LOTTE‘S STORY 

(Note:  The Cajun culture of South Louisiana is filled with tales that have been passed down from generation to generation.  When I approached Lotte Sonnier for an interview, she insisted on telling me the following story, which she swears is true and happens to all good Cajun girls.  The tale is called “Cocodrie Rouge” and is printed here for the first time.)        Ps you can find my book, The Beatitudes- Lyn LeJeune, at amazon.com both as book and Kindle.  Profits go to New Orleans Library Foundation.....It's Christmas and Hanukkah and even "Festivus for the rest of us."              

It’s a hard life on women, for a fact.  SomeWomen.                                                                                  

As I lay Dying                                                                           

William Faulkner  

A giant alligator lives in the swamp. At night, when the mists dance round

the cypress stumps, her eyes shine straight and laughing directly into the

heart of the next woman brave enough to confront her life.  A girl can’t do

this, not until the flow of blood has stopped, not until she has grown weary

of the imposition of all around her, not until she hears the honking call. 

And then she goes out into the blue cave of hanging moss, always before

dawn, always dressed in her best clothes, with a slash of red on her  

shoulder, a dab of green around her waist, a swirl of yellow on her head.  I

knew all this. My mother told me what to expect when I was five, when

most little girls hear tales of ragged waifs who become princesses, or

young women with apple red cheeks who spend their lives taking care of

little men only to be swept away by a tall man with black hair. My yellow

kerchief lies under the cigar box that holds my treasures of early

childhood; I know I will cut my thumb and mesh the blood onto the

shoulder of a white garment, and I will twine the maypop vine, absent the

purple flower, around my waist.  But it is not yet my time.  I am only

thirteen and I will learn from my grandmother’s living tale.  I waited.The

table was set for supper.  Green china plates marked four places, all four  

cracked so that if you leaned over and looked closely you could see the

hands of the perpetrator, smell the breath of age.  The silver spoons were

bent after years of use and the wayward exertion by children playing in

the mud.  The jelly glasses reflected the evening sun, making them look

like miniature merry-go-rounds, the cartoon characters of Mickey and

Pluto dancing against the backdrop of my grandfather’s farm.  There was

no food on the table, save the bread she had baked at the split second of

dawn.  On this day I remember clearly that the sun had been too bright for

my sleepy eyes, the country breezes too cold after a stormy night of

lightning and noises that challenged and delighted my imagination.  No

food but a loaf of bread.  No Grandma who had baked the bread for all the

years that any of her grandchildren, children and, to some degree, her

husband could remember.  Grandma did not show up for supper.  The

dead chicken was in the icebox, headless, clean, the prime suspect in a

gumbo that we did not have that night.

               So I will tell you now, as I begin this mournful rendition, that this

is a story about family.  There is no incest, abuse, starvation, poverty,

withholding of love, or plain old meanness in this story; it is about a

month when one family lost the most precious person in their lives, and

then found her.  This is a story about a game of hide and seek, a trick, that

needed to be played and that taught an age old lesson about what a family

is and is not.  Well, if you’re from the South, and my goodness this is the

place of this story, then you don’t know what you’ve got until you loose

it.               

              When Grandpa went into supper on an unusually cool September

evening; when the crickets had already commenced singing and the

chickens were deciding whether to lay in the night; when the cows had

been fed and Grandpa was clicking his tongue tchee, tchee, tchee, then the

cows were all hustled into the western fields. He could not find Grandma

standing at the old black stove stirring a chicken and boudin gumbo…as

usual.  Every dusk for sixty two years the same thing would happen, the

same routine, whether children hung on her skirts, or her belly was fat

with wanting one, Amy Sonnier would be cooking supper. Today she was

not, nor was she in the washroom or the bedroom or on the back porch

rocking and watching the egrets move like phantoms over the eastern

sky.      

           Grandma had vanished.  Dripping drops pinged and echoed inside

the old cistern, full with rain water siphoned with a rubber tube from

Grandpa’s old Chevy to wash our hair, rainwater to make it sleek and

shiny.  A red bucket waited from Grandma’s rough hands, waited for her

sore back to lift it full and pour the cold, too cold, water over out heads   

But this would not happen, we would remain dry and warm andgreasy for

days and endless days waiting for her, waiting in the eastern fields where

the yellow grass ruffled like the collar of a princess, yellow dress, white

trim.  But she was gone; simply had vanished.  All the horses and goats

and large pigs were accounted for, so she did not escape on their backs;

the buggy waited entombed in the big barn, still holding five bales of hay

meant for the Poisson farm, their cows moaning for hay so their milk

would not sour.  No stranger had been seen tramping the graveled road or

marching through fields and along rows of ripe corn.                

        The men commenced searching.              

          “’Tink she got ‘nesia a go on down ta do swamps, yeah?” asked Noncle

Bleu               

          “’Nesia.  How come you tink she gots that,” said Daddy               

          “She hit on da head.”               

          “What come an’ hit her on da head?”               

         “Mais,’haps a pot fell down.”               

         “No pots up.  You see a pot up top a nuting?”

           Daddy wore his gray suit, a wrinkled black tie fell over his gold belt

buckle.  He had come from a meeting in Abbeville, something about

knights.  I don’t understand, really, and the image that always came was of

King Arthur, the story Madame Bijou read to us every morning.  Daddy

was a knight whose meetings spoke of Columbus and other American

heroes.  Surely, Daddy would find Grandma.  Noncle Bleu seemed to

never  leave the farm, never dressed up in anything but old brown pants

and dirty gray shirt, his work boots caked with mud and cow shit that

everyday brought Grandma’s exasperation when he came into her kitchen

for dinner. He had never married, his hair matched his shirt, and us kids

called him old blue.

          “I tink,” said Daddy, “that she been taken.”

          “Wat you gonna tell Papa?”

         “He know she gone.  Ain’t got to tell him nuttin’.  He’ll tell

us more what to do, seems like.”

          Daddy saw me leaning against the pecan tree, my thumb stuck in my

mouth, tears precariously balanced on the rims of my eyes.  I did not

want to cry.  He came to me and put his big hands on my head, smiled, and

then his thumbs pushed down on my cheeks and the tears are wet, salty

when I stuck out my tongue and licked them away.  He rose and walked

away, met old blue and they walked together towards the barn.She is not

there, I want to yell.  I have looked and looked.  In the barn, in the  

chicken house, in the pig pen, under all of the beds.  Then I remembered

the little door where Grandma kept the jars of figs and chow-chow and I

figured that behind the jars was another door that led maybe up maybe

down into another place.  Perhaps she was hiding from Grandpa; I had

heard them yell once, yell about the rice and the money and how a man

named Justice Hebert stole their land.  But it was last year, the year I

started first grade and met the knights and Madame Bijould.  Would

Grandma hide because of that?                

              Mama was sitting at the kitchen table.  Tante Amy was standing at

the kitchen sink.               

            “Mais, Amy, you ‘tink Ida will marry Bebard?” asks Mama               

            “If she don’ hurry he sure ta pick somebody else in a click of a

heartbeat,” laughs Tante Amy.

          “She will.  She tol’ me he’s the best asked her so far.”               

          “Mon dieu, eh?  Ida is the most beautiful girl I ever saw.  What a

wedding it gonna be.”               

          “Her daddy sure can afford the biggest damn wedding ever been

‘round here.”               

          “Eh.  Father Jean, I ‘tink, can’t wait to say that mass.  Gonna have a

full house finally.”               

         “Poor old blue. "               

          “Yeah, poor blue.  He been loving Amy I ‘tink mos his life.”               

          I walked across the kitchen and into the alcove, pushed myself

against the stove and unhooked the door to the jar cabinet.  The top shelf

was lined with jars of preserved figs, fat brown and shriveled, little specks

of white where the sugar had settled.  The next shelf was my favorite,  The

bright yellow of Grandma’s chow-chow.  I had helped her pick the onions,

chopped them at the kitchen table until my eyes were raw from weeping.I

moved the jar aside, pushed my hand against the back wall and pushed as

hard as I could.               

          “Lotte!  Wat ya doing, petit?”               

          “Nuttin’,” I yelled and ran out of the kitchen, letting the screen door

slam shut behind me.  I pressed my back against the rough slats of the

house, feeling the cool breeze coming from the crawl space and wrapping

around my ankles.

          “Should we tell her?” I heard Tante Amy ask.

           “Oh, I tink she’s old enough.  First grade finished.  Six,  it’s the old

way,” said Mama.

          “Do you tink they understand so young?”Did you?”               

           “Oui. Non.  Not altogether, but I felt it all my life.”

           “Bein,” said Mama. “Then before she goes to sleep, I’ll tell

her.”               

           “Mama will like that,” said Tante.                                                                       

                                                                            *               

I pulled the white sheet that smelled of sunshine and soap over my chest,

rested my arms on my stomach, my head snuggled into two pillows, and

listened to Mama tell me what all girls that live near the swamp are

supposed to know:  A giant red  alligator lives in the swamp.  At night,

when the mists dance round the cypress stumps, her eyes shine straight

up to the sky and her snout points into the heart of the next woman brave

enough to confront her own life.  A woman cannot do this thing until the

flow of blood has stopped, not until she has grown weary of the  

impositions of all things around her, not until she hears the honking call. 

And then she goes out into the purple cave of hanging moss, always at

dawn, always dressed in her best clothes, with a slash of red on her

shoulder, a swash of green around her waist, a swirl of yellow on her

head.  She forgets stories about ragged waifs who become princesses, or

young girls with apple red checks who spend their lives taking care of

little  men only to be swept away by a tall man with black

hair.                          

                                                                        *

Grandma came back after many orange sunsets had burned through the

ragged horizon that leads into the swamp.  She no longer kills chickens or

pulls the spent cane stalks for firing on autumn evenings.  She still bakes

cornbread, but serves it sliced thinly on new bone china rimmed with

silver threads and hand-painted bluebonnets.  I have seen Grandpa touch

her shoulder, lightly, like a caress, then brush a strand or hair away from

her pink cheeks and kiss her neck.  Last week they went to New Orleans.  I

still have the magenta plumed Mardi Gras mask they brought home for

me.  I keep it in my closet, in a white shoebox, along with my yellow

kerchief and a note that reminds me to cut my thumb and mesh my red

blood onto the shoulder of a white garment and twine the green maypop

vine, without its purple flowers, around my waist.  But it is not yet my  

time.  I am only thirteen.  I know that a story can be told in the time that it

takes a child to fall asleep, but it takes half a lifetime, or more, to

understand the moral of a family tale.