Black Treacle Magazine (Issue 4) (3 page)

By the time
the sun came up full, they were Riverside, and Fort Jeff was far
behind them. Nell’s stomach made a fist. She hadn’t eaten since
Nicolas died--she couldn’t eat what Grandmother did. Maybe she
could get something in her belly when they finally reached their
destination. Fort Jeff was the last obstacle, besides distance,
between them and Vieux Carre.

Mama and the
other ladies told stories about the days before the bayou took back
the city. It was a favourite topic at the gumbo ya-ya, where the
women drank moonshine and shared stories with the young girls. Nell
often asked for stories from before the flood. When they weren’t
telling stories, the ladies liked to brush her hair and give her
advice about how to live once she got her woman blood.

All this had
been city, and the bayou was just a trickle. Millions of people
lived here, and every year millions more came to town to drink and
throw beads at a big party. But the bayou remembered, and like the
whale that ate Jonah it swallowed the city. Lake Punchy Train and
the river shook hands, and folks started to think there would be
nothing left but water. Seeing it now with her own eyes, Nell
understood. Some of the houses had fallen completely, leaving only
their foundations to remember them. The cypress trees were quick to
move back in, kicking up knees almost as tall as Nell. Up ahead
were the towering ruins that used to be office buildings, crumbling
concrete slumped like sleepy housecats with whiskers of bent rebar.
Nell wondered whether there might still be treasures in the upper
levels for a little girl brave enough to venture so high.

“Look,
Grandmother!” Nell pointed toward the structure like a popped stone
pimple on the other side of the overpass. “The Superdome!”

Grandmother
showed no sign of familiarity or recognition. She only shuffled
onward.

Just past
those buildings was Vieux Carre, the Quarter, the thriving heart of
the Crescent and the seat of the Loas. That was the destination of
the pilgrims who passed through New Avondale dressed in rags and
robes, the place the old women mentioned before crossing
themselves. It was the place old men snuck off to when they needed
a break, and young women when they needed quick money.

Grandmother
wasn’t heading for the Quarter proper, Nell knew. They were going
into the bayou, to a flooded-out place Mama called Congo. There was
a cemetery there, and when the bayou rose it washed all the bodies
out into the streets, where the swamp dragons came to eat them up.
Congo was the home of the biggest, meanest man-eaters in all of
Dixie, Mama said. But that was where they had to find Nainaine
Laveau.

Nainaine
Laveau, Nainaine Laveau

The teeth that
bite, the eyes that glow

She’ll snatch
you up, she’ll lay you low

She’ll stir
you into her gumbo

She’ll roll
your bones upon her stones

And sit you on
Samedi’s throne

Nainaine
Laveau, Nainaine Laveau

Nell knew more
than one nursery rhyme about the voodoo witch. The children said
she was the daughter of Rumplestiltskin, and her babies were trolls
that guarded the bridges out of the Crescent. Nainaine Laveau was
the reason the Dawn feared the Loas. She was the one that raised up
the bayou and flushed out the dead, and she slept in a bed made
from bones and kept swamp dragons for pets. Before the flood she
used to put on shows in the Quarter, and the old-timers told about
the things they’d seen her do. She raised up a man dead four days
and made him tell his secrets. He talked funny, said lady who saw
it happen, because his lips were all dried up and pulled back from
his teeth.

Nainaine
Laveau was the most feared woman in the Crescent, but she was the
only one with the magic to help Grandmother.

Sometimes the
ladies of the Ya Ya would gather up the children and, together,
tell them all a story. It was one of those stories Nell thought
about now, a story she loved about a little girl, Dorothy, who was
sent to find the only wizard with the magic to help her. Dorothy
followed a road of yellow bricks, though, while Nell and
Grandmother had to follow the muddy brown river.

The collar of
Nell’s white shirt was as wet as her skirt where it skimmed the
bayou. The air was as heavy as a backpack on her shoulders. Nell’s
feet sunk into the soft muck beneath the water, snagging
occasionally on a hidden root or bit of debris. Some of the old
timers back home had deep valley scars along the soles of their
feet where they’d stepped on sharp hunks of glass or twisted metal,
but the river worked fast, and buried such remnants of life before
under layers of soft silt and slime, so it was safe now to walk
barefoot, mostly. Old Nat Dufraine claimed a big turtle had snapped
off the two toes missing from his right foot, but Grandmother said
he’d stuck his foot under a lawnmower, and anyway big snappers were
afraid of people. When Nell asked what a lawnmower was, Grandmother
told her to nevermind.

Yesterday
Grandmother began to smell. Today the funk was almost unbearable,
sweet and thick as molasses. Nell could track her by the buzzing
cloud of shiny green flies. Nell had smelled that scent before, but
she couldn’t remember where. After a while it came to her--a year
or more before, one of the old men had been bitten by a spider in
his sleep. The ladies tried to save his foot, but eventually they
had to pay a traveling surgeon to take it off. The surgeon gave the
man whiskey and something called “loud numb” that the women all
seemed very serious about, but even from outside the house Nell
could hear him scream. The way Grandmother smelled was the way that
slimy black foot had smelled.

Nell grunted
as hunger pains gripped her. She thought about trying to eat a
locust, or even one of the flies that followed Grandmother. She
wondered how they might catch a nutria, which men back home said
were okay for eating. She wondered if Grandmother might help her,
but Grandmother was interested in nothing except walking and
killing, and she only killed people.

Nell tried not
to think too much about those people. It was Grandmother who had
first taught her what death was, when she was five years old and
Ray LeRou, who the old folks called Sugar, came back dead from a
clash with some One-Percenters. Grandmother said then that only the
wicked killed innocent people, but now it was her doing the
killing. Maybe they weren’t all innocent people, Nell thought. If
she hadn’t killed the bikers, they might have kidnapped Nell and
tried to sell her, and the white lady at Fort Jeff might have used
that rifle, if she knew what Grandmother was. Maybe Grandmother’s
hunger was God’s way of getting them safe through the bayou. That
was a tidy thought, but it didn’t explain about Nicolas or
Antoine.

Nell didn’t
notice she was light-headed until the first time she fell, one hand
splashing out and sinking into the soft bottom of the bayou. So far
Grandmother had not steered them wrong, but the mud on Nell’s hand
when she withdrew it reminded her about quicksand. Nell stood up
straight and the world went spinning. Grandmother looked back, her
sunken eyes hot with disapproval.

“I’m sorry,
Gran-Mere,” Nell said. Her tongue felt hard as a dry sponge. She
hadn’t had a drink since her canteen ran dry the day before.
Grandmother continued in her slumping gait, the buzzing
emerald-green flies fighting for room in her matted hair. Nell
pressed on, her suddenly-heavy feet splashing through the murky
water. After a moment the dizziness passed.

The sun sank
lower, the shadows lengthening and growing into eerie blue
twilight. This far into the bayou, the water reached to her hips
and past Nell’s belly-button. Around them, some of the sturdier
stone houses still stood. The bayou had pushed others over,
softening and collapsing them like sandcastles. Now they were piles
of driftwood, held together with vinyl siding. The cypress here
hung curtains of Spanish moss along the flooded streets. With the
twilight came the noise and movement of frogs and swamp birds, and
ripples on the water that might be snakes or channel cats--or swamp
dragons. Dusk was the bad time, when the dragons and the snakes
were all warm from the sun and ready to hunt in the dark. She had
never seen a real swamp dragon, and she didn’t want this to be the
first time.

Nell was so
intent on watching the shadows that she walked right into
Grandmother and nearly fell back.

Grandmother,
hands at her sides, stood still as a stone before a red brick
church with a white cross above the doors. Nell spotted the gris
gris, the bones tied together and hung before the windows, and the
little black dolls made from wood and cloth and straw nailed to the
eaves. On the cross, someone had carved a veve. This was their
destination, the house of the voodoo witch Nainaine Laveau.

The gris gris
turned slowly on their strings. Nell had to pee. Her body was
jittery. It wanted to turn and run away. But Nell thought about
Grandmother, standing still in the ankle-deep water and wavering
slowly. The shiny green flies buzzed around her. The witch was her
only hope.

Nell forced
herself up the steps, her legs shaking like they were boiled
noodles. When she tried to swallow her tongue seemed to fill her
mouth up. At the top of the steps she stopped, wondering if she
should knock. It seemed crazy, like she was visiting one of the
village ladies to borrow a cup of sugar.

In the story,
Dorothy was afraid of the wizard too. But when she was brave, the
wizard rewarded her and set things right. When Dorothy woke up she
was back at home, and everything was as it had been. After she
first heard the story of Dorothy at the Ya Ya, Nell sometimes asked
Grandmother to tell it to her again. It was one of her
favourites.

The red paint
on the doors was beginning to flake and fade. They were open just a
little bit, enough that Nell could see a thin slice of the dark
room beyond. She pushed one of the doors, which opened with a long,
slow creak. The low angle of the sun meant the room didn't flood
with bright light, but the dusk crept in and Nell saw tiny specks
of dust dancing in the dim light. The church looked as it probably
did when it was occupied, the pews and altar and marble font all in
their right places, but there were things hung all around inside
now, gris gris charms and dolls and fetishes in all shapes and
sizes. There were so many of them, hanging all around, Nell
wondered if Nainaine Laveau did anything else with her time besides
make gris gris.

Nothing inside
moved, so Nell crept a half-step inside to see more of the room.
That's when the wrinkled brown hand slapped onto her wrist like a
handcuff and tugged her forward, off-balance, into the dark church.
Nell tripped forward and fell onto the dirty floor, skinning her
knee as she went down. She tugged her arm, but the thin hand around
her wrist was quite strong. She waved her other arm, kicking and
screaming at the unseen witch.

"No!" She
screamed. "Don't dice me up and steal my bones, Nainaine! Don't
shrink my head for a voodoo doll!"

"Hush, child,"
came the old voice in the dark. She pronounced it
chile
,
like the ladies from the village. She stopped kicking and opened
her eyes. Staring back at her was Nainaine Laveau.

She was dry
and folded like a raisin, her old skin pulled taut over her
skeleton, dressed in a red and white Madras adorned with layers of
gris gris, herbs, woven cloth and hair, and dolls. Curly black hair
seemed to explode from beneath her tignon like a lion’s mane.
Beneath her long nose twisted a toothless smile. Her eyes, though
small and ancient, were bright. The bony brown arm that wasn't
occupied holding Nell's wrist extended to point out the front
door.

"Who are you?"
Nainaine snapped. "Why did you bring that thing here? Who sent
you?"

"I'm sorry,
Nainaine,” Nell cried. "I am Nell LaPomeret, from New Avondale! I
come to ask you to help my Grand-mere!"

Nell felt
tears on her face. Her skin was hot, her mouth open wide in
wheezing sobs. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Nicolas said you would help!
He said you would!”

She wished
Nicolas were with her. He would know what to do. He wouldn’t
collapse onto the floor like a sobbing baby.

“Child,”
Nainaine Laveau said. “I’m not going to cook you.” The hand on
Nell’s wrist relaxed, and a crooked finger brush a tear from her
cheek. “You’re as scared as a trapped nutria, child. Never could
eat them, either. Come, tell me about your Grand-mere.”

She brought
Nell to a rough wooden table near the altar. It was piled with
bones and tied up bits of feathers and hair. There were tiny skulls
among the bones, Nell saw, a few with pointed beaks. Nainaine
Laveau set a mug in front of her.

“Take a
drink,” she said.

“What’s in
it?”

Nainaine
looked offended. “It’s water, child. Clean water. Drink, and catch
your breath.”

Nell meant to
sip, but suddenly remembered her thirst, and gulped the mug dry.
Nainaine took it to a bucket across the room and ladled it full
again. Nell looked out through the open door at Grandmother,
staring back, still wavering slowly in the bayou.

“Can my
Grand-mere come inside?” she asked. Nainaine looked out at
Grandmother, and she made the face Mama sometimes made when Nell
said something embarrassing.

“No,” she
said, and crossed herself. “Why don’t you tell me about your
Grand-mere?”

So Nell told
her the story. She told how it was Grandmother’s idea that the
children check for gold and jewelry in the houses around New
Avondale, and how they spent that treasure to pay for protection
from Outlaws and Catholics and crazies. She told how Grandmother
hid their treasure cache, and when her heart attacked, the ladies
of the Ya Ya said the village was doomed. They had to leave New
Avondale, they said, and leave Grandmother behind, buried in the
ground.