Face to Face

Oliver Daigle was a pedophile

Raised in the crook of a Labadieville, Louisiana sugar cane field swamp

Back of the road born, everyone was told mother died in his childbirth

Father never known, raised by his maternal uncle  

Post Oliver’s octogenarian death relatives discovered his mother lived a long life in New Orleans

And the father was the doctor who delivered him keeping silence behind a stethoscope

Generational familial abuse cascades like an acidic waterfall until a threshold of speech

Evaporates the specter of terror from refuge in what the abiding are no longer unwilling to do

Oliver married Mary, my grandmother Elizabeth’s second elder sister

The first elder brother was Thomas siring a daughter of sixteen

Raped by Oliver in her family home in 1941

My grandmother was fourteen to see her Pearl Harbor

Her mother told my grandmother she did not want her to wear shorts at school

Playing basketball was too much and she could get married without high school

Her formal education ended.  Adam always blames Eve.

There were two tom boy sisters on the road that helped their father in the fields

And a king prancing with his violin all day on the porch like a grasshopper

The two girls born in 1900 were each married on New Year’s Eve and confined to the porch

In 2015 at the age of thirty-six alone together in her Westwego kitchen

About to leave my grandmother’s home to pick up my ten year old daughter

I touched on what my ex-wife has spoken and written of me in court and to

The Catholic Church annulment reporting as slips from her otherwise wall of silence

To explain why she abruptly without warning abandoned our marriage

She stated that I am an abusive man; I know I have never been such

Attempting to understand how the person I showed more love to than any on Earth

Can continue to treat me the way she still does six years later

I see the parallel in my grandmother’s eyes and the Daigle name

To which my ex-wife and Oliver share by fate but not blood

My ex-wife’s father was raised by Wilbur Daigle who physically abused the five children in his home

His wife covered it up, the eldest son defended the younglings

Ran to the U.S. army to drive tanks in Germany as soon as he could

He became my ex-wife’s father through a Dutch woman impregnated and running from her own abusive father headed cross Atlantic to be wed in Kansas with a seed in her womb

A dirt floor house in Ponchatoula Louisiana rattled with an alcoholic ex-tank driver

Turned commercial contractor working for Wilbur Daigle for decades

Pickup truck high balls and beer cans ran a man to demand dinner the exact way upon entry

If not right thunder struck and the girl who grew to be my ex-wife felt the lighting

The triad of mother, son, and my future ex-wife scurried to appease

The threats constant that father would leave

Rampage to a bar room or a bluntness children rarely if ever forget

My ex-father in law once told me half-laughing with ice rattling his glass, “As soon as I found out how much child support I was going to have to pay I decided to stay.” 

I never saw the man not order or prepare a Bacardi and Coke in hand

Including the times I lived with his family for two years to help build my ex-wife’s dream home

A full wrap around porch in the country two blocks away from her alcoholic father’s house

Hurricanes tear up swamp lands

To my ex, her father was perfect

Superman that could lift a house with one hand and stomp tornadoes

My grandmother was fourteen at the time

She said to me in her kitchen at eighty eight

“Why didn’t my daddy say or do anything?  I couldn’t understand that,

But then I thought he didn’t want to raise Mary’s two kids OJ and Rayanne.”

I told her he should have said and done something.  That was not ok grandma. 

That is like seeing one wall of the house on fire and instead of water

One lights the other room to say, “Don’t look over there.”

Everywhere blends

In between selling my home and buying a new one

I have moved nine times since hurricane Katrina, six of those after the divorce 

While living with my grandmother, my daughter was over watching Dr. Who on my computer

At the kitchen table at eight thirty p.m. I closed the hall door to buffer the noise

My grandmother is in her darkened bedroom at the end of the hall I assume sleeping

A half hour later she stomps opening the door yelling how she can’t believe we did this

In the morning she cries apologizing saying she thought we were leaving her out from being included

She was praying the rosary on her bed with the door open, light off

I later asked my father at the oddness he said, “When she saw the closed door her mind probably thinks of being molested.”  My grandmother didn’t talk to her sister for fifteen of her adult years.

She is known for holding interminable grudges

The story was always about a drainage ditch one would not allow the other to run across the other’s property on that single Labadieville swamp road

My eighty eight year old grandmother told me in her kitchen

There were over a dozen others, there was another cousin

Bergeron a barber made public accusations he said, “If Oliver Daigle ever comes in my house again

This time I will have my shotgun ready,” no criminal charges were ever filed

While living with my ex in laws after Katrina, after Dallas, back to not New Orleans Louisiana

Building the porch house still trying to sell our Katrina house,

My ex-wife said while her maternal grandfather from Holland

Was living in her parent’s cabana for the summer with his wife

“I told my parents our three year old daughter is never to be left alone with him or them. Never.”

There were stories of my ex-wife’s cousins in Europe, there were never any charges filed.

My cousin lived in a trailer on the swamp road after attending Nichols State University with his wife

Oliver Daigle snuck inside to go through an adult woman’s underwear drawer

My cousin moved

After telling me of Oliver Daigle at her kitchen table at eighty-eight

My grandmother told me she was at a parish fair as a child

She saw a pair of twin cows joined at the face

Her parents behind her, father said, “Look they are just like ours.”

Mother elbowed father to quiet

My grandmother told me as an adult she found out she had conjoined brothers who died soon after birth

The family of poor means the doctor said don’t’ worry I’ll take care of that

Burial implied, years later she found out about a formaldehyde jar in a research laboratory

Dated in proper account and skeletons residing in New Orleans

Lies are the most pernicious of idolatries

We may begin to worship the idea that we are better off inventing a reality

To reduce the horror of facing actual transgressions with the direct eyesight

Of one animal peering into another, face to face

We are taught to look into another’s eyes is an act of aggression or love

Both are powerful

At thirty-six years old expending an extra hour to maintain this conversation with my grandmother

In her Westwego kitchen before driving to Ponchatoula Louisiana to pick up my ten year old daughter who had a Catholic school dance and a sleep over with her two best girlfriends the night prior

I first starting speaking of my ex-wife’s family then letting these words float in the room,

“Abuse can swallow families.  Even in our own.”  My father had told me stories, but he was always short of true details.  I hoped my grandmother might see this aperture to palpable catharsis. 

I think maybe she did, as she began to tell me of her brother in law Oliver Daigle

Before I left, I hugged my grandmother with that long type of hug

She patted me on the back repeatedly ready to release in her four foot eight crook lined frame

Each beat of her hand resisted by my extension of consistency holding contact with her body 

It was the only way I could say I know.  I know.  I love you grandma. 

I told her, “Your father should have done something.  It is ok to think that.  He should have. Those are crimes.  Abuse cascades into families.  Silence can do terrible things.”

Yet still she would not utter her own name among the dozen