The Devil in Canaan Parish Read Free Page B

Panama City, and Jacksonville my father went door to door or set up camp outside of church revivals. We spent the hurricane season mostly in Savannah, but my father always wanted to be back in New Orleans by Mardi Gras and the Lenten season.   New Orleans was a mecca for my father’s wares. From Catholic nuns to Voodoo priestesses, the demand was great, and my father would sometimes set up a stand in Jackson square.   These times were always the happiest for me, because we’d have enough money to get a small apartment where my mother could cook us cornbread and red beans, and I could go to a real school.    
    On my eighteenth birthday, I enlisted in the army.   It was November, and we were in Savannah.   That morning I said goodbye to my mother and father and headed straight to the recruitment office.   One month later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and by early spring, when I knew my parents would be settling down in New Orleans, I was in the Philippines. There was no way for me to write to them.   They had no permanent address, and so I spent the years in Japanese prison camps wondering where they were and if I’d ever see them again.   I was discharged in January 1946, and I headed to New Orleans to wait for Mardi Gras and hope that I might find the old man’s stand somewhere in Jackson square.   I never did.
      I spent the next six months getting as drunk as I could. When I ran out of money, a prostitute I was frequenting kicked me out of her apartment in the French Quarter.   That morning, I took my last nickel and hopped on the streetcar to the garden district, determined to go as far as that nickel would take me.   I got off across the street from the college.   This seemed like a sign to a naïve 23-year-old, so I walked up to the admissions office and announced I wanted to use my GI Bill money to enroll.  
    I decided to study poetry, because I liked some of what I had read during my brief time in high school. I found myself in a class full of women and was surprised to be somewhat of a novelty.   Most men my age were either dead, in a hospital, or married to the sweethearts they had left behind before the war. The girls fawned over me and it wasn’t long before I was having all the free sex I wanted.   I soon realized, however, that I was not cut out for literature and my grades began failing. A girl who had not slipped me her number, in fact had never really spoken to me, impressed me in class.   She kept to herself, but she was often called on by the professor and always had a thoughtful answer.   One day I approached her to ask if she could tutor me.    
    Her name was Sally Bordelon, and after weeks of begging, I convinced her I wasn’t a predator.   We began to meet in the school library where we would spend hours reading Keats, Shelley and Byron.   Sally was also quite adept in French and spent time translating Baudelaire for me. She would read passages to me and try to hide her mirth at my preposterous interpretations.   I was lured by her genteel expressions.   She came from a family with money, and I had never been with anyone of her league.   She wasn’t arrogant, just quiet and reserved, and I used to try my best to crack through the careful exterior and make her laugh.   It wasn’t often, but when she did laugh it rang through the library like silver bells.   She would clap a gloved hand over her mouth and shake her head at me.  
    It was not long before we were steady sweethearts.   I would take her to the picture show, and out to dinner and on long walks along the river.   Sometimes she would let me kiss her before she ran inside her dorm, and sometimes a little more, but always she was a good Catholic girl, and I think the fact that I couldn’t have her made me want her. She graduated in the spring and went back home to Techeville where I thought she would forget about me. I wrote her a few letters, doing my best imitation of the Romantic poets she so idolized,