Bayou Suzette

by Lois Lenski

  “Where you been, Suzette?” she demanded. “You en’t fell …”

  “More coffee, Suzette!” shouted Papa Jules. “Monsieur Johnson thirsty, him.”

  Papa Jules was furious with Maman Clothilde. Never had he known her to behave so before a stranger. Such rudeness he would not have. He began to talk loudly, to drown out whatever Maman meant to say next.

  All this time Marteel had been sitting on the floor beside the open door. Suzette had brought her inside boldly, but had told her to be ready to leave at any moment. Now Maman threw black looks in the Indian girl’s direction. Suzette felt more and more uncomfortable, but she knew Maman could do nothing as long as the stranger was there. She was glad for that, sat down in a chair and rested easier.

  “‘Barataria’—a fine word to roll off the tongue, is it not?” Papa Jules was saying. “A town, a bay, two bayous, a light-house and a pass, they all bear the name. The first Jules Durand in Barataria, he got his grant of land from the Spanish king and we be here ever since. My Greatgreat-grandpère was name’ Jules Durand, too, and one hundred year ago, he one of Lafitte’s men, him. Ah! The great Lafitte! To have live’ in his day—that would have been somet’ing!” In Papa Jules’ eyes there came a dreamy look.

  “He was a great old pirate, wasn’t he?” exclaimed Mr. Johnson, rubbing his hands together. “He robbed the schooners on the sea …”

  “Pirate?” interrupted Papa Jules, with a frown. “In Barataria, we not call Jean Lafitte a pirate. He a great sea-captain, and the fishermen of Barataria, they sail’ his boats for him. They always loyal to their master and when he die, they find his body, they bring it back to the place he love so much and they bury him here. No, we not call Jean Lafitte a pirate. ‘Pirate’ it not a nice word.”

  “I agree,” said Mr. Johnson. “‘Privateer’—is that better?”

  “A great sea-captain, my frien’,” insisted Papa Jules. “He object to pay high duties to the government. He wish to correct injustice. He a bold, brave man—all the time courteous and genteel. He knew all the bayous, bays and inlets of Barataria, from the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans—like a fish know the sea! He knew every island, every Indian mound, every canal, every swamp, every inch of prairie—like a muskrat know its runways!”

  Papa Jules tipped back his chair and warmed to his subject.

  “Jean Lafitte, he had one hide-out by Grand Terre on the Gulf. He had another right here by the Bayou des Oies—the Bayou of the Geese—and his blacksmith shop too, worked by Negro slaves. His barges, they ran secretly up and down through lake and bayou and canal. He took the smuggled goods to Bayou Coquille—the Bayou of the Shells—then by land to New Orleans and sold them right under the Governor’s nose!

  “Ah, he one great man, Jean Lafitte!” cried Papa Jules. “You want to see him, my frien’? Every moonlight night he rides his fine white horse ’cross the road by Bayou Coquille—on the stroke of midnight. But it en’t him, Monsieur, oh no. It his ghost!”

  “You say he is buried in the graveyard here. Is that true?” asked Mr. Johnson, with a smile.

  Papa Jules turned to Grandmère. “It true, that, ma Mère?”

  “It true, M’sieu’,” said Grandmère, with quiet dignity. “I have, myself, the honor to take care of his grave. He lies buried in the graveyard by the Bayou des Oies, with all the Durands. Long ago his friends of Barataria, they put up a iron cross over him. They bury him down in the ground, you understand, not on top. It a big hill of shells there, an old Indian mound. My husband’s Grandpère, he all the time keep the grave flat. His son and grandson, they do the same. All the Durands, father, son and grandson, they take care of his grave.”

  The stranger listened to Madame Durand’s story politely but impatiently. “There is no doubt that Lafitte had many friends among the fishermen here,” he said. “Some of them must have known where he buried his gold.”

  “But yes, Monsieur Johnson!” answered Papa Jules, eagerly. “He hide his treasure here. His men, they help him—the great-grandfathers of the men who live here now. Our great-grandfathers, they tell us many places where he bury his gold.”

  “And you … you remember what your great-grandfather told you, Mr. Durand?” The stranger leaned forward eagerly.

  Papa Jules nodded his head mysteriously. “My frien’ …” he began.

  “I have a map showing all the bayous, lakes and islands from Lake Salvador to the Gulf,” said Mr. Johnson, earnestly. “I have the finest sailing lugger that can be bought and plenty of money to finance the venture. If you will come in with me, I will share the treasure fifty-fifty with you. All you need to do is tell me where to dig—and you will become a rich man!”

  “No, Jules, no!” cried Maman Clothilde, panic-stricken.

  “No, my son, no!” cried Grandmère, trembling.

  The stranger glared angrily at the women. “This is a thing for men to decide between themselves,” he said.

  “Not too fast, not too fast, my frien’!” said Papa Jules, with a laugh. Then his face turned sober. “There one t’ing I not tole you. When a treasure is buried, a man is killed …”

  “A man is killed! What for?” cried Mr. Johnson, exasperated.

  “So his ghost it guard the treasure, my frien’,” answered Papa Jules. “Right in the middle between three live oak trees, that the spot where they bury it. But when once you start to dig, not a word you must speak or the treasure, it sink deep, deep in the earth. So all the legends agree.”

  “And you believe that nonsense? A sensible man like you?”

  Papa Jules shrugged his shoulders. “These fable, they been told by father to son, they been handed down through the generations.” He smiled at Mr. Johnson. “They make a pleasant evening’s talk, is it not so?”

  “Where did you say these three trees are located?” asked Mr. Johnson.

  “Ah, Monsieur!” said Papa Jules. “That you must not ask me. If I tell you, the ghost who guard it will spirit the treasure away to a safer hiding place.”

  “‘The ghost who guard it?’ What do you mean?”

  Papa Jules turned to Grandmère, who explained. “My husband’s Grandpère, he say, when they bury gold, they always kill a man. They cut his neck and put him on top the gold. If you dig, his ghost it come up and watch you. It say, ‘You better not dig up all the place, I throw bricks, mud and shells on you.’”

  Suzette had heard the story of Lafitte and his buried treasure many times. She remembered well the time long ago, when Papa Jules and Nonc Moumout and Doreen Dugas’ Papa had dug for gold all summer long. But she scarcely listened today, knowing that as soon as the stranger went, she would have the Indian girl’s presence to account for. She was trying to think what she would say. She glanced at Marteel, sitting by the open door.

  The Indian girl was listening to the treasure story and her eyes were wide and staring. What were they saying, to make her look like that? Suzette turned back to listen.

  “So! I understand!” cried Mr. Johnson, rising from his chair, in anger. “I see through you at last! You know where the treasure is hidden, but you won’t tell. You’ve invented this cock-and-bull story about ghosts so you won’t have to tell. I see through you! It’s not true—there’s no ghost at all!”

  “But it is true, M’sieur!” said Grandmère, emphatically. “Me myself, I have seen the ghost.”

  Marteel’s eyes almost popped out of her head, as she stared at Grandmère. Suzette shivered. She was used to talk about ghosts—no one ever took ghosts seriously. But she had never heard so much talk of ghosts as today. Would they never stop?

  “You don’t want your Indian mounds dug up! You don’t want your precious graveyards dug up! So you deliberately invent ghosts to guard them!” shouted Mr. Johnson. “I see through you, I see through your French deceit! Well, you’d better tell, or they will be dug up.”

  Marteel, Ambrose, Jacques and Felix stared, wide-eyed, at the stranger. They had never heard such daring words before.

  “Our ance
stors, they wish to lie in peace, Monsieur,” said Grandmère, calmly. “You would not be so base as to disturb their rest?”

  “Have no fear, ma Mère!” said Papa Jules. “There are no three oak trees in the proper arrangement in your graveyard.”

  Mr. Johnson turned to Papa Jules. “Where are they then? Will you tell?”

  “Mais non!” said Papa Jules. “Not today, Monsieur.”

  Papa Jules got up and followed Mr. Johnson to the front gate. From the window, where Maman hastily put her head out, she could see them talking.

  It was the first time in twenty-two months that Papa Jules had walked to the front gate, but nobody noticed it. When he returned to the kitchen, everybody was upset.

  “So you go with the stranger to dig treasure, yes?” asked Maman.

  “I tole him no,” said Papa Jules. “You heard me.”

  “Me, I can see it in your eye!” Maman Clothilde went on. “You feex to run off and leave us and we never see you again. Me, I hear you tell him you wish you had no wife and no children, you sorry you ever git married …”

  “You hear me tell him I not go with him,” said Papa Jules, patiently.

  The excitement was a good thing for Suzette and also for Marteel. Because of it, the family paid no attention to the Indian girl at all.

  Maman and Grandmère threw up their hands and let loose a bursting flood of excited talk, in which ghosts and gold and Papa Jules and men from Minnesota were all mixed up. It took Maman a long time to calm down enough to cook supper and even then the rice was sadly burned.

  “Oh, if Jean Lafitte had only died before he was born!” cried Maman. “How much better it be for us all! Oh, if Jean Lafitte would only go back to his grave and stay there!”

  Maman had a splendid imagination. She kept expecting Papa Jules to dash out at any moment to join the stranger at the gate. All through supper she kept on looking at Papa Jules out of the corner of her eye.

  That was how she spied Marteel sitting by the door. She turned on Suzette. “W’at you mean, bringin’ that Injun girl back here again? En’t I tole you I won’t have her round the house? En’t I turn her loose? En’t I shoo her out?”

  “Marteel my frien’ now,” said Suzette, quietly. “She save me from the big alligator in the cypress swamp.”

  “Alligator! Cypress swamp! W’at next?” cried Maman, throwing up her hands in great agitation. “First Papa, he go off and leave us, and now, Suzette, she get et up by a ole alligator!”

  “Alligator? Cypress swamp?” echoed Grandmère and Papa Jules, and Eulalie who had just come in.

  “Who been to the cypress swamp?” demanded Maman, sternly, turning on the children. “En’t I tole you never to go there? W’y you not mind w’at I tell you?”

  “Ambrose he there … and Jacques and Felix …” said Suzette.

  “Tell us w’at happen, Ambrose,” said Papa Jules.

  Ambrose told the story. “Marteel, she throw moss in the ’gator’s face,” he concluded. “She jump in the water and shove Suzette up on the bank, so the ’gator he can’t eat her up.”

  “The ’gator, he twelve feet long,” shouted Felix. “I see him good, all the way to his tail.”

  “Fifteen feet!” “Twenty feet!” shouted Ambrose and Jacques.

  The alligator grew longer and longer each moment.

  Maman rushed over to Suzette, folded her in her arms, sat down in a rocker and began quietly to weep. “My leetle Suzette! My leetle Suzette!” she sobbed. “To t’ink a wicked ole alligator want to eat her for his ole supper!”

  Suzette was no longer a culprit. She had become a heroine.

  It was Papa Jules who remembered the Indian girl sitting alone by the door. He turned to Maman Clothilde and said sharply, “Go get your broom, you, and shoo her off. We don’t want no dirty Injun round the house.”

  Maman dried her tears and was thoughtful for a moment. “I can give her a bath, me,” she said. “And some supper.” The tone of her voice told how sorry she was for the way she had treated the strange girl before.

  Marteel ran to Maman and put her arms tight around her neck. Papa Jules chuckled. Suzette took his hand and squeezed it. Maman had come round at last.

  That night, a clean Indian girl slept in Suzette’s cot with her. She slept with her each night until her new bed was ready. When Suzette showed Maman the bed ticking and mosquito bar she had bought with her money, Maman was pleased. Now that Marteel had saved Suzette’s life, of course she had to stay. There was no other way to thank her, and Maman was never one to show ingratitude.

  So Maman washed and combed the Indian girl’s hair. She threw her dirty rags into the bayou and gave her a hand-me-down dress of Lala’s to wear. She even turned up the hem to make it the right length. Maman helped Suzette put the moss to soak and hang it on the fence to dry. After it was properly cured, she stitched up the bed ticking for a mattress and stuffed it. She helped Suzette clear out a corner of the shed by moving traps and nets and poles. They put the mattress on the floor, made it up with the red-checkered quilt and hung the mosquito bar overhead.

  And so, at last, Marteel had a bed to sleep in.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The New Sister

  “My Maman’s got a leetle girl dead.”

  Suzette and Marteel were walking along the bayou path.

  “She got drownded in the by’a,” Suzette went on, “when she was four year old. Her real name was Seraphine, but we all the time call her Tit-tit.”

  Marteel said nothing.

  “Right here,” continued Suzette, “is where she got drownded.”

  She walked to the edge of the bank and stood there with her two bare feet placed so that her toes curled over the edge. The embankment went straight down to the lapping water some four feet beneath her.

  “Like this,” she went on. “Tit-tit was standing here like this.…”

  A brown hand suddenly clutched her shoulder and pulled her back to the path. “W’at you doin’?” cried Marteel, frowning. “Tryin’ to fall in yourself?”

  “She fell in flat on her stomach,” continued Suzette, unperturbed. “Then a big lugger went by and she got froze and was drownded. My Maman, she cry and cry, and ev’body, they cry and cry. They had a boat funeral—they put Tit-tit in a boat and plenty, plenty people come from the by’a, they all went in boats and they took her to the graveyard on the Indian mound. And now Tit-tit, she dead.”

  “Dead, yes,” repeated Marteel. “Little sister dead. Marteel Suzette’s sister now.” She smiled her broad, happy smile.

  “My new sister,” said Suzette, shyly, tucking the Indian girl’s arm in her own. “My Maman, she keep little Noonoo, my baby brother, locked up in the yard,” she went on. “She not want him to fall in the by’a and get dead.”

  The two girls strolled slowly on, passing Nonc Moumout’s and then Nonc Lodod’s house. Suddenly Marteel halted, pointing with her toe to a prickly plant which grew on the slope of the levee. “W’at dat?” she asked.

  “Thistle, en’t it?” replied Suzette.

  “W’at it good for?” asked the Indian girl.

  “To prick your bare feets and make you holler!” said Suzette.

  Marteel smiled. Using a sharp-pointed branch, she dug the plant up, washed the root off in the bayou, cut open the tender white heart and gave some to Suzette. “It good to eat,” she said. “Good for medicine, too. It make a tea, good for the throat.”

  As they munched the root, the Indian girl looked around.

  “If you boil the bark and roots of the live oak tree,” she said, “it make a bright red dye to color baskets. Hackberry bark, it make tea for sore throat. Snake grass, that good for snake bite—you chew the leaves and swallow the juice. All the grasses—rat grass, hog grass, pepper grass, broom grass, turkey grass, whooping-cough grass—they all good for somet’ing.”

  Suzette stared. “How you know so much ’bout trees and grasses?”

  “Ole squaw tell me,” said Marteel. “She a ‘treate
r’—she treats people. A snake doctor, too—she cure all kind snake bite.”

  A trio of girls came up the bayou path, arm in arm. They were Beulah Bergeron, Doreen Dugas and Elise Broussard. Elise turned her back at once and gazed across the bayou. The other two looked Marteel over from head to foot.

  Then Beulah spoke: “Who dat you got by you?”

  “Her name, it Marteel,” said Suzette.

  “Marteel w’at?”

  “Only Marteel, that’s all,” replied Suzette. “She my frien’. She stay by me, to my house.”

  This was recommendation enough, but Beulah was still curious.

  “She’s Injun, en’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Suzette. “She know all about plants and how to make tea out of ’em and make sick people well.”

  “Me, I went with my Papa to visit the savages once,” volunteered Doreen. “We saw baskets, plenty baskets.”

  “Marteel know how to make bright red dye to color baskets, too,” said Suzette.

  The girls left off staring.

  “We go by Père Eugène, to buy candy balls and sugar hearts,” said Beulah. “My Papa, he give me pennies—enough for her too. You come with us, yes?”

  “Me, I can’t,” said Suzette, nodding toward Elise Broussard’s back. “You know why.”

  Elise had spoken no word to Suzette, nor Suzette to Elise. The girls passed on. Suzette would have liked to go, but no Durand went anywhere with a Broussard. She gazed longingly after them, thankful they had accepted Marteel so easily.

  Suzette looked up at the next house.

  “My Tante Céleste, she live here all by herself,” she said to Marteel. “She a vielle fille—I mean, she got no husband. There she comes now.”

  Tante Céleste came strolling out toward her front gate. Her sunbonnet was pulled down to shade her eyes.

  “Well, if it en’t my leetle Susu!” she cried. “And who dat?” She stared at Marteel. “Where she come from? She’s Injun, en’t she?”