The Biblio File August Essay: “Cajun Country Grace”

CAJUN COUNTRY GRACE

“The Farm,” as it was dubbed by the deep sea diver and his wife who owned it, was outside Prairie Ronde, Louisiana, which was outside Opelousas, which was a good ways from Lafayette, which was a real good ways from New Orleans, where my second husband, Warren, and I loved and fought for three sordid years before deciding we’d try out the pastoral life. The Farm wasn’t really a farm at all, just a rickety house on nine acres of scrappy land, with a well out back and noisy armadillos under the house and a front porch with a squeaky wooden swing.

Warren worked offshore for weeks or months at a time as a hard-hat deep sea diver, his pricey, patched-up diving hose a umbilical cord connecting him to the world above the water. I was another connection to that world, of course, but the home fires I kept, fueled by alcohol and angst, were not the comforting kind. Daily, I fired up my sixty-five Plymouth Valiant with the slant six engine, and drove the dusty Louisiana back roads, trusting my car to keep me moving and alive while I downed enough substances to halt or maybe kill a lesser woman. Pour jeter (pronounced ‘jay tay’) une derriere la cravate, the Cajun folks would have described my drinking: To toss one behind the necktie real fast. The rock group “Driving and Crying” would have been suitable traveling music if they had been around at the time. Emmylou Harris, though, was alive and kicking, and she rocked me plenty. I loved how she laid herself right out there when she sang, unashamed to hurt or throb or thrash. I loved the pictures of her, often dressed in something filmy and white, on the cases of my bulky eight track tapes.

I dressed for driving in a denim sundress with a checked ruffle around the hem, hiked up over my bare thighs when the temperature soared to the hundreds and the only cool place in the Valiant was the little Styrofoam ice chest where I kept beer and a joint or two. Emmylou’s voice was tripped up more than once when I flew over a bump or swerved to miss a possum.

One July afternoon, stupid with the heat and a ton of Coors, I sped past a ramshackle house with a bunch of chickens out front, and bumped something. Dust billowed like a dark orange balloon, and in my rearview mirror, I saw a chicken lying on the road, too still to be anything but dead. I looked at the small yellow house with its peeling paint and cement front steps. Whoever lived there would value that chicken, I was sure, and I knew I ought to confess. I had not done what I ought to do for quite some time. I did not work. I treated my body like a red-headed stepchild. I had messed around on my husband. But killing somebody’s chicken would somehow be plain mean. I’m not mean, I told myself. I’m not.

I pulled over and trudged up the scraggly brown yard to the front door. The Louisiana sun was hot enough to melt a sober woman. I felt sick. I knocked and was greeted by a black woman in a patched pink dress of thin cotton, a stained apron straining over her bulging stomach, sweat dribbling down her neck. The house smelled like vinegar. A skinny, spotted cat wound around the woman’s ankles. Oh yeah, I thought, she could really use that chicken. I pointed to the road where the thing lay, speckled and bloody. “I killed your chicken,” I sniffed. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”

The woman’s Creole accent was thick as gumbo. “Aw,” she said. “Tha’s all right. Don’ worry.”

“I’ll pay you for it,” I said. “I’d like to.”

She lifted her apron to wipe her neck. “Naw, Cher,” she said. “It don’t matter.” Her sweetness startled me. “Cher” means “Dear.” No one had called me “Dear” in a long time. I sniffed some more, tried to speak, but couldn’t.

She stepped closer and touched my bare shoulder where my dress strap had fallen over my arm. I was a little sunburned, but her fingers felt gentle and light. “Cher,” she said, “I like you too much to be worried ‘bout some ole chicken.” I almost hugged her, but figured I’d break down if I did. “Bye,” I said. “Bye.”

Back in the car, I whipped up more dust, keeping a lookout for chickens, as Emmylou and Gram Parsons sang about a gold-plated door on the forty-fifth floor of some strange, holy building, and of how that heavy door couldn’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain. I wished the Lord’s rain would wash and heal me, but I felt lost and vaporous, like it was dissolving me instead. I remembered the Creole woman’s fingers on my shoulder, comforting and sure, and felt, for a moment, that I had substance, that my life was real. Then I dissolved again, into another beer, and drove and cried for awhile.

I don’t remember how long before a car behind me blasted its siren, the light on the car’s top a spinning, blue-white swirl. What had I done? Killed a chicken, that’s all. Would I go to jail? I pulled off the road and the thirty-something man who appeared at my window spoke with an accent as heavy as the Creole woman’s. “You swervin’,” the man said, then, peering at my blotched face, “You allright?”

I babbled something about just riding around, that’s all, and the man, peering into the front seat at a beer can or two, flashed a card and said, “Deputy Sheriff Charles here.” He pronounced it Chals.  “Where you live, Baby?”

“Uh—Over there,” I waved in the general direction of The Farm. “I’ll head back home now.”

“I’m gone follow you,” he said. “You be careful.”

He did follow me, his siren off, thank Goodness, and, along the way, another car must have joined our caravan, because three cars pulled into The Farm’s dirt driveway as dusk settled in. The Valiant was coated with dust. My face was coated with dust, too, tear-streaks running channels through it. The Deputy was out of his car now, and so were two other men, young, Cajun, and curious. “What you doin, Baby? What’s the mattah?”

“Oh, just swerving,” I said. I didn’t know many Cajun men. I had seen a few, hanging out at Thibodaux’s Grocery Store, swigging home-brewed whiskey and hollering things like “Hot boudin! Cold cous cous! Come on, Baby, Poosh! Poosh! Poosh!” I felt wary of them and kept my distance.

“Where your husband?” the youngest one asked me, and I, too wrecked to have good sense, told them Warren was offshore.

“There’s a buncha those guys around here,” the man said. “Get pretty tanked sometime when they not workin’.”

***

The afternoon is hazy, but I remember when it was past dusk, the spanish moss on the oak trees a tangled mass against the darkening sky, the three men and I sitting on my front porch, swigging beer, toking an occasional toke, swinging in the creaky swing, talking about I can’t imagine what.“I’m a Deputy too,” one of the men said, showing me a card with his swarthy face pictured on it and “Hal” written below it. “I’m not,” his friend said.“I’m just a Deputy’s sidekick.”

“Ya’ll like Emmylou Harris?” I asked them. “Oh yeah, Cher,” one of them said, and the other two nodded. So I cranked up the stereo in my living room, loud enough for it to blast our ears outside, Emmylou’s plaintive voice declaring she was “too far gone,” but that it was “allright, ‘cause it’s midnight, and I got two more bottles of wine”. She would walk, she sang, “all the way from Boulder to Birmingham if she thought she could see, just see his face.” I always figured the “he” in the song was Jesus, but maybe not, maybe it was some man she loved more than anything, some man she’d crawl to on her hands and knees, and Jesus got all mixed up in my mind with beautiful, sweet, absent men with beards and dusty feet. I tried talking with the Deputies about it, about how Emmylou moved me, and though they had little to say, they nodded and let me ramble on.

***

Morning dawned, and the cows mooed, and the armadillos under the house stopped their knocking. Deputy Charles was asleep on the swing, his head back, his mustached mouth open. Deputy Hal and the Sidekick, Thomas, sat on the steps, swigging morning beers.They looked ragged. They looked blitzed.They looked good to me, good men, harmless men, men I couldn’t talk to about psychology or women’s rights or women’s angst, but who didn’t arrest or fine or hurt or try to seduce me, just kept me gentle company during a dark night of the soul. As they walked to their cars, I told them all Bye. Climbing into his Sheriff’s car, the first Deputy looked at me and said, “Hey. Cher.You be allright, you hear?”

“Oh,” I said. “I don’t know. I don’t know about that.”

“You will,” he smiled.“You’re just a little feh, you know?” At least it sounded like “feh” to me, with a short “e”. Or maybe, I thought, it was “fais” as in “fais do do,” a communal dance party Cajuns held as often as they could. But that didn’t make sense.

“I’m what?” I asked him.

And then he touched my shoulder, the same one that the Creole woman touched, his hand heavier but just as kind. “A little feh, that’s all,” he said.

***

When Warren got home a few days later, I told him and his diver buddies about my strange night with the deputies and my non-arrest. “He called me ‘feh’,” I told them.“I don’t know what it means.”

One of them, a Louisiana native, laughed. “It sounds like ‘feh’,” he said. But it’s ‘fou’. F-O-U,” he spelled. “Means crazy,” he tapped his temple with his forefinger.“Kinda crazy.”

“Oh,” I said. “Crazy. Fou.Thank you.”

I learned another Cajun phrase that year. I learned that “touche,” pronounced tooshe, means “touch”, but also pertains to the frets, the metal ridges set across the finger-board of a stringed instrument. The frets are called “les touches”—the places a musician touches to chord a melody, the places Emmylou Harris touched to make her magic. I thought of that sweet Cajun woman saying, “It’s all right, Cher”, and of those good ole boy deputies on the porch swing out at The Farm, and their careless, country grace. And I thought of how much their touches meant to me when my own melody was nothing but discord.

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