A Spark of Light(10)
She hurried to the command tent. “Yes, sir?”
“That patient in the hospital—Bex McElroy, my sister? I need you to give a note to her.”
The detective nodded, waiting while Hugh sat down at his makeshift desk. He picked up a pen and ripped a page off his legal pad.
What did you say to the woman who’d basically raised you? The one who had nearly died today only because she had been trying to help his own daughter?
He thought of a dozen things he could tell Bex.
That she was the only one who laughed at his terrible dad jokes, the ones that made Wren cringe. That if he was on death row, his last meal would be her chicken Parmesan. That he could still remember her making shadow puppets on his bedroom wall, trying to bribe him to go to sleep. That, at age eight, he hadn’t known what the Savannah College of Art was—or even that she had given up her scholarship to come take care of him when their mother went to dry out—but that he wished he’d said thank you.
But Hugh had never been good at putting his feelings into sentences. It was what had led him to this very point, this very instant.
So he wrote down a single word and passed it to the detective.
Goodbye.
—
LOUIE WARD WAS UNCONSCIOUS, AND in the ocean of his memory, he was not a fifty-four-year-old ob-gyn but a young boy growing up beneath a canopy of Spanish moss, trying to catch crawfish before they caught him. He had been raised to love Jesus and women, in precisely that order. In southern Louisiana, he was reared by two ladies—his grandmama and Mama—living in a small cottage that was, as his grandmother pointed out, still a palace if the Lord dwelled there among you. He was a practicing Catholic, as was everyone else he knew, the result of a long-dead white landowner who had come from France with a rosary in his pocket and who had baptized all his slaves. Louie had been a sickly child, too skinny and too smart for his own good. He had wheezy lungs that kept him from tagging along with the other kids, who snuck at midnight into nearby houses rumored to be haunted, to see what they might find. Instead he followed his grandmama to Mass every day and he helped Mama with her piecework, using tweezers to pinch tiny links into gold chains that wound up around the necks of rich white women.
Louie had never met his father, and knew better than to ask about him since his grandmama referred to him as the Sinner, but whatever hole his father’s absence had left in him was, by age nine, well plastered over.
Louie knew how to open doors for ladies and to say please and thank you and yes, ma’am. He slept on a cot in the kitchen that he made with tight hospital corners, and helped kept the house tidy, because as his grandmama had taught him, Jesus was coming at any moment and they’d best all be ready. Mama had spells where she could not muster the courage to get out of bed, and sometimes spent weeks cocooned there, crying. But even when Louie was alone, he was never alone, because all the ladies in the neighborhood held him accountable for his behavior. It was child raising by committee.
Old Miss Essie came and sat on their porch every day. She told Louie about her daddy, a slave who had escaped his plantation by swimming through the bayou, braving the alligators because relinquishing his body to them would at least have been his decision. He had not only survived with all his limbs, he had hidden along the Natchez Trace, moving only by the light of the moon and following the instructions of everyday saints who had helped others get free. Eventually he had reached Indiana, married a woman, and had Miss Essie. She would lean forward, her eyes bright, and hammer home the moral of this story. Boy, she told Louie, don’t you let nobody tell you who you can’t be.
Miss Essie knew everything about everybody, so it was no surprise that she could tell tales about Sebby Cherise, the hedge witch rumored to be descended from the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. What was a surprise was that Louie’s mama had been the one doing the asking. The bayou could be easily split between those who believed in gris-gris and those who believed in the Lord, and Grandmama had set her family squarely in the latter camp. Louie had no idea what his mama could possibly want from Sebby Cherise.
His mama was the most beautiful woman in the world, with sad eyes you fell into, and a voice that sanded all your rough edges. For the past few months he’d noticed that she hadn’t cried, and instead had been rising as if helium were pulsing through her veins. She hummed when she wasn’t aware, melodies woven through her braids. Louie rode the outskirts of her good mood.
When Mama knelt beside him and asked if he could keep a secret, he would have followed her to Hell and back. Which, as it turned out, was not that far from the mark.
That summer was a parched throat, and as Louie and his mama hiked to the witch’s home, his clothes became a second skin. Sebby Cherise lived in the bayou, in a hut with a porch that was draped with dried flowers. There were crudely lettered signs that said KEEP OUT.
Sebby Cherise traded in miracles. Jimsonweed, cut with honey and sulfur and crossed by the path of a black cat, could root out cancer. Dixie love perfume could net you the man who slipped into your dreams. Five-finger grass set a ward around your house to keep it safe. Louie wondered if it was one of Sebby’s potions or pouches that accounted for his mother’s recent good spirits.
He also knew, from his grandmama and the priest, that the deals you made with the devil came back to bite you. But just like his mama seemed willing to overlook that, so was Louie, if it meant she stayed this way.
His mama told him to stay on the porch, so he only had a glimpse of Sebby Cherise, with her long red skirt and the scarf wrapped around her head. She might have been twenty years old, or two hundred. She beckoned Mama inside, and the bangles on her arm sang. Her voice sounded like fingernails on wood.