A Spear of Summer Grass - By Deanna Raybourn Page 0,104

of malice in kind. Granny Miette always sent me to bed early on those nights, nights when the moon had turned its dark face to the earth, away from the things that happened in the hour after midnight. But sometimes I crept out of bed and stood in the shadows of the tea olives, as Mossy had done before me, and I saw the same rituals she had seen and I shivered even though there was no wind. I never stayed to the end. I always hurried back to my bed and burrowed under the covers, the smell of tea olives and sweet smoke clinging to my skin. And on those nights, I dreamed things that came true, grisly red things that I didn’t want to know. I wanted to know them now. I wanted every one of those things visited upon Gates until he cried a river of tears so deep it would drown him. I told that to Gideon, too, and he smiled.

“Moses will be fine, Bibi,” he told me.

“How can you be so sure? Sometimes people aren’t, you know.” It was wrong to say it, but there was bitterness on my tongue.

“Babu has told his future, and it is not his time to leave us.”

I laughed rudely, but Gideon’s level gaze didn’t waver. “I’m sorry,” I told him. I turned away. My throat was too tight to say more.

One of the women brought me another calabash of milk and I held it to give my hands something to do. Just then the babu emerged from his little mud house. He moved slowly and Gideon hurried to lend him a strong arm, settling him next to me on the ground. The babu spoke and Gideon translated.

“He says there is nothing to do but wait.”

“But Moses—” I began.

To my astonishment, the babu’s leathery old face split into a smile.

“He says that there is nothing to do but wait, although he sees that this is a difficult thing for you. You are a woman who runs.”

“A woman who runs?”

The babu opened the leather pouch at his neck and took out a pinch of tobacco. He worked it into a plug and began to chew, spitting expertly. Then he took off his spectacles and cleaned them on the edge of his toga. The cloth smeared them a little, so I sighed and pulled out a handkerchief. I motioned for the spectacles and he handed them over, watching intently as I polished them. When I gave them back he peered through them, then grunted his satisfaction. I gave him the handkerchief and he tucked it away with a gracious nod.

“What does he mean, a woman who runs?”

Gideon repeated the question and the babu launched into a lengthy recitation. Gideon listened intently then turned to me.

“He says that you learned long ago to run, to hide from the dark thing that is like the dog who is half a man.”

“The rougarou,” I whispered.

“I do not know this word, Bibi,” Gideon told me. “What is a rougarou?”

“It’s a bogeyman, a story used to frighten children where I come from. It doesn’t exist.”

But even as I said the words, I tasted the lie in them. The rougarou was real. I had seen him often enough. The only lie was that he looked like a wolf-man. Granny Miette was the first to tell me the story of the rougarou. Some Creoles called him the loup garou; some said he punished bad Catholics. Some even said one could become a rougarou by being a bad Catholic. Seven years of broken Lents could earn you a wolf’s head, it was whispered. But Granny Miette had said those were just silly superstitions. She said everyone knew the rougarou came by night to steal away children who were bad, who caused mischief and made their mothers cry. The rougarou would roam the swamps looking for naughty children, sniffing out the tender flesh and the cindery smell of wickedness with his long wolf’s nose, until he found them tucked in their beds. If you were a lucky child, the rougarou would eat you whole, leaving nothing but the bony feet behind. But if you were very bad indeed, if your black deeds had turned your heart to the colour of night, the rougarou wouldn’t carry you off. He would devour only your blood, turning you into a rougarou yourself.

“The rougarou has a sense for wickedness, Delilah Belle,” she murmured, her pansy-blue eyes piercing in her papery face. “He can smell it