Water Witch (10 page)

Ten minutes after they’d left the Bucket the
first time, when Angelle claimed her sister had a headache,
everyone started talking about the missing kids. Vern, Pork Chop
and Cherokee had been working to untangle the cow from the pier’s
pilings at the time, and as they worked, Beeno mentioned that the
sheriff from Iberville Parish wouldn’t be sending any more deputies
to help search for the kids. According to Beeno, the parish was
short on patrol power and needed everyone back in Plaquemine to
work a NAACP rally. Upon hearing the news, Pork Chop lit into
Beeno. He cussed and yelled about the taxes he paid and how nobody
had the right to use his hard-earned money to pay cops to baby-sit
a bunch of congregating lazy-assed niggers. The argument between
them grew so heated, Vern had to let loose of the cow in order to
stop the men from coming to blows. The cow floated off down the
bayou, headless and gutless, and Cherokee had left without saying a
word to anyone.

To Poochie, that fight had been a juicy piece
of gossip. How could anybody hear that story and not ask a dozen
questions? It just didn’t seem natural. Of course, she was used to
people ignoring her. Most folks thought she was a little off
anyway. And as much as Poochie hated to admit it, her brain
did
occasionally toss her thoughts around like the balls in
the Bingo machine back in St. Martinville. The thoughts would
eventually settle back in the right place, but she sometimes opened
her mouth while they were still in the middle of settling, which
made some of her comments sound wonky, even to herself.

The truth of the matter was Poochie didn’t
really care what folks thought. In fact, it was probably a good
thing they considered her nuts from time to time. When folks
thought a person had loose change jingling around in their brains,
that person could do or say just about anything they wanted and get
away with it. Especially if they had a good number of years under
their belt, which she certainly did. But getting away with stuff
was really the only benefit to getting old. Everything else that
came with old age Poochie considered poop in a toilet—the
occasional forgetfulness—the saggy, wrinkled body—the loss of
teeth, hair, hearing, and sight. It wasn’t fair that a brain could
be so easily convinced it was still eighteen years old, despite its
true number, but the body had no choice but to stiffen and creak
with each passing year.

Fortunately, even at eighty-four, Poochie saw
well enough to know adventure or trouble, which for her was usually
one and the same, when she saw it, and she heard well enough to
hear what she needed to hear. Like the whispering going on in the
next room.

The whispering wasn’t a good sign at all.
Earlier, when she’d been sitting in the living room with them,
Angelle and Dunny had barely spoken a handful of words, but as soon
as she’d excused herself to go to the bathroom, the murmuring
started. The whole time Poochie peed, she tried to convince herself
they were only talking personal sister talk. After all, it had been
quite a while since they’d seen one another. But the logic wouldn’t
stick. The funny feeling in her belly, which she believed God used
as a warning device, wouldn’t let go.

No matter the reason Angelle gave for Dunny
being here, Poochie knew it wasn’t the whole truth. She was
convinced Dunny had come to help find the kids, and she’d come for
other reasons Poochie couldn’t quite latch onto yet. She also had a
feeling she was supposed to help Dunny, but wasn’t sure how or with
what. Praying for the woman was a given, it was something Poochie
did often and knew she did well. Not that praying was anything to
brag about, just another benefit of old age. The closer a person
got to the grave; the more direct they got with God. At her age,
Poochie figured she didn’t have time to mess with the repetitious
hooey she’d learned in catechism. She shot straight from the hip
and told God what was on her mind, and God usually returned the
favor. But for some reason, He’d decided to keep most of the
details about Dunny to Himself.

Since the eavesdropping wasn’t working,
Poochie decided to take a more direct approach. She inched her way
along the wall, her walker leading the way, and peeked around the
corner into the living room. The women were sitting close together
on the couch, just as they had been earlier. Poochie cocked her
head slightly to the left, keeping an eye on them while attempting
to pick up a word or two.

In that moment, Dunny looked up, evidently
sensing she and Angelle were no longer alone. Her eyes were the
color of wet rust, and they held an intensity and depth that was a
little intimidating. Knowing she was busted, Poochie shuffled out
into view.

“Hey,” Dunny said, acknowledging her with a
half-hearted smile. Angelle sat back and glanced over her shoulder.
Judging from the frustration that flickered over her face, Poochie
figured they hadn’t had a chance to say all that needed saying and
wouldn’t as long as she was in the room.

Poochie aimed her walker towards the kitchen.
“Y’all don’t pay me no mind. I’ll go start supper while you two
visit.”

“I’ll take care of supper, Pooch.” Angelle
glanced at her watch. “I didn’t realize it was getting so late.”
She leaned over, ready to get up from the couch.

“No, no, stay where you at. Dere’s some
shrimp in de icebox already peeled. I’ll use dat to make us a stew.
A good roux gravy over some rice, now dat’ll put some meat on
y’all’s skinny butts.”

Before Angelle had a chance to protest,
Poochie hurried through the archway that led to the kitchen. She
by-passed the refrigerator and stove, fully intending to cook the
stew she’d mentioned, only not now. If she couldn’t get the
information she needed out of Dunny and Angelle, then she’d have to
get it out of God, and the one place He seemed to listen best was
at the prayer tree.

After opening the back door, Poochie hobbled
her way down the steps and over to the china ball tree that stood
in the middle of the backyard. On the backside of the tree sat a
wooden bench that Trevor had made and placed there for her. She
shuffled over to it, sat, folded her hands in her lap, and sighed.
Dusk was already pressing down on the day, but there was still
plenty of light for her to make out the pale bricks on the house,
the bayou that ran along the north end of the property, and the
shoes hanging in the tree. Always the shoes.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Because of Sook, when Poochie first arrived
in Bayou Crow, it hadn’t taken long for word to get out that a
teeaunt had moved into town. Most old folks in south Louisiana
still remembered a time when a teeaunt was as common as a doctor
making house calls. Now it was almost impossible to find either. In
the old days, a doctor brought a little black bag filled with
medicine to your house, a teeaunt, a heart filled with prayers.
Both, though, carried the intent to heal. The biggest difference
between the two, besides the doctor thinking he was God and the
teeaunt believing
in
God, was that a teeaunt didn’t take the
one-shot-cures-all approach.

A teeaunt diligently prayed for the living
and the souls in purgatory until they received a tangible answer to
their prayers. That answer could come by way of a family member
professing that a fever had finally lifted, or a cardinal roosting
on a strand of barbwire at sunrise, which meant a soul had found
its way home to heaven. Only then would the teeaunt drop the person
from his or her prayer roster. Poochie had known about teeaunts
since she was a little girl, but had never really considered
herself one. It wasn’t as if anyone said, ‘Here are the rules to
being a teeaunt,’ then trained her. She just prayed for people.

The shoes had come about out of necessity. At
one point, so many people were asking her to pray for them or a
sick family member or for a loved one who’d passed on and whose
soul they thought had a questionable destination, Poochie couldn’t
keep track of them all. The shoes served as reminders, a sort of
visual of the person they belonged to. Once a prayer was answered,
the shoes were returned. The idea to hang the shoes in a tree came
to her one day after she’d run out of places to store them in her
house in St. Martinville.

To make room, she simply knotted the
shoestrings together and tossed the shoes into the chicken tree
that grew in her front yard. If someone brought her a pair of
sandals or shoes with no laces, Poochie tied the pair together with
twine. By the time she’d left her home to move to Bayou Crow,
there’d been over two hundred pairs of shoes hanging in that tree.
As far as she knew, they were still there waiting for her. She’d
thought about taking them along, but moving them felt sacrilegious
somehow, so she’d left them behind.

This tree, however, was giving her a hissy
fit. The last time Poochie counted, the china ball tree held ten
pairs of shoes on the left, which was the purgatory side, and eight
pairs of shoes on the right, which was the living side. In fact,
Sook had been the one to bring the last two pairs of shoes she’d
put up on the living side—pink sneakers that belonged to Sarah
Woodard and a black pair of high-top sneakers that belonged to
Nicky Trahan. Poochie had never met the children, so when Sook
brought the shoes, she’d made sure to describe them down to the
freckle so Poochie would have a strong visual when she prayed for
them. With those babies vividly in mind, Poochie had Trevor place
both pairs of shoes side by side on the same branch about midway up
the tree. They were still up there, all the living shoes were. Only
those two were the smallest, saddest looking pairs of all.

But something was going on with the purgatory
side of the tree that left her completely befuddled. Three pairs of
shoes were missing from it. The first pair, a set of dark brown,
well-worn loafers with lopsided heels, had disappeared three days
ago. They’d belonged to Rospier Trosclair, a big man, according to
Marie, his wife. He’d been murdered by Clarence Wallace, the father
of a twenty-year-old girl who witnesses claimed Trosclair had
raped. Obviously wanting to make sure justice was properly served,
Wallace got to Trosclair before the police and bashed his head in
with a concrete-filled lead pipe. The loafers had been on
Trosclair’s feet the day of his funeral, but removed for whatever
reason before the casket was closed. You couldn’t get a ‘fresher’
pair of shoes than that, right off a dead man’s feet—or so Marie
had claimed when she’d brought them to Poochie. Not knowing for
sure if he had in fact harmed that young girl, the woman feared for
her husband’s soul. No one had bothered bringing shoes for Wallace.
As far as Poochie knew, the man was still serving life in
Angola.

The second pair of shoes, flip-flops that had
belonged to a hooker named Cynthia Bergeron who’d overdosed on
drugs, vanished a day after the first, then the third pair went
absent the very next day. Those had been shrimp boots, whose owner,
according to the woman who’d brought them to Poochie, had killed
three people and himself in a drunk driving accident. No matter
whom the shoes belonged to, though, or why they’d been brought to
her, Poochie couldn’t understand their disappearance. Something
like that had never happened to her before, and she wasn’t quite
sure what to make of it. Either someone was stealing the shoes, or
the dead were returning to claim them. As crazy as both reasons
sounded, the last one felt more probable in her belly, which really
confused her.

Dropping her head back, Poochie blew out a
breath and took in the expanse of sky above her. She heard the
cackle of chickens coming from a neighbor’s yard. A dog barking.
The hum of a boat motor off in the distance. The sounds of ordinary
life. She’d always found it fascinating, how chaos could swirl
around a person while sameness still managed to keep its own pace,
like the chickens, the dog, the sky. Chaos, sameness—two big wheels
in life spinning in opposite directions, yet still capable of
moving a person forward. Only the Big Man Upstairs could come up
with something that screwed up and get away with it.

Lowering her head, Poochie closed her eyes
and pictured the face of God. To her, he looked like an old Marlon
Brando.

“God, me and you got to have us a talk,” she
said quietly. “I got a lot in my head, and you been leaving me in
de dark too long, and I can’t stand it no more. You know if you
leave me wit’ no answers like dat I’m gonna wind up wit’ all kinds
of trouble, so can you give me a break now? Let me know what’s
goin’ on? Look here, I know you brung Angelle’s sister to find dem
chil’ren, and I feel in my belly dat you want me to help her find
dem, but I don’t know what you want me to. I’d sure appreciate if
you’d make dat clear.”

Poochie paused, allowing God a chance to
interject. All she heard was the chickens. She pursed her lips, a
little perturbed that He wasn’t being more immediate with answers,
readjusted her behind on the bench, then continued. “Okay, den
here’s another one. I got dis feeling dat Dunny’s hands got
something to do with what she’s gotta do for dem kids and dat don’t
make no sense to me. De woman wears gloves all de time. I know
‘cause I seen her. Den, when we was at de Bloody Bucket, I could
tell in her face dat her hands was hurtin’ her real bad. Does she
got a bad case of art’ritis or was dat you passing her a sign? You
know, like you pass me in my belly? I’d appreciate if you’d let me
know dat.”

She opened one eye and glanced up at the sky.
“And something else if it’s okay wit’ you . . .I know I already ask
you a bunch of times about dem little chil’ren, dat somebody find
dem fas’ before something bad happens, but you been slow answering
dat, too, so I figure I bes’ ask for dat again.”

A soft breeze ruffled Poochie's hair and sent
a chill up the back of her neck. She nodded, closed her eye and
bowed her head, accepting the breeze as confirmation of the deity’s
presence. “Thank you, God, for hearin’ me. I know you a bit slow
sometimes, but now dat I know you listenin’ for sure, I’m gonna try
and be patient and wait for you answers.” Poochie was about to open
her eyes again, then remembered an additional request. “Oh, yeah,
God, if you still dere and can hear me, would you pass you hand
down here and help Trevor and Angelle? Something’s not right wit’
dem two, no. Sometimes when I look at dem, a frisson pass t’rough
me, like something bad is gonna happen in de family. So if you
don’t mind, please fix dat, too.”