Ox almost smiled, but he caught himself before he could. “I know a little. Are you asking about something in particular?”
“I don’t know enough to ask about anything in particular,” I admitted. “But here’s what I do know: Bernice’s uncle disappeared about fifteen years ago and nobody has seen any sign of him since. Now her cousin—his son—is missing and the circumstances are the same. She mentioned something about the rougarou and said her uncle used to tell them bedtime stories about it to keep them in line. Are there any other swamp legends I should know about?”
Ox nodded slowly. “Lots of them. Too many to list in one sitting. I’ve heard that some people believe the feu follet are hanging out in the swamp. Some people say that they’re the souls of children who were never baptized, but don’t worry. It’s actually just swamp gas.” He eyed me for a moment and asked, “You don’t believe in any of that, do you?”
I shook my head. “Not at all. I’m just curious.” I was relieved that some of his hostility had faded, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back for not rising to his bait. I’d been working on my people skills, and I liked thinking that my efforts were paying off.
“What about Bernice? Is she a believer?”
I wagged my hand in a “maybe, maybe not” gesture. “I don’t think she wants to be, but the legends are part of her childhood. That can be hard to shake.”
“Sure can.”
“She told me that her uncle had a moonshine still out there in the swamp,” I said. “Nobody knew where it was. Do you think that’s why he fed them stories about a swamp monster?”
“To keep them from exploring and finding it?” Ox shrugged. “Could be. I’m sure some of those legends seemed bloodcurdling to a bunch of impressionable kids.” He stood and stared down at me for a moment. “Good luck. Try not to run into the rougarou while you’re out there.”
“Funny.” I got out of my chair, too, so he wouldn’t have the advantage of standing over me. “Guess I’ll see you in the morning then.”
“Okay.”
I thought he might say something else, but he turned and left without another word. We hadn’t patched up our differences entirely, but I had hope that we might eventually.
I just hoped “eventually” wasn’t too far away.
Nine
Miss Frankie was waiting with Bernice when I arrived to pick her up, which didn’t surprise me. The three of us loaded into the Mercedes with Bernice in the front so she could give me directions, and Miss Frankie in the back.
We traveled a few miles on the freeway, but the rest of our trip was on a narrow two-lane road that wound back and forth over water and swampland. If there had ever been lane markings, they’d long ago disappeared. We were deep inside Terrebonne Parish surrounded by forest of pine, live oak dripping Spanish moss, and a few other trees I couldn’t identify. Thick undergrowth and squatty palmetto trees carpeted the forest floor.
Every once in a while we passed a cypress swamp dotted with those otherworldly trees and nubby stumps, apparently called cypress knees, sticking up out of the water. Spots of civilization showed up now and then, but the people who lived out here seemed to like their privacy. Homes were usually solitary and far apart.
Bernice and Miss Frankie kept themselves busy debating about almost everything under the sun. Bernice told us about her grandmother’s favorite remedy for a headache—cow dung and molasses rubbed on the temples—and Miss Frankie declared a deep and abiding gratitude for the man who invented aspirin. Then Bernice explained how her daddy had always been careful not to let his shadow fall on the water when he was fishing because it would bring bad luck, and Miss Frankie declared it wasn’t luck but common sense, so that the fish wouldn’t see a shadow on the water and swim away. They had gone on that way for a while, so I’d tuned them out and daydreamed about different designs for the Belle Lune cake.
After nearly two hours, Bernice lunged up in her seat, straining against her seat belt. “We’re getting close now! Slow down. The speed limit is only twenty-five here in town and they’ll get you if you go over.”
I put on the brakes and slowed to a near crawl, and a few seconds later the trees parted to reveal a small clapboard building. The sun had sunk low in the western horizon, but it was still light enough to see the uneven lettering on the sign: T-REX’S GENERAL STORE.
If this was the “town,” it was little more than a wide spot on a very narrow road. Besides the general store, I saw a ramshackle gas station with two old-fashioned pumps, a bar called The Gator Pit with a faded sign I could barely read, and a single-wide trailer, home of the Baie Rebelle Church. The church parking lot was empty and the gas station was deserted, but a handful of cars were nosed up to the bar.
A man wearing raggedy overalls, white rubber boots, and a dirty ball cap caught my eye. He was bent to look through the window of a white Ford Ranger and he waved his arm in sharp, angry gestures. My natural curiosity stirred, making me wonder who was in the truck and what had made Overall Man so angry. By the time we passed the bar, I’d come up with three different scenarios, all of which were probably way off the mark.
“Aunt Margaret’s house is probably ten minutes away,” Bernice said. “Just turn left here and follow this road until I tell you to stop.”
She’d been giving me those same instructions for over an hour, but I really didn’t mind. The joy on her face as we drove through her home turf warmed my heart. If it weren’t for the worry shadowing her eyes, I would have said Bernice looked twenty years younger.
Maybe it was a good thing Miss Frankie was with us. Seeing how happy Bernice was to visit home, even under difficult circumstances, she might understand why I wanted to go home for Christmas. She might even agree to ask Pearl Lee for help with the holiday festivities instead of me.
“I must confess, Bernice, I had you pegged as coming from an entirely different background,” I said as I made the turn onto a red dirt road.
Bernice sighed softly. “I married when I was just a girl. Sixteen years old. It wasn’t so unusual back then. I took one look at my husband and fell hard. He’d been off fighting in Vietnam, and when he came back, he just swept me off my feet. I thought we’d settle down here and live the kind of life we were both used to, but going off to the other side of the world had changed him. We left the swamp and he never looked back.” She smiled at me and a twinkle danced in her eye, momentarily replacing the worry. “I may’ve peeked back over my shoulder a time or two, but I loved that man hard enough to put the past behind me.”
Miss Frankie stirred in the backseat, but she didn’t say a word. It didn’t matter. I knew what she was thinking. In the beginning, I’d loved Philippe as much as I knew how to love anyone, but I’d never felt comfortable around his wealthy relatives. After spilling red wine on Miss Frankie’s white sofa and carpet on my first visit, I’d avoided coming back with him when he visited New Orleans. Maybe I hadn’t loved him enough. Maybe I’d been too selfish to make sacrifices. Maybe if he’d understood my emotional baggage better, I would have found my way through it.
We’d never know, and I didn’t want to start dwelling on past mistakes, so I concentrated on Bernice instead. “So your husband grew up around here, too?”
Bernice nodded. “David’s people live about thirty miles east. Close enough that we used to run into each other from time to time. You know how it is.”
Not really, but I pretended I did. “If he’d been off serving in the military, he must have been a little older than you.”
“Seven years,” Bernice said. “These days you’d worry about a man that age setting his sights on a girl as young as I was, and you’d probably be right to. But like I said, it was a different world when I came up. It was no big deal for a girl to leave school and get married. A boy either, for that matter. People around here didn’t worry much about education in those days.”
From the looks of t
he ramshackle houses we were passing, I guessed that not much had changed. We rounded a few more turns in the road and Bernice pointed to the roof of a large house visible behind a grove of leafy green trees. “That’s it. That’s Aunt Margaret’s place there. Slow down now. The driveway’s coming up just after this bump in the road.”
The undergrowth was so thick I would have missed the turnoff if she hadn’t warned me. I turned onto a wide dirt driveway that led to a clearing and a large and surprisingly modern home. A broad porch stretched along two sides of the house and at least a dozen trucks and cars were scattered in the clearing, but I couldn’t see anyone moving around. Either the search party was still out looking for Eskil, or they were back and dinner was already being served.
There was no room left in the clearing, so I parked on the edge of the driveway next to a deep ditch filled with weeds and a few inches of brackish water. We took a few minutes to get out of the car and stretch, and then Bernice led us to the front door.
She gave a courtesy knock and let herself in. Miss Frankie and I followed. Just as the screen door banged shut behind me, I saw a broad woman wearing a plaid shirt and jeans squeal with delight and throw her arms around Bernice. Two other women came to see what all the commotion was, and Bernice was swallowed up in a round of hugs and excited chatter.
Eventually the dust settled and the excitement died away, and Bernice introduced Miss Frankie and me to her family. Aunt Margaret was a tiny woman with hair the same snowy white as Bernice’s. She had a narrow face covered with a network of wrinkles and kind eyes.
The squealer turned out to be Cousin Bitty, a friendly woman with a wide smile and arms like bands of steel. Her sister Tallulah was a bit more reserved. She was as short as her mother, but three times as wide, and her brown hair was cut short in no particular style. Tallulah watched us with wary eyes, sparing only the slight curve of her full lips before returning to what she was doing.
I couldn’t tell how old any of them were. Life on the swamp had given them all a weathered appearance. Aunt Margaret might have been anywhere from sixty to ninety, and I thought Bitty and Tallulah were probably in their fifties, but I could have been off by ten years in either direction.
I’d expected to walk into a house hushed with worry, but nobody seemed terribly concerned about Eskil’s fate. Aunt Margaret certainly didn’t look as frail and fragile as Bernice had led me to believe.
After a few minutes Bitty herded us into the kitchen and passed out aprons while she explained the menu and assigned chores. Miss Frankie and I were put in charge of a tossed salad and stationed at one end of a massive pine table so scarred it had to be a family heirloom. Bernice started stirring together a batch of cornbread large enough to feed everyone in Terrebonne Parish, and the other three went back to what they’d been doing when we arrived.
Once we were all working, I broached the subject uppermost in my mind. “Is there any news about Eskil? Have they found him yet?”
Bitty shook her head. “Nothing yet, but the swamp is a big place. There are a thousand and one places to look for him. They’ll find him yet.”
Tallulah gave her sister an irritated look. “He went out fishing like he always does. He would have gone to the places he always goes. If they were going to find him, they’d have done it already.”
I glanced at her mother to see how she’d react to such a negative prediction, but Margaret just kept rolling out a piecrust and barely glanced at Tallulah. “This isn’t like when your daddy disappeared,” she said. “Eskil’s careful.”
Tallulah tsked her tongue and chopped a large sausage link into bite-sized pieces. Some wonderful aromas were coming from the pot she had on the range, and suddenly I was glad Bernice had invited us to share their dinner.
“Mama, I don’t know where your head is. Eskil’s been butting heads with Silas Laroche over that hunting lease for months. And you know Silas. He’d as soon shoot you in the back as look at you. What if Eskil got up in his business?”
“Your brother isn’t stupid,” Aunt Margaret said patiently. “Now stop fretting and get that gumbo ready. Eskil is fine. If he was gone, I’d know it.”
I wanted her to be right, but I thought the potential for something bad to have happened out there in that wild and rugged land was huge.
“Are there many people searching?” Miss Frankie asked.
Bitty bobbed her head up and down. “Most everybody in town, except probably Silas. I didn’t see him leave with the others, but he’s not as social as most. He likes to keep to himself.”
“He keeps to himself all right,” Tallulah said. “Except when he’s setting lines over somebody else’s. He doesn’t believe in rules and regulations,” she explained for our benefit. “He doesn’t think people can own land or lease rights. He doesn’t care one bit what the law says. If he wants to hunt or fish somewhere, he’s going to do it, and he expects everyone else to get out of his way.”
“He’s not easy to get along with,” Aunt Margaret agreed. “But you know he wouldn’t hurt Eskil. They’ve known each other since they were in diapers.”
Tallulah cut up another sausage and pulled a plastic bag full of shrimp from the refrigerator. “Like that ever stopped anybody.” She paused and tilted her head for a moment. “We’d best hurry y’all. I hear ’em coming back.”
Conversation ceased and everyone went to work to finish the meal. After a few minutes even I picked up the sounds of people approaching. At first it was the low murmur of voices. Then a soft laugh and the steady sound of footsteps. The voices fell silent not far from the house and a moment later something heavy hit the wooden porch.
The screen door flew open with a bang and a large man with shaggy gray hair and a long gray beard loomed in the doorway. A small football-shaped birthmark bounced around on his cheek, and a powerfully rank smell wafted off him. I guessed it was a mix of swamp water, rotting vegetation, and spoiled meat. “I heard y’all were worried about me,” he boomed in a voice that shook the boards under my feet.
So this was Eskil? I glanced at Bernice, and from the stunned look on her face, I guess she’d reached the same conclusion I had. Uncle Cooch hadn’t come to see her last night, but I was almost certain Cousin Eskil had.
Ten
When Eskil Percifield walked through the kitchen door, I expected a few tears of relief from the womenfolk. Maybe even a hug or two. But both his sisters and his mother looked at him with bored expressions.
“I might have known you were all right,” Tallulah said, sounding almost disappointed. “What happened?”
Eskil plucked a stray piece of sausage from the cutting board and tossed it into his mouth. “The damn boat ran out of gas on me. I coulda sworn the tank was full when I left.”
“You need to be more careful,” Bitty cautioned as she slapped his hand away. “Now go wash up. You stink.” She leaned over to look out the door at the assembled crowd and called out, “That goes for the rest of y’all. Supper’s on the table but none of y’all are sitting down until you wash yourselves.”
A lot of good-natured tussling over water from the hose and the bathroom sink took place over the next few minutes. Bitty and Bernice did their best to tell Miss Frankie and me who they all were, but with two dozen cousins, uncles, and neighbors roaming through the house, I got lost in a hurry. There were even a couple of women in the search party, both of whom seemed more comfortable with the men in the yard than the women in the kitchen. I checked a few other faces for that birthmark, but Eskil seemed to be the only one present who had it.
While glancing out the window, I noticed one of the women talking to a young man with shaggy dark hair. He cut her off with an angry wave of his hand and stalked away. She called after him, but her voice got lost in the dozen conversations floating around me so I didn’t hear what she said. She was old enough to be his mother and I wondered if she was.
The look on her f
ace and the angry set of his shoulders tripped my imagination and sent it racing forward twenty years. Would that be Edie and her baby in the future? Or the baby and me? I felt a little light-headed at the thought, but there was nothing I could do about it now so I stuffed my concerns into the back of my mind and focused on putting together the meal for the search party.
Eventually everyone was clean—in a manner of speaking—and everyone found a place to sit, or lean. A dozen people crowded around the huge table and the rest spilled into the living room and out onto the porch. Cousin Somebody-or-other said grace, then everybody dug in with enthusiasm.
The food was delicious and hearty. A rich gumbo with just the right amount of spice, fried okra, melt-in-your-mouth cornbread dripping with honey, a crisp salad of fresh-from-the-garden greens and tomatoes, and a roast that could have been anything from beef to raccoon for all I knew. It was seasoned with peppers and onion, and enough cayenne pepper to make a hole in the ozone layer. Dessert, a rhubarb-orange pie, was to die for. The crust was flaky and buttery, the filling perfectly tart and sweet. I knew plenty of professional pastry chefs, myself included, who couldn’t make a better crust or match the flavors Aunt Margaret had coaxed out of the fruit.
Conversation was lively, if a bit confusing, but I found myself enjoying the company more than I’d expected to. After a while, the meal wound down and people began to drift away. That’s when the real work began. Miss Frankie and Bernice cleared the table while Tallulah and Bitty gathered dishes from the living room and porch. I scraped food into the trash and stacked dishes beside the sink, and Aunt Margaret put away the leftovers. Now that I’d seen Eskil and formulated a theory about him being Bernice’s late-night visitor, I was dying for a chance to talk to her. I’d seen the shock of recognition on her face, and I assumed she had some idea why he’d showed up on her back deck last night. She was having such a good time with her family, though, I didn’t want to interrupt.
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