Edmund Callipeaux – artist, college instructor, lives in St. Louis Park.
LeTigre – Edmund’s wife, televangelist, lives in St. Louis.
Barnaby the Hedgehog – R.I.P. summer 2008
Edmund Callipeaux – 20 January 2009, 12:45pm
I drove my wife to work today. I do this almost every day at around 7:30am so that we can spend a little time together in the morning, and so that she doesn’t have to deal with the frustration of rush hour traffic. As we approached her office, we passed four or five guys half walking down the sidewalk, one half fumbling with a torn grocery bag. The man holding the bag was distributing its contents of tall beers to his companions. I hit the windshield wipers on the car to clear away the icy sludge buildup and thought to myself, “Oh right, Obama’s being sworn in today…it’s time to start partying!” – EC
___________________________________________
LeTigre Callipeaux – 24 January 2009, 11:00 a.m.
Cedar Key: Part 1
On one of our many trips to Florida to visit Kidpowertool, Eddie and I spent four days in Cedar Key. The town of Cedar Key is situated on Northern Florida’s gulf coast within a massive marine wildlife sanctuary. The town dates back to before the Civil War and many of the buildings from that era are still standing and being used. Soldiers from the Northern army had used the hotel we stayed at as an outpost during the war. It’s a quaint little town that tourism hadn’t destroyed as it has so many other coastal areas of Florida.
We arrived in town at about 8:00 p.m. on a Sunday in July of 1996. We had called ahead for reservations and were informed during our conversation with the hotel owner that as it was their down season, no one else was currently booked to stay at the hotel. In fact, the owner told us that they’ve taken to not working on Sundays and that when we arrived in town, there would be no one at the hotel to greet us. She instructed me that she would leave a key to the back door of the building in a flowerpot on the grounds. We were to let ourselves in, make ourselves at home, and someone would be by our room in the morning to check us in and see if we needed anything. I thought to myself, “Wow, this place must be in the middle of nowhere.”
We made our way into town that night, found the hotel, found the back door, found the flowerpot, and sure enough the key awaited us. Eddie and I climbed an exterior set of stairs to a second floor doorway, unlocked the door, and entered the building. The doorway opened up to a large parlor with a fireplace and couches and chairs. Doors to the individual guest rooms lined the walls of this richly decorated room. It was a beautiful, warm room with deep, intricate woodwork and soft, sepia-toned murals of the local swampy landscape covering the walls. There were bookshelves lined with books, antique lamps, and worn area rugs covering the hardwood floor. To our left was a grand staircase that led down to the main lobby of the hotel, across which was a small tavern on the first floor called The Neptune Tavern. (Eddie was especially pleased to find the Neptune Tavern the next day…it had a large portrait behind the bar of King Neptune himself, complete with trident, commanding the sea and all its creatures.)
Directly across the room from the grand staircase, and to our right, was the room we had reserved. Eddie and I stood and looked around the parlor, taking in all of its intricacies. His gaze eventually landed on the door to our room. One second after that, his gaze shifted slightly to the left and down to where it found a life-size doll that looked exactly like a four year old girl. It stood about three feet high and she had her back to the wall. It was dressed in a little pink outfit with stockings and shoes. The material that was used to make her hands and head was very realistic looking. And the expression on her face was also very natural looking. Given that dolls are usually exaggerated in some way, like having an extravagant dress, or a porcelain face, this doll lacked any kind of flamboyancy, and for all intensive purposes looked normal and somewhat plain. It was if she was a real little girl, frozen while standing right next to the door to our room. Eddie looked to me and I could tell without him making a sound that he was freaking out on the inside.
Eddie set the bags he was carrying on the floor of the parlor and said, “I don’t know about this.” He then proceeded to walk over to the doll. Crouching down, he addressed her eye to eye. “This is too much. I can’t sleep in a room knowing that this is directly on the other side of the door. What if she starts knocking on the door in the middle of the night?” We looked blankly at each other for a moment or two as I ran through my mind the layout of the town while trying to remember if I had seen any other hotels. There were none.
Reaching out both his hands toward the doll, Eddie said, “Perhaps it’d be okay if we just moved her to some other location.” He then proceeded to pick her up by her shoulders. “My god! The thing weighs as much as a girl of her age…and the weight is distributed evenly throughout her body like a real person. There’s a density to the form that isn’t soft like it would be if she were stuffed with cotton or something. This is not good.” He walked outside the door that we had entered the building from and set the doll down on the landing. He stood up, looked at the doll, looked over at me, looked again to the doll and said, “I don’t know if this works. She might get mad that we stuck her outside. What if it rains?”
Picking up the doll a second time, he moved back into the parlor and to the far end of the room…as far from our door as possible. “Hey, there’s a little nook back here that I could stick her in.” He set the doll down and stood back once again. From across the room, I watched him as the expression on his face went from mildly satisfied to worried once again. “No, this doesn’t feel right either.” Whereupon, Eddie picked up the doll for a third time and began to move her to another part of the room. I watched him go through this same exact process at about five or six other spots in the parlor.
Eventually, despite all of his attempts to move the doll to a new location away from our room, we stood a few feet apart. Eddie was still holding the doll and I was trying to hold onto my patience. Each time he set the doll somewhere, he got a little more worried that she wouldn’t be happy in that new spot, and therefore she would exact her terrible revenge upon him late that night whilst he slept. “Maybe I should just put her back where she was when we got here.” He then moved toward our door and crouched down to return her to her home. “I’ll just turn her around to face the wall though, then she’s not watching us while we’re out here.” And there the doll was left with her face toward the wall.
Our guest room was like something straight out of Gone with the Wind. It had the four-post covered bed, with mosquito netting draping down, an old-fashioned sink and washbowl, antique wooden dressers and tables. It was beautiful and extremely well maintained. There was also a door in the room that opened to a wide balcony that wrapped itself around the entire second floor of the building. After getting settled in a bit, we went out to sit and read our books on the balcony and listen to the sounds of the night. I don’t know if there where more than a couple hundred people living in Cedar Key, so it was very quite and peaceful that night. Of course Eddie wouldn’t shut up all night about the doll. I told him that he was making things worse for himself by perseverating on the matter. I don’t think that he slept much that night.
The next morning, Eddie woke up before the owners had arrived at the hotel. I awoke to see him climb out of bed and I watched as he crept toward the door. He paused at the door to listen for any sounds of life or movement within the hotel. After a moment, he opened the door slightly to see if there was anyone in the parlor. Opening the door a bit further, he bent down and with one eye he peeked out into the parlor. Immediately he stood back and closed the door quickly, but silently. “The doll is facing the stairs again! How the hell did that happen?” He stood there frozen in his underwear as he stared blankly at me. I thought back to what should be done to treat someone whose having a stroke. We then heard voices. The owners were downstairs and other people were checking into the hotel at the front desk. Across from the Neptune Tavern the noise of clinking plates and silverware emanated from the hotel dining room as they set up for breakfast. Eddie cracked the door open again and peered out. “I don’t know how we lived through the night.” Adding to his sentiment I wondered how I was going to get through the day with this madman whom I was trapped with in the middle of nowhere. – LC
___________________________________________
Barnaby the Hedgehog – 21 January 2009, nighttime
I met Edmund Callipeaux and his wife, LeTigre this past August. I burrowed a tunnel under the back porch of their house. I think that they were initially taken aback by my size and girth as I ambled along looking for nibbles in their vast back yard. Soon though, they began to give me two nice green apples each day. The entrance to my burrow was not far from where they would sit in the evenings on their patio to discuss the day’s events. Those were happy times. But then, one day, a roaming coyote ate me, and I haven’t seen either of them since. – BTH
No comments:
Post a Comment