Summer of Pearls (22 page)

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Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Summer of Pearls
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A BARRAGE OF WIND-WHIPPED RAINDROPS AGAINST MY WINDOW WOKE ME
that night. I could hear gusts roaring in the trees. I slept in the half-story attic of our house and there was nothing between me and the storm but a few boards and cypress shingles. The first thing I thought of was my bateau filling up with rainwater where I had left it down at Goose Prairie Cove.
I got out of bed and went to the dormer window that looked out over the street. A flash of lightning gave me a glimpse of pines whipping in the wind like stalks of grass. The roof was shaking around me. A light passed below—a lantern that stopped in front of Constable Hayes' house, just up the street from ours. No one would have been out on a night like that unless there was trouble. I stepped into my pants, pulled on my shirt, and scrambled down the narrow stairway to the parlor. My pop was there, lighting a lantern wick.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don't know,” he said. His eyes shot up the staircase and he almost told me to go back to my room. But then he looked at me and put his
hand on my shoulder. “Let's go see,” he said. “Maybe somebody needs help.”
The wind nearly tore our door from the hinges when we went out. The cold rain soaked us to the skin instantly. Water ran down the cobblestones like rapids. I can smell tornado weather now, and that's what I smelled that night, though I didn't realize it at the time. Twister weather charges the air with a fine, rich aroma—almost like the smell of fertile dirt.
The ground was already saturated from the rain we had received in previous days, and the water had nowhere to go but into the bayou. I remembered my bateau lifting mysteriously from the bank that morning. I knew what was happening. The bayou was coming up. It had been coming up all day.
The lantern came back down the street from Rayford Hayes' house. Rayford was in his nightshirt, his gun belt around his hips, his black boots on his pale legs, the key to the jailhouse in his hand. The tinsmith, Robert Timmons, carried the lantern.
“What's wrong?” my father asked as we fell into a trot beside them.
“The bayou's up!” Timmons shouted over the roar of the storm. “The Treat Inn and the jailhouse are flooded! We've got to get Brigginshaw out!”
When we got to the end of the cobblestones, we stopped and stood in shock, along with several other people who had brought lanterns out. The wharf was invisible under the rushing current. I had never seen the bayou go any faster than a crawl, but it was piling up against the cypress trees now. Billy and Carol Anne were helping their guests to high ground. The bayou was into the lower floor of their inn. The jailhouse was already half under. I could see Captain Brigginshaw's fists on the iron grating of the jailhouse door.
“My God!” Timmons shouted to Hayes. “It's come up two feet since I ran to get you!”
Hayes didn't hesitate. He ran upstream about thirty yards and waded in, feeling for footholds.
“Wait, Rayford!” my pop shouted. “You need a rope or something.”
“No time!” the constable shouted.
I knew he was right. He had to get the jailhouse door open and help Captain Brigginshaw to the shore before the current grew too swift to cross. Brigginshaw wouldn't be able to swim well with a wounded leg. I made a move toward the water, but my pop held me back.
Constable Hayes was in up to his waist when he slipped. The water had filled his boots like sea anchors and dragged him down. He floundered helplessly, cartwheeling in the water, clawing at the bayou with the fist that held the key. The current carried him twenty feet away from the jailhouse door.
I tried to go in after him, but my pop held me back again. I saw Brigginshaw's arms reach through the iron grating, almost too thick to fit. “The key!” he shouted. “Throw the key, Rayford!”
The constable lobbed the key on the iron ring as he went under. It arched through the rain and hit the side of the jailhouse, about a foot beyond the Australian's reach. The captain drew his arms back into the jailhouse. I knew he was on his stomach, underwater, feeling for the key through the grating. I also knew he would not be able to reach it.
Without the key in his hand, the constable was able to stay afloat a little better. Then I saw Billy dive into the bayou after him. Carol Anne was helping the last of the inn guests up to the cobblestone street. I saw the expression of terror on her face when she saw Billy dive in.
Her eyes sparked something in me. I tore away violently from my father's grasp and plunged in to help. I heard Pop come in after me. The current carried us swiftly down to where Billy had grabbed Constable Hayes. I swam against the torrent as hard as I could, but still slipped quickly downstream. I passed the flooded Treat Inn as I reached Billy and Rayford, and grabbed the constable's arm. Pop was soon there with me, and the four of us drifted into the shadows. We pulled the constable out of the swift current, into shallow water. We finally found our footing behind the Treat Inn.
When we pulled him out, Hayes was coughing and heaving, but we knew he would survive. His boots and the weight of his gun belt would have killed him if not for Billy, my pop, and me.
“Get higher!” Billy shouted. “I'm going after Trevor.”
The constable's hand grabbed Billy by the elbow. Hayes couldn't speak yet, but he shook his head, begging Billy not to go in again.
Billy pulled loose and ran through the water toward the Treat Inn, diving in and swimming up to the back porch.
I found more strength than I had ever known. I could have lifted Constable Hayes myself, but with Pop there to help, he felt light as a feather. We carried Hayes to high ground and came through a neck of brush to Widow Humphry's inn, where I dropped the constable and ran back toward the jailhouse.
Pop shouted for me to wait, but I tore on toward the flood. I saw Carol Anne holding onto Billy beside the rushing bayou. He had a crowbar in his hand that he had taken from his flooded store. She was crying, begging him not to go in after the Australian.
The jailhouse was almost flooded now, and the rain was coming down harder than ever. My pop overtook me and grabbed ahold of me with a permanence I knew I wouldn't break. He all but tackled me. Through the lashing rain and the roaring wind, I could hear the long, horrifying cry of Captain Brigginshaw:
“Biiillyyyy!”
I tried to fight my way closer to the rushing bayou. If Billy was going in, I wanted to help him. But my pop wrestled me down with a physical might I had never before felt him use. We slid down the muddy bank together and stopped near Billy and Carol Anne.
“Please, Billy!” she cried, pleading, clinging to him as my father was to me. “You can't help him!”
“Let me go!” he shouted.
“Billy! Billy! He's going to hang, Billy! Don't risk yourself for him! He's going to hang anyway!”
The big prisoner's desperate cry was nearly lost in the maelstrom of wind and water. “Biiillyyyy!” It sounded miles away.
Billy tore free of Carol Anne and sprinted up the bank with his crowbar. The lantern light from high ground illuminated her as she sank to her knees at the edge of the rising bayou and buried her face in her hands. My father would not let me go. I tasted tears of helplessness in the streams that ran down my face.
The hero Billy Treat dove into the water well upstream of the jailhouse and let the current carry him to it. The water piling against the upstream side was almost going over the roof. I was wishing the flood would simply lift that roof off or tear it to pieces so Brigginshaw could get out. But I knew the chances of that were slim. The jailhouse had been built to prevent escapes. Iron bars rooted it deep into the ground to keep prisoners from jacking up the logs and crawling under. Trevor's only hope was Billy.
He came against the jailhouse door like an eagle landing on its prey. Brigginshaw had hardly a foot of breathing space left, and the bayou was still rising. I saw Billy's head bobbing, the arms of both men on the pry bar. I could see only the top of the iron door above the water, hoping any second to see it open. But even if it did, the two men would still have to swim to safety, and the Australian with a broken leg.
The current piled higher against the log jailhouse, obliterating hope as it pressed the air out. Maybe it was just my imagination, but the last glimpse I got of the jailhouse door before it went under was by the brief flare of a lightning bolt, and in that fleeting instant, I thought I saw it swinging open, away from the log wall.
A horrible creaking sound came to me from downstream, and I looked in time to see the Treat Inn floating from its foundation blocks. It drifted downstream like a toy and shook as it hit the trees and the abandoned dry dock behind it. The water was inching toward us, so my father pulled me to my feet and forced me up the bank to high ground.
I watched the Treat Inn shake and tilt strangely in the force of the flood, then my eyes turned to Carol Anne. She was backing away from the rising bayou, looking toward the jailhouse, her soaked dress plastered against her like a second skin. When she called his name, it came out as an animal scream:
“Billeee!”
I looked back toward the jail, but the bayou had sucked it completely under. It—like Billy Treat, Trevor Brigginshaw, and the wonderful summer of pearls—was gone.
WHEN THE RAIN STOPPED THE NEXT DAY, EVERY BOAT THAT HAD SURVIVED
the storm was on the lake looking for traces of Treat and Brigginshaw. My bateau was not among the searchers. The lake had sucked it into some deep hole and buried it. After searching all day, the general feeling was that the bayou had done the same to Billy and the Australian.
The water receded amazingly fast. Less than twenty-four hours after the flood, the jailhouse poked back into view and began rising almost as quickly as it had sunk. Some men in a boat examined it before sundown and found that Billy and Trevor had succeeded in prying the jailhouse door open.
It was a relief to me. In the first place, I hated to think of Captain Brigginshaw drowning in there. I knew how he must have felt waiting for Billy to rescue him from the jail as Billy had rescued me from the
Glory of Caddo Lake.
In the second place, I didn't want to see them pull his body out.
Carol Anne remained down at the bayou from dawn to dusk that first day after the flood, waiting hopefully for a miracle. I felt bad enough about Billy, and I figured it probably hurt her twice as bad as it
did me. That's why it surprised me so when she spoke to me. I was watching the men in the boat look over the jailhouse when I heard her steady voice touch my ears.
“He's out there, Ben,” she said.
I turned and found her standing at my shoulder. “What?” I said, startled.
“Billy's a strong swimmer. He used to dive for pearls in the South Seas. I'm afraid Trevor's dead. He couldn't swim with that leg wound. But Billy's still out there. He'll turn up.”
It was sad to hear her hanging on to a hope so slim. But it was also a little infectious. For a moment, I believed. Billy was one heck of a swimmer. “If my boat hadn't got washed away,” I said, “I'd be out looking for him right now, myself.”
She looked at me and smiled, and briefly I saw the flawless beauty I had once fallen in love with. She put her hand on my shoulder. “I know you would,” she said. “Don't worry. He'll come back.”
The Treat Inn had settled crookedly, about thirty yards from its original location, and it suddenly occurred to me that Carol Anne's home had been wrecked. “Where are you going to sleep tonight?” I asked.
“I'm staying in my old room above Snyder's store until Billy comes back. Then we're going to leave this town and start over somewhere.”
 
 
The floodwaters were still subsiding when the town went to bed that night. No one could have guessed that the lake would continue to fall to a level lower than anyone—even Esau—could remember. But when the morning came, Cypress Bayou and Caddo Lake looked as if they had suffered six months of drought.
My pop was the first to figure it out. Those government snag-boat men who had been clearing the Great Raft from the Red River had made a gross error in their calculations. They had predicted that removal of the Raft would provide a better channel into Caddo Lake, opening our town to steamer traffic more of the year. What they had failed to figure out was that the logjam was actually a natural dam that caused Big
Cypress Bayou to back up, deepening Caddo Lake. The flood had washed away the last vestiges of the Great Raft and removed the natural dam, lowering the lake level instead of making it more navigable, leaving tens of thousands of acres of lake bed exposed.
The government, in one ill-planned stroke, had crippled our riverboat trade, drained our mussel beds, and doomed our town. I know it's not a productive thing to hold grudges in life, but I held a dim view of the government for decades because of what happened to Caddo Lake in 74.
The second day after the flood, Cecil and Adam and I walked over to Esau's place to find Goose Prairie Cove nothing more than a mudflat. Esau's shack had been flooded, but it was out of the way of currents and didn't get washed away. Esau was taking things out and setting them in the sun to dry.
“Good mornin', boys,” he said, as if it were just another day. “Come to check the trotline? Sorry, but my boats‘all floated away or sank.”
“What trotline?” Cecil said with no small tinge of disgust in his voice. “It probably got torn off into the lake somewhere.”
“Probably so,” Esau said. “Too bad, ain't it?”
“We just came down to let the hogs loose,” I said. “Unless you want them.”
The old Choctaw reached for the ever-present flask of whiskey in his hip pocket. He took a small swig, same as always.
It struck me that I had never seen him empty that flask. I had never even seen it near empty. I wondered if he ever really drank any whiskey at all. He shook his head as he put the flask away. “No,” he said, “I don't want them hogs. Let ‘em go back to the woods. You boys breakin' up your partnership?”
I hadn't exactly thought of it that way, but it seemed as if that was what we were doing. Adam looked at me and I looked at Cecil. Cecil looked out across the ugly field of mud that had once felt the toes of a thousand pearl-hunters.
“I guess,” Cecil said. “Me and Ben have to go back to the Academy in a couple of weeks. Adam's old man will have his ass out in the fields,
if the flood left them anything to harvest. We don't have a trotline. We don't have any mussels to feed the hogs. We don't have a boat to haul water in, or any pearl-hunters to sell water to.”
“We ain't got a damn nickel for all the work we done all summer,” Adam added. “Ben don't even have his Ashenback no more.”
Esau stood and looked at us sadly for a moment. He was trying to think of something to say that would cheer us up. I beat him to it.
“But we're still partners,” I said. “Always will be.” I started to hike up to the hog pens. “Well, come on,” I said, looking back. “Don't y'all want to see them run?”
I saw the eyes of Adam and Cecil brighten, and knew I had said the right thing.
We let the logs down on one side of our pigpen and had a great time chasing the hogs into the hills, yelling like wild Indians until we were too winded to run any farther. Then we collapsed in the pine needles and talked for hours about everything that had happened that summer. We had survived fights over girls and money. We had gotten rich and gone broke together. We were better friends than ever.
We made a promise to one another that morning under the pines, and we never forgot that promise. We vowed to remain friends and partners until we died. The three of us turned out different when we grew up, but we never lost our friendship. The last time all three of us were together, we were old men, fishing on Caddo Lake. Now I'm the only partner left.
 
 
I wish the summer of pearls had ended right there. In fact, as my partners and I walked back to Esau's shack about noon, with the intention of helping him clean his place up, I was sure it was over. I knew that none of the good things about that summer would ever come back, but I didn't think anything else bad could happen. That's when I looked out over what had once been Goose Prairie Cove and saw a familiar figure slogging through the mudflats.
At the time, nobody had connected Judd Kelso with the Christmas Nelson gang or the attempted pearl robbery. The only two witnesses to
the crime—Brigginshaw and Colton—were gone. With Captain Brigginshaw wounded, Constable Hayes hadn't interrogated him thoroughly on the subject. Trevor may have told Billy about Kelso's involvement in the robbery attempt, but Billy was missing, too, and presumed by almost everybody but Carol Anne to be dead. In fact, it wasn't until years later that I was able to prove Kelso had taken part in the crime.
“What the hell is he doing?” Cecil asked the old Choctaw.
Esau sneered as his black eyes angled toward the drained cove. “Lookin' for mussels.”
“Pearl-hunting?” I asked.
Esau nodded.
“What for?” I asked.
“He's a fool,” the old man said. It was the first time I had ever heard him speak ill of anybody. “You boys come to help me clean up?”
“Yep,” Adam said. “What do you want us to do?”
“Just take everything out to dry. Then we'll shovel the mud.”
 
 
I worked around Esau's place for a couple of hours, until I looked up and saw Kelso sitting in one of Esau's chairs, covered with mud. He was holding a keg of whiskey over his head, letting the liquor trickle into his mouth from the open spigot. He cut his malicious little eyes toward me and caught me staring at him. I was afraid of him. I had seen him rough up the rousters on the old
Glory of Caddo Lake.
It worried me to have him there with no Billy Treat or Trevor Brigginshaw around to handle him.
Cecil, on the other hand, threw a shovelful of mud right past him and went to talking business with him as if he were any other citizen. “Find any pearls?” he asked.
Kelso put the keg on his knee. “Hell, no. Ain't like it's your business anyway, boy.”
Cecil leaned on the shovel handle, as he had been doing most of the afternoon. “What are you going to do with one if you do find it? We don't have a pearl-buyer anymore.”
The gator eyes squinted as Kelso smiled. “Don't you know?”
“Know what?”
“Boy, how old are you?”
“fourteen.”
“Haven't you ever got your peter wet?”
Cecil straightened. “Maybe I have.”
“Maybe!” Kelso put the keg in the mud and laughed. “That's a sure sign you never have if you have to say maybe. Boy, when I was you age, I had me my own nigger gal. Got her three times a day if I wanted.”
Cecil turned red out of anger and embarrassment. “What's that got to do with pearls?”
“Things is back to usual around here, ain't they? That goddam Billy Treat and that big Australian son of a bitch are gator bait. The town's back to what it was before summer. I'm gonna find me a shell slug and go get me a piece of that whore.”
I felt a sickness rise in my stomach. “What whore?” I asked.
Kelso picked up the whiskey keg. “Pearl Cobb,” he said, pouring the liquor down his throat again.
My fear of him gave way to worry and anger. “Her name's Carol Anne, and she's not a whore.”
He spewed whiskey from his mouth as the keg came down to his knee. He coughed and laughed as the cruel gator eyes locked onto me. “She was Treat's whore, wasn't she? Soon as I find me a shell slug, she'll be mine.” He put the keg back on the ground. “I'll owe you for the whiskey,” he yelled to Esau as he trudged back toward the muddy cove.
I watched him dig for mussels and open them all afternoon, hoping he wouldn't find so much as a dust pearl. If he did, I planned to run ahead of him to warn Carol Anne, and maybe alert Rayford Hayes. I felt as if Billy were counting on me to look after Carol Anne now that he was gone—or until he got back. I was still holding on to the hope I had caught from Carol Anne. The hope that said Billy was still alive and just lost in a cypress brake somewhere, trying to find his way home.
Finally, though, Kelso came up from the cove about sundown without anything to show for his day of hunting. My partners and I left
when we saw him coming. He looked to be in a sour mood and we didn't want to hang around if he was going to get drunk.
When we got to town, I said so long to Cecil and Adam and went home for supper. I didn't have much of an appetite. All the way through the meal, I worried about Kelso finding a pearl. Maybe the next day, or the day after. I couldn't talk to my folks about it. Especially not to my mother. They were awful quiet over supper, too. The only thing Pop said was that he was going to have to drop four pages from the paper and go back to a weekly format.
After we ate, I helped clear the table, then started to slip out through the front door.
“Where are you going, Ben?” my father asked.
He caught me off guard. We had a deal that I could go out and prowl at night, as long as I didn't get into any trouble and came home by nine-thirty. I usually ended up looking through a knothole at Esau's, or spying on some girl who had a habit of leaving her curtains open. Now I knew, however, that those ungentlemanly pursuits were behind me.
“I don't know. I guess I'll go over to Cecil's.” That was a lie. I knew exactly where I was going, but I didn't feel comfortable telling my pop about it. He would probably have tried to stop me. I was going to tell Constable Hayes that Kelso had been making noise about bothering Carol Anne. Then I was going to watch her room. But this time I wouldn't be trying to peep at her through the curtains. I would be guarding her, in case Kelso showed up.
“All right,” Pop said. “Just be back by ten.”
I smiled. “Yes, sir.” Some kids' folks never let them grow up. When I became a father, years later, I learned how difficult it was to let my kids go out on their own. My pop let me do a lot of growing-up that summer.

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