Every Dead Thing

“There’s a woman, down in St. Martin Parish, an old Creole. She’s got the gift, the locals say. She keeps away the gris-gris. You know, bad spirits, all that shit. Offers cures for sick kids, brings lovers together. Has visions.” He stopped and rolled his tongue around his mouth, and squinted at me.

“She’s a psychic?”

“She’s a witch, you believe the locals.”

“And do you?”

“She’s been…helpful, once or twice in the past, according to the local cops. I’ve had nothing to do with her before.”

“And now?”

My coffee arrived and Woolrich asked for a refill. We didn’t speak again until the waiter had departed and Woolrich had drained half of his coffee in a steaming mouthful.

“She’s got about ten children and thousands of goddamn grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Some of them live with her or near her, so she’s never alone. She’s got a bigger extended family than Abraham.” He smiled but it was a fleeting thing, a brief release before what was to come.

“She says a young girl was killed in the bayou a while back, in the marshlands where the Barataria pirates used to roam. She told the sheriff’s office but they didn’t pay much attention. She didn’t have a location, just said a young girl had been murdered in the bayou. Said she had seen it in a dream.

“Sheriff didn’t do nothing about it. Well, that’s not entirely true. He told the local boys to keep an eye out and then pretty much forgot all about it.”

“What brings it up again now?”

“The old woman says she hears the girl crying at night.”

I couldn’t tell whether Woolrich was spooked or just embarrassed by what he was saying, but he looked toward the window and wiped his face with a giant grubby handkerchief.

“There’s something else, though.” He folded the handkerchief and stuffed it back in his trouser pocket.

“She says the girl’s face was cut off.” He breathed in deeply. “And that she was blinded before she died.”

We drove north on I-10 for a time, past an outlet mall and on toward West Baton Rouge with its truck stops and gambling joints, its bars full of oil workers and, elsewhere, blacks, all drinking the same rotgut whiskey and watery Dixie beer. A hot wind, heavy with the dense, decayed smell of the bayou, pulled at the trees along the highway, whipping their branches back and forth. Then we crossed onto the raised Atchafalaya highway, its supports embedded beneath the waters, as we entered the Atchafalaya swamp and Cajun country.

I had been here only once before, when Susan and I were younger and happier. Along the Henderson Levee Road we passed the sign for McGee’s Landing, where I’d eaten tasteless chicken and Susan had picked at lumps of deep-fried alligator so tough even other alligators would have had trouble digesting it. Then a Cajun fisherman had taken us on a boat trip into the swamps, through a semisubmerged cypress forest. The sun sank low and bloody over the water, turning the tree stumps into dark silhouettes like the fingers of dead men pointing accusingly at the heavens. It was another world, as far removed from the city as the moon was from the earth, and it seemed to create an erotic charge between us as the heat made our shirts cling to our bodies and the sweat drip from our brows. When we returned to our hotel in Lafayette we made love urgently and with a passion that superseded love, our drenched bodies moving together, the heat in the room as thick as water.

Woolrich and I did not go as far as Lafayette. We abandoned the highway for a two-lane road that wove through the bayou country for a time before turning into little more than a rutted track, pitted by holes filled with dank, foul-smelling swamp water around which insects buzzed in thick swarms. Cypress and willow lined the road and, through them, the stumps of trees were visible in the waters of the swamp, relics of the harvestings of the last century. Lily pads clustered at the banks, and when the car slowed and the light was right, I could see bass moving languidly in their shadows, breaking the water occasionally.

I had heard once that Jean Lafitte’s brigands had made their home here. Now others had taken their place, killers and smugglers who used the canals and marshes as hiding places for heroin and marijuana, and as dark, green graves for the butchered, their bodies adding to the riotous growth of nature, their decay masked by the rich stench of vegetation.

We took one further turn, and here the cypress overhung the road. We rattled over a wooden bridge, the wood gradually returning to its original color as the paint flaked and disintegrated. In the shadows at its far end I thought I saw a giant figure watching us as we passed, his eyes white as eggs in the darkness beneath the trees.

“You see him?” said Woolrich.

“Who is he?”

“The old woman’s youngest son. Tee Jean, she calls him. Petit Jean. He’s kinda slow, but he looks out for her. They all do.”

“All?”