Chapter Six

Mrs. Domengeaux knew mothers. Laura’s own disapproved of her moving so far from home. “We won’t be nearby to help you if…”

“If what?”

“If you should start to feel unwell again. Chapelle has only two doctors—I, uh, checked that for you while you were gone.”

“And Lost Spring has only one and the same number of traffic lights. The town is full of mostly nice people who would be glad to help me exactly like here.”

“A small town like that—all the men around your age will be married.”

“Not all.”

Laura saw her sister, tossing a salad for the farewell dinner, raise her eyebrows.

“I mean even Lost Spring has Jay Geiger. There are probably some single men in Chapelle—if I were looking.”

“Uh-huh,” her sister, Cynthia, said knowingly. “Tell us all about the people you met down there.”

Laura kept them laughing with thumbnail sketches of Old Thibodeaux, Miss Lilliane, and Jules Picard. She thought she’d gotten the accents about right and used a thick-sliced French fry with the end dipped in ketchup to simulate a cigarette hanging out the corner of her mouth while she told her niece and nephew never to smoke and made them laugh. She omitted T-Bob from her act. She had no desire to joke about him or share him with her family.

Knowing Cynthia adored old things and could not afford them, Laura got some revenge for putting her on the spot about eligible men with lavish descriptions of the LeBlanc’s antiques and the armoire in her apartment. Cruel, true, but she had grown tired of hearing Cissy complain about what a financial drain her son and daughter were when Laura would trade all the armoires and stately homes in the world for one beautiful, healthy child. The old sisterly bickering helped dull her departure pangs.

In the morning, her father hitched the U-Haul trailer to Laura’s car. Her mother, who had no gift for parting words said, “Get over David and start a new life then. I wish you’d stayed closer to home.”

“Get over David? I will never forget David.”

Fuming over her mother’s insensitivity Laura pulled hastily away from the curb with only a wave to her bewildered father. Get over David. Forget David when the very trailer she towed contained all the bits and pieces of their brief life together: an extravagant solid brass bedstead purchased with wedding gift money and their well-used old mattress, their wedding album and a box of even more precious candid photos, the delicate miniature oil rig that sat on his desk, the coffee mug he always used, the old shirt she slept in on nights when her grief grew unbearable. She took as much of David as she could to Chapelle.

Dragging her baggage behind her, Laura crossed the Mason-Dixon Line leaving Pennsylvania and entering the Southern States, so designated only because of previous differences on slave holdings, and not because of any great difference in weather, flora or fauna. By evening she had reached the true red dirt south of piney woods and twanging gas station attendants. Her second day on the road brought her to the South of slow drawls and evergreen magnolias, and her third across the Mississippi and deep into Louisiana where David had died and Laura now planned a new life.

The road off the interstate and into Chapelle seemed less hostile this trip, even with the ever-irate Miss LeBlanc waiting at the end of it. A few of the walls of cane had been broken down into wide alleys where machines with claws gathered the severed stalks and loaded them into carts to be hauled in cumbersome loads to the mill. The furnace-like autumn heat had diminished to a pleasant daily warmth, and cooler evenings laid the virulent mosquitoes to rest.

The rambling gray mill had taken on life, its cranes grasping at the cane and gobbling the stems by the cartload. White smoke from its chimneys spread out over the shabby houses in its shadow and left a sticky dew behind. The grinding season had arrived and given its blessings to the quarters. Here new clothes, unfaded, untorn, flapped on a clothesline, and a small child as black as the soil sat on one slanting porch and nurtured a baby doll still robed in a stiff, pink dress and spotless white booties. More people passed on the streets of Chapelle. Most turned to eye Laura’s trailer, and one, old Thibodeaux at the former Canal station, raised a friendly hand.

Having volunteered two men in the lunchroom away from their beer and boudin sausage, Lola Domengeaux supervised the unloading of the trailer. Mrs. Domengeaux pushed her recruits, loaded to the maximum, up and down the narrow stairs, urged along by a steady stream of Cajun French.

Though the brass bed set up by one of the volunteers using Mrs. Domengeaux’s screwdriver looked inviting after the day’s drive and unpacking, Laura dutifully borrowed the delicatessen phone and called first, her parents, and then the library to announce her arrival.

Miss Lilliane was in fine form. “So, you got here. I suppose you want to start work right away.”

“Actually, I could use a few days to get settled. Would Monday be all right?”

“Take all the time you need. I can manage without you. I’ve been doing it for fifty years.” Miss Lilliane hung up.

Trying not to be disturbed by what lay ahead on Monday, Laura made up the bed, smoothing wrinkles from the sheets and absorbing old memories. Lola Domengeaux interrupted these thoughts by showing up at the door with two plastic containers of her “own etouffee from da freezer” and “dat other one is rice.”

“Just heat it up, cher, pour it over da rice, den get you some rest. I close up at six, but if you need anyt’ing else, you call.”

After singeing her fingers in the sudden flare from the old gas range, Laura did enjoy the zesty pink etouffee. She picked out the tender tails of crawfish and left some of the rice. Ice water and fresh fruit from the little travel cooler completed her meal. She chanced lighting the old stove again to brew a cup of relaxing hot tea, but with so much left to unpack, Laura could not rest.

Along one wall, she erected bookshelves of cinder blocks and boards that had served her through college, career and marriage, and sat her television in its center. She filled the empty space with her unlimited supply of books and several small sculptures, David’s miniature derrick among them, along with a picture of her lost husband.

The volunteers had placed her tan leather loveseat along the opposite wall. Its simple modern lines and warm color blended nicely with the cypress plank floors, but the ornate ceiling seemed to warrant carved rosewood and brocade. Instead, it got a plain, but solid oak coffee table, lovingly refinished and presented as a parting gift from Cynthia. As Laura arranged a few of the overflow of books on its shining surface, she made a mental note to find something special for Cissy, something the children would not break.

Dishes and pans put away in cupboards that required no wiping thanks to Miss Lola, clothes stored in the closet, the antique armoire stuffed with linens and odds and ends of apparel, Laura rested at last on the big brass bed, her body wrapped in David’s old shirt, her mind full of his image. Halfway through the night, she jerked herself out of a dream where a man with dark eyes and black hair laid beside her and caressed her breasts with callused hands. She rebuttoned the shirt that had opened over hot, sensitive skin and peaked nipples.

Climbing out of bed, Laura walked out of her bedroom through the black shadow cast by the massive armoire and into the small kitchen. She poured some milk from the plastic quart jug stocked, along with a few other basic groceries, by Miss Lola in her refrigerator. No way would she risk lighting that stove to heat the stuff when clumsy with sleep and shaken by a bad dream. She could burn the place down. Taking her glass over to the French doors, Laura gazed out on Chapelle. No cars moved along Main Street. With her eyes still seeking heaven, the statue of Ste. Joan glowed near a streetlight. Laura went to her shelves and picked up the framed photo of David with his wide smile and twinkling eyes. She fixed his face firmly in her mind and went back to bed.

****

As if summer could not keep its sweaty hands off of October, Laura’s first morning in Chapelle threatened to be hot and sticky again. Resolutely, she set out along Main Street to finish furnishing her apartment. The Dollar Store provided a huge petticoat fern hanging on a summer clearance rack of outdoor plants. Dot’s Antiques & Used Furniture supplied a refinished solid wood table and four chairs of Depression vintage from the used furniture section of the store. The dining set did not quite have the age or elegance to command the prices of the cypress armoires and nineteenth century marble-topped washstands in the antiques section of the shop. Miss Dot, herself, promised her man would deliver the furniture that same day, nothing being too good for the new librarian.

Laura’s status bought her a bargain at the Cajun Corner, a local crafts shop brimming with cornhusk dolls, oil paintings of live oaks and orange nutria tooth necklaces. She selected two large, handmade rag rugs in muted earthy tones and got a twenty percent discount and two overdue library books to return by the proprietor. A boy from the Penny Saver grocery carried two boxes of food and cleaning supplies up the stairs and into her kitchen and refused a tip. By then, the kitchen table had been delivered as promised.

Laura hung her fern from a hook where, undoubtedly, similar plants had hung in front of the French doors. The doors opened on to a small balcony of wrought iron, much like those at the rear of Chateau Camille but infinitely more rusted, not a place to stand on even momentarily. The rag rugs made circles of color on the old flooring as she laid them down.

She unearthed the carton of framed art prints, remnants of cheap interior decorating from her college days, and placed more color on her bare plaster walls. Once, the walls must have been papered, but now they were stripped bare, patched and painted in what Laura thought of as “apartment beige.” Their blankness enhanced the sunny impressionist garden scene over the sofa, the waggish Toulouse Latrec above the table, and the delicate Japanese landscape by the bookshelves. The picture of her and David locked together on their wedding day she placed in her bedroom.

Laura settled in more quickly than she could have imagined, and a long unfilled weekend stretched ahead. The rugs and furniture absorbed only some of the echoes of emptiness in the new apartment. She gazed out her front window. Below on the green, her companion of the night, Ste. Joan, looked up at her as if Laura had found the paradise she sought. The benign St. Francis, who had dined with Laura on the day of her interview, was hidden by the wide leafy arms of the live oaks. If the black kitten still lived beneath the church, Laura had a promise to keep.

Wrapping some of the cold, barbecued chicken Mrs. Domengeaux had thrust on her at lunchtime, she went to visit St. Francis. “Thanks for the job, Frank. I hope I don’t regret this later.”

Laura lay a bit of chicken near the feet of the statue. The ivy rustled, and the black kitten slithered from the fist-sized hole in the foundation of the church. He ran his rough tongue over the meat, scooping it into his mouth as fast as he could. When he came to give Laura thanks in the way of cats, coiling around her ankles and sniffing for more food, she scooped up the small feline and felt his small bones beneath the velvet of his fur.

“Shall I call you Snake in honor of the scare you gave me?” asked Laura. Snake remained indifferent to everything except the last of the cold chicken. Placidly full and purring, he allowed Laura to carry him to their home.

Snake filled Laura’s weekend with a trip to a veterinarian who worked on Saturdays and pronounced Snake healthy, but thin, and pumped the kitten full of vaccines for various cat-killing diseases. She obtained permission from Miss Lola who understood about promises to saints, purchased cat food and litter, and accomplished the general orientation between pet and mistress. Snake, far from being either finicky or aloof, ate everything ravenously and absorbed and returned affection in equal amounts. When Monday morning arrived, Laura faced the library with at least one small ally behind her.