The Traiteur's Ring (30 page)

How the hell did that crazy old Cajun just show up out of nowhere and have a heated talk with Ben. Just what the hell is going on?

She pulled her phone out again and flipped it open to call him. Just a quick call to be sure he was okay. Her finger hovered over the number two, his speed dial number. She shouldn’t call, right? She should just let him do what he needed to do up there in the woods. It didn’t hurt her at all that he wanted to go alone – she sort of understood she thought. But she did worry more, not being there, not knowing how he was doing or what he might be feeling.

Her finger shifted to the number one, and she speed-dialed her voicemail.

Just gonna make sure he didn’t try to leave a message. Reception sucks out here in Deliverance country
.

Her phone assured her she had no messages (you––-have––no––-messages the annoying bitch told her), and she flipped it closed again, dropping it into her jeans yet again.

She turned away from the diner and decided to stroll around and find something to buy. She had a feeling she would not really want any mementos from today, but she had to do something. For a moment she saw the old Cajun, grinning face, yellow eyes, and “Purple Haze” ball cap, seated on a bench beside a lamp post at the corner. Her pulse quickened, and she felt herself actually gasp, her breath sucked in through clenched teeth. This was no friggin’ coincidence.

But then the old man shimmered in the sunlight, like a mirage of water on a hot asphalt road, and disappeared.

My God, get a grip on yourself, girl.

She felt for the phone in her back pocket. Secure it was there, she continued down the street at a tense, trotting stroll. She glanced again at her watch despite her best effort not to.

Four more minutes down.

Chapter 27

The terror he expected at the sight of his Gammy – decades long dead now and rocking in her same old rocker, a shaker glass of lemonade in her hand – never came. He realized he had known he would see her today. Perhaps a normal person would feel fear at the sight of a living ghost, creaking in her chair on a warped porch in the woods, but he was a child of the bayou – grandson of a Traiteur (
Sho’ ‘neff true dat
). Gammy sipped the warm glass of iceless lemonade and flashed again the smile his memory told him meant everything was alright (
Awright nah, chile
).

Ben approached her and felt a smile creep across his face. This wasn’t the Gammy of his nightmares – the Gammy with the long curved knife, dripping blood from her naked body in the moonlight. This was grandma Gammy. The Gammy of bedtime stories and soft songs when he had a bellyache. The Gammy of warm smiles and warm potions on scraped knees and elbows – always with a kiss to “seal dat medicine in yo’ knee and heart.” The Gammy that somewhere found Christmas presents every year for her dirt poor grandson in the woods.

Just his grandma.

She rose from her rocker with a grunt to meet him.

“Dese ole bones, now,” she said.

Just like always.

She wrapped her arms around him in a huge bear hug, undaunted that she now came only to his chest, and he had clearly grown out of that embrace. He fully expected her skin to be, well cool at least, if not cold. Ghosts were cold, right? But her touch was warm and familiar, and the scent of her was all Gammy instead of the mulchy grave smell he braced for. If not for the powerful memory of her pale and lifeless body, obscene in the simple box so many years ago, he would have been tempted to believe she had never died at all – that he had made some terrible mistake – that and the fact she had not aged a day beyond the old lady from his boyhood.

She pulled out of his hug and looked him up and down. Her wrinkled old face beamed.

“Know’d you’d grow up big, but Christ on a crutch, boy. Look ‘atcha!”

Ben beamed back and kept his hands on Gammy’s shoulders. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Lossa questions, ‘ey boy?”

Ben nodded and felt like the young child he had been when last they’d talked. Gammy nodded back.

“Lots to tell ya’,” she said and looked past him at the sky. “Not much time for the telling, ‘fraid.” She said. “Sit or walk?”

Just like when he was little and had questions or was afraid (usually from something he heard in the dark when she wore her night time clothes like now). He usually said sit, and they would sit on the edge of the porch. Right now he thought a little distance between him and the shack he last saw in flames might clear his head a bit – even if he was still talking to his dead grandmother.

“Walk,” he said.

“Better now,” she took his hand and led him down the rickety stairs. “Best be getting’ ya on to yo’ appointment anyhow.”

They walked hand-in-hand through the clearing and started down the moss-covered path at its edge. Ben felt himself drag back a bit as they entered the woods, but Gammy squeezed his hand, and the tension melted away.

Plenty of time for that if I still gotta go down that fuckin’ hole.

He realized he still hoped Gammy would say something that could maybe spare him that terrifying journey. They came to a large, moss-covered rock – the moss had overgrown the ‘B.M.’ he had scraped into it years ago – and she leaned against it and turned to face him.

“Been meetin’ dat other Traiteur, ain’t ya boy? Dat one from the dark land?”

Ben wanted to be sure he understood everything he heard, even if a part of his mind reminded him – insisted in fact – that all of this was created in his brain.

“Are you talking about the Village Elder? The one I met in Africa?”

“Yep,” she said. “Dats da one.”

Ben tried to shake away the little boy he felt himself become.

“How do you know about that?”

Because she is inside your diseased brain just like that fantasy.

Except he no longer believed that.

“Dem people is kin for us,” she said like that explained everything. It didn’t for him.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Mouth boy,” she scolded. As a kid, he’d been allowed to say “shit” but for some reason “hell” had always been a soapin’ offense. His face became pensive, and she sighed. “Bennie, I love ya more ‘n you could know,” she said, “and I wants to tell you everything you needs, but time don’ let me. Things is that them people over there is our people. Our spirit kin. We is all one wit dem.”

Ben thought a moment.

“All Children of Ginen?”

Gammy laughed the full and deep laugh he remembered, and the musical sound of it tugged another tear out of his left eye.

“We don’ call it dat here, but yep – any name’ll do it, so sure to dat.”

Ben nodded, but didn’t really understand.

Gammy looked past him at the sky again.

“Gots to keep tellin’ it, honey-boy,” she said. “Time keep on movin’.”

She took his hand again, and they continued on down the path. Only a few more paces and they passed the rope hammock where he had pretended to be a pirate, high above the sea on the rigging to the main sail, and more lately had awakened in terrible dreams of his beloved grandmother.

“Time was I could jess be Traiteur here around,” Gammy continued as they strolled slowly now.  Her voice had a sadness that tugged his heart. “Long time like that. Remember dem happy times, Benny?”

He nodded. He had been happy – maybe just a kid who didn’t know better or had nothing to compare his life to, but he had been happy enough in their home in the woods. People came by a lot – white, black, Indian, it didn’t matter which – and Gammy made them better or at least feel better. They would give the Traiteur and her young grandson food or blankets or clothes. Once they got a bucket of Boudin so big that even though they salted it, a lot spoiled before they could eat it all. Fruit – he remembered how special it was when her “patients” would give them fruit. The sweetness had seemed almost overwhelming. He smiled at how uncomplicated it seemed. Simple and happy – two good words for those days.

“Then came dat dark one – wantin’ cleanin’ for dat spirit sickness in him.” She shook her head at the thought. “Woulda done it gone, too,” she said and looked at him. “’Ceptin’ the dark blood got deep in him ‘fore I could. May never coulda, I don’t know.” Gammy stopped and stared off into the woods a moment. “Dat black-blood spirit had him way too tight by then. Sick wit it he was and way too shittin’ late.” She looked over at him, called back from the memory, and smiled again. “Turn out okay, guessin’, right?”

Ben felt a grab on his insides. He had to ask although he knew the answer.

“Did you kill that man, Gammy? The one I saw in the dream who I remembered for so long as a deer – the man that night in the woods?” He held her eyes with his.

He held no judgment for his grandmother. Shit, how many men had he killed in the last few years? If she had done what his dreams told him, it would be for the same reasons – an enemy who had to submit or die for the greater good. As unfair as it seemed though, her answer did matter to him. He knew it would change how he saw Gammy, his gentle and loving grandmother, probably forever.

“Sure the fuck did,” she spit back, and the venom in her voice surprised him. “No man, though, not by then. Blood done turned black by then, from dat dark one.”

She stopped again and looked at him. Her eyes told him she understood how important the words were to him.

“No could give dat dark one what he wanted and ran out of time to git him gone.” The eyes now told him she had done what she had to, nothing more. He wanted that to matter but wasn’t sure it did.

“What did he want? The dark one, I guess I mean. What did he want that you couldn’t give him?”

Gammy took both his hands in her own and smiled at him with wet eyes.

“Why,
you,
chile,” she said. “Dark one sent dat black-blooded fuck to take wit him my grandson.”

Ben literally reeled at what he heard. His body tipped back on his heels, and he stumbled, catching himself with an awkward jolt or he would have fallen out straight to the ground – like some damn damsel in distress swooning and fainting at a danger she confronted.

“What do you mean?” he cried out and realized his voice, too, had taken on a hysterical high pitch. Did this nightmare begin with him somehow?

Might could be endin’ dat own way, too. Sho’ ‘neff, Bennie boy. Sho’ ‘neff true dat one.

“What the hell do you mean?” he asked again, his voice more even and his own. “What the hell is the dark one and black blood? What does all this Voodoo shit mean?” He felt angry more than frightened now.

I’m getting pretty sick of this crazy-ass shit.

Gammy again let loose her grandmother laugh.

“More than some tourist shit Voodoo, dis one, Bennie,” she said. “Dem ‘ole-time Vodu ones, be more like to true. But we all da same, honey-boy. Same kin wit dem dat you met and the ole ones from home.”

“What old ones?” he asked, anger now competing with a desperate need to understand.

“The Eaters of the Dead,” she answered simply. “We all spirit kin from one same great one – all one spirit family.”

Eaters of the Dead. He had heard that enough times now, too. The term brought back nothing from his childhood, but still felt familiar somehow.

“Who are the Eaters of the Dead?” he asked. “I’ve heard that more than once the last couple of days. What does it mean?”

“You know’n dem Attakapa?” she said.

“Of course,” he said. The Attakapa Indians and the Choctawhatchee Indians were the two main tribes of Bayou Louisiana Native Americans. They were also both all but extinct.

“Well, we share more than spirit kin wit dem Indians, Bennie,” she said and her face took on a glow that made her look like a young girl. “Share blood and spirit wit dem, you and I.” She looked at him and raised an eyebrow like he should know what came next. Then, she shook her head. “Come on, now, boy. Remember nothin’ I taught you?” He stared at her unsure what he had forgotten. “Attakapa is a Choctaw word,” she told him. “Means ‘Eater of the Dead’ cause they watch dem Attakapa Indians eat they enemies once they kill’d ‘em. They was protectors of the Living Earth, them Indians. Same as you and I.”

Ben tried to get a handle on all his Gammy told him. Was she telling him they were somehow descendants of the Attakapa? The poor people of the bayou saw a lot of mixing of blood and culture, to be sure. Hell, that was what the word Creole meant to him. People from a big old mixing pot – mostly because they were too poor to travel beyond walking distance to find a little lovin’. A few generations in the bayou produced the mix-breed mutts they had all become. But, so what? What did that mean to him now, even if he did have some Indian blood in his veins, other than more college scholarship eligibility?

“Why do they eat the dead?”

“They was Rougarou,” she said. “Protectors. Eating dat dead enemy prevents the afterlife. Not like some kinda heaven place – no boy. Not like in some story. For dem Indians afterlife meant they could spirit walk back here, back to our world from dat other spirit place, and if them dat come back had the black blood of the dark one, well….” She shrugged like the return of those ghosts held obvious and terrible consequences. She tugged at his arm to get his eyes back on her. “Bennie – honey, boy – you da Rougarou now.”

Ben shook his head, tried to make all the dust of this settle into a meaningful pile of something.

“I have no idea what that means for me, Gammy,” he said and felt frustration return. “I don’t know what any of you want from me.”

Gammy touched his face with her warm hand.

“You will, Bennie,” she said. She looked again past him at the sky. “Time ‘bout up, honey-boy,” she said. “Jess remember now – Attakapa is in our blood and spirit, but can be friend or enemy both.”

Ben’s eyes filled now with frustrated tears.

“I don’t know what the hell any of this means,” he choked and bent his head down against his Gammy’s forehead.

“You will, Bennie,” she reassured again and patted his back. “You gots to be learnin’ now about controllin’ dem gifts’ you got, now, darlin’ chile. You gots lot more of dat Ashe in you. Don’t be scare’t now, chile. It’s okay, now.”