Postmark Bayou Chene (8 page)

By the time he had restacked the fish in the pan, Adam's gloom had lifted some. With a lighter step, he carried the pan back outside to the fire, where the lard was just beginning to smoke. Sssst. He dropped a fish into the boiling kettle. He squatted back on his heels and admired the hot fat roiling around two, three, then four of the fish. Twirling a long-handled fork, he waited. The remainder of his melancholy began to dissipate, crowded out by anticipation. At just the right moment he flipped each fish with the fork so that all four were the same perfect shade of golden brown.

Adam had just flipped the last fish and was studying their progress when the woman appeared. She stepped out of the woods on the path from the boat dock. He might've thought she was a ghost except she was carrying a valise in each hand. Something in the off-kilter way she toted them made him think she wasn't used to carrying her own baggage. She worked to keep the valises from dragging on the ground despite her good size. “Full-figured,” the catalog called it.

Wrapped tighter than a bale of cotton, he thought. No wonder she was breathing hard, or trying to. She was girded some tight into that traveling suit! Adam noticed her bosom heaving against the maroon worsted jacket held in place by two rows of covered buttons, military style. The thick fabric, the extra row of buttons—any dry goods dealer would spot that outfit as coming from the high-priced section. In fact, he had never carried goods so fine, only seen them in the catalog. There was no call for such in Bayou Chene.

They stared at each other—the tall, loose-jointed man and the tightly bound woman. When he saw she wasn't going to speak, he gave it a shot in his best storekeeper's voice.

“Ma'am, can I help you with those?”

Her chest continued to heave but not deep enough. From her waist, which looked no bigger than a coffee can, to her neck, which looked to be about the same size, she was caught tight by whalebone and fabric. Adam, who had helped enough women order clothes to know that necks and waists should not be the same size, also knew she was getting ready to topple. He reached her in two long strides just as she was going down. As he caught her in the crook of his left arm, he began unbuttoning her high collar with the fingers of his right hand. There was nothing he could do quickly about the rest of the bodice below the neck, since the fabric was simply a cover for the laced corset. If lying down with her collar unbuttoned didn't give her enough breathing room, Adam was prepared to slice open the corset with his knife. But for every reason he could think of, he didn't want it to come to that.

“Did anyone see that?” were her first words. Not a thank-you or pardon me.

“Not that I can tell, but I'm a little too busy keeping your head out of the dirt to check right now,” Adam said, making a cushion of her straw traveling hat before setting back on his heels to look at her. “Don't talk, just breathe.”

She relaxed a little at that and worked on drawing whiffs of air past her corset.

He noticed that her black hair was pinned so tight in place by a whole set of jet combs, it had not come loose during her long walk or the fall. Her eyes, just a tad lighter than her hair, focused on the trees overhead. Soon color returned to her cheeks, but the rest of her skin remained pale. After a few more shallow breaths, she lowered her eyes from the trees to look at him. Her gaze was as reserved as her speech.

“Thank you. I'm Roseanne Barclay. If you are Adam Snellgrove, I've heard you may have a room I can rent. I won't need it for long, as I'm waiting for my husband.”

The mention of a husband dampened Adam's pleasure of watching her and brought him back to the reason he had been in the backyard.

“Ooooh, the fish.” He sprang from his squatting position and went back to the kettle over the fire. “Just a little bit brown, but that'll make 'em crisper, don't you know,” he said as he began dipping them out with the long-handled fork.

An old copy of the
New Orleans Times Picayune
waited in a platter to receive them. Adam knew to plan ahead because fish are perfect only for the time it takes to dip them out. Waste time looking for something to drain them on, and you might as well throw them to the dogs to start with because they won't be fit to eat. When he was satisfied that the first batch was perfectly placed, he began dropping another round of fish into the kettle.

She watched every move, but Adam didn't let her rattle his concentration. Only after both sets of fish were situated did he reply.

“I'm not in the boarding business, and it's probably not what you're used to, but I have a room that might do for a time if you got nowhere else to go. How'd you come to be here?”

Her eyes were set deep, which made them even harder to read. Maybe it was her angled face or the high-bridged nose. But when she shifted that dark gaze back to the treetops, Adam thought of red-shouldered hawks. He'd seen them with that same look when they were scouting places to build their nests high in the cypress trees, where their eggs would be safe from predators. Finally she appeared to light on a story she judged would be safe with him.

“I left New Orleans to meet up with my husband, who's on a business trip in New Iberia. Our boat had to detour around a logjam, and Bayou Chene was as close to New Iberia as they could drop me off. I'll just be here until I can get word to him to pay my passage from here to New Iberia, since I don't have money.”

Squatting down to turn the second batch of fish gave Adam time to decide how much of that might be true. Didn't she know anybody with the brains of a fox squirrel would wonder why a woman dressed so fine would be traveling without money in the tapestry reticule hanging from her wrist? The little bag cost at least two dollars if it was a penny. That surprised him almost as much as a husband who would let his wife travel alone on a steamboat across the swamp. By the time he finished turning the fish, Adam had made up his mind it was safest to just change the subject.

He extended one hand and then the other to help the woman to her feet. Then he picked up the little traveling hat (another dollar, even without the dark red feather trimming the ribbon band). She dusted the hat and cocked it just so on her head, as well as if she was looking in a mirror. By the time he had finished forking up the second batch of fish, her collar was buttoned to the top, and she looked like she was ready to seat callers in her parlor.

“Well, first let's go in and do these fish justice,” Adam said. “Then we'll see what we can do. Fate will come get your bags; you just bring yourself.”

Breathing restored, she walked ahead of him to where he indicated the screen door leading into the kitchen. Whether it was the whalebone or her backbone, Adam couldn't tell, but from the set of her spine, he figured this was a woman who'd break before she would bend.

“So you don't
have
to cook outdoors,” Roseanne said. “But I can see why you do.” The beak-like nose jerked in a small sniff.

Adam looked around at his cooking gear stashed here and there along with the rags, water buckets, and other necessaries that make up a kitchen. Trying to take it all in at once like she was doing, instead of gradually like it had accumulated, he understood how the sight might prejudice a newcomer.

Once again her nose jerked in a sniff, maybe over the basket of sprouted onions on the floor next to the stove. He probably should have used them by now. And the strings of red peppers hanging from the ceiling. He'd never noticed before that after a few years past drying out, they start to look like talons of dead birds. A spoon stuck straight up out of a container of honey that had gone to sugar. How long had it been there? He didn't even remember seeing it before. Well, she was either hungry or she wasn't, and the way she had been watching those fish fry made him think she could put all this mess behind her in a flash.

“Ah, Mrs. Barclay,” he said, with all the confidence his fish deserved, “you won't care where these little darlings were cooked when you taste them.”

With that he breezed on through the kitchen door to the porch. He could hear the tippy-tap of her shoes trying to keep up with his long strides.

The music stopped when they entered, the squeeze-box and Fate's fiddle first, then a few more fiddle strokes before Loyce noticed she was playing alone.

“Young'uns, this is Mrs. Barclay, who has been stranded by a logjam and will be passing time with us while she waits for her husband to send her passage,” Adam said, with a proprietor's flourish. “Mrs. Barclay, meet my daughter, Loyce; my nephew, Fate Landry; and Valzine Broussard, first mate of the
Golden Era
.”

Val looked up from where he was putting away his squeeze-box. Always interested in what's happening on the water anywhere, he and Fate took every opportunity to talk about boats.

“That'd be the logjam over around Plaquemine or Simmesport?” he asked.

“Uhhh,” Roseanne hesitated. Adam couldn't tell if she was stalling for time or was overcome with the good smells rising up from the table. It did appear her corset strained with her trying to breathe them in.

Finally, she said, “Simmesport,” but her voice lacked confidence, in Adam's opinion. No wonder, since Simmesport was north of Bayou Chene, opposite from New Orleans, where she had told him she was from.

“Yeh, that makes it a trial to get from Natchez this time of year,” Val said.

Natchez was the city
above
the Simmesport logjam. Adam saw that Val was too occupied with serving Loyce's plate to notice the woman's discomfort over her mistake.

“How about some of those English peas you spent the morning shelling?” Val went on, holding a spoon over Loyce's plate. With the other hand he moved fringe from his vest out of the way. Val's clothes were a little on the colorful side for Adam's taste, but he appreciated the young man's good-hearted attentiveness to Loyce.

“Since I did all the work of picking and shelling, give me a double helping, but wait till I put this biscuit down,” Loyce replied.

Val waited while she split a biscuit and placed it on one side of her plate. Then he covered the biscuit with tiny green peas and the sauce made with butter and pure cream.

Other dishes passed around the table in the same fashion, with either Val or Fate serving Loyce as needed. Along with the creamed peas and biscuits, their plates were soon heaped with the fried catfish, rutabaga chunks smothered in a brown roux, and leaves of wild spinach wilted with hot bacon grease and splashed with vinegar. The conversation flowed to the rhythm of their congenial dining. Adam noticed that the newcomer ate as heartily as the boys.

“Your Bayou Chene surprises me,” she said to the table in general. “I wasn't expecting to see so many houses, picket fences, and even a store way out here.”

“Oh,
cher
, there's nowhere else like it, for true,” Val answered. “I go up and down these rivers, and I know them all. The Chene, she got most everything except roads in and out.”

“How do you get around?” she asked.

“There's paths on each island,” Val said. “Usually along the banks, sometimes across, depending on how close kin the families are on the other side. And everybody, they got boats for going to another island.”

Then Fate jumped in on his favorite subject. “We got boats for anything we want to do. Mostly we use push skiffs like you see tied up along the banks. You can stand up and see where you going for one thing, and a man can row a pretty good load by himself pushing on them long oars. Now, for tight places you can't beat a pirogue—so light it can float on a dew. It's narrow built and pointed at both ends so you can back up as easy as you can go frontwards. And believe me, sometimes backing up is the best thing you can do.”

“Like that time you talked me into toting that beehive over to Cow Island,” Val said, picking on him now. “I knew better than to put a hive of bees in a pirogue or any other boat, as far as that goes!”

“That should have worked!” Fate shot back. “The water was level with the bank, and it could've saved a lot of time and work to move it that way if we'd done it just right.”

“Well, slamming the pirogue up on the bank so sudden it knocked the hive over missed being just right by a long shot,” Val replied. “You backed up, all right, but you plum forgot about the pirogue, yes. Just jumped out and left me,
enh
!”

Adam noticed that Fate didn't let Val sidetrack his education of Mrs. Barclay, whether she was interested in boats or not.

“The thing you got to remember about pirogues is they turn over faster than a frog can snatch a fly,” he went on. “You don't want to try to carry a lot of stuff you care about, like fish or game or family. The push skiffs are wider than a pirogue, and the stern—back end—is flat, not pointed. A kid or two can hop around in that without turning you over. And you can get some traveling done in a hurry standing up pushing on both oars. Yessir, for plain old hunting or fishing or going down to the dock for a card game, give me a push skiff any day.”

Adam could see Mrs. Barclay's interest was waning. When Fate started yammering about boats, it was hard to fetch the conversation back in line. The conscientious host was still trying to break into the stream of talk when Loyce took control.

“Is this your first trip south of Natchez?” she inquired.

Adam settled back in his chair. If anyone could head Fate off, it was Loyce, and boats didn't rank high with her for conversation.

Then Adam noticed the question made Mrs. Barclay choke on a bite of biscuit and reach for her handkerchief, fine lawn with a little tatting around the edges. A dollar a dozen if he remembered correctly. He couldn't let her stumble like that and ruin her meal, so he spoke up for her.

“I do believe Mrs. Barclay told me she
lives
in New Orleans but just happened to be visiting relatives in Natchez, is that right?”