FICTION
S E L E C T I O N :
The Moon and the Stars
by
Marian Carcache
Marian Carcache grew up in rural Russell County Alabama. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah and other literary journals, including Belle Lettres; Crossroads; Stories of the Southern Literary Fantastic; Climbing Mt. Cheaha, and Emerging Alabama Writers. Under the Arbor, an opera made from her short story, appeared on PBS stations nationwide, and she was nominated for a regional PBS Emmy, as well as a finalist at the New York Festival. Three of Carcache's stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The Republic was honored to reprint Carcache's story "The Moon and the Stars" in our Summer Literary issue, and below:
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The first time John Starbuck Lumiere saw Lily Paris, she was swinging on a crescent moon inside a bar off Bourbon Street called the Pearl Palace. John had counted his French fries at the Dairy Queen earlier that day and found that there were twenty-seven. Later, in traffic, he got behind a Blue Bird school bus, number 27. When Lily came down off the moon to take a break, he mustered the courage and started a conversation with her, during which he learned that she was twenty-seven years old. A strong believer in signs and wonders, John Starbuck was then convinced that Lily was the woman Fate had designated for him.
Years later, Johnny Paris, the son of John Starbuck and Lily, found a framed photograph of his mama, a picture she had given John Starbuck soon after they met. It was a picture of Lily at work, riding her moon, and was inscribed, “To John Starbuck--my lucky star--Love, Lily.” In the photo, Lily was sitting in the curve of her crescent, wearing a skimpy wizard’s costume that showed her pretty legs to great advantage, and she was flashing a pearly smile that was, at once, both flirtatious and shy. Lily was actually swinging on the moon, but whenever Johnny tried to piece together the fragmented information he had gathered about his past, for some reason he thought of his mama straddling the moon, riding it through the night sky as if it were a white stallion.
Unlike most people, he had the advantage of never knowing his parents and could therefore imagine them the way he wanted them to be. By the time Johnny was born, his daddy was long gone. Nobody really knew where or why, but popular opinion around Bourbon Street was that Lily’s mama, a still-pretty old lady named Delphine, who knew roots, had “fixed” him. Most people figured he was dead. After all, he had left Lily a little too heavy to keep her job swinging on the moon at the Pearl Palace. It wasn’t uncommon to hear speculation that John Starbuck was at the bottom of the bay, sleeping with the fishes.Since Lily bled to death giving birth to him and everyone else who knew what happened was afraid of Delphine, Johnny had no way of finding the truth. And John Starbuck never even knew he had a living son. Only the old lady knew what really happened, the old lady and a servant who saw and overheard things in Delphine’s house that made ever her mostly Haitian blood run cold. She heard the old lady cut a deal with Lily: “Let him go,” Delphine had said, “and he lives. Try to keep him, and I put a curse on him worse than Satan’s Own could imagine. Not just on him, but on every poor soul who shares an ounce of blood from his bloodline.”
Lily had seen the damage her mother could do. She had seen the handsome unfaithful men of some of Delphine’s wealthy female clients transform overnight into bloated frog-like creatures. She had seen beautiful women drawn irresistibly to liver-lipped men who seemed to have been formed from flour paste, but had been fortunate enough to afford Delphine’s services. And worst of all, she had seen what could happen to stunning young women who agreed to be the kept lovers of the husbands of wealthy termagants with money enough to buy Delphine’s strongest curse. A beautiful goddes could transmogrify into the face of death within a week. And in all of these cases, Delphine had had only a business interest. Lily shuddered at the thought of what her mother might come up with when her own personal interests were involved.
So Lily, who knew roots herself, though not as well as her mother, let John Starbuck go with every intention of strengthening her own powers, hexing the old lady into oblivion, and rejoining her lover at a later date. She pleaded for one more week with John Starbuck, promising that after that week, she would not even mention his name again. The old lady, briefly remembering the passion of her own youth, reluctantly agreed, and Lily began her own brand of magic: the infiltration of his senses. Knowing that John drank many cups of his favorite chicory coffee each day, Lily built a ritual around coffee-drinking so that she became inextricably connected with it in John Starbuck’s mind. She made his coffee strong and then added thick, sweetened condensed milk, teasing him that she had sweetened it with her own love juices. She knew by the look in his eyes that he half-believed her, and that he’d never drink coffee again without remembering the taste of her love.
Lily easily coaxed her lover into Electric Eddie’s tattoo parlor, where they both submitted to the needle of the man whose reputation as an artist often took second-place to the stories about the framed samples of tattooed human skin that decorated the walls of his shop. Some said he took them from corpses; others told that he bought them from living former clients now down on their luck. Having grown up in Delphine’s house, Lily was not easily made squeamish so she found such stories more fascinating than horrifying. And John Starbuck was so deeply in Lily’s thrall by now that he hardly felt the needle, let alone the sublime horror of being in a seedy back alley in a room papered with human flesh. All that his conscious mind could acknowledge was that he was being tattooed with a lily, the symbol of his love. He never noticed that it was the same lily Eddie used on most of his Jesus designs because, this time, instead of superimposing it on a cross or making it appear to grow out of a bleeding heart, Eddie put it inside a crescent moon, and etched it forever on John Starbuck’s inner thigh.
For herself, Lily chose a small star, a simple enough design that she had put on the tender flesh of her left breast--right above her heart.The sense of hearing gave Lily the most trouble. She had to think of the one sound of the many noises John would hear everyday that she could count on to make him not just think of her, but think of her so strongly that he smelled, tasted, felt her. For three days, she fretted over the sense of sound before the obvious became clear to her: the heartbeat, her own, John Starbuck’s, that of their unborn child. On that third day, she began the great performance of listening to heartbeats. Her tears ran down John’s chest as she listened to his marvelous heart and wondered how many months would pass before she lay so close to him again. She listened to his heart beating calmly as he held her. She listened to it beat more and more rapidly as he desired her. She heard it almost burst as he loved her, and then grow calm again as he fell asleep holding her. But even more important to her quest was when, having satisfied himself with her breasts, he rested his head on her heart and listened to the sound he could never forget. And then the crowning moment: when he moved his head downward and listened for a while to the heartbeat of the child inside her.
Their usual lovemaking included the use of oils and incenses. Lily created mood with scented candles and incense. She massaged her lover’s tired shoulders with the essential oils of aromatic plants. And as she worked with the fragrances she knew to be ruled by Venus--Patchouli, Bergamot, Ylang-Ylang--she called on the goddess of Love tokeep John true to her until she could get rid of the curse of Delphine and be with him forever. But on her final night with John, she went even further. She bought and stole and begged for roses until she had enough to make a blanket of rose petals to lead her lover to by the light of the midnight moon. She knew her efforts had been rewarded as their bodies pressed and bruised the tender petals. The sweet odor of rose came in waves,and it seemed to Lily that she and John Starbuck left the ground momentarily and floated like the scent of the rose petals on the dewy midnight breeze. And it also seemed to Lily that every time the sweet wave of rose washed over them, the baby kicked, as if he smelled it too. By the time her week was up, Lily knew she had succeeded. She knew she was a part of John Starbuck Lumiere’s being now, had invaded his heart and mind and soul, his very blood, like a virus. When he went away to find a place to wait in for her to join him,far away from Delphine and her blacker magic, he was no longer just John Starbuck; he was Lily, too.
The old lady found him when Lily died. When she sent the Haitian to tell him that Lily had bled to death giving birth to a stillborn baby, his heart broke, his mind unraveled, his soul dried up. He returned to New Orleans in a daze and wept on Lily’s grave. So grief-stricken was he that he took the old woman’s word that the baby had died and been buried, unnamed, in the coffin with its mother. Then he left New Orleans, numb, never knowing that he was leaving behind a living son who Lily had called John the one time she had held him before she died. Never knowing that he was leaving their baby to be brought up by Delphine, the root doctor.
All he did know was that every time he smelled roses or tasted coffee or saw the lily tattooed on his thigh, his broken heart shattered into tinier pieces. Finally, to escape the pain brought on by the beating of his own heart, he willed it to stop. A derelict, searching for food or treasure in garbage cans, found John frozen in an alley on a hot, muggy morning in Baton Rouge. He was buried by the city, not as John Starbuck Lumiere, but simply as John Doe. The coroner’s report identified him only as a vagrant with a distinguishing mark: a tattoo of a star under his left nipple.
