Cajun Waltz
Page 22
The skiff almost capsized in the next moments. Sallie batted the snakes away with a paddle and jumped on top of the locker, which bobbed like a leaky canoe. She plunged her hand through the vent and swirled it around till she took grip and hoisted with all her strength. It wasn’t Tarzy. The wrist she clasped was wearing white shirtsleeves, the body below as heavy and soggy as a boot pulled from a pond. She let go with a cry of biblical anguish and the arm slid back out of view. Now R.J. too leaped onto the locker, breathing through his teeth, his side on fire from pain. He knelt to the vent and called Tarzy’s name. The reply, spoken inches from his face, was a whisper. “Please get me outta here please.”
Tarzy, over the long and horrible hours, had grown numb to conditions inside the locker, suspended afloat in the dark with the snakes and Abe’s corpse as the locker drifted to deeper water and started to sink. The sound of voices outside had put him into frenzy. He screamed. He clawed at the vent to try and tear it wider, ripping his fingernails bloody. His great-aunt was a vision above him. She fell to her knees and put her face to the vent where his nose and eyes were barely visible above the water rising inside. Her weight and then R.J.’s sunk the locker further. Water spurted from the vent and Tarzy’s face submerged. She cried out all kinds of prayers.
Night had fallen. Delly watched from the skiff as R.J. moved to the side of the locker and peered into the black water. Snakes were everywhere, thick and twisty like noodles in a pot. He rocked forward and dove in soundlessly, like a navy frogman mining a harbor. He groped along the side of the locker, sweeping aside the snakes and pulling them off his neck and shoulders, till he found the upside-down door. He took a breath and went under. The next sign of him was Sallie’s scream that he was inside, that he’d unlocked the door and was inside with the child. She crawled on all fours to the edge of the locker and stared at the water with the mad intensity of a dog watching kids in a pool. Tarzy surfaced with a gasp. Sallie seized his wrist and hauled him out in one swoop as if sharks were at his heels. She took him in her arms and passed him to Delly in the skiff.
Time moved fast and slow. Sallie climbed in the skiff and yanked the cord of the outboard. Tarzy sobbed. He’d been bitten, he said. Sallie shoved off from the locker.
“No!” Delly screamed.
Sallie circled the locker in the dark. Once. Twice. Delly saw her counting in her mind, gauging how long to search before deeming R.J. gone and rushing Tarzy to shore. It was enough. She swung the tiller homeward and gunned the motor.
Delly launched herself out of the boat and swam the few yards to the locker, splashing wildly to scare off the snakes. She heard Sallie yelling behind her. She got to the locker and pulled herself up. She knocked away the snakes coiled there, grabbing them in her hands and hurling them overboard like wiggling ropes. She waved to Sallie to go and had no reaction when Sallie did so. She crawled along the locker’s edge calling R.J.’s name. Like a proud pirate marooned by his shipmates, she didn’t bother to turn and watch the skiff depart in the darkness. Soon the motor faded and night sounds of the marsh replaced it.
* * *
A GUIDE IN his mudboat found her the next day. She was on her knees atop the locker amid all the snakes she’d killed overnight with her shoe, and she was not in her right mind. She refused to leave there for one thing, clawing the face of her rescuer as he tried to coax her into his boat. She begged him to help her find her friend who’d vanished under the water. The guide realized it was dementia talking and slapped her to calm her down.
Seth would be her savior in the weeks and months ahead. With R.J. dead, Arthur Franklin dead, and Fiona placed in the care of her father’s relatives, Delly had nothing left. Seth couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a fresh start that her mental breakdown presented. Once Delly stabilized into more or less her recognizable self, he undertook a supremely patient courtship lasting more than two years. When at last he proposed they get married, she accepted because why not? He was nice, he was good, he loved her—and he never once asked what had possessed her to run off with R.J. that night or what might have passed between them. It was an infinite kindness on his part, since of course there was no good answer.
Money, of which Seth had plenty now that his sister Bonnie was releasing his share of the Block’s profits, wasn’t a factor in Delly’s decision; living in a trailer would have been fine by her for the change of scene alone. But his wealth gave him the means to take her away from Lake Charles and make a new start in New Orleans. He enrolled in the Baptist seminary and was ordained four years later. He joined a parish in Lafayette and became its pastor in 1963. He and Delly had a son they named Francis after her father and lived, thanks to his inheritance, not in the pastor’s modest church residence but in a large white house on Sterling Street. Permission to cherish her was Delly’s gift for which he never outgrew his gratitude. She was everything to him, did everything for him—ran the household, drove him around, a pastor’s perfect helpmate. They were Reverend and Mrs. Seth Bainard, a surname each was proud to claim.
* * *
THE SEWING ROOM at Georgia Hill was a mean sight the day after the hurricane. Those alive in the house—Bonnie, Alvin, Seth, and Richie’s nurse—were trapped there three days, the power still out and the storm having knocked one of the oak trees across the driveway. They ate crackers and made fitful conversation while two bodies lay at the end of the hall like houseguests sleeping late. Even after electricity and phone lines were restored, news of their ordeal was obscured by Audrey’s devastation, more than five hundred dead across two counties being a bigger story than two in a ten-by-twelve room.
Richie Bainard and Donald Meers were buried by people who cared about them. For Donald, that included his parents, two kids, and a number of truly shaken fraternity brothers. His wife Corinne attended the service after initially getting snubbed by Donald’s side of the family. Her son Joey negotiated a rapprochement, a nifty act that prefigured his later success as a state politician.
Richie’s funeral was a two-phased affair. Phase Two was a memorial celebration held at the Lake Charles High School football field. The W. O. Boston student band—Richie had been a benefactor of the Negro school—paraded together with the girls of the Kiltie marching drum corps in their red plumes and Scottish plaid. Staged by Bonnie and her corporate advisors, the event was attended by state officials and dozens of members, from managers to stock workers, of “our Block’s family,” as she put it in her amplified eulogy. She gave an air of formalized grief that would have done the House of Windsor proud; the consensus afterward was that under her leadership Block’s would become the next Sears Roebuck. Phase One of the funeral, held a week earlier, had been a smaller affair. In the presence of Bonnie, Seth, a preacher, and a shovel crew, Richie’s ashes were interred at Orange Grove beside his wives and his father-in-law and his elder son’s headstone.
About that headstone: Sallie Hooker’s claim that her great-nephew’s rescuer had been R. J. Bainard threw an odd light on R.J.’s burial the previous winter. Bonnie’s first response was to mock the allegation as a bayou woman’s voodoo ravings, but when Tarzy and Delly gave corroboration there was little she could do except wait and see how authorities handled it. Here Hurricane Audrey proved a boon. In its chaotic aftermath, R.J. Bainard was a name whose significance to the parish clerk was overwhelmed by hundreds of other citizens to be certified missing or dead. Like many of the hurricane’s casualties, R.J.’s body was never recovered. Sallie, Delly, and Tarzy’s testimony that he’d drowned in the storm gave the clerk all he needed to know. Hence today one can find in the Lake Charles historical records two death notices of the same man registered five months apart, a fun fact that few people know.
Seth wept for his father the day they buried him. The shabby way Richie died, shot in bed by a blithering fool, was such a fateful admonishment it seemed to cleanse Richie’s slate and open the way for Seth to forgive him. His relationship with Bonnie, on the other hand, remained fraught for many years. In time
he began visiting her at Georgia Hill in mutual recognition that they were family no matter what. He knew enough not to wear his minister’s collar or to try any kind of preachment. Once, when sitting alone with Alvin Dupree on the terrace, he asked the old sergeant if he would like to pray together. “Most kind,” Alvin said with some difficulty. But then Bonnie came outside and Seth had to leave it at that.
Alvin had been left permanently impaired by bullet fragments surgeons were unable to remove from his brain. His gait was unsteady, speech halting. Bonnie kept him home with round-the-clock care. He liked to play harmonica and listen to blues and gospel records. She remained fierce in believing that a miracle would restore him someday. If he said anything halfway coherent or reminiscent of their brief affair she would move heaven and earth to make happen whatever he asked for. That’s how she came to partner with Tarzy Hooker’s family to buy tens of thousands of acres in Cameron Parish for the cultivation of rice. And it’s how Fiona Franklin came to receive a check in the mail from the Block’s corporation for twenty thousand dollars in 1959. Alvin had got confused about the amount he’d promised Arthur, a mistake for which he obviously can’t be blamed.
Nobody—least of all Bonnie, who carried her regrets with valiant pride, like a stone in her coat pocket—would make the case that such belated good works excused her and Alvin’s misdeeds. But nor can we say that whenever she made a charitable donation or broke ground on some new civic project the possibility of redemption didn’t occur to her. Hope in someone like Bonnie equals faith in someone like Seth. And she was far from old, after all, leaving open the chance that even many years hence she might start being young.
* * *
SEPTEMBER 1964. LAFAYETTE, Louisiana. As she did every evening, Delly Bainard picked Seth up at church in their station wagon to drive him home for dinner. Their son Francis sat in back. She paused by the driveway mailbox to remove the usual bills and this: a small brown-wrapped box postmarked from Cameron Parish with no return address. She opened it. It contained a bundle of tissue paper wrapped around something sticky that since had dried. She pulled the paper apart and studied its contents before tossing it with a screech into her husband’s lap. Seth felt for the object. It was slender and knobby, like a twig or a sun-dried pepper. Francis peered over his father’s shoulder from the back seat. “Is that somebody’s finger?”
It took until breakfast the next morning for Seth to find courage to ask if Delly was leaving. She didn’t look up from drying the dishes. Nor did she look at their son. “Will you pray for me if I do?” He thought she was asking his permission to go. Then she added, “I will for you,” which told him otherwise.
* * *
JOE FALCON’S WIFE Cleoma never recovered from injuries she’d suffered getting dragged by a bus in 1938. She died three years later at age thirty-six, leaving Joe to raise their daughter alone. He lost interest in performing after her death and even put aside his beloved accordion. He found love again with a widow named Therese Cormier and in the 1950s began getting back into music, playing with friends on back porches and sitting in at the occasional fais do-do near his farm in Acadia Parish. Eventually he formed a group called the Silver Bell String Band with himself as the front man to hook folks into coming to see the once “Famous Columbia Record King” promoted on the publicity flyer.
Joe hadn’t recorded since the late 1930s. But in 1964, a year before his death, the Silver Bell String Band performed at the Triangle Dance Hall in Scott, Louisiana, outside Lafayette. The set, with tunes including “Allons à Lafayette,” “Lacassine Special,” and “Creole Stomp,” was captured on audiotape as part of the Smithsonian Institute’s Folkways project to preserve American traditional music. There’s a photograph in the Smithsonian files of the band backstage. Members listed are Joe Falcon, his wife Therese on drums, Clifford Breaux on fiddle, and Freddy Baez on guitar. Joe holds his black Monarch and Freddy holds a National steel. Aficionados of Louisiana music history will notice that Freddy, a well regarded journeyman player with versatile chops ranging from delta blues to electric zydeco, sports his signature bottleneck slide on his left middle finger, his pointer finger, according to legend, having been bit off by an alligator.
The photographer credited on the back is Adele Baez. Little is known about her. When not touring with such Cajun-Creole headliners as Belton Richard, John Delafose, and Clifton Chenier, she and Freddy farmed a tenant parcel on one of the rice plantations owned by the Hookers of Hancock Bayou. No photo of her exists. Evidently she preferred it that way.
AFTERWORD
Hurricane Audrey hit the southwest coast of Louisiana on June 27, 1957. It left more than five hundred people dead, most from drowning or injury but many, especially children, from snakebite. Lots of books are available on the subject. My favorite is Hurricane Audrey by Nola Mae Ross and Susan McFillen Goodson, residents of Cameron Parish, bull’s-eye to the storm. Their dedicated compilation of eyewitness accounts is harrowing and uplifting. Audrey’s legacy, they write, is “the big picture of life and death—and acceptance, so intertwined in these human hearts.”
Amédé Ardoin (1898–1942) was a Creole accordionist and one of Cajun music’s pioneers. Like my fictional character, Walter Dopsie, he was brutally assaulted after a performance for wiping sweat off his brow with a white woman’s handkerchief. His brain injuries led to his death. Check out his recordings on disk or online. “That poor boy,” said Ardoin’s musical partner, the great fiddler Dennis McGee. “Make people cry when he sing.”
Joe Falcon and Cleoma Breaux are likewise renowned in Cajun music circles. Their lives and influence are discussed in many books, including Cajun Breakdown by Ryan André Brasseaux, South to Louisiana by John Broven, and Swamp Pop by Shane K. Bernard. Ann Savoy’s Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People features full discographies of Joe, Cleoma, and just about all the Cajun musical greats. It’s loaded with photographs, interviews, and, because Ms. Savoy, her husband Marc, and their family are brilliant musicians themselves, lots of stuff on the instrumentation, lyrics, and melodies that inform the Cajun tradition. My book, albeit in an offbeat if not outright perverse way, was conceived as an ode to a part of the country I loved as a boy. Ann Savoy’s book is a native’s true love letter.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s been a kick to write and publish a novel after three nonfiction histories. I’d like to thank some of the folks who helped make it happen. At Thomas Dunne Books, there’s Tom Dunne, Laurie Chittenden, Melanie Fried, and Will Anderson. Thanks as well to my copy editor, Christina MacDonald. Harvey Klinger has been my agent for many years, and I hope he’ll keep me aboard for a few more. Finally, thanks and love to my family, and especially to my wife, Vicki. To my fretful mutterings about doing this book, she urged me to go for it. Any credit therefore is hers, and any blame is mine.
ALSO BY ROBERT H. PATTON
FICTION
Up, Down & Sideways
Life Between Wars
NONFICTION
Hell Before Breakfast: America’s First War Correspondents
Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom & Fortune in the American Revolution
The Pattons: A Personal History of an American Family
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert H. Patton holds degrees in literature and journalism from Brown University and Northwestern University. He worked as a Capitol Hill reporter, a commercial fisherman, and a real estate developer before publishing his family memoir, The Pattons, to wide acclaim in 1994. He lived and traveled throughout the South before settling in Darien, Connecticut, with his wife. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Family Tree
1. Richie, Esther, Angel
2. Bonnie, R. J., Alvin
3. Seth, Delly, Audrey
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Also by Robert H. Patton
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
CAJUN WALTZ. Copyright © 2016 by Robert H. Patton. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Rob Grom
Cover photograph: guitar with hat © BNS124/Getty Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-08899-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-08900-7 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250089007
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