Altar of Eden (8 page)

Lorna sat by herself on the front deck of the CBP boat. It slid smoothly down a narrow canal, framed by ancient cypress trees. The low rumble of the engine had a lulling effect. She had not realized how tired she was until this quiet moment. She took what rest she could, staring out at the spread of the bayou.

Half a mile ahead, the sharper whines of the two airboats led the way. Their searchlights were will-o’-the-wisps in the darkness. Closer at hand, fireflies flickered in branches and flew in warning patterns across the channel.

She listened to the swamp breathe around her. The wash of water through cypress knees, the whispery rattle of leaves from an occasional ocean breeze, all accompanied by the heavy croaking of bullfrogs, the screech of an owl, the ultrasonic whistle of hunting bats. Beneath it all she sensed something timeless and slumbering about this place, a glimpse of a prehistoric world, a sliver of a primordial Eden.

“Are you hungry?”

The voice made her jump. She had been close to drifting off, lost in her private thoughts. She sat up, smelling something wonderful and spicy in the air. It cut sharply through the moldy mire of the swamp.

Jack approached. He had a helmet under one arm and a plastic bowl in the other. “Crawfish gumbo. Hope you like okra.”

“Wouldn’t be a southerner if I didn’t.”

She took the bowl gratefully. She was surprised to discover a couple pieces of
pain perdu
floating in the stew. Her mother used to make it every Sunday morning: soaking stale bread in milk and cinnamon overnight, then frying it in a skillet. The smell would fill the entire house. She’d never had
pain perdu
served with gumbo.

She spooned up a piece questioningly.

Jack spoke, a grin behind his words. “My
grand-mére
’s recipe. Try it.”

She tasted a chunk of the sodden bread. Her eyes slipped closed. “Ohmygod . . .” The blend of heat from the gumbo and sweetness of the cinnamon came close to making her swoon.

The grin in his voice reached his face. “We Cajuns know a thing or two about cookin’.”

He sat near her as she worked her way through the bowl. They kept each other quiet company, but it slowly turned uncomfortable. There was too much hanging between them, ghosts of the past that grew all too real in the dark swamp and the silence.

Jack finally broke the tension. As if needing to push back the darkness, he swept out an arm and captured a flash of light that flickered past. He opened his fingers to reveal a tiny firefly, gone dark, its magic broken, just a small winged beetle again.

“Where my
grand-mére
was a great cook, my
grand-pére
was a bit of a medicine man. He had all sorts of homegrown remedies. Bathing in pepper grass to soak away aches. If you had a fever, you slept under the bed. He used to crush fireflies and mix them with pure-grain alcohol to make an ointment. Cured rheumatism, he claimed.”

Jack blew on the beetle and sent it winging away, again flickering and winking brightly.

“I still remember him walking around the house in his underwear at night with glowing goop smeared all over his shoulders and knees.”

A warm laugh bubbled out of her. “Your brother once mentioned that. Said it scared him to death.”

“I remember.
grand-pére
passed away when Tom was only six. He was too young to understand. ’Course it didn’t help that whenever we spotted some fiery swamp gas in the bayou, I’d tell him it was the ghost of
grand-pére
coming to get him.”

She smiled as their two memories wrapped around each other, centered around Tom. Silence again dropped around them. It was the problem with keeping company with Jack. No matter what they discussed, they had their own ghost haunting them.

In that moment they could’ve let the silence crush them, drive them apart, but Jack remained seated. Plainly there was much left unsaid between them, left unexplained for years. His voice dropped to a breath, but she still heard the pain. “I have to ask . . . do you ever regret your decision?”

She tensed. She had never talked about it aloud with anyone, at least not directly. But if anyone deserved an honest answer, it was Jack. Her breathing grew harder. She immediately went back to that moment in the bathroom, staring down at the E.P.T strip. As always, the past was never more than a heartbeat away.

“If I could take it all back,” she said, “I would. And not just for Tom’s sake. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about it.” Her hand drifted to her belly. “I should’ve been stronger.”

Jack waited a half breath, clearly weighing how much and what to say. “You and Tom were just kids.”

She shook her head slightly. “I was fifteen. Old enough to know better. Before and after.”

She and Tom had made love in the garden shed at her house after a spring dance. They were stupid and in love, having dated for almost a year. They’d both been virgins. Their coupling had been painful and ill-conceived and full of misconceptions.

No one got pregnant the first time.

After she missed her period, followed by confirmation with a pregnancy test kit, that particular misconception was shattered. The full weight of reality and responsibility came crashing down on them. They’d kept silent about it, a terrifying secret between them that wasn’t going away. Over the next month, she had practically cleaned out a neighboring town’s drugstore of its test kits. She prayed on her knees every night.

What were they to do?

She wasn’t ready for a child, to be a mother. Tom was terrified of how their parents would respond. She had also been raised Catholic, had her first Communion at the St. Louis Cathedral. There seemed no options, especially if her parents learned the truth.

Tom had suggested a solution. In the neighboring parish, there was a midwife who performed abortions in secret. And not the clothes-hanger sort of deal. She had been trained at a Planned Parenthood clinic, taking that skill, along with some black-market tools and drugs, and setting up a makeshift clinic out of an old house in the delta. The midwife ran a booming business. And it wasn’t just scared teenagers, but also cheating spouses, rape victims, and anyone who needed to keep a secret. There were plenty of those in southern Louisiana. The region had an unwritten rule: as long as you didn’t talk about it, it never happened.

And in the end, that was the true power of the bayou. Under its dark bower, secrets could be drowned forever.

But it was a delusion to think such secrets truly died. Someone still had to live with them. And often what was thought gone forever rose to the surface again.

JACK READ THE
pain in the woman’s posture, the grief shining so plainly in her face. He should’ve kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t his place to question her, to drive this stake through her heart. When it came to this story, he had his own burden to bear. Maybe that’s why he was here, to find some way to forgive himself.

Jack spoke into the quiet. “Tom never said a word about the pregnacy. Not even to me. We were sharing the same bedroom, so I knew something was wrong. He got all sullen and quiet, walked around the house like he was waiting for someone to hit him over the head. It wasn’t until he called that night, half drunk, sobbing . . . perhaps seeking absolution from his older brother.”

Lorna turned to him. She had never heard this part. “What did he say?”

Jack rubbed at the stubble on his chin. It made too loud a scratching sound, so he dropped his hand back to his lap. “You were with the midwife at the time. While he was waiting, he slipped off to a nearby backwater moonshine bar and got drunk.”

She stared at him, waiting for more. He knew she was well familiar with
that
part of the story already.

“I could barely understand him,” Jack continued. “He got you pregnant. That much was clear.”

“That wasn’t all on him,” she added.

He nodded, moving on. “Tom was racked by guilt. He was sure he had ruined your life. Sure that you would hate him. But more than anything, he felt like he had pressured you into going out there. That it was the wrong choice. But now it was too late.”

She glanced back to him. “I knew he was scared . . . like I was. But I didn’t know he was that tortured. He kept that locked away.”

“It’s the Cajun way.
Joie de vivre.
Sadness is supposed to be bottled up, especially for the men. Probably why Tom got drunk. Couldn’t keep that up without some anesthesia.”

She frowned. “When I came out and found him slurring and weaving, I got so angry. I was in pain, half drugged on sedatives, and there he was drunk. I yelled at him, lit into him good. We had planned on going to a hotel after the procedure. My parents thought I was sleeping over with a friend. It was all planned. But after I found him in that state, I figured we would have to spend the night in the back of his truck, wait until he sobered up.”

Jack heard the catch in her voice and knew why. “But Tom hadn’t been drinking alone.”

“No.”

About that time, Jack had been racing across the parish on his motorcycle. After the drunken call, he knew his brother needed help. He certainly wasn’t fit enough to drive.

Lorna’s voice grew cold, distancing herself as much as possible from the memory. “Tom had already passed out in the back of the truck by the time they came. They pulled me out of the rear bed. Had me on the ground before I even knew what was happening. I fought, but they pinned me down. They had my jeans down to my knees, tore open my blouse.”

“You don’t have to go there, Lorna.”

She seemed deaf to him. “I couldn’t stop them. I still remember the bastard’s stinking breath, fuming with alcohol. His laughter. His hands tearing at me. I should’ve been more careful.” Her voice cracked, and she visibly trembled.

“They were predators,” Jack said. He pushed against the guilt he heard in her voice. “They probably scouted regularly around that makeshift clinic. With women already half drugged, they found easy marks. Who would report an attack? These were women sneaking off for a secret abortion at an illegal clinic. Their silence was practically guaranteed. The bastards probably plied Tom with cheap moonshine so he’d be out of the picture. Leaving you alone and vulnerable.”

“But I wasn’t alone.” She turned to him, her eyes shining in the darkness.

Jack had arrived at that exact time, skidding to a stop on his motorcycle in the parking lot. He spotted them at the edge of the woods on top of Lorna. A blood rage had filled him at the time. He flew into the group of them, but he tempered his fury with calculation. With three against one, he needed to make an example, to unleash such a savage attack that it would cow the other two. He ripped the bastard off of Lorna, twisted his arm until bone snapped and a scream followed. He then pounded the man, half animal in his savagery, breaking the bastard’s nose, his cheekbone, knocking out his front teeth.

Still, he had the wherewithal to tell Lorna to run, to get in the truck and hightail it out of there. He didn’t know how many others were out there, if they had any friends nearby who would be drawn by the fight.

While he fought, Lorna had hesitated by the truck, hovering by the door. He’d thought she was paralyzed by fear.

“Get moving, you stupid bitch!” he had screamed at her, words he still regretted, both for their cruelty then and for the consequences that would follow.

She had jumped into the cab and, with a roar of the engine, flew off. While beating the man under him to a bloody pulp he watched her fishtail out of the parking lot and onto the narrow winding road that led through the bayou. At the time he didn’t know his brother was passed out in the open truck bed. Only later, after the accident, did he learn the truth. She had lost control in the dark, miscalculated a turn, and ended up plowing into a tree.

The airbag saved her.

Tom was found fifty feet away, facedown in the water.

LORNA RECOGNIZED THE
haunted look in Jack’s eyes. She remembered little after the accident. The next days had been a blur to her.

In the end, the fallout of that night was typical of Louisiana justice. Deals were struck behind closed doors. She was convicted of a DUI, though not alcohol-related as everyone suspected following the tox screen on Tom’s body. He had a blood-alcohol level four times the legal limit. Her DUI was based on her impairment while under the effect of a sedative, a detail kept out of the newspapers to spare her parents any additional humiliation.

Jack had also testified behind closed doors as to
why
she had been driving. At the same time he was also up on assault charges.

She was ashamed that she never really knew what had happened to him after that. He had simply vanished.

“Where did you go?” she finally asked. “After the courthouse?”

He sighed and shook his head. “The man I beat up, the one that attacked you, he came from a well-connected family.”

Lorna sat stunned. She struggled to shift her view of the past to match his words. Shock, then anger, burned through her. “Wait. I thought no one knew who he was.”

During the attack, she hadn’t gotten a good look at her assailant. And out in the backwoods, people kept their mouths shut.

“I was railroaded,” Jack explained. “Looking back now, I recognize that they feared prosecuting me outright. It would expose the attempted rape—a crime that in the backwaters is often dismissed as boys being boys, but no one wanted to test that theory. And besides, you hadn’t been raped, so why stir the pot?”

Jack must have felt her go cold next to him. “Those were
their
words,“ he said, ”not mine. Either way, the case never went to trial. Still, they couldn’t just me let go. His family had pull. Mine didn’t. We had a long history of trouble with the law. As you might remember, Randy was already locked up for assaulting a policeman. They made veiled threats against his life if I didn’t cooperate, if I didn’t keep my mouth shut. So I was given a choice: go to jail or join the Marines.”

“That’s why you left?”

“Had no choice.” He kept his eyes purposefully away. “And to be honest, I was happy to leave. I was the one who sent you flying away in that truck, ordered you to leave. How could I face my family? And when I did return home after two tours of duty, I found it easier to remain silent. To let the dead rest in peace.”