Draft HILDEGARD BOTTLEBRUSH October 2023

 

DRAFT

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Hildegard Bottlebrush

~ Fiction ~

Roman à clef, cher
by Leonard Earl Johnson 

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

Your comments and corrections

are welcome

click here

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Hildegard Bottlebrush attended the prestigious Sacred Heart Academy in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, but chose not to speak of it to the group now exiting The Rectory gate.  They had, after all, come to see The Rector not his housekeeper. 

"Catholic hierarchy runs mostly Gott-to-Cloth with merely passing nods towards housekeepers, gardeners and cooks," she said this once to the now canonized spokesperson for the world's disregarded, Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity.  

They met during the future saint's visit to Louisiana.  

She had traveled to the sportsman's paradise to bolster the faithful in the roiling wake of Jason Barry's exposé of Church complicity in the sexual abuse of children.  He published the story in book form, in movie form, and in the National Catholic Reporter.

Cathedral of Saint John The Evangelist, Lafayette

Mother Teresa's visit to Lafayette led to the establishment of the order's Mission House, on la rue Saint John, across from Dillard and Sylvia's new quarters, and the Cathedral's magnificent Oak Tree. 

🎋🌳🎋The sunlight cast shadows across the cured and waxed alligator briefcase Hildegarde had handed to Dillard on their departure from The Rectory.  The reptilian scales on it's tanned hide looked like waves crashing across a leather sea, and felt to the brush of the hand like some thousand year old armer pitted against the sins of the day.  In Louisiana alligator skins cover treasured cedar chests, briefcases, wallets and ~ most prized of all ~ the feet inside a pair of alligator shoes. 

"Oh, mon cher!" Syllvia exclaimed.

Dillard opened the case when they got back to their apartment and explained to Sylvia how they were being asked by the Republican National Committee, to join the Snowball Project and display the frozen snowball contained inside, 

"To dispel talk of Global Warming."

She waved two bumper stickers in the air, "Also these bumper stickers blaming it on Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton." 

Sylvia nodded her agreement but harbored doubts, given the staggeringly high temperatures currently  outside their own door. 

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Flaschenbürste

Flaschenbürste was the Bottlebrush family name before assimilation from German to Cajun English.

Hildegard Bottlebrush  is descended from a line of 1721 immigrants from German/French disputed Alsace/Lorraine; lured by the Compagnie du Mississippi, the bubble-destined, "Mississippi Company" of John Law ~ then the richest man in Europe, and

Controller General of Finances of France under

le Régent Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, 

after whom the bejeweled City and Parish of Orleans are named.

Philippe II's crest

Born a Scotsman, Law worked variously for English and French governments, and in the process helped invent paper money. Which is, after all, merely a bank issued promissory note payable in silver or gold to any bearer thereof.

On this high rolling flimflam, Law financed and promoted Louisiana's "German Coast," as a New World colony favoring German-speaking farmers; promising them riches in abundance derived from feeding the hungry flocks of Africans, French, Germans, Irish, Italians, and Spanish arriving daily aboard every ship in the booming nearby

Port of New Orleans.

This coastal region where the Familie
Flaschenbürstes eagerly settled and prospered, took the French name, 'Bayou des Allemands,' meaning in English, 'Bayou of Germans.'

Bayou Des Allemands

It is a scenic spot on the Amtrak line thirty-five miles west of New Orleans.

Never incorporated it is known still today, and posted on signs and maps as "Des Allemands" (Of Germans).

One morning aboard the Sunset Limited out of New Orleans, passing over the scenic bridge at Bayou Des Allemands, The Bishop and The Rector saw three boys ~ two white and one black ~ turn their butts upward and moon the train and its holy passengers.

"Some things never change," The Bishop said. 

"Some do," The Rector smiled, "Rosa Parks would be amused."

~ www.LEJ.world 

 

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A famed motor boat chase in the 1973 James Bond spectacular, Live and Let Die, was filmed on Bayou Des Allemands.  Click the link below if you desire the thrill of film chair travel.

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Live and Let Die

Youtube 

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Your comments and corrections

are welcome

click here

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The Ladies Wore Red,
July 2021
Origin Story

💞

 

© Leonard Earl Johnson 

Go here for 
T-Shirts, Koozies, LEJ.world icebox magnets and such falderal ...

If you wish to read any month's column go to www.LEJ.world anytime. 

They are posted on the first of each month and polished for the next few years.

~   ~   ~

 LEJ's Louisiana, Yours Truly in a Swamp

is a monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.world,

Hosted by GOOGLE BLOGGER,
and historically at

Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

publication of the

Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association

It is written by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

✍The Rector and JFK's Rocking Chair / August 2023

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 The Rector and 

JFK's Rocking Chair

~ Fiction ~

Roman à clef, cher! 

by Leonard Earl Johnson 

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

 www.LEJ.world ✍

Your comments and corrections are welcome

click here

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Visitation of the two Red Women and Balthazar

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved 

Barcelona Chairs   
courtesy of Knoll

 A week earlier

Two delivery men in blue jumpsuits sat a wooden crate about the size of a small coffee table on The Rector's office floor, in front of two Mies van der Rohe chairs.  These chairs are famously known in artful and culturally cognizant societies as The Barcelona Chairs.

 They were designed by Ludwig Meis van der Rohe and Lillie Reich, for the Pavilion of German Representation at the 1929 Universal Exhibition in Barcelona, Spain. (Antecedent of the 1984 New Orleans World's Fair, the World's Fair that ended World's Fairs in America.)

The Rector's Barcelona Chairs are white leather, and he has them pushed together to form a stunning and expensive sectional sofa.

The crate is made from lumber core plywood.  A sturdy box, the kind that moves art safely between museums, galleries, and wealthy patrons' baronial estates.

Hildegard Bottlebrush, housekeeper to The Rector, takes a small screwdriver and removes boards revealing an alligator skin briefcase.

Republican National Committee, 

Louisiana 

is engraved on its stainless steel clasp and hasp.

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The briefcase is insulated and equipped with a little combustion engine fired by tiny pellets crafted out of pure coal dust. 

It belches nearly imperceptible puffs of gray smoke.  Keeping temperatures inside the case below freezing, and a brilliantly white snowball therein preserved in pristine condition.  Untarnished by the temperature crises brought on in part by the accumulated puffs of such briefcases.

The Snowball Project is designed to aid political evangelicals at public prayer meetings in tents, on television; or within the marble halls of the Nation's Capitol.

An accompanying card reads:

Don't Worry 

Global Warming is a Hillary Clinton Hoax

~ Lock her up

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Hildegard agreed to receive the crate for Dillard and Sylvia, who are out of town.

At the same time, The Rector is off aboard Amtrak for a week's respite at the Houston Opera. 

Of course, The Rector did not know of Hildegard's arrangement.  Nor that the two Red Women would be on his train to Houston.

"Comment ça se passe, Père" (How's it going, Father), they said, in greeting. "Join us for wine in the club car, please."

Observation Car
 Amtrak USA

The checkmated priest followed behind the Red Women, rocking with their rhythm and that of the train as they passed through sugar cane fields, inside air conditioned carriages leading to the glass domed double-decker observation, snack, and wine bar ~ today's version of the old streamliner's club car. 

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The Ladies Wore Red,
July 2021
Origin Story

The week passed, the crate stands emptied, and everyone is back home in Laughingyette.

Dillard leans on the gate bell.  Silvia stands a couple feet behind her talking with Balthazar, the fisherman-poet they had met on last month's bus ride to New Orleans.  They are talking about the colored jewels he has pasted to the tops of his white rubber boots.  In Louisiana such boots ~ sans the jewels ~ are a shrimper's protective dress as well as identification.

"The rubber keeps out the water," he tells her.  "No one knows why they are white."

"Some people say, so's to not scuff the deck," she smiles.

"Those people have never been on a shrimp boat," he says.  They both laugh and turn towards the manicured lawn beyond the gate where lay a path guarded by Italian Cypress, Louisiana Magnolias and Swamp Palmettos, exquisitely plumed and bloomed. 

At the path's end sits The Rectory of The Cathedral

 of Saint John The Evangelist.  It is The Rector's home, office, and reception hall.  The Rector is the priest who actually runs The Cathedral, freeing The Bishop for broader duties throughout the prosperous diocese. 

Cathedral of Saint John The Evangelist,
courtesy Diocese of Lafayette 

 Up ten steps representing the Ten Commandments of The Faith, a broad blue tiled gallery is lined with windows that sparkle in the morning sun.

 The Rector and his German housekeeper, Hildegard Bottlebrush, watch unseen from behind double hung cut-glass windows set deeply in heavy mahogany doors.  

The Rector sees it is the two Red Women he does not care to ever see again, and Balthazar Boudreaux, who he does want to see.  He shrugs.

The Red Women always arrive possessed by causes, banners, slogans, stickers, and madness ~ the things that make a young priest dream of better wine than they had shared on the train to Houston.

But Balthazar?!  The Rector thinks him a blooming poet proclaiming a Liberation Theology loved by the Argentinian Bishop of Rome, but not heard much in the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana.

"Hell," he mumbled, "Not heard since Seminary, not since Trump's trumpets sounded over the collection plates."

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Balthazar has a JFK memento he wants to sell that would be a perfect Birthday gift for The Bishop.

The Bishop is The Rector's temporal as well as spiritual leader.  In 1963, when The Bishop was a child of eleven, his Father and Mother drove him from Basile, Louisiana to Dealey Plaza, Dallas, to see President John F. Kennedy get his brains blown out over the long shiny navy-blue trunk of his Lincoln Continental limousine.  

Of course, the boy never forgot it.

He saved his pennant and lapel pin from that day, and  over the years added to his JFK collection until it grew so large that LIFE Magazine once did a two page photo spread about it.  

Years later, the latest perennial assassination final full disclosure hearing traveled to New Orleans and set up tent in the Old U. S. Mint, in the French Quarter.  That was 1995.  The boy ~ now a grown man and a rising prince of the Roman Catholic Church ~ was asked to put his collection on display and say a few words.  He did so gladly.  

JFK Memento 

Yes, Balthazar has something The Rector very much wants.  A little porcelain rocking chair suggestive of one President Kennedy was often photographed rocking, flexing muscles said to have been injured in World War the Second.

The Rector tells Frau Bottlebrush to bring the visitors to his second floor study.  "And coffee, please."  He spoke from an ascending electric folding chair attached to a steel rail bolted to the wall next to the stair treads.  Slowly The Rector rose.  The Housekeeper buzzed open the gate.  The visitors entered.

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🗣 😷

Your comments and corrections

click here

are welcome

🠟

Lagniappe du Jour

💜💚💛

"Melanie Plesh and the Great Escape"
Katrina Day August 29

Sam Rey's 

magnum opus

MEET ME IN NEW ORLEANS

Performed by the artist on YouTube 

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Lagniappe du Jour, 

la deuxième

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JFK "High Hope"

campaign song

by

Frank Sinatra,

1960 / You Tube  

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~    ~    ~

Leonard Earl Johnson, www.LEJ.WORLD ✍

 

Go here for 
T-Shirts, Koozies, LEJ icebox magnets and such falderal ...

If you wish to read any month's column go to www.LEJ.world anytime. 

They are posted on the first of each month and polished for the next few years.

~   ~   ~

 LEJ's Louisiana, Yours Truly in a Swamp

is a monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.world

Hosted by GOOGLE BLOGGER,
and historically at

Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans

publication of the

Faubourg Marigny Improvement Association

It is written by Leonard Earl Johnson

of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana

www.LEJ.world 

© 2023, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved