by Lisa Wingate
“Netta, look.” Imagene’s voice seemed far off at first. I was still on the porch with Mamee. Imagene rattled my arm, then leaned close to the window, and I snapped back to the present.
We were inching a few foot at a time toward an overpass across a four-lane highway. Down below, the cars sat bumper to bumper, still and stagnant as the water in the Dogleg Bayou, where Mamee lived. On the cement barrier, an old woman in a flowered housedress sat fanning herself, her head lolling back. Beside her, a teenager in baggy shorts poured bottled water onto a paper towel, then wiped it over the old woman’s arms.
My mind couldn’t make out, at first, why they’d be just sitting there on the side of the road, but the reason was clear enough when I looked down a stretch. Alongside the right-a-way, overheated cars’d been abandoned like carcasses, their metal skins giving off a sheen of heat waves far into the distance, like a mirage in the desert.
“Mercy,” Imagene whispered. “Look at all them people.”
In the back, Lucy sat up, stared out the window, and muttered something in Japanese.
“How’re they gonna get out of there?” Imagene whispered.
As we rolled up over the bridge, I thought about that sign on the old church we’d went by, When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. I prayed it over us and over the people stuck below as we drifted into the shade of the pines again.
I didn’t stop praying until the bridge was far behind us, and then I let my mind drift to the Dogleg Bayou and Mamee until I was back in her little shotgun house again.
We were sitting on the porch, where the shadow of the cypress trees fell long and heavy, and the air throbbed like the breath of the bayou itself. Around us, the night was thick like one of her old quilts, stitched together from the smells of wet earth and Spanish moss, and saltwater ebbin’ and flowin’ in the Gulf, far away. Mamee’s cane rocker creaked on the wood floor, and mosquitoes gathered thick on the screen. In the dark, gators slid into the water and cicadas thrummed in the trees. The night was so deep, it seemed like there wasn’t a thing in the world but us and the bayou, Mamee’s little house floatin’ out into the black until it was an island, and my uncle’s place up the hill seemed a million miles away.
I couldn’t remember runnin’ up that hill on the last night I ever spent with Mamee, but I remember the story she told right before she passed into quiet and never spoke again. Even before I ran for help, I knew she was gone. I’d heard the angels come for her. I felt their passing in a whiff of sweet, cool breeze that swept over us just after Mamee told me a story I’d never heard before, and never forgot since.
“Macerio,” she whispered when the story ended. Her head rested against the rockin’ chair, her face tipped toward the screen. She went quiet, and a question turned ’round in my mind. What happened to Macerio?
Before I could ask, the cicadas got loud as thunder. “Mamee, you hear that?” I asked, and pushed my hands against my ears. “Mamee, do you hear?” The air closed in, growin’ heavier and heavier, sitting on my chest until I couldn’t catch a breath. Then there was a waft of something sweet, a flutter of cool, and everything went quiet. When I touched Mamee’s arm, her hand fell limp, the cream peas dropping, half-shelled, bouncing off the floor. I stood and looked at her face, and I knew she was gone.
All I could recall, when I thought about that night later on, was the sound of the angels coming, the feel of them in the air, the way it smelled sweet. I remembered my grandmother whisperin’ that name, Macerio. I wondered if she saw him that night, if he took her hand and floated her away on the tide.
I never shared her story with anyone, not even my mama, or Imagene, but even all these years later, I still knew it just the way she spoke it. I could hear the roll of Mamee’s Cajun words mixing with the bayou’s night song as she told me about Macerio.
Mamee was just a girl of sixteen, a child with dark red hair and skin suntanned from hours workin’ the rice fields, the summer her family headed east near the end of the harvest season to help an uncle bring in his crop. Even though they didn’t travel on the rivers and the bayous by then, she still called it goin’ downwater. She told me how the road followed the river, and they bounced along in back of the old farm truck in the heat and the dust, under the gray of a September sky. At night, they camped by the water, cooked on a fire, and shared their food with tramps and fellow travelers.
When they got to her uncle’s farm, they rushed around to bring in the harvest ahead of a comin’ storm. After more long days than Mamee could count, the work was done and men left for market. Mamee stayed in the barn loft all by herself, and stretched out on a bed of hay, too tired to walk to the house. The sky split open and rain started fallin’ hard, but she didn’t care. It felt so good to have the work done, she just closed her eyes and let the rain come.
When she woke, it was dark and the bayou’d come up, lappin’ at the barn doors. Down in the corn crib, the buckets were clangin’ against each other, afloat. The old building swayed like a ship at sea, the rain blastin’ in as Mamee clung to the heavy cypress beams and looked out, trying to see through the storm. A flash of lightnin’ split the air, and all around, the bayou was like a river. It’d swallowed the foot of the barn and started uphill toward the house. Mamee made the sign of the cross, then fell to her knees and started to pray. She didn’t know how long she stayed there, but when she stopped, the storm’d quieted a little. She heard someone callin’ from down below, and when she looked over the loft rail, one of the harvest boys, Macerio, was there on his tall brown horse.
“Quickly,” he said in his thick Spanish accent, and she scrambled onto the ladder, then slipped and fell into the icy water. He caught her dress, lifted her up with his strong hands, and told her not to let go. He tied her to him with a length of rope, and then he guided the horse out of the barn as the old building cracked, and moaned, and started to crumble. Lightning filled the sky as he whipped the horse into the current, where it swam for its life. Somethin’ hard and solid struck the horse, knocking it under, pulling loose the harvest boy and Mamee. She floated away and sank under. Then the rope went tight around her, tugged her forward, and she stretched toward it, trying for air.
A hand caught hers and lifted her up above the surface. She grabbed on, coughing out mud and water, as tangles of brush and wire caught at her dress before ripping free and floating off. She held on to the rope while the horse fought for shore, struggling against the current until finally it found a footing and scrambled uphill, dragging Mamee and Macerio along.
The harvest boy pulled the knife from his belt and cut loose from the horse in one quick motion, then lifted Mamee and carried her to the house. He set her down on the porch, and she watched him go back for the horse, lead it to the porch, and strip off the saddle. Sliding his strong fingers over its muzzle, he stood, his forehead pressed against the horse’s white star, both of them spent. Even with the storm ragin’, the moment seemed quiet, and still. Then the harvest boy took Mamee’s hand, led her inside, and bolted the door behind them. It was the first time in her life she’d ever been alone with a boy who wasn’t her brother, but she didn’t think of it that way.
“The water comes,” he said, and started gathering supplies—the drinking bottle from the icebox, a floating oil lamp the men used for fishing, a pistol and bullets. Mamee grabbed food, blankets, medicine, and piled all of it atop the big double bed in her uncle’s room. They propped the bed up high, put the oil lamps on the icebox, where they wouldn’t spill into the water, and packed the matches in a jar to keep them dry, and then they waited for the water to come. By mornin’, it was up over the furniture.
For four days, Mamee and the harvest boy floated alone on the bed. He told stories of his home in Mexico, where he would someday return. He confessed that the first moment he saw Mamee, he fell in love with her. He’d been movin’ on when the storm came, but he turned around because he knew she’d be trapped there alon
e. He kissed her—the first time anyone ever had—and as the water rose up, she gave her heart to the harvest boy. Macerio.
When the hurricane flood seeped away, the barn was gone, and Mamee knew Macerio’d saved her life. Her family came back, and she told them what’d happened, and all of them worked to salvage what they could of her uncle’s farm. In the long evenings, she sneaked away with Macerio, and when it was time to go back home to southeast Texas, she told her daddy she was in love, but her daddy wouldn’t hear of it. He said if that boy didn’t leave her alone, they’d have him thrown in jail, and since he was just a harvest boy up from Mexico, things would go awful bad for him. Then the man put his daughter in the car and took her back upwater.
True love won’t be denied by a man’s plans, though—her daddy shoulda known that, if he knew anything. Four nights after they got back to the homeplace, Macerio came for her. Mamee slipped out a window and ran off to marry her beau.
The story ended there, with Mamee in her blue dress, riding away on the back of Macerio’s horse in the moonlight, her arms wrapped tight around her love. Whenever I thought of that tale, I knew, just as sure as I knew the sun would rise tomorrow, there are some things in this world that are meant to be. Maybe that’s why, all my life, I been so bad about matchmaking. I believe in true love. Even though I know as well as anybody, not everyone finds it. I knew Mamee’d found it that summer she was sixteen. The boy who rode off into the night with her was her one true love, but there’s a reason I never shared that story with anyone.
My grandaddy’s name wasn’t Macerio. My mama’s father was named Burnam. He was Cajun French, not Mexican. He’d lived on the farm next to Mamee all his life. By all accounts, and from the little I could recall, he was a hard worker and a good man.
I’d always wondered, when I thought of that story, the same thing I tried to ask Mamee the night she passed. The question she left this world without answering, as she whispered his name and drifted away through the screen.
What happened to Macerio?
The story blazed a path in my heart, the way all good stories do. I always told myself that one day I’d head downwater and find out the truth, but now, with time running out and Glorietta coming in, it looked like maybe I never would.
Chapter 6
Kai Miller
In the back, the dogs lay listless, panting heavily after hours without a drink or a rest stop. I knew exactly how they felt. With the air-conditioner off and the Microbus barely moving, we were sweltering inside. I’d thought about pulling off a few times, but when vehicles left the line, then tried to reenter, road rage ensued. Desperation combined with survival instinct caused drivers to fight for each new inch of road. Occasionally, traffic bottlenecked completely and people exited their cars, then climbed on top, pounding sunbaked metal with frustrated fists and trying to see what the holdup was. The radio stations kept pumping out dire reports, and the sense of urgency heightened. G lorietta was now a solid category four. She’d hesitated just a few hours off the coast, swinging east, then west, toying with weather forecasters as she picked her time and place to strike.
I tried to call Don, then Maggie and Meredith to see if they’d heard word from him, but in reality I knew that even if he’d started to evacuate, he would have become frustrated and gone back by now. In the nine hours since I’d left Perdida, I’d made it only sixty miles north and west—not nearly far enough to be out of the storm’s path.
The cell phone wouldn’t connect, and I slapped it down on the passenger seat as Radar barked, whimpered, pressed his nose against the windows, then scratched at the door. I’d have to stop somewhere. Both the dogs and I needed a pit stop. After hours of following evac traffic down tiny county roads, I had no idea where I was, but according to the signs, another town was somewhere ahead. If it was like the smattering of communities before it, everything would be boarded up, no activity except a few desperate travelers pouring water on overheated radiators or checking gas pumps at closed-down stations.
On the roadside, a series of Berma-shave-style signs was passing so slowly, it was hard to remember one until I reached the next. I reviewed them in my mind as I inched along.
Don’t drive no more,
Stop at Hornwoods Store.
Good gas, good grub,
Got pie you’ll love,
Gumbo, beignets, étouffée,
Get some, cher, and be on yer way!
A National Guard truck passed by in the ditch, the open bed loaded with rescued travelers. Bumping along in the dust with their belongings, they looked like refugees from some third-world disaster area. They were heading south. The wrong direction.
On the outskirts of town, a dirt road led off to the right, toward what looked like a small riverbank picnic area under a bridge. The options wrestled in my mind as I crept closer. It wouldn’t be easy to get back into traffic, but I had to stop before dark. The dogs could get a drink and have a few minutes to stretch their legs. I could locate a bathroom au-natural—having been raised on the road, that was nothing new—then head out again and hope someone would let me back in line. A better opportunity probably wasn’t coming along anytime soon.
Leaving the highway, I rolled downhill faster than I should have. After eight hours of traffic stagnation, watching the speedometer flirt with twenty-five and feeling a breeze waft in the windows was an incredible dose of freedom.
At the bottom of the hill, fishermen had created a makeshift park with a picnic table, some threadbare lawn chairs, a fire pit, and a propane grill with no tank. Under the bridge, a set of old kitchen cabinets served as a fish cleaning area, the butcher-block countertop crisscrossed with knife marks, the side of the cabinet stained with dried blood. The scent was unmistakably familiar. Studying the gutting table, I had visions of my father outside our camp trailer, cleaning fish—our usual fare when we couldn’t afford groceries. Gil and I eventually became pretty good fishermen. Gil was proud of that fact, because he’d read about fishermen in the Bible he stole from the motel.
Now, watching the river drift by in shadow, I thought about that Bible, tucked in my duffle bag behind the seat. I’d used it to baptize my little brother. I felt stupid about it at the time, standing waist-deep in the surf at daybreak, Gil just nine years old, shivering because the water was cold, and he’d lost ten pounds in the past six months. The stolen Bible was propped on a rock, a salt breeze turning the pages. I didn’t know squat about baptizing someone. I did it because Gil wanted me to. When he came up out of the water, the look on his face was one of pure joy. He didn’t care if I’d done it right, and it really didn’t matter in the long run, because a hospital chaplain took care of it a few months later, officially.
My father wouldn’t even stay in the room. The chaplain’s sermon, he said, took him back to the most painful and humiliating part of his childhood, when he was forced to sit beside his mother in church while the pastor railed endlessly about lust of the eye and sins of the flesh. The sermon was a thinly cloaked warning to the congregation, and to my father, not to follow in the footsteps of his father, a deacon and respected physician who’d created a small-town scandal by divorcing Grandmother Miller and running off with a nineteen-year-old nurse. That sermon, intended to steer my father toward a normal life, was in a way the very thing that prevented him from a white picket fence existence. He wanted desperately to prove to everyone—his father, the pastor, his mother, the people in town—that he was better than any of them. He wanted to make it big with his music and watch them all grovel at his feet.
Being the parent of a terminally ill child wasn’t part of his plan. Neither was Gil’s desire to be baptized. On a normal day, the memories of my father’s resistance to the baptism stayed under the mattress with the family mementos, but today, for some reason, it was all close to the surface. I was glad I hadn’t left the Bible, that piece of Gil, behind in the path of the storm. Gil believed in that Bible. He believed the words in it had power. Perhaps, in spite of my father’s view that
religion was all about guilt, and the only person you could count on was yourself, a part of me believed what my little brother had so innocently placed his confidence in. Having Gil’s Bible along made me feel like I wasn’t so alone, even here.
As soon as I put the van in Park, the dogs began trying to claw through the doors, so I grabbed the leashes and limped, stiff, sore, and parched, to the passenger side, thinking that I knew exactly how the fish bones drying in the sun by the old kitchen cabinet must have felt. The breeze off the river touched my back and legs, tugging the sweat-plastered shorts from my skin. A shiver tickled my spine, but it had nothing to do with the weather. The camp had an eerie quiet to it, the traffic overhead passing in a soft hum, nearly hidden by the lacy fan of towering pines. The WPA-era bridge groaned under the weight of cars, its arched metal girders sending a dull ping-ping through the rebar. In the water below, a trotline bobbed up and down, heavy with the day’s catch of catfish—gator bait now that no fishermen would be coming by.
I felt the compulsion to pull up the line and let the fish go, but there wasn’t time. Under the thick canopy of foliage, the riverside was getting darker by the minute, less welcoming and more ominous. A shudder ran over my shoulders, and I opened the door just a crack, catching Radar as he tried to bulldoze his way through. Hawkeye followed and sat politely waiting while I connected his leash and closed the van door.
Just past the picnic tables, a trail marked by a hand-painted sign that read Can led off into the woods. After pausing at the riverbank for a doggie drink, we followed the path into the trees, Radar pulling ahead and Hawkeye sniffing carefully, checking out the unfamiliar territory. A homemade wooden outhouse marked the end of the trail. It was only slightly better than no outhouse at all, but as my mother had often reminded us, Beggars can’t be choosers. Since we were beggars at least half the time, the saying fit. It’s amazing sometimes, the things a weird childhood prepares you for.
