Distraction - Bruce Sterling [187]
Oscar and Kevin conferred briefly. Kevin was very spooked by Fontenot’s story. He really disliked being surrounded by illegal alien black people in the middle of an impenetrable swamp. Visions of boiling iron cannibal pots were dancing in Kevin’s head. Anglos … they’d never gotten over the sensation of becoming a racial minority.
Oscar was adamant, however. Having come this far, nothing would do for him but to interview Papa Christophe. Fontenot finally located the man, hard at work in a whitewashed cabin at the edge of town.
Papa Christophe was an elderly man with a long-healed machete slash in his head. His wrinkled skin and bent posture suggested a lifetime of vitamin deficiency. He looked a hundred years old, and was probably sixty.
Papa Christophe gave them a toothless grin. He was sitting on a three-legged stool on the hard dirt floor of the cabin. He had a wooden maul, a pig-iron chisel, and a half-formed wooden statue. He was deftly peeling slivers of brown cypress wood. His statue was a saint, or a martyr; a slender, Modigliani-like woman, with a serene and stylized face, her hands pressed together in prayer. Her lower legs were wrapped in climbing flames.
Oscar was instantly impressed. “Hey! Primitive art! This guy’s pretty good! Would he sell me that thing?”
“Choke it back a little,” Kevin muttered. “Put your wallet away.”
The cabin’s single room was warm and steamy, because the building had a crude homemade still inside it. Presumably, a distillery hadn’t been present in the village’s original game plan, but the Haitians were ingenious folk, and they had their own agenda. The still had been riveted together out of dredged-up automobile parts. By the smell of it, it was cooking cane molasses down into a head-bending rum. The shelves along the wall were full of cast-off glass bottles, dredged from the detritus of the bayou. Half the bottles were full of yellow alcohol, and plugged with cloth and clay.
Fontenot and the old man were groping at French, with their widely disparate dialects. Fed with Christophe’s cast-off chips of cypress wood, the still was cooking right along. Rum dripped down a bent iron tube into the glass bottle, ticking like a water clock. Papa Christophe was friendly enough. He was chatting, and tapping his chisel, and chopping, and muttering a little to himself, all in that same, even, water-clock rhythm.
“I asked him about the statue,” Fontenot explained. “He says it’s for the church. He carves saints for the good Lord, because the good Lord is always with him.”
“Even in a distillery?” Kevin said.
“Wine is a sacrament,” Fontenot said stiffly. Papa Christophe picked up a pointed charcoal stick, examined his wooden saint, and drew on her a bit. He had a set of carving tools spread beside him, on a greased leather cloth: an awl, a homemade saw, a shaving hook, a hand-powered bow-drill. They were crude implements, but the old man clearly knew what he was doing.
They’d left their ragtag of curious children outside the cabin door, but one of the smaller kids plucked up his courage and peered inside. Papa Christophe looked up, grinned toothlessly, and uttered some solemn Creole pronunciamento. The boy came in and sat obediently on the earthen floor.
“What was that about?” Oscar said.
“I believe he just said, ‘The monkey raised her children before there were avocados,’ ” Fontenot offered.
“What?”
“It’s a proverb.”
The little kid was thrilled to be allowed into the old man’s workshop. Papa Christophe chopped a bit more, directing kindly remarks to the child.