✍ Balthazar, Hildegarde, and The Pope / October 2025
~ Fiction ~
Roman à clef, cher!
Created AI-free
by Leonard Earl Johnson
of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana
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LEJ's Louisiana
a monthly e-column at
October 2025
Yours Truly in a Swamp
by Leonard Earl Johnson
💫💥💫💥💫💥💫💥💫
"Riding on the Donald-go-round,stretching for the brass ring that looks like fool's gold"~ Hildegarde Bottlebrush
© 2025, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved❤
📖
LEJ's
Louisiana
a monthly e-column at
October 2025
Yours Truly in a Swamp
by Leonard Earl Johnson
💫💥💫💥💫💥💫💥💫
"Riding on the Donald-go-round,
stretching for the brass ring
that looks like fool's gold"
~ Hildegarde Bottlebrush
© 2025, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
❤
Best viewed for color contrast on a computer
or phone screen with a black background.
...........❤........... Balthazar, Hildegarde, and The Pope by Leonard Earl Johnson  💥 Balthazar stands at the entrance to The Rectory awaiting Hildegarde Bottlebrush opening the big walnut and cutglass doors. Hildegarde is the Rector's Housekeeper and the Acadian region's renowned Green Alligator Briefcase repairwoman. The Green Alligator Briefcases she repairs are part of a D. C. Beltway project designed to promote the Republican Party's curious notion ~ in Louisiana ~ that Global Warming is a hoax. "We are in a state seriously losing cities, camps, and oyster beds to rising warm tides." Hildegarde knows, "But Republican briefcase repairs are a solid income stream be thee a believer or not." The briefcase's purpose is to keep frozen a snowball as proof. "They have a built-in freezer unit often in need of attention." The Frozen Snowball Project was inspired by the late U. S. Senator James Inhofe (Republican of Oklahoma) to propagate The Party's belief in non- Global Warming. "When the units fail the snowball melts, see. Then the project fails." Hildegarde explained this to The Rector, who gave her permission to freelance the repair work at The Rectory, in her own rooms, on her own time. "Republicans give me a hundred, two hundred. Whatever. I just take what they offer. Nothing to repairing them but adjusting a screw built for that purpose on the side of the freezer unit's housing." 💦🌎💦 Being of Louisiana's German/French Alsace-Lorraine descent, Hildegarde is most heritably good at fixing things and moderately good at holding her tongue ~ sometimes. Silently impishly tickling inside her was a desire to giggle out: "They'd probably give me free wine and an altar boy, too, if I asked." It would be funny to say that, but Hildegarde knew it would also torpedo The Rector's permission. She held her tongue and smiled remembering the uproar Balthazar caused reading, The Little Boy from Big Mamou, at The Bishop's birthday dinner (THE BISHOP TURNED 74 / January 2023). "All it takes is time, attention, and a place to work. "And a screwdriver!" ꩜ She pointed to the screw for The Rector's examination. He nodded knowingly, secure in mechanics gleaned from nights working at a filling station next door to his seminary dorm. ⚔ ✠ ⚔ Balthazar was at The Rectory door presenting Hildegarde with yet another crippled briefcase. A delivery he was doing as a favor for the two Red Warrior Women aboard his train from New Orleans. The two Red Women remained down on Rue Jefferson, near the Rosa Parks train station. They setup a table on the sidewalk outside Rêve Coffee Roasters, where they displayed the frozen snowball removed from the broken Alligator Briefcase. It is slowly melting inside its crystal-clear plastic cube. Inside Rêve, The Rector finishes his coffee, drops his cup in the dirty dish basket, and steps outside to examine the Snowball Project's evidence of non- Global Warming. "You know," he says to Dillard, while holding the cube up to the sun, "The Pope has warned us not to ignore Global Warming. To do so being an affront to God's admonition to be good stewards of The Earth." Prompted by fading faith, Balthazar observes, after The Rector leaves, "The Pope should be careful Trump don't fly a drone bomber through his bedroom window." Hildegarde shudders at the thought. She believes strongly what she believes, with no concern about Trump's or The Pope's infallibility. Or, for that matter, the pessimistic humanism Balthazar has taken to espousing. Too much time reading too much Schopenhauer, she thinks. Hildegarde asks, "What profits the person who scuttles their own ship-of-state just to steal their own brass?" By their tribalism Cajuns are much isolated from outside influences. These two are friends long bonded by place and a deeply seeded belief that it is morally permissible to lift gold coins and banknotes from outlanders splashing through The Swamp, be they Texas oil men, Washington Republicans, The Pope, or Schopenhauer.  They cross the parking lot and enter The Cathedral, where they drop five dollars in a slot and light an electric candle for the prayer of their choice. On the electric switchbox they place a little orange Voodoo Doll and a plastic pennant bearing the image of Joseph Stalin hanging from Mardi Gras beads. Also two chicken wishbones and a dried spray of Spanish moss.Live flaming candles are outlawed in Lafayette Parish churches. The pennant is one Balthazar brought home from Odessa, USSR, many years ago. After they exit The Cathedral, a custodian watching from the shadows removes the Voodoo Doll and Stalin Pennant and switches off their electric candle. 𑪟 𑪞 𑪞 Next Month's Column ⭐FROM JFK TO RASPUTIN⭐ by Leonard Earl Johnson  ▼ 
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posted by LEJ's Louisiana | 3:09 AM
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