by Gwen Roland
“How will my husband know if I don’t tell him?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Marie stammered in uncertainty. “But I’ve heard your husband can tell when you get married if you have been soiled, and then you will go to hell.”
And so started Roseanne’s attempts to become unsoiled. She washed her hands in the basin, not just for meals but several times a day, so often that her stepmother began accusing the servants of stealing the pale green bars of vetiver soaps. That was when she began haunting the linen closets and armoires for items, especially undergarments, in want of folding to her satisfaction. That was when her braids seemed to spring into disobedience, the ribbons defying her attempts to keep them identical in shape and spacing. The tiniest spot of rust from the clothesline would make her put a garment back in the laundry hamper to be washed again. She wouldn’t leave the house in wet weather for fear of dirtying her shoes or her hems.
During the telling Adam had slipped onto the stair next to Roseanne. This time it wasn’t just hearing loss that made him lean forward. He studied her face as she spoke. He could see the little girl before and after the incident. The teenager gliding among the nuns and their linen closets, looking to bring order back to her life. The horror of being forced into a marriage that she believed would condemn her not just to hell but to humiliation on earth. Her effort to avoid her groom’s attentions and thus put off the revelation she had feared for so long. Her fear of being found out—soiled. For her entire life Roseanne had shied away from sensual pleasure lest she be found out.
Now Adam understood why C.B.’s forthright earthiness had repulsed her. It brought back that young man in the garden shed. Adam could also see how the perceptive, ambitious C.B. sensed Roseanne’s abhorrence and resented it. The more Roseanne disapproved of her, the louder C.B. proclaimed their similarities, never guessing how far Roseanne would go in shoving her away, out of sight, even to prison.
Adam reached out and folded the weeping woman into his arms. The weight of her against his chest was a comfort to them both.
26
Roseanne slept deeply, dreamlessly, and awakened to the sound of the woodstove door clanging shut as Adam set about making a fire for coffee. That was the last bit of normalcy for the morning. It was to be a day with no precedent.
The first thing she noticed was her body. She was not curled tightly in a ball with the covers pulled up close. Her arms rested above her head and curved slightly on the pillow, palms up, fingers relaxed. Her legs stretched out, feet flopped outward. I feel like Drifter looks when she’s sleeping with all four feet in the air, she chuckled. And when had she ever chuckled first thing in the morning?
The mirror reflected a smiling face as Roseanne stroked the brush through her hair. The entire length of it fell into waves where hairpins had crimped it in place the day before. No pins today! Maybe no pins ever again. She tied it loosely with a dark-red ribbon low on her neck.
Then she threw open the armoire. No stockings, too warm for stockings! And where were those little slippers? They were fine for skipping around the store all day. She loosened her corset strings and pulled her largest bodice over it. The first thing she would do after breakfast was order one of those brassieres and a larger bodice, but first she’d see if Adam had time to make lost bread for breakfast.
At the time Roseanne was waking to her new self, Sam was steering Fate’s newest boat out of Jakes Bayou into the expanse of Lake Mongoulois, the widest point of the Atchafalaya River thereabouts. It was the most water he’d seen since leaving St. Louis. Today he was fishing his own nets and would run the catch up to Atchafalaya Station in time for the afternoon train.
The old skiff Sam had lost on his way down to the Chene served for those first experimental runs, but in no time at all Fate was agitating for a bigger boat to transport more fish, increasing the profit for each run. For transport these days they used an ark-like vessel with a larger engine, enough room on the deck for a drum of gasoline, a small cabin for shelter, and vast wells for storing ice and fish.
In addition to the big boat, Fate had recently come up with the flat-fronted bateau just for Sam to use for raising nets. It was no wider than the old push skiffs everyone rowed around the Chene, but it was long, almost twenty feet. Instead of sitting flat on its bottom, the front half was raked high so that the bow raised up out of the water, unless it was weighed down with nets or a load of fish. The sides were low, to make it easier to roll nets up and over them. It was equipped with a smaller engine and propeller than the transport boat, but it still sounded loud to Sam.
Noise didn’t bother Fate. In fact, he liked nothing better than shouting over a fog of fumes and racket about the attributes of some new engine he was trying out. He still couldn’t squat like other swampers, but he didn’t stay still long enough to feel any discomfort. He scrambled around, checking the prop in the water, the fuel feed into the engine, the combustion pressure inside the engine jacket. Sam’s head hurt just thinking about the noise and activity in Fate’s life.
On that spring morning the Atchafalaya’s banks were dotted with the pale green of new cypress needles. The river was gray and flat at dawn, but Sam knew it would be reflecting sparkles of sunlight just about the time he pulled the first net out of the water. The sun would feel good on his back because his front would be soaked. C.B. kept telling him to wear a slicker until he got better at raising nets.
Sam had watched Fate roll the dripping webbed hoops into his boat all day long without getting wet. But the same nets poured water down the front of Sam’s pants and into his shoes. His sturdy brogans with brass grommets—the one proud possession he had to show from his work at the shoe factory—filled up with water. His feet squished as he wrestled a net from bow to stern. C.B. also told him to wear rubber boots like the other fishermen. She was probably right.
She believed he would get better at all this. That he could learn to tar nets without dripping it in his hair. That he could stage a box of a hundred fishhooks onto lines without dropping them in a tangled mess in the bottom of the boat. She told him this even as she cut chunks of tar out of his hair or helped him untangle another thicket of hooks and line. He wished he could believe in himself as much as she did. Or as much as he believed in her.
He knew Roseanne was wrong about her trying to drown Sam Junior. Sure, C.B. hadn’t wanted a baby. And why would she believe he wanted one, especially a baby that wasn’t even his? She admitted trying to buy those French pills the first time they went to the store in Bayou Chene. So, what would be the difference in taking those pills before he was born or drowning Sam Junior in the bayou a few months later? That’s how Roseanne saw it.
What was the difference, anyway? That question was too big for Sam to ponder. What he did know was the way C.B. looked at Sam Junior of an evening, sitting on the deck. Like she’d just lifted the lid to the treasure chest old Lafitte was supposed to have hidden somewhere around Four Hundred Dollar Bayou. Roseanne didn’t see her then. Still, Sam couldn’t think of how to say that in her defense when the rumors chattered in the background on a dock or in the post office. It was a relief for him to forget about all that and just fish. The truth would just have to take care of itself.
Sam switched off the engine and listened to silence settle over the river. A net he had patched and tarred was telescoped and lying, small end up, on the bottom of the boat. The tarred line was coiled and waiting for him to stake it to the edge of the riverbed. He tied the line around a sharpened cypress stake, fitted his jugger pole over the stake, and shoved it deep into the muddy bottom near the bank.
Then he drifted down with the current, playing the line through his hands. Shrp, shrp, shrp. The hoops slipped off the bow and into the water, stiffening in the current, letting the water stand them up against the pull from the stake. The net was ready, waiting to fill up with buffalo, some in the twenty-pound range, before he came back to check it in a few days.
When Sam was satisfied with the set of the net, he c
ranked the engine and chugged upstream, looking for the bent willow that marked the next net in his run. He watched the willow slip just past the stern before tossing the three-pronged hook overboard. When he felt it thud against the river bottom, he started pulling, inching the weight along at just the right speed to grab the hoops or webbing of the net below. Sam had taken to this one task quickly, mapping the river bottom through his fingers. The sense of discovery thrilled him every time.
He was ready for the moment the line tightened and pulled the bateau back upstream a bit. Hand over hand, Sam pulled the boat and net together, watching for the first hoops to break the surface. This was what drew him. Fishing was like hunting treasure. You never knew what you would find in a net or on the end of a line. This morning it was buffalo with their blunt noses and broad backs covered with scales as big as Sam Junior’s hand. He was ready for them. Ice filled his wells, and there was plenty of gasoline in the fuel tank.
Bracing his sturdy shoes wide apart on the wooden planks, he rolled the hoops over the gunnel and safely into the boat. Then with a mighty lift he collapsed the net on the bottom of the boat. The largest hoop rested flat on the plank flooring, with the smaller hoops telescoping into it. Picking up the tail line attached to the smallest hoop, Sam began to shake each hoop in turn. Eight large fish tumbled onto the bottom. He squatted on his heels and tossed the buffalo into the ice well. A catfish was tangled in the webbing. He reached in past his elbow to grasp it behind the barbs, untangling it and tossing it into its own compartment.
After washing the slime from his hands and arms, Sam cranked the engine and headed upstream to the next net. The morning was getting off to a reasonable start. He should have a good load by the time he was halfway to Atchafalaya Station and still make it to the depot in plenty of time. Day after tomorrow these fish would be on New York City dining tables.
Sam glanced upstream. Something out of place was drifting toward him. A dark-red upholstered chair bobbed in the current. It spun slowly, daylight sliding through curved armrests in rotation. The high back reared, silhouetted against the sky, and then dipped forward. Just an ordinary parlor chair but out here on the water—most likely, it signified disaster.
Sam sat down to watch it twirl lazily past his bateau. Nothing else seemed amiss on this side of the bend. The chair could have been thrown during a dispute over cards, portending nothing worse than a couple of passengers waking up to sore knuckles. But dread prickled across Sam’s scalp. He cranked the motor and put-putted upstream.
Wreckage greeted him before he made it to the bend. Partially submerged bales of cotton wallowed in various stages of sinking. Barrels, broken and whole, wobbled past. Planks, slabs, whole rafts of wood lay scattered on the current as far as he could see. Then even more tragic than cotton bales and wood scraps came satchels, bottles, busted furniture—the implements of daily life that people had worked for and fussed over. Sam had no frame of reference for the carnage.
Whatever had happened—an explosion or a collision of boats in the night, maybe a wreck with one of the mammoth trees that had caved into the river—the cause didn’t matter. Only survivors mattered now. Perhaps some were still swimming or floating on a piece of buoyant wreckage. Sam called out. No one answered. Nothing moved except to rock in the water.
Sam took a deep breath and started the engine. Methodically, he zigzagged to every shadow in the current and each pile of floating debris until there was no more wreckage visible upstream. He didn’t find a single living soul, but he did recover eleven bodies, towing each one to a tree on the riverbank, securing it with heavyduty line.
Then, out of reverence for the bodies he had found as well as the others that were already resting on the river bottom or headed downstream for someone else to discover, he shut off the engine. Seconds ticked by. Silence stretched out to the horizon. Still he sat, imagining their final moments, passengers and crew asleep in their beds or maybe even starting their day while he motored along the bayous to the big river. They were dead now. They were no more. Forever.
For the first time in his young life Sam pondered death. It was the only finality. He had not died on that sandbar months ago. C.B. and Sam Junior had not died that day in the water. Until death wrestled the strength from his own limbs, Sam could fight for those he loved. Whether it was keeping food on the table with his poor skills or rumors from the door with his halting speech. He might not be good at it now, but he would get better.
There was no urgency in his movements. These people were already dead. Steady as always, he started the engine and motored with the current back to the settlement. He would need help laying all these bodies to rest.
27
Loyce went to bed that night with the bayou outside her window crowded with unaccustomed traffic. She woke next morning to the sound of coffins being built. From upstream at York’s lumberyard the crack of hammers echoed from off the trees, ricocheting and colliding in midair. To her sensitive ears it was like so many woodpeckers trying to batter their way through a tin roof.
After milking the Jersey, Adam left for the cemetery to dig graves alongside the other men who weren’t helping York build coffins. Roseanne walked down the path to the Bertrams’ with clothes for the woman’s body Mary Ann was tending. Preparations were simple. Bodies were washed with rainwater, hair was combed, and burial clothes were found if their own garments were too badly torn for decency’s sake. When appropriate clothes couldn’t be found, the dead were wrapped in flour sacks ripped open to make shrouds.
The store and post office were closed until after the mass funeral, but no one would be inconvenienced since the entire community was involved in preparing for the burials. Everyone except Loyce. She felt useless sitting on the porch in her best skirt and bodice—the worsted traveling suit that Roseanne had outgrown—waiting for someone to come from the cemetery to take her to the service.
Fate had returned to the community several days earlier to renegotiate prices and sign up new fishermen. Now that buffalo were slowing down for the season, prices would go up. The other men treated Fate as an equal now, even deferring to him whenever the talk turned to fishing as business instead of just for supper.
Whenever Fate stopped by the post office, Loyce couldn’t think of anything to say to him. To cover her awkwardness, she sat up straighter and shook back her hair in animated conversation with anyone else who happened to be on the porch. She enjoyed feeling the waves lift from her face and settle back down, fringing her cheeks and jawline. She especially liked wearing the new close-fitting dresses and suits that Roseanne helped her choose from the catalog, and she wondered if Fate noticed how snugly they fit across her bosom. Even though she had never been able to see where he was looking, she had always been aware of what held his attention.
Now that connection was gone. Cut clean off. How different from the days when thoughts and feelings flowed as easily between them as water past the dock. Today she didn’t even know whether he was helping build coffins at York’s or digging graves at the cemetery.
“Morning, Loyce!” Alcide’s voice, less jovial than usual, drifted up from the bayou. “A sad day, is it not?” The splash of his paddle accompanied the sound of his greeting.
“So it is. Who do you have?” Loyce asked.
“A pair of ’em. Dot’s convinced these two are a mother and child, so we are putting them together. Whether it’s so or not, they will be together from now on.”
His voice faded around the bend as he headed on toward the cemetery.
And that’s how it went through the morning; men and boys rowed from all directions toward the graveyard as the women pronounced each body sufficiently prepared. Each pirogue or skiff bore a body lying on its back with feet pointed toward the bow, hands crossed in front. Back at the homesteads, families changed into their Sunday clothes, climbed into their boats, and headed for the cemetery.
It was nearly noon, and the traffic had slowed considerably. Loyce’s stomach rumbled. She didn’t know
when someone would come for her.
“Come on, Drifter, let’s see what we have to work with from yesterday,” she said.
Loyce felt her way across the porch and followed the breezeway into the kitchen. Drifter padding behind, her belly heavy with pups, didn’t make it through before the screen door slammed. She yelped in surprise.
“Well, you just have to watch out for yourself,” Loyce scolded in a soft voice as she bent down to rub the soft ears.
“You should know by now I can’t watch out for you.”
Loyce felt the slight breeze as Drifter waved her tail in forgiveness.
“Let’s see, maybe I can make it up to you. We have a couple of baked sweet potatoes, some lost bread, and plenty of milk. That’ll do me till supper, how about you?”
Drifter looked up hopefully, waiting for something extra to drop as Loyce peeled the sweet potatoes for them. Neither of them heard the boots on the porch, so the squeak of the screen door surprised them both.
“Val? Is that you already? I’ll be right there.” Loyce tilted her head toward the doorway.
Instead of an answer, she heard only Drifter’s low growl followed by a thud, a yelp, and silence.
At the cemetery trees almost touched over the top of the narrow bayou, making a tunnel for the boats bearing the coffins. First came the solemn parade of little vessels bearing the bodies, most with a single passenger facing the sky. The majority of the dead were men of all ages and class, although station in life was hard to determine, since many were dressed in borrowed clothes. Two women were among them, and while it was unusual for a woman to travel alone, there was no way to know which of the bodies represented couples who had shared a life together before they were joined in death. One woman had a child lying in the crook of her arm. Two other children appeared to be siblings.
