Under the Cajun Moon (24 page)

Thus, with the big picture in mind, Travis and I went through the poem, line by line. Decoding the first verse was simple:

There is a place of great repast,
Where promises and friendships last.
Where patrons dine on meals of kings,
And Quarter boys can live their dreams.

The “place of great repast” in the first line was Ledet’s restaurant. The
“Quarter boys” in the last line were my father and Sam, who had grown up next door to each other in the French Quarter. Both of them had found jobs in the restaurant industry at a very young age and continued to stay with it in one capacity or other. For many years, my dad dreamed of owning his own restaurant, and he always promised Sam that once he did, Sam would be his manager and right-hand man.

Given what we knew, the meaning of the next verse was also quite clear:

Yet not alone do I succeed,
But with your help in word and deed.
And so I give you at this time,
Security inside a rhyme.

Clearly, these were references to the financial deal that Ruben Peralta had arranged between my father and the investors. We decided “Security inside a rhyme” was just another way of saying, “I’m using the treasure that this poem leads to as collateral for your loans.”

Thus, the next verse also made sense:

Here in the City Care Forgot
We’ll make a gumbo in a pot.
So grab your spices from the shelf.
We start with Chef Ledet himself

To keep the whereabouts of the treasure’s location a secret, the poem had been written in the pretense of a recipe for gumbo when what it really was, was a recipe for finding the treasure. As for the first line, New Orleans was often called the City That Care Forgot.

I didn’t quite get why my father had included the next verse:

In gumbo, always make a roux,
4T oil heated through.
Then add 5T of flour, white,
Stirred over heat till the color’s right.

I expressed my confusion on this one to Travis.

“That
is
how you start a gumbo,” Travis said. “Maybe he had to put
this part in there just to make the poem seem realistic, like it really was just a recipe for gumbo.”

“Okay,” I said, skimming the rest, “so then why is this the only ingredient for which he gives a precise measurement? Four tablespoons oil, five tablespoons flour. Those numbers must be important somehow.”

“Maybe.”

“What do you think he means by ‘till the color’s right’?”

“The color is the most important part of a roux,
cher
. Don’t you know how to cook gumbo?”

I shrugged, not explaining about my one disastrous experience at gumbo when I was sixteen years old. My father had taken a rare day off from work and we were both at home, so in yet another desperate attempt to get his attention, I had had the brilliant idea of asking him to teach me how to cook.

Much to my delight, he was pleased with my request at first, eagerly gathering the ingredients from the kitchen cabinets and describing for me the origins of gumbo and the infinite number of variations that people had managed to create over the years. His version started with a roux and ended with filé, he said, though many folks believed you didn’t need filé if you had a roux.

He prattled on and on, and though I didn’t care much about the specifics, I remember beaming in the glow of my father’s undivided attention. With him watching over my shoulder, I stood at the stove and stirred the flour into the oil exactly as he directed.

“The trick is to keep stirring and stirring and watching and watching as it changes colors,” he said.

Sure enough, the longer I stood there and stirred, the mixture began to change from a light brown he called “béchamel sauce” to a darker one he deemed “sauce piquant.” As it slowly grew even darker, I thought the mixture might burn, but he assured me that as long as I kept stirring we could push it to the very limits, to that precise dark brown moment that waited between “not quite enough” and “disaster.”

Unfortunately, the phone rang as we were coming into the home stretch. He answered it, motioning for me to keep stirring. My arm was
getting tired, though, so when he ducked around the corner to talk, I took a moment to shake out my arm and switch the spoon to my other hand. That one didn’t work as well for stirring, though, so I switched back, accidentally dropping the spoon in the process.

Mortified, I wiped up the globby mess from the front of the stove and the floor as quickly as I could, knowing that that sort of clutziness in Ledet’s could get a person fired. Hiding the dirty paper towels in the trash and the spoon in the sink, I ran to get a new, clean spoon from the drawer. I made it back to the stove, spoon in hand, just before my father hung up the phone and returned to the room.

I thought I had gotten away with it, but the moment he came around the corner, he screamed. Apparently, in the few seconds it had taken me to clean up my mess, my lack of stirring had caused the roux to burn.

My father went into a rage so extreme that one would have thought I had burned the house down. He took over then, pushing me away from the smoking pan as he banged and clanged and continued to yell. By the time his tirade had run his course, I was still there in a corner of the kitchen, determined to make things right.

“Can we still make gumbo, Daddy?” I asked softly, trying not to cry.

At that, he turned to me and gave me his most withering glare.

“You burned the roux, Chloe. There’s no going any further when you burn a roux.”

All these years later, I could still feel the sting of that moment, of standing there alone after he left, our happy time together having gone up in smoke.

“I know how gumbo is made,” I said now to Travis. “I just wonder if there’s some significance to the mention of color here.”

Unsure, we moved on to the next stanza:

For the one who loves chou and chouchou,
I couldn’t have done it without you,
I add to the roux your trinity,
First learned in your vicinity.

That one made no sense to me whatsoever, but Travis laughed, saying
this one was about his grandfather. Apparently, Alphonse Naquin’s favorite song was an old Cajun tune called “Chou and Chouchou.”

“‘I love my chou and my chouchou too. Give me both and be gone wit’ you,’” Travis sang in a surprisingly good voice.

“What does it mean?” I asked, smiling.

“
Chou
is ‘cabbage’ and
chouchou
is ‘darling.’ It’s just a silly song, meaning ‘All I need is some good food and the woman I love and I’ll be happy.’”

“Does it mention religion? Down here, he refers to the trinity.”

Travis shook his head, explaining that the “trinity” is what a lot of people in Louisiana call the three basic ingredients to almost every dish: onion, bell peppers, and celery. Obviously, those were the ingredients that my father had attributed to Alphonse, though he gave no specific amounts in the poem of how much to add.

Given all that, the last line, “learned in your vicinity,” made sense. Much of what my father knew about Cajun cooking he had first learned from Alphonse and his family down in Paradise.

The next verse stumped Travis but was clear to me:

For the Bürgermeister, a man of means,
Who learned to fight in old Orleans,
I add some andouille sliced fine as can be
’Cause you Allemands love your boucherie.

In Germany, a
Bürgermeister
was a form of public office, much like a mayor, I explained to Travis. Given that Conrad Zahn was of German heritage and was a politician, I felt sure this verse was describing him. I didn’t know who or what he might have had to fight about, but again in the last line he is referred to as an “
Allemand,
” or a German.

“Here’s his ingredient,” Travis added, pointing to the word
andouille
, which was a sausage made from lean pork and garlic. That was reinforced in the next line, because a
boucherie
was a sort of community pig butchering, one that resulted in various pork products, including pork sausage.

I paused, looking up at Travis.

“Pig butchering,” I said, feeling something rise up in my stomach. “A
person who likes to butcher pigs might have no problem torturing someone and then killing them. Like someone did to Sam.”

Travis met my solemn gaze with his own.

“I hear you,
cher
. If we go talk to Conrad, we had better watch our step.”

I didn’t know how much more I could take. In the last forty-eight hours my father had been shot, I had been arrested for Kevin’s murder, and Travis and I had discovered Sam’s brutal death. I closed my eyes, and then I opened them when I felt Travis’ warm hand covering mine again and giving it a comforting squeeze. I wasn’t alone, and I knew the only way out of this situation was to go forward. Taking a deep breath, I smiled at him and then we moved on to the next stanza.

For king of the Sunday breakdown raids,
Whose ancestors brought seeds in their braids,
Professor of juré extraordinaire,
I add fresh okra into the pot there.

I had a feeling this one was for Sam, because I knew that “Sunday breakdown” was an old restaurant expression. When I was little, sometimes he would play restaurant with me, and he’d always order things like a “coal yard,” which was a cup of black coffee, and a “flat car,” which was a pork chop. If I remembered correctly, a “Sunday breakdown” was simply fried chicken and grits.

As for the okra, I knew that this vegetable had first been brought to America by enslaved Africans. I hadn’t heard of seeds being smuggled in braids, but it was possible.

I didn’t know what juré was, but Travis said that it was a form of music, one that had also come out of Louisiana’s African American culture. Unlike zydeco or Cajun music, juré had no instruments. Instead, it involved clapping and singing, and the words formed a sort of testimony or truth, hence the name
juré
, which translated as “truth.”

“Give me an example,” I said.

Travis told me to clap with him, and then he began to sing in time. The words were Cajun French, but even though I didn’t understand what he was saying, I loved the sound of it. A memory began to stir in my mind, and I could see myself with Eugenie and Sam in their apartment, clapping along to an old recording they had put on their phonograph.

Tears suddenly welled in my eyes at the memory, and I was overwhelmed at the thought that I would never sit and listen to music with my dear friend Sam again. I blinked hard and took in a deep breath. I would mourn later. Right now I had to concentrate on this task. Travis stopped singing, and somehow I managed to hold it together as we moved on to the next verse.

This one left us both clueless:

Next comes the stock to fill up the pot,
Seasoned with mirepoix, heated till hot.
For my hoghead friend I shall not scrimp,
As I add to the gumbo a helping of shrimp.

We knew mirepoix was the bundle of spices used to season stocks. Other than that, we had no idea to whom this verse referred. Neither one of us had ever heard the term “hoghead” except for hog’s head cheese. We decided to move on.

Next came this one:

And finally for he who has always been there,
Son of a traiteur, kind and fair.
We grind up filé to add at the end,
Then the dish is finished and ready for friends.

I was thinking of a traitor, but Travis said that
traiteur
was the word
for a folk healer, a practitioner of holistic medicine. That didn’t ring a bell for either one of us. I couldn’t imagine how we were going to be able to narrow this one down. The phrase “he who has always been there” led me to think that it had to be of my father’s very oldest friends. But as far as I knew, his oldest friends were Alphonse, Sam, Ruben, and Conrad. Beyond the four of them, I was stumped.

We moved quickly through the rest of the poem. The next two verses were the ones that explained how the puzzle worked: