Moonwater (eBook)

James Pumpelly (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
270 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-8736-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Shocking, adventurous, colloquial, eloquent, and often graphically unforgettable, 'Moonwater' leaves impressions indelible as first love. A magical read for the oft disappointed. In the Cajun milieu of Louisiana's Atchafalaya, 'Moonwater' is quasi-biographical, borrowing from Pumpelly's birthplace and fundamentalist rearing. His adolescent years, and his philosophical escape from the gumbo of ethnic ritual, portray an inspiring bildungsroman from a small bayou church to a life large as Love. 'Moonwater' beats with a passion for love, family, food, books, and all things Cajun; a narrative lyrical and smart, with occasional undercurrents of rage.

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Young Professor Garo Daigle returns to his Louisiana backwater home, after a four-year absence, hoping to make amends with his evangelical parents. His hope is quickly turned on its heels by the suspicion of murder, infidelity, and the onus of political corruption. Their reconciliation efforts are marred by pessimism, a dogma on the edge of despair, and a tragic certainty that the Creator is a threat to human existence. Reverend Elwood and Mother Daigle annoy and twist their prodigal son's memories into wrenching confessions, youthful pangs of unconsummated passion, and imagined escapes. These acts become the nexus between the feverish past and a palpable paradise, with Julia Delacroix's fervent love as his guiding star. The succubus of torrid dreams as real and present as hunger and thirst. His longing is easily satisfied, if only his heart will surrender. A cast of rascally characters and the sensuously beautiful Julia he left behind - who, in his absence, has borne a child christened in his name - create the turmoil propelling the plot through three generations relived over a long weekend.

Textauszug

From deep in the purple stillness came an eldritch
wail alerting the cypress sentinels of the swamp –
the mother of loneliness had suffered travail.

I

Unbending her fiery splendor on cypress knees, pagan Dawn crawls out of the smoking swamp, splaying her blood-red rays over Bayou Rouge, seeping through long-leafed tupelo and moss-draped oaks to spot the mildewed walls of Garo Daigle’s gabled loft.

Disturbed under heat-heavy splotches dappling his musty sheet, Garo yawns, stretching his un-rested frame to an upright pose. Squinting road-weary eyes, he sniffs at the hint of frying bacon, a hot iron skillet wreathing its Sabbath offerings up the dank of narrow stairs - the gable landing creaking under his mother’s stealthy step, her practiced push on the warping attic door.

“Mo-orn-nin’ son,” the centaur-screech of rusting hinges companioning her across the pine-plank floor, the fraying rug of nylon stockings. “Good t’ have yuh home on somethin’ other’n a holiday.”

Arranging one-handedly a braid of pewter hair, she frames asperity:

“So, what’s chased yuh home, son? What’s made yuh drive fer night n’ day jist t’ git here n’ collapse in th’ attic? Must be somethin’ big. Huh? Huh? Somethin’ dark n’ ugly a-botherin’ yuh, child. A mother knows when somethin’s-”

“Spanish moss,” a yawning Garo fends, accepting a demitasse trembling from her gray flannel sleeve, the sensuous aroma of New Orleans coffee the one southern urbanity her rude religion allows. “The moss is so profuse on the oaks that the sun only peeks through in patches.” Garo surveying the angled plaster overhead: silhouettes of boles, limbs, leaves, and moss in carnal masquerade before the invading fire of dawn.

“Same ol’ Garo,” his mother summoning disgust, stretching audibly to smooth into something she deems presentable his blond and sleep-rumpled hair. “Always avoidin’ th’ truth. Always a-talkin’ his way round things that matter t’ git t’ what glitters ‘n glints.”

“Humph!” The scour of four years absence not erasing her biting words, her morbid tears, the nauseating whiffs of conflicting powders and dime store perfumes - a remembered revulsion rising yeastily in Garo’s chest. “What is, is, Mother, and there’s nothing you nor your temple of doom can do to alter it.”

Bending over a two-handed sip of chicory and dark roast coffee, he winces from its tongue-stinging heat. “Why don’t you believe your own cant?” he challenges, blowing across the lava of beans steaming from the crazed china cup. “According to your incredibly literal Bible, it was God, Mother, God Almighty who created the world. Not your bumbling bishop. And as I recall, the first chapter of Genesis states God was pleased with what He saw. Not to mention, He created the earth and the heavens in a paltry seven days. God Almighty, Mother, not your-”

“Stop!” a finger reeking of onions and pork fat stabbing his empurpled lips, the cotton-thick air absorbing her venom before the sorcery of words can poison. “Stop ‘fore yuh go a’blasphemin’ yo’self! And it was six days, not seven,” she snaps contemptuously, further discussion having the threat of discovery, some hidden sin she may find repulsive; a vacant fear in her writhen face, her thin-lipped twitch-of-a-saintly-smile. “God hears us, Garo Oliver Daigle, hears us whether we like it or not. ‘Sides, th’ Bible’s th’ same for ev-ver-ee-one!”

A boding detachment hollowing her voice, the sanguine promise of the nascent morning vanishing before her menace, what light has penetrated the room now banished by a blackening cloud, a gust of wind, an ominous, Stygian darkness thickening the heavy air - the vast, bleak waste of things dead and dying between them.

Igniting, by long years of habit and woe, the kerosene lamp on the mildewed nightstand, she fumbles a phosphoric flame, adjusting the wick, her quivering hands clack-clattering the globe back in place, conjuring from the smoke-smeared glass a dim remembrance of light - lurid circles jouncing over plantation scenes in the water-stained wallpaper, figures under pale-shadowed oaks, repetitive covens of long-skirted ladies close-cringing as gossamer ghosts – the while, returning the lamp to its mark in the mold, and cracking balefully:

“As I was tellin’ ya, Garo, God hears us, like-it-or-not!”

As if, he muses, startled by freakish flashings and threatening thunder. “Better shut the windows,” he warns; Mother Daigle shuffling warily to a flapping fray of flour sack curtains to huff down the dingy pane.

“So, why did yuh come?” she persists, patting the footboard of the night-mussed bed before perching with diligent stiffness, “‘cause o’ poo-uhr ol’ Brother Felix?” one fisted hand stifling a retching rattle, a cough dying away in a sigh. “They say it might’a been muhr-duhr. Probably was, yuh know,” Mother Daigle oracular, clearing her throat, her swampy voice a dark glissade of mystery. “Yo’ daddy fears it so…a revelation while a-searchin’ out last Sund’y’s sermon, it was. A vision.”

Trailing off, her skull-bleak pallor takes on a ghoulish glow, a stab of lightning grazing her sweat-polished features like a glint from an upraised blade, a reflecting flash from a marble sarcophagus recumbent by the iron fence footboard.

“Chilling,” Garo manages, “bone-rattling cold.” Shucking the night-sweated sheets, he swings a bare leg off the side of the bed to question the pine plank floor, his stockinged feet in search of remembered moccasins. “Where-where’ve you put them?”

“Not there anymore,” mutters the marmoreal figure. “Hadda toss ‘em last time I was up. Seems th’ rats ate th’ soles clean out.”

What better homophone to begin such a morning! he marvels, grateful that in his exhaustion he’d kept on his socks from the day before. The first cruel howls of wind-driven rain rattling and lashing the window, the murky, musty attic room closing grave-damp and dark about him; his mother’s eyes a screech of disgust down the chalk of his naked flesh.

“If a bare arm or a hairy leg offends you, Mother….” Cut it off, he thinks ruefully, recalling the Master’s words, for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. “Give me a moment and I’ll rustle together a few fig leaves.”

“Oh, I reckon it’s alright with th’ Almighty, since I had t’ suffer th’ pangs o’ yo’ birth,” Mother Daigle flashing an indulgent smile before averting her eyes, in doubt of the Almighty’s complicity. “‘Sides, yuh still haven’t tol’ me why yo’ home,” her forced smile transmuting to a smirk as she bends for his night-thrown clothes on the handwoven rug. “And don’t think yuh can keep it from me,” she scoffs, presenting his rumpled jeans, her thin lips curling in scorn at the suggestion of sin. “I know it’s somethin’ bad. Always has been, child. Always will be, too, long’s yuh give th’ devil control of yo’ life.”

Clang! Clang! Clang! The downstairs grandfather clock scattering hours like Rockefeller’s dimes, contemptuous of dwindling time.

“That’s why I left Louisiana, Mother,” Garo hobbling and kicking at least two offending members into the ready cover of denim. “Left you and Dad to fend for yourselves in the swamp - and the devil, too, for that matter. Thought a college in Vermont was far enough away from the hellish old fiend he wouldn’t find me. Kind of a reverse hex, what with Jonathan Edwards running him out of New England so many generations ago.”

“An’ th’ reason yo’ back?” she retorts, what remains of her scorn softening to a simper, that the boy even remembers the likes of Jonathan Edwards a talisman of haunting contrition.

“Spanish moss. And things similar. Gray threads, past and present, crossing and re-crossing till nary a star can be wished upon through the maze. Defunctive dreams. Yes…and the savage penury of ignorance,” he adds hastily, turning to spare her an impish grin. “And because, just like your icon - that beer-sopping rascal Martin Luther – just like he said, when pressed to answer his inquisitors: Ich kann nicht anders.”

“Which means?” asks the idol worshipper, ignoring the frothy portrayal.

“Which means…well, which means: ‘I can’t do otherwise’,” his bright wit, challenged by his dull and umber past, provoking a penitent blush.

“Th’ still, small voice?” she queries, wringing her age-spotted hands with the nervosity of a pacing Pilate, “could it be yo’ conscience harkin’ yuh back? Yo’ daddy ‘n me’s been a-prayin’, yuh know. Been a-fastin’ two days a week for yo’ eee-ter-nal soul.”

The image of his hatchet-faced mother and turkey-throated father locking their larder, depriving their palates of a Biblically blessed pleasure (if not blessed, at least parodied in mountainside miracles - and all on his behalf) enough to furrow his untroubled brow, his sea-green eyes threatening a salty...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.2.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-8736-X / 166788736X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-8736-4 / 9781667887364