The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival (3 page)

“Give me a little credit, Vick.”

“All I’m saying is it can’t be easy.”

“That’s part of the point, I think. It’s not supposed to be easy. Besides, I made it this long, I think I can make it another thirty years.”

“You expect me to believe you’ve gone your whole life without?”

“I expect you to believe what I tell you,” I say, giving her what I imagine to be a rakish grin.

“Okay, stop that. You look like you’re in pain. But, seriously, another thirty years? You’re not giving yourself a very long life.”

“I’m hoping the equipment will give out by then and I won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

She laughs. I laugh. But I’m not joking half as much as she thinks I am.

“Well, I’m going inside,” I say. “Going to watch
Touched by an Angel
or something.”

“So that’s what angels are for?” she says, trying to keep a straight face but failing miserably. I would have laughed—I walked right into that one—but she’s so pleased with herself that she’s bending over at the waist and laughing too hard at her own joke.

“Shit, Padre,” she says. “Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.”

I turn away and face the one streetlight in the parking lot, where the nightly drama of bats chasing moths is unfolding.

“Aw, c’mon, Steve. Look, I’m sorry. I’m just messing with you. That was a good one. You have to give me that much.” She’s almost pleading.

“Okay. It’s a good one. Ha. Ha. Now I’m going inside. You’re more than welcome to come in.”

She stands straight. “I’d love to join you, but I have to head into town. Big Saturday night.”

When was the last time I had a big Saturday night? When was the last time I had a Saturday night?

She picks a moth off my shoulder. After releasing it, she smoothes out the spot on my robe where it was sitting. “Yeah, I promised Mama and the girls I’d go play cards with them.”

Oddly enough, I find it harder to imagine her mother, a woman I’ve actually met, than her father. Grace was never more than a minor character in the rumor, so maybe that’s why it’s hard to deal with her in terms of reality. It would be like running into Jesus one day and when he introduces you to a parent, you get stuck with Joseph instead of Mary.

We say our good-byes and she drives off into the night. As she’s pulling out of the driveway, I see the flit of red again, this time across the highway about half a mile down in the gathering shadows of dusk. For a second, it looked like a girl wearing a red cape and hood. But just like that, it’s gone. I rub my eyes, blink, and look again. Nothing. Probably just residual red in my eyes from Vicky’s taillights.

I go to the vestry and help myself to a large glass of unblessed Franzia before putting away my overlay, taking off my collar, and heading to the rectory.

They told me before my placement to expect such moments, that I’d get a little loopy sometime around the fifth month, sooner if plopped into a small rural parish. I’m nothing if not punctual. There’s even a hotline I can call.

One of the seminary instructors, Father Benjamin Snyder, had warned me of the “dangers” of working in a small parish.

I laughed in his face. “You’re kidding me, right? Priests back home are minor celebrities,” I said. “They get fat on the meals cooked just for them. Besides which, every town in Louisiana has more than one church. I can always just hang out with the other priests. Just like here.”

“You’ll see,” Father Snyder had said, with a thousand-yard stare that should have been warning enough. “You’ll see.”

Oh yes, I have seen.

First, I saw my blind spot. Yes, proper towns have more than one church. But if Louisiana lacks one thing, it’s an abundance of real towns. How could I have forgotten this? As a kid, I was dragged around the state to one godforsaken hamlet after another in the service of visiting distant relatives with my dad, the family’s self-appointed missionary. Those little towns. Three intersections, one convenience store, and, halfway between one village and the next, the church they shared. It inspired in me an overwhelming claustrophobia—or was it agoraphobia?—and a need to escape to something grand.

I got grand all right.

Grand Prairie. Plenty of horses. One church. We don’t even have a convenience store. I have to drive fifteen minutes to get a Coke and a pack of Camels.

And yes, I’m a minor celebrity. I was right about that much, at least. I don’t cook for myself because these old women can’t get enough of me. They send their husbands to take care of the church lawn, their grandkids to wash my car.

But what’s becoming increasingly clear is that I’m the shepherd of a flock that does little more than the requisite bahhing. They’re good people. Good and simple. Good and simple and boring. My Dear Lord, forgive me, but, man, are they boring!

I suspect that’s what Father Snyder, who himself had served a small-town church for twenty-five years, had been trying to warn me about.

If nothing else, I expected to be tutored in the ways of the common man, schooled in the philosophy of folk wisdom. But either movies about common folk are far, far off base or the good people of Grand Prairie aren’t living up to their part of the bargain. They farm, go to work in Opelousas, eat too much, sleep just enough, and spend time with their families. Some have an easy time of it, others make a mess of it. But no one seems to be following a secret code of simple people.

And other priests? Of the four in Opelousas and the three in Ville Platte, five are too busy with their big fancy parishes, with all those weddings and baptisms and confirmations and funerals. Another is about as stimulating as decaffeinated coffee and carries on way too much about his mother. And the seventh is a black separatist trying to break from Holy Mother Church while still keeping the church and school buildings for some sort of Black Power commune.

So it’s just me. Sometimes Vicky. Sometimes the red thing. I attend to my duties, flirt with the old women who drop by, and stay up too late watching bad TV or surfing the Web. Then I’m up at the crack of dawn for prayers and morning Mass, which is always attended by the same four people: the Holy Trinity and me. It’s actually rather nice, the ritual of it, the familiarity of it. But to be honest, I get a little creeped out by the echo of my own voice bouncing around the otherwise silent church. Every time the building settles, I flinch and look around to spot the source of the sound, as if I’ll find a ghost in a red sheet bumping around the place or one of the statues taking a leisurely stroll through the pews.

When I first started at St. Peter’s, a couple of the hard-core biddies showed up for morning Mass. But there was something slightly embarrassing about it. In a cathedral of appropriate size, there’s enough room for each person to create her own personal buffer. But in St. Pete’s it feels like we’re sharing an intimate moment. The prayers take on the hushed tones of a seduction, the call-and-response portion of some sort of holy, private flirtation. One morning, I made eye contact with Miss Emilia Boudreaux and a blush bloomed from her neckline straight up to the roots of her hair. They’d all rather flirt outside of Mass, I guess, because she quit showing up after that, and so did the others.

So now I have the Masses all to myself. It took some getting used to at first. Sitting alone and silent for the Adoration of the Eucharist is one thing—chilling with the J-man, we called it back in seminary. You sit or kneel in private with the Eucharist, wrapped in silence, contemplating Christ—or, depending on your lack of focus, the art on the wall, how funny chimpanzees are, or whether ghosts really do exist because you swear you just heard something moving in the dark corner of the church for the fifth time.

Mass is different. It involves at least thirty minutes of formalized religious ceremony and public speaking—minus the public. When I first did it alone, I was overly conscious of my movements and how silly I must look, raising my arms up into the air, praying out loud, and saying, “Peace be with you,” the only response the dead-eyed stares of the sculpted saints. As time went on, it felt less like mental masturbation and more like meditation. Now it seems an especially tranquil way to start the day.

This morning starts out no differently and finds me standing in an empty church reading aloud to myself from 1 Corinthians.

That’s a meaty one, all about spiritual perception and receiving wisdom and those in the world who are limited to believing only what they can see with their eyes, touch with their hands. Some folks always think of scientists when reading this passage, but in my limited experience with scientists, many of them seem to feel like the more they learn, the less they know.

The Gospel reading is from Luke, in which Jesus goes down to Capernaum and starts casting demons out left and right.

Then I see it.

A little girl, all in red, her pale white face pressed to the door, her dull eyes staring, staring.

“Son of a bitch,” I say, dropping the Bible to the floor.

“Shit,” I say, and bend immediately down to pick up the Good Book, my hands shaking violently. When I stand up, it—she—is gone. I run to the front door. Another flash. Off to the left on the highway. That’s it. I’m getting to the bottom of this. I run out to the car. I don’t have my keys. I always take them out of my pocket so that they don’t jingle during Mass. “Fuck,” I whisper, and run back into the church. As I’m doing so, I hear a faint clopping sound drawing near. “No, no, no. Not today,” I mutter, casting about wildly for my keys. But once I find them and get back out to the car, the clopping—hooves on asphalt—is distinctively clear and growing closer.

By the time I have the car backed up and turned around, it’s too late. Lem Landry and his horse-drawn hay wagon are upon me, cruising down the highway at a blistering five miles per hour. Bastard. Once a year, a reporter-slash-photographer from the
Daily World
will trek out from Opelousas to take a picture of Lem going down a dirt road in his wagon. And Lem, in excruciatingly broken English, will smile and tell the reporter how Lem’s granddaddy made the wagon by hand and how he, Lem, lives in the woods and survives on the squirrel, rabbit, and catfish he kills or catches and whatever his wife grows in the backyard. And he always apologizes for his bad English “ ’cause we don’t got much use for it back here.”

I wonder why the paper doesn’t just keep the story on file instead of sending someone out every year to be lied to. Because it is a lie. And not just a little lie. To borrow an expression common to the area, it’s a
damn
lie.

As anyone in Grand Prairie could tell any reporter interested in doing more than a fuzzy feature piece, Lem Landry bought that wagon at a flea market in 1972 and pulled it home with a truck. In fact, sitting in Lem Landry’s driveway at this very moment is a sparkling red Ford F-250 Super Cab, which complements his true sweetheart, a 1973 Thunderbird that he drives once a week to Walmart, not half a mile from the offices of the
Daily World
. Once he gets to Walmart, he sits in the concession area with a bunch of other old farts and shovels the bullshit until it’s knee-deep. Furthermore, said shit-shoveling is done in perfectly fine English, the only flaw being that Lem never did get a firm grasp of correct pronoun usage, referring to everyone and everything as “he,” even if speaking about a “she” or an “it.”

Lem prefers Popeyes fried chicken to squirrel and, from what I hear, will only eat squirrel if someone else kills, cleans, and cooks it for him. His wife grows nothing in any yard, gardening being a tough hobby for a woman who’s never existed in the first place. Lem, in fact, had been an incorrigible womanizer well into his fifties, taking advantage of the fact that many of the men around here worked two-weeks-on/one-week-off schedules in the oil fields during the boom years. One of the truly amazing things about Lem is that he’d never been shot and left for dead in the woods of Grand Prairie.

Even calling the hay wagon horse-drawn is a bit of a stretch considering Lem insists on using the most stubborn mules he can find. It’s as if he goes to farmers’ auctions with an eye for the slowest unmovable animals created by God. He even admits that if mules could be bred, he’d get in the business and breed the stubbornest animal he could create just because the entire idea, like suckering newspaper reporters, strikes him as a great laugh.

What also strikes him as a great laugh is driving his buggy down the center line of the highway, seeing how many cars he can get to pile up behind him. Today he’s already got a string of six. So even if I got on the highway behind them, it would be nearly impossible to pass them all. That’s assuming the red thing is something real, something that can be followed.

So I get out of the car and wave at Lem and the passing parade. Then I head back into the church to finish the interrupted Mass. I mutter my way through the rest of it, embarrassed that I’d let myself get so scared. Even so, I can’t help but keep one eye on the door to see if it comes back.

After Mass, I clean up the altar, then halfheartedly clean up the rectory before heading over to the home of Miss Velma Richard for an early lunch.

I’ve been dreading this one, using all my other invites as excuses, putting off Miss Velma again and again until finally guilt got the better of me.

The thing is, Miss Velma smells familiar. Mothballs, cigarette smoke, and canned cat food. It’s the smell of old, the smell of loneliness, the smell of defeat. And the Avon perfume she douses herself with for church can’t hide that. It’s something worse than nursing home; it reeks of shut-in.

Even the other old birds sort of shun her. They’re polite, sure. But after Mass, Miss Velma is always that person just outside the group, standing on tiptoes to see over the back of whoever is blocking her entry into the circle. She listens to the gossip but is never invited to participate. If hyenas roamed the grounds of St. Pete’s, Miss Velma would be lunch.

If I haven’t exactly done my part, I have an excuse.

When I was a kid, Daddy, good old Steve Sr., dragged me to the outlands to visit an assortment of crazy old aunts and uncles. But there was one in particular, Aunt Gladys, that I’ve never been able to shake. Daddy always brought Aunt Gladys two cartons of cigarettes along with her inhaler and prescriptions for emphysema.

“It’s all she has left,” he used to say. And when I whined about going, which was every single time, he’d respond with, “
We’re
all she has left.”

“Can’t you just buy her an extra carton of cigarettes and leave me at home?” I’d said once. His elegant and fitting response was a backhand to the side of my head.

A kamikaze had taken Aunt Gladys’s husband, Uncle George, in World War II, leaving her with one child and a hatred for Asians that bordered on the pathological. That child, George Jr., grew up and ran his pickup into a school bus. Drunk and dead at eight o’clock on a Monday morning. With a Vietnamese hooker bloody-faced and babbling in the passenger seat.

But I didn’t care. None of that was my fault and it had nothing to do with me. Those trips terrified me.

We’d pull up the dirt drive to a tar-paper shack with a sagging porch. Aunt Gladys would shuffle to the door in a threadbare floral-print housedress and tattered open-toed slippers. She wore no stockings and the sight of her varicose-veined legs is burned onto my retinas to this day.

“Yall come in,” she’d say after unlatching the screen door, inviting us into her lair. Cats, like roaches under a light, rushed off into the other rooms, leaving only their fleas behind. Damn cats. We’d sit at the kitchen table under an exposed bulb and I’d immediately start scratching my ankles. I learned after the first time not to wear shorts, but jeans weren’t much better. I always prayed I’d get ringworm and Mama would make Daddy stop bringing me around.

While she poured coffee, Aunt Gladys would get the conversation rolling. The same one every time. Dead relatives. No shortage there. And it always ended with her damn fool son. At least George Sr. had died in battle. Why not talk about him? But no, it was always George Jr. “I just thank the Good Lord above he didn’t kill any of those kids on that bus,” she always said. Never mentioned George Jr.’s passenger, who died later at the hospital.

And the smoke. I like a cigarette now and again. But I don’t see how she didn’t die of smoke inhalation. She’d blow the first plume of each cigarette straight up into the haze hanging just below the ceiling. I’ve seen college bars with less smoke in them. For whatever reason, she never opened her windows. Perhaps she was one of those old ladies who thought the elements—rather than three packs a day—made a person sick. The place was always shut down tight. During the summer, it was freezing from the unit rattling away in the kitchen window. Worse was during the winter, when the wall-mounted gas heaters hissed away, backed up by two or three electric space heaters.