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Virgil didn’t know whether or not he loved his son. Bernard was just there. He worked the boy hard with neither a word of praise nor a show of affection. His parent’s rules about childrearing were severe. He’d been the better for it. Three lashes across his bare ass every week, he learned not to get caught slacking off.
He pretended not to notice, a couple of years ago, when Marie sent the boy to school on his seventh birthday wearing one of her dresses to punish him for not keeping his zipper pulled up. Or the times when she made him wear the dress while tied to the live oak tree near the road at the rear of the farm. She didn’t care it wasn’t his fault he’d outgrown his jeans. She declared his leaving the zipper down was a willful act of annoyance directed at her. Virgil kept his mouth shut. If the boy ended up with his wires crossed the blame would be on her.
By the age of five Bérénice began showing signs of being somewhat disturbed.
At some point when Virgil was in the hayloft he looked down and saw her standing still under the elm tree. She seemed mesmerized by the homemade white-cloth poppet with black-button eyes and a stitched-shut mouth she held in her hand. An unusually large raven landed on a branch above her. It cawed three times. Staring defiantly at the bird, she stabbed the little voodoo doll once with a hatpin. Somewhere in the house Bernie screamed. Virgil stumbled backward, fell over a hay bale. The bird flew away.
Spying on her again, he saw her tying a string on a beetle’s hind leg. She let it fly like a kite until the string tightened and tore its leg off. Then coolly hunted for another bug.
Spiders were altogether different.
Virgil listened, one day, as Bérénice cried and told her mama a big spider had bitten her after she’d been locked in the dark attic overnight, her punishment for peeing on the couch while looking at pictures of people wearing guns and badges in Bernie’s school library book. Marie couldn’t find a bite mark so she whipped the girl not only for lying but also for wetting the cushioned seat on an old rocker in the attic.
Bérénice ran outside. She collected crickets in a small jar. When the jar was full enough she bashed it against the base of a tree. Went wailing to her mama again claiming “the jar fell down and broked all the purty little buggies.”
Marie patted her on the head. The girl stared at Virgil with such a wicked expression on her face his blood chilled in his veins. She never smiled. Cried a lot, but never smiled.
* * *
Marie was three weeks pregnant. God must have been mad about something. She miscarried.
Her mind was so far gone she believed she’d given birth. To another girl. One to replace the crazy one the salesman ran off and left behind.
Awakened by a nightmare, she stormed upstairs to Virgil’s bedroom. Demanded to know where he had taken her daughter, Bérénice Jacquette?
Her daughter? And the salesman’s, no doubt. He let the thought sink in. Old anger issues resurfaced. The little spawn of Satan was the direct result of transgression and lust. And he’d been stuck raising her.
“Wake up, you dumb stupid idiot. You’re having a damn dream. That kid of your’n ain’t gone nowhere. But if she has, maybe that loverboy of yours done come and got her. Huh? Whaddya say about that? Speak up, woman. You didn’t have a problem speaking your mind a minute ago.”
He threw aside the covers, swung his legs off the bed.
She put her hand over her open mouth, and backed up. Once she was in the hallway she ran to the staircase, barely feeling the old floorboards under her feet. She reached the last step by the time Virgil put a foot on the first one.
She hobbled through the kitchen, and out the back door. Her toes swept up fallen Spanish moss. She lost precious time removing the coarse strands. Inside the barn she paused again to catch her second wind. Ruefully wished she had gone to the secret place in the attic.
Marie lifted the side of her nightgown to mount the hayloft ladder. Rivulets of blood were trailing down her ankle to the dirt floor. A wave of nausea engulfed her. Virgil had refused to take her to the hospital. He’d seen animals miscarry before, he told her, and they survived.
She heard him slap the screen door open and stomp out into the yard. She gathered her waning strength, climbed the ladder. Balancing perilously close to the edge of the loft, she attempted to haul the ladder up.
Amused, he stopped to watch her. Since he’d already seen her hiding place there wasn’t any point in struggling with the damn thing. “Dumb stupid idiot.”
He jumped up and grasped the bottom rung, triggering a fight-or-flight response from her. She hooked her arm around the end post of a short two-tier railing, and hung on to the ladder with both hands. For a split second the tension on the ladder was unequal in their dangerous game of tug-of-war. She let go, causing him to fall backward.
Embarrassed, he exploded in a tirade of expletives.
She scurried away from the edge, at long last understanding her predicament. Her mama—a descendant of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans—had died in unexplained circumstances along with her husband, little Marie’s stepfather, whose smarmy gaze often lingered too long on a young girl’s body.
Marie had no friends. Virgil said her place was in the kitchen. He never knew she married him because she lived in her car in back of the feed and seed store where he’d met her, or that the only reason the married proprietor had given her the job in the first place was because she’d agreed to frequently perform the act of fellatio while he sang hallelujah.
Nobody in the whole wide world would ever ask what had become of Marie Alma Wentzel—who tried to make a life for herself on a farm outside of New Orleans—except for, maybe, her weird daughter and a preteen son she hardly knew anymore.
I held the power of life and death in my hands, but Mama disapproved of Madame Laveau’s dark majick so much she forbade me to ever practice what I knew. Now, in a time of great need, I can’t recall a single spell to save my soul.
Marie viewed the loft in a glance.
Where’s my grimoire? And my special box?
Virgil tossed the ladder aside. He spread his feet wide, put his fists on his hips, and glared up at her, an action more ridiculous than threatening. She would’ve laughed had the look in his eyes not been so deadly serious.
Marie cowered in the clearing surrounded by hay bales. Knees drawn up to her chest, she folded her arms over them, buried her face. Quietly sobbed. She had nothing. No television to watch. No newspapers to read. No neighbors to chat with. She had no idea what went on outside the perimeter of Virgil’s fifty-acre farm.
She raised her head.
What was that?
Marie crawled to the start of the loft. Lying flat on her stomach, she eased her body under the railing that was attached to the interior wall on the opposite end, the end above Virgil. Careful not to drop any hay, she craned her neck to sneak a look. He had stepped on a rusty sheet of corrugated metal to pick up the top block of a half dozen forty-eight pound concrete blocks. He hurled it into a red, steel wheelbarrow where it landed with the sound of gunshot.
She yelped. Moved fast to her hiding place. Lay on her side, and curved her body into a fetal position. Intense abdominal pain made breathing difficult. Shaking with chills, she piled hay over her bloodstained pale blue nightgown.
A new sound alerted her.
Marie sensed nothing mattered anymore.
She limped to the railing.
He leaned the ladder against the wall beside the open doorway. “You’re pretty good at getting up there. Let’s see if you can get down.” He rolled the wheelbarrow outside, shut the doors fast, cutting off her screams. Stabbed a shovel through the metal handles to lock her in.
* * *
Virgil returned to the barn several days later. Struck a match and lit the wick of the oil lantern on his work bench by the pegboard wall. Mounted the ladder.
He knelt beside her, covered his nose with a soiled handkerchief. She was as stiff and bloated as any dead armadillo he’d seen on the side of the road. Flies and beetles had arrived to feed on maggots and the decaying flesh.
The plan was to send her to Hell along with her boyfriend, who was waiting for her in the pond. He’d already loaded the concrete block in his truck when a better plan came to him.
He managed to keep her balanced on his shoulder until he descended the ladder. Wasn’t until he laid her down on the floor that it occurred to him he should’ve just shoved her off the loft. Wouldn’t have matter none if she’d broken a bone or two. He laughed a little at his lack of common sense.
Remembering the bugs, he swiped a hand down each arm.
“Ah well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
He slid a pint of whiskey out of his hip pocket. Stayed long past midnight.
At daybreak, Virgil took Bérénice Jacquette to live with his older brother, Jessup Wentzel and the missus, at their cabin in the swampland near Chalmette in Louisiana.