Page 29 of The Cajun Doctor

Louise Rivard’s niece Charmaine was driving her home to her cottage on Bayou Black after visiting the “boys” at Bayou Rose. Watching the passing scenery through her open car window, Louise mused that she must have traveled this way ten thousand times, maybe fifty thousand, her humble home having been in the Rivard family for generations. It was a ride Louise always enjoyed.

The memories . . . ah, the memories this road evoked! Many of them involved her fiancé Phillipe Prudhomme and warm summer days in his old Triumph sports car, the radio blaring out “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” That was 1942, of course, after Phillipe got drafted into the war. The Big War. Phillipe, bless his soul, died on D-Day.

Enough of that! Otherwise, she would be weeping. Even after all these years.

The landscape along the two-lane road which ran parallel to her beloved bayou was like a step back in time. Old peeling billboards and painted wood Burma Shave signs that had been restored by some misguided parish historical society member. Really, there had to be more important relics of the past.

She sighed and continued to watch the passing scenery in silence. Cajun style houses, including some on stilts, and the occasional rice plantation from another era. A few shanties and run-down trailers. Boudreaux’s General Store, the fish and bait shop whose owner also sold Avon beauty products, a landscape company that had a special running on crushed oyster shells and mulch, some small, blue-collar cottages, like hers, that had been built a long time ago by men and women involved in the fishing industry, whether in the swamp or out on the Gulf.

The best thing of all about living here in Southern Louisiana was the lush flowers and trees that grew in the sub-tropical climate. Magnolias the size of dinner plates, picturesque live oak trees dripping gray Spanish moss. Fruits and vegetables that grew so well that a person didn’t hardly need to go to the grocery store. And of course there was the ageless, coffee-colored bayou stream.

“You’re awful quiet today, auntie,” Charmaine said suddenly.

“I was just thinkin’. Nothin’ important,” Louise said. “But there is somethin’ I wanna discuss with you. Charmaine, honey, we gotta have us a powwow.”

“Lawdy! A powwow?”

Ignoring Charmaine’s question, Louise mused, again, on another subject now. I must be in a musin’ kind of mood today. “Funny, ain’t it, how over the years so many people come ta refer ta me as Tante Lulu, or Aunt Lulu, that I think of mahself in the same way?”

“That, and busybody, bless yer heart, auntie.”

“Yep. An’ they say it lak it’s a bad thing. ‘You old busybody!’ Frankly, I’m more pee-owed at bein’ called old.”

Charmaine arched her brows at her. No one could do a good eyebrow arching better than Charmaine. Hers were “artificially enhanced.”

“Doan ya get me started on the age bizness. Yer only as old as ya feel, and I’m feelin’ ’bout forty and frisky.”

Charmaine arched her brows again, but the girl knew enough not to say anything.

Anyone under fifty was a girl to Louise.

Charmaine was probably thinking “Lawdy!” That used to be Louise’s favorite expression before Charmaine took it over. Let her! She’d be taking over a lot more than that before long, if Louise had her way. But she wasn’t about to say that out loud . . . yet. Instead, she said, “I know I got a few years under mah girdle, but I doan let that get me down, lak some folks with puffy lips and foreheads so tight they cain’t hardly blink.”

“Don’t look at me. I haven’t had any work done.”

“I was thinkin’ ’bout Flora Mae Benoit. When I saw her goin’ ta communion at Our Lady of the Bayou Church, I almost fell off mah pew. Fish lips! Thass all I’m gonna say on the subject. And didja watch them Academy Awards las’ time? Half the actresses, and even some of the actors, looked lak their skin was pulled off their faces and tied in the back with a rubber band. One clip, and there’d be skin flyin’ everywhere. The idjits are allus lookin’ fer the fountain of youth, when they’s already drownin’ in the fountain of dumb.”

Charmaine blinked at Louise’s long tirade, then asked, “Auntie, yer so skinny. Why would ya be wearin’ a girdle?”

As if that’s the most important thing I just said! Didn’t the girl listen?

“Ta hold up mah folds, silly. When ya get old, yer skin kinda sags inta folds, dontcha know? Not that I’m old, mind you. Jist ripe.”

“Lak a peach?” Charmaine giggled.

“Zackly!”

“A peach with folds?”

“Well, mebbe more lak an orange. All those dimples. Some folks sez cellulite is jist butt dimples, what spread to yer thighs.”

Charmaine grinned and shook her head, as if Louise were hopeless.

She wasn’t. There was method in her madness. Always had been.

How did they get on the subject of age, anyhow? Well, she couldn’t blame Charmaine. Not really. For some reason, Louise’s mind seemed to bounce from one subject to another these days, like fleas on a mangy dog, and she needed to speak what popped up at the moment, lest she forget. Usually, she then forgot her original thought. Oh, right. Now, she remembered. “Back ta our powwow . . .”

“A powwow? Lawdy!” Charmaine said, and she didn’t mean it in a nice way.