The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (18 page)

I didn’t have much time to gloat. Two days later, the smell of fried turkey still hanging in the air, Boudreaux drove up. His entire face was pulled down into a frown.

“What’s the problem?”

He handed me a flyer.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

B.P. had stepped it up.
All the turducken you can eat
, the flyer read.

“Turducken! How much money does he have?”

For most of us, turducken—the Russian nesting doll of poultry—was a once-a-year novelty served up at Thanksgiving or Christmas. For do-it-yourselfers, deboning a duck and chicken, then stuffing them into a turkey was too much work. To buy one ready-made typically ran fifty bucks or more.

“He’s gonna have pony rides, too,” Boudreaux said.

“Oh, c’mon!” I ripped the flyer in half, ripped it again, then balled it up and threw it on the ground. “What do we do now? At this rate, we’ll have to have a festival before the festival.”

We stood in silence for a while. Finally, Boudreaux spoke.

“I think I have an idea.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t want word to get out. I want to catch that sumbitch off guard. He won’t know what hit him. If this works, he’ll have to have a full-on circus to top us.”

“How are you going to keep something like that a secret?”

“You just going to have to trust me, Father.”

“Okay. Fine. But what do I put on the flyers?”

“I don’t know. Just go crazy.”

So I did.
February Surprise!
I wrote.
A Winter Wonder! Boudreaux and crew present a meal so stupendous, so amazing, so colossal, so mouthwateringly delicious, you’ll want to
SLAP YA MAMA
! It’s so beyond the limits of imagination, we can’t even tell you what it is
.

I used big letters and sprinkled exclamation points liberally throughout. Heading off all arguments at the pass, I typed the word
FREE
in a 72-point font across the bottom. I printed them and Denise distributed them before Mark and Vicky could do anything to stop me.

Now here we are in the predawn darkness and I have no idea what’s unfolding around me.

“Boudreaux, what’s going on?” I ask.

“Yeah, what kind of koo-koo you got us up to this time?” asks Thibodeaux.

I turn to Thibodeaux. “Yall don’t know what’s going on, either?”

“Mais, no. He wouldn’t tell. He call me up on Tuesday and tells me to find fifty pounds smoke sausage and chop it up. I still got no damn idea what we doing.”

Another old man, Felix Arcenaux, pipes up. “You think that’s crazy, he called me on Tuesday, too, and made me swear on my mama’s grave not to tell anybody. Then he axed me to bring—”

Boudreaux puts up his hand, cuts him off. “Okay. That’s enough for right now. It’ll make sense soon enough.” He looked around the crowd. “Now. T-Chew, you back your truck up and let’s unload those tables. And, CaCa, you get some charcoal going in that barrel pit. Once it’s ready, start preheating that box.”

While the men set out about their tasks, Miss Emilia carries out a tray of coffee.

“Yall about ready to start?” she asks.

“I reckon,” says Boudreaux.

Miss Emilia works up the courage for her next question. “Can I call Celestine, tell her to come?”

“Now c’mon, Emilia. You do that, half the town’s gonna be here in half an hour.”

By the way he’s smiling, I can tell he wouldn’t mind that so much.

“No. I’ll just call her. I swear. And maybe Pamela.”

Boudreaux waits, makes her suffer. “Fine. But nobody else.”

She’s already got her cell phone to her ear by the time he shouts after her, “I don’t want a bunch of women and kids out here getting underfoot.”

With his wife back in the house, the fire going, and the tables set up, Boudreaux surveys his troops. Clad in camo caps and hunting clothes, hands jammed into their pockets, they stand shivering in the cold.

“Yall about ready?”

Mark whispers to me, “Ready for what?”

“Not even God knows what this one’s all about.”

Boudreaux claps his hands together. “Allons! Let’s go. Thibodeaux, you get that sausage and put it on that table. Arcenaux, you and Toby, back your truck up, get what you brought and slap it on that table. See if you can do it without telling anybody.”

Arcenaux and his grandson head for his truck. The rest of the battalion mutters its disapproval at being kept in the dark. One shouts out, “Arcenaux, what you brought, man? Just tell us!”

Arcenaux, now caught up in the theatrics, shouts back. “Yall hold yall horses. Won’t be but a minute. Now get out of the way so I can back my truck up.”

Said truck backed up, Arcenaux hops out and drops the tailgate. He and Toby grab hold of the blue tarp and whip it off.

“Kee-yaaaahhhhh,” someone exclaims. “It’s a whole damn cow.”

That it is. Not just a side of beef, but a whole damn cow, gutted and skinned and glistening under the lights like an autopsy-ready alien at Roswell.

Kenny Wyble slaps the side of the truck. “Mais, Boudreaux, if you had him bring a whole damn cow”—apparently whole damn cow is now the thing’s official name—“why you asked me to bring—”

“Kenny,” Boudreaux says. “Just hush your mouth and go get your truck. Rest of yall get this on the table.”

That done, Boudreaux looks to Mark and me. “Fathers, yall ready to get busy?”

We both shrug. “Sure.”

“There’s some seasoning in these bags,” he says, pointing to some gallon-sized zip-tops. “Want yall to rub this whole damn cow real good on the outside. Then, yall take that sausage and put about a quarter-inch layer all over on the inside. Pack it in good.”

“Don’t we need gloves?” I ask.

Boudreaux looks at me.

“He’s just joking,” Mark says, elbowing me in the ribs. “C’mon, Steve. Time to get to work.” Ten seconds later, he’s rubbing the cow like it’s had a long day at the office. “Boudreaux, yall going to inject this thing with marinade or what?”

“Nah. I thought about it, but it’ll be plenty moist. You’ll see.”

The others jog off to Kenny Wyble’s truck to harass him, leaving us to our work. Arcenaux, after parking his pickup, has climbed in the back of Kenny’s bed and is waving a rake handle at the other to keep them away. As I rub a handful of spice into the whole damn cow’s haunch, I look at Mark. “Since when are you one of the boys?”

“You kidding me? I passed as one of the boys for eighteen years. I made damn sure I was always first to volunteer for this kind of thing. I guarantee you I was twice the man you were in high school.”

“Please.”

“How many deer did you kill in high school?”

The fact was, Mama had never let me go deer hunting. Duck, squirrel, dove—all of that was fine. Deer? No. Too many kids were killed deer hunting, she said.

“How many did you kill?” I ask.

“Ten.”

“Ten? In four years? Is that even legal?”

“Not hardly,” he says.

We stop talking as Kenny Wyble’s truck backs up to the table with a throng of men jabbering excitedly around it. Not even the appearance of Miss Pamela and Miss Celestine calms them down. They’re on the verge of rioting. Arcenaux and Boudreaux, stationed in the back of the truck, are laughing so hard they’re having problems standing up, much less fending away the gang. When they finally do whip off this blue tarp to reveal a whole damn hog, all hell breaks loose. Cheers rise up in the air.

“I knew it,” someone shouts.

“Aw, you didn’t know a damn thing, you,” he’s promptly told.

“I told yall Boudreaux done lost his mind,” says someone else.

“B.P. can keep his damn turduckens,” one of the others says.

“No, he can’t,” says Rocko Castille. “Boudreaux made me bring fifteen of them, too.”

“And me, I brought a whole damn sheep,” says Tommy Carrier, running off to get his truck.

The crowd breaks out into another round of cheers as they realize that we’re about to assemble some sort of Frankenstein version of the turducken.

Boudreaux puts his hands up one more time. “Okay. Okay. Might as well get moving. CaCa, start getting that box warmed up. Rest of yall, get the heads off the pig and the sheep. Fathers, I figure yall got the rest figured out.”

“Yes, sir,” says Mark.

“Any questions?”

I can’t help myself. “Boudreaux, how did you think of this?”

“I read it in a book,” he says.

“A cookbook?”

“Hell no!” Boudreaux says as if I offended him.

“Boudreaux! Watch your mouth in front of Father Steve!” It’s Miss Emilia, who’s been standing on the steps huddled with Miss Celestine and Miss Pamela watching the madness unfold.

“Sorry, Father,” says Boudreaux. “But no. Not a cookbook. Just a regular book. Can’t remember the fella’s name who wrote it, but it was something in Czechoslovakia.” He pronounces it “checkasluhvakyuh.” “And a bunch of Africans use all sorts of animals—even a zebra—to do something like a turducken. I couldn’t get that out my head.”

“You don’t say?” I say. Boudreaux reading a novel. I just can’t imagine it.

“Aw, yeah,” says Thibodeaux. “That fool always got his nose in some book or other. Ever since he was a kid.”

“Yeah,” says Arcenaux. “Used to call him Book-Book Boudreaux before he got big enough to beat us up.”

Boudreaux, by now, is blushing. “I’m still big enough to do it,” he says. “So everybody shut up and get back to work.”

So says Boudreaux, so it is done. After Mark and I get a good coat of sausage spackle into the whole damn cow and season the outside of the whole damn hog, Boudreaux and Thibodeaux heave up the swine—exhaling like steam engines in the predawn cold—and try to wedge it home. It fits only after some on-the-fly surgery that entails Arcenaux removing the hog’s ribs and Mark sawing off its feet with a hacksaw. Figuring the whole damn sheep will require the same treatment, Mark leaves me to stuff the hog, while he goes to work with efficient fury.

“Shooo! They taught you how to do that in priest school?” one of the younger men asks, teasing Mark.

“Hardly,” he says, standing up from his grisly task and wiping his hands on his jeans as if born into butchery. “That’s old-fashioned Gueydan education, right there,” he adds.

The mere mention of the town sets off fifteen minutes of duck-hunting talk, in which Mark reveals that he knows practically every hunting lease within fifty miles of his birthplace. The men of Grand Prairie, who grew up here in the higher grounds of Cajun country with only a measly little bayou or two pulling in wood ducks, are jealous of a marsh Cajun who grew up with mallards, teal, canvasbacks, and geese practically nesting in his backyard.

While they prattle on about hunting, I keep stuffing ground sausage into the hog, fighting the overwhelming urge to ask for an apron, or maybe even a high-pressure hose, to get the cold pork grease off my hands. Thank God it’s cold; otherwise I’d have no excuse for the shivers that periodically rack my body when I realize I’m elbow-deep in two different animals and applying more meat to their insides.

Soon enough, the meat monstrosity is assembled and ready to go. Boudreaux positions two men over the microwave, ready to lift and shut the lid as quickly as possible to minimize heat loss. He, Arcenaux, Thibodeaux, and Mark take places near each leg of the overstuffed cow.

Arcenaux grabs a hoof and says, “C’mon, let’s go.”

“Now, you just wait a minute,” Boudreaux says, then looks to me. “Father, want to say a quick word before we lay him to rest?”

“Sure.” Figuring the gathered army has little patience for long-winded sermons, I go with a standard grace even though it’ll likely be some time before we actually eat. “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive through thy bounty, through Christ our Lord.”

They all chime in on “Amen.”

“And please don’t let our roast beast burn,” I add.

“Amen,” they all say again, more heartily this time.

With that, the beast is placed into the box, the lid clamped down tight, and more coals shoveled on top. The sun is just reaching pink fingers over the trees to the east.

“Now what?” I ask.

“That’s it,” Boudreaux says. “Sits in there for eight hours.”

“That’s it?”

“Yup.”

“When do you check it?”

“As long as the thermometer says three hundred, we don’t.”

“So you’re not even going to peek?”

“Not till two o’clock, I ain’t.”

I’m not man enough for that sort of self-discipline and I don’t mind telling him so.

Boudreaux laughs. “That’s okay, Father. Most of these others aren’t, either. That’s why I’m going to have to sit here and keep watch.”

My work done, I head back to the rectory to take a nap before eight-thirty Mass, leaving Boudreaux and the gang to pull lawn chairs up around the Cajun microwave and break out a silver flask.

Both Masses come and go in a blur, neither a fine performance by anyone involved. Like kids keeping an eye on the clock the day school lets out for summer, we fidget and keep looking toward the windows as if we could see through the stained glass. The smell doesn’t help. I think the parishioners have it worse than I do as they have no idea what’s in the box. Those who come for eight-thirty Mass refuse to leave, content to gather around Boudreaux and his men, begging to be told what’s in the box. The only answer they get is, “Just some old leaves and trash.” Folks arriving for the eleven o’clock Mass have to park on the side of the road and in the field across the highway.

By the time eleven o’clock Mass ends and we’ve cleared enough cars to set out tables and chairs, it’s coming on two o’clock and the day has warmed up to a balmy fifty degrees. The crowd is buzzing by now. A photographer from the
Daily World
has materialized.

“You the priest?” he asks.

Resisting the urge to ask him if he’s seen anyone else running around in a long white robe, I say yes and ask him what brings him around these parts.

“We got five calls at the paper this morning.”

“So you know what it is?”

“I know what they told me. I don’t know if I actually believe them.”