Postmark Bayou Chene (21 page)

“This is the first I heard about that!” Adam chuckled. “It does seem like his mishaps always end in a powerful smell.”

“Well, you know he's got Sam working with him now.” C.B.'s voice was muffled by a hairpin clamped between her lips. She swept a handful of frizz from the nape of her neck and re-pinned it into the bundle of yellow, which now had dark auburn roots.

“Yessir, they both gonna be rich someday, according to Fate. See, Fate don't like being out here in the swamp so much anymore. Once ever'thing's working right, Sam's gonna run Fate's boat—a bigger one he's building—with the fish in it to Atchafalaya Station, stopping along the way upriver to pick up fish and pay out the money. Fate bought a scale and tub that Sam can take right along with him. Now that suits Sam just fine; he don't like nothing better than just easing around from net to net, dock to dock, handling them fish like they were some kind of treasure.

“See, Fate says he likes running the bizness end, as he calls it. Fate'll meet Sam at Atchafalaya Station, where he'll have the ice ready to bed 'em down for the trip. A man right there at the depot buys ice out of Lafayette and stores it until Fate needs it. Both of 'em making money, too, according to Fate.”

Loyce's keen ears picked up the clatter of a horse cart before Adam or C.B. could hear it.

“Fredette, you stay right there—I won't be a minute.” Mary Ann's voice floated through the breezeway, followed by the thud of her boots across the floor.

“Come on in here and tell us about York,” Adam said by way of greeting.

“Doing better now that he can wear pants again,” she said. “'Course, this heat don't help him any. It's so hot I'm fearing the wax is gonna melt in Val's hives and flood the island with honey. Now won't that be a mess and a half? And talking about honey, you know it made York's skin grow back just a pretty as a baby's.”

“Now, don't you wish you hadn't been so hard on him?” Adam asked, returning to the cane-bottomed chair and settling, with the pan of potatoes on his knees.

“Well, I didn't expect it to be that bad—I just wanted to make him sit up and take notice.” Mary Ann's voice sounded remorseful, then she snorted. “All he'd had to do was look at me to see I waddn't going to have a baby, even if he didn't want to bother asking! That man's seen enough animals born around our place to know what to expect. And to think he thought I had the time to take up with another man! Who does he think would have been raising his food and cooking his meals? Cleaning lamp globes, washing clothes, and scrubbing floors? And now I got the extra trouble of keeping up with the sawmill.”

Her boots picked up speed back and forth along the front of the porch, reminding Loyce of how Fate used to pace when he talked. Thoughts of him crowded out the rest of the conversation around her. Why had he disappeared from her life? What was so all-fired important about selling fish that he didn't stay home anymore? A new scheme with Wambly Cracker to hatch disaster throughout the swamp? If so, why wasn't he here telling her about it? He'd been facing off with her for as long as she could remember. Without Fate, Loyce seemed like a stranger to herself.

She felt a pang at how they had parted the night he came to tell them his plans. Why had she been so angry? Deep down she knew the reason. It was the letter. Once he found out that they weren't kin, he didn't feel responsible for her anymore. He had been obliged to watch over her while they were kin. Now she was just another girl—a blind one at that.

18

Two pair of boots thudded along the planks from the bayou. Lost in her own reverie and the noise of conversation on the porch, Loyce hadn't heard anyone landing at the dock.

“Went down so fast, they didn't even save any of the cows,” said a voice she recognized as a deckhand from the
Iona
, a small steamboat that serviced the timber camps dotting the swamp.

“What about the crew?” asked a second voice.

“Saved about half of them. Lost one that you might know, that curly-haired mate from the
Golden Era
.”

“Valzine? From Morgan City?”

“Yeh, that's the one. Damn shame.”

“Damn shame is right. He played a fine squeeze-box. Gonna miss him at the dances.”

Loyce's face went cold. Her voice caught in her throat, forcing her to try twice, three times before her lips could shape the words.

“Val? Who says?” She rasped just above a whisper.

Conversation stopped, then Adam's voice was strident with denial.

“Can't be! The
Golden Era
was here a few days ago, and he was on it.”

“Sorry, Miss Loyce, Adam. I forgot he was a friend of yours, or I would have broke it better,” the young man said. “His captain loaned him out to that sister boat
Golden Crescent
needing a crew member that could talk French. They was hauling a load of cattle from them prairie cowboys west of the swamp on Bayou Courtableau. Hit a snag in Grand River. With such a load, once it started taking on water, wasn't nothing to be done but every man look out for himself. Val was one of the ones that never came back up.”

The conversation faded for Loyce. First Fate, now Val. The realization that she had lost both of them swept over her. She slumped in her chair and buried her face in her hands, letting the shuttle fall to the floor.

“Loyce, Loyce.” Roseanne's voice was gentle, but her hand was firm on Loyce's shoulder, shaking her awake. She had only a moment to wonder why Roseanne was in her room before the awful truth came back. Val was gone. She had rolled over to get up but now buried her face in the pillow again, so like the way she used to bury her face in Val's curly hair.

From the time they were children, Val had bowed his head for her to feel as soon as he stepped on the porch; it was his own special greeting for her. When she playfully hid her face in his curls, she could smell the places he had visited, smells not common to Bayou Chene. Pine trees from upriver, the red clay of Natchez bluffs. She could identify the cargo that shared his space and even tell him something about the passengers. Cattle, cotton, sugar, or a traveling photographer's chemicals smelled as different to her as an apple pie from a bar of soap. It tickled him that she could often tell him what dishes Tot had cooked earlier in the day.

How could it be that she would never hear him bantering with Fate, taking her side against her sparring cousin? She would never have the chance to find out if Val was sweet on her, as Fate had claimed.

“Loyce, you have to face up to this,” Roseanne's voice persisted. “Everyone is meeting at his beehives before noon, and you'll regret it if you don't go.”

Of course, we have to hang black crepe on the hives so the bees will know their keeper is gone, she thought. No one really believed that old superstition anymore, but it was a ritual that was just as important as the funeral itself or the all-night eating and drinking at the wake.

“No, I can't,” the girl insisted. “If I go, it means he's really gone.” The moss mattress crunched as she turned over and sat up against the feather pillows.

“Here's coffee with extra cream and sugar,” Roseanne said, as she guided the thick mug between the space of Loyce's hands. “You didn't have supper last night.”

Loyce waved her hands gently until they felt the heat of the cup and closed around it.

“Our last conversation,” she said. “When was it? Was it the day C.B. and Sam arrived? No, it was later. He helped carry York to the bedroom the day the still blew up.”

A new wave of sadness surged through her. That was the day the letter surfaced. That piece of paper sliced through her life like a knife neatly divides a mound of dough into two loaves. The first eighteen years, when Fate was her cousin, her liaison to the rest of the world. And now the bleak rest of her life, adrift without Val or Fate. The double loss hit her again, and she felt more alone than any time in her life. She pushed the cup out in front of her as fresh tears began to fall.

Roseanne caught the cup and waited just a moment before leaving the young woman alone to make peace with her grief.

The dry autumn days mirrored Loyce's life. She didn't knit nets. She didn't bother to comb the tangles from her hair. She wore the same shapeless shift day after day. Most days she wouldn't even go out to the porch. If she did sit out for a while, she slipped back indoors if the
Golden Era'
s whistle blew an approach to the dock. If someone stopped by while she was sitting on the porch, she was as likely to get up and leave as she was to rock silently in their midst.

Conversations swirled around without meaning for her. Why should she care whether water rose or fell? Or if fish were biting on shrimp or cut bait? The price of cotton line didn't matter. The friends who had joked and argued with her about all those details of their community—the two who enlivened her small world—were gone. She would live the rest of her life hearing about the mundane happenings of her relatives and neighbors, but none of it would matter.

Like the day Dot Verret brought the news that C.B.'s baby boy had arrived. Dot had spent two days out on Graveyard Bayou nursing C.B. through the birth and recovery. Then Sam brought the midwife as far as the post office before heading out to raise nets. While waiting for Alcide to fetch her up on his way home from picking moss, Dot visited with customers and helped Adam cook and serve meals.

“Well, I declare, it's good to be this much closer to home!” she said by way of greeting when she arrived. “Don't know what's the hardest job—picking moss for a penny a pound or delivering babies for two dollars.”

“How's everybody doing down that way?” Adam said from where he was turning venison sausage at the stove.

“Well, I tell you now, C.B don't seem to be taking to it yet,” Dot worried. “Some takes longer than others to get the hang of it, but poor little old C.B. seems plumb put off by the little fella even being close to her. She didn't even rouse up enough to name him, but Sam was proud as anything to call him Sam Junior. She'll come around—I never seen it fail. Some just take longer than others.”