Tina Mcelroy Ansa (18 page)

“Shoot, I wish you were a little bit taller,” Sister said with disappointed lines creasing her forehead as she held one dress after another up to her chest and looked in the door mirror. “What size shoe you wear?”

“Eight, triple A.”

“That’s more like it, yeah,” Sister said with more enthusiasm as she eyed the pairs of shoes hanging in two plastic caddies on the wall.

Then, she sat down on the floor and examined every pair without saying another word, just sighs of appreciation at every pair of shoes Lena owned—the cute black and taupe and red leather flats; brown-black and oxblood loafers; the small heels in neutrals and colors; high-heeled ostrich skin pumps and suede pumps, and boots both for weather and fashion. When Sister was finished, she stood with her hands on her hips, her elbows akimbo, and stared at Lena with a smile playing around her face.

“Well, Lena, what should I tell the girls upstairs about you?” she asked. Then, she added, wrinkling up her face and making her voice rise into a cracking little falsetto, “Are you a
good
witch or a
bad
witch?”

The fact that the other girls in the dorm thought that she was a witch at all hurt Lena’s feelings. It felt like more of what she had been suffering through at school ever since she was thirteen. But Lena couldn’t help herself, she had to giggle at Sister’s imitation of good witch Glenda.

The sound of her own laughter surprised her. It was the first time she had really laughed since she arrived in New Orleans. To laugh, and to laugh with Sister, a friend, after such a hard dry spell was so sweet. It was like eating her mama’s fresh orange and coconut ambrosia at Christmastime, or like being let in on a joke at The Place.

Lena didn’t do any more studying that night. She and Sister spent the evening getting acquainted, with Lena doing most of the talking about her family and Sister trying on nearly all of Lena’s clothes. By the time Sister asked Lena directly about the screams everyone heard coming from her room at night, Lena didn’t even feel self-conscious about talking about her recent nightmares. But she kept the facts of her birth to herself.

In one night, Sister had learned more about Lena’s private life than most anyone else knew. But when Sister went back upstairs to
her own room, she refused to answer even one inquiry that her roommate had about the witch on the floor below.

The next morning, Sister met Lena coming out of the bathroom with her plastic bucket of toiletries in her hand and a towel wrapped around her and tucked in under her arm. Sister was already dressed. She wore the new plaid pleated skirt she had casually taken upstairs from Lena’s closet, which looked like a miniskirt on the taller, larger girl. She also had on Lena’s new orange cotton sweater.

“Get dressed,” Sister commanded, “we got somewhere to go. They’re expecting us.”

“But I have a class in fifteen minutes,” Lena had protested.

“Look, Lena, this is more important than some class. Get dressed. If we hurry we can catch the next No. 18 in time to transfer to the Elysian Fields bus going toward the French Quarter. We call it ‘Vieux Carré.’”

As they rode toward Canal Street in the sultry bayou heat of early fall, both of them dressed in Lena’s new clothes, Sister explained her theory.

“You know what I think? I think that the reason you’re having these bad nights is the witches are riding you, that’s all. And I
know somebody
who can fix that!”

Sister sounded so upbeat and sure of herself that Lena felt a little less strange sitting on a bus going she didn’t know where in an unfamiliar city with a new friend beside her. She nodded her head dumbly and thought about how Grandmama used to say that the witches rode her at night, dancing on her chest and sucking her breath, voice and will away.

Sister kept right on talking.

“Her name is Aunt Delphie. At least, that’s what I call her. My family’s known her forever, my great-great-great-grandmother knew her grandmother in olden times and before, I guess. But you should call her Madame Delphie, okay?”

Lena nodded again and noted that Sister pronounced the name like a French girl.
Madame Delphie.
Sister chattered all the way across
town, pointing out historical and personal spots of interest like a tour guide, hardly leaving room for Lena to speak.

“Over there is where my first boyfriend lived in the Ninth Ward. That little park over there is where I lost my virginity. I went to a high school dance once down there. There’s Madame Leveau’s house. That’s the back side of Jackson Square. Maybe later on, we’ll ride on down and get some beignets and some chicory coffee at Cafe du Monde.”

They got off the bus near Canal Street downtown and walked over three blocks to Dumaine Street, then down to Rampart. Lena was certain that Sister was going to lead her deep into the Old Quarter, down narrow back alleys, through wrought-iron fences and maybe up a winding back staircase or a wide fan one like in
A Streetcar Named Desire.
But when they got halfway down the block on Rampart, on the edge of the Quarter, Sister stopped and pulled Lena up two steps leading to the door of a small wooden shotgun house that looked like all the others on the street.

A short squat Creole-looking woman with soft golden skin and thin, greasy, crinkly black hair answered Sister’s knock eating a dry soda cracker. She squinted in the daylight at Sister and led the two girls inside to the long dark narrow hallway without saying a word. Sister took Lena’s arm again and pulled her down next to her on a bare deacon’s bench as the woman disappeared through a curtained doorway off the hall. When Lena leaned over to whisper a question in Sister’s ear, her friend just shook her head and put her finger to her lips as if they were sitting in church during Mass.

The light in the hall was so weak that Lena found her eyes pulling, making it hard to see anything clearly. But the darkness seemed to heighten her other senses. There was a smell in the close air that she thought she had smelled somewhere before, but she couldn’t place it exactly. At first, she thought it smelled like food cooking or burning. Then, she decided that the odor was too pungent to be anything to eat, even in spicy New Orleans. It smelled more like someone who had been working in the sun. Lena longed to lean over and ask Sister
if she knew what the scent was. But her friend was sitting next to her so stonily that Lena didn’t dare disturb her again.

To Lena, it felt as if they sat there in silence for half an hour, but after about ten minutes, the short Creole woman returned and held the door to the front room open for them. Sister rose with a polite smile and pushed Lena ahead of her into the room. Then, Sister closed the door behind them and stood by the entrance with her hand on Lena’s shoulder. Lena reached for Sister’s hand in the darkened room, but her friend just squeezed and patted her shoulder and pushed her forward a few steps.

It took a couple of seconds for Lena’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. Her heart did not stop pounding the whole time she was in there. Heavy dark material was stretched across the four windows on two sides of the room that blocked out all the natural light. The only other light in the room came from two candles burning on a low table placed against the wall opposite the door. As far as Lena could see, other than two straight-back wooden chairs, the room was bare of furniture.

From her right, a voice seemed to come out of the darkness. “You, child, the one born with a veil, come here.”

Sister came forward a half-step and said, “No, Aunt Delphie, Lena wasn’t born with a caul, she …”

But Lena interrupted her, “Yes, I was.”

Sister looked at her friend with surprise and respect and stepped back against the door. Even the woman sitting across the candles and charms from her seemed interested. Sister was impressed. And frightened.

“Come here, child,” Aunt Delphie repeated impatiently. Lena moved in the direction of the woman’s voice.

In the darkened room, it was difficult for Lena to get a good look at Aunt Delphie. All she could make out was a seated figure in a light-colored flowing garment. What she felt pushing through her veins, pumped by her heart, was not fear, but excitement. Lena knew that her mother would have laughed out loud at Madame Delphie and the
trappings of mysticism in the room, but in her heart, Lena felt a connection to the woman that was nearly religious.

Lena moved toward the woman gratefully, as if she were going toward her grandmother. Just as she got in range of seeing the woman’s face in the candlelight, Madame Delphie held up her hand to stop her advance. Lena could see the woman’s eyes fly open and her back stiffen against the spine of the chair she was sitting in. She looked over her shoulder just in time to see Sister step back a bit in shock at Madame Delphie’s reaction to her friend.

The woman took a deep breath that seemed to steady her a bit and motioned again for Lena to approach her.

She reached over and pulled the other straight-back chair closer to her side. Then, she motioned for Lena to take a seat there.

When Lena did, Madame Delphie didn’t waste a minute.

“Child,” she said right away, “so many spirits are trying to get to you. It’s been that way all your life, hasn’t it?” the woman asked.

Lena didn’t know if she was supposed to speak or not, so she just nodded her head dumbly.

“I know Sister brought you here, but she does not know how deep it is, does she?” Lena could barely hear her whispery questions. But the woman lowered her voice just a tad and leaned closer to Lena.

Madame Delphie smelled like incense, but not the kind Father O’Donnell had used in the Eucharist Adoration and Benediction after Mass when she was a child that made her sick to her stomach. The woman had a sweet spicy smell that made Lena smile.

Lena looked around one time to make sure Sister wasn’t within hearing range.

Then, she replied, “No, uh-uh, Sister doesn’t have any idea. She just thinks the witches are riding me, giving me nightmares.”

Madame Delphie could not help herself, she had to give a little chuckle through her nose and toss her head, tied up in a red and white and orange scarf, at that understatement.

“Sister, she a good friend, yeah. Don’t let her go.”

“I won’t,” Lena promised solemnly.

“Now, as for you, I know she brought you here for me to fix you. But you know I cannot do that,” Madame Delphie said with some regret, but with respect, Lena noticed, as if she were talking to a peer.

Lena didn’t know when she would get another chance like this, so she screwed up her courage and asked, “Why not? Why can’t you fix me?”

“Well, for one thing, I don’t have your birth caul. You don’t either, do you?”

“Uh-uh, Grandmama’s ghost told me Mama burned it.”

And Madame Delphie shuddered in just the way the ghost of her grandmother had the night of her funeral when she had come back to see Lena.

“Well, I still could not do that much even if we did possess the skin without some more information.

“And the one, the woman, who oversaw your birth. She is no help? Oh, never mind. I see. Nurse Flowers …”

“Nurse Bloom,” Lena corrected timidly.

“Nurse Flower. Nurse Bloom. Either way she gone a little out of her head, eh? She no help, no.”

And they both sat there like two old women commiserating over the senility of a once-reliable friend.

“Well, I can’t fix you. But I can take you a step closer maybe,” Madame Delphie said.

Knowing how her family felt about education and how her mother felt about the supernatural and such, Lena couldn’t believe that she was sitting in a strange house on the edge of the French Quarter talking to an even stranger woman about spirits when she should have been sitting in biology class. But she still couldn’t shake the feeling that what she was doing was right.

“Go to the altar,” Madame Delphie directed.

Lena did as she was told.

“Take the white candle laying there in the middle.”

Lena picked up the candle with a trembling hand and, with the
short slender taper clutched in her hot, sweaty palm, came back to stand in front of the woman.

Madame Delphie asked, “If I tell you this candle can help you, can help straighten what has been crossed, would you believe in its power?”

Lena looked down at the candle in her hand and thought a moment.

“My mother calls it old-fashioned foolishness,” Lena said. It was the first thing that came to her mind. Then, she giggled nervously because she was embarrassed that it had just popped out.

“I did not ask you what your mother believe,” the woman fairly roared, causing Lena to stifle her giggle immediately. Now, she was just nervous. “I ask if
you believe.”

Lena paused awhile thinking of her dead Grandmama and her belief in signs and how she had died the night the screech owl flew down the chimney and into the house on Forest Avenue. She thought of all the visions and voices and touches.

“Take your time, girl. It is an important question, yes,” Madame Delphie said solemnly. “Do you believe?”

Lena opened her mouth a couple of times to reply, but no sound came out. Inside her, it felt as if a storm were brewing.

The simple question had thrown her into such a state of confusion that she was actually dizzy. Without thinking, she brought her empty hand up to her face and rubbed her temple to try and settle her thoughts. All her life, Lena had tried the best she could to handle her visions and powers. She had tried living with them, ignoring them, renaming them crazy. She had gone to the church for help. She had left home. She had even tried putting the magic on herself.

Each time, she had believed with all her might that her remedies would work. They never had. And now she found herself once more in the same predicament: with only one friend to her name and everyone else calling her a witch. How can I dare believe? she wondered.

But even as she had these doubts, other feelings flooded into her
soul with such a rush that they seemed to wash away her doubts and fears. She stood alone near the middle of the nearly bare room, but she felt as if she were being tugged—one arm east, the other west—between two giant hands.