The Old Poetess

It was near closing time. A poetry reading had just concluded and people were leaving. Rachel recognized the poet, old Mrs. LeClerc, a woman well into her eighties, whose family had for years run a tannery on the edge of town. Despite the coarse and sanguinary nature of the family business, the woman was a verse stylist of some literary repute. She had gained early notoriety by translating Troubadour chansons and erotic French poetry of the 18^th century, writing at an old walnut secretary in the evenings after long hot days spent inspecting the cured hides of slaughtered cows and sheep. In time, an even darker fame had attached to her. 

Dresser Altmont was fond of telling the story how, many years before Rachel was born, Mrs. LeClerc had murdered Mr. LeClerc, shooting him point blank in the temple while he dozed languorously in the arms of a brawny tannery worker, a man who narrowly escaped the same fate as his moneyed lover. The jury, however, was persuaded by Madame Leclerc’s plea of sustained mental and physical cruelty in the course of a loveless marriage. After her riveting testimony on the witness stand, in which she candidly recounted having been forced to suffer numerous and brutal episodes of sodomitic ignominy at the hands of her leather magnate husband, the jury acquitted her in less than an hour of deliberation. The vindicated widow was said to have celebrated her freedom by installing a suspiciously young and pretty Chinese seamstress in the very bed she once shared with the philandering Mr. LeClerc. 

Now, as the old poetess made her way toward the door, she was partly shrouded in the smoke of a fat cigarette that dangled from her perforated red lips. Through the smoke’s silver haze, the woman’s eyes sparkled a cheerful cerulean blue. She smiled slyly at Rachel and nodded, while a beautiful young man with translucent ears escorted her on his arm and together they stepped out into the cool evening air.