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Mark Twain Comes to Cut Off, Louisiana: A Ghost Story

by Stephanie Soileau

I. What to Eat When There’s Nothing to Eat

How could you, Mark Twain? How could you lie in that bed-out-of-nowhere, in my kitchen suddenly, covered to your chin with quilt and comfort, and suggest that I feed my family raw turnips?

I’ve got nothing to put with those turnips, I said. No salt. No onions. Nothing. They won’t make much of a soup. You said, Don’t cook them, Marie. Your family won’t know the difference. How could I set my table, on your word, for a five-course meal?

And how, then, could you titter through your moustache while Ulysse commended the pork roast; my seven children the gumbo, greens, cobbler, and no one asked where or how, or thought of turnips?

Then night after night, when one and then another and another of the children took to bed with tummies swollen and hard (as turnips), and mouths round for complaining, but mute—only burps popping like bubbles from their lips; when, one by one, they settled into the straw mattress, deflated of turnip-gas and soul—and, Mark Twain, when Ulysse carried the wilted bodies, one every night for a week, and potted them in the mire behind the chicken house while I and my dwindling brood paced the yard where there had been no chickens since fall—

How could you wiggle your toes like that, cozy under your counterpane, delighted?

And when, praying the Our Father at our kitchen table after he buried the last, Ulysse belched at kingdom come, and said, Marie, j’mai sent comme ci j’manger trop navet. J’ai de gaz—how could I tug at the hairs on the hide seat of my chair and answer him: It’s only grief. And you, in the corner by the door, bobbing your white head. Even the bedsprings laughed at your joke.

In the morning, Ulysse passed through you in his hat and boots and shabby coat pulled tight across his belly—you, still in your bed, with your nightcap cocked over one eye. He didn’t notice you at all. I’ll go till I find work, he said. Now, even the turnips were gone. Amen, I said, as you plucked a button from his coat, as his belly tumbled free, as he tottered down the road towards town to look for work where there was no work, only mud roads skirting a dead river and branching out into the subtropical everywhere winter.

*Marie, I feel like I've eaten too many turnips. I've got gas.

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