“The King, he drew a circle with a lump of charcoal and motioned for me to stand inside and wear around my neck a small gunnysack decorated with hair and horns. Upon my head, he struck a stick and chanted another singsong in words of the Kongo, and all the people there echoed back to them, and then I was told to dance, and thus I did, slowly at first, but then some mood or spirit came into me. I felt the weight of all my troubles drag me to the earth and I must push and pull myself out of it, and then I was moving all in a frenzy and everyone in that stables was dancing around me in that circle, urging me to stay inside. Not sure at all what possessed me, not aware in the least of how my body moved. Faster than the bamboula, driven by a drum only I could hear, I felt so completely free. Soaked in perspiration, my lungs heaving like a bellows, I collapsed in the euphoria. The Queen and one of her acolytes helped me to my knees. Dipping her thumb into the liquid at the bottom of a wooden bowl, she then laid her print across my lips. With this seal of blood, she said, you are sworn to keep the secrets of the Vaudoux. And then it was over, and everyone dispersed like taking leave from Sunday church, the King and Queen disappeared, and every dancer. I was alone with Hachard, who hung upon my arm, still panting from exertion. I feel better already, she said. Good to loosen the old bones.
“Monday morning at the new house, the Mistress cried out for me first thing. On the foot of her bed, the yippy dog lay stiff and cold as February. Take this wretched creature from me, she said, quivering in her nightgown. Light raced through the window and the thin fabric of her clothes. I had not thought in some time what a scarecrow she was, and how she was becoming a bundle of twigs. Gathering the poor dog in my apron, I took it outside and dumped the body in the alley, reminding myself to ask some young boy to fetch the thing to the refuse heap or toss it over the levee into the Mississippi. No satisfaction filled my soul that morning, for I shook in dread over the power of the dark custom.
“Into the breakfast skillet, I dropped another egg to make a half dozen and another spoon of butter for the Master, and he never noticed but ate every bite and complimented me afterward. Thus commenced the stuffing of the Old Goose. Gumbo ya-ya a-swim in fat, and more fat in the roux. Jambalaya thick with hock and sausages. étouffé brightened with the extra yellow fat of the crayfish. Cassoulet, maque choux easy on the vegetables and heavy on the bacon, sweetbreads and tripe, potato dumplings taught to me by Frau Morgenschweis on the Rue Charles. Meatpies and fruitpies, beignets de carnaval any time of the year. At the market, I would lay in a supply of beer and ale, and just as the King ordered, with every meal the lagniappe, which M. LaChance came to favor and anticipate as a dog longs for the meatbone or the children their sweeties. Oh, I fed him those, too, the pralines and toffees till his teeth ached. I shoveled the food into that man, but he just got fatter and fatter as the years lurched by. Let me tell you, he popped the buttons off his breeches more than once after Marie’s dinners, ya, yet still I slaved. Not that I said nothing about the money. I begged him to show mercy if not for me then for my daughter, but he was steadfast as to the terms of our contract, though in truth, I think he kept me for his voracious appetite and would never let me go.
“Seven years passed this way. Clothide grew into a girl, and the Master grew into a prize hog. He even got the gout, but on he ate, hollering about his foot as he stuffed his mouth with a mess of alligator tail seasoned and slick with butter sauce. And though I went to the Vaudoux and danced with the snake King and Queen, nothing ever changed. There were times of waiting when I felt I could not go on, yet I went on.
“And then it happened, just like in a fairy tale. All of the children had long left the house, and the Master and Mistress dined alone, she living on red beans and rice, he facing a table crammed with bowls and dishes. Just an ordinary crust of bread caught between two fingers, his mouth open to receive the morsel, when the Vaudoux struck. The heel slipped from M. LaChance’s grasp. His other hand shot to his chest in panic over the vise pressing his heart. Like a big snake squeezing and squeezing. The pressure. His pale skin flushed claret, and his lips quivered as if to say something—adieu, perhaps, and then he died before his face hit the plate. He was too fat for the household slaves to lift, and we had to call in three more men just to lay him out in the parlor, a hearse with an extra pair of horses to pull him away, and God knows how heavy the stone to stop his corpse from sinking into the swampy ground of New Orleans.”