Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
G enesis…
I threw myself into two things in the days after all the craziness with the Bayou Brethren. One was work, with, and I’m not going to lie here, a slight and uneasy dread that one of the men who had attacked us would come through my ER.
Thankfully, that part didn’t happen.
The second thing I threw myself into was aiding the other old ladies of the Voodoo Bastards with everything that I could through support by way of a shoulder to lean on and someone to talk with, to the planning and execution of Cypress’s funeral whenever they got around to releasing his body from the medical examiner’s office.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t going to be precisely what Cypress wanted. He’d wanted his final send-off to take place at the club, but that couldn’t happen as the police were making life miserable in that they had no desire whatsoever to release the crime scene.
That was frustrating.
I invited the women of the Voodoo Bastards MC over to my place to gather around my table for Cypress, and they took me up on it.
Chainsaw made himself scarce that night, going and staying out at the Bayou House alone, which I hadn’t liked.
I couldn’t help myself but text him all throughout the evening, taxing myself with holding down two completely separate but no less important conversations on top of a long and exhausting day at the hospital.
“So if we can’t hold things at the club, where’s the next best place?” Cor asked Jessie-Lou.
“My brother would be rolling in the freezer if we even suggested a church or funeral chapel,” Jessie-Lou said, exhausted. “I’ll fight Momma and Daddy to the damn death on that, because that’s what they wanted to do.”
“The distillery isn’t off-limits,” I said. “But that really doesn’t feel right.”
“Agreed,” Alina said.
“What are some of the other places he liked where a big party with a lot of liquor could go down?” Sandy asked.
It was Velina who slapped both her palms on the table, making us all jump with her epiphany. “You’re a genius!” she declared to Sandy. “That’s it!”
“I am?” Sandy asked.
“It is?” Alina looked mollified.
“You’re not thinking Laffite’s Blacksmith Shop, are you?” I asked. “That place would be way too small, and I don’t picture a place like that allowing for a private rental of the whole place.
“No, no! Not Laffite’s.” Velina shook her head.
Jessie-Lou looked startled and snapped her fingers, pointing at Velina and shaking her finger three times, crowing, “I’m pickin’ up what you’re throwin' down!”
“Okay, that’s great,” Alina said, laughing. “Mind filling the rest of us in?”
“Landry’s,” Velina and Jessie-Lou said in unison.
“Landry’s?” I asked curiously, as Alina, Corliss, and Sandrine all perked up like it was so obvious and they felt dumb for not thinking of it.
“Landry’s is this Cajun bar & grill out there by the swamp on the way out to LaCroix and our places,” Jessie-Lou stated.
“You’re so new, I just don’t think Chainsaw’s gotten to take you there yet,” Velina said.
“It was one of the first places LaCroix ever took me to,” Alina said.
“Same with me and Saint,” Velina declared.
“First time I ever set foot in the club, my car broke down. Saint and Collier took me out to LaCroix at the parts yard, and we stopped at Landry’s for lunch on the way back into town.
” Velina leaned back in her seat, but Jessie-Lou already had her phone in her hands and was dialing the number to the place.
“Okay,” I drawled. “So, we need to know how much and figure out a night. What else did Cypress say in his last wishes?”
Jessie-Lou slid the composition book with its rumpled and folded cover and pages across the table to me. I looked at the page and the spidery scrawl that was barely legible on it and went to work with my tired brain, trying to decipher it.
Jessie-Lou was already speaking to someone on the other end of the line in her native Cajun-French, trying to work something out with the establishment.
“They gettin’ me da owner,” she said, and she went back to intently listening to the line and waiting for someone to come back on.
“Okay, so he picked out a black casket and a funeral home, and it says here…” I furrowed my brow. “He wants to be interred in the family graveyard out there somewhere.”
“Ugh.” Sandy made a face. “I heard the guys talking about putting his urn up on the memorial wall next to Louie’s,” she said.
I shook my head and said, “That’s easy enough to handle. We just get an urn that we know Cypress would like and put an empty one up there. It’s about memorializing and the aesthetic more than what or what not might be in the urn.”
“That’ll work,” Alina affirmed with a nod.
“It’s about what Cypress wanted, not what anyone else wants,” Cor agreed.
“That’s right,” Velina agreed. “Louie didn’t have any advance directives.
The guys just did what was the cheapest option and what was right in his case.
I get that. It wasn’t like Louie had any family that they knew of down here to object, and even if I had been in the loop…
” she shrugged. “Practicality would have had me do the same thing.”
Sandrine nodded and heaved a sigh, scrubbing her face with her hands, “I still feel like this is all my fault,” she said.
Jessie-Lou’s voice rose in a clear tone of triumph as she rattled into the phone what sounded like profuse thanks. She ended her call and looked at all of us.
“Troy, the owner, said yes!” she said, and we all breathed a sigh of relief and the tension eased out of us.
“You know where your family’s graveyard or cemetery is at?” I asked her and she nodded.
“Gonna be an above-ground burial. We got some old oven tombs on some high ground out there near the swamp. Momma an’ Daddy gots all the paperwork for it goin’ back generations.”
“Right, okay, so we’re going to need a funeral home’s services to prepare the body, and one specializing in above-ground burial that can access that grave site.
We’ll have to look into whether that funeral home is capable of updating the carving on the slab or if it has to be outsourced to a different monument company.
I’m not sure how that works, to be honest. My family has only ever done cremation. ”
“Start with the funeral home, I guess,” Jessie-Lou said with a faint shrug.
“Does your family have a preference on which one?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Okay, time to hit the phones and shop around.” I checked my watch. “Which is going to have to be a tomorrow thing, because most of them have to be closed by now.”
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Let’s make a list tonight,” Corliss suggested. “Write down everyone we want to contact, a checklist on each page for them of things we need to ask them, and the cost for each of those things.”
“His policy was around ten thousand,” Jessie-Lou stated.
“We don’t have to stay on budget for that,” Corliss said firmly.
“A lot needs to go into this. Coffins are expensive, so is the labor, the space rental, catering, all of it. It’s likely going to exceed that ten thousand and I don’t want anyone to freak out or try and fit everything into that.
It goes over? It goes over, and we’ll handle it.
” She looked at each one of us in turn, and all I could do was nod in agreement.
Planning a funeral was hard. There was some laughter, a lot of tears, and a lot of dark humor, and wine.
We ended up, the six of us, on the back patio with our glasses – Alina and Cor in one hammock, Velina and Jessie-Lou in the other.
Sandy and I leaned back in folding zero-gravity lounge chairs I had stashed against one wall in the garage.
I’d gotten them a year or two ago to take to Greek Fest on a Memorial Day weekend to enjoy the music and dancing on the main stage without having to lie in the grass.
My mom had come down for it and spent the weekend with me, and it had been nice.
It had also been the last time I’d seen her.
With everything going on, I was feeling more and more overdue for a visit.
The hammocks swayed, the girls in them laughed, and we all tried to let the alcohol we’d consumed win and numb the pain.
“Jesus Christ…” a booted foot kicked an empty wine bottle, and I opened my eyes, then immediately squeezed them shut against the bright morning sun. Tiny angry gnomes with hammers pounded on the back side of my frontal bone, sending throbbing shockwaves through my head.
“You look like us when we’ve tied one on the next morning.” I shaded my eyes and looked up at Chainsaw, who had his hands on his hips and was shaking his head.
LaCroix and Hex stood nearby.
“Why didn’t you tie one on last night?” Velina asked as Saint’s head came up over the railing at the top of the spiral stairs.
“We were planning funerals of our own,” Hex said and Saint got out of the way to let Bennie up.
“Oof, baby.” Bennie went around to Sandy on the other side of the patio hammocks. Jessie-Lou’s hand was hanging over the edge of hers on that side, her fingers tangled with Sandy’s.
“Right.” Chainsaw held a hand down to me, and I took it. He hauled me up out of my chair. I protested loudly, but he held me in his arms upright and said, “Let’s get you cleaned up and some aspirin in you.”
“Mm,” I half-groaned and half-whined as he led me into the house through the double French doors that still stood wide open.
“You gotta be more careful than this, baby,” he chastised gently. “Anybody could have come up in here while y’all were passed out, out there.”
“Then let’s move,” I said. “Somewhere out closer to everyone else. A nice place at the edge of the swamp on stilts like we talked about.”
He chuckled and got the shower going, leaning me against the edge of the sink and said, “Sounds good to me. We can start looking.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Hell yeah,” he said.
“Some place big enough for us, that everybody can come visit?” I asked. “Hangout?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I like the sound of that.”
“Me too,” I murmured and scrubbed my face with my hands.
He got me into the shower and cleaned me up. I didn’t throw up, but boy did I want to .
The guys cleaned up our mess, got each of their ladies through a quick shower and their hangovers, and each left one by one until it was just me and Chainsaw left.
“Make any progress last night?” he asked. I nodded and filled him in on how the wake would be held at Landry’s and that we’d decided to split the difference for Cypress’s parents and have a short, blood-family only service in a chapel up the road first.
“Cy would hate that, but he would knuckle under for his mamma and his dad. It’s a good compromise,” he said.
“He was their son, and Jessie-Lou said much the same thing. After that, they’ll bring him to Landry’s.
We can party that night, celebrate his life, do whatever, and the next morning will be the procession to his final resting place.
He wants to be interred at his family’s plot near the swamp.
We figured we would get a memorial urn for the club, but that nothing needed to be in it.
Jessie said she isn’t above stealing a toe or finger bone to put in it when they open up his crypt after a year and a day to shove everything back or whatever. ”
Chainsaw chuckled at that and said, “She fuckin’ would, too. Hell, if his skull was intact, she’d smuggle it right out of there and carve it up pretty for the chapel’s altar.”
“She said something like that,” I agreed, and I winced as his laughter boomed out of his chest and sent the gnomes in my head into an angry tantrum at having been disturbed. I gripped my head and groaned, whining about the hangover gnomes.
Chainsaw asked, “The what ?”
“Hangover gnomes!” I repeated a little louder than necessary over their incessant banging in my head.
“Okay, the hangover gnomes, I got it,” he said, and he was trying so hard not to laugh at me, but failing fucking miserably. “You lie here,” he said. “I’m gonna get you something that’ll get you hydrated.”
“Thank you,” I mumbled and buried my face into my pillow.
He came back a while later with an electrolyte drink he had likely found in my fridge. Even though I had zero desire to drink it, I got it down and promptly collapsed back onto my mattress to try and sleep it off.
To Chainsaw’s credit, he let me.