Chapter 147

Mable

My Papa had been a transplant from a northern parish some years before he met my Mama who had been raised in coonass Cajun country. Papa loved her very much even though he didn’t agree with her “country superstitions,” he indulged her actions accepting them as “charitable deeds,” of a proper Christian woman. The “Red’s” as everyone called them were a strange lot of families that had grown together over the length of the family’s long history in the area. They didn’t take charity and were hard workin ole school Bayou folks. Mama’s kinda people.

She always found somethin around that needed tending or that Papa had “neglected” to pay the men and boys to do odd jobs for her. She paid them from her tediously managed grocery allowance which she painstakingly utilized sales and cut corners on things that were luxuries in order to pay them to do things here and there. She would slip the boys candies or freshly baked cookies when the men weren’t lookin and never neglected to speak kind