by Annie Proulx
“My car’s gonna get a Mexican car wash,” said Buddy.
“That’s your leather valves. They’ll curl up over time.” He had the instrument open, examining the reed plate. “It’s an old one, see it how it’s made, oh yeah, everything by the craftsman hand, everything good. Look here. We replace the valves. Just one big reed plate. See how he puts a little bend in the reeds at the tip? That gives you more metal at the tip, the tone is deep, more full. You know, I think we give her new reeds, retune, flatten the thirds, give her a good sharp bite. ‘Anodder man’s waaaaaf.’”
“Sounds pretty good.”
“OK. Then replace the gasket around the treble box—she’s no good. Take the grille off. Pretty, but it smothers the tone. We get it ready for Saturday. They say some woman photographer come here, wanna see Cajun life, oyster tong, fais dodo, la boucherie. How much you pay for this little box?”
There was an anxious silence in the room. Buddy leaned against the sink, crossed his feet at the ankles. A tremendous thunderclap, and a simultaneous stroke of lightning turned the room blue.
“Don’t sit near the window, cher,” pleaded Mme Malefoot to the yellow cat.
“One hundred and fifteen dollars.” He ignored the storm, his mother.
“Mon dieu! You Jean Sot! Too much money. It’s a fortune. You throw money away. Don’t you point out the problems to him? You could get him down maybe to fifty, sixty? She’s worth something, oh yeah, me, I don’t say she’s not, a handmade, a special one, but needs work, and if you was smart you could jew him down, non?” and crushed the smoking stub of his cigarette into the glass ashtray.
“No. Listen, Papa, you getting tight as the skin on a dead goat. I got a good reason. That poor woman up in Maine after what happen she need every penny. She’ll never, never, never get over it, Emma says.”
“She find him?”
“No, thank the saints. Somebody work in the woods near him, finds him and run out like a crazy man.” He lowered his voice so the children wouldn’t hear, although they did. “He cuts off his own head. He makes a thing in the woods, tie up the chain saw between some trees and get it running, and then he—and then he walk into it so it—zut.” He drew his hand across his neck.
“Non!”
“Yeah. But you know what? He done his day’s work first.”
“That’s the Frenchman for you!”
“Grandpa, the cows fell down and now they’re sleeping in the rain,” said the boy.
“Eh? Oh, oh, holy god!” He flung open the kitchen door and looked at the three cows, their bodies steaming in the downpour, looked at the tilted pole, the power line from it trailing on the fence, at the metal trough half full of wet hay and sparking. Yet they were not dead. In twenty minutes they were standing with wide-spraddled legs, and nothing ever induced any of them to eat from a trough again. Onesiphore had to pitch their hay on the ground and even then they were suspicious.
Women at the fais dodo
The photographer, Olga Buckle, a tall blond woman with Afro-frizzed hair and wearing red bell-bottoms, skilled at setting her foot in an advantageous spot and shoving until she got into the center of things, parked in the lumpy dirt yard outside the plank-sided dance hall faced around the bottom with corrugated metal and roofed with the same material. She drove a new De Soto with Flair-Stream fins and push-button drive. Her great shot had been on the cover of Life the year before, college students squeezed into a telephone booth, and a close-up of an agonized face with bulging eyes at the bottom of the pile, a twenty-year-old pole vaulter dying as the shutter clicked.
She was on assignment for the Folklore of the American Hinterlands Institute in Washington, a government-funded archive staffed by trim little men with grey goatees. She could never relax, did not drink even when someone said a drink is a Cajun handshake, wouldn’t dance, couldn’t see the point of bourée, yawned at horse races, was a stranger to hog and beef killings, had never tasted the white tailmeat of cocodrie, could not keep her balance in a skiff, had never slept on a pillow stuffed with dried moss, was not Catholic, had never before seen a rub-board or thimble rhythm section, rice or cane in the field, nor driven a mule, nor ridden a horse, nor caught a hog, could not understand French and did not like women. She was a chain-smoker. Almost all the pictures she took were of men, though weaver Granny Reneaux (who looked like a man) appeared in one or two, weaving, and Mme Fortier, five times a widow, tufting a quilt and shooting glances out of her rare violet eyes, got a shot.
Inside the hall the writer, Winnie Wall, sidled up to her and said, “I thought you were lost.”
“I never get lost.”
Winnie Wall was a youngish woman who had abandoned her brassiere, dressed in a sprigged calico Mother Hubbard and lugged a recording machine. She asked hundreds of relentless questions in a French so stiff and peculiar that people begged her to speak English. She seemed always about to faint, her underarms wet with sweat, her rough-skinned face without makeup or lipstick, streaked with perspiration, and her damp hair matted down.
“She is very sick, she has a sickness in a private place,” whispered Mrs. Blush Leleur, the traîteuse, to the daughter-in-law’s pale ear. Both women stood in the room off the main dance hall, the children’s room where the big platform bed was made up for a dozen babies. In the main hall they were playing “The Unlucky Waltz.” The daughter-in-law handed her plate of Marshmallow Krispy Treats to the traîteuse to hold while she put Debbie down. At the end of the waltz Archange, the announcer, spoke into the microphone.
“Driver of the maroon and white pickup, you lights is on.”
The traîteuse, tall, with large, strong hands, was dressed in rose-colored slacks and a purple rayon blouse with cloth-covered buttons and a Chinese collar. She wore twelve strings of false pearls around her neck, one long and descending below her waist. Although she was sixty-five her hair was as black as soot and as curly as sucked dandelion stems. She wore gilded harlequin eyeglasses with tinted lenses. On her withered earlobes were clamped pearl disks. Her face was wrinkled, the same blunt but agreeable expression as that of a turtle, her mouth colored with black-red lipstick called Barbecue. The daughter-in-law covered her wide-awake child with a red shawl and sang, half American, half French, “‘go to sleepy, little bébé, when you wake you shall have some cherry cake …’” Her white, sleek arms looked airbrushed. The music stopped and the microphone squealed and whistled.
“Driver of that two-tone pickup, you don’t shut the lights off you be hoofin it. You battery almost dead.”
“I can smell this sickness. It is in her private parts and she wears no underclothing because of the pain it causes her. She can speak of it to no one. The photographer, she dislikes her and did not wish her to come. They are here to learn Cajun ways.” She laughed with good-natured malice. Through the doorway they watched the young woman take a bottle of beer from an outstretched hand.
“That will make it worse,” said Mrs. Blush Leleur, “beer is very bad for this one’s condition. There was such a woman in a certain parish a dozen years ago, she swelled up so her private parts resembled two slices of watermelon, a terrible itching and burning of fire. Her husband—he was an albino and at first I thought it was because of something coming out of him, you know what I mean, that made her like this—but he could not even enter the same room. She prayed for death and wept day and night because the pain was so intense.”
“What caused such a thing!”
“Beer. And other foods and spices, wholesome for others, simple good things as okra, yams, beans and peanuts, pecans and even grits. It came to me in a dream. I dreamed of her drinking beer and suffering. First I made her fast for five days and drink only rainwater to clear her body of poisons. Then I gave a little corn bread and lettuce, rice and other little things that nourished her and did not inflame the susceptible parts. She lived many happy years until she was frightened by a bone in a jar some evil one placed on her top stair and went into a cataleptic trance and wasted away. How is
Mme Malefoot?”
“She’s in good health except for the arthritis, but very coldhearted. She barely touches her grandchildren. She cares nothing for the child that is coming. Onesiphore sleeps alone in their bed. She spends much time in Belle’s room. What must we do? Is there a cure for this?”
The music halted again and Archange’s hollow voice said, “you better call you mother, pickup owner—you ain’t got no transportation.”
“Do you wish to engage me?”
The daughter-in-law thought for a moment. It was not her affair or her place to interfere. Onesiphore and Buddy should speak to the traîteuse. Yet she thought they would not do so. She thought of her children, so coldly embraced by their grandmother whose glance fell away from them as though they were worms.
“Yes.”
“Very well. This woman has frozen her grief. This woman has sealed her heart up by will. She fears nothing for herself now, not death or God, feels herself damned to hell on earth. She feels nothing for her husband for she has left his bed. She feels nothing for her grandchildren for she is cold to them and does not see them. You she does not see. But what of the other son, Buddy. Is she frozen to him as well?”
“To everything. Except her yellow cat. In the storm that knocked down their cows—she laughed as they lay in the mud—the cat sat near the window and she pleaded with him to move. She called him ‘cher.’”
“Maybe this is good. She still feels something. Not good that it is a cat who engages her affection. Still, perhaps we can pry open this little crack into her heart to pour in a warm medicine that will make her return to her family. Let me put this matter under my pillow. Come to my house if you can in a few days and I will have a plan.”
In the house of the traîteuse
One did not enter the kitchen of Mrs. Blush Leleur but stepped into a cramped hall containing a coatrack and a chair with a cowhide seat, a hooked rug in a design of roses. She had come by her fearsome powers as a child. One day in the late autumn her father, an alcoholic cow horn salesman, leaned against the barn wall and jealously watched a stranger enter his yard, knock on his door. A gypsy. He imagined he saw his wife smile and wink at this gypsy man selling painted wooden fruit. When the gypsy left he gathered armfuls of dry leaves and grass and piled it in the yard, dragged his wife outside (the child watching through the window), threw her down in the tinder and set it on fire. The wretched woman ran shrieking and aflame for the bayou, emerged sobbing and muddy, burned on her arms and legs, the side of her face white with dead skin. The child directed a savage thought at her father, that he become small and weak. That night her father began to shrink. The process was agonizingly slow, but in ten years he was the height of a child, withered and tiny, his arms like hollow stalks, and when he finally died he was no larger than a loaf of bread. His scarred and ruined wife threw him into the yard for the hens to peck. (She remarried a blind egg farmer and enjoyed a decade of vigorous affection before their car was struck by an Amtrak train, the engineer’s timing distorted by the hallucinatory by-flashes of utility poles.)
The hall opened into an intensely crowded parlor, the walls obscured by photographs of Leleurs and Prudhommes singing, graduating, marrying, paintings of Christ blessing the multitude, Christ like a girl with a mustache, crucifixes large and small, stamped metal maxims, bunches of dried flowers, silent clocks, calendars, a recipe for butter cookies on a painted breadboard; every flat surface was covered with a cloth and every cloth was of lace. On a table in the corner lay a bible, a spiral notebook in which visitors were invited to write their names, a ballpoint pen that formed the tail of a ceramic hound dog, three vases of plastic flowers, seventeen saints and Christs, eleven photographs of grandchildren, five candles, a folded newspaper, a stack of postal flyers and supermarket coupons, a Zippo lighter, a bottle of Troutman’s cough syrup, a camera, a ceramic owl, a blue candy box. The television, new and blond, with splayed spindle legs, flickered in the corner. Pinned to the wall was a newspaper article featuring a photograph of Mrs. Blush Leleur dressed in her rayon blouse and strings of beads.
She invited the daughter-in-law, who had fetched a plate of green cupcakes as an offering, to take a chair near the table, brought her a demitasse of petit noir and said, “if this cat dies, her affection will take flight and fasten to the first one who approaches her with consoling words. You must see that it is you, her grandchildren, her husband and son who comfort her over the loss of the cat. She will love you all. And that’s what we want—when people’s gonna love you, when evrabody’s her friend and she won’t never do no wrong against you and the grandchildren again. Just gonna love them.” She bit into a cupcake.
“Oh, chère, what good frosting.”
“But the cat is healthy and well.”
“Things change,” said the traîteuse.
Death comes for the yellow cat
The yellow cat was nine years old and had not spent one of his lives. But, as sometimes is the case, he had to pay up everything in full in a few brief minutes.
Like many fortunate beings he had become self-centered, would not eat crawfish unless Mme Malefoot removed the shells, spurned skim milk, preferred sauce roulée to butter but had been known to lick the butter down to the pattern on the dish, and had only to scratch idly at the back door and Mme would come flying and coax him in with promises of cheese, for he liked squares of good strong cheese above all else excepting fresh-caught young mice, so young they had not yet grown throat-catching fur to spoil the treat, could be swallowed alive, bones and all, their wriggles providing a pleasant frisson.
He rarely left the Malefoot farm for he was too heavy for adventure, knew the boundaries and fences very well, had timed to a nicety the distance he could travel in the adjoining goat pasture before the old billy would charge and helplessly clang his horns on the fence while the cat licked his paw in safety. He crossed the road sometimes to the neighbor’s where he ate the dish of scraps the child set out for a thin dog, but looked both ways first and never let himself be approached by pedestrians, especially those with guns, sticks, ropes, whips, branches, stones or other harmful objects in their hands. No one could touch him but Mme Malefoot, and sometimes he pulled away from her or clawed her caressing hand. Before he became too heavy, he was a great cat for climbing the chinaberry tree and capturing birds. In his prime he had torn swallows from the air, and he was still a first-rate rat and mouse catcher, crouching silently near the long grass for interminable lengths of time until he detected the faint stirring in the grass, then, with hindquarters setting and resetting, tail twitching and eyes ablaze, he sprang, and an hour of amusement was guaranteed as he let it go, sprang again, released it, batted it up in the air, caught it in his hind feet like a ball of yarn, rolled on it, pretended to lose it utterly while watching the grass quake and tremble as the wounded mouse staggered off, then flew upon it once again until the mouse was worn out and dead, and even then he smacked it about hoping to revive it with a little roughing up.
Two weeks after the fais dodo the photographer was still hanging around, though Winnie with the tape recorder had gone back up north. The photographer had exhausted the tamer aspects of Cajun life and had turned now to illegal cockfights, flashlight alligator hunts, horses being fixed with charms and potions to win or lose races, miscegenation, arm-wrestling matches where the winner snaps the loser’s ulna, staring matches, bad-blood ambushes, shooting victims, raped and disheveled girls telling their stories, raids on stills, swamp hideouts with escaped convicts in residence, or, what was now promised for Saturday night, dogfights to the death. She felt no personal danger when thrusting into these dark affairs; she held her camera as a shield, felt her position to be one of privilege and safety, for she had an important reputation, came from the north, and she knew better.
The yellow cat was taken in surprise ambush. As he helped himself to orts in the neighbor dog’s dish, a croker sack came down over him with violence and such speed that the dog’s dish and the fatback rind and co
ld grits in it were swept up as well. At first he tried to claw his way out, razory talons protruding from the sack mesh, but the abductor tied a double knot in the sack neck and threw it and the cat into the back of an idling pickup truck which squealed onto the highway and sped into the golden evening light. Inside the sack the cat wrestled and clawed, slumped, despaired, howled and swore vengeance, bit the dish with such fury it cracked, shat with rage but was still in the croker sack when the truck arrived at a waterfront warehouse where men, dogs and the photographer waited.
The dogs were streamlined for fighting, their ears cropped away, their tails bobbed. They had no rest. Tonight’s winner had to fight again the next day and every fight was to the death. How long a dog lived depended on how long he kept winning. Big money exchanged hands. A good dog man could live on his ring earnings without working. The yellow cat was the opening entertainment, an appetizer to get the dogs’ blood up, in the mood for killing.
The yellow cat was dumped into a sandy ring about twenty feet across, surrounded by a chicken-wire fence with a rail top. Men, smoking, chewing, rolling cigarettes, gnawing on buffalo chicken wings or biting their nails, sucking at their fingers, picking shreds of meat from between their teeth with horny nails, hung over the rail, rested their arms on it. They shouted when the yellow cat tumbled out. Grits were matted in his fur. He was huge, bristling with insult, fright and rage. He streaked for the chicken-wire fence, searching for the way out. Three dogs were released into the ring and they went for him at once, growling, snapping, skidding to a stop and turning on a nickel as the cat spun and wove and dashed between them. There was no respite. Every frontal feint was answered from behind. He clawed a dog’s nose, another dog seized him by the back and shook, his hindquarters were paralyzed, yet his eyes continued to blaze and he lashed out. It was over in a few minutes when his head was taken in the jaws of a stubby black dog and crushed. The yellow cat was dead.
