The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival

by Ken Wheaton

Genres: Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Welcome to Grand Prairie, Louisiana—land of confounding accents, hard-drinking senior citizens, and charming sinners—brought to hilarious life in a bracing, heartfelt debut novel simmering with Cajun spice. . .

Father Steve Sibille has come home to the bayou to take charge of St. Pete's church. Among his challenges are teenybopper altar girls, insomnia-curing confessions, and alarmingly alluring congregant Vicky Carrier. Then there's Miss Rita, an irrepressible centenarian with a taste for whiskey, cracklins, and sticking her nose in other people's business.

When an outsider threatens to poach Father Steve's flock, Miss Rita suggests he fight back by staging an event that will keep St. Pete's parishioners loyal forever. As The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival draws near, help comes from the strangest places. And while the road to the festival may be paved with good intentions—not to mention bake sales, an elephant, and the most bizarre cook-out ever—where it will lead is anyone's guess. . .

"A sparkling debut."

--Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Queen of America

"Delightful. . ..Wheaton writes with an infectious energy, and his affection for the characters and culture is authentic."

--Publishers Weekly

Release date: October 1, 2012

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

The counter clerk at T-Ron’s Grab ’n’ Go doesn’t bat an eye when I ask for two packs of Camel Lights, a bag of pork cracklin’s, and a pint of Crown Royal. Is it every day she’s confronted with a priest—black pants, black shirt, white collar and all—buying whiskey and cracklin’s before lunch?

The cigarettes are mine, the rest is for Miss Rita, who’s finishing out life in Easy Time Nursing Home, where the staff frowns upon booze and pigskin. Before I walk in, I place my purchases into my black leather satchel, alongside a Bible, a Daily Missal, and last week’s copy of People magazine.

“Hey, Father Steve,” the receptionist says when I enter Easy Time’s lobby, which is covered in the chintzy sort of Thanksgiving decorations you’d expect to see in a preschool or kindergarten. She’s a short, chunky girl with a curly helmet of dull brown hair and an overly pleasant smile. She strikes me as the type who, unable to find a suitable man and unwilling to settle for an unsuitable one, has come to a place where she’ll be appreciated and adored, where she can dole out a little of that love pent up in an otherwise lonely life. I wonder if she lives in a trailer full of cats.

“Hi, Marie. How you doing today, cher?” I don’t know why I put on the Cajun schtick for her, but I do.

“Aw, I’m doing good, and you?” she chirps. I swear her teeth just might explode right out of her head.

“Comme ci, comme ça,” I answer. “Can’t complain. How’s Miss Rita doing today?”

“Oh, she’s good today. She’s awake and sitting in her room.”

As opposed to what? Hopping around the grounds on her one leg? Playing roller hockey in the parking lot?

“Good, good. I’ll see you later, Marie.”

Miss Rita, as far as anyone can tell, is somewhere between 105 and 117 years old. No birth certificate. Her “birthday” rolls around in late November, early December and seems to fall on whatever day is convenient for Easy Time and the reporters who cover the occasion. Her grandchildren don’t mind. Miss Rita doesn’t, either, as long as someone makes a fuss over it.

Aside from one dutiful grandson, I’m Miss Rita’s only regular visitor. She’s not a member of my parish—St. Pete’s doesn’t have a single black parishioner—but she’s practically a member of my family. Miss Rita was “the help” Pawpaw hired for Mawmaw back in the days when it was still acceptable to call people “the help.”

I remember Miss Rita and Mawmaw sitting in Mawmaw’s kitchen, in a pair of old wooden rocking chairs, Miss Rita shiny black to the point of being purple, Mawmaw white and liver-spotted. They rocked in a counterrhythm, black forward, white back, white forward, black back, all day long watching soap operas. Soul poppers, Miss Rita called them. I guess there was plenty Miss Rita helped Mawmaw with—folding laundry, shelling peas, collecting eggs from the chickens, peeling shrimp. But I remember them most clearly in those chairs, rocking away and arguing about the existence of evil twins.

Mawmaw died when I was twelve and Miss Rita went right on living. Now Miss Rita spends her days in a nursing home, sitting one-legged in a wheelchair, watching TV alone. The newspaper reporters invariably describe her as slightly incoherent but happy, like a retarded child who doesn’t know she’s been handed a tough lot in life.

Daddy used to visit her a lot, which is where I picked up the habit, but not so much since he remarried fourteen years ago. I asked him about it once, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

I walk into Miss Rita’s room. She’s facing the window, her head thrown back on her shoulders, eyes closed, mouth opened, a little string of drool hanging down onto the T-shirt she’s wearing—a wet splotch sits right in the middle of Malcolm X’s forehead. Not quite what he had in mind when he uttered the words printed on the shirt: “By any means necessary.” The left leg of her jeans is rolled up and pinned to where the knee should be. It’s what she’s worn since the amputation ten years ago. The orderlies would prefer her to wear a robe or a housedress, but I’m sure they found it easier to let her have her way. Her skin’s faded in her old age to the color of dirt, and sitting there like that, she looks like a piece of discarded furniture.

A rap song blurts from the radio; every other word is bleeped out for airplay and I can still make out the phrase “Bitch, I’ma kill you.” One of the orderlies must have been listening to it. I twist the radio’s volume knob and Miss Rita moves.

“Boy, you better put my program back on.” Her voice is a whisper of its former self, but it still demands respect. She told me once when I was a child, “Never, ever fear no man. You fear God, but no man. God. And Miss Rita, too. Boy, you better watch out for me, too.”

“You sure you don’t want some Cajun or zydeco music, Miss Rita?”

“Yeah, I’m sure I don’t want no Cajun or zydeco music. Your mawmaw made me listen to that for thirty years. Tired of that noise. Now put that radio back on 95.5 before—” she says, but falls silent as the door swings open and Marie pokes her head in. “Yall doing okay?”

“Just fine,” I say. Miss Rita’s head falls to her chest. She’s all smile and drool and babbling while she picks at some imaginary spot on her T-shirt. “Just having ourselves a little visit.”

When the door closes, Miss Rita’s head snaps back up. “You bring my stuff?”

“Yeah, I brought it. You sure you should be drinking this?”

“You sure you should be putting your pecker in them little boys’ behinds?” she shoots back at me, and starts cackling.

“Now, c’mon, Miss Rita,” I say, blushing for no good reason.

“Now, c’mon nothing. You quit bugging me about my little medicine, then. Same thing every time. I’m the one a hundred years old. Think I know what I should and shouldn’t do. Lotta good not drinking did your mawmaw.”

“But what about the cracklin’s? All that salt and fat. You don’t even have teeth to chew them with.”

“I got gums. All I need. Now give.” I hand her the bottle in its little purple sack and the brown bag already going transparent from the grease. “All them years of dumping them bowls of okry gumbo your mawmaw tried to force you to eat and this is the thanks I get? You getting on my case all the time?”

She has me there. She was my only ally in the battle against Mawmaw and her okra gumbo. Any other gumbo I loved—chicken and sausage, gizzard and hearts, seafood, squirrel. But okra? No way. I could write sermons about the pure evil that is okra. Fry it, sauté it, cover it in sugar and chocolate, or wrap it in bacon, but no way is anyone going to convince me that okra, especially in its slimy gumbo manifestation, isn’t concrete proof that Satan walks the earth.

Miss Rita’s hands stop trembling after she takes possession of her gifts. I half expect her eyes to bug out and for her to start hissing and talking about her “precious.”

Strong from years of work—picking cotton, shelling peas, snapping beans, smacking kids—her fingers make quick work of the plastic seal and cap on the bottle. I remember those fingers taking hold of my ear and dragging me off for a switching.

She takes a slow pull, says, “Ahhhh,” and smacks her lips before placing the purple Crown Royal bag into a cookie tin with a nest of others like it. I wonder who her connection was while I was away at seminary, but I don’t bother asking. “None of your damn business,” is the reply I’d get.

She takes another pull from the bottle and pops a cracklin’ into her mouth, rolls it around, and sucks on it noisily.

“Mmmmmmm-mmm. Never get tired of that,” she says, slapping her knee.

Our little ritual over, she turns her full attention to me.

“Now, what’s your problem, boy?” She nods at a calendar on the wall. A twenty-something black man in a fireman’s hat and a Speedo lies stretched out on a rock. “You a week early for your regular visit.”

“I can’t come at other times?” I counter.

“You can come any time you want, as long as you remember to bring me something. Now, what’s your problem?”

“I don’t know,” I say. And I don’t. Well, I do. Kind of. Three months into my first solo assignment, just twenty minutes up the road in Grand Prairie, Louisiana, I’ve grown bored. Absolutely and utterly bored. But I didn’t come here to whine about malaise to a woman whose mother was born a slave.

No. The problem is boredom leads to other problems of the heart and soul and mind—or, in my case, the optical system. I’ve been seeing things. Well, one thing in particular: a red blur flitting around the church, always near the edge of the grounds, in the trees or by the road. I’m pretty sure it’s not a ghost. If it is, it’s a peculiar one that avoids the cemetery and the inside of the church. At first, I told myself it was simply a trick of the eye—a butterfly flitting by, a red leaf on the wind. Lately, I’ve grown partial to the theory that it’s a symptom of a massive brain tumor. I can all too easily imagine how Miss Rita’s going to respond.

But there’s no need—or time—to explain. She’s quick with her own conclusion: “What you need is a woman.” She points a bony finger at me.

A woman? Mama doesn’t even bring that one up anymore. Besides, that’s the last thing on my mind. A woman? That part of my mind has been cauterized.

“Can’t have a woman,” I say.

“Don’t matter. You still need one.”

“Well, it does matter. I’m a priest. Can’t have one.”

“Them Baptist preachers over at Zion got women. Hell, that main one there got him three or four from what I hear.”

“Them Baptist preachers don’t let their people drink.”

She pauses for a moment, takes another sip, and fixes her eyes on me. “I bet you a woman do you a lot more better than a beer anyway.”

“Hmmph,” is all I can think to say.

“You not one of them likes men or little boys?”

“No, Miss Rita,” I snap.

“Hey, now. Just checking. You never know these days. You never know. But Lord, it’d kill your mawmaw if she wasn’t dead already.”

“Well, she’d be fine because I’m not.”

“There’s your problem, then. Need a woman. Ain’t natural for a man to be without a woman. Bible says so.”

“The Church says—” I start.

“The Church nothing. I had the Bible read to me about five thousand times in my life. Ain’t a damn thing in there about priests not getting married.”

When did she become a theologian? Of course, she’s right. Nothing in the Bible about it at all.

“Look. I can’t. Okay? It’s the rules. That simple.”

“Hmmph. Rules say you can’t have altar girls, either.”

She glares at me. I glare back. I never told her about the altar girls. Which means I’ve become a rumor already. The new priest in Grand Prairie adding another chapter of crazy to that little town’s history. She pops another cracklin’ in her mouth and takes another swig of whiskey. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, bobs her head in rhythm with the hip-hop coming out of the radio.

“There’s nothing in the rules against altar girls,” I say. “Besides, I couldn’t find any boys.”

“Wonder why,” she says. “Some strange man living alone in the woods without a wife. I wouldn’t let my sons go around him, either. People read them stories, you know.”

“But they trust me with their daughters?” I say, knowing full well what the response is.

“Probably didn’t even cross their mind you’d be interested,” she says, laughing again.

At this point, she’s already enjoying herself at my expense far too much, so I decide to save my ghost story for another time. “I’m sure there are other good explanations,” I say, not entirely convinced myself.

“There always is an explanation, isn’t there? Well, I got a simple one for you. You need a woman.”

The last thing I want lousing up my life is a woman. I don’t want one and don’t need one. Miss Rita is wrong about that. Wrong as a Scientologist. Forget the rules of the Church. I like my life simple, and simplicity is the last thing I associate with women.

Yet now, at this very minute, I have two women-in-training traipsing about my altar, their fruit-scented shampoos making it next to impossible to stay in that space I inhabit when I’m saying Mass—the zone, if you will.

I’d waited a month, an entire month, before asking for altar boys. To be honest, I don’t really need them. But the altar felt naked without them. Besides, the priests in all the other parishes have them. So I put a notice in the church bulletin and made a few announcements during Mass.

The following Monday, a young girl with strawberry blond hair knocked on my door.

“Yes, my child?” I asked in my most priestly voice, immediately feeling like an ass. Thirty-two years old and there I was saying, “Yes, my child?”

“Mama sent me to help you. Daddy said it was okay.”

“Help me? With what?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. Her thick accent made it sound like a one-word question, Ahduhno? “With the altar and stuff, I guess.”

“Really?” was the only thing I could think to say. I had her write her name and number down and told her I’d call. Denise Fontenot. She dotted the i in Denise with a heart.

Five more girls followed, all about thirteen. Two for each Mass. Not one single boy.

And now, instead of focusing on the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, I’m overly aware of my surroundings.

This is not a good thing in St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church in Grand Prairie, Louisiana. Doubly so at the Saturday evening Mass, when the old-timers stroll in out of the woods.

For example, in any other congregation, the old man burping in the fifth pew, on my right hand side, would send a ripple of arched eyebrows, turned heads, and covered giggles through the church. But not here. Mr. Boudreaux can sit there and let one rip, his big owl eyes blinking away like all’s just peachy keen.

Then a fart echoes from one of the pews to my left.

No one seems fazed by this. The only two people in St. Peter’s who seem to notice at all are the Smith boys, who attend twice a month when they’re visiting their father out here in the sticks. I feel for those two boys, spending a Saturday night in the Grand Prairie wilderness while their friends are getting pizza delivered to their front doors in Opelousas.

Opelousas, twenty minutes down the road via the Ville Platte Highway, is where I grew up. With a population of fifteen thousand people, we were a veritable metropolis. And we had a name for places like Grand Prairie: Bumfuck, Egypt. Bumfuck. A good word to be thinking while saying Mass. Good work. The Lord, no doubt, is smiling upon me.

Luckily, the seminary doesn’t just toss you into the world without a lot of practice, and the words coming out of my mouth are holy, sanctified, and expected.

“Bless and approve our offering. Make it acceptable to You, an offering in Spirit and Truth.” (And please, God, forgive me for my wandering mind and for Your sake, my sake, the congregation’s sake, get me back on track here. Have that little white bird of yours flit back down here and roost in my head.)

But the truth is, once I lose the path, it’s hard to regain. While my mouth keeps motoring along, my mind wanders.

The church building itself doesn’t help. Of all the churches in all the towns in Louisiana. I was hoping for a cathedral; I got stuck with a gussied-up bingo hall, one of those unfortunate low-ceilinged ’60s constructions. The heavy timber beams bracing the roof are the only things even remotely “majestic” about it. Threadbare carpeting covers creaky wooden floorboards. The Way of the Cross marches down either wall in simple formation. There they are, the last, most painful hours of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ done up in fourteen plastic “sculptures” all made in Taiwan.

Near the main entry is the church’s namesake, St. Pete, concrete done up in paint, his eyes directed woefully toward the scrawny but suitably gruesome crucifix suspended by wire directly above me.

“Let it become for us the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, Your own Son, our Lord,” I say.

St. Pete’s eyes bug me. Too much like an understudy watching the lead actor onstage, mesmerized by his idol but hoping for a tragic accident all the same. I’m tempted at times to wheel that statue of St. Pete out to the front of the church, where an older version of himself, this one done in white plaster, is nailed to an upside-down cross. That’ll show him. But who knows? Maybe he’d be glad to see it. Maybe it would tickle him to know that when we were kids we were convinced the upside-down crucifix was the welcome shingle for a satanic cult. But I doubt it. St. Peter never struck me as the type to have much of a sense of humor.

To my right and facing the gathered flock is Mother Mary. Now, her, I like. She’s the one truly beautiful thing in the church. Carved out of cedar and stained rather than painted, she still manages to be more realistic than the rest of the lot—like her husband shoved off in the corner, an afterthought done up in faux marble and chipped paint. In the right light, Mary outshines the tabernacle, which comes as no surprise. I’m not going to admit this sort of thing to some born-again Pentecostal, but in these rural parishes, Mary carries the load. In her simplicity, she sits above that enigmatic Trinity of her Son, His Father, and that little white bird—or whatever it is people imagine the Holy Ghost to be. I spent kindergarten through twelfth grade at a Catholic school, went to seminary to become a priest, and I still have problems wrapping my mind around the Holy Trinity. But everyone understands a mother’s capacity for love and forgiveness—and her power over her child.

Mr. Boudreaux burps again, and the Smith boys look at each other, eyes wide and betraying thoughts of strangling their daddy while he sleeps. Divorcing their mother was one thing. Dragging them to this place is unforgivable.

Mr. Devillier, one pew in front of Mr. Boudreaux and three people over, jams his pinky into his ear and gives it a good shake before pulling it out and studying his fingernail.

“Take this, all of you, and eat it,” I say.

So much for the miracle of Transubstantiation.

I wrap up the Eucharistic Prayer, lead the flock through the Lord’s Prayer, and make it to the Breaking of the Bread with no incident.

“This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” I say. I hold up the jumbo wafer for all to see. “Happy are those who are called to His supper.”

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” they all reply like good little lambs. “But only say the word and I shall be healed.”

I break the wafer into the platter that holds the smaller, uniform ones I’ll administer during Holy Communion. I chew and swallow my piece and I feel a calm working through me. I wouldn’t expect some random heathen or some Bible-thumping Tammy Faye to believe or understand. A runner, maybe. I’ve heard of runner’s high and that’s how I try to describe it, although I’ve never run anywhere near far enough to experience anything more than runner’s aches, runner’s cramps, and runner’s vomiting. But whatever it is, it’s working. I can feel I’m slipping back into my zone, my plane of worship.

I reach for the wine chalice, bring it to my lips, and, bam! I’ve lost it again.

Grape juice! Son of a bitch!

It’s all I can do not to wince. I never did like grape juice. Vile, nasty, sickly sweet purple scourge of the fruit-juice set. Yes. I know. By this point in the ceremony, it’s supposed to be the blood of Jesus, and the flavor shouldn’t matter.

But still.

I shoot a glance over the chalice rim at Denise Fontenot, standing there decked out in the white robes that belong on a nice, obedient, unscented altar boy.

She’s the one, the thorn in my side. The very picture of innocence if she weren’t Satan incarnate. I swear she was watching me for a reaction just now. There’s no other explanation. She had to have switched it purposely. Or else she somehow, impossibly, after being told twice before, confused my cardboard box of Franzia with one of the plastic bottles of grape juice that dear departed Father Carrier left behind.

I suffer through the rest of the grape juice. It’s not even good grape juice—if there is such a thing. It’s that Sam’s Choice garbage from Walmart. I shudder to think where Walmart gets its grapes.

Bad wine I can stomach. I belonged to a group in seminary who theorized that Transubstantiation was all the more miraculous if you had to turn really cheap wine into the Blood of Christ. One guy, who was probably a self-flagellating Calvinist in a previous life, planned to torture himself weekly with Thunderbird (Fortified by Christ!) even if it did render him blind within a year. Grape juice was the last resort of recovering alcoholics, God have mercy on their souls.

As I wipe the rim of the chalice, I look over at Denise again. Is that a smirk? I look over at the other altar girl, Maggie Deshotel, for some sort of comparison. But as usual, she simply seems sleepy. I worry that one of these days she’s going to pitch right over, split her head open, and I’ll have little-girl blood pooling all over the sacred altar of Jesus. I look back at Denise, who seems very pleased with herself.

Denise has been acting a little weird lately. Squirrely, maybe? Or kittenish? Is that the word I don’t want to acknowledge? She’s been bumping into me on the altar. Her palms have been a little clammy, her grip a little too firm, a little too slow on the release during the Sign of Peace. Or maybe I’ve just lost my mind. Maybe I’m just imagining these things.

I manage to conclude Mass without verbalizing anything I’m actually thinking. I hate to run things on autopilot, but at the moment I’m more than thankful for the ability. I follow the two girls down the aisle and through the front doors. Denise hugs me around the waist—a new development—says “Bye, Father Steve,” and runs off with Maggie.

I make my usual round of handshakes, hugs, and headpats. The old men say little. A handshake and maybe a “How you, Father?” or a “Comment ca va?” before going to their trucks and Suburbans, where they stand around talking the serious business of farming, hunting, and dirty jokes. Their wives stay behind, clucking with each other and fighting for my attention.

This is a fine art, this making old women happy, playing to their individual egos without permanently offending the rest of the gaggle. In a way, I’m their rock star, they are my groupies.

Tonight, I have to thank Miss Robichaux for the pork roast she dropped off this afternoon. While I’m doing this, I notice Denise and Maggie, now in jeans and baby tees, being chased through the parking lot by Sammy Guidry, a gangly boy still at an age where he hasn’t figured out why he’s been chasing girls his whole life, an age where he wouldn’t know what to do with one if he caught one. Both of the girls are laughing, their cheeks red. I’m watching this action over Miss Robichaux’s head when Denise looks directly at me.

“I’ll tell you a secret, Miss Robichaux,” I say, returning my eyes to hers, stage-whispering loud enough for her friends to hear. “That was the best—and I mean the best—piece of pig I ever had in my life. And don’t you go repeating that anywhere near Opelousas, because my mama’d like to kill me if she heard me saying that.”

Miss Robichaux blushes and giggles. Even through the Avon base she has caked on, her cheeks turn the same gaudy red she’s died her hair. It’s the same look Mawmaw wore to church when she was alive—Louisiana old lady.

“Aw, now, Father. You stop that,” she says, and makes a show of slapping my chest, a bit of the teenager she once was apparent in that gesture.

After the crowd departs, I stand alone in the parking lot watching the sun set over the graveyard, a small intimate plot just to the west of the church. Only a few of its bodies are shelved aboveg. . .