Louisiana Loco-Motive

Chapter 13

Happy Birthday

Back at Mrs. Devereux's place, Geneva knew she had a visitor, but she never lifted her eyes to see who it was. She just instinctively asked the shadowy figure  standing in the doorway of Mrs. Devereux's bedroom, "you gave Sugar the biscuits from scratch?"

"Yes baby, I did," the voice answered.

*****

Out in the freshly burned cane field, Sarah Anne Prejean Brown attempted to take another step, but her knees buckled giving way to the hard ground beneath her, and her head suddenly swirled with instant dizziness. Poison had a way of taking hold of ones soul in the least way expected.

*****
Being it was the day of the 80th Annual Founders Day Festival, Geneva collected all of her thoughts to  process them. As she began to piece together the clues from the diary, she realized that her secret lover Marvin had actually been the great, great, grandson of the woman who lived in the hut and who'd died in the swamp with her own sister Diane. She also realized he was a distant, distant, DISTANT cousin of Sugar's. Another realization was that her deceased employer, Mrs. Devereux was the sister of both Abigail and the banished swamp witch Anita, who again she realized had been Marvin's great, great grandma.

She wondered if Marvin knew the truth. The truth that she'd read within the pages of the diary that'd been locked away inside the saddlebag and meticulously buried beneath the floor boards of her employers garden shed for all these years. The truth that Marvin's great, great, great Uncle Eugene Prejean, father of Abigail, Anita and Addison, and also the brother of Sheriff Earl; well, did Marvin know that Eugene's wife Lydia Rose was having  a deep sexual relationship with Roger Brown. Lydia Rose, the Prejean sisters mother was discovered by her youngest daughter Anita one day when the girl was supposed to be inside the house

getting washed up for dinner, but she'd snuck out the back door to go play in the sugar cane field of their plantation. She'd wanted to go running carefree through the tall stalks as her and her sisters often liked to do when they were younger. As she was making her way through the tall stalks of the field, she'd heard something and became curious, although she remained quiet. The noises continued, so she softly treaded barefoot through the tall stalks to peer through them in the direction of the noise. Crouching down quietly, she saw her mother bare breasted with the top half of her long dress unbuttoned and slouched down around her waist. She also saw a colored boy, who she thought was about her own age, but turned out to be much older, who was fully clothed. She watched in silence as her mother pulled the colored boy's face into her bare breasts. Lydia Rose then unbuttoned the boy's britches and pulled them down to the ground of the field. With the boy's face still buried in the cleavage of her breasts, she hitched up the lower portion of her petticoat, and Anita watched as her mother wigged her way out of her knickers pulling the colored boy's body tautly up against her own as she dropped down to the ground. She watched in silent horror as her mother pulled the colored boy's long and thick rigid eagerness deep into her own silky wetness.
What happened next Geneva didn't know, cause there were some torn pages from the diary. It picked back up with the young colored boy courting Abigail and them getting married. Later on in the diary, Geneva read that Abigail had been coerced into marrying Roger by her mother so she could continue her sexual relationship with him. There were so many more times after Abigail's marriage that her mother, Lydia Rose was discovered engaging in deep sexual encounters with Roger Brown by both Anita and Addison. Anita was the one who told her big sister about what she had witnessed many times between their mother and Roger Brown, starting with that first time in the sugar cane field about a year earlier. Abigail had been so distraught about the news, she ran into their mother's house screaming and crying. Anita tried to catch up to Abigail to calm her down, but she didn't reach her before she'd made it inside the house. When Abigail had started recounting through labored breaths and ragged sobs what her baby sister Anita had told her outside, it just so happened that her Uncle Earl was there talking to their dad, Eugene. Both Eugene and Earl heard what Abigail had screamed at her mother. Lydia Rose was so caught off guard and embarrassed, she frantically confessed, but not without accusing Roger Brown of raping her. This was the run in Roger had with Sheriff Earl years prior to Ranger's birth and the reason why he'd always told Ranger to steer clear of Earl.  For Anita Prejean's trouble of speaking about what'd happened in the sugarcane field between her mother and her sister's husband, Roger Brown, is what got her banished to the swamp and driven out of Butterville by her family, which is how she ended up living in that moss covered hut along the marshland. Whether Marvin knew this or not, Geneva didn't know, but she did go on to realize the plantation she and Diane had grown up on was actually the Prejean Plantation, which is how Diane and Sugar had become such good friends. It took a moment to figure it all out being that her sister Diane had married Reggie when she was but  sixteen years old and he was nineteen. Geneva herself had only been eleven. Diane and Reggie were together for three years before Remi was born, and now that Remi was about to turn eleven, that made Geneva twenty-five herself. Diane would be thirty now, if she were still alive. She also realized it's how her mother and grandmother, as well as herself, had gotten the job of working as Mrs. Addison Devereux's house maid and personal attendant after she'd married Mr. Devereux. So her employer had known all along her family was responsible for the horrendous thing that happened to Remi's great, great, great, granddaddy Roger Brown. So why now would she have Geneva pull up the floorboards of her garden shed to share the truth with her? After some deep thought, Geneva reconciled it to the fact that at a hundred and nine years old, Mrs. Addison Prejean Devereux, Butterville's historian and sister of Abigail Prejean Brown, who was the mother of Ranger, along with Anita Prejean, the banished witch, was the last living hope to restore some decency and reverse the curse her Uncle Earl had caused all those years ago by acting out on Lydia Rose's lie about Roger Brown. Seeing how whatever woman married into the Brown family seemingly met her demise at her offsprings eleventh birthday, was one of the very reasons she'd chosen to forego having any children of her own. She feared one of her descendants somewhere down the line, would eventually marry someone from the Brown family; thus, making her own bloodline, Prejean - Devereux, obsolete. She never discovered the long guarded secret of how the Brown
family men managed to do it, get away with murder, but she was certain it would eventually happen again.

Geneva knew, though. Maybe, Mrs. Devereux hadn't been able to figure it out, but Geneva knew the tiny brown bottle that contained the secret ingredient for the Brown family's biscuits from scratch recipe was the same bottle Abigail had purchased from Mister D's that day in the town square. It wasn't hard to put the pieces together to realize Ranger had found the bottle and kept it after his daddy did not wake up the next morning. The only thing out of the ordinary that happened the night before at dinner, the last time Ranger saw his daddy, Roger Brown alive, was they'd all had biscuits from scratch; but, only Roger was allowed to use the thick, honey like, sweet elixir from the tiny brown bottle to sop with his biscuits.

Guess that was Abigail's own little secret she never shared with her sister Addison; that she caused her husband's physical death, after her Uncle Earl had already caused his spiritual death.

Although, Geneva had never been aware of the fact that Marvin was a descendant of Earl Prejean,
she was still wise enough to have Marvin pass the biscuits off to Sugar. Geneva herself, didn't know that it was the biscuits that were redeeming the unrighteous actions of Earl. Not before she read the contents of the diary about all the other disgraceful happenings and was able to piece the clues together. Before that, she never suspected the biscuits contained a poison as vile as Earl Prejean's deeds back then. All she knew is that  they were supposedly an old family recipe of the Brown family that Ranger Brown had started as a tradition with his own son and every year, the family celebrated birthday's with the homemade biscuits from scratch. Her niece Remi had been so rejectful of celebrating with the homemade biscuits from scratch throughout the years that she felt it was her obligation as Remi's aunt to help her keep the history of her daddy's bloodline alive. She'd found it embarrassing that Remi had always been so rejectful of the secret recipe over the years, so she had Remi share the recipe with her, although she kept quiet about it. Even though Geneva knew the recipe, she wasn't familiar with the ingredients. She just knew it was a pinch of this and a dash of that; so, a drop of whatever was in the long guarded and secretive tiny brown bottle, she didn't know what it was, except a secret ingredient that was only ever to be added upon the child's eleventh birthday and presented to her mother. That was the way the tradition was supposed to go, from one generation down to the next, according to Ranger. Since her sister Diane's death, she'd made the biscuits herself and gave them to Marvin to share with Sugar during his interview, because she knew Remi wasn't going to do it. It was interesting how all the pieces of this puzzle fit together, because even knowing the recipe she never shared the biscuits with her employer over the years, which was a good thing since this was the year for the secret ingredient to be added and Mrs. Devereux had specifically requested some of the biscuits from scratch. Thank goodness the old woman had died in her sleep before she ever made her a batch.

Marvin helped Geneva up from the floor of his great, great aunt's bedroom floor. From there, she had Marvin locate the telephone number and she proceeded to call Doctor LeBlanc. There was no need to wait around as there wouldn't be any questions as to how a hundred and nine year old woman had passed away in her sleep, so Marvin and Geneva set off to Butterville's town square.

So much time of the morning had escaped them and once they arrived, it was already a few minutes past eleven o'clock. They spotted Remi standing a distance over from Mister D's hardware store, where the ol' Oak tree used to be. They  began their ascent over to join her; but Geneva turned back toward Mister D's, reached into her brassiere to pull out the tiny brown bottle containing the secret ingredient of the long held family recipe, dropped it to the ground and crushed it underneath the heel of her clodhopper. It was precisely at that moment, 11:11 a.m.

Chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga, chooo-choo. Chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga, chooo-choo.

Geneva hurried over to the former location of the ol' Oak tree and put her arm around the lanky pre teen standing to her left. Her lover Marvin was standing to her right no longer looking nervous as he used one long, bony, crooked finger to push his wire rimmed spectacles back up on the bridge of his nose as he watched the locomotive traveling in reverse, abruptly stop at that moment, and for the first time in eighty years since that fateful day in the town square of Butterville, the ol' locomotive began rolling in a forward motion again. With a smile on his face, Marvin gleefully looked on as  Geneva delightfully announced to her niece, "Happy 11th Birthday, Remington Ranger Brown."

Author's Request

Thank you for reading my book. Although, its premise may be severely outdated, please consider that it was inspired by a real life event that occurred during a historical time, and was written from the viewpoint of that era. I hope you found the storyline intriguing, and will please vote for this story.