her hands to the small of her back, she arched out a few of the kinks and sighed. What she really needed was to crawl into bed and take a nap. Or a bubble bath would be nice. She probably smelled as bad as she looked.
If only she had the time!
Thou hadst time to drink two cups of coffee this morning. Thou hadst time to take the Lord’s name in vain when chasing that swamp creature. But, forget thy stink, didst say thy morning prayers? No. Ah, the priorities of God’s children!
St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless cases, was Louise’s favorite, ever since he’d saved her from a soul-rending despair six years ago. But then he’d stuck around, speaking to her in her head on occasion…like now. To say he was a royal pain in the patoot at times was an understatement. But still, she couldn’t ignore him. Oh, no! One did not ignore a celestial messenger.
Okay, okay. I’ll shower before Adèle wakes up and then say my prayers.
Priorities again!
She made a growly noise. Got it. Prayers first.
Bless you, child.
Hah!
In Louise’s defense, it had been the day from hell (forgive my language, Mister J, if that sounds sacrilegious), starting with two of her late mother’s customers showing up practically at the crack of dawn needing medicinal herbs, not for the croup, but for equally desperate issues…to them, leastways.
For some reason, without her actually making a decision, people had assumed she would take over as Bayou Black’s only traiteur when her mother died last year. Although she’d learned much at her mother’s side about folk-healing herbs, she was still winging it in many regards. For example, this morning, even though she had the receipt book that had been passed down through three generations of Rivard females, it had taken what seemed like forever, not helped by her sleepiness, to match up the recipes with the dusty bottles on the pantry shelf for two different customers suffering from migraines and male genital rash.
Another job for her when things settled down—organizing Mama’s “pharmacy.”
More priorities! St. Jude said.
Louise rolled her eyes.
After her customers had left, she had to use a broom to chase a baby alligator out of her blueberry patch and back into the stream where its anxious mama, whom she had named Gloria, was no doubt waiting to take a bite of some tasty human flesh. Her five-year-old niece Adèle had gotten so hyped up by the encounter…jumping up and down with excitement, giggling, screaming, wanting to pet the stupid thing…that it had taken Louise more than an hour afterward to get the by-then weepy, fussy child down for her usual nap. Two loads of laundry were waiting for her, and she still had an order of fresh fruit and vegetables to deliver to Boudreaux’s General Store, a small but essential source of income to supplement her folk-healing proceeds.
Louise was only twenty-six years old, but she felt like seventy-six most days. And it wasn’t just physical exhaustion that wore her down. It was the never-ending grief of losing her father, her fiancé Phillipe, her brother Frank, and her mother, but mostly Phillipe. And the responsibility of raising her daughter while pretending the child was actually her niece.
Louise sighed again and picked up a large, oval wicker gathering basket by its handle and walked over to the fig tree where she began to gather the ripe fruit. She would need to make fig jam for herself, but this first harvest would be for sale. Every penny counted these days. She was saving to buy new tires for her jalopy, which she’d named Lillian two years ago after trading in the car she’d inherited from Phillipe when it had broken down once too many times.
Once she dumped the figs into two sturdy cardboard tomato boxes, she moved to the vegetable garden. Tomatoes, green peppers, scallions, string beans, okra, several varieties of lettuce, squash, zucchini, and snap peas soon filled two more boxes on the porch. She was back in the garden, bent over, pulling out carrots by their green fleecy tops from the loose soil when she heard a motor vehicle approaching, then pulling into the clamshell driveway behind her at the side of the cottage. She didn’t straighten and look back…not at first, figuring it would be another of the traiteur customers seeking some herbal remedy.
When she did glance back over her shoulder, she saw a man leaning against the front of a short-bed truck, arms folded over his chest, staring at