Lavinia's Jar

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a light glowed in the window.

Now, the first thing you need to know is, this wasn't just any old cabin. This was great uncle Jonjon's cabin, and if you've heard anything about him, you would know this was one cabin anyone with any sense in their head would keep away from like liquor on Sabbath day. No? You haven't? Well, let me keep talking, and I'll explain about him in due time.

The second thing you need to know is, this wasn't just any old woods. Those were Louisiana swamp woods, and as far away from any weak-kneed whistle in the dark strut about as you got here as there could be. You walk out here, maybe you trip on a rock. Maybe you get stung by a yellow jacket, get startled by a deer. Down there, well. You can't even trust the ground down there to stay ground. You'd be walking along, not paying attention, looking at that pretty moss swaying in the trees. Next thing you know, you're knee deep in muck and a gator's sizing you up deciding if you'd be better as lunch or a midnight snack. You think I'm lying? Don't be so wise. Just because you don't know it don't mean it ain't gonna kill you.

Old Jonjon had been in that bayou since anyone could remember. His daddy died from tuberculosis before he was born. Got it while serving a little sentence for debt owed down in the Parish jail. His mamma, she was her parent's youngest. Fresh as a magnolia petal and that's what they called her, Petal. I expect she would have been just fine raising Jonjon with the rest of the family, but that was not to be. She was with her big mamma way out in the tidal zone pulling shrimp traps when the birth started. It came on fierce and hard like a freight barreling down and her caught in the headlights. Her mamma knew she wouldn't be able to get back to shore in time and set to catch the baby right there in the boat, but something was wrong. The baby was all bound up in a way that wouldn't forgive, and when big mamma couldn't staunch the flow her heart like to died, watching her youngest fade as the blood filled the floorboards. But those women were cast out of strong iron back then and when she realized she couldn't save her daughter, and Petal's lips kissed their last breath, big mamma took out her fillet knife and got that baby out as fast and slick as gutting a fish. So that was how Jonjon came into this world.

He was a capable boy and that goes without saying, seeing that down there in those swamps it's either capable or dead. By three he could pole around the dock and by 6 shoot a possum and by 8 fell a deer. The folks grew him with all they knew but there's no substitute for a mother's love and with how he came about there couldn't help but be a little distance between him and big mamma. Still, she raised him as best her heart could and poulticed his wounds and slapped his behind when he needed it and fed him all the good things that flap and swim and strode onto your plate down there. But God takes what he will when he will and by the time Jonjon was 13, both of his grandparents were dead. Now if you were up here in one of these cities, and that happened, all sorts of strangers would be sticking their nose in it and he would've gotten plucked from his roots like a weed and sent off somewhere far away to who knows what kind of treatment. Funny what people call civilized. But down there in those swamps and at that time, folks saw he had a home and knew how to take care of his own and let him be. They kept an eye on him though, come by at least once a week with some pawpaw or tupelo honey or traded some game from him for flour or fat or fuel or just about anything else he could need. And so he went on like that til he got to be a man at 18.

Well, you bet he surprised them all when he took a notion to somehow get into Tulane over in the Crescent. He closed the cabin shutters, threw the last scraps of food out into the yard, and jammed the heavy bench on the front porch up against the door, since there wasn't any lock on it. And just... disappeared. Word got back that he was working the docks down there during the day and doing classes at night to learn up on the three R's. Then nothing, for years. The cabin sat and waited, and no one made a move to touch a piece of it. It was Jonjon's and he would get back to it when he would.

It was seven years later when he returned, with as pretty a woman on his arm as you ever saw. Her name was Lavinia and she had been training as a nurse at Charity before arriving. She was skilled with her hands and could pull a splinter from you before you even realized you had one. You can be sure we were glad to have her. She had a patient face, one you could whisper your secrets to, and she would hold them there in the upturned corner of her mouth, to keep them from tipping out. Black hair and black coffee eyes. Milk skin.

Apparently, before her defection, she had been quite the Belle of the Ball there in the quarter. Always a carriage with a fine horse stopped in front of the house when she turned herself out on the terrace. Many a man cut his fingers trying to climb that trellis into her smile. But she had eyes only for dusky skinned Jonjon.

He had long since moved from the docks to the classroom and had taken work in the chemistry department as her father's assistant. Jonjon worked with him after school hours, mixing and heating and measuring and cooling volatile substances with a delicate touch that his large hunt-scarred hands belied.

Strange stories surrounded her father. It was whispered in the back rooms that as well as being a master of the tangible sciences, he dipped his hand in some darker brews. Then again, there may have been some prejudice in those assumptions. Just because it's something people aren't used to, don't mean it's evil. Voodoo is a religious practice, just as any other. Same people shrieking at a chicken with its throat slit have no problem sitting down to fried drumsticks that night. It's a fool who thinks their own world is the only one.

Anyways, I digress. Where was I now...

As I said, Jonjon came back with that missus fresh as cream and sporting a genuine gold embossed signed and stamped Degree from the esteemed Tulane University, stating that he had refined and excelled in his studies of Biology in general, and Herpetology in specific.

What's Herpetology you ask? No no, that's just fine, if I didn't grow up where I did, knowing who I did I wouldn't have the foggiest notion neither. Herpetology, it's evidenced, is the study of the creature that has plagued man since Eve decided Adam wasn't quite all God talked him up to be. The serpent himself. Jonjon showed up and pulled away the bench and swept all the nests n critters out of the old house, and two days later, a special freight got delivered to the closest post. One by one, we could see him poling home with glass terrariums holding this viper or that constrictor, gold and green and iridescent ones, back and forth, 'til the last glass cage came out, and, from within it, writhed a snake like no one had ever seen in any book or wilds, local or otherwise. It was long and thin, like rope, glossy black, with an oddly large head and eyes that shifted blue to green to purple to copper, and slitted pupils so fine as to not be able to see them at all. Its tongue was the red of blood and when little Sue Ann crouched down to look at it through the glass, while it was caged up on the porch awaiting the return of Jonjon, she fell into such a state her mama had to carry her home and she was in bed for a week, eyes vacant staring up at nothing. Then just like that the following Monday she come out of it, don't remember a thing but said she had some frightful Haints in her dreams.

They set up house and seemed as blissful as could be. Lavinia had a way of making Jonjon go soft and warm as a buttered biscuit. Her being a healer was a real boon round there, being that the nearest hospital was over 100 miles out and half the folks didn't even trust it enough to go there 'til it was mostly too late. She could wrap and set and staunch and soothe most of the complaints we had when I was young.

Jonjon would take long trips out into the bayou, coming back with grasshoppers the size of your hand or a kingfisher with a wounded wing. Some of them were patched up and put in small cages 'til they could be released, the ones who didn't make it though, were carefully drained and resigned to hang suspended in clear fluid, in a jar corresponding to their size, with a neat label in Latin on the front written in Lavinia's graceful cursive. They got embalming fluid sent by the gallon, and large crates of jars in varying sizes arrived regularly to the post. Occasionally he would arrive at the post office with a box marked fragile, liquid, perishable, and it would get sent off to universities all over the world, places whose names took up half the package to write.

This went on fine for some years when I was young, until I was about 8 or so. Most of my memories of being in their home involved her quick hands easing the pain in whatever limb I had managed to mangle, and of gazing around, fascinated by the endless shelves of preserved creatures, lined up like some sort of death aquarium. This was great stuff for a young boy's mind, and I suspect that at least half that pain relief came from sheer distraction, especially when the floorboards trembled a little, causing the creatures to drift and spin ever so slightly. Had that eye been open before? Did that arm just twitch?

The day Jonjon died we could hear her screams clear as a bell across the water. Most of the neighbors were too frightened to go near but eventually the sheriff came and before long we all got word of what had conspired. According to him, when he opened the door, there was Jonjon lying next to a shattered terrarium, face and hands bloated up purple like an overripe muscadine, and Lavinia nearby on the floor lying on top of an overturned white enamel pot. When the sheriff tried to get her to sit up she refused, saying that she couldn't, and eventually he figured out that she had trapped the creature that had delivered the fatal bite and damned if she'd let it go.

Now, I'll give you one guess as to which of those snakes delivered its poison, and if you can't answer correct, I can just stop this story right now.

That's right. The one that looked like the devil's noose itself.

None of us figured she'd last long out here without Jonjon. And none of us for sure could have predicted what she did directly after his death. Sheriff was of a mind to dispatch that snake as quickly as he possibly could, but she refused it. Told him it was her property and that he had no rights on it. He argued with her for a while but there was a buzz coming up over his radio about a high-speed hot pursuit of the Lawson boy and he was getting closer to the Texas border by the minute and Buddy had nothing if not the twitchiest lead foot in the surrounding 5 Parishes. So when given a decision between wheedling with a madwoman and tearing up some tarmac with the possibility of a promotion at the end of it the choice was pretty clear.

Back in those days and in those parts we were allowed to do what we saw fit with our kin when they passed the veil. We had a lovely little cemetery on some higher ground and all of us offered to pitch in to get him a crypt, but she flatly refused. Wouldn't even let us come in to help with the corpse. She went to the post, sent off a money order to a familiar address, and closed the house up tight, shutters and all. Three days later the largest crate yet arrived and it took Boudreaux with his fan boat to get it to the house. Had to leave it on the porch, she wouldn't even let him bring it in.

After two weeks, a small white sign with a red cross appeared on the dock, and she opened her doors again. Jonjon's direct kin had all passed on and with him being gone for so long and having the solitary nature that he did even before then, none of the neighbors felt too comfortable asking any close questions. Then Jenny got a compound break in her forearm when her hand got caught just wrong in a dock rope, and Lavinia had her as a patient. After that they trickled in, and things got back to a sort of uneasy keel.

Wasn't long though til the first strange stories came in. In the beginning we just thought she was attending to her soul by not charging anything for her services. But it was noticed... She didn't quite not take anything. Sometimes it was so subtle as to not even be obvious. After all, you're not going to ask for your earwax back after your ear has been candled for infection. First time was when she pulled Becca's tooth and refused to give it back to her to take home. She just smiled, washing the blood off her hands and popping a piece of cotton in the hole, and said "Consider it payment." Then nearly shoved her out the door. Then there was that time Hank came fairly tore up with eczema. She placed a white bowl under his arms and told him part of the treatment was to shed the skin. Then she commenced to raking her nails so fiercely over his red mottled flesh that he said it was all he could do to not cry out. Big flakes of scab and skin shore off into the bowl, and after a sizeable pile had accrued in the bottom of it, and his flesh was raw and bleeding, she stopped and wrapped his arms with poultice and gauze. He said it felt like it took twice as long to heal as usual. Then Molly came in crying her poor heart out after being stung fierce by yellowjackets and before anything, before putting on baking soda or giving her Benadryl or even trying to comfort her, Lavinia got a small glass vial out and held her head and pressed it to her cheeks, sliding upwards, catching those tears like folks harvest snake venom for the cure. It seemed anything that came off the human body, she would collect. Sweat, phlegm, nails, hair...It got so bad that even though she was more or less free, people began to avoid her. There was another man one town over who had been in the curing business for over 60 years, and even though he charged and his hands shook with palsy so bad that he had begun to ask the patients to administer their own shots, it was still more attractive to the neighbors than her with her questionable practices.

The final straw came when old Mrs. Landry, the widow of 2 preachers back, came in to see about her fainting spells. She had always taken a motherly interest in Lavinia and brought her pepper jelly and andouille sausage and other small tokens of care. Landry came to on Lavinia's chaise lounge, unable to open her eyes fully, with Lavinia straddled above her, eyelash curlers in each hand clamped firmly on her gray lashes, right before she yanked them out. Mrs. Landry screamed and bolted out to her son waiting in the bright sun in the pirogue, and he poled her home to lay with petroleum jelly on her lids for a spell of days.

Suffice to say that was that, and no one set foot on her dock again.

After several months, we saw that the heavy porch bench was once again pushed against the door, the small red and white sign taken down, and shutters closed tight.

Some years passed then, and the cabin began its slow reclamation by the swamp. Spanish moss drifted off the eaves of the porch, lichen stained the roof a rich green, dock boards began to warp and soften. But the main house was built of cypress, and that wasn't gonna go anywhere. You can dig up cypress logs that have lain in the dark tannin waters for 500 years and break your saw trying to cut them. No joke.

For us kids it was a great place for unfulfilled dares and the kind of stories that stretch the boundaries of your conception of life in delicious, painful ways. We loved to invent more and more fantastic things that Nurse Lavinia would steal from you, right up to and including your very soul. For all our talk though, not a single one of us would venture off the boat onto her dock. We touched the place with our tales, but not our bodies.

Eventually, as children tend to do when allowed, we all grew up, and dispersed ourselves from those waters in the directions our interests followed most. For me it was the trolley clang and oak arches and pulsing music of La Grande Dame Nouvelle Orleans, where I got a job as a mule and carriage man in the Quarter. I roved the streets like a starved wolf at night, sinking my teeth into the bars and hedonism that everyone who comes to New Orleans thinks that they will consume, but instead consumes them. Despite any intentions otherwise I got myself into more than a bit of trouble, and it wasn't pretty or exciting or intriguing like those tales we told each other back home. It was just downright bad and ugly.

I came home at age 25 a hollow man, intent on building up my soul with the things that fed my heart when I was young. Hunting, fishing, accordion music dancing across the dark still waters. Helping mama clean the kitchen and tend the garden and pickle green beans, hearing about how this one went off to Ole Miss for law school and that one was down in Lafayette playing music and getting sent all over the world with his music. And there I was not even knowing my own mind, taking one day at a time.

No, what I did don't concern you. Maybe you n me can have a talk about what roads Not to go down when you're older.

So it went that one night I was out gigging, looking for the frogs with the most meat on their thighs for mama to fry up with a little cornmeal and some seasonings. I wove this way and that with my boat, losing all sense of direction and time, the heady pulse of all those night creatures a musical cacophony in my ears. I was loving it and had about half a bag filled with their twitching bodies. Along came this bank that was near deafening with their call, and I slid my john boat up amongst the reeds and stepped out careful onto the spongy bank, going slow and silent as I could be. It wasn't but 5 steps in when a loud Snap! rang out and a fire like hell itself came shooting up my leg. I looked down and found my sockless sneaker bent oddly to the side below the biggest bear clamp I'd ever seen. I howled something fierce and that's when I saw the light come on over the hill. I still didn't know where I was, more familiar at night with the moonlit canals and reeded boat ways than any of the dark shadowed masses between. That clamp had dug in so deep I couldn't see the teeth where they met my flesh, but judging from the ones on either side, there was a good inch and a half sunk into my muscle. I could feel a strange sort of pressure where it dug hard into what I guessed was my bone. It looked as though the teeth had been altered, sharpened down to fine points. At that moment after the initial flash of pain my adrenaline kicked up so high I swear I couldn't feel a thing, just stared in shock at the clamp oozing blood. I'd fallen butt deep in the mud, and as I leaned forward, I sunk deeper, making me strain twice as hard to sit up. The clamp was chained and padlocked to a young cypress sapling, but I'd left my hunting knife in the boat, and even if I had it, it would take forever to carve through that trunk even as small as it was. I yelled, and then yelled again, voice hoarse with fear. My mind's wheels were turning fast, and I knew I needed to figure out something quick, before the pain settled in again. I sucked in my breath, found the spring-loaded levers on either side that would trigger release, and pushed them down hard into the soft ground. I pulled my leg back fast and my foot flopped on the end of it like the ball in a ball and cup game and the guards of my adrenaline broke with an agony of stabbing spasms. I watched a red fountain of blood start to spurt rhythmically with my pounding heart and knew it had struck an artery and I turned to the side and wretched and that was the last I knew of that moment.

I came to with a pale, careworn face hovering above me. It had beauty, and loneliness carved down the cheeks. In my peripheral vision I could see rows of jars like dead fisheyes, in a neat, orderly procession. In the corner, behind her, was a 6 or more-foot cylindrical object covered in faded gingham fabric. A piece of the fabric had fallen to the side, and there was the shine of glass and the corner of something round and pale inside. Pain radiated in hot waves over my body. I could feel my leg, lifted and bundled, but could not bear to look at it. She held up a cup with some pungent bitter liquid and said, "Drink." Her high forehead was slick with sweat and something like excitement glittered in the way she spoke.

I drank. My mind swam as the liquid burned down my throat, and my head slid to my shoulder, face hanging off the dusty velvet of the chaise lounge. Before my lids fell shut, I could see a white enamel bowl at the foot of the lounge, filled scarlet to the brim with what I could only guess was my blood. I remember wondering how I could still even be breathing, with that much blood spilled from the sack of my body, and then there was nothing but darkness.

The next time my eyes opened, it was to a light so bright it seared my vision. "He's awake" I heard a voice say, in panic, then a jab in my arm, and blessed nothing again.

The hospital she had dropped me at was far from our town, and the second time I awoke, I asked for a phone and balanced it carefully on my gown and dialed home. Mama's relief was salve to me. They had found my boat some 50 miles away, drifting in the currents out to sea.

She was there in two hours, wrapping her arms awkwardly around my head in the hospital bed and chattering all her endearances to me in an unending stream. I told her what happened as best I could remember, and she seemed downright puzzled.

"Lavinia? She came through about a week ago, just to check on things, but I'm pretty sure she left right quick. That house ain't fit to live in as it is, part of the roof caved in during the last hurricane." I wanted to protest, but every time I even started trying to remember that night, waves of nausea came over me so bad I eventually just stopped. Doctors say trauma works that way sometimes. Said no reason to push it when I was trying to heal.

The trap had cut deep into my artery, nearly severing it completely and shattering several of the small bones in my foot. It was a long recovery and gave me a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do next, and what kind of a person I wanted to be. I decided I might try my hand at medical school. It wasn't easy, but I worked my way through community college, then university at Baton Rouge, and finished my training in Magnolia at the Mississippi Regional Health Center. It was there I met your grandmother at the end of a long night at the ER, and I expect your mama has told you a lot of the rest.

What you don't know, is what happened that summer between community college and university. Mama had one stroke, and then another, and she lost the use of most of the right side of her body. I was neck deep in studies but took a month out in the summer to be with her. The days were long and hot and quiet, and she slept a lot, and I sat on the screened in porch and looked out over the waters. I got to thinking about Lavinia and Jonjon. At that point my memories of that dark night had faded to a back page, the closing words in a book before my new, more real life began. Word around was that there were signs of activity over at the old cabin, that the bench had been pushed from the door again, and new boards patched the dock. But no one had actually seen Lavinia. I ruminated on that brew she had given me and how well it had seemed to work to take both me and the pain out of the equation, and how useful that sort of thing could be when puzzling out how to try to patch someone together who is doing their best to stop you from helping them. I thought of all the cures for things over the years that have simply faded away for lack of being passed down, swallowed down into the dark waters. How much is lost with nothing but the passing of time.

I resolved to go over the next morning.

That night a fog rolled in, so thick you could cut and spread it, blocking out even the giant tupelo in mama's yard. It crept in the house and under the covers, making them damp and heavy, and when I awoke the next morning, I couldn't figure if it was early dawn or late afternoon. I had fixed my mind to go though, and slipped out onto the silent waters, winding this way and that, as familiar with those passages in the dim light as I was with the veins on the back of mama's hand.

They were right, the dock had been patched up, though the job was sloppy at best, looked like a child had done the hammering. The nails that weren't bent in two were sunk in halfway and at odd angles. Something told me to prepare for a fast departure and I made an easy loop that could be pulled off quick and fastened it to the ladder. The house was shrouded in mist, a barely discernible path led up and trailed into nothing. I picked my way along, looking down for the roots that climbed and crawled across, waiting to trip someone.

The smell hit my nose so strong I coughed and lifted my arm to cover my mouth with the sleeve. As I did my head raised as well and there before me too close before me with no uncertainty at all stood Jonjon. The soft grey cloth of his outfit was riddled with moth holes but was the familiar one from my hazy memories. As my gaze traveled upwards, I noted the blackened burst vessels in his cheeks, the yellow green holes clotted up where the fangs had entered, my medical student's mind clicking automatic snapshots of his cadaver. I was frozen in disbelief. Up his arm shot, faster than my reflexes, and his sodden pale fingers squeezed hard into my shirt sleeve, filling my arm with pain and soaking my shirt with clear liquid. He pulled my arm away from my face, I gagged with the stench of embalming fluid, of sweetish rot, and the pungent scent of mothballs. His bruise-colored lips peeled back, he sucked air between his amber teeth as he strained to open his mouth, his swollen tongue rolled obscenely.

And then and then, a slow hiss like brakes releasing, and words, I swear to Joseph, words...

Thhaank yhouuu.

He exhaled, putrescent breath sloughing over me, and snapped his clasp open. The second he did, I turned heel and ran, stumbling and catching myself in the vertigo and running so fast that when I reached the boat, I nearly tipped it into the water, jumping in both feet first, struggling with the loop as the pirogue rocked violently, snagging the rope on a splinter in the wood and whimpering nonononono as my ankle throbbed anew from the twisted roots and the hard land into the craft.

Well. Yes. You can be sure I got out of there right quick.

I like to think of myself as a fearless man, and a man of science. But at that moment I wanted nothing more than to run to my mama and be held by her, and that I attempted to do, though I had to pull her loose arm around me and cling to it for comfort. There are times in your life that you realize despite all your best efforts you will never truly know the world and want nothing more than to go back to where you came from.

I never spoke of what happened. A week later, I packed my bags and returned to school. Two months later, I got the call that mama had gone home. When I returned for the funeral, I only stayed til the white stone cover slid over her crypt.

I tried to tell your grandmama about it, but she laughed and told me to stop telling such tall tales. I can see it. You don't know what to think of it either. That's alright. If it weren't me I wouldn't believe me either.

What's that? If it were true, then what happened to Lavinia? Well, I'm glad you asked. See, after 50 years in the profession of witnessing and ferrying both life and death, I have a theory. It's my own and I don't share it around the office since I don't particularly feel like losing my license. Right at the moment someone passes, it's like a door opens. You can see it in their face, as they go through. Well. What if. What if when that door opened, something could go Out, as well as in? See, I think Lavinia decided to make a trade. Her life for his. I think all of them bits she was collecting was for some sort of recipe as it were. Think about it. They all had to do with a different sense. Earwax, hearing. Skin, touch. Tears, vision. And so on. And then, and then, maybe the last bit she needed, was something to mix all that up. To brew it as you will. But before she could collect it, the townspeople stopped trusting her. And so, she waited. Bided her time. Left and let the town forget about her. Then I came along like some bumbling fool and gave her the final ingredient. A white enamel bowl full. Every good recipe needs a catalyst, fire for the pot. And that was her. Her life.

Now I can tell you think I'm crazy. That's alright. I've had a lot of time to think this through. I think she kept his body, gathered the things she needed to make it live again, and then let the snake bite Her in order to fix it. Why else would she keep that damned thing? Pardon all this cursing. It's late.

And maybe, just maybe, she knows he will do the same for her. The collection won't be so easy this time around. Probably have to be a bit more forced if you know what I mean. I've heard of a few disappearances round those parts over the years. Best I can see is to just stay away. Stay. Away.

Well, fire's almost out. You all run to bed now.

Author's note. Probably the strangest part of this story, is that a large piece of the beginning is pulled from truth. Well, truth as told to me by a hitchhiker I picked up in a mid-day thunderstorm. He was out in the middle of nowhere huddled under an overpass on the I10 heading east. He must have been over 70 and his leg reeked from an unresolved wound. He spun me the story of his life during that hours long ride, beginning with his untimely and violent birth in a boat. It could've all been lies. But I don't think so. As the saying goes, truth is stranger than fiction...