Louis Maistros - The Sound of Building Coffins

Your tea will be just as sweet, but it will have a bitter aftertaste and that taste will be calisaya. Typhus will make your bed and you will lie on it. Then you will be sick, as I have explained. The second life will come out of you, and then it will die. There will be pain for you and for the little one, too. Typhus will take good care of that baby, bring him to the river for nightswimmin’. And I will do my best to ease your suffering. It will be your saddest day. And there will be more sad days to follow.

If you go by that path, little sister, after listening to all the love in your heart, then you may take solace in knowing this one thing:

All life is eternal because all souls are eternal. Even little lives taken by calisaya tea. Little lives like that stay with you always, and sometimes even visit you in ways you don’t expect. That’s because even little lives come from the will of God, and there is a mysterious joy in that fact. For God is learning about love from you , little sister. And he is eternally grateful for the lessons that you give. Through your pain you teach God right from wrong.

It is never the other way around. Never has been and never will be. It’s the reason we are here on this earth, little sister. We are educating God.

With a pain that he could never feel.

Six-dollar stockings and she went through them like kindling, but the right had been hard earned and so the small luxury brought her no shame. Pretty little whore pulled up a stocking nice and slow; not for worry of runs, just for savoring the slide of silk against skin. It had been a long road to the sweet life of whoring at Arlington Hall.

Opportunities of employment for young girls in the Parish came down to whoring or factory and field work. Whoring paid better than the others-and wasn’t much dirtier all told-so the choice was bitter but obvious for pretty tan gals of color like Diphtheria Morningstar. So at the tender age of fifteen, Diphtheria had rented herself a crib on Marais Street and got busy.

When a gal is working the cribs, it means she rents a tiny room in a shotgun row house at the dirty inner crust of the district, puts out a red lantern and pays rent to a landlord who doubles as pimp. The room is so small that her bed must be narrow, so narrow that it can’t hold two unless one is on top of the other, which is the idea anyway. A bed, a stove for heat, a washstand and two lanterns; one regular and one red. The red one to draw in flies.

Most of her memories of that place were reduced to blur by now, but the wallpaper in that crib had remained etched in her brain with perfect clarity all these years. Still had dreams about that wallpaper. Curved burgundy lines joined by small x’s at the ends, making shapes that could pass for either edges of stormclouds or seagulls in flight or razor-wire fencing-depending on her mood and disposition. The paper itself was dingy yellow, curling brown towards the ceiling and warped from leaks. All the cribs had their leaks. “If it got no leak then it wouldn’t exactly be a crib,” Oscar the Pimp once told her by way of excuse for not fixing hers.

Money is short but steady in the cribs. This is the low budget world of whoring where sailors can have a go for a dollar or less, usually counted out in the form of nickels and dimes. “Crib-nickels” they called them-sailors rarely holding paper money in their pockets. The higher class bordellos of Basin Street are for the mid-to-high society men who want more than just to fuck; they want music and atmosphere and a woman’s tender touch (along with tender lies) before their britches come down. It’s the tenderness and music that costs extra-you can’t expect such fancy things for no combination of crib-nickels.

In the cribs, the pay is low and tenderness is dispensed at the whore’s discretion, but traffic is high and the nickels can really add up if a girl works long hours.

Five solid years in that crib on Marais.

Five years turning sheets over between customers because she didn’t have time to wash. Five years of watching other girls get sick, then die of flesh plague, wondering when her own turn might come up-hoping, on some days, that it might be sooner rather than later. Five years of being handled rough by sailors, listening to their nasty mouths and feeling their fists when they couldn’t get it hard after six months eating sea rations spiked with saltpetre. Five years wiping tears from the faces of women who had to decide between a “trick baby” and a visit to Doctor Jack for a “cure.” Five years of phony smiling, leaning half naked through a window saying, “C’mon pretty papa, come take a li’l nap with mama.” Drawing in flies. Needing their nickels. Hating their grins. Wishing them harm.

Sometimes doing harm.

During her time in the cribs, Diphtheria Morningstar had kept a knife under her mattress. Seven-inch blade with a four-inch wooden handle, a knife meant for gutting fish. Just in case, for self defense.

Diphtheria knew better than to use a blade simply because a john might give her a smack on the jaw or skip without paying. Oscar would turn her over to the cops quick as a whip for cutting a john over something so small. But if her life was in actual and immediate peril, well, that was a different matter. A pimp can’t make a red penny off a dead whore, and so Oscar tended towards sympathy regarding humanitarian plights that might result in lost profits.

The bruises around her throat had been proof enough for Oscar on the night she’d used the fish knife. The bruises were less from pressing than from the rub of rough, callused hands, but those hands had meant to kill Diphtheria Morningstar all the same. Oscar had been a real sport; dumping that sailor’s body in the Bayou St. John and bringing around a clean mattress with a new set of sheets that same night. Oscar had snuffed out Diphtheria’s red lantern while the night was still young, told her to rest up, feel better, don’t worry about the cops-and even gave her a dixie (a ten dollar bill) to keep her mouth shut. Oscar had taken care of everything the night she had killed the sailor-and by the next morning it was like it never happened. All gone except for the remembering.

Remembering his limp dick flop against her thigh, only getting harder as his fingers tightened around her neck, his eyes feeding on her terror, filling his terrible, handsome face with a look of cold confidence and dumb power, his complete control over her life and death being the key to his sexual success, to his defeat of the saltpetre in his veins. She remembered looking into those wide black pupils, eyes like a shark, and seeing death. A part of her beaten soul welcomed the sight.

She remembered the ease of giving up, slipping into sleep, watching those depthless eyes fade and melt into the flickering gray of his face, a concrete statue come to deliver her from the crib. Was this man her knight in shining armor? Come to take her from this awful place, to show her something better?

No, he wasn’t that. Wasn’t that at all. But it was true he had delivered her from the crib. At least for a moment.

For a moment she was gone.

Diphtheria remembered touching death with her fingertips, caressing its cheek, kissing its nose, swimming in its thick waters, its music tickling her ears. The music was familiar and telling, its voice gentle and firm. It was the sound of Buddy’s horn, the same strange sound it made the night her father died, the sound it made while Buddy’s fingers splayed and stretched above the instrument, impossibly; not touching the keys at all. The music spoke to her dying mind the night she touched death; said that love was life , not death. Not now, not yet.

And so, before her heart had beat its last, she had reached beneath the mattress.