Postmark Bayou Chene (3 page)

“Hey, is this some new kind of laying on of hands?” Papa's voice came from the back door, followed by the thump of the milk bucket on the table. The smell of the cow came with him, along with the peppermint his feet had crushed at the back steps and the morning scent of the woods out back.

“Hmmm, that one might be a lost cause,” he said.

“Just a drifter—showed up with that skiff,” Fate said, and I could feel him nodding toward the dock.

Papa sloshed some milk from the bucket into a bowl, while Fate told him the story, embellishing his part way beyond good taste in my opinion. I rolled her so that she rested on her belly and Fate could hold the bowl in front of her nose. I didn't have to say anything—we always could work together that way.

I felt her ribs rise in short little spurts while she breathed in the smell of that sweet, warm milk. I even felt the little blink when she opened her eyes. Then the tap, tap, tap when her tongue reached out, touched the milk, and drew back with a little slurpy sound. Again and again, the sound picked up speed until it was a flutter. Then a smeary sound as she polished off the bottom of the bowl. Finally, she sighed and dropped her head back down on the towel.

“Put her basket behind the stove; she can stay here long enough to see if she's going to pull through,” I told Fate, who had started moving in that direction before I'd even made up my mind. He's like that. “But it's up to you to figure out what to do with her, since you're the one who brought her here,” I added, just so he'd know I was still in charge of what goes on behind the stove in my kitchen.

“Well, I figured you could use a good dog,” Fate said. I could hear him tucking the towel closer around her before standing up, putting off having to face me.

“What? And have one more thing to stumble over?” I slapped my thigh, a habit I'm prone to when agitated, something that happens a lot when Fate's around. “You keep me bruised enough, leaving things setting about all over the place. More's the wonder I don't just stay head over heels!”

“Well, she could be protection,” he went right on, like my opinions on what lived in my house wasn't any more than the sound of the frogs outside harping on last night's rain.

“And what do I need protecting from other than your schemes?” I shot right back. “I know everybody who's likely to walk in here, kin to most of them, and I'm never alone anyway.”

“Well, what about when you go outside,
enh
?” Val broke in. “Maybe she could learn to take you different places. Me, I done heard of dogs doing that.”

“If she could do that, we could make some money showing her off,” Fate said, and I could hear him start pacing.

Thinking, talking, and moving are all of a piece for him. I cocked my ear to catch how his feet and his tongue would outrun his brain this time.

His voice drifted down from about a head taller than most men who come around here. I remember the summer a few years back when he started growing past me until finally my feet were off the ground when he lifted me to his level, something he does regularly, no matter how much I slap his hands and tell him not to. That was around the time his voice started to break until he sounded like a honking
gros bec
flying to roost on a spring evening. After a while it came back deeper, taking me by surprise when I came home from the Blind School for good last year. That's what everyone calls it—the Blind School, like a building can see or not—but the real name is the Louisiana School for the Deaf and Blind. I went all the way through the eleventh grade and graduated—making me the most educated girl from the Chene so far. Truth be told, I have more schooling than most girls anywhere in the state, thanks to being blind.

Those years I was gone, everything about Fate grew, even his laugh. These days it rumbles from somewhere deep in his belly. Even the smell of him grew stronger, but I don't mind that, considering all the powerful smells that float around here on a hot day. In fact, I always liked his smell better than anyone else I know, even when he's being a torment, which is most of the time. Take his highfalutin' plans to make easy money.

“Make some money, hmmmmph? Just like you did with that goat-powered butter churn that left the porch ceiling smelling like sour milk for months?” I asked, even though we all knew there was no question to it.

“Well, that one came close. Wambly said it would have worked if that goat had been more tractable. I swear, Loyce, I could have had her churning her own milk into butter in no time and with no effort on our part.”

“Our part! When was the last time you spent any effort trying to do anything except listening to that no-good Wambly Cracker and trying to get out of work.”

Wambly Cracker is a peddler. Farm equipment mostly. When he makes rounds to that college in Baton Rouge, he picks up snatches of information from the researchers. He weaves all those snatches together into schemes to sell more equipment. He keeps things stirred up among the swampers, and it seems someone is always hot on his trail. Fate's the only person who constantly falls for the crazy ideas he comes peddling around here.

“You got it all wrong, Loyce,” Fate pushed on ahead. “Those ain't just Wambly's ideas. They come right out of that college up there in Baton Rouge. They do research with real scientists. It ain't his fault if sometimes things don't work out here. They probably have a better class of goats up there at the research farm than we have out here in the swamp.”

“Hmmph. Seems to me his research is all about ruining as many families as he can out here to make more time for sitting on his big butt inside the store.”

“What would a blind girl know about the size of Wambly's butt?” Fate said, always quick to take the first rabbit trail off his shortcomings.

“I don't need eyes to feel the breeze from his coattails—they must be the size of a cast net. Or to hear the way a porch banister groans when he hauls himself up the steps. And his big feet flapping across the floor like shutters in a hurricane. Since his voice is on the same level as my ears when I'm sitting down, I figure he must be just about as wide as he is tall. Am I right?”

“You got 'im,
cher
, for true!” Val hooted. “Right down to the coattails. All you left out was the li'l derby hat perched on top his greasy hair like a cow patty.”

Some images do make blindness a blessing.

I felt the breeze from Fate's arms beating the air, marking time with his words. “Go ahead and say what you want, but I know when I'm onto something.”

“And you think a dog leading a blind girl around an island might be it?” I gave my thigh a good slap for emphasis—my way of puffing up, Fate says.

“It seems as much of a draw as that fuzzy little dog on the
Majestic
that walks on his front legs,” he shot back.

“So, if we get this working right, do it mean Loyce she'll have to go on the showboat with the dog?” Val broke in. He's always had a way of translating what Fate is really getting at.

“Now you're onto something,” I said, warming up to this fight. “I'll travel around with my trick dog and live high on the hog. No more knitting nets or sitting on this porch all day!”

“But you'll need someone along to manage your affairs,” said Fate.

“So this blind girl and her orphan dog will be working the rivers to pay for you?” Val supplied, sounding helpful but making fun. Fate never catches on, even though Val has been doing that since we were little.

“If I have a watch dog, what'll I need
him
for?” I waved my hand at his pacing across the porch. “Anyway he'll just be getting us in trouble with fathers and husbands all along the way. We'll be supplying alibis to cover his sorry ways from New Orleans to Natchez.”

Val, as usual, had his own version:

Seems to me that letter was the start of it all. 'Bout the time Fate was pulling that skiff to the bank, I was pushing my chair back from breakfast in the galley, me. They had just blew the whistle, and being the mate, I had to get the crew up top for docking.

Tot was already peeling the potatoes that give him his Cajun name, Patot, because he was just about as round as one. When you worked on Tot's boat, you ate as good as the passengers up top. Me, I knowed those potatoes would end up full of hot peppers, onion, garlic, and ground-up garfish before dinnertime. And then, don't you know, he'd wait till we was milling around the galley table before he'd start dropping them garfish balls into hot lard.
Mais oui
, when that smell drift out over the water, other crews want to jump overboard and swim to whatever boat Tot was cooking on. It paid to stay on his good side, for true. I stopped before going out the door.

“Tot, you don't have no honey? It's a shame to pour that ol' cane syrup over biscuits good like yours,” I said. “It's a li'l early in the year, but I'll get us some honey before we leave if nothing happens to keep me away from my hives.”

“Ain't nothing likely to happen at this stop—outside you playing music too late to get back to the boat in time,” he said. “Been plowing this river since before the war and ain't heard of nothing happening yet at Bayou Chene.”

'Course Tot was right. Other than talk about that pirate Lafitte hiding around here a long, long time back and then some jayhawk doings during the war, not much ever happens here. If anything, people came to get away from happenings.

The Chene, giving up her channel to the 'Chafalaya like she does and then forking off into petite bayous, always seem to get herself found by people looking for a place to start over. Sometime they have a past they want to lose, but mostly they just young, hoping to get they start with nothing but a strong back and gumption. Shoot! You never know where they come from next, that's for true. They come from other countries right through New Orleans. Or Morgan City, my own hometown. Sometime they come from way out East, hearing about cheap land here in the big woods. Land that could grow anything, but if you had
enough
of that land, you put it into sugar.

White gold. That's what they call the sugar back before the war. The Chene, she was busy as a hive of bees in nectar season according to Grandpère, what with the plantations and the sugar mills and the syrup makings and the hauling of it all in and out. Then the Yankees done burnt what the Rebs didn't steal, and by the time it was all over, the planters had move out. Yassir, they just line up, one right next to another, along the Mississippi levee where the railroad track connect them with everywhere they was needing to be. No more toting everything into the swamp and back out again,
enh
?

Bayou Chene, she didn't really miss all that sugar doings, no. She seem happy to ease back down to the slow way she been used to since Injun times. These days most everybody farms a little and keeps some stock, at least some pigs and chickens, if nothing else. Once that big logjam was broke up by the government just before the war, more water come down this way. Then they broke up an even bigger jam after the war, in the seventies. More and more water come pouring in from that Red River, yas, and the Mississippi already too.
Mon père
, he can tell about that. He saw it happen. That was just in time for the big steamboats to start coming through. My boat, the
Golden Era
, she's not even the biggest that comes through the Chene, and she's 150 feets long.

With the 'Chafalaya bringing more and more water every year, that's when people start fishing and picking moss to sell instead of just using for themselves. They sell all kinds of stuff out of the swamps by riverboat, keeping them paddle wheels busy. Some people—York Bertram, he's one, with his sawmill and charcoal—could keep riverboats stopping here just for theyselves. What with the farming, the fishing, and the riverboats, you can't help but make a living on the Chene.

For true, the Yankees who come down here for the war, they saw how easy it could be in a good year. After the dodging and shooting stop, more than one Yank decide to stay, some even change they names and start over when it was easier to let people back home think they was dead. Not many out here even remember which side of the war they was suppose to be on. That's one of the things I like about the Chene—newcomers just pick up their life wherever it fits them, without lots of questions about what brought them here.

Me, that's just what I was thinking about that morning when I push through the galley door to the deck. I took me a good look around and say to myself, “
Mais oui
, it would be fine to have me a few hundred hives along these bayous and never have to get on a boat again except to sell a barrel or two of honey.”

I'm with the third generation of Broussards to work on the river. These days it's the steamboats shoving off from Morgan City where the 'Chafalaya, she runs into the Gulf. Sometime we head down around the bottom of Louisiana to New Orleans, where Mama's family lives in the Irish Channel. But most often we go up the 'Chafalaya to the Mississippi River that carries us to Natchez and other places up north.