Altar Of Eden

“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.