Postmark Bayou Chene (7 page)

Loyce worked at not complaining. She knew how lucky she was to have traveled more than most people born and raised on the Chene. But her world had shrunk considerably in the past year, and it took some getting used to.

Mary Ann's long stride reached the screen door and kicked it open. She stepped through before the tired spring could pull it back. Loyce felt her stop and bend over, bringing the milky scent of barnyard to the porch. That was followed by the yeasty fragrance of Drifter's ears being ruffled.

“Well, you still got that little pup!” Mary Ann exclaimed. “I thought Fate was supposed to give her to Alcide?”

“After that snake fracas, she walked right up the steps like I'd called her, which I can tell you I didn't,” Loyce laughed. “Brazen as anything, parked herself by my foot, and now she's set her mind to stay there. Been that way ever since she killed that cottonmouth. I sure don't need a dog, just something else to trip over.”

“Well, whether you want a dog or not, it looks like she's here to stay,” Mary Ann said. “She's so stubborn, I'm guessing her last name might be Bertram. If so, you might as well give up and keep her, or it'll wear you out trying to stay ahead of her. I know 'cause I'm married to a Bertram.”

Loyce listened to Mary Ann's boots clomp through the breezeway and down the back steps to the woods path, free to walk wherever she pleased. Just then Drifter shifted position, and Loyce felt the comforting weight settle against her foot. She placed the shuttle in her lap and reached for the silky ears.

“Drifter, could Fate have a plan this time that will work? Do you think you could learn to take me a few places around the island?”

All she got was a tail thump, but she thought it sounded promising. The squeak of barrel wood being pried open told her that Adam was still putting away stock on the momentum Mary Ann's search had started.

5

“Take it easy there, little fella,” Adam murmured as he slipped a hand into the fish cart hanging alongside the dock. The afternoon was hot for late April and made the water feel cold. His fingers closed behind the fins of a small blue catfish. Sure, it took practice to keep from getting finned, but he knew the right mind-set was just as important. Talking to them helped too.

“You have potential to live up to, and you can be sure I won't let you slack off,” he said to this one.

It had been years since Adam could go out—away from the store and post office—to fish. There was just too much to do. It would be impossible for him to keep up with nets and lines that required daily attention. He did manage to bait a couple of lines near the dock, where he caught enough fish for supper several times a week. Firm, lively catfish like this one.

A blow on the head from the butcher knife's wooden handle stunned the fish. Then Adam slit the bluish-white skin just below the bony protrusions on each side of the skull. He went through the movements swiftly, without thinking. Placing the knife on the cleaning board, he picked up the blunt-nosed skinning pliers. Had to be careful making that switch; one or both could slip out of his hand into the water. He sold plenty of replacements for the knives and skinners that got buried in bayou mud.

Four passes with the skinners, and the blue cat was peeled like a banana. Nothing to it. Back to the knife again, he opened the belly from the throat down with one quick thrust. Holding the head in his left hand and the body in his right, Adam gave a twist. The insides pulled away with the head, leaving a firm white column of meat with the back and tail fins intact.

Just the right size for frying whole, he thought. Everyone nibbled off the crisp fins first thing, and Adam knew that a fish longer than ten or twelve inches would turn out greasy if cooked whole. It cooled down the boiling fat too much.

He squatted to swish the small carcass in the bayou before flipping it into the granite dishpan, where it plopped softly on top of a pile of identical white bodies. After lowering the wooden cage back into the water, he hoisted the dishpan and carried their supper toward the house.

Shadows were long across the yard. The fire left over from the washday laundry was now burning under a smaller black iron kettle, the one reserved for fish. Adam had placed it there to heat while he cleaned the fish. Now he stepped into the smokehouse and scooped a pound of lard from the pork barrel into the hot kettle. While it melted, he took the pan of fish through the kitchen door.

Fate, Val, and Loyce were playing an Irish waltz on the porch—“The Star of the County Down.” Their music flowed right into the kitchen where he was working, bringing Josie to mind. How gracefully she had waltzed to that very tune! Hearing it brought home how much he still missed her.

He couldn't remember the first time he saw her, but she was probably right there toddling around the dock, likely peering around Mame's skirt, when he stepped out of the boat. He had been taking in his own fill of the strange new sights. Yessir, Bayou Chene was a boy's best dream. About as far away from the confines of city life as you could get. Not that there was anything wrong with Nashville—it's where his father's family had lived for generations.

But this swamp—this was where Robinson Crusoe could have had an easy time making do. Natty Bumppo would have been at home tracking game through these very woods. Who could say for sure that some freshwater Moby Dick wasn't hiding in the depths of the Atchafalaya? Or 'Chafalaya, as Adam grew up pronouncing it. He didn't realize the word started with an
A
until he missed it in a fifth-grade spelling bee.

Back in Nashville, when Papa came home weak from that boring but most effective wartime killer—dysentery—father and son spent their days downstairs in the library. At first Adam listened to his father read, but as the man grew weak and the boy learned the words, they exchanged places. In this way he read aloud his father's favorite stories from childhood, plus all the new books they could purchase in the hard times after the war.

Adam figured that in two years he spent more hours with his father than some sons get in a lifetime. By the time Papa died, all those adventure books had convinced Adam that life was best lived on the outskirts of civilization.

Later he shared those same books with Josie. The old volumes transported the two youngsters from Bayou Chene to the most exotic locations on the planet. They sailed to India and England through
The Moonstone. King Solomon's Mines
took them to Africa. As newlyweds, they braved the frozen wilderness of
Frankenstein
while tucked snugly under the covers of their bed.

Adam's mother—Eugenia Snellgrove—didn't have family in Nashville; her people had come across the Appalachians when she was small. So, after her husband died and a missionary came to church telling about the Bayou Chene Primary School needing a teacher, it seemed like the perfect adventure for mother and son. The first thing Adam packed was boxes and boxes of his beloved books.

When they arrived in Bayou Chene, Mame and Elder Landry put them up over the post office until the teacher's cottage next door to the one-room primary school was ready. A new schoolteacher was a big event for the isolated community. Neighbors whitewashed the walls, built a new set of steps, and made fresh moss mattresses for the teacher and her son.

While the grownups were busy, Josie and Adam clambered around the post office, inside and out. Several times a day they trotted along the path to check on the work at the school. They were left alone to entertain themselves. Alligators, snakes, and washday fires were the only taboos. Other than the water, of course.

Water—it's the boon and the bane of swamp communities. Giving life but also taking it—one or two a year around the Chene, sometimes more. Mostly children. Josie and Adam learned quickly not to play in the water or even hang off the dock to stir in it with a stick. They didn't climb into any of the boats tied along the bank for fear of a switching. Like the rest of the mamas, Eugenia and Mame kept sharp eyes on their children when it came to the water.

Come September, the teacher's cottage and the schoolroom were fresh and ready. For three years after that, Josie walked through the woods to school. Then she quit, just like Lauf would quit when he finished third grade.

Mame refused to let them ride the school boat across Lake Mongoulois to the upper grades. The trip took better than an hour each morning and afternoon, depending on the weather and the steamboat traffic. During that time a storm could blow in, or the school boat could overturn in strong current. All of Eugenia's arguing about the benefits of education was no more than the bawling of a calf to Mame. She refused to loosen her grip on Josie's safety.

Adam suffered right along with Josie when her education stopped. He made up for it as best he could, bringing her books from his father's collection, which also served as the school library. She read them faster than he could find new ones for her. Postal customers grew accustomed to their magazines and catalogs being creased open before they were delivered. Josie stopped short of actually opening letters, but Adam suspected she would have if she could have gotten away with it.

The most difficult time for Adam had been when he left for college in Nashville. Education was a tradition in his family, so there was no question about whether he would go. While he had been glad for the experience, Adam missed Josie and life in the swamp so much that he could hardly wait for vacation. His valise was always packed with as many books for Josie as everything else. When he graduated and returned to the Chene, Adam brought all the books he had collected during his school years. He joked that his library was the reason Josie married him instead of one of the attentive swampers who lingered at the post office counter. She never corrected him about that.

Adam listened to a lot of people on the trips back and forth from Nashville. Slightly hard of hearing, he had to pay close attention to lips or risk losing the gist of a conversation. It made others think he was a good listener, and he supposed in one way they were right. The better you listen, the more people want to tell you, or at least that had been his experience.

Passengers traveling with the slender young man often mistook him for a lawyer or a judge. There was something in the calm, loose-jointed way he stood or sat. Comfortable in anyone's company, never fidgeting, he was relaxed but attentive. Fact was, he did come from a cadre of scholars in his father's family, but they mingled with the fur trappers, mountain men, and trading post proprietors on his mother's side. Adam could have lived in either world, but he had made his choice years ago. Having grown up surrounded by the majestic swamp, life in Nashville seemed crowded and squalid in comparison. The fast pace wore him down, and he never felt so peaceful as when he stepped off the steamboat onto the bayou bank once more.

Besides, the Chene was a good place to raise a family. Sure, it was out of the way, but it had suffered little from the war and had a better future than many landlocked communities. If Josie hadn't drowned, their lives would have been all they hoped for, maybe more.

But that April in 1907 all the good times seemed lodged in Adam's past. With his handlebar mustache and iron gray hair the same color as his eyes, people who didn't know Adam might guess him to be a decade or more beyond his forty-five years.

Finding a crockery bowl, he cleared a place on the table for it and began the search for the ingredients, eventually locating cornmeal ground nearly as fine as flour, to which he added a handful of salt and a half-hand of red pepper. He stirred the dry ingredients around in the bowl with his hand, rubbing the mixture together with long slender fingers to distribute the seasoning.

Humming along with dance music from the porch, he placed a fish on the table and cut three diagonal slits in the thickest part of the flesh. He turned it over and made three more slits in the other side before rolling the entire fish in the seasoned corn meal. Thinking about how the hot grease would bubble up in the gashes to quickly cook the fish tender on the inside and crunchy on the outside made Adam's mouth water. It also pushed back his loneliness. Cooking could do that for Adam, especially if there were other people around to enjoy a good meal with him.