“Each person has their own minder root. Particular to them and
them alone. It’s out behind us in the bayou…waiting.”
                                              —Judeline Laguerre, 1862

When the first baby was planted in her belly at fifteen, Viera’s momma made her take it out to the swamps. It was nothing but a little thing when born, squirted out on the bathroom floor beside the toilet four months premature.

“That’s why it needs to go,” Momma said, not giving notice to her blubbering. “It ain’t cooked all the way. See! Not cooked, Viera.”

Momma absently waved toward the hall where the baby still wiggled on the bathroom floor. Momma’s eyes looked tired, having that anemia all up in her blood. She told Momma that she wanted to try and keep the baby. Momma said it wasn’t no squirrel.

“I told you about what lives in that mist,” Momma said. “I’s sat right here at this table. Right where I’m sitting now and you up in that chair over there. I’s told you to stay clear as long as you could. But I’s suppose the heat rose up between your legs and you couldn’t help yourself, could you now? And besides, the thing ain’t cooked. Won’t live through the night. So go on and do what you got to do. Viera!—child I need you to look at me in the eyes—there you go. Wipe your nose and listen to me. When you’re out there in the reeds, you need to look hard and long at that thing. Watch it for a spell before sending it off. You got to commiserate with them details so you know, so you can remember, from here on out, what sort of misery your body can bring you just like it did with me.”

Viera could barely feel what she carried in the blanket. It stopped moving the minute she had balled it up, pulled it in close to her chest, and carried it outside. A salty sheen coated across her skin, and the late afternoon sun winked through the branches like some forgiving witness. Even the ground obliged, lifting her off the dirt a few inches because her feet didn’t feel the earth, gliding over leaves, around the side of the house, down a narrow path lined with water oak and palmetto. She went to a place where the sky opened and the reeds scattered like whiskered droplets.

The feel of the water on her ankles revived Viera, and she was surprised where she had ended up. She hunted in the waters for the right resting place; her fingers incessantly stroking the blue twill of the blanket before squatting.

Brown tannins in the water turned the shallows into a thin hue of copper, but it was clear enough to see her feet, the dead-soaked leaves she stood upon as well as the blue coloring of the blanket when she extended her arms and let her package go.

The blanket floated briefly before sinking. The waters owning it, playing with the fabric, opening the edges, making angel wings only to have them fold back on itself as the blanket settled to the bottom. There it sat below the water not a foot deep as if it weren’t even gone.

Frantically, she moved out past her calves and pushed the blue blanket further. The same angel wings, the same reversing folds when it settled. But when it finished, the gift still glowed right below the surface.

Her eyes made more tears. A stranger’s moan quivered from her lips as parts of her soul seeped from her heart. It was animal pain: primal, hideous, not of this earth. It was no wonder that other thing paid her a visit. No bigger than a hand and about as narrow as a thumb, an odd-looking root, stark white and coated with tan follicles, floated out beside her half-submerged face as she toyed with the thought of drowning herself.

She sat up as if prodded to do so, water dripping from her wet shirt where she was invited to lean close to this visitor who seemed desperate to get to her. When close enough, the root rolled on its back showing her a tiny face of a baby. The face projected from the root’s side, and if the root had legs, she was sure it would have crawled up into her lap.

Above her, tree branches flexed when tickled by the wind. And the cicada made the only kind of music that mattered. It was a chorus of tears rolling down her cheeks, but all those broken things inside her urged her to eat this root who had a mind of its own. Maybe it was something she felt the root could fix in her life or was something that could mindlessly end it.

The minder root broke easily in her mouth. With eyes squeezed shut she chewed fast. Bite after bite, fighting with the burst of bitter tasting water laced with grit. Deep breaths fought back the impulse to spit but she pushed herself on until swallowing the rest. Her tongue was coated with a little heat like droplets of Tabasco sprinkled in her mouth. But the fire quickly died, and with its departure so did a weight. Viera perked up as if just noticing her wet clothes and the bayou she sat in. She got to her feet, then checked around her as if she were forgetting something. 

“It was just here,” she said aloud, turning over her hands, then searching where she was sitting. “It was something lost, but I can’t remember—”

Confused, she looked further out into the waters. All she saw were those things that only lived in the bayou. Nothing there belonged to her.

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