Odditorium: A Novel (9 page)

When Coughlin (born in Hamilton, Ontario) found out that Lucien was a fellow Canadian, he invited him to attend services at his church. Lucien was completely devastated by that first visit to the Shrine of the Little Flower and became a fiercely loyal parishioner, taking the host as often as five and six times a week. But it was the sermons he came to hear, fidgeting impatiently through the drone of the liturgy, hoping to be once more dazzled by one of Coughlin’s booming orations. He was an angry wind in the pulpit.

Up until that time Lucien’s political awareness had been confined to the hatred of the English his father had taught him, a vague desire to avenge the French loss of Quebec at the Plains of Abraham. But now Coughlin opened his eyes to the foul machinations of the Bolshevik Antichrist, a specter that could be traced back to 1776 when a Bavarian called Adam Weishaupt had founded a cult known as the Illuminati, based on principles expounded by medieval rabbis and cabalists. The French Revolution, Coughlin taught, was instigated and controlled by Weishaupt. Marx and Engels had been no more than Illuminati puppets. World affairs were being currently directed by Illuminati bankers in New York and London in collaboration with the Jew commissars in Moscow; and the day would soon arrive when these despotic stewards of Satan would be able to dictate their vile and ghastly terms to every man, woman and child on the planet.

The breadth and enormity of this secret design filled Lucien with terror. It transcended all boundaries, negated all hopes and ambitions. What chance could there be to defeat the Red Serpent when the world’s leaders refused even to recognize it?

Lucien left August Hansen, took a room in a flophouse and a part-time job sweeping out the radio station. In order to cleanse himself, he stopped eating, ingesting only fruit salts dissolved in rain water. He conducted all-night prayer vigils in a field behind the municipal car barn, invoking obscure saints and rolling naked in the mud. The weaker he became physically, the stronger was his mental resolve, the greater the inspiration of inner righteousness. On a Sunday just before dawn, weighing one hundred twelve pounds, he rose from aching knees a staunch and fearless soldier in the army of the Lord. He was ready now, ready to battle the Red Serpent until his final breath.

No one was more ravaged when, in 1931, Coughlin’s national network hookup was canceled by the Columbia Broadcasting System. In fact, Lucien was so crushed by this Zionist treachery that he left Royal Oak behind, drifting down to Ville Platte, recreating in his own small way the original Acadian migration. But he took with him a personal letter from Father Coughlin appointing him a recruiter for the National Union for Social Justice, the political party Coughlin had formed in alliance with Gerald L. K. Smith and Huey Long, the senator from Louisiana. Frustrated in his efforts to meet with Long at his Baton Rouge compound, unable to enroll a single member in the party (he was a dreadful speaker and had an innate distrust of strangers), Lucien went to work in a pencil factory, milling graphite, and passed into a friendless and fixated bachelorhood.

During the wicked dementia of the World War, in which he served as a stateside file clerk (receiving an ordinary discharge after one too many efforts to convince his superiors they should leave Hitler alone and get after Stalin), and the silencing of Coughlin by the nabobs of Rome, suggesting as it did Illuminati infiltration of Mother Church—through all of this, Lucien somehow managed to abide. The ensuing years saw many setbacks, the Beast moving ever forward, capturing new territory and new souls, but Lucien’s flame burned on. He never lost hope. The day would come—perhaps not in his lifetime, but it would come—when the tide would be reversed and there would be much work for His fiery sword.

As he rankled into middle age, Lucien determined that he would need an heir to carry on the work. In 1953 he met and married Harlene Diggs, an itinerant gospel singer from Grapeland, Texas, who had grown tired of strumming her way along the Gulf Coast and resolved to hitch up with the first blue-eyed man she met. She bore Lucien a daughter by Caesarian section one year later. Harlene took in washing, Lucien worked double shifts at the pencil factory, and before too long they were able to make a down payment on a small farm just outside of town. They plowed some ground for vegetables, planted fruit trees, and traded a dresser and cedar chest for an old milk cow. There was only one thing wrong: Lucien’s health. He coughed all the time, was short of breath. Down at the clinic, they told him he had chronic bronchitis. In truth, years of inhaling graphite dust had caused degenerative pulmonary fibrosis, but this condition was not to be discovered until much later.

The weather was mild on Christmas Day of 1958 and the Soileau family went on a picnic by a calm, blue lake ringed with pines. Cold chicken, egg salad, bowls of fruit and nuts were laid out on a lacy embroidered sheet spread over the grass. After the meal Harlene played her guitar and they sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Lucien took his daughter for a walk in the woods and made for her a tiny crown out of leaves and plaited twigs.

They returned to find Harlene floating facedown in the water, her skirt fanned out among the reeds, a gingham banner of gall and desolation.

For several months, Lucien did not speak.

“
Pauvre Papa
.” Tildy smoothed his eyebrows with the tip of one finger. “You really ought to eat something, but I can’t make you…. Remember how we struggled over the fried eggs in the morning? You would stand over me until I cleaned my plate. Those cold, greasy eggs sitting there and I’d tell you I could not eat them, they were like big yellow eyes. But you would stay and stay. You’d be late for work and I’d be late for school, but nobody moved until I choked those eggs down. Do you remember that, Papa?”

“I am bigger than you. Stronger.” He lurched, spat a thick wad that crackled on the newspapers. “Jo. Where is Jo? … She give me good thumps of the chest when I need.”

Lucien rolled to one side, groaning, trying to lift himself, estranged from the mechanics of his own body. Tildy put out her hand; he squeezed it a moment, then pushed it away. Going rigid, covering his eyes, Lucien began to recite a psalm, running words together in a roupy, waning voice.

“Lord all my longing is known to Thee and my sighing is not hidden my wounds are repulsive to me and festering because of my folly I am bent am bowed down all the day I go mourning … heart beats fast strength fails me even the lights of eyes I must do without … loved ones and friends stand aloof from illness even … my kinsmen at a distance … and they who seek after my soul … lay snares … who seek my hurt talk mischief and think … up treacheries all day.”

Lucien quivered and went limp. Startled, Tildy pushed herself forward, approaching both the bed and the possibility that she had heard last words. Her relief at the thin purl of his breathing, at the vapor left on her ear as she held it to his lips, was boundless. She was here with him now, seeing him, touching him, regaining him, and yet the love she felt for the old man was no less opaque, no less disconnected than it had been an hour ago, a week ago, ten years ago.

Be brave, be brave.

“How’d it go?” Joby Daigle looked up from the teetery metal table where she was pouring herself coffee from a thermos.

“He passed out after a bite or two.” Tildy cupped her hands under the running faucet and splashed her face.

“Poor soul. Not much strength left in him. Coffee for you? Brewed it with my own chicory, stuff comes up like a weed.”

“Not right now. Mind if I smoke?”

“Suit yourself…. Scared you some to see him that way, did it?”

“Something like that.”

“Can’t be but tore up over it, seein’ a man jes about drained empty. Oh but Lucy was quite a man when I first knowed him. Had fire, you know?”

“Fire,” Tildy said, turning her back. Her hand was growing numb under the cold water.

“Yep. Used to be all through him so’s he kinda glowed. I sure do bless the day I met that man. I was jes driftin’, kinda lost. Like to wither right off when Mr. Daigle passed. Got started sendin’ out my cards. I’d go through all the papers for the announcements and then I’d send out the get-well cards and the sympathy cards and the happy-graduation cards and the new-baby cards. Did over nine hunnert of ’em and wasn’t but twelve people thought to write back and thank me. So right then I says to myself, Joby, you want to help folks, you got to go out and do it. Joined up with this volunteer program for seniors over to the hospital. Met Lucy on the first day. He asked me to read aloud to him from the columnists. Almost three years ago and I hardly missed a day with him since.”

“I know. You’ve done more for him than I have.”

Mrs. Daigle fingered the dregs in her empty cup. “Hadn’t been for those checks you sent every month, who knows? Don’t go throwin’ mud on yourself.” Her shoulders dropped along with her voice. “I wish sometimes—forgive me, Lord—but I wish sometimes I’d met Lucy a lot sooner. Mr. Daigle, he was good to me but he didn’t have no fire. Say there’s wheels within wheels, girl. One of ’em had turned a little different, we could be sittin’ right here mother and daughter.”

“Why not,” Tildy said, regretting it. Like swinging at a pitch right up under the chin.

Joby Daigle rose from the table with effort and advanced on Tildy, plucking shyly at the end of her braid. “You and me, we come to an understandin’ right off. I like that. We got to be like a team, hear? Lucy’s women. Slide on over here and I’ll show you my secret jes the two of us be knowin’.”

With that she opened the broom closet and dragged out a battered footlocker. Closing her eyes, she mumbled a string of private words before raising the lid. A confusion of sharp smells attacked Tildy’s nose. Paper packets, foil-wrapped bundles, bottles and jars of various shapes and sizes were crammed inside the box and as Mrs. Daigle removed each one, she called out its contents: rose hips, sassafras twigs, hoof powder, allspice berries, burdock root, dried liver flakes, pine pitch, beetle legs, cow moss, milkweed, eucalyptus bark.

“This here’s the power of life. Right from nature. Right there for the gatherin’.” Mrs. Daigle sat lightly down beside her arrayed pharmacopoeia, flushed with pride and excitement. “It’s what brung you and your daddy together.”

“Beetle legs?”

“What I’m sayin’ to you, child, is this. If Lucy had stayed with the doctors over there, he’d be gone. But I been dosin’ him with my secret medicines and he’s still here. I got the knowledge.” Her knobby fingers encircled Tildy’s wrist, an emphatic grip. “I know what he needs, understand? Nothin’ funny about it cause it’s all from nature. Mother Nature, she can be real generous if you know how to friendly up to her. There’s all kinds of life essence out there.” Mrs. Daigle pointed out the window.

Tildy followed her finger out to the withered fruit trees and swirling dust. She thought: Lady, you’re as crazy as he is.

Mrs. Daigle extracted a few round, yellowish seeds from a vial and popped them in her mouth. “I take these myself,” she said. “For gas.”

“You got anything for a tired brain?”

“Not exactly, but I know just what you mean.” She held up a cork-stoppered pop bottle containing a viscous brown liquid. “My pacifyin’ tonic. Chamomile, horehound syrup, licorice root, buckthorn, peach and comfrey leaves. When Lucy gets to wailin’ with the hurt and twistin’ all over the bed like the devil’s tryin’ to get a-holt on him, I give him a spoon of this in some weak tea and he curls on up just as sweet as a lamb.”

“Could I try some?”

It took time for Tildy to convince Mrs. Daigle that she could handle things on her own.

“Sure, you want some time alone with him,” Mrs. Daigle said grudgingly. “But lemme write down my number case you need to reach me. I’ll come ’round tomorrow to give him his bath.”

Still the woman lingered; puttering aimlessly under the hood of her Nash Rambler, rubbing splattered insects off the windshield with her fingers and casting every few moments an unhappy, squinting look in the direction of Lucien’s bedroom. At last, having seen Tildy peering at her from the window, she backed out to the road and rattled slowly away.

“We could be sitting down right here mother and daughter,” Tildy repeated, not altogether repelled by the idea at that moment. The only things she could remember about Harlene were that she liked to suck ice and could sleep standing up.

She passed the afternoon at her father’s bedside, reading every second or third sentence of the mystery novel she’d brought with her. Lucien floated up into full awareness only twice, each time wheezing out, in his peculiar franglais, a request for white robes and clean straw. Tildy laid a cool washcloth over his eyes. His sleep was tranquil, save for the rattling in his lungs, and when Tildy held his hand it felt as corky and inert as a heel of old bread. She skipped to the closing chapter to find out who the killer was (Carla, the sweet younger sister, with the revolver, in the office above her lover’s restaurant) and stole away to pace the sprawling shadows of the house.

Those gloomy, narrow rooms were unchanged, full of the same cheap furniture, the same dust, without the slightest decoration. At the end of a long and contentious life there ought to be trophies and mementoes to pass along. But there were none. No photographs or letters bound with ribbon, no album of pressed flowers, not even the Last Supper rendered on a slab of varnished pine. How dismal it must be to leave the world as bereft as the day you’d arrived.

“
Pauvre Papa
,” Tildy murmured. “I can’t even say you’ve got me.”

The sound of her own voice, fluttery and tight, drove her outside for some air. The sun was low on the western horizon now cluttered with water towers and power lines, and the undersides of clouds were tinted orange. She turned, looked toward the scrub behind the house and felt rising within her like bile an urge to take off and run, fighting through brambles and sumac till her legs gave out and she dropped, spent but clear of the area. That instinct for flight that always surged over her when the proceedings turned hard.