They Sold Me to the Crippled War God, So Why Was He Standing in My Father's Barn on Two Good Legs novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Blue Dress
At the parish supper Gabe announces he is marrying Odile's stepsister, her father says she is already sold to the crippled war god, and Odile takes the truck keys and drives to meet the man alone.
Gabe Landry stood up at the long table with a paper cup of sweet tea and tapped it with a spoon.
Two hundred people in the parish hall stopped eating jambalaya to look at him.
I was in the blue dress.
Every aunt in Vermilion Parish had told me for a month to wear the blue dress, because he was about to ask.
"I have something to say," Gabe said.
I put down my fork and smiled at him, because three years of practice is hard to stop.
"I've asked Tessie Thibodeaux to marry me," he said.
He looked down the table at my stepsister, who was twenty-four and honey-haired and already crying into a napkin.
"Tessie's the one who makes me want to be better."
A brief ripple of applause went through the hall, then died as people saw my face.
I did not move.
Paper lanterns swung over the tables, and somebody's baby started to fuss.
My father leaned in from the head of the table and put his mouth next to my ear.
Raymond Thibodeaux was fifty-eight, treasurer of the rice co-op, and the most loved man at every funeral in the parish.
He smelled like Old Spice and fried catfish.
"Ça va, chère," he said warmly, over the noise.
That means it's all right, sweetheart.
"I've got news of my own for you.
"The contract's signed.
"Sebastien Guidry has agreed to take you as his wife in three weeks, and it's high time.
"He's the only man in this parish who can afford you."
I turned my head and looked at him.
"Who?" I said.
"The Guidry boy.
"Le Dieu de la Guerre."
The War God.
Everybody in the parish knew who he was, and nobody had seen him in a year and a half.
He had come home from twenty years in the National Guard, they said, with half his face and both his legs gone to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.
He had not come out of the old sugar-mill house at the end of the levee road since.
My stepmother leaned in from my other side.
Bernadette Thibodeaux wore pearls to every church supper and a smile that stopped at her mouth.
"Poor man," she said, in her altar-society voice, meant to carry two seats either way.
"He's a cripple, and half a ruin, they say.
"It's a mercy for both of you, chère.
"Nobody else would have you now."
Somebody at the next table heard it and turned away fast.
I looked down the long table at Gabe, who would not look back.
I looked at Tessie, behind her napkin, and saw the corner of her mouth lift.
I looked at my father, who patted my hand.
He had known.
He had picked this night and this hall and these two hundred people, so I could not make a scene without being the girl who ruined the party.
I had been the easy one all my life.
I was the one who didn't make a fuss, who paid half the farm's insurance, who tuned the organ at four churches so nobody had to pay a man from Baton Rouge.
I stood up.
The hall noticed.
I folded my napkin in four and laid it on my plate.
"Then I'll go and meet him tonight," I said.
My father's smile slipped.
"Odile, sit down.
"Nobody meets a man at nine o'clock at night."
"I'm a grown woman, Daddy.
"I'd like to see who I've been sold to."
Around us, the clatter had stopped altogether.
"Chère," Bernadette said, low.
I picked my father's truck keys off the table, next to his tea.
He reached for them and then thought better of it, with the whole hall watching.
I walked the length of the room between the tables.
Nobody stopped me.
An old man I'd tuned a reed organ for took off his cap as I passed.
I pushed through the screen door and the night hit me, warm and wet and loud with insects.
My father's truck smelled like cigarettes and feed.
I did not know where the Guidry land was, except that it was at the end of the levee road.
I turned out of the church lot with my dress hiked to my knees and drove east, with the cane fields black on both sides.
The paved road gave way to shell, and the shell gave way to dirt.
My hands shook on the wheel, and I let them.
I would not cry in my father's truck.
If the man at the end of this road was what they said, I would look at him.
If he wasn't, I wanted to know why my father needed me to believe it.
Past the Thibodeaux dryer yard, past the faded co-op sign for a new grain bin that had never gone up, the road narrowed to a strip of white shell between the fields.
A light showed at the end of it.
I stopped the truck at the foot of a long wooden porch and killed the engine.
The old mill house sat behind a row of live oaks, all raised columns and dark windows.
One lamp burned on the porch.
A man stood at the rail with his back to me, tall and broad in a plain gray T-shirt.
A wooden cane hung over his forearm.
He wasn't leaning on it.
He had a telephone at his ear, and he spoke without turning.
His voice was even and low, and carried across the yard without any effort.
"She's here," he said.
"Raymond told her I'd be crippled.
"Tell the lawyers I said I'd never sign it."
I got out of the truck and shut the door.
He heard it, and set the phone down on the rail.
He turned around.
He had two good legs, and not a mark on his face.
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