The Body of the Night

I got all caught up with some Prairie des Femmes stickers that I ordered and tagged the back of the stop sign at the southern entrance to the Prairie. A few hours later, in full regret of my harmless place identification /blatant vandalism, and after night fall, I ventured out into the dark to right my wrong before the sun came up. 

Night in Prairie des Femmes is eerie no matter how you cut through it. It's Saint Landry Parish. There are dark, rank bayous and open fields, empty trailers and big trucks with strange blue lights. The roads are dirt, rutted, and there is lots of tall grass, fog, wild animals, party people and even the occasional ghost. Tonight, the sound of the frogs and crickets in the swamp is extra loud and silvery, and the humidity of the day makes the navy-blue air feel like a body itself, like the body of the night. Despite the heat, I wanted to hear my surroundings, so I drove slowly to the front of the road with the windows open. It was a heavily humid night, a Friday full of the electricity of the week's release. It was nearly moonless, and in the direction I drove, there was the faint mauve glow of far-off lightening. I rounded all of the curves, avoided the black dogs in the road, and as I came to the straightaway and Saule, where Delores used to live before she was killed back there, I saw this short pole with some kind of signs on it, right there at the T. It was all white and just standing there. I was immediately taken back to the early morning when Delores really was standing there, hitchhiking her way to school. It was like when I saw her then. I shook it off, but around the next curve and where the dirt road meets the bayou, I saw what looked like people walking on the side of the road toward me. They were trudging. I imagined that there was an old woman in front in a long, Civil-war-ish dress, and maybe a few other women, and a man, too. As I approached, though, I could see that these "people" were actually the wispy tall weeds that were shooting up off of the dirt road.

The spooky feeling just wouldn't leave me, so I was relieved when I pulled up at the juncture of road and highway at Frozard, near le Beau Chene, and no cars were coming either way. I stopped and opened the door when I saw someone or something standing on the other side of the highway. They were wearing a green shirt with a white covering over their head. It was after nine at night on a dark and somewhat busy highway.  This intersection is an old cross roads, about halfway between the towns of Arnaudville and Grand Coteau, so it seemed that this person was waiting for a ride into town. That is what it seemed. There is an old pink store there, but there are never people standing there. In all my years of living here, this was the first I had seen of it. I did not dare get down, now, so I turned around and made a few passes. Every time, the "apparition" was there, as unknowing cars zoomed by on the dark highway that acts as a modern portage between the well-lit interstate at Exit 11 and the dark back country of the Prairie des Femmes.

The Apparition