Meet Delphine

From Sashé Boudreaux: Beignets, Bones & Buried Secrets

Chapter Seven

It had been three long, lonely years since Frank had passed. Delphine thought she was finished grieving and had come out on the other side, even if her heart was pieced together a bit too tight. But then something unexpected would remind her of him and pull her back into fresh heartache like no time had passed at all.

Just the other day, she was organizing the closet in the spare bedroom and found an old trunk she’d forgotten about. She opened it and was rummaging through when she shoved aside some tissue paper and caught a whiff of Frank’s Old Spice, still lingering on one of his flannel shirts.

In an instant, a flood of emotions and memories washed over her. She felt like she could barely breathe as a memory pulled her back in time, nearly a decade earlier.

She was leaning against the kitchen doorway, listening to Frank explain the wonders of the olfactory system—how a simple smell could take a person back to memories they didn’t even know they had.

Frank had always been good like that, sharing bits of knowledge, making things interesting. Being the parish coroner, he couldn’t bring his work home, thank goodness, but he was a natural-born teacher. And Delphine was a willing student. She liked knowing things, understanding how things worked—the human body, plants, the weather, the way the land recovered after a hard rain. They’d never been able to have kids, her and Frank, but they had told each other they were enough, just the two of them. And they were.

She dragged the trunk out of the closet to the side of the twin bed and sat down on the floor. One by one, she took out little pieces of Frank’s life—a belt, his worn leather shaving kit, the pocketknife he never went anywhere without. Each item tugged open old memories like little doors she’d thought she’d shut and locked forever.

When Frank went, a part of Delphine went, too. She’d been so woven together with him for so long, she didn’t know who she was without him, or even what she was supposed to do on any given day.

She sighed, reached into the trunk and took out a small box. Inside, sandwiched between thin foam, were three small arrowheads. She took one out, felt along the still-sharp flaked edges, and turned it between her fingers. It was Frank who had told her about how her people had used arrowheads back in the day, and that had stirred a hunger in her to learn more.

She remembered when he’d brought home photocopies once from an old survey along a stretch of bayou where farmers kept plowing up flint points and bits of pottery.

“Not from Cherokee,” he’d said, spreading the pages out on the table, “from the Chitimacha and other tribes in this area. The Atchafalaya Basin’s full of signs of their lives—fish weirs cut into the shallows, middens where oyster shells were piled higher than a man.” He tapped the margin with his finger. “The land remembers, even if people don’t.”

Delphine glanced down at the arrowhead in her hand, imagining the hands that had worked it, and thought about her own people. Her Cherokee ancestors weren’t from these bayous, but they too were more than a few chapters in history books. They were flesh and bone, hands that chipped stone, built fires, and left their mark on the earth.

When she saw a flyer advertising a two-day seminar on Cherokee heritage in Baton Rouge, she cooked up enough food to keep Frank fed for a week, packed a bag and went.

She was in the middle of a breakout session on the Trail of Tears when the call came. She’d been scribbling notes as a speaker showed the native removal routes on a map. One passed just north of Baton Rouge, another through Arkansas, both funneling thousands of people westward. So many had died on the way. How was this even possible? she remembered wondering. The cruelty and injustice of it all was almost too much to bear. She was staring at that map when the news reached her: Frank had been driving home from work when a truck crossed the center line, killing him instantly.

Three years later, the Cherokee tragedy and her own private one had become inseparable, entwined so tightly around her heart that she feared the scars they left would never heal.

That’s when my own trail of tears began, she thought, wiping a tear slipping down her cheek. These past few years had been her own horrible trek to somewhere she’d never been to and where she didn’t want to go.

She placed the arrowhead back in the box and held it out in front of her, all three arrows pointing in the same direction: forward.

She was surprised by a gentle sense of hope that swept over her. “Forward,” she said aloud. “I don’t know where it’ll lead, but it can’t be any worse than behind.”

A year after the seminar, she’d gotten a newsletter in the mail about a mini Trail of Tears pilgrimage, two weeks long, walking a preserved section of the route. She’d signed up without thinking twice. Frank would have wanted her to go. She was sure of that.

The trip had changed her, and she was surprised by it. She’d stood on the same ground her ancestors had walked, listened to the wind move through the trees, learned the stories passed down by people who still carried them. She’d felt connected, like she belonged somehow, for the first time since Frank.

When she got back to Cypress Grove, she’d taken a job at the recycling drop off, her way of giving back and stewarding the earth. It wasn’t much of a job, but it gave her a reason to get up in the morning and do something productive. As the weeks went by, Delphine discovered a sense of purpose, sorting through thrown-away and broken things to be remade into something new. Grief had left her broken too. Maybe working at the recycling drop-off could transform her into something new as well. She’d sort glass and paper, separate good from bad, and in some small way, she believed she was helping to set the world right.

Months, and then years passed, and somewhere along the way, Delphine found a part of herself again, if a little worse for wear.

She smiled a thin smile of resignation mixed with determination. The afternoon light played against the waxy leaves of the magnolia tree outside, sending shadows dancing across the plaid wallpaper on her wall. She leaned back and let her thoughts continue to drift.

Once, Frank had come home with a book about the human body. She remembered how intrigued she was by the skeletal structure, studying and memorizing the bones by heart.

That’s how she immediately knew what was in the baggie she pulled out of the craft box. At first, she was curious, then appalled. As she held it up to the light, her eyes flew open, then narrowed the next instant. There was no mistaking it. At all. For a split second, she wondered if Mini Monroe’s hooligan boys were pulling a sick prank—maybe a deer bone slipped into the box for shock value. But it was only a split second. Delphine had held the baggie out in front of her and frowned. “Human,” she said out loud.

Her first instinct was to march it straight down to the new sheriff and let him deal with it, but she hesitated. She could already hear him brushing her off: “So, y’all are recycling toes now?”

“Uh-uh,” she shook her head. “No greenhorn sheriff’s gonna shove me off. Reckon I’ll just tote this over to Sashé and see what she thinks before callin’ in the law.”

Whoever dropped the bone at the recycle hadn’t done it by accident—and that thought made her angrier than the thing itself. In fact, the more she thought about it, the madder she got. Carrying around a toe bone in a baggie was bad medicine all on its own, but dropping it off like trash to be tossed was inexcusable—a sacrilege even. She wasn’t going to stand for it. Sashé had an uncanny knack for getting to the bottom of things, and Delphine couldn’t get rid of that toe bone fast enough.

She huffed. Just rehashing it made her blood pressure spike. She pulled herself up from the floor with a grunt, rubbed the small of her back, and drug the trunk back to the closet.

“Well, I done my bit anyway. Y’all hear me, Frank? The daddy toe’s in Sashé’s hands now. She can figure out what to do about it,” she said. “Just goin’ ‘bout my business, gettin’ my rhythm back, and some grave digger drops a warnin’ at my doorstep? Nu-uh. Not if I have anything to say about it. What’s this world comin’ to? I’d like to know,” she muttered as she walked down the hall to the kitchen. ~

Delphine's story continues in the first Sashé Boudreaux Mystery.