Postmark Bayou Chene

by Gwen Roland

  “You have potential to live up to, and you can be sure I won’t let you slack off,” he said to this one.

  It had been years since Adam could go out—away from the store and post office—to fish. There was just too much to do. It would be impossible for him to keep up with nets and lines that required daily attention. He did manage to bait a couple of lines near the dock, where he caught enough fish for supper several times a week. Firm, lively catfish like this one.

  A blow on the head from the butcher knife’s wooden handle stunned the fish. Then Adam slit the bluish-white skin just below the bony protrusions on each side of the skull. He went through the movements swiftly, without thinking. Placing the knife on the cleaning board, he picked up the blunt-nosed skinning pliers. Had to be careful making that switch; one or both could slip out of his hand into the water. He sold plenty of replacements for the knives and skinners that got buried in bayou mud.

  Four passes with the skinners, and the blue cat was peeled like a banana. Nothing to it. Back to the knife again, he opened the belly from the throat down with one quick thrust. Holding the head in his left hand and the body in his right, Adam gave a twist. The insides pulled away with the head, leaving a firm white column of meat with the back and tail fins intact.

  Just the right size for frying whole, he thought. Everyone nibbled off the crisp fins first thing, and Adam knew that a fish longer than ten or twelve inches would turn out greasy if cooked whole. It cooled down the boiling fat too much.

  He squatted to swish the small carcass in the bayou before flipping it into the granite dishpan, where it plopped softly on top of a pile of identical white bodies. After lowering the wooden cage back into the water, he hoisted the dishpan and carried their supper toward the house.

  Shadows were long across the yard. The fire left over from the washday laundry was now burning under a smaller black iron kettle, the one reserved for fish. Adam had placed it there to heat while he cleaned the fish. Now he stepped into the smokehouse and scooped a pound of lard from the pork barrel into the hot kettle. While it melted, he took the pan of fish through the kitchen door.

  Fate, Val, and Loyce were playing an Irish waltz on the porch—“The Star of the County Down.” Their music flowed right into the kitchen where he was working, bringing Josie to mind. How gracefully she had waltzed to that very tune! Hearing it brought home how much he still missed her.

  He couldn’t remember the first time he saw her, but she was probably right there toddling around the dock, likely peering around Mame’s skirt, when he stepped out of the boat. He had been taking in his own fill of the strange new sights. Yessir, Bayou Chene was a boy’s best dream. About as far away from the confines of city life as you could get. Not that there was anything wrong with Nashville—it’s where his father’s family had lived for generations.

  But this swamp—this was where Robinson Crusoe could have had an easy time making do. Natty Bumppo would have been at home tracking game through these very woods. Who could say for sure that some freshwater Moby Dick wasn’t hiding in the depths of the Atchafalaya? Or ’Chafalaya, as Adam grew up pronouncing it. He didn’t realize the word started with an A until he missed it in a fifth-grade spelling bee.

  Back in Nashville, when Papa came home weak from that boring but most effective wartime killer—dysentery—father and son spent their days downstairs in the library. At first Adam listened to his father read, but as the man grew weak and the boy learned the words, they exchanged places. In this way he read aloud his father’s favorite stories from childhood, plus all the new books they could purchase in the hard times after the war.

  Adam figured that in two years he spent more hours with his father than some sons get in a lifetime. By the time Papa died, all those adventure books had convinced Adam that life was best lived on the outskirts of civilization.

  Later he shared those same books with Josie. The old volumes transported the two youngsters from Bayou Chene to the most exotic locations on the planet. They sailed to India and England through The Moonstone. King Solomon’s Mines took them to Africa. As newlyweds, they braved the frozen wilderness of Frankenstein while tucked snugly under the covers of their bed.

  Adam’s mother—Eugenia Snellgrove—didn’t have family in Nashville; her people had come across the Appalachians when she was small. So, after her husband died and a missionary came to church telling about the Bayou Chene Primary School needing a teacher, it seemed like the perfect adventure for mother and son. The first thing Adam packed was boxes and boxes of his beloved books.

  When they arrived in Bayou Chene, Mame and Elder Landry put them up over the post office until the teacher’s cottage next door to the one-room primary school was ready. A new schoolteacher was a big event for the isolated community. Neighbors whitewashed the walls, built a new set of steps, and made fresh moss mattresses for the teacher and her son.

  While the grownups were busy, Josie and Adam clambered around the post office, inside and out. Several times a day they trotted along the path to check on the work at the school. They were left alone to entertain themselves. Alligators, snakes, and washday fires were the only taboos. Other than the water, of course.

  Water—it’s the boon and the bane of swamp communities. Giving life but also taking it—one or two a year around the Chene, sometimes more. Mostly children. Josie and Adam learned quickly not to play in the water or even hang off the dock to stir in it with a stick. They didn’t climb into any of the boats tied along the bank for fear of a switching. Like the rest of the mamas, Eugenia and Mame kept sharp eyes on their children when it came to the water.

  Come September, the teacher’s cottage and the schoolroom were fresh and ready. For three years after that, Josie walked through the woods to school. Then she quit, just like Lauf would quit when he finished third grade.

  Mame refused to let them ride the school boat across Lake Mongoulois to the upper grades. The trip took better than an hour each morning and afternoon, depending on the weather and the steamboat traffic. During that time a storm could blow in, or the school boat could overturn in strong current. All of Eugenia’s arguing about the benefits of education was no more than the bawling of a calf to Mame. She refused to loosen her grip on Josie’s safety.

  Adam suffered right along with Josie when her education stopped. He made up for it as best he could, bringing her books from his father’s collection, which also served as the school library. She read them faster than he could find new ones for her. Postal customers grew accustomed to their magazines and catalogs being creased open before they were delivered. Josie stopped short of actually opening letters, but Adam suspected she would have if she could have gotten away with it.

  The most difficult time for Adam had been when he left for college in Nashville. Education was a tradition in his family, so there was no question about whether he would go. While he had been glad for the experience, Adam missed Josie and life in the swamp so much that he could hardly wait for vacation. His valise was always packed with as many books for Josie as everything else. When he graduated and returned to the Chene, Adam brought all the books he had collected during his school years. He joked that his library was the reason Josie married him instead of one of the attentive swampers who lingered at the post office counter. She never corrected him about that.

  Adam listened to a lot of people on the trips back and forth from Nashville. Slightly hard of hearing, he had to pay close attention to lips or risk losing the gist of a conversation. It made others think he was a good listener, and he supposed in one way they were right. The better you listen, the more people want to tell you, or at least that had been his experience.

  Passengers traveling with the slender young man often mistook him for a lawyer or a judge. There was something in the calm, loose-jointed way he stood or sat. Comfortable in anyone’s company, never fidgeting, he was relaxed but attentive. Fact was, he did come from a cadre of scholars in his father’s family, but they mingled with the fur trappers, mountain m
en, and trading post proprietors on his mother’s side. Adam could have lived in either world, but he had made his choice years ago. Having grown up surrounded by the majestic swamp, life in Nashville seemed crowded and squalid in comparison. The fast pace wore him down, and he never felt so peaceful as when he stepped off the steamboat onto the bayou bank once more.

  Besides, the Chene was a good place to raise a family. Sure, it was out of the way, but it had suffered little from the war and had a better future than many landlocked communities. If Josie hadn’t drowned, their lives would have been all they hoped for, maybe more.

  But that April in 1907 all the good times seemed lodged in Adam’s past. With his handlebar mustache and iron gray hair the same color as his eyes, people who didn’t know Adam might guess him to be a decade or more beyond his forty-five years.

  Finding a crockery bowl, he cleared a place on the table for it and began the search for the ingredients, eventually locating cornmeal ground nearly as fine as flour, to which he added a handful of salt and a half-hand of red pepper. He stirred the dry ingredients around in the bowl with his hand, rubbing the mixture together with long slender fingers to distribute the seasoning.

  Humming along with dance music from the porch, he placed a fish on the table and cut three diagonal slits in the thickest part of the flesh. He turned it over and made three more slits in the other side before rolling the entire fish in the seasoned corn meal. Thinking about how the hot grease would bubble up in the gashes to quickly cook the fish tender on the inside and crunchy on the outside made Adam’s mouth water. It also pushed back his loneliness. Cooking could do that for Adam, especially if there were other people around to enjoy a good meal with him.

  By the time he had restacked the fish in the pan, Adam’s gloom had lifted some. With a lighter step, he carried the pan back outside to the fire, where the lard was just beginning to smoke. Sssst. He dropped a fish into the boiling kettle. He squatted back on his heels and admired the hot fat roiling around two, three, then four of the fish. Twirling a long-handled fork, he waited. The remainder of his melancholy began to dissipate, crowded out by anticipation. At just the right moment he flipped each fish with the fork so that all four were the same perfect shade of golden brown.

  Adam had just flipped the last fish and was studying their progress when the woman appeared. She stepped out of the woods on the path from the boat dock. He might’ve thought she was a ghost except she was carrying a valise in each hand. Something in the off-kilter way she toted them made him think she wasn’t used to carrying her own baggage. She worked to keep the valises from dragging on the ground despite her good size. “Full-figured,” the catalog called it.

  Wrapped tighter than a bale of cotton, he thought. No wonder she was breathing hard, or trying to. She was girded some tight into that traveling suit! Adam noticed her bosom heaving against the maroon worsted jacket held in place by two rows of covered buttons, military style. The thick fabric, the extra row of buttons—any dry goods dealer would spot that outfit as coming from the high-priced section. In fact, he had never carried goods so fine, only seen them in the catalog. There was no call for such in Bayou Chene.

  They stared at each other—the tall, loose-jointed man and the tightly bound woman. When he saw she wasn’t going to speak, he gave it a shot in his best storekeeper’s voice.

  “Ma’am, can I help you with those?”

  Her chest continued to heave but not deep enough. From her waist, which looked no bigger than a coffee can, to her neck, which looked to be about the same size, she was caught tight by whalebone and fabric. Adam, who had helped enough women order clothes to know that necks and waists should not be the same size, also knew she was getting ready to topple. He reached her in two long strides just as she was going down. As he caught her in the crook of his left arm, he began unbuttoning her high collar with the fingers of his right hand. There was nothing he could do quickly about the rest of the bodice below the neck, since the fabric was simply a cover for the laced corset. If lying down with her collar unbuttoned didn’t give her enough breathing room, Adam was prepared to slice open the corset with his knife. But for every reason he could think of, he didn’t want it to come to that.

  “Did anyone see that?” were her first words. Not a thank-you or pardon me.

  “Not that I can tell, but I’m a little too busy keeping your head out of the dirt to check right now,” Adam said, making a cushion of her straw traveling hat before setting back on his heels to look at her. “Don’t talk, just breathe.”

  She relaxed a little at that and worked on drawing whiffs of air past her corset.

  He noticed that her black hair was pinned so tight in place by a whole set of jet combs, it had not come loose during her long walk or the fall. Her eyes, just a tad lighter than her hair, focused on the trees overhead. Soon color returned to her cheeks, but the rest of her skin remained pale. After a few more shallow breaths, she lowered her eyes from the trees to look at him. Her gaze was as reserved as her speech.

  “Thank you. I’m Roseanne Barclay. If you are Adam Snellgrove, I’ve heard you may have a room I can rent. I won’t need it for long, as I’m waiting for my husband.”

  The mention of a husband dampened Adam’s pleasure of watching her and brought him back to the reason he had been in the backyard.

  “Ooooh, the fish.” He sprang from his squatting position and went back to the kettle over the fire. “Just a little bit brown, but that’ll make ’em crisper, don’t you know,” he said as he began dipping them out with the long-handled fork.

  An old copy of the New Orleans Times Picayune waited in a platter to receive them. Adam knew to plan ahead because fish are perfect only for the time it takes to dip them out. Waste time looking for something to drain them on, and you might as well throw them to the dogs to start with because they won’t be fit to eat. When he was satisfied that the first batch was perfectly placed, he began dropping another round of fish into the kettle.

  She watched every move, but Adam didn’t let her rattle his concentration. Only after both sets of fish were situated did he reply.

  “I’m not in the boarding business, and it’s probably not what you’re used to, but I have a room that might do for a time if you got nowhere else to go. How’d you come to be here?”

  Her eyes were set deep, which made them even harder to read. Maybe it was her angled face or the high-bridged nose. But when she shifted that dark gaze back to the treetops, Adam thought of red-shouldered hawks. He’d seen them with that same look when they were scouting places to build their nests high in the cypress trees, where their eggs would be safe from predators. Finally she appeared to light on a story she judged would be safe with him.

  “I left New Orleans to meet up with my husband, who’s on a business trip in New Iberia. Our boat had to detour around a logjam, and Bayou Chene was as close to New Iberia as they could drop me off. I’ll just be here until I can get word to him to pay my passage from here to New Iberia, since I don’t have money.”

  Squatting down to turn the second batch of fish gave Adam time to decide how much of that might be true. Didn’t she know anybody with the brains of a fox squirrel would wonder why a woman dressed so fine would be traveling without money in the tapestry reticule hanging from her wrist? The little bag cost at least two dollars if it was a penny. That surprised him almost as much as a husband who would let his wife travel alone on a steamboat across the swamp. By the time he finished turning the fish, Adam had made up his mind it was safest to just change the subject.

  He extended one hand and then the other to help the woman to her feet. Then he picked up the little traveling hat (another dollar, even without the dark red feather trimming the ribbon band). She dusted the hat and cocked it just so on her head, as well as if she was looking in a mirror. By the time he had finished forking up the second batch of fish, her collar was buttoned to the top, and she looked like she was ready to seat callers in her parlor.

  “Well, first l
et’s go in and do these fish justice,” Adam said. “Then we’ll see what we can do. Fate will come get your bags; you just bring yourself.”

  Breathing restored, she walked ahead of him to where he indicated the screen door leading into the kitchen. Whether it was the whalebone or her backbone, Adam couldn’t tell, but from the set of her spine, he figured this was a woman who’d break before she would bend.

  “So you don’t have to cook outdoors,” Roseanne said. “But I can see why you do.” The beak-like nose jerked in a small sniff.

  Adam looked around at his cooking gear stashed here and there along with the rags, water buckets, and other necessaries that make up a kitchen. Trying to take it all in at once like she was doing, instead of gradually like it had accumulated, he understood how the sight might prejudice a newcomer.

  Once again her nose jerked in a sniff, maybe over the basket of sprouted onions on the floor next to the stove. He probably should have used them by now. And the strings of red peppers hanging from the ceiling. He’d never noticed before that after a few years past drying out, they start to look like talons of dead birds. A spoon stuck straight up out of a container of honey that had gone to sugar. How long had it been there? He didn’t even remember seeing it before. Well, she was either hungry or she wasn’t, and the way she had been watching those fish fry made him think she could put all this mess behind her in a flash.

  “Ah, Mrs. Barclay,” he said, with all the confidence his fish deserved, “you won’t care where these little darlings were cooked when you taste them.”

  With that he breezed on through the kitchen door to the porch. He could hear the tippy-tap of her shoes trying to keep up with his long strides.

  The music stopped when they entered, the squeeze-box and Fate’s fiddle first, then a few more fiddle strokes before Loyce noticed she was playing alone.