The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (4 page)

All things considered, it was only fitting that one cold winter night, the house blew up with Aunt Gladys in it.

“At least it was quick,” was what Daddy said.

Yeah, if you didn’t count the twenty-some-odd years of sitting alone in that kitchen, waiting to die. God have mercy on her soul.

So when I pull into Miss Velma’s dirt drive and park behind her ’70-something Toronado, I ask God for an easy afternoon, for Him to instill in me whatever spirit had moved Daddy to make those trips all those years ago.

“It’s your job,” I remind myself as I consider the squat house on its stubby concrete blocks. I know that after all is said and done, I’ll feel better for having visited, feel that inner glow of a job well done, of doing something no one else wants to do, bringing joy into another person’s life. The porch isn’t sagging at least.

A cat darts out from under Miss Velma’s car and dashes under the house.

“Christ,” I say.

“Please help me,” I add as an afterthought, but I’m not fooling either of us.

I skip the front porch and walk to the door just off the driveway. Miss Velma answers wearing a pantsuit. Not a varicose vein in sight. Her hair is combed neatly and she has a light dusting of makeup. She’s even wearing shoes.

As she holds the screen door open to let me in, an orange cat runs up the steps and into the house.

“Uh-oh,” I say.

“Aw, that’s Meenoo. I can’t keep that one out of the house,” she says with a laugh.

I step into Miss Velma’s kitchen. Bright light reflects off the recently mopped linoleum. A cigarette burns in an ashtray next to the sink, but a small fan is blowing the smoke out of the window. Meenoo rubs against a door opening onto the rest of the house and Miss Velma opens it a bit. The cat disappears into the darkness of the other side. I wonder if Miss Velma simply cleaned up the kitchen, shoved all of her mess into the other part of the house.

“I hope you don’t mind the smoke,” she says.

“Not at all,” I reply. She’s trying. “I just might join you,” I add, reaching for my pack. I don’t like to smoke in front of the flock, but it might make her feel a little more at ease.

She offers me coffee. I scratch my left ankle with my right foot out of some conditioned response. The smell of mothballs and cat food is here in the kitchen, but it’s being held at bay by candles and incense.

I notice, too, that the stove is bare. Nothing bubbling or simmering or warming. The oven knob is in the off position. Nothing in the sink and nothing in the draining board. That’s just not right.

Miss Velma hands me a cup of coffee and puts a Tupperware bowl of sugar and a jar of powdered nondairy creamer on the table. Coffee is good. I like coffee. But I swear she’d said lunch. My stomach growls as if in agreement.

I say nothing about the apparent lack of food and sip my coffee. We start talking and it isn’t long before her story comes spinning out. Born and raised on a Grand Prairie farm, married young to a good man, a farmer who later became a bus driver for the St. Landry Parish school district. They had no children, something wrong with one or both of them. They never bothered to look into it. It was a different time then—just after the last of the orphan trains rolled through south Louisiana and before fertility treatments were as common as cold remedies. If you were barren, you lived with it until God sent down an angel to change you, perhaps striking your husband dumb in the process. Still, they were happy with each other, one of those couples that could have lived forever without the rest of the world and been happy as clams.

Mr. Richard died ten years ago.

“He had a heart attack,” she says, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Right there in bed. It was bad, bad, Father. Thirty-five years I was married to that man and I never seen a look like that on his face. Never seen him cry.”

“It must have been hard on you,” I say, reaching over and patting the back of her hand. The move surprises me. I’m not the touchy-feely type, but it strikes me as the right thing to do. It’s what priests do in the movies.

She stares down at my hand on top of hers.

“You get used to a person after that long. And then they’re gone. You know?”

I don’t. I absolutely don’t. I live behind a church, by myself. I don’t even have a dog. I’ve only been alive thirty-two years.

But I need to say something. That much is obvious. In the space of seconds, Miss Velma has seemed to shrink. Her shoulders are slightly hunched now and I swear the room gets dim, the smoke starts to collect around us, the old smell of defeat gets stronger.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll remember you both in my prayers tonight. And I’ll light a candle for Mr. Richard over at the church.”

It shouldn’t be that simple, but it is.

“Thank you, Father Sibille,” she says. “That’s so nice of you.” And her smile comes back. It’s a little weaker, sure, but a couple of kind words from the priest and it was all a little more bearable.

She pats my hand now, stands up, and goes to the fridge.

“I don’t cook too much since he’s gone, but I still like to make chicken salad. That was his favorite.”

“That sounds great,” I say. And I mean it. It’s not just that I like chicken salad—and I do—but the thought of a light lunch, something cold served on white bread, is somehow liberating. The conversation was heavy enough.

Miss Velma places the large ceramic bowl on the table. The chicken’s been shredded down almost to a paste, just the way I like it. She grabs two plates and a loaf of Evangeline Maid bread and is making the first sandwich when someone knocks on the door.

“Miss Velma, what you doing in there, girl?”

“Oh, it’s Vicky,” Miss Velma says. But I’d recognized the voice immediately.

“Well, that’s nice,” is all I can think to say.

“Come in, come in,” Miss Velma says.

“Hey, folks. Hey, Padre, thought I saw your car out there. Figured I’d stop in and see what kind of party I was missing.”

Miss Velma giggles. “Father Sibille, Vicky stops by all the time to say hi,” she says with a hint of pride.

“Really?” Well, there goes my beatification, I guess.

“We’re just having some lunch, Vick, so you gonna have to stay and eat you a little something,” she says, grabbing another plate from the cabinet.

“Okay, but only if you sit down,” Vicky says, pulling a chair from under the table and motioning to Miss Velma, who doesn’t put up an argument.

With that, Vicky takes over, makes two sandwiches for each of us, fetches a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator, and lunch is on. Smiles all around. It’s that simple.

Following lunch, Miss Velma and I are enjoying a post-meal smoke and Vicky is washing dishes when she suddenly says, “Little Red Riding Redneck!”

I practically fall out of my chair. “What?”

“A little girl in a red hoodie just rode by on her bike,” she says. “Red jacket and long skirt. Weirdest thing. I’ve never seen her around here before.”

“Which way was she going?” I ask, already at the door.

“Toward Ville Platte,” she says. “Steve, what’s the matter with you?”

“Bye, yall,” I shout, and offer no further explanation before running out to the car and nosing it onto the road heading toward Ville Platte. I’m not even a mile down the road when I see her ahead of me, steering her bike with one hand and swinging a stick at the tall grass growing from the ditch running along the shoulder. I drive by at forty miles per hour and glance at her through the rearview mirror. She looks like a normal kid riding her bike on the side of the road. A ghost, she’s not. But Pentecostal she does appear to be.

The long hair tied up in a bun. The ridiculously impractical denim skirt. Where the hell did she come from? I didn’t think there were many—or any, for that matter—Pentecostals back here.

I keep on driving. I never come down in this direction. All of my house calls so far have been in Grand Prairie proper (as loosely as that’s defined) or on the road toward Washington. I slow down to thirty and keep an eye out for a house or gravel road heading off into the woods that could conceivably harbor a nine-year-old Pentecostal girl.

I’m about to turn back after four miles when I see in the distance a large yellow bulldozer worrying a mountain of dirt off the side of a newly laid gravel road in a recently cleared field. A handful of trees—four stately oaks and three pecan trees—have been allowed to live. The trunks of the fallen—those that haven’t been hauled off yet—are stacked neatly on timber-hauling beds waiting only for the trucks to come and cart them away. Toward the back of what appears to be a twenty-acre piece of land are the burning remains of pulled stumps.

Sitting under the biggest oak is a double-wide trailer. In front of it are a wine-colored Cadillac, a brand-new Chevy Suburban, and a child’s jungle gym. Swinging from the monkey bars is a small, pale redheaded boy.

“What is this all about?” I ask myself.

I’m not exactly proud to admit it, but Pentecostals bug me. Unlike Baptists and Methodists or any other Protestant faith, they simply strike me as traitors. Why? Because my perception, right or wrong, is that many of them—the ones in south Louisiana, at any rate—were born and raised Catholic and then, one day, they turned tail and ran.

And they took Timmy with them.

Timmy was my best friend in grade school. Before he suddenly changed. Kindergarten through fifth grade we were as thick as thieves. Then one year, he was a week late coming back from Christmas vacation. When he did come back, he told me bluntly: “We ain’t Catholics no more. Mama and Daddy switched us to Pentecostal and they say the rest of yall are going to burn in the fires of hell.”

How’s that for a conversation starter? The details at the time were fuzzy. His parents had converted and adopted a whole slew of weird rules. Out went the TV. Out went the movies. Out went any music other than approved Christian stuff. No more cursing. In other words, out went everything twentieth-century American kids based their friendships on. Hell, Timmy couldn’t wear shorts anymore. His sister and mother couldn’t cut their hair or wear makeup. On top of that, he had to go to church twice during the week and another two times on Sunday.

Even more mystifying was that he seemed happy about all of this. How could he be? Everything enjoyable in life had been taken from him. Worse, as the weeks went by, as he grew into his new religion and learned its language, he started talking about the Holy Ghost more and informing me that I was going to hell for listening to Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night.” When we went to Mass once a week for school, he’d sit there and watch the priest intently as if expecting him to burst into flames.

“He’s the one who’s really gonna get it,” he’d tell me.

“God, Timmy. Shut up!” I remember telling him one day. “Why do you even come to this school anymore if you’re so full up on Holy Ghost? Why don’t you go talk in tongues somewhere?”

My words didn’t seem to make an impact. “Because it’s halfway through the school year, that’s why. Once summer rolls around, I ain’t ever coming back to this school and I’m never going back into one of those churches. All them false idols drive me crazy.”

“False idols? What are you even talking about?” I wanted to know.

“Statues and stuff, dummy. All them saint statues ain’t any better than a golden bull.”

And that was pretty much the end of it. We tolerated each other until the end of the school year, and I spent more and more time with other friends talking about Transformers and Smurfette and whether country music was even worth listening to. And at the end of the school year, Timmy bid us all good-bye and we never really saw him again.

Of course, with half a lifetime under my belt and a library of gossip at my disposal, Timmy’s happiness at the time isn’t such a mystery anymore. His parents hit a rough patch when the oil market went under in the ’80s. Daddy started drinking. Mommy started yelling. They both started smacking Timmy around. Then one day they realized they needed help or someone was going to get really hurt. Their twice-a-year Catholicism really didn’t do much for them. They probably felt they’d have the eyes of the whole parish on them if they started going to church more often. “There’s the drunk and his beat-up wife,” they’d whisper. A friend of a friend told them about this new church, which just happened to be filled with rules—no drinking, for example—and structure and a whole community of people trying to get their acts together.

As far as Timmy knew, Daddy caught the Holy Ghost and he quit being a mean old drunk. Now, those are results. And it was certainly more than all those statues in the big brick and marble building had ever done for him.

Good for Timmy. And good for the Pentecostals.

Still, they took my friend away from me, the bastards.

And now they seem to be setting up in my backyard. Across the gravel road from the big trailer under the oak tree where the little boy is playing, there are four more—all double-wides by the looks of them—set at fifty-yard intervals from one another. Each trailer is on its own concrete slab. On the right side of the path, groups of men are knocking together wooden braces where I assume more slabs will go. Clusters of gas and water pipes sprout from the dirt like wildflowers telling me it’s just a matter of days before the new slabs are poured and more trailers moved in.

How does this happen? There’s a suburb going up back here without me knowing about it?

The bulldozer comes to a jerking halt and the driver climbs out of the cab and stands on the passenger-side tread of the machine. While he considers my car, he pulls a red bandana out of the bib of his denim overalls and wipes his brow. Like meerkats who’ve detected a hawk, the men working on the slab frames for the trailers all pop their heads up, look to the stopped bulldozer, look at my car, and settle their eyes on the bulldozer man. He waves his bandana at them absently and they go back to their work.

He then flicks a wave my way in hello and motions me over. I ease up on the brake and inch down the drive, watching him the whole way.

I stop the car and walk across the fresh dirt of the field. I feel it sticking to my shoes, but don’t look down. I don’t want to come off as prissy.