Chapter 42 (part 2)
And speaking of grocery stores, you don’t just grab a cart and haul butt up and down the aisles anymore. Nope. You go on the one day of the month that you’ve been scheduled, depending on the first letter of your surname that appears on your official documents – and you walk in with your ration book, a list, and a debit or EBT card. Grocery stores no longer accept scrip or cash, so if that’s how you get paid you need to deposit it. If you live on an EBT card you better have the discipline not to spend it ‘til you need it. Rent payments, utility payments, and quarterly taxes are automatically deducted from EBTs so there is a lot less fraud in the system – and a lot more reason to work your way off the system so you have more control of how your income is distributing and to whom.
Once you make it into the store, you better behave … or else. You hand over your list, ration card, and ID to a clerk and you stand there quiet or lose your place and have to wait around until next month. And no I’m not kidding. Another rule is only one person per family is allowed in and they have to be at least eighteen. Makes it challenging for people with kids but you gotta do what you gotta do and most people go during school anyway because they’ve made lights out time and curfews stricter. And it keeps the addicts and their type from selling what’s on their cards for drugs. The country went through about a month of finding dead addicts all over the place, some OD’d, some died of the DTs, and some died because they were so stupid they’d huff poison rather than get straight.
You’d think people would cause more of a stink than they do, but that only lasted a couple of times with people not being able to get regular groceries. The ruckus is also kept down because only so many people are allowed in at a time and there’s usually private security or even national guard or military personnel with rifles roaming around to keep the peace.
People are beat down but most of them still seem to be able to get up in the morning and make something of the day. I will admit that the death rolls are hard to read when they update them. I check every time even though it tears me up to do it. I try and keep track of all my old friends and so far so good. Em doesn’t. I guess he was in long enough that more of his friends have been KIA. I dread the day I’ll find someone’s name there, and I try really hard not to believe that the day is coming, but looking around and seeing that most families have lost someone or know someone who had, it looks like the day will come whether I want it to or not.
On the plus side of the ledger, Mr. Julius and Aunt Orélie have buried the hatchet. Momma LeBlanc said it is answered prayers as none of them are getting any younger. Don’t get me wrong, they’ll still pick at each other a bit, but they do seem to have found common ground where Fabrice is concerned. I think Mr. Julius not drinking as much as he used it has helped as well. Sure doesn’t hurt that Fabrice rarely sees his father these days. The man got caught doing something he shouldn’t and he was forced to volunteer to work on the road gang that keeps the local highways and biways in good repair for all the military and national guard vehicles that travel on them. The little bit of time Dante gets to call his own, he isn’t spending it on his kid. Fontaine and Franc get more time than Fabrice and they’re just his nephews. Word on the street he may even be the dumbtastic duo’s half-brother as his father also spent time with Serafina. Whatever upside-down mess that is, Fabrice is out of it more than he is in, though his mother is her own kind of hot mess. But she’s not around too much either as she works in a packing plant between here and Lafayette and is only home on the weekends.
Thibaut is just as big a mess as he’s always been though some of it might be an act, I haven’t decided yet and frankly not too sure I care to puzzle it out. He received his draft card but failed the physical exam and got sent home. He has something called protanomaly, which is a type of red/green color blindness. It doesn’t keep him from driving, but it keeps him from being able to read a lot of the digital gauges he would need to in the military. Turns out for Tib violets may be blue but roses aren’t red. His girlfriend Jackie griped, “No wonder Valentines has never been a big deal to him.” Okay. Maybe that’s one excuse.
Em made peace with leaving the military. Every once in a while, I can tell he’s thinking about it but since he’s been able to get that special designation on a license … Master Electrician … he gets regular work. He tries to only take jobs that need a higher experience level so the local journeymen electricians get some work too. That makes him a good guy and his fellow electricians treat him with respect which is I think the best thing that has helped him negotiate that unexpected left turn that life threw at him. His back and leg are also better and only on real bad days does he hurt … and he’s learned to need something for it besides a pill. He doesn’t even like to take a Tylenol or anything, relying solely on liniment or similar.
While Em studied to get his license he poked at me until I agreed to get my GED. I don’t see that it has done much for me but I gotta admit it was nice to get that knocked off my list of things that needed doing. And while it might not help now, Em seems convinced that some place down the line it will come in handy. Might at that, but I’m not waiting around for it to fix any problems I run into.
The town librarians know me pretty well by now. I’ve even got my own library card finally. And geez, wasn’t that harder to get than my driver’s license. When I wasn’t studying for my GED, I checked out books on reading and writing Acadian so often that one of the ladies that worked there said I should make my own dictionary. I thought that idea was so good that I did that very thing by using index cards I cut in half and strung them together with binder rings. One ring is Acadian to English and the other set is English to Acadian. It was too hard to just have one set when I was trying to keep the cards in alphabetical order. And this way I can add new words as I run into them. I also have another ring with cards in it that no one would understand. I’ve been working on translating Uncle Henley’s journal.
It’s a slog, and kinda embarrassing in places, but I think I understand Uncle Henley more … and maybe my parents as well. Uncle Henley saw Mom first, she just wasn’t interested in him because he was too wild and since she grew up in a home like that and didn’t want any part of it she didn’t want him. She did want Dad. Uncle Henley says it was love at first sight. T … M … I. He kinda blames that in the beginning for him hopping from woman to woman. But when I got to the day my family was killed … I guess it took a little bit but he had a Come To Jesus moment. And he really did think I was better off in foster care. I have a hard time understanding how he could think that, but it is right there in black and white that it is what he did think. I also found out why he didn’t write as often as I would have liked. Some social worker told him that I wouldn’t acclimate and recover from the trauma of things if he kept putting his nose into my life. I’d like to rip that woman baldheaded but there’s no going back and changing things. Maybe if he had tried to clue me in, but he didn’t so I couldn’t tell him they were full of crap.
Sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out what he’s written. The more shorthand he uses the harder it is. And for some things I think he is just making it up as he goes along. The journal or whatever you want to call it covers almost ten years and there’s an obvious difference in his writing in the beginning and the writing he did at the end, or at least what I have of the end. I’ve learned things about Pa-pere and Granmere, and other family members, that I never knew as I was always the youngest and out of touch … kept out of touch. I’ve looked back through the pictures and letters and stuff after I read something in the journal and a lot of them have notes tacked to them or put between the pictures and the back of the frame. It shows where those people belong on the family tree and sometimes there’s stories that explain who they were or what they did in their lives.
As I cleaned up the storage room and organized it, I found other things too, like a box that had a bunch of pictures and stuff about my biological grandfather and his family. The pictures of Granmere are wild; she looks so young and happy, nothing like I remember her being. I found out that after the baby that she had with Pa-pere died, she turned strange for a little bit and the entire family was really worried for her but she came back from it, just a little less flexible and needing things to be just so or she’d get upset real easy. Uncle Henley said she got that way even more as she got older and towards the end of her life it was almost more than he could deal with but the few times he tried to talk to her about moving closer to better healthcare she would come completely undone and he just gave up and stayed with her as long as she stayed on earth. She was his mother and they were all the two of them had left.
The one thing though is that Uncle Henley really did mean for me to come to him after I aged out of the system. It’s in just about everything he left behind. All the notes. The things he was doing. How he left his will. He wrote as if he really had meant to keep the money from Dad’s will for me to have. And he also wrote about things I don’t expect he ever thought I would read or find out. Things I was shocked to find out because I sure don’t remember them.
Pa-pere had a brother. A twin brother no less. Only this brother was different from him as night from day despite the fact that were identical in looks. Something happened when I was real little. I sure don’t remember it and Lalli and DJ were pretty young and were sworn to secrecy about it … or so remembered Uncle Henley in his journal as he worried whether he should tell me or not. Seems Dad and Pa-pere’s brother had a disagreement over something. Uncle Henley didn’t say exactly what it was about but it had something to do with how much favor that Pa-pere was showing me. I know it was because I reminded him of the little girl he and Granmere had lost but I didn’t know anyone in the family objected to it.
Well one time when we were visiting them I went missing. It rattled everyone in the family. They thought at first I’d wandered off into the swamp; I was fearless even as a baby. But somehow Pa-pere found out his brother had me and if he didn’t sign some paper or other they weren’t getting me back. Uncle Henley writes like he is talking to himself and already knows the story so I don’t have all of it but I think that Pa-pere picked me over his brother and his brother wasn’t ever heard from again and nobody said nothing. I’m not too sure a missing person report was ever filled out. I tried to look it up in different kinds of records but haven’t found squat. It sorta explains why Dad point blank refused to move back home … I guess Pa-pere’s brother had some kids of his own and a little bit of feuding was threatened. Weird. I also found out that Granmere was a little jealous of the attention that Pa-pere showed me when we visited. Lalli was her favorite even over my Aunt Julie’s kids which is why it wasn’t that big of a tear for her to leave the family … until there was supposed to be money to be inherited. Ugh, what a mess that was to read about. The other thing I found out is that Pa-pere’s Treasure Box had disappeared for a while after his death. It was in his will that I was supposed to get it but no one could find it. Uncle Henley finally found it Granmere’s trunk that held all her mementos and a lot of the old family pictures. She had known where it was all along. She told Uncle Henley that she didn’t want to give it to me until she had seen what was inside and made sure it was appropriate but that she’d never been able to figure the trick out and had completely forgotten about it after my family died. Well maybe she did forget about it and maybe she didn’t. Uncle Henley never spoke (wrote) a bad word against Granmere so I’m not sure what he thought about it. What I do know is that Uncle Henley had known how to get into it because he’d overheard Pa-pere showing me how once.
Well he says there was nothing in there that I couldn’t have had and that he planned on giving it to me when I came to him. I don’t know why the lock is all rusted like it is but to get to the special piece that unlocks the box I have to get through that rust and that’s what I do when I absolutely have nothing else to do. I take WD40 and a nail and I’ve been chipping away at the rust little by little. Hopefully one of these days I’ll break through. But it won’t be tonight. Tib turned me on to some crapwork at the grocery. Three of the stock boys got called up and it has left the store in a bad way as they have two trucks coming in tonight. Unloading the trucks has to be done fast and in the dark and then the shelves have to be stocked too before the store reopens. My reputation precedes me so to speak, plus Sgt. Kramer is part of the local delivery operations, so I was suggested as someone who wouldn’t mind the piece work without the normal bennies. Dang straight that’s me. Queen of Crapwork.
I’ve only been waiting for twilight to set in so I can put Green and Greener through their paces and then into the garden. It is warm enough these days I don’t have any trouble convincing them to come along. They aren’t the biggest gators in the area and they’re quite happy to skedaddle into the fence area rather than having to fight it out with Mr. Big and Mr. Bad. I’m not too fond of those two dinosaurs myself, but they do add a layer of security that most places don’t have. They’ve also been known to encourage the younger military personnel how bad an idea it might be to go out after lights out.
And speaking of grocery stores, you don’t just grab a cart and haul butt up and down the aisles anymore. Nope. You go on the one day of the month that you’ve been scheduled, depending on the first letter of your surname that appears on your official documents – and you walk in with your ration book, a list, and a debit or EBT card. Grocery stores no longer accept scrip or cash, so if that’s how you get paid you need to deposit it. If you live on an EBT card you better have the discipline not to spend it ‘til you need it. Rent payments, utility payments, and quarterly taxes are automatically deducted from EBTs so there is a lot less fraud in the system – and a lot more reason to work your way off the system so you have more control of how your income is distributing and to whom.
Once you make it into the store, you better behave … or else. You hand over your list, ration card, and ID to a clerk and you stand there quiet or lose your place and have to wait around until next month. And no I’m not kidding. Another rule is only one person per family is allowed in and they have to be at least eighteen. Makes it challenging for people with kids but you gotta do what you gotta do and most people go during school anyway because they’ve made lights out time and curfews stricter. And it keeps the addicts and their type from selling what’s on their cards for drugs. The country went through about a month of finding dead addicts all over the place, some OD’d, some died of the DTs, and some died because they were so stupid they’d huff poison rather than get straight.
You’d think people would cause more of a stink than they do, but that only lasted a couple of times with people not being able to get regular groceries. The ruckus is also kept down because only so many people are allowed in at a time and there’s usually private security or even national guard or military personnel with rifles roaming around to keep the peace.
People are beat down but most of them still seem to be able to get up in the morning and make something of the day. I will admit that the death rolls are hard to read when they update them. I check every time even though it tears me up to do it. I try and keep track of all my old friends and so far so good. Em doesn’t. I guess he was in long enough that more of his friends have been KIA. I dread the day I’ll find someone’s name there, and I try really hard not to believe that the day is coming, but looking around and seeing that most families have lost someone or know someone who had, it looks like the day will come whether I want it to or not.
On the plus side of the ledger, Mr. Julius and Aunt Orélie have buried the hatchet. Momma LeBlanc said it is answered prayers as none of them are getting any younger. Don’t get me wrong, they’ll still pick at each other a bit, but they do seem to have found common ground where Fabrice is concerned. I think Mr. Julius not drinking as much as he used it has helped as well. Sure doesn’t hurt that Fabrice rarely sees his father these days. The man got caught doing something he shouldn’t and he was forced to volunteer to work on the road gang that keeps the local highways and biways in good repair for all the military and national guard vehicles that travel on them. The little bit of time Dante gets to call his own, he isn’t spending it on his kid. Fontaine and Franc get more time than Fabrice and they’re just his nephews. Word on the street he may even be the dumbtastic duo’s half-brother as his father also spent time with Serafina. Whatever upside-down mess that is, Fabrice is out of it more than he is in, though his mother is her own kind of hot mess. But she’s not around too much either as she works in a packing plant between here and Lafayette and is only home on the weekends.
Thibaut is just as big a mess as he’s always been though some of it might be an act, I haven’t decided yet and frankly not too sure I care to puzzle it out. He received his draft card but failed the physical exam and got sent home. He has something called protanomaly, which is a type of red/green color blindness. It doesn’t keep him from driving, but it keeps him from being able to read a lot of the digital gauges he would need to in the military. Turns out for Tib violets may be blue but roses aren’t red. His girlfriend Jackie griped, “No wonder Valentines has never been a big deal to him.” Okay. Maybe that’s one excuse.
Em made peace with leaving the military. Every once in a while, I can tell he’s thinking about it but since he’s been able to get that special designation on a license … Master Electrician … he gets regular work. He tries to only take jobs that need a higher experience level so the local journeymen electricians get some work too. That makes him a good guy and his fellow electricians treat him with respect which is I think the best thing that has helped him negotiate that unexpected left turn that life threw at him. His back and leg are also better and only on real bad days does he hurt … and he’s learned to need something for it besides a pill. He doesn’t even like to take a Tylenol or anything, relying solely on liniment or similar.
While Em studied to get his license he poked at me until I agreed to get my GED. I don’t see that it has done much for me but I gotta admit it was nice to get that knocked off my list of things that needed doing. And while it might not help now, Em seems convinced that some place down the line it will come in handy. Might at that, but I’m not waiting around for it to fix any problems I run into.
The town librarians know me pretty well by now. I’ve even got my own library card finally. And geez, wasn’t that harder to get than my driver’s license. When I wasn’t studying for my GED, I checked out books on reading and writing Acadian so often that one of the ladies that worked there said I should make my own dictionary. I thought that idea was so good that I did that very thing by using index cards I cut in half and strung them together with binder rings. One ring is Acadian to English and the other set is English to Acadian. It was too hard to just have one set when I was trying to keep the cards in alphabetical order. And this way I can add new words as I run into them. I also have another ring with cards in it that no one would understand. I’ve been working on translating Uncle Henley’s journal.
It’s a slog, and kinda embarrassing in places, but I think I understand Uncle Henley more … and maybe my parents as well. Uncle Henley saw Mom first, she just wasn’t interested in him because he was too wild and since she grew up in a home like that and didn’t want any part of it she didn’t want him. She did want Dad. Uncle Henley says it was love at first sight. T … M … I. He kinda blames that in the beginning for him hopping from woman to woman. But when I got to the day my family was killed … I guess it took a little bit but he had a Come To Jesus moment. And he really did think I was better off in foster care. I have a hard time understanding how he could think that, but it is right there in black and white that it is what he did think. I also found out why he didn’t write as often as I would have liked. Some social worker told him that I wouldn’t acclimate and recover from the trauma of things if he kept putting his nose into my life. I’d like to rip that woman baldheaded but there’s no going back and changing things. Maybe if he had tried to clue me in, but he didn’t so I couldn’t tell him they were full of crap.
Sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out what he’s written. The more shorthand he uses the harder it is. And for some things I think he is just making it up as he goes along. The journal or whatever you want to call it covers almost ten years and there’s an obvious difference in his writing in the beginning and the writing he did at the end, or at least what I have of the end. I’ve learned things about Pa-pere and Granmere, and other family members, that I never knew as I was always the youngest and out of touch … kept out of touch. I’ve looked back through the pictures and letters and stuff after I read something in the journal and a lot of them have notes tacked to them or put between the pictures and the back of the frame. It shows where those people belong on the family tree and sometimes there’s stories that explain who they were or what they did in their lives.
As I cleaned up the storage room and organized it, I found other things too, like a box that had a bunch of pictures and stuff about my biological grandfather and his family. The pictures of Granmere are wild; she looks so young and happy, nothing like I remember her being. I found out that after the baby that she had with Pa-pere died, she turned strange for a little bit and the entire family was really worried for her but she came back from it, just a little less flexible and needing things to be just so or she’d get upset real easy. Uncle Henley said she got that way even more as she got older and towards the end of her life it was almost more than he could deal with but the few times he tried to talk to her about moving closer to better healthcare she would come completely undone and he just gave up and stayed with her as long as she stayed on earth. She was his mother and they were all the two of them had left.
The one thing though is that Uncle Henley really did mean for me to come to him after I aged out of the system. It’s in just about everything he left behind. All the notes. The things he was doing. How he left his will. He wrote as if he really had meant to keep the money from Dad’s will for me to have. And he also wrote about things I don’t expect he ever thought I would read or find out. Things I was shocked to find out because I sure don’t remember them.
Pa-pere had a brother. A twin brother no less. Only this brother was different from him as night from day despite the fact that were identical in looks. Something happened when I was real little. I sure don’t remember it and Lalli and DJ were pretty young and were sworn to secrecy about it … or so remembered Uncle Henley in his journal as he worried whether he should tell me or not. Seems Dad and Pa-pere’s brother had a disagreement over something. Uncle Henley didn’t say exactly what it was about but it had something to do with how much favor that Pa-pere was showing me. I know it was because I reminded him of the little girl he and Granmere had lost but I didn’t know anyone in the family objected to it.
Well one time when we were visiting them I went missing. It rattled everyone in the family. They thought at first I’d wandered off into the swamp; I was fearless even as a baby. But somehow Pa-pere found out his brother had me and if he didn’t sign some paper or other they weren’t getting me back. Uncle Henley writes like he is talking to himself and already knows the story so I don’t have all of it but I think that Pa-pere picked me over his brother and his brother wasn’t ever heard from again and nobody said nothing. I’m not too sure a missing person report was ever filled out. I tried to look it up in different kinds of records but haven’t found squat. It sorta explains why Dad point blank refused to move back home … I guess Pa-pere’s brother had some kids of his own and a little bit of feuding was threatened. Weird. I also found out that Granmere was a little jealous of the attention that Pa-pere showed me when we visited. Lalli was her favorite even over my Aunt Julie’s kids which is why it wasn’t that big of a tear for her to leave the family … until there was supposed to be money to be inherited. Ugh, what a mess that was to read about. The other thing I found out is that Pa-pere’s Treasure Box had disappeared for a while after his death. It was in his will that I was supposed to get it but no one could find it. Uncle Henley finally found it Granmere’s trunk that held all her mementos and a lot of the old family pictures. She had known where it was all along. She told Uncle Henley that she didn’t want to give it to me until she had seen what was inside and made sure it was appropriate but that she’d never been able to figure the trick out and had completely forgotten about it after my family died. Well maybe she did forget about it and maybe she didn’t. Uncle Henley never spoke (wrote) a bad word against Granmere so I’m not sure what he thought about it. What I do know is that Uncle Henley had known how to get into it because he’d overheard Pa-pere showing me how once.
Well he says there was nothing in there that I couldn’t have had and that he planned on giving it to me when I came to him. I don’t know why the lock is all rusted like it is but to get to the special piece that unlocks the box I have to get through that rust and that’s what I do when I absolutely have nothing else to do. I take WD40 and a nail and I’ve been chipping away at the rust little by little. Hopefully one of these days I’ll break through. But it won’t be tonight. Tib turned me on to some crapwork at the grocery. Three of the stock boys got called up and it has left the store in a bad way as they have two trucks coming in tonight. Unloading the trucks has to be done fast and in the dark and then the shelves have to be stocked too before the store reopens. My reputation precedes me so to speak, plus Sgt. Kramer is part of the local delivery operations, so I was suggested as someone who wouldn’t mind the piece work without the normal bennies. Dang straight that’s me. Queen of Crapwork.
I’ve only been waiting for twilight to set in so I can put Green and Greener through their paces and then into the garden. It is warm enough these days I don’t have any trouble convincing them to come along. They aren’t the biggest gators in the area and they’re quite happy to skedaddle into the fence area rather than having to fight it out with Mr. Big and Mr. Bad. I’m not too fond of those two dinosaurs myself, but they do add a layer of security that most places don’t have. They’ve also been known to encourage the younger military personnel how bad an idea it might be to go out after lights out.
