Who Was Found in Ruddock, Louisiana

Who Was Found in Ruddock, Louisiana 17 MINUTE READ

The day the naked woman with the long dark hair walked out of the Manhac Swamp was the same day Jean-René Marceau found Holy Cross Catholic Church returned from beneath the brackish water covering the ruins of Ruddock, Louisiana, so it was natural, in his mind, to think the two incidents were connected.

Jean-René was born in Ruddock, so he felt it his duty to watch over it. He’d been working in New Orleans when the big hurricane struck in 1915 and sunk it in the swamp, but his wife had died there, along with many others. Didn’t seem right to just leave the place to rot. There had been a church once, which he attended, and a school where he’d learned to read, and there was still a graveyard, deep between the cypresses.

So he salvaged timber and worked and bought what he needed to put himself a home on stilts out towards where the old cathouse used to be. A little boat got him to the train for work and back home at night. Jean-René worked ten hours in East Carrollton as a yard man, digging stumps and cutting limbs and sweating in the hot sun, and when the day was through paddled home to get his lamp and gigging fork. Then he went out to Ruddock.

He’d catch a little dinner, but mostly he’d drift and shine the lamp on the water, looking for things that floated up. Jean-René’s second job was getting fraught as more and more gators claimed the area, but he wasn’t ready to give it up just yet. He fished ruined books, and hats, and once, memorably, a skull up into his boat. Some bottom feeder dislodging it from the swamp floor—catfish, maybe—and Jean-René had dutifully buried it with the rest of the dead who’d been found.

It wasn’t a catfish that pushed Holy Cross up out of the water, though. Or, if it was, it was the world’s biggest catfish, and the thing had come armed with hammers and nails.

It was Sunday, the Lord’s day, and Jean-René had it off. He took service in East Carrollton since the loss of his hometown. He prayed with the Baptists now, and hoped that was fine, and then had lunch at his great-aunt’s house with distant relations till two o’clock. On many a Sunday he’d have it off only until something big needed done, then someone would come running with shovel and saw. Better he be close, then. But two o’clock came around that day and no one else did, so he said goodbye to Lea and Beatrice and all the little babies and set off for the Manhac Swamp again, more than a little bucked-up by the idea of having daylight on his boat trip for once.

By the time he got out to the ruins the setting sun did make a pretty picture behind the white-washed timbers of Holy Cross. Only they hadn’t been standing, much less white-washed, for four years. The first floor was still partly flooded— the water had come up a bit in the years since the hurricane, cresting over where its old stilts would’ve held it, tinting the paint greening where it met the building. But the attic and the cupola were untouched.

“Well, I’ll be,” Jean-René wheezed, grabbing his cap off his head and pressing it to his chest. “The… The Lord must know what I’m doing, and…”

That was when the naked woman with the long dark hair waded into view to the west.

Jean-René had knelt in his boat to receive the vision of the church restored, so he stayed there, gawping, as she walked around the root system of a cypress tree, then struck out into deeper water, thick pond scum painting her body bright green and something like decent. An old copper statue of some war hero gone green, rather than a dirty picture. She swam until she could stand again, then started walking, east-like, towards the train.

“Hey there!” he finally gathered himself enough to shout. “Uh, ma’am… Auntie Julia?”

The woman looked back at him. He’d always thought it hard to tell with negroes, but she seemed peeved, not just like her face sat that way on its own. He did think after a moment any resemblance to that old voodoo queen Julia Brown was thin— she’d been mulatto, from what he remembered of seeing her singing on her porch outside Freneir. This one was black as pitch, so black she was blue in the sunlight, and when he looked at the parts of her skin that weren’t painted by scum he thought he saw…

Saw…

His mind skittered away from what he thought he’d seen back to safer subjects. “No, you ain’t her. It’s only— you best get out of the water. There’s bugs and leaches and gators, you’ll get eat up.”

“The city of New Orleans,” she said, in a real queer accent, not Creole or Cajun but something more like those he used to hear, sometimes, around Congo Square— the way they talk in places where blacks don’t even know they’re black, because everyone is. “It is this way?”

“Well, yes, but you can’t go looking like that,” Jean-René said. To her deeper look of aggravation, he explained, slow-like, “Miss, you’re naked.”

The naked woman with the long dark hair looked down at her nakedness like it was news to her and unwelcome news at that. Not embarrassing news, but irksome. “I am.”

“Yep,” Jean-René agreed. His eyes darted between the woman and the risen church. “Say, you don’t know anything about, well, that building there, on account a yesterday it was under the water?”

“It was?” she asked, apparently seeing the only building standing in the middle of the swamp for the first time. Her look softened somewhat. Maybe thoughtful.

“Yes, ma’am. It’s been gone almost five years now, same as the town.”

“Then it was provided for me,” she said, with a certainty that made Jean-René want to agree, though it made no sense. “What I need will be inside.”

“Don’t imagine there’ll be anything in there,” he said, “other than gators, maybe.”

“Then they will have been provided for me.” She started towards the church but paused next to Jean-René’s boat. “As have you.”

All in all, Jean-René decided it was only polite to row her over rather than make her swim, and her climbing into the boat and staring him down was only a bit of why.

II.

Holy Cross Catholic Church never had a big trunk in the attic containing two dresses, a pair of decent shoes, ten dollars, some sort of foreign-looking armor costume, and a sword, at least not to Jean-René’s knowledge. Then again, he hadn’t been up there much.

“Uh, pardon me, didn’t say before. I’m Jean-René Marceau,” he introduced himself, hat in his hands again. “What… what are you called?”

The naked woman with the long dark hair tilted her head to the side, like she was listening to something far off. After a moment she reached back into the trunk. She pulled out a piece of paper folded in thirds and opened it. Jean-René saw at the top big letters declaring it a ‘Petition for Naturalization in the State of Louisiana.’

“Ginika,” she read off the paper. “This time I am called Ginika Ezemonye.”

Jean-René twisted his hat in his hands. “This time?”

She folded the paper back up and stuck it down the front of her dress with the ten dollars.

“Your boat,” Ginika asked, “will it go to New Orleans?”

“It’ll go to the road, and the road goes on to LaPlace,” he said. “From LaPlace you take the train in.”

“What is a train?” she asked, squinting at him.

Jean-René gave up on twisting his cap and put it back on. “Think I’d better just go with you.”

III.

The men at the train station didn’t know what to do with Ginika Ezemonye any more than Jean-René did. Jean-René got her in the right line to buy a ticket for the negro car, and she bought one, but once released on the platform she just went right for the first entrance to board, which wasn’t the negro car at all. She got herded back off and didn’t fight or nothing, but that was the weird part. She didn’t need to.

There was something in the way she talked and held herself. Something off. Jean-René watched the railway men grapple with it. They’d start in talking the way they would to any other darkie who caused a fuss, chests puffed out and tall on their toes, then she’d look at them and they’d just… sink. Back down to being flat on their feet. Back down to neutral tones. It wasn’t intimidation outright, that dog wouldn’t hunt, it was…

It was…

Jean-René stepped in when the conductor started shaking. “Ginika, you’ll get on to New Orleans, just can’t go in here— likewise, I can’t go back there. That’s how it is. Better for everyone.”

“You cannot go back there,” she repeated, “because you are not like me.”

“She slow or something?” one of the men asked. Enunciating, pointing between Ginika’s arm and Jean-René’s, he drawled, “You are colored. He is white.”

She held the arm up like it was new to her. “Ah. This again. I am ‘colored,’ now. I will go places you do not, or cannot.”

“Yep,” Jean-René said. He let the affirmation hang for the railway man and Ginika’s baffling observation, and the railway man snapped it up first, looking relieved there was some reason for his feeling of discomfort in the woman’s presence.

Ginika dropped her arm and nodded. “This is necessary, then. Where is my place on this ‘train’?”

Jean-René got her situated before he slumped into his own seat. It was full dark, now, and normally he’d be home cooking the frogs he gigged and sorting through the things he’d fished up. He wouldn’t usually be so tired, but, again, there was just something…

Something…

He woke up to a hand rapping on the glass of the window he fell asleep against. He jumped, gasped, and looked out onto the platform. They’d ridden further in than he did normally, past the outlying neighborhoods into the heart of the city. Ginika stood there in the dim light, fist raised to knock again, another worried railway man fretting off behind her. It struck Jean-René again how black she was. So black that with her mouth closed to hide her teeth, at first he really only saw the whites of her eyes.

Two. Two eyes. He saw two eyes.

He kept making himself think about precisely two eyes as he got off the train and led Ginika Ezemonye into New Orleans.

IV.

As the night wore on, Jean-René came to understand his situation a little better. Ginika didn’t know anything about anything, and at the same time scared the living daylights out of people without doing anything to them. He was part-nanny, part-lion-tamer. In one breath he’d try to explain electric lights, in the next he’d apologize to a mother whose baby took one look at her and wailed to wake the dead.

If Ginika knew what she was doing, she didn’t seem to care. If she had a destination in mind narrower than ‘the city of New Orleans,’ she didn’t share. Eventually Jean-René got tired of the looks they were getting walking together on the high streets and steered them towards Treme.

“Been a long time since I was out at night,” he mused. He’d decided on taking a load off at an old haunt where he could get a stiff drink, too. There was some teenager with a horn in the back of the place, blowing a tune Jean-René didn’t care for but Ginika seemed interested in, like the other negroes clustered around tables and thronging the bar. He comforted himself with several glasses of bourbon in quick succession. “Near five years now. Nice and all, but I still don’t get what exactly it is you’re needing in the city proper. This ain’t no place to find a job.”

“I have a job,” Ginika said, still watching the boy with the trumpet.

“You do?” Jean-René asked, surprised. “Where do you work?”

“New Orleans,” she said. Abruptly, she turned from the performance to stare at him. “You have not come to the city since the church was destroyed.”

He polished off his second drink and waved for another. “Yep, not since then, ‘cept for work. Didn’t seem right, after Mary drowned in the storm.”

“You were here in New Orleans when it happened, at your job?” she asked.

“Yes,” Jean-René said, unsteadily. The look on her face at his answer didn’t help matters. He opened his mouth to talk over it. “We knew a big one was blowing in, but no one, no one could’ve known big like that. Why’d you ask?”

“I am wondering why you were provided for me,” Ginika said. Her stare made him squirm. “You said on the walk you keep gardens. What garden needed keeping during a storm?”

“Jean-René!” called a voice. He turned, grateful for the interruption until he saw who was calling. Across the bar, Magnel Cope waved, all but falling out of her dress in her enthusiasm. Ginika’s eyes fixed on her like they had the trumpeter. Jean-René wished that boy would blow another wailing note.

“We should get on,” he said to Ginika, sliding out of his chair in the direction of the door.

They stopped to rest again in the French Quarter nearer the river, on the edge of the Washington Artillery. Ginika let her old questions lie but needled him with new ones. Mostly about goings-on in the city, about which he could only tell her as much as he saw in headlines, passing the newstand by on his way to work rather than stopping to pick up the gossip rags.

“I guess things been strange,” Jean-René allowed, “but I don’t know about the Devil.”

“I did not ask about a devil,” Ginika corrected, watching him with her dark eyes as he took his shoes off to rub his feet, “but about an Adversary. Tell me of these strange things.”

“Well, there was the Axeman. Don’t know much about it, because I go home at night, but apparently lot a blood was spilled. Then there was… well, the Spanish flu was always coming, but it was bad there, for a bit, and men went missing from the docks. Then the children what were kidnapped…” He sat back. “Don’t know how much a that’s the Devil and how much is just the city. Too many people in one place, you know, too hot, too close together. They spoil.”

Ginika stared out over the river and the lights it caught from the city.

“Jean-René Marceau,” she finally said, “you were unfaithful to your wife the night she died.”

It wasn’t a question any more than her pronouncement about Holy Cross had been.

“No!” he snapped, trying to marshal himself out from under the liquor and the deepening night, “no, I… How dare you? You uppity, burr-headed crow—”

It was her face that stopped him as he worked up steam to tell her off. Stopped him cold, like her words had, and pushed him back down like the railway men. There was no expression, not even the peeved one she’d worn when they first met. Her face was smooth dark stone. A carving. Something ancient, and uncaring, and big.

“You were provided for me, Jean-René Marceau,” she repeated.

“I… I only used to see Magnel for a half hour a week, on a break,” Jean-René tried to explain, “but with the storm coming, seemed… seemed good a reason as any to stay, come home and say how there’d been no using the trains, and Mary’d just be glad I was alright…”

Ginika stood in front of him. “What more am I to learn from you, Jean-René Marceau?”

To Jean-René’s shame, he began to cry. “I don’t know, ma’am, I don’t— With the church, I thought that God had seen my good works, how I worked out there alone, how righteous I’ve become, and…”

“God cannot see you,” Ginika said. “He is too far. But I can see you.”

Jean-René stared at the damp pavers under his bare feet for fear of what impossible thing he’d see if he looked up. Head bowed, he repeated, “I don’t know, then.”

It seemed like they held their poses there for a long, long time before Ginika spoke again.

“Humanity is unchanged,” she decided, “and this should be beneath my notice.”

“I suppose,” Jean-René said to his feet, not really understanding why she talked like that.

“I am only here to fight the Adversary. This should be beneath my notice,” she said again. He looked up, then, to find her woman-shaped and studying the distance instead of him, like she was talking more to herself. When she did look at him again, it was with nothing but her apparent usual level of annoyance at the concept of transportation. “We will return to the swamp now.”

“Alright,” he said, and they did.

VI.

Jean-René Marceau didn’t go to work the next day. He felt drained, like the time he’d had a fever as a boy and his mama sweated him, keeping him hot and miserable until it finally broke and he was left clammy in its absence. He woke with the dawn light and moved around as it strengthened. Finally, he got in his boat and went the wrong way, back towards Ruddock and not LaPlace. He had his gigging fork next to his leg, and a two-thirds full bottle of whiskey by his boot, which he began to work on almost immediately.

It was easy to orient himself in the center of town, now, thanks to Holy Cross standing again. From there it was easy to follow where the cross-street would’ve cut through by the schoolhouse and down, down towards old familiar stilts. To his home.

There was something floating in the water where his house had stood. A pale dress or something wearing one. Something with arms spread and skirt drifting behind, face-down in the brackish water.

Jean-René paddled closer with terrible desperation, surer with every stroke of what he’d finally find, after all these years fishing the remnants of the town up to use or lay to rest. He could see the fan of dark hair suspended in the green scum. The pale fingers curled in death. The shiny bottoms of Mary’s shoe heels just peeking out of the water. He pulled up alongside and leaned out, gigging fork aimed at the waist of the dress.

That was all he caught. A soggy dress, empty of any body. What he thought was hair was a tangle of reeds, and fingers the protrusion of roots. The dress, now that he’d hooked it, struck him as familiar. Jean-René looked back towards Holy Cross.

Standing in the window of the cupola was Ginika, naked, long dark hair falling over her shoulders as she looked down at him.

He remembered too late he hadn’t accounted for what he thought were the heels of Mary’s shoes. The gator floating underneath the dress turned as he pulled it away and opened its massive jaws.

Ginika Ezemonye went downstairs to put on the other dress which had been provided for her.

It took a little while for the empty boat to knock up against the drowned front steps of Holy Cross, but that gave her time to carry the trunk downstairs to it. She loaded it in over the fresh bloodstain before taking up the paddles. There came a massive groan from the timbers of the church at her back. Board by board, it began to collapse inwards, years of rot taken away given back with interest, laying it low again in the muck of the Manhac Swamp with the rest of Ruddock, Louisiana.

“I am listening,” Ginika said, apparently to no one, as she rowed away. “I understand my purpose. I will not be swayed again.”

Nothing but the glassy eyes of the alligators peeking above the scum watched her as she pointed herself towards the road, which would take her to LaPlace, and the train, which would take her back to the city of New Orleans.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 7/14/2019 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024