Ritual (37 page)

‘Maybe you
should ask,’ Robyn suggested. Charlie went back into Fruge’s All-Day and
approached the grizzle-haired black man behind the counter. He was watched with
unabashed interest by an old man with a Jim Beam golfing cap who was making his
way steadily through what the proprietor advertised as a seven-course Cajun
meal – a six-pack of beer and a one-pound boudin.

‘I’m headed toward
Lebeau,’ said Charlie. ‘You don’t happen to know anyplace quiet I could stay
for a few days?’

The black man
stopped rag-wiping the counter and pressed his hand thoughtfully over his
mouth. ‘You could try Eric Broussard. He lives about six miles shy of Lebeau
back from the road by the Normand Bayou. He used to take in guests from time to
time, back when his wife Nancy was still alive, though whether he still does it
now, I can’t say. Tell him that Jimmy Fruge sent you and everything’s okay.’

‘That’s generous
of you,’ said Charlie.

The black man
looked at him with his eyes narrowed into cynical slits. ‘You’re running from
the law, man ami, so don’t talk to me about
no
generosity.’

Charlie was
about to protest, but the black man waved his hand dismissively. ‘I know a
fugitive when I see one. I’ve been selling Po-boys beside this highway for
thirty-two years. You get along now, and good luck, and don’t try driving along
these back roads at night, lessen you want to go swimming inside of your car.’

Charlie hesitated
for a moment. Jimmy Fruge was the first person to have offered them help since
they had left Connecticut. He wanted to tell him how much this meant, but he
couldn’t find the words, and in any case Fruge wouldn’t have understood what he
was talking about. So he just said, ‘Thanks,’ and left the restaurant, and
walked slowly back to the car, where Robyn was waiting for him in her $3.75
sunglasses, looking as if she had just stepped out of 1963.

E
ric Broussard was sitting on the verandah of his house soaking in
the late-afternoon sunshine as they came bumping and jolting down the muddy
track that led through the fields to the Normand Bayou. They could see his
bifocal spectacles reflecting the marmalade-coloured light.

His house had
two storeys and was clad with weather-boarding that had once been painted red.

There was still
red paint to be seen in the nooks and crannies and knotholes; and the redness
of the house was increased by the redness of the light and by the stand of
cypress trees that surrounded it. Eric Broussard didn’t wave as they
approached, or give any indication that he had seen them, but when they drew up
in front of his verandah and climbed out of the Chevrolet, he stood up, walked
to the top of his steps, and stood facing them, an old black man in a warm
plaid shirt whose sleeves were too short for his long accordion-player’s
wrists. He must have been very handsome once. Now his moustache was grey and
most of his front teeth had gone, and of course he wore those heavy horn-rim
spectacles with two kinds of lenses in them, so that he could see to read the
sports pages in the Times-Picayune and also to scrutinize whoever was driving
through the fields towards his house.

Charlie mounted
the first step. ‘Mr Broussard?’ he said. A north-westerly wind was blowing off
the bayou, and it made the pages of Eric Broussard’s newspaper stir and flap.

‘Who wants
him?’ Eric Broussard demanded.

‘Mr Broussard,
my name’s Charlie McLean. This is Robyn Harris. We’re travelling hereabouts and
we’ve been looking for some place to stay. Jimmy Fruge suggested we come to
you.’

‘Jimmy Fruge?
That boll weevil?
He didn’t have
no
business sending you here. I don’t take in guests no more. You’re wasting your
time.’

Charlie wiped
the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Mr Broussard, we’re
kind of desperate.’ ‘Desperate? What does that mean?’ ‘It means we don’t have
anyplace else.’ Eric Broussard scratched his black, wrinkled neck. His skin had
the quality of dark-dried tobacco leaves. ‘There’s a Howard Johnson’s over at
Opelousas. Whyn’t you stay there?’ ‘Because we’re having a misunderstanding
with the police,’ put in Robyn boldly.

Eric Broussard
frowned.
‘A misunderstanding?
Who’s misunderstanding
whom?’

‘They’re kind
of misunderstanding us,’ Charlie explained. ‘They think we’re guilty of one or
two rather unpleasant misdemeanours, and the fact is we’re not, but at the
moment we’re having a difficult time persuading them of that.’ ‘You
was
framed,’ Eric Broussard suggested. ‘Something
like
that.’

Eric Broussard
slowly shook his head. ‘I
didn’t never meet no
lawbreaker who wasn’t framed.

You go talk to
all of the men on all of Louisiana’s state farms, and the amazing thing about
it is they’re all innocent, every last one of them. They
was
all framed by ill-wishing associates who of course are still free. So what
manner of state do we live in, that sends innocent men to prison, and allows
guilty men to walk the streets unmolested?’ Charlie said, ‘Believe me, Mr
Broussard, we’re not criminals. But we do need somewhere to stay. Only a couple
of days, that’s all we need.

Then we’ll
leave and you won’t ever see or hear from us again.’

Eric Broussard
sucked at his gums and thought about this. ‘Jimmy Fruge sent you, hey?
That boll weevil.’

‘He seemed okay
to me,’ Charlie ventured.

Eric Broussard
shrugged and sniffed. ‘He’s okay. He and
me
used to be
the best of friends once upon a time. We fell out over some fiddle-playing and
we haven’t hardly
spoke
since then.’

Charlie said,
‘We really do need someplace to stay, Mr Broussard.’

‘Well, I can
understand that,’ said Eric Broussard, ‘but the fact of the matter is that I
don’t take people into my house no more. I’ve grown too old, and to tell you
the truth I don’t care too much for anybody excepting myself.’

‘We don’t
expect meals, or any looking after,’ said Robyn. ‘And we can certainly make our
own beds.’

But Eric
Broussard kept on shaking his head like a man who has spent far too long alone,
sitting on his verandah and watching the hawks circle around the cypress trees.

‘Come on,
Charlie,’ said Robyn. ‘I think we’re wasting our time.’

Charlie stepped
back from the house and lifted up both hands in resignation.

‘Hurt your hand
there,’ Eric Broussard remarked.

Charlie nodded.
‘Did you ever hear of the Celestines?’

The effect of
this question on Eric Broussard’s face was astonishing. He stared at Charlie
until his eyeballs looked as if
they
going to press
against the lenses of his spectacles. His mouth dragged itself downward, and he
took two or three epileptic steps backwards across the verandah.

Charlie said,
‘Mr Broussard? Mr Broussard? What did I say?’ But Eric Broussard kept on
stepping backwards until he was flattened against the weatherboarded wall of
the house.

‘Mr Broussard,’
Charlie said, ‘I don’t know what you know about the Celestines. Maybe you
support them, I don’t know. But let me tell you that they’re holding my son in
captivity, and that they’re planning to kill him. That’s why I need someplace
to stay – at least until Friday.’

‘You say
Friday?
asked
Eric Broussard, with unconcealed dread.

‘That’s right.
They’re holding a special ceremony.
A special Last Supper.’

‘It’s come so
soon?’ Eric Broussard asked.

Charlie climbed
the verandah steps and stood just a few inches away from Eric Broussard.

Robyn came up
close behind to give him moral support. She tried to smile at Eric Broussard,
to reassure him that they didn’t mean him any harm, but he stared at them both
with unmasked fear.

‘Mr Broussard –
we’re not Celestines. You don’t have anything to be afraid of as far as we’re
concerned. But if you know something about the Celestines, anything at all,
even if it’s nothing more than hearsay or rumour, I really have to know what it
is.’

Eric Broussard
crossed himself. ‘What I know about the Celestines ain’t hearsay or rumour,’ he
whispered. ‘I lost my dear wife to the Celestines, let me tell you that, and
the manner of her passing was too terrible for me to want to think about.’

‘Your wife was
a member of the Celestine church? She was a Devotee?’

‘She was a
Devotee, God bless her poor soul.’

Charlie said,
‘Mr Broussard, we’ve come here to St Landry County to try to put a stop to the
Celestines, one way or another. Friday is their great Last Supper. Friday is
the day that the thousandth thousandth Devotee gets eaten – or is supposed to;
and Friday is the day that Jesus Christ is supposed to come back down to
earth.’

‘Those people,’
Eric Broussard said, shaking his head from side to side.
‘Those
people.
You know what those people are? They’re voodoo, that’s what
those people are! They talk about Christ Jesus, they talk about the second
coming,
they
talk about Jerusalem builded in
Louisiana!

But all they
are is descendants of the voodoo people, the people that point the baby’s bone,
and curse you to death! All they are is stealers of other men’s souls! I swear
to God I thought I’d heard the last about the Celestines, but when I saw your
automobile come through the fields, I thought to myself, I’ve got a bad feeling
about these people coming, I’m going to be hearing about things I don’t want to
hear about.’

‘Mr Broussard,
they’ve got my son,’ Charlie appealed. ‘My son is supposed to be the thousandth
thousandth Devotee, and on Friday they’re going to eat him alive so that the
Lord can be resurrected in the body of their Chief Guide.’

Eric Broussard
raised his head, and there were tears sliding down his cheeks. ‘They took my
Nancy, those people. They took her away. They took people from all over St
Landry County, from Krotz Springs and Bayou Current and Ville Platte. They took
people from Acadia County, too, from Iota and Evangeline. Those people went to
their meetings and never came back. And if you tried to persuade them to come
back, all they did was smile at you and say, “Never
you mind
,
we’ve found the Lord.” That’s what my Nancy said: “I’ve found the Lord.” But
what kind of a Lord is it that ends a good woman’s life by having her cut open
her own stomach and take out her own liver and eat it while her eyes is glazing
over? My Nancy ate her own liver, Mr Misunderstanding-with-the-Law, and you
tell me why I should give you a room, just to be reminded of that?’

Charlie said
gently, ‘Can we talk inside? I think I’m going to need your help.’

‘Ain’t you been
listening to me?’ Eric Broussard shouted at him. ‘Ain’t you been listening to
one single word I’ve been telling you?’

‘Let’s go
inside,’ said Charlie, taking hold of his arm. ‘Please, we have to talk about
it. Otherwise my son’s going to die on Friday, the same way that your Nancy
died, and the Celestines are going to go on causing misery and pain for ever
and ever.’

Eric Broussard
lowered his head. He was silent for a long time, but then he said, ‘Well, I
suppose you’re right. You’d better come along in. There’s some beer in the
icebox, no wine like there used to be. I’m sorry if your lady drinks wine.’

Robyn said,
‘Don’t mind me. I could finish a beer in five seconds flat.’

Inside the
house the blinds were all drawn down and the stuffiness was oppressive. Eric
Broussard led them through the kitchen to the front parlour, and offered them a
large brown sofa to sit on, while he found them a glass of beer. Charlie and
Robyn sat side by side in silence, looking at the green diamond-patterned
wallpaper and the shelf above the fireplace clustered with framed photographs
of Eric Brous-sard’s family, solemn and formally dressed, and all bearing the
distinctive Broussard likeness. The breeze that came across the bayou lifted
the blind away from the window every now and then, so that it tapped against
the windowsill, but it wasn’t a strong enough flow of air to penetrate the
room.

Eric Broussard
came back with a tray and three glasses of cold beer. ‘When I first walked out
with Nancy, I used to drink it by the neck. But she would never allow me to do
that. With Nancy, everything had to be just so. You don’t meet too many women
like that any more. These days, anything goes. Women don’t have
no
pride any longer.’

‘You must be
lonely, living out here all by yourself,’ Robyn remarked.

Eric Broussard sat
down in a large armchair with dark varnished arms and seat cushions that had
been pressed over the years into grotesque, wrinkled shapes. ‘People say that
you can get over losing somebody you love. Give yourself time, that’s what they
say. But, you know something, I’ve given myself years and years, and I still
can’t get myself used to living without Nancy. It was worse than losing a leg.’

Charlie said,
‘Tell me, Mr Broussard, how much do you know about the Celestines?’

Eric Broussard
drank beer, and made a face. ‘As much as anybody I guess. Right at the very
beginning, Nancy used to tell me all about them. She tried to persuade me to
join her. We could eat each other’s flesh, that’s what she said. We could share
each other’s body and blood, just like the
holy communion
.
But, my God, that made my blood run cold, that’s all. I could never understand
how she could believe in it all so much.’

‘Do you know
anything about the second coming ritual?’ asked Robyn.

‘I know they
believe that when a thousand thousand people have gotten themselves all eaten
up, their Chief Guide is supposed to eat the thousandth thousandth person, and
when he does that the Lord’s going to come down and inhabit his body, and a new
age is going to start. I seem to recall the Chief Guide don’t have to eat
all of the
thousandth thousandth person, only their brain.’