The Baptism Bill She Refused To Pay
The Parish We Married Into
I should explain, for anyone who has never lived in this part of southern Louisiana, what the word parish actually means down here, because it does double duty in a way that matters to this story.
A parish is what other states call a county, the plain civic kind of boundary that decides which courthouse your marriage license comes from and which sheriff’s office answers your call. But a parish is also, in the older sense, the actual church family, the building and the congregation and the priest who has baptized three generations of the same last names. Around here those two meanings sit on top of each other so completely that most people never bother separating them. You do not just live in a parish. You belong to one, the way you belong to a family, whether you asked for it or not.
Our town sits where the sugarcane fields give way to marsh, close enough to the bayou that you can smell the water on a still morning and far enough from any real city that the nearest mall is forty minutes up the highway. Friday nights in the fall belong to the high school football stadium lights, visible from three roads over. Sunday mornings belong to the church, and Sunday afternoons, more often than not, belong to somebody’s crawfish boil, a folding table and a propane burner set up in a yard, the whole street smelling like cayenne and boiling corn by two o’clock.
It is a good place to raise a child. It is also, and this is the part that mattered most in the weeks after Glenda’s phone call, a very small place to be humiliated in.
Everybody at that credit union window, everybody at that banquet hall, everybody in every pew of that cracked-bell church, already knew each other’s business in a hundred smaller ways. A parish like ours runs on the assumption that most secrets do not stay secret for long, not because anyone is cruel about it, but because there are only so many tellers, so many pews, so many hands to shake at the feed store on a Saturday morning. Sheldon had built his second account inside a community that was never built to keep a secret that size. He had simply gotten lucky, for a year, that the one person who could see it clearly happened to love me enough to eventually pick up the phone.