She’s right. We pass Jesuit Bend, and there is a high flush of cirrus in the blue sky and the smell of the open country. Soon we are rolling alongside miles of orange groves interspersed with odd-looking squares of magnolia and live oak that were once the site of great plantation homes.
In the days before the Civil War, when a single white man could own as many as seventeen thousand black slaves, this country of the Plaquemines delta was the center of a fantastically opulent plantation culture built on the sweat of others. Rice, sugarcane, and indigo grown in fields reclaimed from the swamp were traded upriver for the luxuries of the world: Carpets and Sèvres china and books from France, bolts of silk and spices from the Orient, dueling pistols and silverware and beaver hats from England, even Renaissance paintings from Italy. Each planter then was monarch and law on his land and owed allegiance only to the profit margin and his own bad conscience. But all of it came to an end in 1862, when Admiral Farragut’s gunboats crashed through the chain the Confederates stretched across the mouth of the river. The Federals bombarded Fort St. Philip and Fort Jackson into submission, then steamed past the plantations to New Orleans, which capitulated without a fight.
About five miles south of Naomi, Antoinette turns off the highway onto an access road that leads through an orchard of orange trees into the bayou. There is the buzzing of many bees here and the smell of honey, and down one of the green shaded alleys between the trees, I catch a glimpse of a man in overalls and a mesh veil tending to rows of square white boxes that are the hives. A few of the yellow and black insects splat against the windshield before we pass off the gravel and onto a narrow road marked “Private—No Trespassing.” It is paved with shells and just wide enough for one vehicle to pass. The air here is live with gnats and mosquitoes. On both sides of the road the terrain falls away to swamp, and all around is the green press of vegetation. I see sap willow and pine, cypress, magnolia, and low, scrubby bushes punctuated with the occasional burst of wildflowers: wild Creole lilies, camellias.
“Alligator,” Antoinette says as we cross a new wooden bridge, and I turn quickly to see what looks like a mossy log sink beneath the green surface of the bayou. The shell pavement ends here. She bumps the Saab none too gently onto a rutted track, and I have to reach out and push branches away from the car as we pass. Now there is only the green light through the trees and the noisy hush of the swamp.
“Jesus,” I say, “this is …” But I am too awed to finish.
“Not New York,” she says, and she smiles.
6
THE RIVAUDAISES’ fishing camp occupies a clearing on a rise overlooking the still waters of a lagoon. This dark, oblong body of water drains into a navigable creek which meanders through the bayou to the Indiana shaped lake known as the Pond, which is in turn connected through a complicated series of bayous to the open waters of Lake Salvador. At one end of the Pond is the small town of Coeur de France. There’s a bait and tackle shop, a saloon that is also a general store and post office, a Catholic church built by the Spanish two hundred years ago, a jail, and a few dozen shotgun houses raised from the sandy soil on cypress stilts. It is the closest bit of civilization, about three hours by pirogue through the bayou.
“They used to have dances there all summer long,” Papa Rivaudais says. “Real country-French dances. Had a kind of dance hall attached to the old church. But that was a long time ago. Before the girls came along when we were still a young married couple, Mrs. Rivaudais and I, we spent all our weekends down here. Come Saturday afternoon, we’d hop in the pirogue and paddle all the way out to Coeur de France, dance all night, then hop in the pirogue and paddle all the way back again. But a hurricane came through—oh, sometime in the late fifties—and knocked that dance hall right out of there. The priest, he was a superstitious old buzzard, and he decided God didn’t want any more dancing at the church, and that was that. Never did rebuild the place. Otherwise I’d tell you, latch on to Nettie, get the pirogue, and get on over to Coeur de France. Dancing’s just about the best thing two young people can do to get acquainted. Know what I mean?”
I am sitting with Antoinette’s father at the end of the small landing that juts about twenty yards out into the black water of the lagoon. Papa Rivaudais is supposed to be fishing. But in actuality he is just slumped in a canvas-backed folding chair, staring out at the lagoon, a dull expression in his faded blue eyes. The expensive-looking fiberglass reel is propped loosely in one hand. At his feet, a Styrofoam cooler of alcohol-free O’Doul’s, a tackle box, and an empty wicker basket for the fish. The years have finally caught up with the man, still one of the twelve richest citizens of the state of Louisiana. His hand trembles upon the pole; one eye droops, the legacy of a stroke the year before. His white hair floats in wisps from underneath his long-billed fishing cap, and the once handsome mustache is thin and yellow-looking. I remember the robust patriarch of ten years before, a man still in grips with life, and I am sorry. Papa Rivaudais has become old. He survives on a bland salt-free diet and a shoe box full of medications. Even as we speak, his lungs are filling up with fluid.
He leans over and spits cottony white phlegm into the black water of the bayou. It is a messy business. He wipes his mouth with a red bandanna that he stuffs back into the pocket of the long-sleeve plaid shirt he wears, even in this stifling heat.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he says now. “When the stuff comes up, the stuff comes up. My doctor says it’s better to spit than swallow.”
“That’s O.K.,” I say. Then we settle down to a long silence. From somewhere nearby there is the cry of a loon.
The three cabins, arranged on a rise overlooking the lagoon, are connected by covered walkways and surrounded by a raised wooden patio. The center cabin with an old-fashioned porch, stone chimney, and sash windows probably dates from the twenties. The two side cabins with sliding glass doors and air-conditioning units are new additions, just a couple of years old. Still, there is a rustic feel about the place. This is the way the first French settlers must have lived, it seems to me, before slaves and plantation opulence, when they came to the province in the wake of the Sieur de Bienville and his soldiers. Then there was just the trees and the sky and the Indians off in the bayou. The primeval purity of frontier life.
From the cabins now I hear the high shriek of a child’s laughter and a baby crying and the sound of women’s voices. I look over my shoulder to see Antoinette and her sisters emerge onto the patio. They are preparing to barbecue. I recognize Jolie, though her hair is dyed blond. She’s got a baby in one hand and a bottle of Abita in another. Also, there are two little girls, twins from this distance, pulling each other’s hair.
“You don’t mind sitting with an old man, do you?” Papa Rivaudais says, looking up at me. “Unless you’d prefer to go up and join the women.” There is a trace of the old irony in his voice and a spark behind the faded blue.
“No, I don’t mind,” I say.
“The husbands have all gone off fishing. I’m getting too old for that. Two hours in a pirogue nowadays, and the damp settles into my bones for weeks.”
“And Mrs. Rivaudais?”
“My wife’s up the road taking care of her people. She does that now, like any good Creole housewife. Always in the end, if you live long enough, you come back to the old ways. As for me, about a year ago, I actually talked to a priest. Haven’t talked to a priest to say anything other than ‘Hello, Father, how are you?’ in something like forty years. Know what the bastard asked me?”
I shake my head.
“He asked me if I believed in God. I didn’t know what to say for a minute there. Then I said, ‘Well, yes.’ First time I’d thought about it since I was a boy. God! You believe in God, Mr. Conti?”
This is the second time I’ve been asked this question in as many months. I consider for a moment, still hesitating, but the old man doesn’t give me the chance to answer. He takes a deep breath that rattles in his throat and leans forward.
“You ever he
ar tell about this Frenchman Pascal?” he says, and he draws a carefully thumbed copy of the Pensées out of the deep pocket of the khaki hunting jacket hanging off the back of his chair.
Pascal? I am stunned. I had always pegged the Rivaudais family for one in which any ideas beyond the purely practical were not tolerated. So much for my smug complacency.
“Amazing guy, Pascal,” Papa Rivaudais continues. “Highly religious but also a brilliant mathematician and the father of public transportation among other things. He instituted the first horse-drawn bus line in Paris in the seventeenth century. But he started out a skeptic like me, like yourself, and he came up with a proposition for skeptics. Make yourself a bet, he said. Bet yourself that God exists. If he does exist, you win. If he doesn’t exist, you win anyway, because it doesn’t really matter and you’ve managed to give yourself something to hold on to in this sad life. Something to keep you warm against what old Pascal calls les silences effrayantes de ces espaces inconnues. You know what I’m saying? Here …”he says, and hands me the book. “Read it cover to cover three times.”
I look it over politely, make a few comments about French philosophy of the era, and hand it back. But I am still a bit surprised. Pascal in the bayou.
“You know, I try to talk to the family about what I’ve been reading, but they just roll their eyes. They think I’m a crazy old man, even my wife. We’re not a stupid bunch, Mr. Conti. Don’t make that mistake, no, sir. My père and my grandpère, they were smart as a whip—I mean in a country way, because they were real country people. Still, seems like we could use a little of this stuff in the family.” He taps the book. “I mean, a little abstract thinking …”
After that there is another long silence. I hear the water moving against the dock and birds in the bayou. It is possible to sit with an old man without talking and not feel awkward. After a certain age there is the sense that all conversation has been had, all points argued, and it is only the companionship that matters. Like children, old people do not want to be alone. At last we are roused by a tug upon the line.
“Ha!” Papa Rivaudais says. “Sometimes if you don’t go to the fish, the fish, they come to you.” There is a brief struggle, he is weak, but his seventy-odd years of fishing experience wins out. He reels in a two-pound bream, its dark scales glistening in the diminishing light. “I almost feel sorry for the creatures,” he says. “Lacrima rarum, as the Romans used to say, how sad it is, but I tell you, split ’em open, clean ’em out, stick ’em on the grill with some lemon juice and garlic butter, and the sadness will pass.” He tosses the fish into the basket. Then, fifteen minutes later, he pulls up another one, a two-pound sunfish, all silver and brilliant spots, gasping for oxygen in the thin air.
We sit for another hour like that. I join him in an alcohol-free beer, and he trolls the line as the sun descends, green and gold, through the trees. Then, in the final moments of dusk, two pirogues wind their way from the creek into the lagoon.
“There they are. The husbands,” Papa Rivaudais says, and stands with difficulty. I make out four men in the pirogues and hear their hearty shouts as they call back and forth, each to each. I bend to take up the tackle box and basket as Papa Rivaudais folds the canvas chair, but he sets this aside for a moment and turns to me. In the fading light I can hardly see his face.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” he says. “Antoinette is my favorite out of all my girls. Not a mean bone in her body.”
I am silent.
“She nearly killed me when she ran off with that swamp redneck. She wasn’t much older than thirteen, you know.”
“Yes, sir,” I say.
“And I’m telling you, the girl hasn’t been the same since. That son of a bitch, he broke something inside her. She’s never been able to settle down. She’s the only one of my girls who didn’t finish college, the only one who isn’t married, doesn’t have a child. Always so unsatisfied, jumping from one thing to the next. The store’s been good for her, but it’s just not enough. You know what I’m saying, Mr. Conti?”
I don’t, but I nod anyway, and he puts his hand on my shoulder, and we head slowly up the rise toward the lighted cabins.
7
THE STARS are up, but even here you can see the lights of New Orleans as a pale green reflection in the sky. From the darkness of the bayou now, the reedy chirp of frogs and the occasional plop and splash of fish in the lagoon. An upside-down half-moon throws a sinuous glimmer on the dark water. In the yard the husbands have constructed a bonfire, and the orange blaze lights our faces on the patio. We are all out eating beneath the stars: Mama and Papa, Antoinette and her sisters, Elise, Manon, Claudine, and Jolie, and their husbands.
The baby is asleep. The two little girls, both eight years old, their long black hair done in pigtails, dance like Pocahontas around the bonfire, then roll, fighting and shrieking, on the woodchips of the drive. One is Manon’s daughter and half Irish; the other 100 percent Creole, the fruit of Claudine’s union with her husband, Paul Sarpy, of the Sarpyville Sarpys, representative from St. Charles Parish to the state legislature in Baton Rouge, but the little girls could be sisters instead of cousins. They are alike as two peas in a pod. The dark, pretty Rivaudais blood seems to dominate all lesser heritage.
The picnic table is littered with paper plates and casserole dishes. The coals of the barbecue glow white hot, always perfectly ready twenty minutes after the last person has eaten. There was barbecued bream, crawfish jambalaya, Texas caviar, which is marinated black-eyed peas, corn on the cob, mixed greens, red beans, and rice. Only scraps remain. Now we sip Louisiana Lemonade, which is a potent combination of crushed ice, mint, fresh lemonade, and an indigenous sugarcane liquor called Davant, found only in the Plaquemines delta.
I lean against the railing with my drink and listen to the husbands talk about sports. New Orleans is trying to acquire an ice hockey team. The semipro Winnipeg Glaciers might become the NHL New Orleans Revelers sometime in the next six months. I have nothing to add to the conversation.
“I’m telling you what, this city needs a good hockey team,” says Paul Sarpy. “I say why not, if the fans will support it?”
Jim Remington isn’t so sure. He is Jolie’s husband, an old friend of Paul’s from the days when they both worked as staffers on Capitol Hill—and they are still two glad-handing Hilloid preps in plaid shorts and pressed Warthog polo shirts from Britches of Georgetown. Their Bass Weejuns are worn without socks. They met their future wives at the same Bush inaugural party in a Republican group house at A and First streets, SE. Jim is a member of the famous Remington gun family and vice-president of a new division that installs alarm systems. Antoinette has told me that he wired her parents’ house on Prytania Street and her own apartment in the Faubourg Marigny, free of charge.
“Face it, Paul,” says Jim. “New Orleans is just too hot for a hockey team. It’s a sun town. Hockey doesn’t go in a sun town.” He’s a tall, handsome fellow with a shock of black hair. He looks quite at home with the rest of the Rivaudais clan.
“Y’all heard of the Los Angeles Kings?” says Charles-François, Elise’s husband. “Los Angeles is a sun town, but they’ve got a tradition of hockey going back to the thirties.” A content and balding engineer in his early forties, he sits very close to his wife at the picnic table. She’s just a year or two younger than he, but could pass for twenty-eight. Their two girls are off to camp for the summer, and they’re cuddling like newlyweds.
“I personally would patronize a hockey team in New Orleans,” says Manon’s husband, Sean O’Farrell, the Irishman.
“Of course you would,” Jim says. “Any sports is good business for you. More drinking.”
“That’s not it a’ tall,” he says. “We’re not a real sports bar. I like hockey. Fast-paced game. But word around the place is this—team’s going to be called the Bayou Blades, and they’re going to be based out of Baton Rouge.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit to you,” Sean says.
/> There is no trace of the hip jazz musician left in this man. He put down his saxophone a long time back, and now he’s just one of the boys. The artistic streak he once possessed has been leached out by the Louisiana heat and the easy living afforded by his wife’s money. But recently he has gone from being the bum of the family, butt of Irish drinking jokes, to something of a success story: After years of sullen loafing, he opened an Irish bar in the French Quarter, called O’Farrell’s Four Provinces. It is an exact replica of a favorite pub in Dublin, down to the Guinness on tap and the gouges in the oak wainscoting caused by an IRA bomb in the seventies. The place has become so successful he’s thinking of expanding to Metairie.
“The question is, Where are we going to put a hockey team?” Charles-François says now. “Not in the Superdome.”
“That’d be a sight,” Paul says. “Zambonis in the Superdome.”
“What we really need is a baseball team down here,” Jim says. “Now there’s a good sun sport. The boys of summer …”
Et cetera.
The conversation passes from sports to local Republican politics, then to the state of nutria devastation in the swamp. Thousands of miles of wetland have been destroyed by this small brown muskratlike animal from South America, accidentally introduced to the ecosystem in the 1930s. It reproduces like mad and will eat anything.
This is a topic for everyone, even Mama Rivaudais, who thinks the nutria is a cute animal with just as much a right to live as anything else. Only Antoinette and her father and I hold back. The old man, I know, has come to value his silence. He nods off in his chair. Antoinette keeps quiet for reasons of her own. But I have never been good at such gatherings. Normal folks eating and drinking and talking sports and politics just to hear themselves talk. The husbands are all fine fellows, who express very interesting and well-considered opinions, but I am vaguely depressed by the whole thing and bored to tears. I nod and smile and sip my Louisiana Lemonade and make the occasional assenting exclamation, but they don’t have much use for me. The very fact that I live in New York seems a threat.
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