Old Man's Boy Grows Up

by Robert Ruark

  “That’s plenty for lonch,” Anatole said. “Come on, we go back to boat. We got plenty odder t’ings for eat, us. Today we got jambalaya. At least we got de making, eef dat Pierre he don’ wreck de rice.”

  I clambered down and we dragged my string of fish into the boat, where the big reds flopped and kicked on top of whatever it was Anatole had provided. What Anatole had provided was a bushel of big crayfish, another bushel of big shrimp, and about two bushels of clams.

  When we got back to the boat, sitting clean and riding high and pretty, the Old Man was already aboard. He was perched on top of the cabin, shucking a mound of fresh oysters that reached nearly to his chin.

  “Man, this is the land of plenty,” he grinned around his pipe. “All you got to do is stick down a tong and drag up a peck of oysters.”

  “Oui” Dedée said from the stern sheets, where he was plucking ducks. “Plenty huîtres. Odder people’s huîtres. You don’t teenk deese tengs just grow sauvage, you? Steal de oyster very bad. Put you in jail plenty.”

  “Worth a stretch,” the Old Man said happily. “Here, boy, have a dozen of these illegal critters to hold down your appetite until dinnertime, which is a good hour off yet. We got to get the raw materials ready for the cook. All he’s done so far is fumble around with some rice and drink a quart of that jaundice-colored poison they make out of oranges.”

  The oysters, new-tonged from the mud and washed clean, tasted wonderful without salt, pepper, or sauce. There must have been a zillion-billion oysters in that bayou, because all the roads alongside were made of crushed shell, and right where the launch was moored were mountains of the bleached shells, just sitting like big white hills.

  “Try some dees clam, you,” Anatole said, dumping a dozen of the yellow-fleshed, purple-cornered, plump little clams onto my tin plate. “More better dan de huîtres, I teenk, me. Got more salt, heem.”

  Indeed, the clams tasted even better than the oysters. We all sat and worked now, me finishing up the fish and graduating to plucking ducks. Anatole tossed most of his clams onto the Old Man’s dwindling pile of unshucked oysters and started preparing the shellfish. As the cleaned raw material mounted, somebody would take a batch to the cook. Certain smells began to drift out of the galley, wonderful smells....

  It was full light now and the ship was near awash, the deckload of logs loosened, the deep-cut well decks running with water. Eight bells hit on the bridge. I tapped the bells back. There was no need to yell, “Lights ‘r bright, sir,” because the running lights and the masthead lights had been doused. I could see the cadet stumble down the ladder from the wheelhouse. As soon as I’d hit the bells I secured my watch and picked my way over the loosely moored logs, climbed the ladder to the wheelhouse deck, and crossed the open midships deck to get back to the warmth of the engine room fiddley.

  I peeled off my wet stuff and went aft to the crew’s mess and what passed for breakfast. Breakfast would be half-baked, doughy biscuits and fried fatback and ancient eggs, badly scrambled, but at least the coffee would be fresh. But whatever it was we were going to have, if it had been plovers’ eggs and caviar, I wasn’t going to like it—not after what I had been expecting for lunch on the sunlit Bayou Philibert in Louisiana.

  It wasn’t really my fault that I got into trouble over the captain’s night lunch. It was some my fault, because I was the actual thief, but mostly it was the Old Man’s fault. He shouldn’t have taken me to Louisiana, duck shooting that time, and the eight bells that sent me off watch to a filthy breakfast shouldn’t have interrupted my train of thought. Smitty, the second cook of the “Sundance,” was an enormous plum-black Negro, and a good cook when he had anything to cook. But like the old gittar song says, “the beans was tough and the meat was fat and oh, my Lord, I couldn’t eat that”—which also applied to the eggs, which may have been extracted at gun point from the last of the dodos.

  I guess it was one of those days. I couldn’t seem to sleep in my blue-jean sheets back under the fantail, because the steering engine was making an ungodly racket as some poor freezing sailor tried to keep the raunchy “Sundance” on course. So I got up for lunch and we had curried-something, possibly ship’s rat, and supper was worse. All through the three meals I had to look at Svendsen, the bosun, with his cigarette dripping out of his pursed mouth, the smoke floating upward past his squinted eye, as he held forth on the futility of hiring college boys as sailors when master mariners and chief mates were starving on the beach.

  Then that night I came off the foc’sle-head lookout at midnight, frozen stiff and wet through. When I thawed out a bit I was hungry again. The night lunch wasn’t much—coarse-grained cold bread, clammy salami, mummified bologna, and cheese a rat would refuse. What made it worse there wasn’t anything left but crumbs, because the able seamen had eaten it all. My belly was singing a long lament, and I kept thinking about that meal I had in Louisiana, and this process led inevitably to the officers’ night lunch.

  I figured the skipper was in his sack, and I crept forward to the pantry. I opened the icebox and there it was, all the delicatessen my soul as well as stomach craved, and I ate hearty—stuffing it in with both hands. The stolen feast called for coffee...boiled-only-once coffee in a silver percolator, when I heard familiar steps. The skipper had been roused, by either intuition or hunger, and was heading for the pantry. I beat him out the door by a whisker, and for some stupid reason I was carrying the coffeepot with me. Thereupon began a chase that was never bettered by the Keystone Cops or the Ritz Brothers.

  Still grasping that percolator I took off. The captain, wearing carpet slippers, took one look at his ravaged icebox, the door gaping open, and the gimbaled holder on which his purloined coffeepot once had rested. He let out a scream like a wounded banshee and took off behind me. Around, over, and practically under the ship we went, aft to fore and fore to aft, the skipper cursing, stumbling, and blowing his whistle for aid. It sounded like the Apaches had captured the fort and were scalping everybody.

  I was pretty young and sure-footed and I knew that ship and its cargo as I knew my fingers, and what to me was a beaten track was an obstacle course to the captain, who ordinarily stayed close to the chartroom. He fell over deck cargo and barked his shins, slipped on the watery deck, collided with bulkheads, lost his footing on ladders, but he continued to blow his whistle and scream for assistance.

  He got assistance, all right. He roused the off-watch mates and the steward’s department and the deck gang and the black gang, and he also roused me. I had long since flung his coffee-pot over the side, not wishing to be caught with the evidence, and I joined the protective coloration of the herd of drowsy men. I made myself busy at all sorts of things, like trimming the vents and slapping suji on distant bulkheads, and when the skipper herded everybody into the crew mess to sort out the culprit you might have seen the canary’s feathers fluffing out of my lips.

  There were over thirty men on that ship, and it’s hard to pick a night-lunch thief out of thirty men, unless you stomach pump ‘em all. Fortunately the “Sundance” did not carry a stomach pump, although I had a fleeting suspicion that the skipper might order the ship’s carpenter to jury-rig a food detector out of the bilge pump. The skipper ranted and roared, and swore that he would keelhaul the guilty party when he caught him, and in the meantime there would be no pay when we docked and no shore leave at all. I suppose if it had been wartime he would have shot the entire crew. The captain ultimately lost his voice, swore a final husky oath of vengeance, and departed, croaking. Everybody went to bed, and I went back on the foc’sle head to announce colliding dolphins and reflect aloud that the lights, running and masthead, were bright, sir.

  After the hare-and-hounds episode I had little difficulty concentrating on that midday meal on the Bayou Philibert, because I was stuffed with the skipper’s night lunch and had scored my first and only victory over the anointed personnel of the wallowing bucket “Sundance” from Savannah.

  I spoke aloud into the wind, a
ddressing the Old Man, off somewhere in infinity. “I hope you’re satisfied,” I said. “You could have got me hanged from the yardarm. This’ll teach you to expose me to Louisiana food....”

  That day on the bayou, after we’d finished preparing the ducks and the oysters and the fish and the shrimp and the crayfish, we saw the entire fruits of the morning collection pass down into the launch’s galley, where Pierre was chef. I had stoked myself pretty well with raw oysters and clams, but there was still plenty of space in the boilers for whatever Pierre was making. What he was making was one big dish, and he made it in an iron cauldron big enough to boil a hog in.

  It was jambalaya—call it pilaf, payloo, pilau, paella, or anything you want—but its main ingredients are rice and red peppers. Into this rice had been mixed shrimps, oysters, clams, crayfish, pork sausage, great white slabs of fish, a chicken for the stock, and the whole business cooked together until it was one great big wonderful adventure. Pierre had cooked the rice with saffron, so that it came out yellow, and the juices from the sea-food and the chicken had got married in a tremendous soupy ceremony so that the rice, while dry by grain, was damp by volume, and the hunks of fish and the shellfish hadn’t lost any of their flavor but were nuggeted through the rice.

  He served all this with great big chunks of crusty French bread for mopping up and a gallon of homemade red wine, and we finished up with Louisiana chicory coffee that was so strong you had to cut it to drink it. Even with an elder gentleman’s estimation of a young man’s, anaconda capacity I hesitate to recall how much I ate, sitting with a basin of this stuff in my lap, soaking in the sun, listening to the birds in the marsh, watching the fish jumping in the sparkling, breeze-ruffled bayou, and smelling the good smells of decaying oyster shell and marsh-grass mud.

  Pierre observed the destruction of his masterpiece with proper Gallic pride, although he played it coy. “Dat only meedleday snack, heem,” he announced. “You tak’ leetle sleep now and then go shoot goose. I theenk I don’ go. I theenk I stay here on boat and mak’ really good beeg supper, me. You got plenty of people for shoot goose.”

  The Old Man said he thought he’d grab forty winks below, and the other people said, “By gar, dat one hell of good idea,” but I stayed up topside and just sort of snoozed on the cabin top. About three o’clock the Old Man stuck his head out of the cabin and announced that I better take some No. 2’s along with the 4’s if I intended to go shoot a goose that day.

  “I already shot a goose,” I said, “With a duck load.”

  “You shot a pinfeathered adolescent goose,” the Old Man replied. “I’m talking about real grown-up geese, including maybe a honker from Canada. You don’t want to mess around with 6’s on these fellows. Buckshot ain’t too big for a real hoary old gander. They can pack off a power of lead.”

  The Cajuns started piling stuff, including a bundle of reeds, into a broad-beamed, shallow-draft bateau, about the size of a surfboat but wider. It had a small engine in it. The bateau had been floating tandem to the launch.

  “You don’ need pirogue for goose,” Anatole said. “You need beeg boat. We jus’ go along bayou een dees bateau, then we park heem ‘long levee, walk through muck, mak’ blin’, shoot plenty goose. We shoot off prairie.”

  We putted along the bayou for half a dozen miles. The flights of geese were enormous, and they settled in huge flocks on the water-soft savannas the Cajuns called prairie, semibogs covered with bright-green grasses. In the distance you could see the feeding geese, blue some, many white, as if they had changed their plumage with age. Once in a while a V-ended double thread of bigger, grayer geese entered the party—Canucks. I looked and saw no decoys in the boat, and finally screwed up courage enough to ask why.

  Dedée laughed. “Dees ver’ intelligent goose,” he said. “Read all de tam’. We use Picayune newspaper, stick him on prairie, goose fly down to read all de news, shoot goose, bim, bam!”

  I looked at the Old Man.

  “You remember that time we were making decoys and you said they didn’t look like ducks to you?” he said. “And I said they may not look like ducks to you, but they look like ducks to a duck? Same thing. You fold these papers, prop ‘em up with sticks in front of the blind, and to a flying goose they look like a hull herd of geese feeding. You call the goose right, and the old stud gander will fetch his flock in.”

  We chuffed along some more, and on both sides of the bayou the geese rose with wild, annoyed honking in clouds of thousands, until the sky was filled with a hundred thousand. The noise they made was unbelievable.

  Dedée, who was steering the bateau, finally nosed her into a cut, pushed a pole into the soggy turf, and announced it was firm enough to walk on. He drove his pole deeply into the turf, bent the bow painter around the pole, and let the bateau swing with the tide until she nestled against the bank.

  “Allons-nous,” Dedée said. “We go shoot de goose.”

  We went off to shoot de goose, each man carrying his gun, each man with a couple of boxes of shells. I looked at the Old Man and saw he was loading his long barrels with a 4, right, a 2, left; and I did the same. I’d get mixed up later maybe, but at least I’d start right.

  Away over yonder the ground was snowdrifted with geese. Flocks whirled and circled lazily and then dropped the under-carriage and slanted down to feed. Two of the Cajuns, Anatole and François, started splicing the reeds together to make small repairs to a blind that had been shot over before. There was a plank, a long one, mounted on saw-horse legs inside the blind.

  “Better dan get the derrière wet seeting een dees prairie,” Anatole said. “He’s look dry, but he got plenty water under grass, heem.” For the first time I really noticed that I was muddy past my shins. The water seeped up from the muck and came all the way through the grasses, when you put your foot down hard.

  While Anatole and François were repairing the blind Dedée was out with the newspapers, which he had been folding into a very creditable representation of a goose—the wings cocked, so, the paper extended into a searching neck, scanning the sky, or a feeding neck, crooked over and inspecting the muck for nutriment. Even at a short distance they looked remarkably like feeding geese. From the air, I imagined, they would look exactly like feeding geese. Even to a goose.

  “Ees not bad,” Anatole said, “but ees not de best. When we shoot a few goose, we run out queek, us, and plant de dead goose in forked stick, so we have nex’ best teeng to live goose. Den de goose he come plenty, heem.”

  Dedée finished his paper work, gave a look around, seemed satisfied, and scurried into the blind. We sat along the sixteen-foot length of plank, each man with his shell box opened in front of him.

  “Who de goose?” Dedée asked. “I teenk you, François. You call de goose, you.”

  François scorned a mechanical caller. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelped. He pleaded and cajoled and attracted the interest of a big flock of white geese. They circled three times, were not alarmed at the blind or the Picayune decoys, and sailed in for dinner. I performed in my usual fashion. I picked the biggest, oldest, toughest, grizzliest gander I could get under my sights and gave him two. He more or less cocked an eye at me and went swiftly elsewhere. I reloaded while I listened to the soggy thump of other people’s geese hitting the prairie. One was a runner that got up and shook his head, and I settled his troubles for him, figuring I’d better contribute something to the party.

  We let the dead geese lie. The Old Man had a smug look about his mustaches that indicated he had scored a double. All told, there were six geese down by seven shooters. Since I got none, and giving the Old Man two, the other five boys shared four. Somebody else missed too, I thought, and felt better.

  François started to gabble goosy again, and before long in came another flock. This time I committed my second mistake. I let go both barrels at the entire flock, where it was biggest, and something dropped this time. A handful of feathers. Around me was the solid thud-thud of geese falling like sacks. I co
unted and now there were fourteen. Everybody was improving but me.

  Dedée held up a hand. “Now we got de real decoy,” he said. “Anatole, you help me feex, you.”

  They scuttled out of the blind, keeping low, and replaced fourteen folded newspapers with fourteen dead geese, their necks jammed in forked sticks, their wings braced in a flap or left to fold. Some had necks crooked, some extended. They looked like feeding geese. Even more so to a goose.

  Back in the blind Dedée squinted at the horizon. A small V of birds, bigger and blacker in the distance, was headed our way. “Les Canadiens,” Dedée said. “My goose French she’s more better dan you,” he said to Francois. “I call dees cousins from Canada.”

  He changed the timbre slightly and began to talk. The Canucks halted slightly as the call touched them, and the lead gander inclined his head to look at the ground. He seemed satisfied and came on. The Canadas—big, gray, black-headed, with their white collars—came on, swept round in great circles, losing altitude all the time, and then came straight in like a great covey of aircraft. While they were coming I slipped the No. 4 out of one barrel and shoved in another 2.

  This time, by gar, I wasn’t going to miss, me. I still went for the gander, which flew almost into the gun barrel and then flinched, shuddered, and fell when the load struck him I watched him drop from under the gun, and switched to a male friend that was struggling for altitude and led him too much for a big goose, but managed to put the full load into his head and neck. Down he came, like a rock, and while I did not blow through the smoking barrels I felt like it. I had my geese for the day. The other folks could mess around with blue geese and white geese, but I had a full bag of bull elephant. Blue geese me no blue geese. The pros shoot only the Canucks.