Lulu’s Recipe for Cajun Sass Read online

  Not consciously anyhow.

  He set his paddle down and opened the jar, taking a sniff. “Pee-yew! I can see why the bugs don’t like it,” he said with a grimace of distaste. But when he slathered a few fingerfuls on his face, it worked. “Thanks,” he offered begrudgingly. For some ridiculous reason, he was blaming her for the bugs, and the sweat. Probably because he wasn’t usually required to go to so much trouble to seduce a female.

  Am I trying to seduce Louise?

  Damn straight, I am.

  Paddling and steering took all his concentration at first because of all the submerged or half-submerged trees, including the weed of the bayou, the loblolly, and the bell-shaped trunks of the bald cypresses with their roots jutting up out of the water here and there like knobby knees. Louise, who’d turned around again, called out directions, but it was still difficult to avoid the obstructions.

  Just then, his focus was broken by a hiss and a loud roar, so loud he jumped on his seat and caused the pirogue to wobble again. It was a large gator, a female by its size; males could be up to twenty feet. Not that this creature wasn’t formidable at about ten feet long. The gator was guarding its nest…a huge mud mound three feet high and ten feet across made up of decaying vegetation and twigs which held its eggs, as many as fifty or so. They’d just rounded a bend in the stream, and the nesting spot hadn’t been visible to him right away. Otherwise, he would have stayed on the other side of the bayou stream. Which he immediately did, with him paddling and Louise standing and facing forward again, poling them forward.

  “You knew that was there,” he accused.

  “Well…” she said.

  We could have gotten killed.”

  “I would have saved you.”

  “Hah!”

  The gator followed after them for a distance, showing off a mouthful of piano-key teeth, roaring a message which was probably something like, “Humans…yum! Taste just like chicken.”

  Louise sat down again and faced his way, with her back to the front of the boat. Some people couldn’t stand that backward position and got motion sickness. Apparently, it didn’t bother his over-confident Louise. She was, incidentally, laughing her pretty ass off. At him, no doubt.

  “You know, I remember when I was a kid, we would try to steal some eggs from the gator nests. Don’t have any idea what we would have done with them if we’d succeeded. Never heard of anyone eating scrambled gator eggs.”

  “Dumb,” she remarked.

  “You’re telling me! Louie Mouton almost lost a leg one time when he tripped over a stump as we were running away.”

  “Like I said, dumb.”

  “Just for the record, Lou wrestled alligators for a living for a few years until he ran for the state senate.” He swatted at another swarm of gnats that surrounded him as he continued to paddle, first on one side, then the other. Then he got swatted across his face by a low-hanging swath of moss hanging from of a live oak tree. “I forgot why I hate the bayou.”

  “You hate the bayou?” she asked, obviously shocked. Or was it disappointed? Or both?

  “I love it, and I hate it.”

  She made a snorting sound. “Make up yer mind, cher. You cain’t speak out of both sides of yer mouth.”

  Speaking of mouths, Louise had one smart mouth on her, which was beginning to irritate him. He wondered if she was worth the effort. He gave her a quick survey and decided that, yes, she was. But she was going to pay for all this aggravation. Eventually.

  “I’m bayou born, same as you, chère,” he said, putting extra emphasis on the Cajun word for dear or darling, just to show he wasn’t a total traitor to his roots. “But I’ve traveled more, seen other places,” he tried to explain.

  She made another snorting sound, which really annoyed him.

  He went on anyhow. “I love the beauty of the bayous. The slow-moving water the color of fresh-brewed tea, which I know is the result of centuries of tannin seeping in from the bark of stream-side trees, but seem almost like some heavenly concoction.” He cupped a handful of the translucent water and let it seep through his fingers. “The flowers are enormous and colorful, like one of those French paintings, too vivid to be real.” He glanced to the right where a giant magnolia bush was covered with white flowers the size of lunch plates. “And their scents? Enough to draw a thousand bees. I know, I know, cornball to the max. And then there’s Cajun cooking? Gumbo, jambalaya, beignets. My mouth waters just thinking about my mother’s shrimp étouffée.”

  “But…?” she prodded.

  “But I hate this blistering heat, and I hate gators and snakes, and I hate the slow pace of living here. Sometimes I just want to shout at my dad, or his customers, or the car in front of me on the highway, ‘hurry the hell up!’ Oh, Louise, you have no idea how wonderful the change of seasons are up north. The summers are hot, occasionally, but never as uncomfortably steaming as it is here on the bayou, and when autumn comes with its crisp air and changing colors, it’s well, a welcome change. I even like winter when a body just wants to stay inside snug before a cozy fire with snow coming down like goose feathers from the sky. The food is simpler. You have to try Maine lobsters with melted butter and Boston Cream Pie. Yum! The hospitals I’ve worked in are incredible, and—”

  She put a hand up to halt further words and said, “It sounds pretty much like you’ve decided to live up north, for good.”

  Oh, hell! Had he ruined all his chances with her? “No, no, no,” he disagreed. Honestly, he hadn’t made that decision yet. “I’m just giving you a comparison, to show why I say I love and hate the bayou.” No comment on how the scales were teetering. “Besides, I just thought of something else I like about bayou land.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You.”

  “What a load of hooey! You don’t even know me.”

  “You wound me,” he said.

  She arched her brows with skepticism.

  “A man doesn’t need to know a woman to like her. First impressions count for a lot…maybe fifty percent of the chances for a connection to blossom.”

  “Is that some kind of northern statistical nonsense, or just a male line?”

  He laughed. “Seriously, I knew the first time I saw you…I mean last week, not when you were a skinny little brat running around the bayou in your bare feet.”

  “You remember me from that long ago?”

  “Well, a little. You were a lot younger than me.”

  “Anyway, you were probably in your bare feet, too.”

  “That’s not important. Stop interrupting me. I knew when I saw you last week that there was some chemistry between us. And I wanted to see where we would go.”

  “That has nothing to do with liking me. It just means that you were attracted to me sexually, that you want to get me into your bed.”

  “There is that, but—”

  “Besides, you weren’t attracted to me when you first saw me last week, in my bib overalls. You only decided you would pursue me when I got my Cajun Sass on at the church festival.”

  She was probably right, but he wasn’t about to admit that. In fact, he sensed a sort of destiny thing between. How cornball was that? “You’re wearing bib overalls today, and I’m still attracted to you.”

  “That’s because you now know what I’m hiding.”

  He shook his head at her bluntness and pretended to leer, as if he could see through her clothes, visualizing her naked body. But then he laughed and said, “You don’t make it easy for a guy.”

  “If it was easy, it wouldn’t be worthwhile.”

  “Let me ask you this. If you’re so on to my devious ways, how come you’re with me today?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” she asked with a little smile. “I like you, too.”

  His silly heart skipped a beat at her words, or maybe it was an organ down lower. But then, before he had a chance to react to her tantalizing words with something witty or provocative, she noticed a small island they were passing and she yelled, “Whoa,
whoa. Turn around. This is where I found the lizard’s tail plants a few months ago.”

  With some maneuvering on both their parts, they had the pirogue beached, then walked through the pudding-like mud on the banks up to a more grassy area. The island was no bigger than half a football field, he guessed…one of those bits of land in the bayou that were here today and gone tomorrow after a big storm.

  He took the machete out of her carry bag and she picked up the garden shears. Together, they made their way through the thick growth toward the center of the island where there was a giant sweet gum tree. Dropping to her knees, Louise pulled from her carry bag a bunch of bags and dampened cheesecloths, as well as several tools. Handing him a knife and a jar, she said, “You can cut away some bark and scrape the sap into the jar.” She was busy gathering star-shaped leaves which she put in one bag and the spike-ball seed pods in another.

  While they worked, Louise instructed him. “It takes these trees twenty to thirty years to mature enough to produce fruit. And many of them get destroyed in storms before that time. That’s why they’re so rare in the wild.”

  “What do you use these things for?” He held up the jelly jar of sap he’d half-filled, and nodded toward the various bags she had arranged on the ground around her where she still knelt.

  “Everything from the rheumatiz to diarrhea.”

  After she carefully placed each of her prizes in their designated pockets in the carry bag, they explored the rest of the little island. She found the lizard tail flowers, and he dug up the roots of several plants for her, one of which she claimed gave men a boost when their virility was on the wane. She waggled her eyebrows when she told him this, so, he wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not.

  “Are you inferring that I might need a lift?” He waved at his groin, just in case she didn’t understand what he meant.

  She did if the blush on her face was any indication. “Me, I would never make such an accusation about you.” She batted her eyelashes at him in an exaggerated fashion. “Your swagger says it all.”

  “I do not swagger.”

  She shrugged, as if that was debatable.

  He grrr-ed inwardly. “Just so you know, Louise, I am keeping a tally of all your digs at me. You will have some whopping bill to pay when this day is over.”

  “Really? And how do you expect me to pay for them? I’m just a poor bayou girl.”

  “Kisses,” he replied.

  She didn’t respond to that. And her silence was telling to an experienced seducer like Justin.

  Finally, she said, “Maybe I’m keeping a tally, too. Of all the times you come off as big-headed and snooty.”

  “I don’t do that,” he protested. At least not knowingly. “And how would you expect to collect from me? I’m just a poor almost-doctor.”

  She cast him a little Mona Lisa smile, the one as old as Eve.

  And, like Adam, he was tempted.

  For the next two hours, they paddled and poled along the murky waters of the swamp. Through its translucent depths, he saw catfish, the white crappies known as sac-au-lait, even an occasional grindle, the tough bottom feeder that liked the swamp mud—and wished he’d brought along some fishing gear.

  Once they ran into a sheet of water hyacinths that covered practically the breadth of the stream. As beautiful as it was, like a floating island of fragrant flowers, they were the bane of the bayou, having been introduced to Louisiana at the International Cotton Exposition in New Orleans in 1884. They choked other vegetation, cut off sunlight necessary for aquatic life, clogged waterways, and were in general a pain in the ass, almost impossible to destroy. Some frustrated farmers had even tried dynamite, to no avail.

  They stopped here and there where Louise noticed particular plants that interested her. Goat weed, hackberry, Jesuit’s tea, French mulberry. And the more fanciful names of Silver Drop, feverfew, tansy, horehound, and angelica. For each of them, she gave him a brief discourse on the benefits of the plant and its particular parts. He was impressed. Honestly, she could give a seminar on herbal remedies at his medical school and be praised for her expertise.

  He noticed that when she spoke of her chosen profession…bayou traiteur…she used language peppered with educated terminology, but many other times she lapsed into the almost illiterate Cajun patois. Which he did as well, or at least he used to before moving north where he’d been subjected to so much laughter—and not the good kind. He heard way too many not-funny redneck inbreeding jokes about being married to his cousin, or a sister, for God’s sake. Didn’t matter that he had no sister. To his shame…okay, not too much shame…he’d been involved in more than one barroom brawl over that derision until he’d learned to just ignore the idiots. More likely, the mockery had lessened when he’d blended in by losing his accent.

  Of course, Louise ruined the whole effect when she admitted, with a sly grin, that she also gathered herbs which Madame LeSeur packaged into mojo bags to be sold in her French Quarter voodoo shop,. Things like mugwort, bloodroot, skull cap, pennyroyal, and good old valerian, which has been around since the beginning of time.

  He was shocked that she would unapologetically mix her folk healing with voodoo nonsense. “See, and you wonder why some people don’t take your folk healing work seriously!”

  “Don’t get cross-legged over such a piddly matter,” she advised him with a laugh. “The things I sell Sally LeSeur are harmless. And the tourists who buy them…well, they’re dumb as dirt if they think a stinky bag hung by a string around their fool necks will help their peach pie win first place at the state fair, or prevent dandruff, or cause the town tart to suddenly fall in love with them. Talk about! Most of them are probably Yankees.”

  He laughed then, too.

  Heat still shimmered over the bayou stream when they decided to call it a day in the mid-afternoon. The ride back to Louise’s cottage was mostly quiet, but it was a deceptive calm. They saw a large water moccasin lying on the bank waiting for some easy prey, followed by the sudden flight of white egrets up up up out of the swamp. And gators were known to slide quietly with barely a splash into the waters, only their snouts and beady eyes visible. No wonder the early French settlers called it “sleeping waters.”

  He and Louise didn’t say much, both of them exhausted. Not so much from their activity, but the intense heat had a way of draining a body of energy. He helped her beach the pirogue and tied the mooring line to a tree while she carried her bag of herbs and tools up to the house. He knew that she had to go pick up her niece soon.

  “I had a great time today, Louise,” he said, following her up to the porch. “Unfortunately, I need to hit the books. I have about five hours of study for my boards to get through yet today.”

  “I sympathize,” she said.

  “Maybe we can get together again some time before I return to Boston.”

  “Maybe,” she replied, eyeing him warily.

  What? Did she think he was going to jump her bones and take her right here on the back porch? Not that he wasn’t tempted, even smelly and sweaty as they both were. They had to know each other a whole lot better for that kind of desperate gotta-have-you-now dirty sex.

  On the other hand…

  No, no, no! Timing is everything, and this is not the time. Yet.

  But what about that fire in his belly? And lower?

  Take a Tums, he advised himself. He was a doctor, or almost-doctor, after all. He had to smile at his inner humor. It was either laugh or cry of horniess. Is horniess a legitimate malady? Sure feels like it. “Okay. See you,” he called out with a wave as he walked to his vehicle.

  She was surprised…and probably a little disappointed, he hoped…that he didn’t kiss her good-bye, not even a peck on the cheek. Especially with his comments throughout the day about the tally of kisses she was chalking up for her sarcasm.

  She sighed.

  Yep, she was disappointed.

  But she was even more surprised when he showed up at her door later that evening. And hope
fully the opposite of disappointed.

  Now that is timing!

  Chapter 5

  Is sassy just another name for sexy?…

  For a moment…a long moment, Louise stared after Justin, her heart heavy with longing, but not longing for him, per se. No, what she’d been thinking when he mentioned having to go back to his apartment to study and questioning whether he could see her again was, This should have been Phillipe, who wanted to be a doctor, too. He would be at the same stage of his career. If he’d survived the war. Would we have been married while he went to medical school? Surely we wouldn’t have waited. No, we couldn’t have waited. There was a baby on the way. Oh, if only...

  She sighed. Again.

  Justin had misinterpreted her sigh before he left. That’s why he’d been optimistic enough to mention seeing her again. Not that he’d been specific about when she’d see him again. Darn him!

  Should she? See him again, as in a real date?

  She could think of a hundred reasons why that would be a bad idea.

  And one which outweighed all the others. She wanted to be with him, pure and simple.

  No, no, no! She made a concerted effort not to go down that path. Instead, she decided to go now and pick up Adèle, rather than wait until after she’d bathed and put away all the herbs she’d gathered that day. Louise had enjoyed a pleasant day on the bayou; let that be enough, she cautioned herself. She’d gathered some essential herbs. She was young and healthy with a life of hope in front of her. Optimism was sometimes a trait you had to work on, even when you felt just the opposite…especially when you felt the opposite. An added feature of Cajun Sass. Thus, she was smiling as she drove into Houma, singing along with the car radio which blasted out that new Hank Williams song, “Jambalaya.”

  All in all, it had been a good day. That thought kept running through her head. She wasn’t ready to examine why, but for now, she felt as if she’d made a turning point in her grieving process for Phillipe. Was it due to her newfound Cajun Sass, or Justin Boudreaux, or just that old cliché about time healing? She wasn’t sure. Maybe all three.