Bless Me, Sister

J’ai ete-z-au bal au soir
Tout habille en noir
Je fais serment de ne plus boire
Pour courtiser la belle.

I went to the dance last night,
All dressed up in black.
I promise never to drink again
To court my beautiful girl.

Poem by Ivy Lejeune from the Les Acadiens d’Asteur

The only path to grace, a momentary state at best for me as a young Catholic schoolgirl, was to raise enough money every Lent to buy at least one pagan baby. It was an endless struggle of impure thoughts, unkind words, and wasteful actions locked in a battle with unattainable ideals. Little white paper boxes came to the Catholic classrooms the week before each Lenten season. Sister Benignus began distribution from front to back, each dirty soul grabbing his chance at redemption as the cardboard coin receptacles passed to the edges of the room. I vaguely knew where in Africa the money might be going as I struggled to visualize the face and body of paganism. For me, it took the form of dark, wet and unclothed people. I could feel a mother’s agony in a grass hut as she enveloped an unwanted infant in her saggy, empty breast. Years of National Geographic, a Catholic’s Playboy magazine, probably painted these images for me. All I knew was that I could put rice in bowls and milk in chests by giving up Saturday morning trips to Mr. Biddle’s candy store. Five dollars was all it took to feed one African baby and baptize him into a new life. All I had to do was stare down my depravity for 40 days.

It seemed simple at first. If I didn’t get on my bike and ride to Mr. Biddle’s with my brothers Anthony and Greg, I wouldn’t see the layers of boxes and colorful rows of B-B Bats, Turkish taffy, ruby red wax lips, peanut butter-flavored Mary Jane’s, day-long Black Cow suckers, and firesticks. Pretty soon, however, I felt left out of the lazy day ritual and rode along “just to read” recycled comic books stacked in the store corner, ten cents apiece if you wanted to bring them home. Walking along the counters, as my brothers loaded up on the three for a penny and two for a nickel treats, my torture was shoved to a conscious level. But, I quickly basked in piety and reasoned that eternal salvation was within my grasp. I could almost smell the soapy, clean scent of my spirit receiving its saintly bath. I was evolving into Holiness. Sister Benignus was going to be so proud.

Trips to the Saturday afternoon twenty-five cent movies were a little more of a challenge. Mom dropped the three of us off and I was in charge of two ungrateful scoundrels, my younger brothers, who of course, had money to burn on Dots, Junior Mints, and Milk Duds. I could get a dill pickle the size of a small refrigerator but the esthetics of it was all wrong for me. The retrieval of the rubbery, frog-like object from a jar of green swill with swirling seeds usually resulted in shriveled hands and lips, squinty, tearing eyes and a soggy napkin, the side effects of over-vinegarization. This seemed like way too much suffering for a continent I’d never visited. Popcorn was the usual substitute. As we took our seats close to the screen and prepared to watch black and white newsreels and serials featuring walls that move to squash beautiful women trapped in rooms with handsome heroes in dark suits, smacking sounds emitted from my two brothers. It was interminable anguish to watch them suck the life out of the fragrant boxes crammed up against their faces and dislodge caramel from their stuck teeth. I began to question my choice of suffering. Why didn’t I give up movies, Indian Baseball, Red Rover, Four-Square, Hopscotch, or Jacks. Sister Benignus said to give up something that’s difficult to live without. Candy met this criterion and still allowed me recess with my friends at school. And, the biggest payoff was how much money I saved. It would go into the white box with the cross on it!

I won my engagements with evil by becoming fortified through a Monday classroom ritual. Each morning, we stood by our desks, faced the American flag, recited the Pledge of Allegiance aloud, and then sat and listened to Father read prayers over the intercom. On Lenten Mondays, Sister Benignus lit fires of passion for more pain. There she stood, her squatty body swathed in yards of black fabric. Her pinched, pale face poked through a starched, white, bib-like construction of selflessness. Her enormous black belt supported an oversized rosary and leather strap (weapon), which she alternated with a wooden yardstick to strike reluctant readers. She pontificated eloquently about the needy around the world and restated how each child’s $5 was the hand needed to snatch souls from those muddy huts and thrust them into the comfort of God’s waiting arms. Circus carnies, take lessons here. She was so good at selling God that I never questioned the method, even when repeated requests from my classmates and me to go down the hall to the bathroom were cruelly ignored or rebuked. This often resulted in at least one child per classroom wetting the schoolroom floor during arithmetic at the board or choral reading, including me. We were extruded through the church’s purification framework, nuns crafting the die into which we were cast. Spunk, individuality, and creativity were the broken cookies in this factory.

Visits to the confessional provided another opportunity to stay the course of self-righteousness. I built up a large cache of mercy as I usually got credit in the confessional for larger sins than I actually committed. I discovered this quite by accident one day in a clumsily worded divulgence. A priest got the impression that I actually had sex with a boy when my description was only meant to cover unchaste thoughts. The result was a mere extra two or three “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” penance and a bona fide bonanza of a redemption strategy. It was a simple way to keep secret reserves in the event of Complete Conscience Collapse, which I sensed was in my future.

After a series of stockpile confessions, rosaries, and graphic tours around the church tracing the Christ’s steps through the Stations of the Cross, Easter came and we indulged our greed, gorging ourselves into a sugar-induced stupor. We all became like Uncle Brud, my grandmother’s youngest brother. Brud, a corruption of “baby brother,” still looked like the infant name he bore as an adult. He was over six feet tall, weighed in at around 300 pounds and sported a red round angelic countenance. He visited Mamam’s home every Easter and Christmas but we never had verbal exchanges with him. He usually plowed through the door with his compass set on "dining room table" uttering only grunts if young ones blocked his path. He heaved his corpus load onto fragile, cane back, homemade chairs and we held our breath and privately saluted the furniture. Brud emptied serving bowls of potato salad, jambalaya, pork roast and gravy, and mache choux. And with utensils ready for battle, he dispatched the next round of fresh, coconut cake, sweet dough pies, and fudge. Brud beat the food in his mouth with the precision of an electric mixer. And then, as if the breaker to the home's light source had been flipped, he froze, wide-eyed and motionless. My brothers and I caucused in hushed whispers about how much food was still lodged in his cheeks, waiting for retrieval and more chewing later in the day. His next move was to the living room sofa where he took root and stared off with no hint of delight or satiation. I watched Brud and marveled at his endowment--this child-man sibling of Mamam, Tante Nola, and Tante Swit had three tireless women in service to him.

I still stand in awe of the messy mysterious courtship of Catholic Louisiana and springtime. In February, the strict, Catholic ritual and kaleidoscopic celebration culture escort each other arm in arm at masked Krewe balls and noisy street dances. Each wretched sinner waltzes in a delirious trance with his own greedy excess. And by design, the transgressor recognizes his defects, gives them a costumed form, and ushers them out through the dogma and liturgy of the church that is Lent. Easter provides each ragged spirit with a rehabilitated soul and the promise of Love for eternity. Sinners call this grace. Cajuns call it living.

J’ai ete-z-au bal au soir
Tout habille en noir
Je fais serment de ne plus boire
Pour courtiser la belle.

One Yellow Plate

My brother Greg is past fifty years old now. I’m older than he, but I’m not telling by how much. Greg remembers ‘the yellow plate incident’ like it was yesterday. You will want the plate, too, when you hear the story. It happened at one of our big Sunday lunches when we were children. Mom set the table with Melmac, the hot consumer dinnerware item of the 1950’s. Public bus seats were made out of it. Kids couldn’t break it. You could toss it like a Frisbee. It wouldn’t come back. But if it did, you could lose your nose. No cracks in the Melmac, though. Like its now higher brow vintage cousin, Fiestaware, it came in bright colors—coral, lemon, and turquoise. At this particular lunch, at the place where Greg always sat, was placed a lemon-colored Melmac plate. Before this day, the yellow plate had no real value in our family. Greg raced to his place with great dispatch and announced loudly, “Ooh, I get yellow today!” We all fixed our gazes on him and searched our brains to assess what this could mean. My sister, Danielle, no slacker as a scorekeeper of our parents’ love, grasped the monumental significance of the plate before Anthony, Marc, or I did. Though billed by reputation as indestructible, my mother had managed to burn and shatter all but one yellow Melmac plate. There were still multiples of the blue and red. You could see the horror on my sister’s face as she realized that Greg, four years older than she, was given the only yellow plate in the house by Mother. My sister burst into spasmodic sobs, “he has the yellow plate!”

Mother snatched at the most expedient solution and barked, “Greg, switch plates with Danielle.” Greg quickly seized control, “No, I want the yellow plate.” Mother, wanting lunch to go on as planned, urgently pleaded with Greg to give my sister the plate. Greg said “no” more defiantly this time. He was going down with the plate. Grasping the plate tightly against his chest, Greg decided Danielle should back off. Mother then gave Dad ‘the look” we all know so well. It had “make it happen” written all over it. If Mother was the Court of First Instance, Dad was the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court. He only stepped in when a grenade was necessary. While he rarely spanked any us, we saw him frequently in a military jeep, dressed in his uniform loaded with World War II and Korean War medals on his chest. We all assumed he was capable of barehanded assault on any enemy target. Dad moved to stand over Greg and boomed, “Greg, give your sister the plate.” He then snatched the plate from Greg’s clutch and planted it in front of Danielle. “The plate goes in this spot.” My sister then did something no graceful victor should do. She turned to Greg with an impishly smug smile and waited for a reaction. Greg left the table and, as far as I can remember, didn’t eat that day.

We all recently gathered on Memorial Day for another Sunday lunch around the same table in my parent’s home. This time, Marc, our youngest brother, told a story to the group about a recent trip to the hospital emergency room to be with Mom. My Dad fell unconscious from his chair to the ground at an outdoor barbeque cooked by the Mire Fire Department at their headquarters. After the ride in the fire department ambulance to the hospital, Mother called Greg, now our oldest living brother, to discuss what happened. She wrongly assumed that he would sense her panic and rush from Lafayette to be by her side. He, on the other hand, hearing no urgency in her voice, laid down for an afternoon nap. My brother Marc, the recipient of the second call, hearing panic mixed with the disgust about Greg in Mother’s voice, drove quickly to support her. Recounting this story at our Memorial Day lunch, Marc ended with self-satisfaction by saying, “After this, I’ll probably get the keys to the safety deposit box.” Greg fired back losing no time, “I already have it.” Then he dangled the little gold key in front of us all. My sister Danielle, now registering the same expression Greg wore on the day he lost the yellow plate, sputtered in disbelief,” I didn’t know. I didn’t even know there was a safety deposit box!” Later, from her home in Florida, she mailed Greg the yellow plate. Some people know when they’ve lost a war.