He left me behind—my grand père, my papa. I took too long to get ready. Primping and applying foundation uselessly in the sweltering Louisiana heat. This time, he would teach me a lesson. He would finally prove that my mouth was the only thing I ran. I hurried down the hideous green shag-carpeted stairs to find everyone gone. A look out of the kitchen window, clouds of dirt road billowing behind two 1989 Oldsmobile Regency Broughams, one blue, the other burgundy. My parents, smokers, rode in one car. Riding along with Papa, my three cousins: Marie Celestine, Marie Suzette, and Marie Adelaide…CeCe, Suzy, and Addy for short.
Who, for the readers’ sake, I will refer to as The Three Maries.
Every woman in our family was named Marie, whether it be her first or middle name, it was there. This Marie naming frenzy was in honor of our progenitor Marie Thereze CoinCoin, whose paintings and likeness hung on everyone’s house walls.
Marie Celestine, CeCe, a widower, was no one’s favorite. She was always upset about something, an everlasting scowl of irritation at everything and everyone worn across her face. Her true beauty was hidden behind a squished face of discontent and anger. CeCe alerted us all to the swamp lily’s harvest times each season by the slamming of doors and the mumbling of curse words in French under her breath. Marie Suzette, Suzy, was a woman of romance and love, a dreamer who spent most of her days in a walled-off garden built by a forgotten relative when this old house was built. Suzy’s long black hair always hung down her back with a rose adoring the side of her ear. Suzy had had more husbands and boyfriends than anyone else in the Rachal family, three husbands who had all died by sickness or accident.
And then there was Marie Adelaide, Addy, also a widower, who had five miscarriages and five stillbirths. In all my fifteen years I had never seen Addy wear any color other than black. She wore a veil that always covered her face. If she did speak, it was because something had to be said, and all listened.
CeCe and Suzy argued constantly about one thing or another, always hushing up when my presence was noticed. Walking by a half-cracked door in the old house, I came upon them both in hushed and angry voices in the first room of the house. I stood behind the door listening, motionless, trying not to breathe. CeCe paced back and forth on the wooden floor, her dull grey skirt swishing the planks, while Suzy sat on the edge of the four-poster bed, a bouquet of roses on her lap. Addy in all black, a netted black veil covering her face, staring out the large bedroom window.
“People are more curious these days Suzy, not like it was in the past! The lily isn’t growing like it used to. Each year there’s less and less. What’s going to stop folks from coming on this land then!!? What do you think they’ll find when they open those coffins?!” CeCe cried.
“It’s the runoff from the nearby businesses polluting the water supply.” Says Addy, in her deep and somber voice, never looking away from the window.
“I know an alderman I could … can … umm, talk to,” Suzy says smiling.
“Of course you do,” CeCe says rolling her eyes and stroking her forehead. “Don’t even mess with that SUZY! You’ve caused enough issues!”
A shift of weight, the creak of a floorboard, a clearing of the throat, a fake sneeze, and CeCe’s hand pulling my ear through the crack in the door, threatening to cut it off.
My parents had moved to Houston for better job opportunities, but every weekend we made the trip back to Louisiana for something my Papa wanted or an event that he demanded my father not miss. This instance was the visit to Magnolia Plantation, built in the 1830s and framed with 150-year-old oaks that from the pictures seemed to watch visitors as they moved up the driveway. Apart from Magnolia’s Big House complex were red brick slave quarters, and an overseer’s house, one of these buildings, (now a B&B for blood-lusty visitors) was where our Great Grand’Mere, Marie Rachal, was born, and I, Marie Marguerite was missing it all.
In the center of Papa’s kitchen was a green linoleum table almost as ugly as the carpet, with a crystal cake holder that housed my tante Marie Celina’s famous double-decker chocolate cake, the best in all the parish. Every weekend there was a whole cake, untouched, unsliced, uneaten. Did she drop off a new cake every week? Was it being eaten when I wasn’t around? On the table, there were two gutted and dried-out baby alligators standing upright on their hind legs which were used as salt and pepper shakers. There was no way of telling salt from pepper, so you just had to guess. Attached to the cake holder’s iridescent dome was a note.
The note read:
Mon Cher, since you have so much time on your hands…string up the rest of that swamp lily root. We need it all done before we get back to Texas.
Next to the cake lay hundreds of small chopped-up cubes of swamp lily root drying out on local parish newspapers and a spool of black thread with a needle stuck through its side. We made teething necklaces for babies out of the root. Swamp lily is known for its medicinal properties in keeping babies well. Houston was expensive and my parents sold these “magic” teething necklaces at festivals and farmers markets on the weekends to make ends meet.
The buyers were enthusiastically ready to buy from the racially ambiguous-looking Creoles selling The Craft and mysticism of Louisiana. In truth, it was no more magic than aspirin but let a Creole woman with long glossy black hair sell it to you and it becomes supernatural. This, along with many others, was a gift passed down to us by our ancestor Marie Thereze, who attained her medicinal and herbal healing from her African parents.
Two hours passed sitting at the kitchen table threading the brown and black cork-like cubes into necklaces. The sun was beginning to set, with no sign of my parents, my Papa, and the three Maries, which meant that in addition to missing the plantation visit, dinner was also being had without me. With one angry sweep, I cleared the table of the swamp lily root scattering its bits and pieces around the kitchen in places Papa was certain to find irritating.
I dug my hand directly into the middle of the cake scooping out large black pieces of chocolate and furiously stuffing it inside my mouth. Tante Celina had never made a better cake.
This house and its surrounding twenty acres had been in our family for almost two centuries. On this land, was also a church, once the only church in Natchitoches parish. The church provided daily mass to the Riviere aux Cannes or Cane River, community for years until the murder of Father Quintanilla in 1880. When the priest’s body was found, he was said to have been “depleted of his vital humors” and last seen in the company of “quadroon beauty Marie Suzette Rachal.” After the murder, the congregation’s attendance had dwindled to only the Rachal family. As Papa puts it, “People just stopped coming.” Rumors on the river refer to Rachal land as, The City of the Dead.
Adjacent to the church, our family graveyard, fenced in by a weathered black wrought iron gate, rusted and flanked by two crumbling pillars of timeworn stone. At the top center of the gate was the name “Rachal.” For the past two hundred years our ancestors had been buried here. Trying to ask my parents, cousins, and Papa why all the Rachals were buried here was always met with more questions than answers. One sticky and humid evening Papa sat out on the back porch in his rocking chair, a glass of Weller’s on the rocks clinking around in the glass, his gaze fixated on the vast acres of land and the full moon appeared as a docked ship on a night’s ocean.
He barely noticed me stepping onto the red-bricked porch, the screen door slapping back behind me. The three Maries, were there as well, in wicker chairs, also silent, staring into the night.
“Papa, what if I don’t want to be buried here?”
“You don’t have a choice, bebe.” Says Papa.
“Why? Why don’t I have a choice?”
“Someone messing with you again ‘cher? Asking you questions about us again?
“Well, no but they do stare. When I go up on the river to the fish market, all I get is stares and whispers. On the sidewalk, people step off and wait for me to pass. You never tell me anything!”
In unison, the Three Maries spoke, “SHE’S OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW.”
“She’ll be old enough when I say she’s old enough dammit We don’t know if she’ll change or not!”
“Papa”, Suzy says sweetly scooting her chair next to his, “By the next full moon, she’ll be sixteen, her cravings will begin, the hunger—”
Suzy stopped talking. Papa’s eyes began to widen and turn black in a way I’d never seen
before. He didn’t look normal; he didn’t look —- human.
The night had come, and my family still had not returned from Magnolia plantation. I could have called to see what time they left. The new owners advertised tours with bed and breakfast packages in the Yellow Pages. But I had never been alone this long in the old house before with fifteen rooms in total and at least eight of those rooms were off-limits to me. There were rooms in this old drafty mausoleum of a house that I had never entered. I had the urge to explore while I had the time.
The house was silent, but the sounds of the night hummed and buzzed the song of frogs, hissing cicadas, and the soft vibration of fireflies’ wings. In the darkness, I saw them as tiny lights, flashing, flickering, bouncing off the overgrown grass.
We had no neighbors and the houses that were near us were owned by us as well, empty of tenants now. Papa couldn’t seem to keep renters in these homes. Sometimes they would just leave with all their furniture and clothing still in the house. It didn’t make any sense why they would never come back for their things. Papa never had an explanation either. And we all knew better than to ask Papa too many questions.
This two-hundred-year-old mansion was once a striking example of Southern architecture and craftsmanship; with its wild and overgrown magnolias and dozens of Spanish moss-draped cypress trees. The once white Greek revival columns, now cracked and soiled, aged by centuries and water damage from the many hurricanes it had survived. I had never taken my time to look over the dusty, and chipped crystal of the grand foyers crooked chandelier, that hadn’t been used in my lifetime. I imagined the room lit up by candlelight the shimmering of diamond-like sparkles reflecting off each pane of crystal.
I made my way up the staircase, flashlight in hand, and into the hallways passing by the large rooms of the three Maries, each room occupied by canopy beds, faded silk wallpaper, and open shutters. Sometimes frogs perched on their windowsills serenading them with their croaks. The Maries never complained. But I knew what their rooms looked like already. It was the off-limit rooms I wanted to explore, simply because he told me not to. In the back of the house were the old servants’ quarters now storage rooms, or so I had been told.
This first small room held old family paintings, paintings of our ancestors. I didn’t understand why they would be here, hiding and rotting away. So many of them face down and stack on top of one another. One painting was of Augustin Metoyer, who bore a strong resemblance to Papa, the painting was dated 1799. My head became light, and I realized all I had eaten was cake that day. The next paintings were of middle-aged women in tightly fitted bodices and floor-length skirts. Of course, all with variations of the name Marie. They too all favored my cousins, the three Maries, whose hairstyles are different but their faces the same, in different periods. Paintings from the 1700s through the 1800s and black-and-white photos from the turn of the century. All the same faces.
A jolt of pain twisted and turned inside me, taking me down to the ground with hunger pangs like never before crippling my body and landing on another face-down painting. The painting showed the distant relative with Papa’s face sinking his teeth — no these were fangs— into the neck of an unknown man in a single-breasted waistcoat of what could’ve been silk, his hands tied to a post behind him. I had seen those eyes before, they were wide and black again just like Papa’s the night on the porch, the blood running down his face.
Next to the man in the silk waistcoat, a woman in white chiffon ruffles and lace, her hands also bound to a post. She was surrounded by the women from the paintings, the women whose faces were just like the three Maries. Their mouth feasted on different parts of the woman’s body, a trail of blood leading down the white train of the woman’s dress. The woman and the man both looking at one another with tears on their faces. A bonfire a blaze.
A golden bronze antique plaque was centered at the bottom of the painting with an inscription: The Wedding Feast, 1845. Falling from a positioned place on the wall, were several other paintings just like this one, even more gruesome and terrifying as the one before.
There was a loud clang of metal outside. The sounds of shovels scooping mounds of earth and men speaking in hushed whispers. I grabbed what railing I could find and made my way back down the stairs terrified and in shock of what I had just seen. But what had I seen? I couldn’t explain it or rationalize it. All those paintings, those pictures, the murders …I couldn’t deal with that now. There were people on our land. I turned off all the lights that were on in the house and crept through the patio door holding back the noisy screen door and closing it slowly with my hand.
There were men in OUR graveyard!
Hiding behind a tree, I watched as two men, one short and fat, the other tall and thin, unsuccessfully tried to keep their voices at a whisper, but I could hear it all; even their beating hearts. The pang of hunger was now even more intense than before. I could smell the men’s skin wafting through the breeze, the salty sweat on their brow. I smelled the beef they ate for dinner and even the cheap beer they drank. I watched them dig down to three graves revealing the caskets.
“Go ahead and open it!” The fat man said whispering a shout.
“This was your idea.” The tall man said. “I told you this was a bad idea. No one steps on Rachal grounds anymore. If you had not paid me, I wouldn’t be here either!”
“The Rachals were wealthy Creoles back in the day! The Gens De Couleur Libre! La di fucking da! There have to be some diamonds, emeralds, or something in those graves! They don’t need them anymore. Who’s going to stop us? That old man and a bunch of women?” Smirked the fat man who smelled of animal fats and grease.
I could taste the rich thickness of his blood on my tongue. I placed my hand to my mouth and noticed that I was drooling. The tall man jumped into the grave and opened the lid revealing the red velvet headrest that had never been used, brand new looking even for having been 100 or so years.
“What the— Where’s the body? Open the others hurry!”
The men opened the other two graves with the same results. Empty, unused caskets.
“This was a bad idea.” The tall man said.
The intoxicating smells of the two men took over my senses, propelling my body at an unnatural speed toward the short fat man. Grabbing him with my full strength, his body now flimsy in my arms, my teeth sharp and new sank deep into the many folds of adipose tissue surrounding his neck and I drank and drank, inhaling all the sweetness of his flesh. The tall man had tried to run, but Rachal land was vast and I was faster now, faster than I had ever been before.
My arms stretching out twice as long as normal, grabbed his neck from behind and dragged him down to the earth and into my grasp. I was happy I started with the fat man as the taller and thinner man was not much of a meal. I looked up from his neck to see the shadows of car lights coming from the front driveway of the house but I didn’t move, savoring every last drop, draining the tall man of even his mahogany-colored skin, leaving him pale and gaunt.
Standing over me and the depleted carcass of what used to be a man were CeCe, Suzy, and Addy holding bags of swamp lily bulbs for planting. My papa and parents were standing by the back porch, my mother in tears. I didn’t bother to wipe my face or hair that was drenched in the men’s blood.
“My baby is growing up!” My mother cries, burrowing her wet face into my father’s shirt.
“She’s only 15 years old, she’s too young to change.” My papa said
“It’s the runoff from the—” Addy said annoyed.
“We know Addy, we know! “Suzy shouted.
. “I just didn’t want her growing up too fast,” Papa said, dabbing his handkerchief to the corners of his eye.
In unison, the three Maries spoke to my papa saying:
“WE TOLD YOU IT WAS TIME.”
“Good thing you didn’t come with us to Magnolia, there wasn’t anything to eat there anyways, just family. We needed to ask our Metoyer cousins for help. They were willing to give us more bulbs to get our lilies back strong. That’s why we all had to go. Looks like we were just in time too. The lily keeps the Rachal property safe, no person outside of the family tree can cross. It’s the lily that keeps us safe ‘cher, remember that, without it, we can be exposed. And you see what happened here tonight.”
This was the nicest CeCe had ever been to me. I began to understand now why she was always so angry around harvest time; the crops growing smaller and smaller every season. It wasn’t anger, it was fear.
“So, are all the graves empty Papa?”
Blowing his nose in his hanky and stuffing it into his pocket, he put his arms around my shoulders, walking me into the house, not minding the blood that also stained his shirt.
“Yes, mostly as we try not to eat where we live. But you never know when will need a body to fill those empty graves. Tonight, we will be able to fill two caskets, thanks to you my little vampire.”
I blushed, even my father wasn’t as sweet. My papa, my grand père, proud of me?
“Do we die Papa?”
“C’mon let’s talk in the house, ‘cher. You want some cake?”
“No, I’ve had enough for one day.”
I breathed deeply walking into the house, feeling for the first time proud to be a Rachal, honored to be a part of this heritage. As I closed the screen door behind me I can see CeCe and Addy, arguing and pushing what was left of the men into the empty graves.
