“Well, now, I might use what God put in the soil of this earth to make a cure, but I don’t ever tell nobody they gots to rub it on a black cat. I just go ahead and make a medicine out of growing things that I know will help a body make it through they troubles. I don’t hold with no fetishes like voodoo folk do. If I keep a thing and look at it when I pray, it because it remind me of the God of Abraham and Moses who deliver the Hebrews away from the Pharaoh and take them to the Promised Land. Now, lets us talk about something else.”
—Where’s your family?
“They all be gone.”
—Where did they go?
“They gone on before me to the Sweet By-and-By.
—Is that in Louisiana?
“What you mean, ‘Is that in Louisiana?’ Mercy sakes, chile, who been teaching you geography? The Sweet By-and-By be in heaven!”
Bonaventure made a mental note to ask his dad about the Sweet By-and-By.
—Did you ever see anybody do voodoo?
“Are we back on that old stuff? Yes, I did. But she gone now.”
—Did she go to the Sweet By-and-By?
“That depends.”
—On what?
“On whether she be sorry or even understand the bad she done.”
Trinidad busied herself at the sink and stove then. She didn’t like to dwell on certain memories.
Bonaventure had this feeling that Trinidad knew things other people didn’t. Not stuff like if somebody happened to eat a cookie before supper or if somebody maybe forgot to wipe his shoes on the mat and maybe tracked some dirt in the house. It was more like he thought she could tell when folks were feeling bad, like when they were sick or sad or worried.
The next time he met with Grand-mère Letice for what she’d begun to call his catechism lessons, the story of the Ten Commandments was the topic of the day. After their lesson, Bonaventure signed, —Trinidad knows Ten Commandments.
“Oh? What makes you say that?”
—She knows about God.
“That’s good.”
Nod, nod.
“What does Trinidad say about God?”
—She keeps things for him.
“I see.”
—And Trinidad can make hoodoo medicine. Not voodoo.
Even though Grand-mère was superb at understanding sign by this time, Bonaventure used the notepad to write out the stuff about hoodoo and voodoo, just to make sure she knew what he said.
Letice tried not to give her thoughts away. She didn’t speak; she didn’t blink; she didn’t breathe. She looked at her watch and said, “Well, I think that’s all we have time for right now, Bonaventure,” and kissed him and sent him out to play. She couldn’t stop shaking for the rest of the day.
Letice had a dream that night in which William was alive, locked inside his tomb. He flailed and gasped for air, spending his breath in anguished screams. The door was solid brass, heavy. William scraped at it until his fingers bled. Then the vault transformed around him: its cement walls and iron braces softened into human flesh, and he was trapped inside a grasping membrane within a hollow, gray-tissued, scarred-up womb. William peeled and tore and rubbed at the membrane, and as he did, the cord wrapped tighter and tighter around his neck, leaving it covered in welts and bruises.
Letice awoke sick to her stomach. That afternoon, when Gabe came for the tutoring session, she excused herself, saying she had something to take care of, and headed for the kitchen.
“How are you today, Trinidad?” she asked.
“Well, I’m just fine, Miz Arrow, just fine. And you?” Trinidad wondered how it was that Miz Arrow was in the kitchen with her instead of at the lesson with everyone else.
“I guess you could say I’m mostly fine.”
As determined as she was to find out about Trinidad’s connection to hoodoo, Letice was nervous and was having a hard time getting started at it. She busied herself rearranging the apples and bananas that sat in a wooden bowl. Finally, she spoke.
“Bonaventure tells me you’re familiar with hoodoo.”
Trinidad felt the presence of suspicion in the room. “Yes, ma’am.”
“In that case, I would like to ask a favor of you.”
Trinidad supposed it was possible that Miz Arrow was about to ask for an herbal remedy for some slight malady or other, but Trinidad didn’t really believe that was the case.
“You’re more than just familiar with hoodoo, aren’t you, Trinidad? In fact, you are a hoodoo practitioner. Am I right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Please don’t be offended by what I’m about to say, but I would appreciate it if you would not discuss hoodoo or voodoo with Bonaventure. I’m trying very hard to educate him in the Catholic faith and I don’t want him to become confused. Can I count on you?”
“Yes, ma’am, you can. I know you be Catholic. I have Catholic in my soul too.”
“You’re Catholic, Trinidad?”
“I say I have Catholic in my soul, Miz Arrow. I hold with the notion that it not enough to preach, that you got to do good too. And I hold with Blessed Mary.”
“How did you come by your faith?”
“When my mother pass on, I got put in a orphanage that be run by Catholic Sisters; the Sisters of the Holy Family they be,” Trinidad answered. “Well, one of them, Sister Sulpice, she tell me about how we got to show God our goodness, not just brag on ourselves like the Pharisees do, and she told me about that good Saint Francis and how he love all God’s creatures and all God’s earth, and she told me about Mary too. And it felt real good to hear what Sister Sulpice have to say.”
Letice asked to hear more of what Sister Sulpice had said.
“She say Mary never have one sin on her soul because she be the mother of Jesus. And she tell me that Mary’s heart big enough to be mother to everybody. She say Mary all good and all kind and will lead a soul to Jesus if they ask her to.”
Letice reached into her pocket, pulled out a rosary, and handed it to Trinidad. “I want you to have this. If you like, I’ll teach you the proper prayers and the joyful and sorrowful mysteries.”
“Well, now, I thank you for that, Miz Arrow, but there no need to teach me the prayers; I already know them,” she said. “But I always did suspect there be mysteries. Lord knows, nobody understand where love come from if not from inside a mystery. Maybe you could teach me about the mysteries at the same time as you teach Mr. Bonaventure.”
“I would like that,” Letice said. “I would like that very much.”
Trinidad put the rosary into her apron pocket. She intended to place it on her altar when she got home, along with the other sacred objects she kept there. Wanting to make sure things were all right with Miz Arrow, Trinidad offered a further explanation.
“If you don’t mind, Miz Arrow, I’d like to say something more. But like I said, that be if you don’t mind.”
“Well, if it’s important to you, then please go ahead.”
“It be about the hoodoo, ma’am. See, I don’t mix with conjuring or voodoo charms. I only deal with root work. It be the healing of the body with herbs and such. Root work be all I do with the hoodoo.”
Letice hadn’t heard the words
root work
in nearly thirty-five years, and hearing them now caused her mind to fly back to April of 1923, to a whitewashed room on St. Philip Street, where voodoo and hoodoo leached through the bricks like a creeping scum and crawled down her throat and into her belly and out from the place between her legs. She remembered the fever and the terror and the pain. It was the night she had become haunted, made anxious and devout by the fragile apparition of a torn and bloodied infant.
L
ETICE
Molyneaux had kissed Tristan Duvais for the first time on a Thursday in 1921 when they were both sixteen years old. She’d been watching him clean saddles in the tack room. He looked different to her on that day. She suddenly noticed his hair curled at his collar, and she was awed by the breadth of his shoulders. Letice hadn’t planned the kiss; she simply walked up behind him, stood on her tiptoes, and touched her lips to the back of his neck.
“Miss Letice, please don’t do that,” he’d said.
“Mr. Tristan, why not?” There was laughter between her words.
Tristan looked a long look at her before saying, “Don’t make fun of me, Letice. You know why not.”
“Because you’re the help?”
“Right the first time.”
“I don’t care, Tristan.”
“I do. We’re not children anymore, Letice. We’re too old to play together.”
Tristan Duvais left the tack room and went out into the stable yard so as not to be alone with the boss’s daughter.
Three days later she kissed him twice, and the second time he kissed her back. A third kiss came through open lips, and a fourth with seeking tongues. The two of them lived with desire after that; a desire they satisfied on a cot in the tack room, or in a hidden place by the riverbank, or on a blanket in a far corner of a pine tree woods. They risked everything to feel each other skin to skin.
Letice sought out her father, saying she wanted to become a better equestrian. Sportsman that he was, Horatio Molyneaux was only too happy to oblige. Arrangements were made for Tristan to give Letice advanced instruction, and no one questioned how much time she spent in the stables.
Tristan and Letice fell in love, in the way only the very young can. What had begun as a sexual awakening became so much more in their eyes. At first, they worried about Letice becoming pregnant, but the longer they were together, the deeper the spell became, until neither of them thought about that at all. They went on sharing their bodies and their dreams, not noticing that more than a year had gone by.
Letice made her debut into New Orleans society at the ball before Lent in 1922, when she was seventeen. She had dressed in white, as debutantes most always will. Tristan had dressed for the evening too, in crisp dark livery, as chauffeurs most always do. Being so close on the night of her debut, but not being able to touch, had put them in a frenzy.
Everyone noticed Letice Molyneaux on Fat Tuesday at the Goddess of the Rainbow Ball. She was presented with a “call-out” card and given a seat in a select area until she was “called out” early in the evening by Remington Arrow, a Rex Krewe member and sender of the card. Remington was older than Letice by ten years.
“Have we met before?” she asked as they danced, trying to make conversation.
“Indeed we have, a year or so ago, on a boat outing.”
Letice did not remember.
“It was a sail down the Bogue Falaya and the Tchefuncte River put on by your daddy’s yacht club.
“Oh, yes, now I recall.”
The evening passed pleasantly enough. Remington took Letice’s quietness for shyness, when in fact she was consumed with thoughts of Tristan.
When the Lenten season ended, Remington Arrow came to call, and by summer they were engaged to be married the following year. But in stolen moments the bride-to-be cried in her secret lover’s arms and begged him to run away with her, though she knew Tristan needed time to save money.
From the moment the engagement became official, Letice’s mother, Emmaline Molyneaux, kept Letice relentlessly busy with wedding preparations: invitations had been die-cut and printed in Paris, and dressmakers and florists were always underfoot. As a result, she and Tristan had not been together for a very long time.
The year went by. For Mardi Gras in 1923, Letice told Remington she would like to meet him at the Athenaeum rather than arrive together. She said she wanted to surprise him with her costume. Remington agreed and Tristan was once again her chauffeur.
When Remington looked at his fiancée that night, he marveled at the thought that soon she would be his wife. She seemed distracted and a little curt, but he attributed her behavior to a case of stretched nerves due to the wedding plans. Letice was anything but nervous; she was anxious, sexually excited, and watching the clock. At nine, she was to rendezvous with Tristan in an anteroom she knew off a little-used ballroom corridor.
Minutes passed slower than days. At last there was a break in the dancing, though the musicians continued to play for the pleasure of those couples who chose to step through the doors that were open to the terrace. Letice complained of a headache and told Remington that she needed to lie down for a while in the ladies’ lounge.
Over her Scheherazade costume, Letice had deliberately chosen to wear a shawl that was pale pink on one side and sea-mist green on the other. She left the ballroom wearing the pink side out, but when she turned a corner in the outer hall she ducked behind a decorative Oriental screen. Anyone who happened to be looking when she emerged would have seen a young woman in a green shawl walking briskly down the corridor. She passed love seats and paintings and lush, potted palms until she came to a door marked
Mémoire d’Archive
. Behind that door were
objets d’art
and also her
objet d’amour
. Tristan had been pacing behind that door, too anxious to concentrate on the book he’d brought to read while he waited for Letice.
Their first embrace was full of the violence born of want. They grabbed on to each other like starving people grab for bread. Both hearts pounded and ached.
“How does this thing come off?” he whispered as he tried to remove her gown.
She turned around and said, “I had them make it with a zipper.”
“Ah, she is not only beautiful but smart,” said Tristan.
“He is not only handsome, he is mine,” said Letice as her costume and masque fell to the floor. She turned back to face him, and he helped with her underthings until all she wore were her hair combs and jewelry. She pressed her body to his. He placed one hand on the back of her head and the other on her waist as he brushed his lips along her neck from her ear to the base of her throat. The rhythm came easily, as it did every time, and their lovemaking left them gasping. Passion had robbed them of physical strength.
Now Passion had robbed them of their luck, as well.
Letice reentered the ballroom wearing her shawl pink side out once again. Remington found her when she returned and asked if she felt well enough to dance. She remarked that she was feeling much better. She wondered if he could smell the scent of love on her skin, a fragrance she wished would never wash away.