Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

Mr. Cole smiled. “That’s a nice thought. For a long time after I came home, I thought I might do something special because I hadn’t died in the war.”

  “Make a mark someway,” Jax said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Did you ever see anybody die?”

  “Quite a few.”

  “Done a lot of things, but I never saw a man die.”

  “That’s a blessing.

  Jax pressed his lips together as the flamethrower made another pass.

  Mr. Cole said, “A fella who knows he’s dying usually needs to get a few things off his chest.” He glanced down the street. Everyone was indoors because of the cold. “Even a fella who isn’t a Catholic can feel a need to make a confession.” Bill Cole waited a minute, but Jax said nothing. “Over there, at the frontline, we all followed a rule about that, even though nobody ever told it to us.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A fella’s last words stayed on the battlefield. They didn’t come back to camp without him.”

  “Good rule,” said Jax.

  “Well, that’s how it was at the front.”

  Jax said, “I regret that Barksdale business.”

  “I appreciate that, Jackson.”

  Jax started to add that he never intended for it to happen, but what difference did that make now?

  “You can leave that burden right here,” said Mr. Cole. “No need to carry it with you when you leave.”

  “All right.”

  “No harm done. Everything worked out.”

  “Okay.”

  They sat in silence until they were sure neither of them had anything more to say. Then Mr. Cole made a move to get up. “Thank you for stopping by, Jax.”

  “Would you ask Cargie to come out here?”

  “Yes sir.” Mr. Cole took hold of the car and pulled himself to his feet with a grunt. He put out his hand. “It was good to see you, son.”

  Jax shook the man’s hand. “You too, Mr. Cole.”

  Bill Cole shut the car door and went inside. Jax pulled the blanket higher on his chest and waited. It was a little while before Cargie Barre opened the dry cleaner’s front door. It occurred to Jax that he had never seen her use that door. She always used the rear door because that’s how things were done.

  Cargie walked to the car and opened the door. She bent forward awkwardly. She was pregnant again, which surprised Jax. It seemed to him Cargie was getting on in years to be pushing out babies. This one was big and riding lower than the others, making Jax wonder if Cargie had worn out her undercarriage. Nevertheless, she sat on her heels as Mr. Cole had done. “Hey, Cargie,” he said.

  He thought she wasn’t going to speak at all. Finally, she said, “Hey, yourself.”

  “Congratulations,” he said.

  “Thank you. This one’s Mr. Johnny Come Lately.”

  “How do you know it’s a boy?”

  “Don’t reckon I do for sure, but my patient husband is due a son.”

  “I used to call you Black Olive,” Jax blurted. He had not intended to lead with this. He realized just then that he had not imagined what he would say to Cargie Barre at all.

  Cargie’s face was impassive. She was looking down her nose at him, as she always had. She had no sympathy, even now. “Why’d you call me that?” she asked.

  Jax wondered if she was thinking about black olives and green olives and the fact that she had never looked like an olive of any sort, even when she was stuffed with a baby. “I thought you looked like Olive Oyl. Except black.”

  Cargie pursed her lips.

  “You know, Olive Oyl and Popeye.”

  “I know who Olive Oyl is.”

  “Oh.”

  “I called you names too.” Cargie pointed to her temple. “In here.”

  “I don’t guess I’ll ask what they were.”

  “No sir, I would not care to repeat them. But I reckon thinking them was just as bad as saying them out loud.”

  “We didn’t get on very well, did we?”

  “No sir. We did not.”

  “Well. Anyway. I told Mr. Cole I was sorry about the Barksdale business. Don’t know if it mattered much to you, except that you and Mr. Cole are friends. I can see that now.”

  “We are. Real good friends.”

  “Well, like I said, y’all should’ve had the Barksdale business.”

  Jax thought her face softened a little. She seemed to really look at him for the first time.

  “It seems like a good day to try and settle the books,” Jax said.

  “Consider us square,” Cargie said without hesitation. She stuck out her hand, and Jax took it, surprised at how warm she was. They sat this way a moment, neither moving, and he looked down at their hands wrapped around each other, dark and pale. He pulled back, embarrassed at holding her hand too long, but Cargie held on a few seconds longer, then squeezed his before releasing it.

  She struggled to her feet with one hand on the car and one under that monstrous belly. She gently closed the Caddy’s door and walked to the dry cleaners, opened the door, and went inside. She did not look back. Jax pulled the blanket up to his neck. His mother came out and got in the car. She started the engine and turned the heater up.

  “You okay, Jaxy?” she asked.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Ready to go home?”

  “Yes’m.”

  Jax’s mother passed a hypodermic needle to the backseat, and Jax shot himself full of Vitamin M. The morphine wrapped him in warmth. A mirage of palm trees and a desert castle shimmered before his mind’s eye. Jax closed his eyes and his vision cleared. The Lady Sheik stood in a moonlit window, her dark curls backlit by a thousand candles. She gazed out the window into the night, searching. Searching for him.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  When the early flowers—the jonquils, daffodils, and irises—had broken through the earth and bloomed, Cargie gave Thomas his one and only son. Thomas cried when Pretty Mama brought the baby out and placed him in his arms. “What are you gonna call him?” she asked. “Cargie’s leavin’ it to you.”

  Thomas shook his head.

  “Why don’t you call him David?”

  Thomas smiled then, with tears running down his cheeks into his graying beard. “Like King David in the Bible?” he asked.

  “Yes sir, just like King David. Turns out he was a good man, after all.”

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  1957

  On the morning Hurricane Audrey made landfall, Mae and Hollister were vacationing in Cameron, Louisiana, as they had done every summer for twenty-five years. Mae was awakened a little after three by a driving rain and discovered Hollister’s side of the bed was empty. She went outside and saw him sitting in the car, smoking and listening to the radio. They were both smoking that year to keep their weight down, as the advertiser’s slogan promised—Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet. Mae rushed through the downpour and got in the passenger seat.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Weather Bureau issued an update,” Hollister said. “Hurricane’s moving faster than they thought. It’ll be here in a few hours.”

  “We should leave,” Mae said.

  “Now?”

  “Yes. What are we waiting for?”

  “The Primeaux. We have to warn them.”

  The cabin in which Mae and Hollister were staying—had stayed every June—belonged to Tud and Flo Primeaux. Tud was a shrimper, but he was an able carpenter too. He built the cabins himself, without the help of any man. Only his wife, who Tud was fond of saying worked from can ‘til can’t.

  Mae had a soft spot for Florence Primeaux, especially since the war. During the years Hollister was in Europe, Mae made the drive to Cameron alone and stayed in their cabin. Without Hollister around, Mae paid more attention to Flo and Tud and their children. Each morning during those years, Flo sent Mae a hot breakfast by her eldest daughter, Charlotte, who was just achieving womanhood, and Mae gave Charlotte movie magazines. One morning, Mae gav
e the young woman a makeover, applying mascara, rouge, and lipstick. She discovered then that Charlotte was beautiful and showed her in a hand mirror. “Don’t you ever forget this,” Mae said.

  Charlotte gazed at her reflection, then she handed the mirror back to Mae and said, “Gotta go. Mama got chores.” But she stopped in the doorway, open to let the Gulf breeze in, and she turned to Mae and smiled.

  During those solitary trips, Mae wrote to Hollister every day. She wrote about the sunrise and the beach birds catching their breakfast. She wrote about the dolphins that swam lazily down the shoreline and about a stingray she almost stepped on because it had buried itself in the sandy shallows. Mae liked to imagine what Hollister was doing while she trudged on alone. She imagined him seeking cover in bombed-out buildings—like the ones in the newsreels at the movie theater—with the sound of mortars exploding all around. She saw him opening her letters as he hunkered down, out of the enemy’s sight. She pictured him smiling and escaping the awful war for just a few minutes.

  She wrote about Flo’s oyster gumbo and crawfish étouffée, and fresh-baked French bread, buttered and crusty. She wrote everything about the Friday night shrimp boil on the beach, even though she and the Primeaux were the only ones attending. Cameron’s beach was quiet during those years, with so many men gone and their women working in the war effort. Tud was the only able-bodied man around, having refused to register for anything having to do with the United States government, especially conscription.

  Before the war—when Tud and Flo’s three children were young—Hollister had played with them endlessly. The kids were beach rats. Ankle-biters, Hollister called them. He built elaborate, moated castles with them, which the tide took every evening. He chased the children with sand crabs in his outstretched hands, their claws winding. He permitted the kids to bury him in the silty sand, so that only his ruddy, sunburned face showed amid an expanse of ecru.

  The Primeaux children left Cameron one by one as soon as they were able. Tud cursed his children’s faithlessness, but Mae believed Flo was happy for them, even though she never said a word in their defense.

  The early morning of June 27, 1957, while Mae and Hollister sat in the car in the driving rain listening to the radio, everyone else on the coast was sleeping peacefully in the arms of their life-long experience and the prior evening’s weather advisory. The Weather Bureau had predicted Hurricane Audrey would make landfall Thursday afternoon, giving everyone plenty of time to assess the situation at first light.

  At half past four that morning, Mae stood with Hollister on the Primeaux’s tiny front porch, soaked from the wind and rain, while Hollister knocked persistently. For the most part, Tud tried to refrain from showing his bad temper to paying guests, but awakened from sleep by Hollister’s pounding, Tud, bleary-eyed and irritated, jerked the door open. “Why you don’t sleep, mister?” he said. This Tud called Hollister—mister—despite the years.

  “The Weather Bureau put out a new report,” Hollister said. “Audrey’ll make landfall this morning. We need to get out before the water closes the roads.”

  “Nah, nah, nah. We stayin’ put. Done nailed up boards to save the wender glass. Audrey, she blow in, make a little mess and blow out. Just like you folks what rents them cabins.”

  “Audrey is unpredictable,” argued Hollister. “Why take a chance? We can drive up to Lake Charles for a couple of hours—we’ll buy you and Flo breakfast there—and drive back. We’ll help you clean up too, after the storm.” Hollister glanced at Mae.

  “Of course we will,” Mae said.

  Flo stood behind her husband. Mae had watched this wiry scrap of femininity clean, cook, and corral children without complaint for twenty-five years. When Flo looked up at Tud, Mae thought she saw a plea in her eyes. If Flo could’ve found her tongue, Mae believed she would have said, “Please, husband, let’s go. Just this once, let’s be reasonable people instead of stubborn Cajuns.”

  Mae could not hold her own tongue. “For God’s sake, man, say yes,” she shouted above the wind. “Think about your wife, you stubborn old goat!”

  “You daren’t talk to him like that, missy!” cried Flo.

  “You muzzle that ‘un, mister,” said Tud. “Before she git you in a heap a troubles.” Then he slammed the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Mae said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Hollister. “Guys like that go down with the ship, and they don’t give a damn who they take with ‘em. C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

  When they got on the highway, the big tires of their Chrysler Imperial skidded and crunched and made the most God-awful sound. “What is that?” Hollister said. He leaned over the steering wheel and strained to see beyond the slapping windshield wipers. “Something’s washing over the road.”

  “Slow down, honey. Stop the car.”

  Hollister stopped in the middle of the highway. Mae retrieved a flashlight from the glovebox and opened her door enough to shine the beam onto the road. The beam illuminated a tide of scurrying creatures, their pinchers high and threatening in their panic. “It’s blue crabs! Millions of them.”

  She handed Hollister the flashlight. He opened his door and looked out. “Good Lord,” he said.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Yeah.” Hollister eased down on the gas pedal. “Slow. Slow,” he said as if coaching himself. “The road’s slick with them. We don’t wanna end up in the ditch.”

  It took them two hours to drive from their cabin on the beach to the north side of Lake Charles, fifty miles inland. They kept the car’s radio tuned to a Lake Charles station the entire trip. By the time they pulled into the parking lot of a diner, reports were coming in of a twelve-foot tidal swell, with twenty-foot waves riding on top of it.

  Hollister had saved them.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  1967

  No one knew how old Rebecca Pittman was when she succumbed to a weakness in her heart that had nibbled at her vitality for years. At certain times, Thomas had noticed his mother-in-law taking a seat to hide her breathlessness, but he had never mentioned it. She would not have been happy if he’d made a fuss. One day, when Pretty Mama could no longer hold the malady at bay, she took to her bed and told Cargie to gather the family.

  Cargie’s mother had never seen a doctor in her life, so Cargie called on her own physician to make a house call. After he examined Mrs. Pittman, he told Cargie and Thomas that she only had a week or two to live, so ineffective was the echoing beat of her heart. The doctor wrote a prescription for a diuretic to slow the floodwater seeping into her lungs, and Thomas filled it at the Mooretown pharmacy.

  Thomas spent hours beside his mother-in-law’s bed. He read aloud to her when she was awake and silently to himself while she slept. He offered chicken broth and herbal tea and 7-Up and ginger ale, all of which she refused. “She’s shutting down,” the doctor said during his daily visit. He handed Thomas and Cargie a prescription for morphine and told them to give it to her if they thought she was in pain.

  Cargie made her phone calls, and family members began to arrive from out of town. Adele came on Friday after work with plans to stay, and Becca and Rudy put her up in their spare bedroom. Cassandra’s husband could not get away from work, but she packed up her boys—school was out for the summer—and came for the duration. Cassie moved into her old bedroom, and David welcomed Cassie’s two sons, teenagers themselves, to stay with him in his room, which had been converted from the house’s deep side porch. The boys slept on pallets and came and went with their uncle through the side door, only showing themselves at mealtimes. Lydie Murphy opened her mansion, which had half a dozen bedrooms, and Cargie’s siblings and their families stayed there. Rebecca Pittman’s only living sister, Caroline, insisted on staying in the little house Thomas had built, where she slept on a rollaway bed.

  Cargie and Thomas had food brought in by the truckload, and they hired a housekeeping service to help out at Lydie’s place. Cargie wanted Mavis, who was certainly too ol
d herself to clean up after such a crowd, free to spend time with her dying friend. They all waited together, coming and going as necessary for work and other obligations, but for the most part camping out and keeping watch for the death angel. As her hospice progressed, Rebecca Pittman withdrew into herself. She closed her eyes and refused to speak, even though everyone believed she was awake.

  “Expect a rally a day or so before the end,” said the doctor. “That’ll be your time to say goodbye.” The rally came as predicted, and everyone who had wandered away on his or her own business was recalled. Thomas supervised the visitations, ushering the keeners out before they got the chance to tune everyone else up.

  Rebecca Pittman smiled and squeezed hands and gave kisses. She permitted hugs and mouthed “Thank you,” and “Bless you,” and “Love you,” as appropriate. Her strength waned late in the afternoon, and she lay panting. The time for diuretics had passed, and Thomas had nothing more to offer her except to hold her hand. Caroline sat across the bed from him and held her sister’s other hand. Cargie was not there. Watching her mother pant for every breath was more than she could bear.

  Thomas could hardly believe how quickly the years had gone by. He looked at all the photographs hanging above the straight-back chairs that lined the walls of the bedroom. Some were old and some were new, but all were pictures of people Rebecca Pittman loved. It seemed only a short time ago that Thomas was spreading plaster on these walls, hurrying to finish in time for it to dry and take a coat of paint before his mother-in-law arrived.

  Pretty Mama worked her mouth in a whisper that was not quite a word.

  “She’s gettin’ close,” Caroline said.

  Thomas nodded.

  There again, the whisper. “I think she’s trying to say something,” Thomas said. He took one of the long cotton swabs from the drawer and swished it in a cup of iced water they kept on the nightstand. He ran the wet swab around the inside of her mouth. “Is that good, Pretty Mama?” he asked.

  “David,” she whispered.

  “She’s calling for your son,” Caroline said.