Rougarou

The cypress boughs reached out above her, curlin’ tightly, like his fingers had around that damned bottle. The woods were darker than Nadine had ever seen them. She knew the forest had a way of sucking all the light of the world into it, like ether through a straw, and, yet, she still felt safer there, among the thickets, than with Pa when he had been drinkin’ and yellin’. Before Mama had died, they would walk through those woods together, catchin’ fireflies at the creek. For Nadine’s thirteenth birthday, she had received a small silver brooch from her mama, a gris-gris, inscribed with the glowing insects she loved so much, and she was told to never take it off, especially in them woods. Nadine recalled how her mama would laugh loud enough to drown out the distant shouts of Pa when he was in one of his huffs, and she remembered watching the sides of Mama’s eyes wrinkle like the peach trees in August when she howled.

For a long while after she had left them, Nadine had wondered how Mama could laugh so hard, even when Pa was so angry all the time. “Yer Pa is tryin’, but dere are some tings we just keep tryin’ widout tinkin’ if de tryin’s doin’ any good,” she would say before laughing again like the foxes did hunting rabbits. Nadine remembered that Mama had told her that laughing real hard brought the fireflies out, and “nuttin’ bad could happ’n” while they danced in the air. But somethin’ bad had happened; she lost Mama.

Nadine learned to avoid her father’s wrath simply by watching how his eyes looked when he’d come round from the docks. If they were puffy, like the great gray goujon he’d hook for market, bloated, staring in different directions but not seein’ anything, then it was time to skip out the back and take the path she knew soundly, even after the sun had set behind the tupelo trees.

Nadine knew every bog, bank, and branch of the bayou, and she had learned how to stay safe there, too. Boiling some black willow bark would ease Pa’s sore back and Mama’s headaches. With a good fire and some patience, she could stew nettles to make soup that would keep her going for days. If she was careless and got stung by the nettles or a bald-faced hornet, a little jewelweed sap could soothe the stings. Nadine’s mama had taught her everything she had ever known about them woods, and they protected her even now. 

“Chil’, WHERE Y’AT!?” Pa yelled from near the house. Nadine instinctively held her breath– he was awfully bad tonight. He had never been this bad when Mama was alive.

Nadine remembered how Mama’s headaches had progressively worsened, to the point where her own remedies from the woods worked about as well as a screen door would in Pa’s pirogue. Then, Mama’s nose started bleeding, and she fell on the front porch. She slumped next to the cardinal flowers poking through the railing, the same crimson color that ran down her face and onto Nadine’s hands as she tried rousing her. She shook her mama violently, desperately, as tears burned her face like the July sun. There was so much blood, then Mama lay still. 

Pa had found Nadine holding Mama, wrapping her arms around her like honeysuckle as she had every day of her life. Nadine stopped crying, but she still shuddered and squeezed her mama’s arms, hoping they would warm up again. Pa had not looked his daughter in her eyes again since that day, and they never did have a proper funeral for Mama.

***

“WHEN I FIND YUH!” her Pa roared. The panicked prick of reality buried those painful memories among the ferns surrounding her. Pa sounded real close, and she knew that that meant trouble. Nadine was careful to step only on the dry or mossy patches of the trail so as not to give her Pa any undue lagniappe. She traveled away from the furious voice, although she knew that, like lost light, sound also became garbled in those woods. A human voice could wander for what seemed like miles after its owner had stopped talkin’, with the tree hollows and tides echoing and taunting any listeners within earshot. 

Nadine grew quieter still, and sought cover in the dampened groove under a toppled cypress near Firefly Creek, briefly making sure there were no hornets’ nests in the exposed roots. She heard something moving, quick as a cocodrie, through the woods. It was large and heavy, but still moved swiftly– much faster than her pa could in his stupor. He was angry about somethin’, but, even pie-eyed drunk, the couyon wouldn’t rush into the bayou unprepared. No, whoever was closing distance on Nadine could not be Pa. Then she heard it, like the sharp crack when her mama had collapsed on the warped wooden steps of their porch. 

There were two gunshots, and wiry red flashes to her right, much closer than she had expected, where the gunpowder had ignited. Birds scattered from their roosts, and a boar squealed in surprise. Then, Pa screamed, a wet, dark scream that matched the inky blackness of the woods. Silence settled across the bayou, as brief as the fire flashes, before Nadine heard something else entirely.

A rasping breath followed, and she swore she could hear something inhaling deeply through its nose. Nadine thought she almost felt the searching stare of someone she could not see, and she gravely hoped they could not spy her ‘neath the clammy roots where she hid. Her own breath caught as a figure emerged from the grove. She grasped her brooch with one hand and covered her mouth with the other.

The figure was hulking and matted in dry muck. They stood tall on two sinewy legs that seemed nearly as thick as the tree trunk that concealed Nadine, and their face was far too long. Their aquiline snout and teeth shone sharp, even in the dark, and, yet, the figure’s yellow eyes reminded the girl of the fireflies she so deeply admired. She dug her palm into her mama’s brooch and lost herself to terror. Nadine’s other hand fell away as she gasped, and the creature turned, hearing her, and staring with open maw. Nadine noticed somethin’ slick painting the figure’s mouth, red as the blackbird’s wings, when they approached her hollow with ferocious speed. 

Without thinking, she laughed desperately, wildly as her mama had in life. She squeezed the brooch as hard as she could, until the silver was warm like her. As she laughed, the figure bounded towards her, filling her vision as they grew nearer still. All she saw were their two swollen, yellow eyes, staring unblinking into her own. This was the end, her end. She felt it, had felt it for a while, ever since Mama had died.

***

The rumble was soft, even, and gradual. It sounded as if the ground were shakin’, but her hands and stomach rested upon the damp, still earth. The echo filled her ears and the space behind her eyes, and she suddenly heard her mama’s laughter. The trees creaked, while the sky seemed to be brightening, awash with a luminous luster. With a glow as full and warm as her mama’s embrace, a cloud of fireflies flickered, turning the bayou into a crystalline scene. Wisps of yellow, green, and gold transformed the cypress trees into inverted chandeliers, while the water was wet peridot. 

The sky gleamed with swarms of fireflies, multitudes like she had never seen. Swaths of insects landed anywhere they could, including all over Nadine’s chilled body. The figure inhaled deeply again, but the laughter continued, stronger still, and the fireflies swarmed them, unrelenting. The figure reached out to bat at their luminescent assailants. The insects overwhelmed them, pulsing with their living light, until, yet again, all Nadine saw was the figure’s gaze, full as the moon would be in a fortnight. 

As the figure swayed, gilded in wings and the thunderous thrum they made, the laughter now came from Nadine’s own throat. And, as she stared back, the figure’s eyes were, all at once, a much more familiar color. “Mama?”