reading

CHAPTER ONE

June 2010

Thinking back after all these years when I try to write about the storm of June 27, 1957, I remember the memories of my life when I was drowning—the meticulous reliving in a dimension with no time. I remember barreling over and over, a storming stone through the waves, and when I managed to come up for a breath, I thought the wind would take my head right off my shoulders. My arms grasped at nothing and everything. My legs were useless against the force of wind-driven water. I had no thoughts, just the sense of a storm in my head that shredded everything that had been important to me. I had no great revelations, no great epiphanies, but I saw the extraordinary. Through all the dirty, swirling water that tossed wooden beams, branches, tires, telephone poles and cattle carcasses, my eyes focused microscopically. I marveled at the intricacies of a single oak leaf with its webbing thoroughfare of veins. I marveled at the leaf as a single, cyclical debris of a greater tree, and then I remembered the tree. I remembered Papa shooting at me in the tree. I remembered my mistake. I remembered that all the good that I had done in my short life was defined by one mistake. Why do humans remember only the bad? I was that human remembering my life, and I knew that I was dying. I didn’t want to die. I had to atone for too much. I remember that I had the sense that I had been a witness to miracles like the leaf but did not see them because of the swirling debris of my life. It was a great sin. I needed a miracle, so I asked. I heard a woman’s voice calling my name,

“Walt, Walt, come up.”

I grew up on the northern crescent of the Gulf of Mexico, a body of water in the shape of a human brain with the brain stem positioned at the Yucatan Strait. The Gulf at its deepest is around 13,000 to 14,000 feet and is fed by water from the Caribbean Sea entering through the Yucatan Strait. This fast-moving current circulates in a clockwise loop before exiting through the Florida Straits into the Atlantic Ocean. It forms what is known as the Gulf Stream, one of the most powerful water currents in the world. I lived in a small town in southwest Louisiana by the name of Cameron, originally known a hundred years or so earlier as Leesburg, and the only remnant left of that name is a street. Southwest Louisiana is nothing but a speck on the world map, the button of a ball cap on the head of the Gulf of Mexico. Cameron positions itself almost halfway between the hook of Texas, sporting Brownsville, and the toe of Louisiana’s boot where the crescent city of New Orleans lay at the mouth of the Mississippi. For nature lovers and birders, Cameron is probably best known for its nature trails. Its marshes grow giant cattails, maiden cane, and bullwhip that are especially good in trapping silt and preventing erosion. It provides a good environment for a wildlife teeming with alligators, reptiles, muskrats, nutria, and migratory birds.

When I was growing up, the semitropical climate was all that I had ever known, its blanket of humidity smothering my world for most of the year—hot summers, mild winters, mild being relative, though. I thought the winters were cold because I had never experienced snow and real cold. I had never been north of Lake Charles or east of St. Martinville, and I had never been to Texas except in my dreams and the movies. We were isolated with a history of being unwanted. My ancestors were Acadians, an exiled people who were expelled from the Canadian Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia, the land that they had cultivated for close to a hundred years, the land that they called Acadia, or Acadie, a colony of New France, and the land that was conquered by the British in the early eighteenth century.

During the French and Indian Wars, the British demanded that the Acadians sign an oath of allegiance to the King of England and thus the Church of England. Many of the people refused because they were devout Catholics. Others refused because they feared being forced to fight against their native country, France. Still, others refused to sign because they feared an Indian uprising. In today’s world the Indians would be referred to as Native Americans, a more dignified name. If they had signed the oath of allegiance to the King of England, the Indians would believe that they were acknowledging British rule. Because of their refusal to cooperate with those in authority, specifically the King of England, the Acadians were expelled which became known as le Grand Dérangement, the Great Expulsion. The British burned their homes and confiscated their land and animals. The saddest of all the events that befell them was the splitting up of their families and their deportation on separate ships to various colonies on the eastern seaboard. Some of the ships were lost in storms. Some of the Acadians were sold into slavery. Some became indentured servants to the colonists. Others were sent to England and France where they made their way back to the new world searching for their loved ones. Louisiana was ruled by Spain who allowed the Acadians to settle the coast of Louisiana where they occupied the swamps and marshes, the lands that no one else wanted. They became known as Cajuns. They were my people.

During the post-World War II years, the windows of the world began to open. Uncle Thib’s Admiral TV broadened my horizons, and then, many did not believe what they heard on the news, especially the weather report which was so often wrong. When the weatherman reported a hurricane so early in the season, most people thought it was ceremonious like the opening pitch of the baseball season, but the unctuous warning, a slippery science of weather for its time, became the extreme unction for over five hundred people. Most of the town’s people were older and didn’t have TVs and did not trust the squawking that came from them. My dream, nightmare, or premonition, whatever you want to call it, had broken the time bubble that had been floating around in space and decided to settle on a reed of grass and burst. It happened and all hell broke loose. I was almost twelve-years-old.

CHAPTER TWO

June 1957

The dreams had begun before the drowning. It felt like my whole life had been hurtling through time and space like a meteor streaking to that one last moment. Is that the way it is? We live our lives for that one climactic moment when we die? That night, I woke up fearful and couldn’t sleep. I sat up and leaned against the iron headboard. I blinked my eyes to adjust to the dark. The night was black, but I could see the white frame of the windowsill glowing in the soft light of the stars. Many times, I was secretly afraid. I couldn’t relax because I was afraid Papa would come into the bedroom and flip the mattress with me still in it. I listened. My senses pricked to the screaming point. I heard my brother Bobby’s steady breathing in the twin bed next to mine. I heard Pooch on the floor, his breath also steady. I heard the gentle, rhythmical snoring of the Gulf that lay in a crater several hundred yards away. The Gulf reminded me of Papa. There was something deep and dangerous underneath, if only I could understand him.

I tried to remember the dream but could only feel the confusion. I threw my legs on the side of the bed. It was the first time I realized that I was the least loved by Papa, if loved at all. Sadness filled me and overflowed into the room around me. I saw the aura of myself turn my collar up and walk away. I got out of the bed and followed, groping through the dark, carefully opening the door and making sure the screen door didn’t bang shut. Pooch followed me, or us. It was strange. I stepped across the dew-covered St. Augustine grass, bent down and cuddled him.

“I know, my good old Pooch, you love me the most,” I said and felt the rise of tears.

I tried to convince myself of the many reasons that I could come up with for Papa’s meanness toward me. There was more than I knew at that time, but back then, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Papa must have known. I resolved to try to do something special for him or to make him proud of me in some way. Maybe then he would love me. This was different. The fear was a different kind of fear. It wasn’t about Papa. I didn’t know why I was so unsettled with a clammy feeling of foreboding. Was it the dream? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. All I wanted was to sleep under the stars so that I would know that God was still in charge, and my problems were nothing but dust in the wind. A mulberry tree grew next to the front porch, and I had rigged a hammock high up in the tree for those fearful nights. I climbed the tree feeling the rough fuzz underneath the glove-like leaves brushing my face. Pooch curled up at the bottom of the tree. I crawled into the hammock, and it molded around me like a cocoon. I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of the exact occurrence of what happened to me when I was drowning—the barreling through the waves, grasping for anything, and letting go of everything. I dreamed of floating face down with the incredible ability to focus. I heard a woman calling my name, but as I came to consciousness, I realized that it wasn’t the lady in the tree calling me, but this time it was Mama.

“Walt, Walt, wake up.”

Mama came to the front porch. She was calling me into the world of things to do. I heard the front door open again, and Papa came out and picked up the hoe that lay against the house. High above in my hammock, he poked me in the back.

“Up and at ‘em, Boy,” he said in his gravelly morning voice not yet tempered by his morning coffee. Papa looked at me as I came down the tree. “Why were you in the tree?” he said.

“Don’t know. Scared I guess.”

“You scaredy-cat, you can’t give in to fear. Dying is dying whether you drown in saltwater or pass out in your beer,” Papa, known by everyone in the community as Man LaCour, said.

“Or fall off the stupid roof,” I said. “A Leeeeeeee,” I yelled with all my might, but he didn’t hear me. Éli, my friend, the idiot-genius stood astride the pitch of the roof, glorious in his devotion to ritual. “I guess,” I said, and my voice cracked—the dead giveaway of a boy entering puberty. “I guess that’s why we have guardian angels for all the drunks and idiots.” Papa sliced his eyes at me.

“Boy, where’d you come from? You act like an old woman.”

Papa left me on the porch to watch Éli’s ritual by myself. The door slammed. You would think I would have gotten used to it by now because every morning at sunrise, since Uncle Baby picked him up on Highway 27 going toward Cameron, Éli braved the slick, slant of the roof to stand on top of Uncle Thib’s Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler bar and serenade the fleet of fishing boats that lined the dock. The shrimp boats rocked on the dark water, the skeletal rigging black against the sky. Today was no different. Through the overgrown vines and roses on the front porch, I watched Éli’s silhouetted figure. His dark jacket flapped in the breeze. His arms stretched out like a tightrope walker. One hand gripped his violin, a world-class violin at that, and the other held the bow. There was a big mystery surrounding Éli’s violin that no one had figured out yet. It was a Stradivarius. It was supposed to be a secret, but most of us Cajuns didn’t give a big cahoot about that. Just so it worked for the fais-dodo on Saturday night. Éli staggered. My body tensed.

“For Pete’s sake why do you have to get on the roof? Why not the dock? Why not the stupid dock?” I said under my breath. Éli’s total lack of self-preservation was part of his condition. His foot slipped. I gasped. “How can anyone be so smart and so dumb all at once?”

Éli bent his knees to regain his balance, stood upright, his back to the sun, facing the wind, and the magnificent, fog-shrouded Gulf, not letting anything mess up his ritual because change was not part of his small vocabulary or his life. I exhaled. Éli lifted his violin and tucked it under his chin; then he lifted his bow and drew it across the strings, trying to understand the very air and properties of the water. The faint strains of sea-groaning notes filled the air. The sun hovered on the horizon flooding the Gulf and inched up the dark sky. Éli played with freshness, as if it was the first time he had seen a sunrise.

Spiders had been busy in the hours before dawn. Their webs strung up and down the barbed wire fence, netted diamonds of dew and every now and then a mosquito or fly. Spiders and shrimp fishermen had something in common. They both had to cast their nets at the right time of day for a good haul, and even then, they might get lucky or they might not catch anything. The beauty of the morning was nature’s irony because the weather could change to threatening in no time. I opened the screen door and stepped into the front room and tossed my leather gloves on a chair. I controlled my voice to hide my excitement that the weather would be too bad for shrimping today.

“It’s going to rain. Éli is playing some kind of funeral music.”

“That’s hogwash,” Papa said.

“Éli is a barometer. He knows,” I insisted.

“The idiot don’t know when to come in from the rain.”

“Mama says he’s a miracle.”

“He’s retarded for God’s sake,” Papa said.

Soft light aproned around the bedroom door where my mama, Mary Effie cooed to the four-month-old Baby Faye. Baby Faye babbled. Mama had heard our conversation because she appeared sleepy-eyed at the bedroom door wearing her faded robe and holding a squirming, curly-headed Faye.

“Miracles come in strange packages. God doesn’t make mistakes,” she said, and turned her attention back to the baby.

“It will be a miracle if I can put food on the table,” Papa said. “Miracle is just another word for hard work.”

Mama walked around the room in the opposite direction of Papa, bouncing Baby Faye in her arms, stopping in front of the window, and swaying quietly. Papa paced in front of the window; the radio roiled static. Papa and the radio charged the air with electricity. He stopped at the window, parted the curtains and stared at the gathering clouds, those darkening-by-the-minute clouds, stalling over the Gulf, daring the wind to move them until they were emptied. He squeezed his eyebrows and squinted his eyes as if to will the weather to change. Shrimp fishermen were dependent on the weather, just like the farmers, except the farmers usually wanted rain and the fishermen did not. A little rain never scared anyone, but a thunderstorm and rough seas made everyone sit up and take notice. The radio announcer’s baritone voice trailed in and out of the static.

“It has been reported that there is a disturbance in the Gulf that’s worth keeping an eye on,” the radio announcer said. “News out of the New Orleans Weather Bureau reports that the ship the SS Terrier radioed that it unexpectedly experienced thirty-five to forty miles-per-hour winds, probably a tropical depression developing in the Bay of Campeche in the lower Gulf of Mexico. The depression looks like it is moving northward. We will keep an eye out for further bulletins and forward them to you as they come in.”

Mama and Papa paused and looked at each other. Fear held their gaze—their lives balancing on that second of knowing. It was June, a little early for the hurricane season, but storms were real in the Gulf south where we lived. Bobby stepped out of the bathroom sporting a bandaged, stubbed toe—a Kick the Can injury. Bobby—with his sleepy, black eyes, face glowing with fresh freckles since his last sunburn peeled off had grown a half a foot taller this year and was a little tougher to beat at arm wrestling. I could still slam the back of his hand on the table for now, but time wasn’t just whistling Dixie; it was blowing and going. I knew back then that my brain would prove to be my best asset, and I worked at it. I was the older brother, and in Bobby’s eyes, I still reigned as king of his admiration.

I scooted into the bathroom for fear of holding Papa up. God knows he wasn’t a patient man. When Papa was around, the bathroom was the only place where I didn’t have to uphold an all-is-well pretense. I closed the bathroom door and accidentally knocked over the bottle of Mercurochrome that Bobby had left uncapped. Instinctively, I tried to catch it. The red liquid filled my hands and splattered on Mama’s white bath rug.

“Darn,” I said under my breath. In the dull light from the single light bulb, my hands looked bloody. Murder weapons, I imagined. Papa banged on the door.

“Get a move on, Boy.”

“Yes, sir,” I said in my meekest voice.

Acting in the LaCour family meant self-preservation. My shoulders slumped when I glanced in the mirror at my anxious face, hazel eyes blinking, fair complexion, and a chin that come hell or high water wouldn’t grow whiskers. I looked closely at my chin almost in the same way Papa looked at the weather and tried to will it to change. I tried to will whiskers to grow. Even my name, rather my nickname, for God’s sake, was a slap in the face of my manhood. Papa called me Boy to remind me that I was nothing special, just an immature male of the human species. I didn’t like it, but it was all I had ever known. Papa used that name to lord it over me and to keep me in my place. Mama called me Walt Junior. I didn’t much like being named after my old man either. His was a legacy that I didn’t care to repeat. I was my own person, yet I was Boy.

I rinsed the bath rug as best as I could and laid it on the side of the tub. It was stained for good. Mama wasn’t going to be happy about that, but I didn’t want to get into it now, especially when Papa was around. When I came out of the bathroom, Papa stood on the back porch taking a leak on the oleander bush. I hid my red-stained hands with my work gloves, and at the first chance I got, I showed them to Bobby, pinching him on the arm, angry because he always got me into trouble. Bobby squealed.

“Don’t you two start,” Papa said coming back into the house zipping up his pants. The door banged behind him.

I glanced at my book, that lay on the fireplace mantel, and wished I could take it with me, but there was no time for reading on a shrimp boat. The fireplace was emptied of logs and ash for the summer. The mantel always held special things—the things we didn’t want to lose like the car key and a framed photo of Papa in his US Army uniform standing squarely on two good legs. It was a mantel of memory. Grandmère’s books were stacked there. Papa had wanted to bury them with her, but Mama said that Grandmère had wanted me to have them. That was one of the very few times that Papa ever talked about his mother. She never existed in his world. She lived in a smooth world, according to Mama—hands gliding through the yellowed pages of the ancients, Shakespeare, and most of all the Bible, books falling open to the chapters she read and reread as if they had a mind of their own, pages worn from use, but never dog-eared—no, never dog-eared. I suppose to most of the hard-working Cajuns, it seemed like a useless pastime. It surely didn’t get the lawn mowed, the garden hoed, or the corn shucked, but it took root in me and made me feel like a little fish in a big pond—the more I learned, the less I knew compared to what there was to know. I loved every morsel of the knowing.

I had little memory of my Grandmère except that when she took the bobby pins out of her hair, it fell past her waist in a gray waterfall, and the one memory that shaped my world—she read to me. In the evenings or late afternoons, she sat in her rocker, pulling me onto her lap, reading in English, her eyes hungering for more, my eyes adopting her hunger for secrets that unfolded like Mama’s oriental fan that she used in church on hot Sundays. Even though I didn’t fully understand the words then, the lilt of the language imprinted my brain.

Although the grandchildren called her Grandmère, the French name for grandmother, she was of English descent and had married a Frenchman, Alton LaCour. The Cajuns began to adopt the customs and attitudes of the American culture when the oil industry took over the economy of southwest Louisiana. Many Anglos married into French families. Our family was one of them. World War II dumped many Cajun soldiers, like Uncle Baby and Papa, into American patriotism, and with the influences of foreign lands, the pure Cajun culture was worn away. Although I was not a fourteen-carat coonass, I considered myself one because of my accent, and the fact that our family was mostly French and had accepted the French culture.

“Ninety-five percent chance of thunderstorms in the a.m.” the radio announcer’s voice boomed. I heard Papa curse under his breath.

“Can’t fish, can’t eat. Can’t even piss in my own john. Miracles—hmph,” he paused for a minute. “We’re going out anyway,” Papa said. “This ain’t a dying day for us; it’s just a kiss goodbye for the shrimp,” Papa said full of his macho, gun-slinging self. “Get a move on boys.”

He crammed his hat on his head and banged out the front door and down the steps, stuffing his bandana in his back pocket, glancing over his shoulder to make sure that Bobby and I followed. Heading for the boat, I watched Papa’s lopsided gait as he walked down the crushed clamshell road.

“Poo Yie. C’est la vie,” I said to Bobby low under my breath. “It would take a miracle for me to understand Papa.”

All I wanted to do was to stow away in my short story where a war was going on and Finny and Gene were Upper Middlers at Devon school. I identified with war: psychological and physical. That and the need to escape kept me reading. Pooch stood on the front porch and barked.

“Come on, Pooch. We have work to do,” I said. Pooch barked and bounded off the porch. I considered Pooch to be a human being in a dog suit. I loved him, and he loved me and that was that. I wished my old man loved me like that, but human love wasn’t that simple. There was more to our relationship that I didn’t understand. I always felt that I was on the brink of discovery, but it escaped me. I was afraid again and fear twisted my stomach.

“I wish I could follow my own intuition,” I whispered to Bobby.

“No way with Hitler in charge,” Bobby said.

With Papa in the lead, Bobby and I followed. Pooch tagged along behind. We reached the dock where a Negro man who looked to be older than Papa waited for us.

“Mr. Man,” he began, “my given name that my mama give upon birthing me is Hipolite Garfield Mays but mostly deys jus call me Pud cause I’s always has a hankering for chocolate puddin. I says my name like dis so you never forget: My name is Puddin and tang, ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”

“Good morning, Pud,” Papa said.

“Ain’t so good of a morning, suh.”

Pud looked into the sky.

“It’ll clear up,” Papa said. “What you want?”

“I’s got ice in my truck, and I’s uh be puttin it in your hold for one dollar.”

“I’ll give you two bits.” Pud scratched his head. The rain came in sprinkles.

“See hows I got ice dats gonna melt my profit and youz the only boat goin out in dis rain, I guess dat will be alright by me.”

“You got yourself a deal,” Papa said and stuck his hand in his pocket and jingled his coins. “We surely can use an extra hand this morning seeing how these boys are no count.”

Pud looked at Bobby and me and winked.

“Deys mighty fine lookin boys dey is. But no suh, I ain’t going out in dis weather. It skeers me.”

After I cast off and Bobby pulled in the fenders, which were nothing more than old rubber tires that Papa had scavenged at a dump, Papa maneuvered the old shrimp boat, the Mary Effie, around the docked boats and chugged through the dark water, heading out to his lucky shrimping place. When we left the dock, I waved at Éli who was still on the roof. Éli saw our boat going out and stopped playing his violin to wave his hands, still holding the violin and bow, in warning as if to flag us down. It was useless. He began playing again furiously moving the bow although we were too far away to hear him. Papa was hell-bent on proving the weatherman wrong. Bobby stayed in the wheelhouse with Papa. We got to the area that Papa liked to claim as his own and lowered the butterfly nets. We all hoped that we would catch enough shrimp, so we could head in early, but to our disappointment, we came up with a couple of red snappers and enough shrimp for a pot of gumbo. Bobby and I picked them out of the nets and threw them on the ice in the hold. Papa came out of the wheelhouse. He frowned and looked out at the horizon.

“Bobby,” he yelled over the rumble of the motor, “take her out further. We’ll still be in mid-deep water.” Bobby, who loved to pilot the boat, gave it a little throttle and headed out.

“Alright, shut her down,” Papa yelled to Bobby.

“Papa,” I yelled. “Look. It looks like a person. A lady with dark hair.”

The sun glinted off the water in a starburst, and I thought of the picture in our parish church of the Virgin Mary, Star of the Sea who was the patron saint for us Cajuns.

Papa squinted to where my outstretched arm pointed. Bobby ran out to take a look.

“That ain’t nuttin. Probably a dolphin. Old sailors saw apparitions like that a lot, probably because they had been out to sea too long. Maybe we will catch us a mermaid,” he laughed.

Papa took over the boat and went another mile out. I couldn’t see the lady or whatever anymore, so Pooch and I sat down and felt the boat rise and fall. The waves were higher, and the boat fell into a galloping rhythm, the bottom of the boat slamming the trough between waves like my butt hitting the saddle when I galloped Mr. Doguet’s horse, Belle. I glanced over at Bobby who was holding on. Bobby gave me the thumbs-up sign. I felt a little puny, and I’m sure I looked green, but I nodded back at Bobby. I surely didn’t want to get sick. That would also be a slap in the face of my manhood. Papa slowed the boat, and settled in, and cast the butterfly nets again and again and finally, coming up with a small, net-belly of writhing shrimp and a few fish—an okay catch. Bobby and I worked the nets while Papa shoveled the shrimp in the hold. I was slowed down by the shrimp stink that made me want to puke. Papa frowned at me for being slow, and he joined in to help, so we could hurry. When we finished, I sat down and held Pooch. Bobby stood up and saw a band of dark clouds that gathered further out.

“Papa,” he yelled and pointed toward the sky.

“Let’s bring her in,” Papa said. When he turned the Mary Effie toward home, a wave caught us just right, and I lunged sideways losing my balance. My already sick stomach made my legs and arms so weak that I couldn’t grab on to anything. Pooch went flying out of my arms, and in a flutter of a heartbeat, he was overboard.

“Papa,” I yelled frantically over the engine noise. “Pooch is overboard!” Pooch dog-paddled keeping his head above water.

“We ain’t got time to stop,” Papa yelled back. “The storm will be upon us any minute. We will all drown!”

Lightening ripped across the sky. Thunder boomed. In a flash, without a second thought of danger, I dove into the water and swam toward Pooch. When I reached him, I came up sputtering salty water and looked around for the boat. Waves came crashing in on us, and it was all I could do to keep my head and Pooch’s above water. Bobby ran to get Papa’s attention. Papa stopped the boat and grabbed a lifesaver. Although I tried to swim toward the boat, I floated further away with each wave that surged over us. I held on to Pooch. The clouds let go of a hard, pelting rain and made it impossible for me to see the boat. I was terrified and realized that the foreboding feeling that I had last night was real. Papa had turned the boat to get closer to us, and I saw it emerge from the downpour. He sprinted from the wheelhouse and climbed out on the nets and hurled the white lifesaver toward us. I saw the white disc through the rain, flying overhead like a halo in slow motion—coming closer and closer to me.

“Keep coming, a little more,” I said, but it fell short. My heart caved in my chest. With Pooch under one arm, I gave a desperate, spirited kick that pushed us toward it, and I grabbed it with my outstretched, free hand. Papa leaned with all of his weight and pulled the rope. Pooch and I paddled as hard as we could.

“Give me your hand,” Papa yelled. I reached out and he grabbed me, lifting me up until I got a hold of the nets. Bobby grabbed Pooch and pulled him over the rail into the safety of the boat.

“That was a close call. Are you okay?” Bobby said. I nodded, breathing heavily.

Papa pulled himself back onto the deck and gave me a trembling hug. I cringed, expecting a wallop, but Papa was too tired and scared himself.

“Don’t you ever pull a stunt like that again. You good for nothing,” Papa yelled more out of fear than anger, but I was unaware of it. “Get your life preservers on, the both of you. We got to get the hell outta here if we ever want to see dry land again.”

Wet and shivering, Pooch and I curled up under a tarp. I listened to the train of blood roaring through my veins, and my lungs pumping like bellows, bringing air in and kicking it out all in a superb and delicate balance like walking a tightrope, or like Éli on the roof. The rain fell in torrents just as Éli had predicted. I listened to the sound of the rain that beat harder and harder on the tarp. A crack of thunder made my heart quake. Hidden under the tarp, I cried.

CHAPTER THREE

Late afternoon, same day

When I was drowning, I could see myself floating face down; then, I remembered the tree. I was fascinated by the details of color, texture, and emotion. I understood that my brain was impressed every day by my experiences and what I made of them, but when they presented themselves to me, as they say, “your life flashes before your eyes,” they were all out of sequence. They were scattered, each in their own beauty, hunting the tail of the previous experience to attach to. It was sort of like arranging words in a scrambled sentence so that it would make sense. The memory settled on me, and I gazed up into the light. I stared at the live oak tree stretching high into the sky, that oak tree holding my efforts of the day, firing my imagination. That oak tree seemed sacred. It knew that it was important to me, even before I knew it. That oak tree, for a coastal boy, was my Mount Everest that left me shaking with fear, my stomach in a knot as the rope around my waist was tied in a knot. I mounted the ladder nailed to the trunk. Hand over hand, I climbed higher and higher into a higher perspective. I looked out at the horizon, over the coffee-colored rooftops, the watermelons bulbous and bloating in Mama’s garden, and the clothes drying on the line. I looked out at the salt grass of the distant marshes where egrets and poule d’eau searched for food. I looked out at the sun going down over the pearl-gray Gulf, and suddenly, the earth shook when I looked down at the upturned faces of my brother and friends.

“Don’t look down,” they yelled up at me.

I looked down, gasping. I couldn’t understand how I could be driven to do something so stupid. I remembered Uncle Baby’s quote from Emerson, “Fear defeats more people than any one thing in the world.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, belly-inching my way out on the highest limb and looped the rope, tied and knotted it again. I got a little braver and sat up straddling the limb. I tried to give the rope an extra tight pull, but when I yanked on it, I slipped. My friends below gasped. Instinctively, I lunged forward, bear hugging the limb and wrapped my legs around it. I felt the gnarled banks and rivulets coursing the bark of the tree. I thought I could hear the sap rising. I felt my body tremble and clung tighter to the tree; I felt the wilderness of death giving up its secrets. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt the whoosh of my own blood in my ears and knew that if I became dizzy, I would fall for sure. I had flashes of scenes when Papa hurt his leg and was in traction in his bedroom—the white cast on his leg in a stationary Heil Hitler march step. I couldn’t let go or sit up, so I scooted—my only option.

“Don’t fall, Boy. Papa will kill you,” Bobby yelled. I slowly inched my way back down the limb.

“Merci, Mon Dieu,” I whispered when my feet touched the solid boards of the platform. I could no longer hear the rush of blood in my ears.

“Way to go, Boy,” Al, better known by us kids as Potted Meat, yelled.

I heard cheers from below. I tied a big knot at the bottom of the rope to sit on and took a deep breath. I straddled the rounded knot with its long tail of unraveled rope.

“A fiery horse with the speed of light!” I yelled and whooped shoving off the platform amidst the groan of rope rub and wind whistles in my ears. I sailed to the point where I no longer went up and the point I returned down, briefly suspended like my heart between beats and floated in the evening air. My excitement shattered with Papa’s thunder-thickened call.

“Boy, Bobby, suppertime.”

“Hurry up, Boy,” Bobby called and took off toward the house.

The other kids scattered. They didn’t want to be around when Papa was in one of his moods. Only Pooch stayed waiting for me. I stretched my legs out to land on the platform only to bang my shins. I flew back out feeling the pain pulse up to my knees. Time was running out. Papa waited. I hit the platform again. This time I had to do it. I swung back out and turned with determination to land on the platform. If I were late, Papa would take the hide right off my back.

“Boy,” I heard the thunderclap call for the God-forsaking second time.

One more time out and I landed on the platform. I let go of the rope and shimmied down the makeshift ladder nailed to the tree, so fast that the bark scraped the skin off my knees. I landed with my two feet on the ground. Good old Pooch grabbed the unraveled end of the rope. He growled and shook it furiously like he did when he got a hold of Baby Faye’s rag doll and shook it so hard the stuffing went all over the yard.

“Come on, Pooch,” I said, and we took off full speed to the house.

The white-framed house glowed in the fading light. Bobby and I had spent last summer scraping paint and repainting it because Papa had wanted to make men out of us and thought that we should learn to do a man’s day of labor, which took us most of the summer vacation. We didn’t mind the painting so much, but the scraping covered us with bits of dried paint that made us itch. The closer I got to the house the higher it loomed, and in my mind, it had lost its luster because I remembered the reason for my hurry—Papa. The fear of being late wrenched my stomach. When Pooch and I reached the steps, we took them three at a time. I bolted through the screen door. It slammed behind me. I smelled sauce piquant when I entered the yellow light of the kitchen where Papa sat at the head of the table with his back toward me. The table was set with Mama’s blue and white plates that she had dug out of boxes of washing powder. Mama stood at the stove. She stirred a black, cast-iron pot, set the spoon down, picked it back up, peeked under the lid of the rice pot, stirred the sauce piquant again, and wiped her hands on the white apron with the bright red cherries. Wisps of dark hair that had escaped from the combs that held them back floated around her face. Mama glanced at me, and then at Papa. She filled the teakettle with water and sat it on the stove for Papa’s after-dinner coffee.

“Where you been, Boy?” Papa said never turning around, sitting so very still and staring at his plate. I could tell that Papa had been drinking.

I looked around the room searching for an answer or a lie that would get me off the hook. I stared at the shine bouncing off Papa’s bald spot at the crown of his head. Papa had a way of making me feel as different as a green pea in a pot of red beans. I stared at Mama’s buffet with the woodcarvings of a hare and a fish that was given to her when her mother passed away. Mama’s one and only china cup and saucer with the pink roses on it, which she had also inherited from her mother, sat on display. When Baby Faye slept in the jaundiced afternoons of summer, Mama sat out on the front porch and sipped her demitasse cup of Seaport coffee. It was her favorite time of day to sit, usually alone. Her dreamy look turned sad, eyes stared out at the watery horizon, not seeing anything but the landscape of her own memories.

“Answer me,” Papa said.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“Come around here, so I can get a good look at you.”

The water in the teakettle crackled. I shuffled around to face Papa. My young mind jumped from the catalog of lies in my brain, of which none would work in this situation, back into the tension of Papa’s tirade. I mumbled under my breath.

“What did you say?” Papa said.

When I got nervous my ears drowned with every sound: the refrigerator’s hum, the rhythmical rasp of Mama stirring the pot, the distress of my feet changing positions, the clicks of the clock, and the kettle building steam.

“What was the question, again?”

“Where have you been?” Papa asked more forcefully.

“Outside.”

I looked down at my dirty feet and bloody shins. Bobby looked at me with huge eyes. I could hear Bobby pop his fingers under the table. Baby Faye who had been banging her spoon on her highchair stopped its flight in mid-air. She sat quietly with her thumb stuck in her rosette mouth and a sock hanging off her left foot.

“Where outside?”

Here we go again, I thought. Papa was the fisherman that cast hard questions—questions that led me on a crooked path like the question mark itself, a hook that would snare me. Yellow light from the hanging light bulb enclosed us, trapping me on center stage. I felt that I wasn’t really the source of Papa’s irritation. I was the neck he slapped instead of the mosquito.

“In the tree house,” I said, staring at a hair on Papa’s eyebrow—a conductor’s baton that waved with the ups and downs of his facial gestures. The red web of veins on his nose glared a signal to stop. The kettle boiled.

“What the devil is so important in that tree house? Ain’t you got better things to do? You could have helped me paint the rails on the shrimp boat or given your Mama a hand, hoeing the garden or the like. You lazy, good-for-nothing. I ain’t never seen anyone like you in all my thirty-eight years. Always dreaming and reading some damn, old book like a little sissy or doing what you ain’t supposed to be doing.”

“But Papa—”

“Watch the slap, Boy,” Papa said holding up a threatening hand.

“Mr. Daigle came by and said that Walt Jr. made all A’s on his report card,” Mama said in an attempt to change the subject. “He said the Bookmobile was coming next week and that I should encourage the boys to read.”

Her voice seemed to soften the air like wind chimes. Bobby hung his spoon on his nose and stuck the handle end of his fork in his ear letting it hang. I was the only one who noticed. I clinched my jaw to keep from smiling. The kettle rocked a rhythm of boiling water and lisped a whisper of a whistle.

“I guess I am supposed to be proud of that,” Papa said. “But grades don’t make a man. Being a man means to sacrifice your precious pleasure to make a living, and you boys don’t want to do that. You don’t want to help when things get tough. You just want to play in your fantasy world.”

Papa slammed his fist on the table accidentally smashing a slice of white bread. Bobby’s utensils clattered on his plate. Papa continued in his rolling, sermon voice.

“Books don’t amount to a hill of rice hulls. You and your Mama always dreaming of being somebody you ain’t.”

The kettle finally blew its whistle like a referee.

Mama’s eyes smoldered. She turned back to the stove. Her face was steaming as much as the kettle that she took off the burner. The tyrant continued his ranting. The kettle continued to whistle.

“Dreams are like a fire that burns everything to ash and what’s left floats off in smoke. So, what’s the use of dreaming?” Papa said.

Mama jerked her head up with a stern look at Papa. I wanted to protect Mama like I’ve always tried to protect her, but I remained silent. I knew which line in the sand I could cross, and this wasn’t one. The kettle’s shrieking whistle began to fade when she poured the water into the coffeepot.

“Go to the sink and wash your hands,” Mama said to me and looked crossly at Papa.

“Don’t pass me a pair of eyes, woman,” Papa said.

I walked to the sink trying to be invisible. Poo yie! The flowers on Mama’s shirtwaist dress trembled when she reached out to serve each plate. I sat down glad to be out of the limelight and watched a fly struggle against the sticky fly-strip hanging from the kitchen light. It fluttered its wings, but it couldn’t get airborne. I pitied the fly because I knew that we were both born to a sticky fate. At Mama’s lead, we mumbled and made a swipe at the sign of the cross. At last, the table was quiet except for the chewing. At first, I nibbled at my bread and took a bite of the rice and some kind of sauce piquant while the butterflies settled in my stomach. Then, I ate like I hadn’t seen a morsel in a week.

“What is this?” I said.

“Rabbit sauce piquant,” Mama said.

My jaws stopped in mid-chew. I stared at my plate.

“Rabbit?” I asked.

I looked into Mama’s eyes. They darted from mine. I looked down and dabbed my napkin at my mouth. I bolted to the back door and threw up on the oleander bush. Wiping my mouth on my sleeve, I ran behind the garage to the rabbit cage. Thumper twitched her nose and nibbled on a lettuce leaf, but Foot-Foot was gone. I remember sobbing when I picked up Thumper, her ears alert and twitching—the inside of them thin as onionskin and pink with blood glow. I nuzzled her and cried in her soft, gray fur. The back door slammed, and I heard Papa’s heavy boots stomp down the steps with the weight of one foot heavier than the other. I squeezed my eyes shut and let Thumper go free. Papa rounded the corner of the garage at the very moment that I let Thumper go. He started to chase her, but the rabbit took off in a panic. Papa chased her around the pecan tree and under the oleander bush that I had just thrown up on. He slipped down on his good knee but got up and continued to chase the rabbit.

“I’m gonna snap your neck when I get a hold of you,” Papa yelled at the rabbit; at least, I thought he was talking to the rabbit.

Pooch rounded the corner and joined in the chase.

“Go get him, Pooch,” Papa commanded.

Pooch and Thumper took off under the mustard greens, crossed the row of bell peppers and banana peppers while Papa hopped over the rows on his good leg in pursuit. I whistled.

“Pooch!”

Pooch stopped to look at me.

“Come.”

“Pooch get the rabbit,” Papa said.

Pooch looked at Papa and then looked at me.

“Come Pooch,” I said again.

Pooch came to me with an awe-shucks-you-spoil-all-the-fun look. Papa cursed, kicked at Pooch, but missed and slipped on the damp St. Augustine grass. Thumper got away. If I hadn’t been so upset over losing Foot-Foot, I would have laughed out loud, but Papa raised himself up on his big arms and hunched his neck and shoulders. The laughter turned sour in my throat.

“That was Foot-Foot, we ate,” I said right before Papa backhanded me in the face.

Later in the evening, Bobby and I holed up in our bedroom and listened to Mama and Papa argue.

“Je m’en fichu,” Papa said from his bedroom where he and Mama were having it out.