Postmark Bayou Chene (16 page)

She didn't waste time asking why but flew down the breezeway to the room Fate had used before he moved into the houseboat with Mame. As she felt across the top of the mattress, she heard Roseanne's shoes running down the stairs. Only a bundle of newspapers and a few of Adam's books cluttered the top of the neatly made bed. She kicked them under the bed and felt across the top of the quilt again. As a final step, she fluffed the pillow and caught Fate's scent, even though he had moved to the houseboat years back.

Boots clomped up the back steps as she finished dipping water from a bucket into a basin. Adam, Fate, Val, and Alcide were all talking at once. Loyce grabbed a towel and caught up with the commotion just as they were stepping through the bedroom door. She squeezed inside, on the edge of the noise, waiting for someone to notice the basin and rag. Adam grabbed them.

“It's York!” Roseanne explained to Loyce before switching to questions of her own. “How bad? What happened? What do you need?” Roseanne continued, throwing the questions at anyone who might know.

“A doctor would come in handy,” Adam answered. “But since we don't have one, Mrs. Barclay, bring me a tin of that yellow ointment from the store.”

Roseanne didn't take time to answer but ran across the breezeway.

“I'll fetch Mary Ann!” That was Alcide's voice already coming back through the door. “But some honey and Mame's comfrey leaves would be better. That store-bought medicine ain't as good when it comes to a bad burn.”

“Whoooeee, he looks mighty bad, Adam.” Val's voice came from the other side of the bed. “Do you think we should take his clothes off, or will the skin come with it?”

“Don't matter if it does, they have to come off. Let's be quick before he comes to,” Adam said.

Boots shuffled, the mattress rustled, and the bed frame creaked. Loyce backed into a corner, out of the way. She smelled something like burnt cotton and scalded chicken mixed with whiskey. Roseanne's skirt brushed past, trailing a carbolic fragrance Loyce recognized as the ointment Adam used when he picked up a hot skillet by mistake.

“York's still blew up? How does that happen?” Roseanne asked, when she came back to stand out of the way with Loyce.

“No one seems to know,” Loyce said. “How bad is it?”

Roseanne took stock of the injuries a moment longer before replying.

“Well, there's blisters already full of water and looking to be swelling even more inside of his thighs. I can't imagine how he got burned like that. His palms look pretty raw, and the tops of his hands are sprinkled with smaller blisters. His face looks like it was splashed with hot water. I don't know what would cause that pattern of injuries unless he was sitting astride his still when it exploded. Is that part of the distilling process?”

“I don't know,” Loyce replied. “I can smell the difference when he's using corn or sugarcane to make it, but that's all I know about it.”

“Well, it doesn't look life-threatening, but he's going to be in pain a considerable amount of time. If he hadn't been wearing thick underwear and pants, his privates would be badly burned.”

Just then steps pounded up the back path and burst through the open door.

“Oh Lordy mercy! How bad is it?” Mary Ann threw her brown felt hat on the floor in exasperation. “I didn't mean for to hurt him. I just wanted to get him back for turning loose my hogs.”

“Whaaat?” Adam asked.

“I put an old dirt dauber nest in that pressure relief valve to cause him some aggravation. It must of started the still to jumping, and that fool straddled it to hold it down.”

Her footsteps crisscrossed themselves. Then she stood, fists on hips, at the foot of the bed and leaned over to get a better look at York, as if he were the runt in a new litter of pigs.

“He's had a case of the mean-as-a-snake-itis for the longest time, and I just got tired of it. Turning my hogs loose was too much, and I was bound not to let him get away with it. I never done a thing to deserve the way he's been treating me.”

“Mmmph.” As York's senses returned, his voice was muffled and weak but angry.

“Mmmph,” he said again.

Mary Ann picked up his pants. “What? Is there something in here you want? You want to see if anyone stole something while they were hauling your burnt-raw carcass over here? Here's your billfold, see?”

She held up the worn black leather rectangle. York reached toward it. Wincing with the effort, he yanked the pocketbook from her hands and clumsily opened it with his burned fingers. Slowly he withdrew a small envelope. It wavered in his shaking fingers as he lifted it toward her.

Mary Ann opened the envelope and took out the page of unlined paper. She read aloud.

“Michaud, by next year this time there will be three of us. Please send me passage as soon as you get this letter. I'm looking forward to being in France when my time comes so we can start our family in your country—ours is falling apart. All my love, Mary Ann.”

“Who's Michaud?” Mary Ann puzzled.

“You tell me.” York blinked his eyes, which were lopsided because of a growing water blister on the right side of his face.

“You think I wrote this?” She waved the little blue sheet of paper, which looked incongruous in her broad calloused hand. “You don't even know what my handwriting looks like! York Bertram, you're an even bigger ass than I took you for. How'd I get to know anybody in France?”

“Don't know. Maybe someone you met at your daddy's shop, same as I done?” Yelling was easier now that he was coming to his senses. “Why would anyone sign your name on a letter you didn't write?”

“I ain't got an idea about that, but I know this ain't my letter, ain't never been my letter, I never saw this piece of paper before.” Concern had left her voice. Now she just sounded mad. Loyce winced back from the noise.

“Can I see it?” Adam took a step between the warring couple. Mary Ann handed him the letter and envelope.

He walked to the window and examined the two paper items. “It was mailed from Bayou Chene all right. ‘
INSUFFICIENT POSTAGE, SOUTHERN LETTER UNPAID
,'” he read aloud. “I've never seen a blue postal mark like this. What's this? June 21? Today's only June 13. Wait a minute—the year stamped on this is 1861!”

No one had noticed Mame's slight frame in the open doorway, clutching a bundle of comfrey in one hand. She dropped the comfrey, shuffled forward, and wordlessly took the letter in her left hand. She gently passed her right index finger across the address.

“Michaud,” Mame finally said in a kind of whisper. “So that's what happened.”

All eyes in the room turned to her. Loyce tilted her head in that direction. As Alcide would describe the scene later, “Right then, the Angel Gabriel himself trumpeting into that room couldn't of broke our concentration. There was nowhere else to look or listen for any of us, let me tell you!”

Mame's thin shoulders began to shake, but instead of crying, she was chuckling. The bonnet slid off the pink and green– streaked bun onto her shoulders as she threw her head back and cranked up a laugh like no one had heard since before the drownings. After a while the bed creaked, and York yelped as the old woman dropped onto the foot of the mattress, still cackling with mirth. Then she told them.

“Michaud came the spring before the war started. Wanting to learn all he could about growing indigo, of all things. Where he was from in France, they made their living selling some kind of seashell that blue dye was made from. He said when the indigo plantations over here started taking away that market, it just made sense to try to get into the indigo business themselves—not just his family but the whole region there. Oh, he was quite the figure—tall, with that black hair and green eyes. Swept me right off my feet.” She chuckled again at the memory.

“He was staying right here with Elder, that room up over the store where Roseanne stays now. Bought up a whole sugar plantation and planted it in indigo all at the same time. Everyone told him sugar was the thing to plant out here then, but he was bound and determined for indigo. I was taking care of Josie—it wasn't long since Maudie passed. Elder knew Michaud and me had taken up together. Two youngsters like us, wasn't no surprise. And Michaud was a ruckus all by himself, could cheer up a funeral if you gave him a chance. We was all glad for the merriment he brought after what we'd been through.

“He left around Easter and was supposed to come back at harvest time to see how the indigo was processed. But the war started in early summer, and everything changed—I mean everything! For one thing they broke loose that big logjam up where the Red River comes in. When the extra water started coming down the 'Chafalaya, it covered Michaud's plantation plum up, which was on low ground to start with. He never did come back, so I guess he never knew. I reckon he give up on his blue dye when the war started. That's when they started calling it Indigo Island, though. I had about forgot that's where the name came from.”

Mame's attention swerved away from Michaud back to the envelope.

“I remember when they started using that blue stamp, stopping letters that had postage paid with Confederate money. A few of those letters made it back to the post office during that time, mostly letters meant for our boys gone to the war. It would've meant a lot for them to get news from home.”

“Ol' Michaud!” Alcide said. “Tall fella, Frenchy speech, but not like the Cajuns around here. Sure, I remember him.”

Mame took up her telling again. Her voice was stronger and not so far away as it usually sounded.

“Once the war started, I could understand him not trying to come back, but I wondered about him not answering my letter. Now I see it never got to him. As time went by without us hearing anything from Michaud and my condition got more noticeable, Elder was the one who came up with the idea that we could solve both our problems if him and me would just go ahead and get married. It made sense because I was already taking care of Josie. It was Josie who started calling me Mame, 'cause she couldn't say “Mary Ann.” I was growing up so fast in the midst of all that and the war to boot, so it wasn't long before Michaud was as much a part of my childhood as my corn shuck dolls. I haven't thought about him for years.”

“When Lauf turned out to be one of them
early
babies, everyone kidded old Elder to no end,” Alcide broke in with a laugh.

“That's right, he didn't back up from taking the credit,” Mame chuckled. “He made a good daddy—better'n I was raised with, that's for sure. Treated Lauf like he was his own.”

“So that's where Lauf and Fate got them long legs from!” Alcide chortled. “Might be where they got their dislike of hard work, too, seeing as how they came from a line of high-falutin' business stock.”

“I don't care where anybody got anything,” York spoke up. “I'm an injured man; do I have to drag myself down to the dock and get a deckhand to help me out?”

This brought a round of argument about the merits of the comfrey and honey compared to the tin of ointment. Loyce didn't have an opinion because her mind was still on Mame's story.

“Maybe we should mix them all together so as not to miss anything,” Adam suggested.

“
Mais non!
” Val offered. “Put the store medicine on one side, with honey and comfrey on the other. See which one works best, once and for all. Me, I'll go get the honey.”

“Whatever you put on it, what's he gonna wear until it heals?” Mame asked. “He's not stepping into pants for a long time, I can tell you that much.”

“Well, I can tell you something else; I ain't laying abed till it heals!” York's voice was taking on its normal belligerent tone. Loyce could hear the change even through her distraction.

“The best thing I can think of is a dress,” Mary Ann spoke up. “I don't have any dresses, but I have an old nightgown that will do. In fact, what difference does it make whether it's a nightgown or a dress?”

“A dress!” York exploded. “I ain't putting on no dress or a gown, I'll tell you that right now.”

“Well, what other ideas you got for covering your blistered privates for the next few weeks?” Mary Ann shot back.

In the noisy debate over how to treat and dress the injured man, only the blind girl noticed that Fate had slipped from the room without saying a word to anyone.

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