"The spirit is hiding in a cistern or a pot. It has to hide in water. Don't be afraid," she coached, and then stopped by a cistern used to gather rainwater from the roof of the Rodrigueses' house. She opened her bottle and tipped it so as to spill only a drop or two into it and then closed her eyes and mumbled a prayer. We did the same thing at every barrel and every pot until we circled the house and returned to the front where Mr. Rodrigues, Theresa, and the other two children waited in anticipation.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Landry," Mr. Rodrigues said, "but Theresa's just told me the children have an old gumbo pot out back. It's surely got some rainwater in it from the downpour late this afternoon."
"Show me," Grandmère ordered Theresa, who nodded and led the way. She was so nervous, she couldn't find it at first.
"We've got to find it," Grandmère Catherine warned. Theresa began to cry.
"Take your time, Theresa," I told her, and squeezed her arm gently to reassure her. She sucked in a deep breath and nodded. Then she bit down on her lower lip and concentrated until she remembered the exact location and took us to it. Grandmère knelt down and dropped the holy water in, whispering her prayer as she did so.
Perhaps it was my overworked imagination; perhaps not, but I thought I saw something pale gray; something that resembled a baby, fly up and away. I smothered a cry, afraid I would frighten Theresa even more. Grandmère Catherine stood up and we returned to the house to offer our final condolences. She set a totem of the Virgin Mary at the front door and told Mr. Rodrigues to be sure it remained there for forty days and forty nights. She gave him another one and told him to put it at the foot of his and his wife's bed and leave it there just as long. Then we started back to our own home.
"Do you think you chased it off, Grandmère?" I asked when we were sufficiently away from the house and none of the Rodrigues family would hear.
"Yes," she said. Then she turned to me and added, "I wish I had the power to chase away the evil spirit that dwells in your Grandpère as easily. If I thought it would do any good, I'd bathe him in holy water. Goodness knows, he could use the washing anyway."
I smiled, but my eyes soon filled with tears as well. For as long as I could remember, Grandpère Jack had lived apart from us, lived in his trapper's shack in the swamp. Most of the time, Grandmère Catherine had only bad things to say about him and refused to set eyes on him whenever he did come around, but sometimes, her voice got softer, her eyes warmer, and she would wish he would do this or that to help himself or change his ways. She didn't like me to go poling a pirogue through the swamps to visit him.
"God forbid you turn over that flimsy canoe or fall out. He'd probably be too soaked with whiskey to hear your cries for help and then there are the snakes and gators to contend with, Ruby. He ain't worth the effort of the journey," she'd mutter, but she never stopped me and even though she pretended not to care or want to know about him, I noticed she always managed to listen when I described one of my visits to Grandpère.
How many nights had I sat by my window and looked up at the moon peeking between two clouds and wished and prayed that somehow we could be a family. I had no mother and no father, but only Grandmère Catherine who had been and still was a mother to me. Grandmère always said Grandpère could barely care for himself, much less substitute as a father for me. Still, I dreamed. If they were together again. . . . if we were all together in our house, we would be like a normal family. Perhaps then, Grandpère Jack wouldn't drink and gamble. All of my friends at school had regular families, with brothers and sisters and two parents to come home to and love.
But my mother lay buried in the cemetery a half mile away and my father. . . my father was a blank face with no name, a stranger who had come passing through the bayou and met my mother at a fais dodo, a Cajun dance. According to Grandmère Catherine, the love they made so wildly and carefree that night resulted in my birth. What hurt me beside my mother's tragic death was the realization that somewhere out there lived a man who never knew he had a daughter, had me. We would never set eyes on each other, never exchange a word. We wouldn't even see each other's shadows or silhouettes like two fishing boats passing in the night.
When I was a little girl I invented a game: the Daddy Game, I would study myself in the mirror and then try to imagine my facial characteristics on a man. I would sit at my drawing table and sketch his face. Conjuring the rest of him was harder. Sometimes I made him very tall, as tall as Grandpère Jack, and sometimes just an inch or so taller than I was. He was always a well-built, muscular man. I decided long ago that he must have been good-looking and very charming to have won my mother's heart so quickly.
Some of the drawings became watercolor paintings. In one of them, I set my imaginary father in a fais dodo hall, leaning against a wall, smiling because he had first set eyes on my mother. He looked sexy and dangerous, just the way he must have looked to draw my beautiful mother to him. In another painting, I had him walking down a road, but turned to wave good-bye. I always thought there was a promise in his face in that picture, the promise of return.
Most of my paintings had a man in them that in my imagination was my father. He was either on a shrimp boat or poling a pirogue through one of the canals or across one of the ponds. Grandmère Catherine knew why the man was in my pictures. I saw how sad it made her, but I couldn't help myself. Lately, she had urged me to paint swamp animals and birds more often than people.
On weekends, we would put some of my paintings out with our woven blankets, sheets, and towels, our split-oak baskets and palmetto hats. Grandmère would also put out her jars of herbal cures for headaches, insomnia, and coughs. Sometimes, we had a pickled snake or a large bullfrog in a jar because the tourists who drove by and stopped loved to buy them. Many loved to eat Grandmère's gumbo or jambalaya. She would ladle out small bowls of it and they would sit at the benches and tables in front of our house and enjoy a real Cajun lunch.
All in all, I suppose my life in the bayou wasn't as bad as the lives some motherless and fatherless children led. Grandmère Catherine and I didn't have many worldly goods, but we had our small safe home and we were able to get by with our loom work and handicrafts. From time to time, although admittedly not often enough, Grandpère Jack would drop by to give us part of what he made trapping muskrats, which was the main way he earned a living these days. Grandmère Catherine was too proud or too angry at him to accept it gracefully. Either I would take it or Grandpère would just leave it on the kitchen table.
"I don't expect no thanks from her," he would mutter to me, "but at least she could acknowledge I'm here leaving her the damn money. It's hard earned, it is," he would declare in a loud voice on the galerie steps. Grandmère Catherine would say nothing in reply, but usually keep on doing whatever she was doing inside.
"Thank you, Grandpère," I would tell him.
"Ah, I don't want your thanks. It's not your thanks I'm asking for, Ruby. I just want someone to know I ain't dead and buried or swallowed by a gator. Someone to at least have the decency to look at me," he often moaned, still loud enough for Grandmère to hear.
Sometimes, she appeared in the doorway if he said something that got to her.
"Decency," she cried from behind the screen door. "Did I hear you, Jack Landry, talk of decency?"
"Ah . . ." Grandpère Jack waved his long arm in her direction and turned away to return to the swamp.
"Wait, Grandpère," I cried, running after him.