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"Lord, have mer
cy on the innocent soul before you," she said, and crossed herself. I did, too.
We both said, "Amen."
Just as we looked up together, I saw a blue jay flit through the cypress trees and disappear in the direction of Graveyard Lake, a small brackish pond in the swamp that Daddy had named for its collection of floating, moss-strung dead cypress. Mama's gaze trailed after mine. She sighed. She still held on to my hand, but we didn't start back to the gallery and the work that had to be done.
"Being a mother, any kind of mother, is very hard, Gabriel," she said. "You don't just give birth to a baby. You give birth to worry and pain, hope and joy, tears and laughter."
"I would never throw out one of my babies," I vowed, refusing to relinquish my hold on that innocence Mama feared would pull me down with it.
"I hope you never have to even think of such a thing, honey, but if you do, remember the blue jay and make the choice that's best for your child and not for you."
I stared up at her. Mama was a wealth of wisdom, most of which was years and years beyond me. But she had the eyes of a fortune-teller. She could look into the darkness of tomorrow and see some of what was to come.
I shuddered a bit even though it was a warm spring day. Mama was looking deep into the swamp, into the beyond, and what she saw made her hold more firmly to my hand.
And then, as if it had heard and had seen everything, a blue jay I imagined to be the mother started to sing its own dirge. Mama smiled at me.
"Your friend is thanking you," she said. "Come on. Help me weave a bit."
We turned away, and nervous, but secure because Mama still held on to me, I took my small steps toward tomorrow.
1
My Own Eden
.
The sound of the screen door being slammed
sharply at my family's shack house ricocheted like a gunshot through the willow trees and cottonwood, quickening my footsteps. I was almost home from school. Part of the way I had walked with Evelyn Thibodeau and Yvette Livaudis, the only two girls in my class who cared to talk to me at all. Most of the time we had all been speaking at once. Our
excitement boiled over like an unwatched pot of milk. It was our last year. Graduation loomed around the corner with all its promises and terrors hanging like so much Spanish moss.
Evelyn was going to marry Claude LeJeune, who had his own shrimp boat, and Yvette was going to Shreveport to live with her aunt and uncle on their sugar plantation. Everyone understood she would eventually marry the foreman, Philippe Jourdain, with whom she had carried on a letter correspondence all year. They had really seen each other only twice and he was nearly fifteen years older, but Yvette was quite convinced that this should be her destiny. Philippe was a Cajun, and Yvette, like most of us, would marry no one else. We were descendants of the French Arcadians who had migrated to Louisiana and we cherished our heritage.
It was 1944. The Second World War still raged and young, eligible Cajun men were still scarce, even though most farmers and fishermen had exemptions. Evelyn and Yvette were always chiding me for not paying attention to Nicolas Paxton, who was going to inherit his father's department store someday. He was overweight and had flat feet, so he would never be drafted.
"He's always been very fond of you," Yvette said, "and he's sure to ask you to marry him if you gave him the time of day. You won't be poor, that's for sure, n'est-ce pas?" she said with a wink.
"I don't know which I would hate most," I replied. "Waking up in the morning and seeing Nicolas beside me or being shut up in that department store all day saying, 'Can I help you, monsieur? Can I help you, madame?"'
"Well, you've turned away every other possible beau. What are you going to do after graduation, Gabriel, weave split-oak baskets and palmetto hats with your mother and sell gumbo to tourists forever and ever?" Evelyn asked disdainfully.
"I don't know. Maybe," I said, smiling, which only infuriated my sole two friends more.
It was a very warm late spring day. The sky was nearly cloudless, the blue the color of faded dungarees. Gray squirrels with springs in their little legs leapt from one branch to another, and during the rare moments when we were all quiet, I could hear woodpeckers drumming on the oak and pecan trees. It was too glorious a day to get upset over anything anyone said to me.
"But don't you want to get married and have children and a home of your own?" Yvette demanded as if it were an affront to them that I wasn't engaged or promised.
"Oui. I imagine I do."
"You imagine? You don't know?" Her lips moved to twist into a grotesque mockery. "She imagines."
"I suppose I do," I said, committing myself as much as I could. My friends, as well as all the other students at school who knew me, thought I was born a bit strange because my mother was a spiritual healer. It was true that things that annoyed them didn't bother me. They were always fuming and cursing over something some boy said or some girl did. Truly, most of the time I didn't even notice. I knew they had nicknamed me La Rule au Nature!, the Nature Girl, and many exaggerated stories about me, telling each other that I slept with alligators, rode on the backs of snapping turtles, and never was bitten by mosquitoes. I was rarely bitten, that was true, but it was because of the lotion Mama concocted and not because of some magic.
When I was a little girl, boys tried to frighten me by putting snakes in my desk. The girls around me would scream and back away, while I calmly picked up the snake and set it free outside the building. Even my teachers refused to touch them. Most snakes were curious and gentle, and even the poisonous ones weren't nasty to you if you let them be. To me, that seemed to be the simplest rule to go by: Live and let live. I didn't try to talk Yvette out of marrying a man so much older, for example. If that was what she wanted, I was happy for her. But neither she nor Evelyn could treat me the same way. Because I didn't think like they did and do the things they wanted to do, I was foolish or stubborn, even stupid.
