The Devil in Canaan Parish (17 page)

This was why Blanchard was so shocked when I confronted him soon after he took his seat.

“What’s happened to Annie?” I demanded.

He eyed me up, suspicious as usual.
 
I saw Boyle’s jaw muscles flex.

“Well now Bram,” he began, sarcasm oozing from his voice, “worried about the domestic help again, I see.”

“Come on, Junior,” I grumbled, “you know I wouldn’t speak to you unless it were absolutely necessary.
 
What’s happened to her?”

Blanchard took a long sip of his lemonade, licked his upper lip, and then shot a quick glance at Boyle.

“Sheriff, I guess you’d better explain this one.”

Boyle shifted uncomfortably on his stool.
 
He leaned forward and motioned me to come closer to him.

“Annie’s husband, Vernon, has been lurking around lately.
 
I guess he must’ve messed her up a few nights ago.
 
Annie won’t talk about it, but it seems that’s what’s going on.” Boyle pushed himself back into his chair and then crammed a large bite of sandwich into his mouth.

“It’s a shame,” sighed Blanchard, shaking his head, “Peg was pretty upset by it.
 
Last thing we want is to have some crazy nigger loitering around our house, but it seems like that’s a possibility.
 
He followed Annie home the other night.”

“What?” I gasped.
 
“Followed her home?”

“Yep, beat her up and left her on the side of the road,” Blanchard shook his head.

“Jesus.” I mumbled, stunned.

I turned to Boyle who was shoving another enormous bite into his mouth.

“Are you going to do anything about this?” I asked.

“Do?” he choked out, his mouth full of sandwich.

“Yeah, DO,” I hissed, “you know, serve and protect and all that.”

“Good God, Palmer, you have a heightened sense of morality, don’t you?” laughed Blanchard.
 

“I do my best to stay out of the coloreds’ affairs.” Boyle added.
 
“But, since Annie works for the Blanchards and they don’t want Vernon Johnson coming around their place, I’ve been picking her up after work and driving her home,
 
you know, just to make sure.”

“And it’s awful kind of you,” said Blanchard, “you know if it was up to me, I’d just let Annie go, but Peg wouldn’t have it.
 
Course, I know better than to get involved with that kind of thing,” he smirked and shot a knowing glance at the Sheriff.
 
I saw a slight smile forming at the corners of Boyle’s mouth. I knew from this remark that the two of them still thought my keeping Melee around was a tremendous joke.

“Well, that is decent of you,” I admitted to Boyle.

“Uh, yeah, all the same, Palmer, be on the lookout for him, got it?
 
I mean, I think he’s wandering around here, and if that’s the case, we all had better be careful. No telling what he might do, you know.”
 
Boyle sat back and began picking his teeth with the nail on his pinky finger.
 
I nodded and then went back to wiping down the counter.

Later in the day, after the lunch counter had closed I cornered Izzy who had come by to make the afternoon deliveries.

“Izzy, how is your mother?” I asked.
 
He shot an anxious look at me, the smile draining immediately from his face.

“Uh, she, she alright, sir,” he mumbled, ducking his head to examine his shoes.

“Izzy, you know you can tell me if something’s wrong, don’t you?” I said.

“Mmm hmm.”

“Izzy?
 
Israel Johnson!” I demanded, getting his attention.

“Yes sir?”

“Has your daddy been around again?” I asked, softer this time.

Izzy seemed confused, began to shake his head, and then stared back at his feet.

“I guess so, sir,” he sighed.

“Well have you seen him?” I asked.

“No sir.”

“Well, did he hit your mother?”

“I guess so, sir,” he repeated.

“Izzy, the next time you see your daddy, I want you to come get me, you here?
 
You come get me, and I’ll do whatever I can to help your momma, alright?”

“Mmm hmm, I mean, yes sir.”

Izzy kept his head ducked, so I gave him a quick pat on the shoulder, and then sent him out to make the deliveries. The afternoon went by quickly.
 
It was the week before Halloween, and children would come after school each day to try on masks and
 
all the costumes we sold.
 
A woman came in with a little girl who was determined to be a witch, no matter how her mother tried to convince her to be a princess or a fairy.
 

“No momma! The witch!
 
I wanna be a witch!” she pouted, her head shaking with exasperation.

Her mother eventually gave in, and the little girl insisted on wearing the witch’s hat out of the store, her long curls bobbing underneath the wide black brim as she skipped along.

Before I left for the day, I put two large bottles of valium and a can of white paint in my pockets.
 
The valium was for Sally, of course.
 
It helped her get through the days and nights without hearing me and Melee.
 
It was the least I could do to keep her in supply.
 
Each evening I would put two pills on her nightstand and two more in the morning.
 
She spent her days in bed, barely speaking.
 
Melee continued to tend to her, bringing her food, sometimes even feeding her, giving her sponge baths and caring for her like a dedicated nurse.
 
Sally did not complain.
 
In fact she seemed to have formed a strange attachment to the girl, which I did not question. I only cared that Melee would be waiting for me at night after Sally dozed off.

The white paint was for my annual pilgrimage to the cemetery.
 
Every year, before All Soul’s Day, I would drive out to the cemetery beyond the town limits and spend a few hours tending to the grave of our lost child.
 
Other relatives of lost ones would do the same, trimming the grass, cleaning and painting the tombstones.
 
I knew the drive well, though I only went there once a year.
 
Up the oak-lined gravel lane, through the main gates, the road wandered around to the left.
 
I parked the car and walked North, passing the rows of Landrys, Martins and Naquins, and came to a small white marker, the lonely resting place of the only Palmer who would be buried there until her mother and father joined her.

I took out the white paint, a brush, and a clean cotton rag.
 
I wiped down the stone, trying to remove some of the grime from the last year of neglect.
 
She would have been seven years old. Just a little older than Gracie was when she died.
 
I wondered what she would look like. Would she have curly hair like Gracie did?
 
Would she want to be a witch or a princess for Halloween? I brushed a coat of white paint carefully over the gravestone, dipping it into the P, the A, the L,
 
lingering over the M, wondering what we would have named her. . .Pamela, Alice, Lucy, Maggie, Emily, Rachel. . .

By the time I had finished, it was getting dark and the air was chilly.
 
I shivered and pulled my jacket up around my neck, jamming my hat down over my ears and tucking my head down.
 
I shoved my fists into my pockets, gripping the valium bottles in one hand and the empty paint can in the other.
 
In seven years, Sally had not once gone to see the grave of her child.
 
I wondered if she ever would and felt sad for the little lost soul.

“I’m sorry,” I said under my breath, not knowing exactly to whom I said it.

The wind was starting to kick up when my car hit the main road back to town. I rolled my windows up and fumbled with the stereo, hoping to find a cheerful tune.
 
A few drops of rain splattered across the windshield, and I sighed.
 
There wasn’t too much of a fall season in Louisiana.
 
Summer seemed to last forever, with warm weather all the way into December at times, a brief period of frost through January, and then warm again as early as February.
 
By May, it was summer.
 
Leaves did not usually turn the glorious colors they did elsewhere in autumn, and their stay was short-lived, a hard rain in October or November would knock them all out of the trees.
 
I felt that this was going to be another one of those fall-ending rains.

By the time I pulled into the driveway at my house it was pounding down on the car, heavy raindrops, so large it was almost possible to see them falling individually.
 
The car’s headlights were muffled by the deluge.
 
I could barely see to pull into the garage. I ran the short distance from the car to the back porch and stood shaking, cold and wet.
 
It wasn’t until I reached for the door handle that I noticed Melee sitting in the rocking chair.

She was rocking slowly, her feet drawn up and her arms wrapped tightly around her knees.
 
She was staring vacantly out into the night.
 
The same vacant stare she had when I first saw her, the same stare as when I drove her away from Meyer’s store after the arrest. The same stare as a person whose soul had been emptied, her eyes black and lifeless.

“Melee?” I whispered, “is everything alright?”

Without looking at me, and in a voice so low it was barely audible she murmured,

“I have seen the devil again tonight.”

Chapter Twelve

I’ve seen the Vieux Diable again, awake and in my dreams.
 
At first I thought it was as it always has been, just my imagination -- the frightened nightmares of my childhood coming back to revisit me -- but now I am sure it is not.
 
This time, he is there, watching me from the back yard, just out of reach of the porch light, a dark figure, unmoving, his face obscured in the night.

The first time I saw him I was taking care of Sally.
 
I was bringing her soup that I’d made, and I fed it to her.
 
She only eats for me now. Though I know she once hated me, now she calls for me, and I help her.
 
I bathe her and bring her roses cut from her garden.
 
I sit at her bedside and I tell her stories – happy ones – about Compere Lapin and Compere Bouki, and I sing to her a little. Bram does not know.
 
He is often so cruel to her, and it frightens me, though I cannot tell him this.
 
He comes to me every night and I give him what he wants, so that I may stay here, so that I don’t have to go back to my father.

After I fed Sally the soup that night, she told me she was hot and asked me to open the windows and the door to the back porch so that she could breathe easier.
 
As I peered out into the night I saw him, leaning against the garage.
 
Bram was not home; he was working late at the drugstore. I stifled a scream so that he wouldn’t know I was there.
 
I stood watching him for quite a while, and he didn’t move.
 
So I shut the back door again and returned to Sally.

“Melee,” she called, “are you there?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I assured her.

“Don’t leave me tonight until Bram comes home, please.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

“Melee, tell me a story.
 
I have such a headache and your stories always make me feel better.”

I sat next to her and prepared myself to tell a story, wondering which one of Marraine’s collection I should tell her tonight,
 
and then a thought came to me.

“Miss Sally, may I ask you something?” I said, stroking her hair.

“Hmm?” she mumbled.

“Why are you so sad?”

She didn’t speak for a moment, and then she closed her eyes and sighed.

“Because I am lonely.”

“For Mr. Bram?”
 
I asked.

“No,” she answered, and then after a long pause, “for my child.
 
She died.”

“Oh, I am sorry,” I said.

And so I told her the story Marraine had given me, so long ago, about the mother who had lost a child and the child’s candle, and how the mother had to let the child go. And I think that this soothed her, because her face smoothed out and she began to breathe deeply and for the first time in many weeks, she fell asleep without crying and without taking any pills.

The next morning, she woke up and sat up in bed and called me.

“Melee!” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.

“Bring me my clothes.
 
I think I would like to work in the garden today.”

And so I helped her dress, and she did work in the garden all morning, and I heard her humming from time to time.
 
And when it was time for lunch she ate out on her back porch instead of in her bed, as usual.
 
I waited until Bram had eaten his lunch and then he wanted to take me upstairs to my bedroom, and I gave him what he wanted again, so that he would leave and go back to the store.

When he left I went to check on Sally.

“Miss Sally,” I said, as I took her lunch tray.

“Yes, Melee?” she smiled.

“I would like to help you, would you let me?”
 
I asked.

She laughed a little, but her eyes were troubled.

“How would you help me, Melee?” she asked.

“I know some things. . .some medicine that my Godmother taught me.
 
I think that it might help you.
 
It might heal you and make you able to, to have a child.”
 
I ducked my head down and waited, afraid that she would be angry at me for saying this.
 
Instead she became very quiet.
 
I waited for what seemed like forever until I dared to glance at her again.