Je Me Souviens

Georgia summers can be brutal. Not for the heat so much as the humidity. As Sylvia Waters stepped out of her car, the street breathed like a dragon under her feet, but the air blew cool on her face because any air on a hot day soothes. Her auburn hair brushed the moisture on her face as leaves fluttered like a sail, clinging to the branches of a nearby oak tree. The drive from Montreal to Atlanta takes three days but seeing the busy food market in the quaint Georgia town, she stopped to marvel at the wonderous local faire, and welcomed the chance to breathe in the vivid colors harvested by the proud community.

Any clothing she wore complemented her vegetarian-diet figure, and that morning in Charlotte she had decided on a comfortable, white breezy sun dress that sloped over her shoulders and stopped just above her knees, with grey slip-in Sketchers to make the final leg of the drive more comfortable. Sylvia strolled toward an antique wooden vegetable cart bearing huge crimson tomatoes that looked like half-full water balloons and held one up to her nose to breathe in the celestial aroma. The sun glowed yellow on the back of her eyelids as her mouth flooded with saliva.

“Prodigieux,” she whispered.

A teenage boy spoke in a kind, southern drawl. “I’m Roy, would you like for me to bag that up for ya?” 

Perhaps it was a combination of accents colliding as the wind waved across her summer dress, but when she slowly opened her eyes and looked at Roy the fields of hazel surrounding her tiny pupil, a slight swoosh of yellow in them, struck the young man, rendering him practically speechless thereafter as she simply said with a lightly stressed Québécois accent, “please”.

Succulent blueberries and blackberries, plump peaches bursting in glorious sunset reds and yellows, and the noblest of sweet corn all seemed to brighten as she said that one word, and Roy didn’t blink, nor did he move as he resisted the magnetic force that pulled his eyes toward Sylvia. 

She knew she had that effect on some men. Her family chided her for her “je ne sais quoi”, which means, “I don’t know what”, often leaving others entranced and stupefied. Never too ornery, she spared many by not weaponizing that poetic ether emitting from her soul and learned how to nonchalantly break their concentration. As the adolescent’s head homed in to orbit Sylvia amidst an attraction that would soon be as difficult separate as salt from seawater, she looked behind him and twisted the tomato sharply.

Roy removed his sweaty ball cap, looked at the street underneath the cart and said, as if incapable of removing a shoe from his mouth, “I harvest the tomatoes in July.”

Being a kind soul that also needed the comfort of general conversation, especially at the end of her thousand-mile journey, she temporarily forgot that being friendly could only make situations worse, and eloquated, “I have a PhD in Agricultural Chemistry, and if your peaches are anything like your tomatoes. I am sure they are the prize peaches of your county fair.”

Roy bit his lip, and wisely decided on the simplest course of action by responding with a “thank you” and began rearranging the cart by putting the okra with the green beans. Sylvia unconsciously let out a mid-octave giggle, which, unbeknownst to her, was the final brush stroke, and Roy had to decide whether to jump over the cart and run away with her over his shoulder or turn tail and walk quickly to the neighboring cart where his mother sold her blue-ribbon watermelons. He chose the latter. 

Deciding to return the tomato to the cart, Sylvia began to inadvertently finesse her way through the town, in her thoughts and words, in her movements and simple mannerisms, to which every able-bodied man acquiesced, some more readily than others. Silent eyes had become raucous eyes. Even the local preacher passing by bowed while clutching his cross. Most of the men felt that same inclination, to bow as she sauntered by, leaving invisible floral footprints in the cobblestone street as she went. 

Her graceful countenance released spiritual pheromones into the air, and she stopped at another cart to feel nature’s fingerprints on an exquisitely ripe cantaloupe. She saw Roy conversing with a friend, trying not to gawk as he observed her out of his periphery.

Feeling overheated and in need of something cool to drink, Sylvia decided to walk to a nearby diner, observing the quaint, old town architecture that connected the two-story buildings on both sides of the street, and wondering how refreshing a late-September day would feel with the large trees covered in glorious sunburst leaves. 

Inside she sat at a stool, observing a glass of iced tea that had been left at the bar. The cold, sweaty glass dripped condensation onto a napkin, and when the waiter appeared from behind an old, wooden swinging door to ask what she would like, she remembered Roy’s empty stare and opted to point at the tea to indicate her preference.

While she waited, she continued to observe the town outside the window. The diner had proven to be a safe haven from the many eyes that felt as though they were trying to pry the nails out of her foundation, but the wake of her presence had settled, and she thought that if she simply didn’t speak, she could make her way back to her car without unwanted attention. 

She sipped her tea frequently and thirstily, and upon finishing noted the sign above a closed door, “Lavatory”. Making her way to splash water on her face and empty her bladder before completing the trip to Atlanta, she pushed the spring-action door open and saw a hallway that revealed two opposing doors five yards away, with an exit sign on the ceiling above another at the end. The door behind her let out a squeak as it methodically swinged back into place.

Photographs of the townspeople and their families graced the walls of the time-stained hallway, and as she approached the women’s room, she turned to an image of an old man who looked like Samuel Clemens smoking a corn cob pipe. 

The photo captivated her, provoking curiosity about who the man had been, how he had lived his life and how he had died. As she marveled at the aged imagery and his expression, she hardly noticed the door behind her open, and a white cloth quickly appeared over her mouth and nose.

*     *     *     *     *

Sylvia opened her eyes slowly, drooling through a gag in her mouth tied around her head. Lynyrd Skynyrd played hard southern rock at low volume singing of whiskey bottles from a stereo nearby. A dark hood blocked her vision, yet the light in the room exposed a dim view of her surroundings through the cheap cloth. She could see she had been placed in the corner of a room by a desk. Creaking in the floorboards forced her head sideways to listen closely, and she could make out large, Caterpillar work boots that made her cower further into the corner, her now bare feet flat against the wall. 

Though a fight or flight response can save a person from many certain deaths, it proved useless when realizing her hands and feet were bound tightly and tethered by leather strings. She shivered with frantic intensity, but consciously controlled her bladder, as it remained the only snippet of dignity she could muster.

“What I wanna see is those juicy quebekian tomatoes,” a deep voice said as the mean guitar persisted in the background. 

Shuddering, she tried to catch her breath and wondered how anyone in that town would know she came from Quebec. The answer horrified her as she envisioned her Canadian license plate. “Je Me Souviens”, it read underneath the tag number. I Remember, she translated the motto of Quebec. She knew someone must have followed her, and ineffectively kicked outward sharply to try to ward the man off. Disassociating from the horrific moment, she quickly remembered. Remembered her mother faithfully praying at the Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal. Unshakable, her faith carried every member of the family through the most difficult of times, and she remembered the candles they lit. She remembered the prayers and the masses, half-believing, because her faith had been based on the flame in her mother’s heart. 

She fought a possible truth that would crumble her dimming faith in God, a supposedly loving God that would grant her Calypso’s beauty, only to abandon her to the grossest of beasts. That was not a God she wanted to have any part of. 

Terrified by the intimidating steely guitar constantly belting out at her, she tried to counter the offensive by wishing it away, but she couldn’t. Her thoughts raced so fast that she began to stutter in her mind as tears flowed freely down her darkened cheeks.

“You think you can come into Johhhjahhh, flash that pretty little face round the food market and not leave without a date?” he taunted her happily. “All the men was smitten by you, and I’ll be damned if you ain’t gonna leave here without giving me a slice of that pretty peach.”

She opened her eyes. Leave here. He said leave her, she thought, and her senses sharpened, realizing that there might still be a sliver of a chance at life. “Je vous salue Marie,” she muttered through the gag, now drenched in saliva.

“Whaat? Is that Free-onch you trying to speak? They told me y’all changed languages up there, but me, I didn’t believe it. European languages don’t belong that close to the South, much less from a buncha foul mouthed idiots that mistakenly call us Yankees.” Spit from his tobacco splattered onto her feet, and the man wiped his mouth. “I’ll tell you what, if you can say Robert E. Lee in a way I can understand, I’ll cut your bindings and run. I promise.”

Sylvia would have tried to say anything the man wanted, but nothing coherent could have escaped the gag, and she tried to move it out of the way with her tongue to say Robert E. Lee, but she couldn’t. Je vous salue Marie, she prayed, comblée de grâce, and in the recesses of her mind she wondered why the man was just toying with her like a boy with a magnifying glass set loose on an insect burning rampage. Then, suddenly, his cell phone rang, and he left the room, the door closing fast behind him.

She rubbed her foot against the wall to clean off the spit, bent her head to her hands secured to the binding at her feet, and lifted the edge of the hood to look for anything she could use to defend herself. Meanwhile, she tried to control her breathing and listened. The man was calmly explaining something. She kept the hood raised to her forehead and frantically scooted toward the desk. Tears gushed from her eyes as she wiped them away with her free hand, trying to see if there was anything sharp at the base of the desk because she couldn’t stand up, but the man’s voice stopped, and she pushed her body back into the corner with her legs, the hood falling back over her face. A fiercer course of adrenalin struck her sharply once again as the door opened, and she cowered with her head on her knees, her hands gripping her feet. 

“JE VOUS SALUE MARIE, COMBLÉE DE GRÂCE,” Sylvia screamed through the gag, her faith teetering in imaginary balance, dreaming she would be rescued by her father, her brother; any person worthy of calling themselves a human being, for angels do not really manifest in this world. Angels do not tear the veil that covers and separates the divine from the ethereal. Their golden crosses with their shining shields are only pictures and images in churches, in divine paintings and other worldly adaptations of bravery and victory over evil. She battled in her mind to reject those thoughts that burned in her like a heretic trying to cut its way into her soul. 

Responding indignantly to her prayer, the man kicked her foot. “THAT……WAS NOT Robert E. Lee,” he yelled, leaning over her weakened body to breathe the stench of cheap whiskey and Copenhagen snuff heavily into her hooded face. 

As he stood upright, she heard him remove his belt, and Sylvia made one last effort to kick him with both her feet. A valiant, but futile jolt that was thwarted by the leather string that kept her feet close to her hands. Despite her faithless thoughts, she mustered the only image of the only angel she believed might come to her aide.

As she envisioned the Archangel Michael with a flaming sword, his foot crushing the egg-shaped head of Satan against a rock, a shadowy figure appeared behind the silhouette of the man, and just before the music stopped playing, she heard a thunderous clank of metal that accompanied the crushing of bone. The dark shadow of her abductor slammed into the floor to the clamor of a dropped shovel. 

Scuffling quickly to free Sylvia’s bound feet and hands, Roy Sullivan pulled the tear-soaked hood off her head. His astonished face appeared in a blurry, yellow haze as his eyebrows scrunched strongly downward in deep concern for her well-being. With several out-of-breath “Oh my God’s”, he helped her to her feet.

“I saw you through the window at the diner,” he murmured between breaths, trying intermittently to explain that he had not seen her return to her place at the bar, and in a quick search of the restaurant, he checked the alleyway only to see that she had been placed in the back of the man’s truck as he sped away. “You are so divine, I……couldn’t let anything happen to you,” he continued, but his voice was stifled in the aftershocks of excess fear she had experienced.  “….and I had to run through town, backyards and whatnot, chasing his truck. When I saw him come down this road, I knew he would bring you here.” He stopped abruptly and breathed more. “Are you OK?” he asked, not waiting for an answer as he tried to usher her out of the grain mill office. She stopped him short and turned to the dead man on the floor, kicked him hard in his dead crotch and yelled, “It’s Québécois, you brainless piece of shit!”

Roy gently pulled her away and carefully walked her to his truck to drive her to the police station. 

*     *     *     *     *

The realization that good actually does triumph over evil became the cornerstone of Sylvia’s faith. Maybe angels do exist. Maybe they jump into a person sometimes and go for a stroll in their subconscious. Maybe they don’t, who knows? But there is one thing Sylvia could be one-hundred percent sure of. Saints exist. The golden image of Roy Sullivan would forever be etched into her memory as much as she had been etched into his.

Years later, the details of the horrifying incident had become only fragments in the recesses of her mind. Fear and hatred for the man had dissipated, and she smiled happily, as she had learned once again to smile happily. Sylvia Waters stepped out onto her apartment balcony high above Montreal and thought of Roy, who undoubtedly saved her life on that victorious date. Peering into the crisp evening twilight, she grabbed the railing with both hands and yelled at the setting sun, rebirthing stars, and quarter moon.

“JE ME SOUVIENS!” 

Several people echoed the popular Québécois motto from their own stoops from far and near. Je me souviens……

Then she pumped her fists high in the air and yelled louder.

“JE ME SOUVIENS DE ROY SULLIVAN!”