sure I can explain in a way you can understand. At first it was because she was in a foster home. She reminded me of me. Dara could have been me. I could have been her. Only by a set of circumstances were we any different. Does that make sense to you?”

  Noel took that in with an obvious struggle. He was trying to understand if she had just insulted him. “Dara ain’t like choo,” he said finally. “She have parents, parents who dint run off on her.”

  “I know that now, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not concerned about where the sheriff’s investigation is leading.”

  “You t’ink John Henry is all messed up,” Noel said incredulously. The underlying rage faded for a second. “You don’t t’ink dat boy, Tomas, be the one who harmed my girl?”

  Mignon steadied herself for the outburst of anger that she was sure to follow. But Noel suddenly calmed. His ham-sized fists unclenched, and his shoulders slumped.

  “Choo crazy for coming out here,” he said presently. “Look at choo. Choo fell in, dint you? A big old gator goin’ to et choo for his supper and have to go find seconds. And as for Tomas, let a court decide ‘bout him. I don’t know ifin he done that ter’ble t’ing, but choo ain’t goin’ he’p by coming out here and sticking your nose into everyone’s bidness.�
�� His chin went up. “Go on. Go on home now. Ain’t not’ing out here for choo.”

  Apolline went to protest but instead got off the bench on the other side of the picnic table and offered Mignon’s wet Nikes to her.

  “Put dose boots on, too,” Noel directed acrimoniously. “Else we looking for choo…again.”

  Putting the Nikes on the ground for a moment, Mignon pulled the rubber boots on with a bleak silence. Noel walked her three-quarters of the way to the dock and then handed her something, enveloping her smaller hand with his. When his hand retracted, she saw a wad of worn and dirty twenty dollar bills resting in her open palm. Noel glanced over his shoulder at where his wife was watching anxiously from the muddy front yard of their little house. Then his head swiveled back to Mignon and he said, “For the funeral. Cain’t pay much, but choo get it all over time.”

  She couldn’t look at the money because she was caught up in the expression on Noel’s face. “I can’t— ” she started to say, but he cut her off.

  “We pay for our own,” Noel snarled. “Choo should have asked first.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything that Mignon could think to say that would make the diminished situation any better. Noel watched while she launched the same pirogue and clambered ungainly in, managing to stay afloat and inside the little boat this time. She settled herself on the little seat and looked over her shoulder at the enclave. The children had come back out and were playing, albeit quietly, and surreptitiously looking at her and Noel.

  Mignon hesitated before pulling the paddle off the inside wall of the pirogue. The very action of getting inside of it had pushed it outward, and she was very slowly going out into the deeper part of the bayou. She stared at Noel and then called, “What about Robert Dubeaux?”

  Noel called right back “What ‘bout Robert Dubeaux?” He said it so promptly that Mignon doubted that there had been any connection in his mind between her cousin and Dara’s murder. She wasn’t exactly sure if that was good news or that she should suspect that Noel was a little slow. A group of children gathered behind him, and the littlest one went to wrap himself around Noel’s trunk-like leg. One of his hands went down to absently pat at the little boy’s dark brown head. Then another older child encircled skinny arms around Noel’s waist. A third one yelled cheerfully, “Time to blow the old man down!”

  That was a signal for a pile-up on their father because a throng of children flew at him from multiple directions. They weren’t concerned that his temper would flare. They didn’t seem to notice that he had just been very angry with the stranger who had visited. They were just children. Noel mock-bellowed and went down like a ton of bricks under several flaying bodies. After thirty seconds of playful skirmishing, he yelled, “I surrender! Oh, Lordy I surrender! Choo got me good!”

  By the time Mignon got the paddle out, she was more than a little ashamed of herself for her previous thoughts about the Honore family. It was only a snapshot she’d witnessed, only a brief slice of their existence, but they seemed like caring people. They struggled with money, but they didn’t allow it to rule their way of life like a miserly overlord who subjugated them at his beck and call.

  The wad of money burned like a condemning brand in the palm of her hand. She wanted to drop it or return it to Noel with slick words that would slice through the discomfort like a warm knife through butter. But Mignon had nothing. Nothing at all came to her lips except denunciation of her own thoughts on what poverty did to people. Judgment had been her personal executioner. Because she was educated and wealthy and once in the same position as many of the girls at Blessed Heart, she thought that she knew what the true situation was like.

  Mignon now realized the reality of it. She knew nothing. She began to paddle toward the dock, taking refuge in exertion and letting her mind go as blank as the black waters through which the pirogue cut.

  •

  The sun was about to set in the west. Mignon glanced at her watch and determined that repeated dunking in the water had made it stop at 4:12 p.m. She didn’t know what time it was but guessed it had taken her about thirty minutes to go to the enclave. There was about an hour spent talking with Apolline and Noel. She wouldn’t have particularly cared about the time except that the sun was about to set, and she was smack-dab in the middle of a bayou in a rickety boat that she would have to trust to get her safely to dry ground.

  Not my ideal situation for having fun, Mignon thought. She put the money that Noel had given her into one of her damp pockets and tried not to think about how she was going to handle that issue in the future. She didn’t want the Honores to pay her back. Not only could she afford the cost of the funeral, but she wouldn’t even miss it in the greater scheme of things. They’re so damn poor.

  That isn’t the way Noel sees it though. She couldn’t check the contradictory thought from spearing through her mind. Oh hell.

  Mignon followed the markers as the sky turned to pink in the west. She passed an idling power boat with two men who stared at her as if she were a loony escaped from the local asylum. She waved at them and called, “Am I close to where the communal dock is?”

  One jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction that she was going. Mignon was reasonably pleased that she hadn’t taken one of the wrong turns that led down to other bayous. As darkness began to fall, the bayou was looking remarkably similar to where she’d already been. It would be so easy to get lost, and she didn’t want to spend the night out here. “Cain’t miss it,” he called. “You…ah…fall in?”

  “Half-Man,” she called back, suddenly perverse. “Tried to get half of my soul. Best be careful if I were you.”

  One of the men laughed nervously, and the other one jerked the wheel of the power boat. “Ain’t funny,” he said loudly to the other. The engine of the power boat suddenly roared, and the two men took off for safer parts.

  She came up to the dock after the sky had begun to turn the ripening shade of a matured plum. Full of nervous tension that bordered on excitement the seeming isolation made Mignon take a moment to appreciate how lonely the bayous could seem. Only twenty miles away was a small city, full of people in the midst of tourist season. Mardi Gras had just been jubilantly celebrated, and the bayous were distant things in which only rumors wandered. It was the thing of which urban legends were created.

  But not to Mignon, not right now. The image of the ruined church in a distant unknown bayou came to her. The walls tilted ominously to one side, the light refracted through what was left of crimson leaded glass, and gravestones sank into the murky depths where they would never be seen again. It had been a town where freed and escaped slaves had settled, in a place that no one else wanted. At the end of the world where, there be dragons, like on an ancient map. But the only dragon about was the one who had murdered a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Another thought occurred to her. Apolline said that Dara had changed in those weeks. The mother didn’t understand the radical transformation in the daughter. The person who wasn’t related could see a little more objectively. Dara was determined to keep her child. Maybe she hadn’t been aware of it, but Mignon didn’t think that her parents could have legally forced the teenager to give the baby up. Morally, ethically, and through familial persuasion they could have manipulated to their hearts’ content. Dara had been smart enough to realize that she needed the legal edge. Her family was no longer on her side, despite what Apolline had said about Noel coming around. The realization had made Dara Honore desperate, desperate enough to change in the ways that her mother, and doubtless others, had noticed.

  Mignon tiredly stowed the paddle as the pirogue bumped the support of the dock. She didn’t want to pretend that she could adeptly step in and out of the little boat like John Henry and Robert could. She moved toward the shore and put a leg into the water, while she tried to maintain her balance. It was rough going, but she managed to only get soaked from the waist down. She yanked the pirogue up on the shore with a colorful curse. Then she carried the little
boat back to where she’d found it. Although it wasn’t heavy, no more than fifty pounds, her arms ached by the time she was done, and she knew she would have sore muscles the next morning.

  Her shoes had been dumped out on the shore, so she removed the boots by hopping on alternating legs. Leaving the boots in a prominent place on the little dock, she sat down on the edge and squeezed her feet into the shrinking material of the shoes. As she began to climb to her feet, some indiscernible thing made her hesitate.

  Although it wasn’t full dark, shadows had begun to inch their way over her, intent on conquering the landscape until next the sun peeked its face over the horizon. A noise made her stop in place, one knee resting on the deck, one hand resting on the bend of her knee to aid in her ascent. Mignon wasn’t sure that she had actually heard what she thought she’d heard. Then it came again. A low growl echoed over to her, a warning noise that made the hair on the back of her neck stand up straight.

  Shapes moved in the shadows to her right. She heard another deep growl, and she tried to become invisible. Remembering the cougar in the bayous, she knew that there were dangerous things about; she had been warned of them repeatedly by John Henry, Miner Poteet, and Robert Dubeaux, among others. But where was her Beretta? The answer was simple; it was locked in the back of her Explorer, where it would remain while an unknown something attempted to eviscerate her still-warm corpse.

  Her head jerked at another movement off to her left. Abruptly, Mignon perceived that it wasn’t a cougar, and it wasn’t alone. She didn’t know whether to be relieved that her unknown persecutor was not human or to be even more alarmed.

  Low growls overwhelmed the peaceful tranquility of the bayou. Birds settling into their nests for the evening had stopped their chirping lest they became the prey of choice. The wind had ceased, leaving an awful noiselessness that seemed louder than the howl of a tornado. Out of the corners of her eyes, Mignon could see the slinking movement of that which was determinedly stalking her. Her muscles were like lead. Fear had inundated her body and was making her limbs as useless as a baby’s.