The Thickness of Night

The Thickness of Night

Lacy nooses of Spanish moss hung silently from the Virginia Willows that danced along the water’s edge, their limp branches sipping quietly as the river crept by sleeping homes. At a lazy bend in the river, a rivulet branched off from the main flow, winding sinuously along the banks and lily pads. A bullfrog’s deep-throated love song broke the silence of the humid summer night as fireflies winked like ghost lights above the water.

The rivulet flowed westward behind the plantations, behind the shantytowns to where it entered the bayou. Lush vegetation peppered the islands and peninsulas that made up the maze-like bayou, hiding any sense that modern civilization lay just ten miles east. A soft mist floated inches above the water, gently kissing the in-between places where water met air and land met water.

The nightlife of the bayou serenaded the flat-bottomed pirogue as it sluiced through the water with the occasional curious gator serving as a toothy sentinel. Rolling one glassy eye at the pirogue, the pirogue's current escort sunk below the surface, abandoning his post as pallbearer.

Three travelers entered the bayou to deliver their cargo. None paid any mind to the white sheet serving as a makeshift shroud. None wanted to see the blooms of warm red blood that marred the fine cotton weave. Grief, rage, pain, and sorrow mingled with the night-blooming jasmine scented air, turning the gentle fragrance sickly sweet and bitter.

Her hand still sticky with blood, Ella Terrebonne attempted to concentrate on the winding path through the bayou rather that the prostrate form lying next to her. The human eye was a tricky thing however; always drawn to what it shouldn’t see. Her concentration was muddled, foggy, as if a thick haze was wrapped around her brain.

Attracted by the scent of fresh blood, ravenous mosquitoes feasted richly upon the occupants. Numb as she was, Ella didn’t feel their biting stings. Fiercely gripping her torn jeans, she listened to the calming, monotonous sound of her father poling the pirogue through the bayou.

The wild, panicked screeching of a muskrat broke the preternatural silence of the night bayou. Rising to a fevered pitch, the muskrat’s screams went unnoticed by the rest of the bayou. Life came easily as death here, and one animal’s passing was just another turn of the wheel.

Hearing the pain and fear permeating the muskrat’s screams, however, Ella took notice where nature did not. Her forehead wrinkled as she slammed her eyes shut. The dark beast of memory rose within her, pulling her back into the abyss she had so recently escaped.

“You’re nothing but a chain around my neck.”

“Why must you be so slovenly?”

“What did I do to deserve such an unnatural child as you?”

“You will wash with the lye. Neither God nor I tolerate filthy little beasts.”

A small hand reached through the blackness and gripped her tightly. Prying her eyes open, Ella turned her head to find the source of comfort. Hazel green eyes identical to hers stared back softly at her, compassion and support filling them. Ella tried to give her brother Jackson a reassuring smile, but her mouth could only form a stiff rictus of a smile. Understanding her plight, Jackson offered the same strained smile back.

Even in rural Louisiana, it wasn’t every day, or night in this case, that you had to dispose of a body.

It was even rarer that the body belonged to your mother.

Kamikaze flight patterns of bats zigzagged overhead, making easy meals of the vampire mosquitoes preying upon the pirogue’s passengers. Ella watched the fierce battle overhead and recognized how the strong always prevailed over the weak. It was an easy theme for her to see as it had been center stage in her life for as long as she could remember.

If she was honest with herself, Ella knew that she shouldn’t be all that surprised by the situation that she now found herself in. Her mother had been a complicated, manipulative woman, and interactions with her always had a way of getting out of hand. This last and final episode was just the culmination of years of pain and abuse.

Stealing a glance back at her father, Ella could just make out the firm line of his jaw and the hunched set to his shoulders in the dim starlight. He often reminded her of a noble warrior, standing proud and strong, but she could now sense a wave a humiliation emanating from him. He still held that aura of the proud and noble warrior, but darkness tainted it now, marred by a madness that he could have neither predicted nor controlled.

It wasn’t as if he hadn’t realized the antipathy her mother harbored towards her, it was just that he didn't realize how deeply it ran, how twisted her mother’s mind had become.

Ella didn’t blame her father for not stopping it sooner, even though she knew he thought that she did. No, she didn’t blame him. How could you blame a person for being unable to stop the inevitable?

After the divorce, the courts in their misguided and erroneous wisdom had awarded their mother custody, firmly believing that the children were better off with their mother. A clever and devious woman and a skilled manipulator, Ella’s mother had played upon the judge’s sympathies, easily playing him. Despite all the evidence of the good man her father was, she and Jackson had left that bleak courtroom and entered into an even bleaker life at home.

Fear and secrecy had ruled their lives from there on out. Fear and secrecy were their mother’s greatest weapons. Chameleon-like, she could twist and distort the truth so that even those closest to her were unable to discern the truth of what happened behind closed doors.

Only Jackson had known of her plight. Only Jackson shared her pain as if it was his own.

Camille Terrebonne had never laid a hand on her son, but then, she didn’t have to. An expert in psychological warfare, the threat of pain was enough to instill the proper fear and obedience their mother required.

“Not much longer now, ‘tite fille.”

Despite the thickness of the night, Ella shivered at her father’s words. Hallow and broken, Ella’s heart clenched at the pain she heard in her father’s voice.

Somewhere in the night, an owl called out hauntingly. Cypress trees with their knees bent and crooked, hung over them like wraiths, their white skeletal limbs twisted and deformed. Ella loved it out here. One could learn a lot from the bayou. Here there was none of the pretension or oily slickness that one often found within human civilization. Life was purer here, more real in a way.

For all its fierce beauty and dangerous ways, however, the bayou’s ecosystem depended upon a delicate balance that even the slightest change could upset. One could see it with the canals the oil companies built or the levees the Army Corps of Engineers had misguidedly constructed all those years ago. More dangerous that any predator one might naturally find in the bayou, mankind thoughtlessly destroyed what nature had created and then wondered and raged against her when Mother Nature turned on them.

Ella understood the nature of the bayou, but she understood the cruel nature of mankind as well. Perhaps too well.

It had been all about appearances with her mother. Appearances and the meticulous, obsessive way her mother had to have her life in order. All one had to do was to look at her mother’s vanity with her mysterious pots and crystal bottles lined up against the spotless mirror in military precision. Each bottle and pot was exactly one inch from the next—no more, no less—and woe betide the person who messed with her mother’s system. Beneath the blood and bruises currently covering Ella’s body were the scars she bore for not being fast or careful enough.

The acidic change to the air announced the end to their Lethean journey and the bog emerged through the vegetation and fog. Not much lived here. The high acidity level of the soil and water made it so that very few animals lived here; less of a chance that anyone would find her mother after they interned her into the bog. Loblolly and slash pines lined the shore as the pirogue scraped the bottom and finally came to a stop.

Loamy earth squished and burped around them as Ella clambered out of the pirogue, watching her father secure the pirogue to a tree with a length of rope. Jackson soon joined her on the shore, their hands clutching at each other for support. Brother and sister watched silently as their father hauled the body out of the pirogue.

One pale arm slipped from the bloody sheet, the fingers already beginning to stiffen. The hand seemed to beckon them, calling them to follow on its final journey.

Formed into a half fist, the hand slapped against her father’s leg like linguine al dente. The almond-shaped nails painted a pale peach seemed to glow in the moonlight as Ella noticed that several were broken and torn. Ella gnawed on her lower lip, worrying about her mother’s reaction to this untidy appearance before she remembered that her mother was no longer capable of such concerns for her appearance.

“Look at what you make me do!”

“How can you be so clumsy?”

“You will do it over until you get it right.”

Her mother’s voice swirled around her with hurricane force winds. Even their echo was enough to instill caution and fear within her. Slimy bog mud sucked and burped as she watched her father trudge to shore with his burden.

“Stay here with your brother, ma ‘tite fille.”

Snapped out of her reverie, Ella stepped forward in protest.

“But Papa-,”

“You’ve seen enough Ella. You don’t need to see this.”

“I’m not afraid. I have to see this through.”

“Sa c’est de la couyonade.”

“It’s not foolishness, Papa,” Ella protested, suddenly full of purpose and determination. Some part of her realized that if she didn’t see this through to the end that her mother’s ghost would always haunt her; that if she didn’t complete the journey, her soul was doomed. “I’ll never be free of her if I don’t do this.”

“She’s right, Papa. We have to do this.”

Corbin Terrebonne stood before his children and couldn’t help but marvel at what he saw: strength amid adversity, stubbornness in the face of fear. He didn’t know all of what his children had suffered, but he quickly saw that it would follow them always if they didn’t have closure. More a spiritual man than a religious one, Corbin understood the ebb and flow of life and all the intricacies it entailed. Sighing, he shifted his burden and nodded his head in slow consent.

The path their father led them on seemed to open and close around them, as if Mother Nature realized the importance of their task and used her vines and trees to protect them from prying eyes. Ella felt as if she was on a secret path to the land of Narnia as they passed silently under the starlit sky.

The small pond that would be her mother’s final resting place was yet another part of nature’s filtration system. It worked as part of the bog to filter out impurities and deposit clean water into the bayou. Ella had some doubts about leaving her mother in this place. The woman had been poison, and although her life spirit was gone, Ella worried about any residual evil still residing with the body. Her poison had permeated every part of her being and spread to everything she touched. Ella worried that her mother’s poison would seep into the bog and, overpowering it, spread out into the bayou and the world.

“Papa, are you sure she can’t get out of here?”

In the process of pushing the body into the bog pond, her father stopped and turned to her.

“Don’t underestimate the power of the bayou, ‘tite chatte. This here bog won’t let the badness that was in your mama get out. The bayou had its own ways of dealing with such things.”

Ella swallowed heavily as she nodded her head. Her eyes fixated on the sheet-wrapped body as it slowly sand into the muddy water, pulled down by the excercise weights strapped to it. Lily pads and pitcher plants converged around the body, seeming to pull it further within. As the white sheet faded into the water, Ella realized that her father was right.

Squeezing her brother’s hand, she offered him the first real smile in a long time. Free at last, she knew that she could finally move on, because here, in the thickness of the night, maybe especially now, the bayou had a way of dealing with the badness of things and setting the goodness free. Setting her free.