by Gwen Roland
“I’ll look like a schoolmarm—won’t that be a wonder!” C.B. said as she held the blue jumper in front of her and grinned at Adam. “Me, who ain’t never seen the inside of a school. I ’spect you haven’t either, huh, Loyce?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t see the inside or the outside,” she said, “but I did go to school in Baton Rouge for eight years. Fate’s the one who talked me into giving it a try. I missed home, but it’s a good thing I went, or I’d a never learned anything. I learned to read by touching the words punched in paper. That’s where I learned to knit nets—they called it occupational therapy. I learned to swim and ride a horse. I learned to play the fiddle and the mandolin. Music! Of all the things I learned, that’s what I wish I could have kept up.”
“Did you go to school, Mrs. Barclay?” C.B. turned companionably toward the doorway into the store, where Roseanne stood, arms folded over her bosom.
“Of course I went to school. I graduated from the Sisters of Evangeline in New Orleans,” she said, fingering the top button of her high collar, making sure it was still properly fastened.
“What’d you learn there?” C.B. asked.
“Deportment, the classics, catechism, some piano and singing,” she replied.
“I reckon the first thing I learned was how to open oysters without cutting my hand,” C.B. went on. “Don’t know about that ’portment and classics, but we did have some cats hanging around that dock, and there was plenty of singing—fighting too—when the boats come in. So, I guess we got some background in common, Mrs. Barclay.”
Roseanne sniffed loudly, but C.B. rambled on.
“We was living down there at Dunbar where the oyster luggers come in. I started out standing on a bucket to reach the shucking table. The bigger kids blocking the wind off us little ones and the littlest one of all sitting in the middle of the oysters on the table. Mama was one of the fastest shuckers on the dock, so that’s why they let her bring a baby too little to be any help yet. I know you’re thinking about how tight a oyster closes their lips and that no shirttail kid could pry ’em open. But what you learn right off is it’s not the strength in your hands but putting that oyster knife in just the right spot and twisting it just so. I wasn’t more than four years old, which was a little young. Most didn’t start till they was about school-age, but Mama didn’t have nowhere to put me, so there I stood, starting my schooling two years early, you might say.”
Roseanne had taken a step back and refolded her arms over her chest.
“We have nothing in common, nothing at all,” she said, with more wonder than anything else. Loyce was also puzzled at the connection only C.B. could see.
“Well, what did you do after schooling?” C.B.’s voice was more than inquisitive. Loyce felt something building.
“I lived with my father and stepmother until I married Mr. Barclay.” Loyce heard Roseanne’s voice change from proud to uncertain in the middle of the reply. She realized Roseanne never talked about that time.
“See! Me and you’s a lot alike, Mrs. Barclay,” C.B. said, way too innocently in Loyce’s opinion. “I was passed from my daddy to a peddler man when I was twelve. See, he’d reached the point of figuring out how many kids can you feed even when they all shucking. The numbers wasn’t coming out so good. So, when this oyster peddler took a shine to me, it seemed like a good chance for all of us. He taught me how to do the things that please a growed man. I got pretty good at it too. So good that he started loaning me out to pay debts to men who beat him in card games. By the time I was fourteen, I’d found out that making my own living got me a bigger dip out of the pot than just hanging around someone else’s pot hoping for whatever they saw fit to pass along to me. So, I struck out on my own one night when the peddler was sleeping off a drunk. Your daddy passed you along to Mr. Barclay. I just got an earlier start at being kept.”
Roseanne sniffed loudly and turned back into the store without a word.
“C.B., you oughtn’t fool with Mrs. Barclay like that,” Adam admonished.
“Tell me why not?” she chuckled. “Someone’s got to, or she’ll drown next time it rains with her nose so far up in the air. Oh, speaking of drowning, did you hear about Fate’s boat? Sam told me all about it. Fate paid him and eight more fishermen for a day’s catch. Then he laid all them fish on ice in his boat and covered ’em with it too. So loaded down it was just about flat in the water, or so Sam tells it. He aimed to tote all of it to that railroad at Atchafalaya Station. You know he’d made two, maybe three trips already. Thought he could save some time and make more money by taking a bigger load.”
Loyce’s hands stopped on the line she was knitting, but she didn’t say a word. It was Adam who asked, “What happened?”
“Well, from the way Sam tells it, Fate miscalculated the amount of that gasoline he needed to make it all the way upstream with such a load of fish and ice. Most they can figure out is that the extra weight and going against the current sucked up all his gasoline along about two-thirds of the way. But he didn’t give up. He just set about tryin’ to paddle that big load upstream, even though he should of knowed better. Sounds like he made it a ways before the current pushed him into the bank, where he broke his paddle trying to get back out into the water. By the time the Mollie B came by the next morning and gave him a tow, his ice was melted and that whole load of fish was stinking to high heaven. He dumped fish overboard all the way back. They left him up there at the big dock in Atchafalaya Station washing the slime out of his boat.”
“This is the first I heard about that!” Adam chuckled. “It does seem like his mishaps always end in a powerful smell.”
“Well, you know he’s got Sam working with him now.” C.B.’s voice was muffled by a hairpin clamped between her lips. She swept a handful of frizz from the nape of her neck and re-pinned it into the bundle of yellow, which now had dark auburn roots.
“Yessir, they both gonna be rich someday, according to Fate. See, Fate don’t like being out here in the swamp so much anymore. Once ever’thing’s working right, Sam’s gonna run Fate’s boat—a bigger one he’s building—with the fish in it to Atchafalaya Station, stopping along the way upriver to pick up fish and pay out the money. Fate bought a scale and tub that Sam can take right along with him. Now that suits Sam just fine; he don’t like nothing better than just easing around from net to net, dock to dock, handling them fish like they were some kind of treasure.
“See, Fate says he likes running the bizness end, as he calls it. Fate’ll meet Sam at Atchafalaya Station, where he’ll have the ice ready to bed ’em down for the trip. A man right there at the depot buys ice out of Lafayette and stores it until Fate needs it. Both of ’em making money, too, according to Fate.”
Loyce’s keen ears picked up the clatter of a horse cart before Adam or C.B. could hear it.
“Fredette, you stay right there—I won’t be a minute.” Mary Ann’s voice floated through the breezeway, followed by the thud of her boots across the floor.
“Come on in here and tell us about York,” Adam said by way of greeting.
“Doing better now that he can wear pants again,” she said. “’Course, this heat don’t help him any. It’s so hot I’m fearing the wax is gonna melt in Val’s hives and flood the island with honey. Now won’t that be a mess and a half? And talking about honey, you know it made York’s skin grow back just a pretty as a baby’s.”
“Now, don’t you wish you hadn’t been so hard on him?” Adam asked, returning to the cane-bottomed chair and settling, with the pan of potatoes on his knees.
“Well, I didn’t expect it to be that bad—I just wanted to make him sit up and take notice.” Mary Ann’s voice sounded remorseful, then she snorted. “All he’d had to do was look at me to see I waddn’t going to have a baby, even if he didn’t want to bother asking! That man’s seen enough animals born around our place to know what to expect. And to think he thought I had the time to take up with another man! Who does he think would have been raising his food
and cooking his meals? Cleaning lamp globes, washing clothes, and scrubbing floors? And now I got the extra trouble of keeping up with the sawmill.”
Her boots picked up speed back and forth along the front of the porch, reminding Loyce of how Fate used to pace when he talked. Thoughts of him crowded out the rest of the conversation around her. Why had he disappeared from her life? What was so all-fired important about selling fish that he didn’t stay home anymore? A new scheme with Wambly Cracker to hatch disaster throughout the swamp? If so, why wasn’t he here telling her about it? He’d been facing off with her for as long as she could remember. Without Fate, Loyce seemed like a stranger to herself.
She felt a pang at how they had parted the night he came to tell them his plans. Why had she been so angry? Deep down she knew the reason. It was the letter. Once he found out that they weren’t kin, he didn’t feel responsible for her anymore. He had been obliged to watch over her while they were kin. Now she was just another girl—a blind one at that.
18
Two pair of boots thudded along the planks from the bayou. Lost in her own reverie and the noise of conversation on the porch, Loyce hadn’t heard anyone landing at the dock.
“Went down so fast, they didn’t even save any of the cows,” said a voice she recognized as a deckhand from the Iona, a small steamboat that serviced the timber camps dotting the swamp.
“What about the crew?” asked a second voice.
“Saved about half of them. Lost one that you might know, that curly-haired mate from the Golden Era.”
“Valzine? From Morgan City?”
“Yeh, that’s the one. Damn shame.”
“Damn shame is right. He played a fine squeeze-box. Gonna miss him at the dances.”
Loyce’s face went cold. Her voice caught in her throat, forcing her to try twice, three times before her lips could shape the words.
“Val? Who says?” She rasped just above a whisper.
Conversation stopped, then Adam’s voice was strident with denial.
“Can’t be! The Golden Era was here a few days ago, and he was on it.”
“Sorry, Miss Loyce, Adam. I forgot he was a friend of yours, or I would have broke it better,” the young man said. “His captain loaned him out to that sister boat Golden Crescent needing a crew member that could talk French. They was hauling a load of cattle from them prairie cowboys west of the swamp on Bayou Courtableau. Hit a snag in Grand River. With such a load, once it started taking on water, wasn’t nothing to be done but every man look out for himself. Val was one of the ones that never came back up.”
The conversation faded for Loyce. First Fate, now Val. The realization that she had lost both of them swept over her. She slumped in her chair and buried her face in her hands, letting the shuttle fall to the floor.
“Loyce, Loyce.” Roseanne’s voice was gentle, but her hand was firm on Loyce’s shoulder, shaking her awake. She had only a moment to wonder why Roseanne was in her room before the awful truth came back. Val was gone. She had rolled over to get up but now buried her face in the pillow again, so like the way she used to bury her face in Val’s curly hair.
From the time they were children, Val had bowed his head for her to feel as soon as he stepped on the porch; it was his own special greeting for her. When she playfully hid her face in his curls, she could smell the places he had visited, smells not common to Bayou Chene. Pine trees from upriver, the red clay of Natchez bluffs. She could identify the cargo that shared his space and even tell him something about the passengers. Cattle, cotton, sugar, or a traveling photographer’s chemicals smelled as different to her as an apple pie from a bar of soap. It tickled him that she could often tell him what dishes Tot had cooked earlier in the day.
How could it be that she would never hear him bantering with Fate, taking her side against her sparring cousin? She would never have the chance to find out if Val was sweet on her, as Fate had claimed.
“Loyce, you have to face up to this,” Roseanne’s voice persisted. “Everyone is meeting at his beehives before noon, and you’ll regret it if you don’t go.”
Of course, we have to hang black crepe on the hives so the bees will know their keeper is gone, she thought. No one really believed that old superstition anymore, but it was a ritual that was just as important as the funeral itself or the all-night eating and drinking at the wake.
“No, I can’t,” the girl insisted. “If I go, it means he’s really gone.” The moss mattress crunched as she turned over and sat up against the feather pillows.
“Here’s coffee with extra cream and sugar,” Roseanne said, as she guided the thick mug between the space of Loyce’s hands. “You didn’t have supper last night.”
Loyce waved her hands gently until they felt the heat of the cup and closed around it.
“Our last conversation,” she said. “When was it? Was it the day C.B. and Sam arrived? No, it was later. He helped carry York to the bedroom the day the still blew up.”
A new wave of sadness surged through her. That was the day the letter surfaced. That piece of paper sliced through her life like a knife neatly divides a mound of dough into two loaves. The first eighteen years, when Fate was her cousin, her liaison to the rest of the world. And now the bleak rest of her life, adrift without Val or Fate. The double loss hit her again, and she felt more alone than any time in her life. She pushed the cup out in front of her as fresh tears began to fall.
Roseanne caught the cup and waited just a moment before leaving the young woman alone to make peace with her grief.
The dry autumn days mirrored Loyce’s life. She didn’t knit nets. She didn’t bother to comb the tangles from her hair. She wore the same shapeless shift day after day. Most days she wouldn’t even go out to the porch. If she did sit out for a while, she slipped back indoors if the Golden Era’s whistle blew an approach to the dock. If someone stopped by while she was sitting on the porch, she was as likely to get up and leave as she was to rock silently in their midst.
Conversations swirled around without meaning for her. Why should she care whether water rose or fell? Or if fish were biting on shrimp or cut bait? The price of cotton line didn’t matter. The friends who had joked and argued with her about all those details of their community—the two who enlivened her small world—were gone. She would live the rest of her life hearing about the mundane happenings of her relatives and neighbors, but none of it would matter.
Like the day Dot Verret brought the news that C.B.’s baby boy had arrived. Dot had spent two days out on Graveyard Bayou nursing C.B. through the birth and recovery. Then Sam brought the midwife as far as the post office before heading out to raise nets. While waiting for Alcide to fetch her up on his way home from picking moss, Dot visited with customers and helped Adam cook and serve meals.
“Well, I declare, it’s good to be this much closer to home!” she said by way of greeting when she arrived. “Don’t know what’s the hardest job—picking moss for a penny a pound or delivering babies for two dollars.”
“How’s everybody doing down that way?” Adam said from where he was turning venison sausage at the stove.
“Well, I tell you now, C.B don’t seem to be taking to it yet,” Dot worried. “Some takes longer than others to get the hang of it, but poor little old C.B. seems plumb put off by the little fella even being close to her. She didn’t even rouse up enough to name him, but Sam was proud as anything to call him Sam Junior. She’ll come around—I never seen it fail. Some just take longer than others.”
And so it went throughout the day. Dot dished up plates and washed them when they came back, passing along news from customer to customer. Loyce, who usually looked forward to Dot’s company, stayed in her room. And so the weeks dragged out.
“No sense in getting your feathers ruffled, girls, I’m just here to take some of the pressure off of you.” Adam’s voice was familiar to the chickens, and they settled back down on the roost.
“Sorry, girls, I wouldn’t be out here so early exce
pt I was just too dadblamed tired last night to wait up for you to go to roost.”
He felt for the wooden latch and turned it, before gently opening the henhouse door. Warm, downy chicken smell wafted out along with a few sleepy murmurings.
“If I had put these roosters in the coop for the night, I could have waited till later this morning, but I’ll never catch them once daylight comes.”
He ducked under the low doorway and stood for a moment to get his bearings. The proud tail feathers of the flock guardian shone white in the predawn light. Skip that one. With deft skill that comes from long practice, Adam picked up one young cockerel with his right hand and transferred it under his left arm without even waking the bird. Then he ducked his head and backed out the open doorway. Removing the top from an old fish cart, he placed the bird on the slatted floor. The sleepy rooster would probably just sit in the darkness, but Adam didn’t take that chance; carefully, he replaced the lid. Good thing he did. The next bird slipped out of his grasp and flapped noisily; his squawks set off bedlam among the rest of the flock. The bird in the crate woke up and joined in the racket. Finally getting the frantic bird under control, Adam backed out the doorway and placed him in the fish cart. He propped the coop open so the rest of the birds could step over the threshold when the rising sun told them it was time.
Adam picked up the box of roosters with one hand and made his way to the dock. They would sit quietly under the tree until he returned after breakfast to dispatch them for the noon meal.
Roseanne had kept an eye on the tomato gravy and biscuits for Adam, and by the time he stepped into the kitchen, three places were set at the table. However, Loyce didn’t join them until they had nearly finished eating and were planning the rest of the day. Adam and Roseanne exchanged a worried look at the way a sacklike dress hung from her thin shoulders. She toyed with half a biscuit on her plate but didn’t eat any with her coffee.
