“Feu Follet” uses an excellent admixture of the real and the fantastic and the historical. I never knew quite what to expect from this story even as it met many of the beats of a classic fairytale, and the ending made me sit up straight in my chair. What, exactly, has happened? Something marvelous, something dangerous, something that feels utterly right. I loved this. — Guest Judge Kelly Link
New Orleans, 1915
Red carried the baby just so, the way she had been taught. The way she always did. The baby was so new it wasn’t hungry yet. It just slept quiet in the basket. She was sorry she had to give up the basket along with it. It was a nice basket. She wondered what would happen if she just left the baby naked inside the little door in the wall that surrounded the convent, and kept the basket and the blanket with the flowers on it for herself, in case some gentleman should give her a doll. She knew she wouldn’t, though. If Mama Des’ree, or the baby’s mama, or any of the whores who might be Red’s mama caught her, there’s no telling what they’d do. Throw her out, maybe. Send her to one of the circuses, where there were gentlemen who didn’t care she didn’t have any hair down there.
Red liked being given the responsibility of carrying the babies to the convent. She wished she could meet the trains like the boys Mama Des’ree paid to lead the soldiers past the other New Orleans bawdy houses and into her parlor, but everybody said it scared some of them to have a little girl showing them such things. And if it didn’t, you didn’t want them. That was for the circuses.
Mama Des’ree let her wear the blue dress and shiny button shoes when she was on the street instead of her old cotton shift and apron, as long as she didn’t get a speck on them. Look like you’re somebody, Mama Des’ree said. When she wore the blue dress Red liked to pretend she was on an important errand for a fine lady, maybe taking a pint of oysters to a neighbor who would give her a loaf of bread in return. She set her feet down extra hard on the packed dirt street so the shoes could make some noise, as if to say “Get out the way! An important girl is coming through!”
The blue dress had hardly been worn before Red got it. But then, hardly any other babies had gotten to stay in the house. Almost all had ended up in the convent or the orphan’s home uptown, where they say they went to school, but Red wasn’t sure she believed any of that. Mama Des’ree said keeping her had been a business decision, that having one baby around gave all those who’d given theirs up something to fuss over. And since Red had never been told who birthed her, and none of the mamas had claimed her outright, or had bright red hair like she’d been told she had from the day she was born, she had spent her whole ten years being first everybody’s baby and then everybody’s trouble. Redheads are always trouble. That’s what the mamas said, in between kissing her and slapping her and crying over their own lost mamas. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything but this blue dress and shiny button shoes, and this basket and this pretty flowered blanket. She was glad this baby hadn’t stayed. Babies weren’t nothing but trouble.
“What that you got? Something to eat? Can I have some? I’ll show you a secret.”
Ellie. Raggedy Ellie, who the sisters had scrubbing the banquette in front of the gate today. Red only hesitated for a second before she set her foot on the clean walk, her nose in the air the way Mama Des’ree’s was when she passed third row chattel on the street. She didn’t even glance down to see if she had spoiled the girl’s work when she came up out of the muck where the carriage horses stood.
“You got no secret I want to see.”
“You got a baby in that basket, right? Lord, have mercy, third one this week out of Storyville. You whores need some potions, keep them babies from coming. You give me something and I’ll see you get some. Sisters be sending those babies to Jesus, they keep coming like that.”
Red had reached the door in the wall, high but not too high for her to pass the basket into the little opening. She looked down at the sleeping form.
“What do you mean?”
“Aw, nothing. That baby a boy or girl?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Girl baby they keep. Boy baby they send off to St. Ant’ny.”
“Then what?” She’d never thought about it before. Nobody talked about it.
“What do you mean, ‘Then what?’ They raise them up. They send them to Jesus. They sell them for rendering. What do you care?” Ellie snorted and turned back as if to take up her scrubbing again, then hesitated. “I know somebody who’ll swap you a potion for that baby. One for when some other woman gets in trouble. Keep the next one from coming a’tall.”
Red looked at the girl. She didn’t look like she knew anybody who could do anything of the kind. She looked like a poor bayou girl who scrubbed floors and carried slops in a convent. She looked like she knew the back of a hand and what it was like to be a nobody who might end up with nothing but a mattress and a backstreet crib herself before long.
She set the basket down. A sound like a rusty hinge issued from inside. She had to think fast before that baby got hungry and attracted attention. “You got a mama?”
“She can’t take care of me. Got a mémère though. Grandmama. She’s the one with the potions. She’s a traiteuse—a healer, and a trader, got powerful medicines for folks. She stays out in the Atchafalaya. I can take you there if you want.”
Red looked up the street and down. “Now how would you take me out in that bayou? I don’t see a wagon and I sure don’t see a pirogue nor a pole. You walk on water? ‘Cause I sure don’t.”
Ellie shrugged. “I got a boat, me. And I can get us a ride quick as that.” She snapped her fingers. “How you think I get here?”
“Pfft. I don’t think about you at all.”
“You want that potion or not? Those whores’ll think twice about how they treat you if you got a potion that’ll solve their baby problem. Besides,” Ellie winked. “My mémère’s a trés bon cook. She’ll feed us right. Not those slops you eat after the men gets through with them.”
Red thought that maybe Ellie knew too much about her. Knew she was always a little hungry, always wanting something she never seemed able to quite name.
“What does your grandmama want with a baby? What’ll she do with it?”
Raggedy Ellie puffed up and smiled. She had a gap where her teeth hadn’t come in yet.
“Why, she’ll set it free,” she said.
“What do you mean, set it free?”
“You come with me you’ll see.”
The basket began to make sounds. It snuffled and wheezed. It sounded like it was winding up to do something. Red had to decide fast. The little door or the bayou? Go back to Mama Des’ree’s and take off the blue dress and become just trouble again or take a chance on having something to bargain with?
“Tell you what. I’ll ask her to teach you how to make the potion yourself. Then you’ll really be somebody.”
“Okay, okay. Find us a ride,” she said, shifting the weight of the thing from arm to arm. It was getting heavier by the minute.
* * *
Ellie hadn’t been joking about having a pirogue. She’d found a street vendor, with a wagonload of empty croaker sacks that stunk to high heaven, headed for Lake Pontchartrain, where the bayou folks tied their bateaus when they came into the city. Both of them had laughed at Red’s insistence that she sit on the wagon seat beside him rather than in the back, but he’d made the mule trot, and before half an hour Ellie pointed to a little bateau among the many tied up along its edge.
“You do this every day?” Red asked as she set the basket in the boat’s bottom and sniffed the hem of the blue dress, making certain none of the stink of the sacks had seeped into the fabric.
“Not every day. I stay with the sisters mostly. But Mémère, she likes me to come see her when I can. Bring her things she can’t get out in the bayou. Things to trade. Things to make potions.” The girl smiled and winked. She picked up a set of oars and pushed off from the pier to which all the little boats were tied. “First we row, then we pole, then we see what we can do for that baby.”
* * *
“You mean you never been in the bayous?” Ellie’s voice was incredulous. “You spend your whole entire life in New Orleans and never come out here? Girl, you don’t know what’s good. We got everything out here, or something to get it with.”
Red didn’t answer. She was busy trying to look in every direction at once. When she craned her neck and looked behind, she could still see the open water of the lake, afternoon light rippling off the little bouncing waves, penetrating into the openings in the trees. Ellie had rowed hard; Red was surprised how strong the girl’s arms and back were. She looked at her with grudging admiration. If Red was that strong she could beat as well as get beat. Nobody would slap her face or laugh at her and call her trouble again.
Now the oars had been swapped for a long pole, Ellie thrusting it down into the slow, shallow black water, grunting with every push. Tall cypress trees and the smooth, worn stumps of those long since fallen into the dark water closed in around the bateau. Spanish moss hung like tangled women’s hair, trailing the water, filled with gnats and mosquitoes whose whine made her ears tingle and itch. Now and then a long-legged white bird would lift from off a branch on wide wings, arcing toward the banks of clouds overhead. Red thought of angels, of effortless beauty and purpose, of rising up over this place and looking down, knowing nothing down here could touch you. She smiled and pointed at a trio of turtles sunning on a slantwise log, suddenly unwilling to say anything and break the gathering spell. Ellie nodded. She understands, Red thought. She knows this place. She’s of this place, not the dirty city, where she scrubs at steps where girls like me stomp mud without a thought.
This world was grey-green, black, brown, the water truculent, the air thick with the smell of decay. Now and then Ellie would poke Red and point, and Red would look, and have the feeling she had looked just a moment too late, into the space where a candle had just gone out, or a creature she wouldn’t even recognize had pulled behind a clump of swamp grass or sunk beneath the surface, leaving unexplained concentric circles that made her think of being pulled under.
“Are there monsters?” she whispered, praying the baby would stay quiet and not give them away to someone—or something—who might do them a kind of harm she couldn’t quite name, but that made her shudder.
Ellie snorted. “There’s always monsters.”
“Why do you live where there are monsters?”
“You think you don’t?”
* * *
“What you bring me, ma chère?” The woman’s voice carried down from the little porch that stuck out of the front of the tilted grey shack. It sat on waterlogged pilings above the water, though Red wasn’t sure it wouldn’t fall right in if the two of them—the three of them—should climb out of the little bateau and add their weight to hers.
The place looked held together by the vines that climbed out of the bayou up its sides, and the Spanish moss that hung from the cypress trees onto its roof. The woman herself was hard to make out. Her dark hair made shadows around her face as she leaned forward. A shadow, or maybe the halo from the afternoon sun behind her, gave her face an indistinct look. She wore a bright yellow shawl like Red would imagine a grandmother would wear. Her voice sounded young, though. If this was Ellie’s mémère, this bunch had nothing on the girls at Mama Des’ree’s for having them way too soon.
“I got a girl from one of the Storyville houses, and a bastard baby,” Ellie called back. Red looked sharply at the woman to see if words like those would bring the kind of punishment the nuns at the convent would certainly have given either of them had they heard, but the woman just waved them in and caught the line that Ellie threw her, throwing its loop over a pole and reaching down.
“Give me up that basket,” she said. As if something in her voice had reached the baby’s ears in a way that no other noise had, for the first time it began to squall. “Oh, I know that sound,” she said. “That baby’s hungry. Give it up to me.”
The basket began to twitch and sway as the little form thrashed beneath the blanket. Red, standing in the flat-bottomed boat, clutching it with two hands, shifted her weight, suddenly afraid she would tumble head first into the thick soup. She found purchase and started to lift it toward the woman’s outstretched hands.
A guttural growl from inside the shack made both of them draw back. The baby hushed as though it had been turned off.
“Oh Lord, I forgot,” the woman laughed. “That’s my Magdalena. My dog. She don’t see many strangers, got no company manners. I’ll just go tie her up. Ellie,” she said as she turned, surprisingly slowly, as if in pain, “take care your friend and her child.”
Ellie hopped up out of the boat and onto the porch, so nimble Red imagined she had seen her grip the rough edge with her toes. She looked down at her pretty button shoes. In New Orleans they made her feel important. Here they were worse than useless. Here they made her clumsy, and being clumsy in this place seemed like a very bad idea.
Holding onto a piling, Ellie reached down as the woman had done. “That one’s quiet now. Hand it up before it gets going again. I expect Mémère has makings for a sugar tit in there somewhere ‘til we can find some milk.” She set the basket on the porch and reached back down.
Reluctantly, Red took her hand.
* * *
It was dark inside, and cool. The only light came from a little window that was covered in thick glass, a large hurricane lamp, and the countless candles, all lit and in various stages of melting, that were clustered on a mirrored sideboard at the back of the room. The mirror had the effect of echoing and doubling the light, bouncing it around in the corners so that the room seemed to sway. Red was surprised to see real furniture, a table and chairs, a chifferobe, a blood-maroon divan with ticking and buttons, a kitchen sink on one side with a cistern above it and shelves crowded with jars and books, a wood stove, and a closed door that must have led to a bedroom. The rafters were hung all around with plants and flowers. The scent of them made her head swim. She had a brief vision of Ellie bringing all these things out on the little boat tied outside, but knew it couldn’t be. Somebody else had come here, maybe to sell, maybe to trade. One thing was for sure, Ellie’s grandmama was no poor bayou root worker. The girl had been right; the bayou seemed to have given them everything they needed, or the means to acquire it. Her mouth must have hung open in wonder, because Ellie, still holding the basket behind her, laughed. “Now you see what you don’t know,” she said, setting her load down on the table. “I told you my mémère was somebody. She’ll feed us, and this here one too, if it’s still alive.” “Oh, it’s alive,” a voice said from the other side of the bedroom door. The baby answered with a howl, as if to confirm the fact. “And I think it’s time we have us a look. Magdalena, you keep quiet now.” The door opened a crack and the woman who had been on the porch slid through lithe as a dancing girl, squeezing as if trying to keep the dog from getting past her. Red heard panting that sounded like a bellows in the second it was open. She was glad the dog was kept away. It sounded big, and she didn’t even like the little ones some of the whores had tried to keep as pets. That panting dog was no more use than this crying child, and she was more than ready to get her potion and make Ellie take her home. The afternoon was almost gone. Already she was going to have to think up some powerful story to keep from being hided and locked up herself.
“Let me see,” the woman said, stretching out her hands toward the basket and the crying child inside.
Ellie handed it to her, and the two of them bent over it as she pulled away the flowered blanket. She tossed it to Red, who snatched it greedily from the air and wrapped it around her own throat above the neck of the blue dress. “Mine,” she thought, stroking it as though it was a thing of great value, while Ellie and her mémère stared into the basket with looks in their eyes that seemed to say they felt the same way about the little screaming form inside.
“It’s a girl baby,” Ellie pronounced. Red couldn’t tell whether she did it with approval or contempt. Mémère, though, smiled when she nodded in agreement.
“Pauvre petite,” she said, lifting the naked, flailing form in her two hands and walking toward the candle lit sideboard. “Lets us see who you are.”
Red focused on the sideboard. Her eyes had adjusted to the light, and the rest of her to the strangeness of the room, so she could see what she had not seen before. In the middle of the sputtering, dancing candles was an assemblage of things, some familiar and some odd as could be. There were statues, a couple made of china as pretty as Mama Des’ree’s, some crude and carved, and some sewn out of material as rough as the croaker sacks from the ride this morning—could it really have been just this morning? The day and the world itself seemed strange and far away. Red had hardly left the District in her whole life, and here she was so far from where she had been sent she wasn’t sure she would ever see regular houses and streets the same way again.
And yet, so much was familiar. The biggest china statue was of the Virgin, shining prominent among the others, not so different from the one in the grotto at the convent gate. There were bottles of liquor, cigars like the gentlemen smoked, bundles of dried plants like those that hung from the ceiling. There was a pretty glass bowl with a pile of money in it, bills and coins, all held down by a bundle of herbs, tied with a bow that looked like it was made from a woman’s long hair. There were rosaries like the sisters carried hanging from the mirror, and a Bible, open on a stand. There was so much wax on the sideboard it flowed in a creamy tide over the feet of the statues and the base of the bowl and the Bible stand, as though it had held them there for a hundred years and might just for a hundred more. The wax came from candles like the ones the mamas burned in their rooms when some special gentleman came by, like the nuns burned on their altars too, when they prayed for something. Red figured if a candle equaled asking, this grandmama had done a whole lot of asking. She wondered what for.
“Mémère, this girl wants to trade,” Ellie said loudly, over the squalling. She stepped up beside the woman, who was holding the baby so close to the mirror that Red worried the candles might burn it—her—and make her cry even louder.
“So I see,” the woman answered, tucking the child under one arm and rummaging on a shelf beside the chifferobe. She pulled a crock down, stuck her finger into it and then into the infant’s mouth. The baby rooted and hushed as if by magic. Red gasped. The woman laughed. “It’s just honey. This here girl has a sweet tooth without any teeth. She’s hungry though. This won’t last long. Never does. Now, what’ll you take for her?”
“She wants a Pennyroyal cure, Mémère,” Ellie apparently had appointed herself manager of Red’s affairs, and for now Red was just as glad. She still had not managed to see Mémère’s face in full, and the longer she was in this strange place the more she worried what it might look like once she did.
“That right, girl?” the woman continued to soothe the baby with one hand while looking up at the rafters as though searching for something.
Red nodded, then, irritated with her own reticence, said “Yes ma’am” so loudly she jumped at the sound.
“Who’s this cure for?”
Red hesitated, and Ellie chimed in. “Don’t know yet. She lives in a bawdy house in the District. Somebody’s sure to get caught before long. She wants to be the one can bring on the flow. Then maybe she’ll be worth something.”
“Oh, so you worthless then?” It was a challenge, not a question.
“No ma’am.” It was a question.
Mémère placed the baby back in the basket, tugged the yellow shawl until it came off her shoulders, quickly made the sign of the cross over it, and tucked it around her. The child stayed quiet.
“I’ll teach you how to make the cure yourself if you’ll feed my dog,” she said, stepping up close, where Red could see her at last. She was beautiful. Her eyes were as dark as her hair, and her skin was smooth, unweathered. She must be Mama Des’ree’s age. Red wondered if they would be friends if she introduced them. If they would say good things to one another about that Red, the girl who’d been smart enough to bring them together.
“Teach you tansy tea and how to dose pennyroyal oil.” She was still talking, crooning like a lullaby. Red’s head swam a little. “Teach you cohosh for the trouble and chamomile for the flow. I’ll even show you where to find a root you can give to any man tries to take you and any woman tries to sell you, make them fall down in a fit. You can pack that basket right there yourself, full of so much power you can buy all the pretty dresses you want. Dresses that fit, not like that little rag you’re wearing.” She pointed to the mirror. Red looked at her reflection, and felt her face grow hot. She saw, not a self-sure girl doing her own business, but a child in a shabby blue cast-off that fit too tight here and too loose there. An orphan’s dress. A dress to be ashamed of. A dress for nobody of worth.
Mémère spread a cloth on the table and began to pull bundles of plants from the roof beams. Pennyroyal for the flow, she explained, a handful in a teapot. Manglier, three times a day, for the fever. Raspberry leaves for cramps when the monthlies came. Chamomile to calm the nerves. She held each one in front of Red’s face and made her say the name three times, more softly each time, until her face and Red’s were inches apart over the growing bundle. Red’s head began to swim. “Pennyroyal for the flow, Manglier for the fever, Raspberry for the monthlies,
Chamomile for the nerves.”
“It won’t take nothing to feed her. Just a little meat, a little sweet meat. Then you can have it all, this bundle, the blanket, the basket, and all.”
Noises came from the other side of the door. The breathing, snuffling, guttural sounds of something hungry, something that wanted to be fed, needed to be fed right now. Red thought of something. She turned to Ellie, sitting on one of the chairs, knees drawn up under her chin, her grin both childlike and mysterious. She knew things, Red thought. A girl should know things, and have somebody to teach her.
“Why did your mama leave?” she asked, and then turned to Mémère. “Why did her mama go? Where did she go?”
“She shouldn’t have eaten sweet meat at Lent,” Mémère said. “I tried to tell her. But she’s hungry, always hungry. Girls not supposed to be so hungry. You know what I mean.” Not a dog. Not a dog at all. The gentlemen had told stories to make the whores and the servants shiver. Late at night in the safety of the city and the District and the houses where you could do what you wanted, stories told by sinners did the work of the priests and the nuns in places they would not go. They had whispered that things lived in the bayous, that the spirits of the unbaptized floated like lights through the air, that the veil between the living and the dead was thin, and easy to fall through. One of the tales that made the women shiver and clutch at the gentlemen, and the men laugh just a little too loud, was loup garou, the wolf, changed from regular human to animal because it broke the commandment—thou shalt not eat meat during Lent. Thou shalt not be so hungry. Thou shalt not need. Thou shalt not do what we are doing right here and now. Thou shalt not. Red had thought the loup garou was always made from a man. Now she felt foolish. What free man ever knew hunger like she knew? What free man would do what the mamas did, what Mama Des’ree did? What she would do.
“We tied her up so she don’t kill nobody important, but that means we have to feed her,”
Ellie said. For the first time Red heard the misery, the desperation in her voice. She realized then what Ellie was, and why she stayed with the nuns. Ellie was important. Ellie was bait, and she and the baby were the catch. Ellie made promises to people who needed things, and were willing to trade things—even other people. Ellie and Mama Des’ree might be in the same business, caught in something they couldn’t get out of. “We been feeding her so long, but she never satisfied. We can’t let her go. Then we’ll never know where she’ll be, who she’ll eat right up.
You understand. You know. She was my mama one time.”
“Why don’t you kill it—her?” Red looked from one to the other. The snuffling got louder, the throaty growl she had heard before beginning again. The little hairs on her arms stood up.
“She was my mama one time.”
Mémère raised her palms and shrugged. “She was such a sweet baby. Just like this one here.” She smiled down at the basket. “No trouble. She was learning the craft, was gon’ be my ease someday. She brought what I need for the cures. Brought the men and women who wanted something for their breath or for their bellies or for revenge, for everything folks need help with.” She took in the room with a sweep of her arm. “She brought them, and they brought all this, and we lived instead of dying. We had plenty, and plenty to give. But there wasn’t no satisfying her. She didn’t want this life.” Mémère smiled, almost tenderly. “She wanted more. Then she got big with this one,” she nodded toward Ellie. “Don’t know where from.” She chuckled darkly. “Magdalena was trading on the side. Oldest trade there is. But it was hers to trade. Can’t fault her that.”
“Did you make her—” Red nodded toward the door. The snuffling, the whining, the growling was almost a tune, rising and falling, weaving itself into the conversation, insisting on being heard, on being the most important thing there.
Mémère drew herself up. “I did not!” she bellowed the house into shocked quiet. “That is my child! I’m no hoodoo.” She sighed. “Not usually, anyway. She got that way because she got that way, no more, no less. Just like your whores trade what they got and sometimes get caught, and you bring this here child hoping to climb out the muck a little. Sometimes you rise and sometimes you fall. But she came home to us. She came home. And she needs to eat.”
Mémère’s unbound hair cascaded around her shoulders. Its ripples reflected the light. Red felt a wave of sorrow and fear. Sorrow for what this woman and this girl had had and lost, fear for the power that emanated from them now, and for the battle Red had not known, until now, they were having.
“What—what am I supposed to feed her?”
“What you think?” Ellie pointed to the basket.
“You’re crazy!”
“Why not? That ain’t nobody. She’s trouble. She’s not even baptized. Who she got? Got no mama. Got no papa. The sisters never knew she was coming. Your old Mama Des’ree’ll never know you didn’t leave her there. She just disappeared along the way, like girls do. Nobody’s going to know.” Ellie licked her lips, her own hunger revealed in the reflected light. The loup garou howled from the other side of the door.
“I will. I’ll know.”
“Like I said. Nobody.”
Red slid the blanket from around her neck. She looked at it. It was faded, ragged at the edges, no more than a bit of trash that could be spared to wrap around a life that meant nothing to the woman that had sent her to dispose of it. It didn’t seem right. None of it was all right.
Red wadded the blanket up in her hands and threw it as hard as she could onto the altar. The blanket hit the candles, which hit the statue of the Virgin, which crashed into a bottle of liquor, which fell onto the bowl of money, which burst into flame. In the rumpus of screams and curses and swattings and smotherings that followed, Red caught up the basket full of wailing girl child and the bundle on the table, and ran out the door.
The leap down into the bateau wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it would be, even with city girl button shoes. Her legs were strong, her arms certain as she dropped the basket and the bundle and snatched at the rope. The boat drifted a little off the side of the shack. It was nothing at all to dig the pole into the soft muck beneath the water and set off, not toward but away from. Maybe she would go away from it all. Away from Ellie and Mémère shouting and cursing from the edge of the pier. Away from starvation and the loup garou. Away from Mama Des’ree and the mamas who weren’t mamas at all.
But even as she left, she believed.
“Give me a blessing for this baby, Mémère,” she cried, as the shack faded out of sight and the cypress closed in.
“Bless her yourself,” the reply came, snarled into the gloaming. “You know how. I got to feed my dog.”
Red rowed and poled as best she could. It was getting dark in the bayou. The overhanging trees might be full of snakes, the water full of gators and gar and whatever else might want feeding this night. She wasn’t afraid; she had seen worse in the city. She knew how to survive.
Now, Storyville seemed far away. Mama Des’ree would be wondering where she was, would be mad as hell. She would never let her wear the blue dress, shabby as it was, again. Would decide she was too much trouble. Might find another girl. Might give her to the circuses and let a man take her now. Red kept moving, not sure where she was going, but certain she would never go back.
In the distant twilight, little sparks of light shimmered in the air. Maybe they were other shacks, or other bateaus carrying lamps to light their way in the dark. Maybe she could follow them somewhere and stay the night, figure out a plan. Somehow, though, they were always just far away enough that she couldn’t quite make out what they were.
Red looked at the little one, the pauvre petite, who looked back, dark eyes shining, beautiful, in the way Red thought she herself must have once been. She drew in a breath full of bayou air. It tasted rich and full. She made the sign of the cross over the child, the way the sisters would have. The way Mémère would have. The way it had never been made over her. She gave the only blessing she knew.
“May you never be hungry.”
* * *
The infant in the basket wasn’t heavy anymore. In fact, she was light as air, light as light itself. As Red stood balancing their weight in the bateau, a little ball, bright as fire, formed under the yellow shawl. It hummed like music, like the cicadas that took up their fiddles in the evening air, then it lifted through the cloth like a cold candle flame, rising into the wet darkening over the slow, rich bayou water, water that could yield up wonderful and terrible things. The light moved over the water, languid, as if she wanted nothing, needed not a thing this world could give or deny, not the nuns’ baptism, not a mama’s care. As if, all on her own, she was complete.
As Red watched, the newborn fire floated out among the cypress and the marsh grasses, among the Spanish moss laden branches and up into the leaves. There she joined the others, countless others, tiny little balls of light, feus follet, suspended over the bayou, way off into the gathering night, lighting the way for one another, being enough. Set free.
Red watched for a long time, content settling over her like a warm blanket, like a full belly. She placed the bundle of herbs in the empty basket, draped the yellow shawl over her red hair, and looked around her. Pennyroyal for the flow. Manglier for fever. Raspberry for the monthlies. Things she could use to become somebody in this bayou or in the city. Now that she thought about it, either one seemed like a good place for a smart girl to be. She didn’t need to follow that baby, nor anyone else. She knew who she was, and what she could do, and for right now that was enough.
Red picked up the pole and set off.
Rebecca Meredith is a fiction writer, poet and retired psychotherapist. Though she now lives in the Pacific Northwest, her early years on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in New Orleans have shaped much of her work. Her prose and poetry have appeared in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. In 2011 she was chosen the first poet laureate of Redmond Washington. Her self-published novel, The Last of the Pascagoula, took first place in the literary genre in Writers’ Digest’s 2014 Self-Published Story Competition. Upon retirement she returned to college and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She particularly loves magical realism, innovative use of language, and work about women’s lives.