Under the Bayou Moon

by Valerie Fraser Luesse

  “Raphe!” Leo called out. “Put down that sorry Co-Cola and come have a beer with us! It’s on me.”

  Before Raphe could answer, Leo put a cold beer in his hand. Raphe thanked him and set his Coke on the table.

  “Well, don’t just stand there!” Leo said. “Pull you up a stool and help us eat this crawfish! I hauled in a mess of ’em.”

  Leo was a character—tousled gray hair with a few remaining dark streaks and usually capped with a straw hat, a twinkle of mischief in eyes black as coal, and a thick mustache framing a jolly smile. His skin was dark, his face lined with age, but he had the muscular body of a thirty-year-old and still worked like one.

  Raphe pulled up a stool and joined the men eating from a mound of crawfish piled onto newspaper in the center of their makeshift table. “Tell me ’bout that teacher,” he said.

  “Well, I can tell you this much fo’ sure: You might want to pack you a lunch pail and tell her you done forgot yo’ ABC’s,” Leo said with a grin. “She’s a pretty one, that teacher.”

  “Mighty pretty,” Clayton agreed.

  “And she said ‘merci’!” Andre added before sucking the meat from a crawfish shell.

  “Bought one o’ Freeman’s alligators too,” Binkie added. “What you make o’ that, Raphe?”

  “Don’t know.” Raphe took a sip of his beer and pinched the head off a boiled crawfish. “Maybe she don’t hate us like the last one. Or maybe she wants to know how we answer when we don’t think twice. Testing us a little bit for the school board?”

  “Never heard a teacher say a word o’ French,” Leo said. “I think it’s a good sign. Maybe Remy’ll have a better time this year.”

  “Maybe so,” Raphe said. “Can’t get any worse, that’s fo’ sure.”

  “Hey, what you hear from ol’ Heywood lately?” Leo asked him.

  “Not much. Passed through on his way to New Orleans. I look for him to stay up there a while—bet you he’s got that camera goin’ ninety to nothin’.”

  “That’s the truth.” Leo smiled, nodding in agreement. “That boy loves to take his pictures. Heywood’s a good friend, Raphe. You got to hang on to your bon amis—’less you want to get stuck with a bunch like this!” Leo gestured to his relatives around the table and laughed. “You a sorry sight when don’t nobody love you but your own kin!”

  “And we just here fo’ the beer and the crawfish,” Binkie said. “He run outta food, we gon’ leave him fo’ good!”

  Raphe laughed with his father’s friends. Sometimes he wondered what they had all been like when they were young, waltzing and two-stepping with the girls on Saturday nights and spending their days on the water. Raphe had enjoyed such a carefree life—hardworking but carefree—before the storm changed everything. Heywood had a way of bringing back those days. Raphe had almost forgotten how to laugh and pass a good time till the lanky photographer turned up on the bayou, asking for help getting his bearings on the Teche and the Atchafalaya. Right away they hit it off and had been friends ever since.

  Heywood probably had that effect on everybody. He wasn’t from Louisiana but had moved there from Illinois, following work in the oil fields. He always said he could ride a billy goat around the world backward and never see anything more exotic and beautiful than Louisiana. To Raphe, the bayou wasn’t exotic—it was home—but it was beautiful, alright. There were no ills a paddle down the river couldn’t cure, no problem he couldn’t sort out with a fishing rod in his hand. Raphe wasn’t restless like Heywood. He just knew he had a missing piece, with no idea where to find it.

  EIGHT

  THE METAL DOOR ON THE MAILBOX clanked shut as Raphe dropped an envelope in. Though the post office was open, he hated getting tangled up with Miss Ernie, who ran it, and opted for the mailbox out on the porch instead. Miss Ernie was a nosy old woman who brazenly pried, sharing her information with the whole community. She even kept a notebook where she wrote down the more interesting addresses on local mail so she could ask you all kinds of questions about them: “Who you know in Mobile, Alabama? Why you gettin’ mail from a hospital in Baton Rouge? Somebody in your family been sick? Y’all havin’ trouble payin’ the bill?” Everybody felt sorry for her husband, Mr. Jimmy, who was as sweet and kind as she was vexing.

  Raphe stared at the poster nailed to the post office wall.

  He pulled the sign off the wall and threw it into a trash barrel. Cajuns didn’t worship alligators any more than Catholics worshiped statues. The very idea that such a misguided notion might destroy something so purely beautiful as the white alligator was more than he could stand. He was about to walk back to the landing and head home when he paused and thought about the new teacher. Maybe she wouldn’t terrorize Remy the way the other one had. Even so, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to let her know here and now that he wouldn’t stand for it. He took a chance that she might still be at the school and made his way there.

  The double front doors were propped open, and the ground-floor windows were raised. Raphe climbed the steps and went inside. He could see that all the desks and chairs had been pushed into the dogtrot that ran from the front to the back of the building, creating a wide, breezy corridor that separated the two large classrooms on the ground floor of the school. The walls of the dogtrot had wooden shutters that could be opened, creating cross breezes with the exterior windows. All of them were open now.

  Through the open shutters, he heard a radio playing and a woman singing “Lovesick Blues.” She must’ve thought there wasn’t another living soul in sight, because she was really belting it out. Raphe liked her voice. It would sound mighty good with a fiddle. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t a terror like all the others.

  He followed the music into the open doorway of the classroom to his left. The teacher was wearing overalls rolled up to her knees. She was barefoot with her hair in a ponytail. Raphe watched as she poured herself a cup of coffee from a thermos on the desk, sprinkled in some sugar from a paper sack, and splashed it with milk from a mason jar. She took a few sips and then climbed onto a step stool by one of the windows, standing on tiptoe to try to hook a curtain rod onto a nail she had no hope of reaching.

  “Can I give you some help?” he asked.

  She gasped and dropped the curtain rod.

  “Sorry—didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, hurrying to retrieve the rod and help her down off the stool.

  Breathing hard, she put her hand to her forehead. “I think you just took a few years off my life. Guess I had it coming, though—probably deafened you with my singing.”

  “What?” Raphe cupped his hand over his ear.

  That made her laugh. And what a fine laugh it was, light and clear.

  “Hey, I know you,” she said. “Or at least, I’ve seen you, right? In Doc’s office?”

  Raphe looked closely. It was her. The brown-eyed girl with the gold-streaked hair was the new teacher? He couldn’t decide whether she was prettier in her teacher clothes or barefoot in overalls. “That was me.” He rested the curtain rod in the windowsill.

  She extended her hand. “This one’s fairly clean,” she said. “I’m Ellie Fields, the new teacher—though, from what I hear, that won’t exactly put me on your Christmas list.”

  He shook her hand, which felt soft but strong. “Raphe Broussard.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I guess I’ll be teaching your kids?”

  “Nieces and nephews. I don’t have any kids.”

  She gave him a puzzled frown. “I thought I counted three.”

  “Three?”

  “Children—at the doctor’s office?”

  He nodded as he remembered. “My sister’s. She needed help. Her husband was out on a shrimper.”

  Raphe surveyed the classroom. Usually musty and dark, it looked and smelled as if it had been scrubbed clean. He caught the faint scent of lemon. There was a box of colorful paints and brushes against the back wall and a big stack of quilts in a rocking chair next to the desk up front. More boxes were stacked in a c
orner of the room.

  “So if you don’t have any kids, what brings you to the school?” Ellie had a way of looking straight at him that Raphe liked—no hedging or hiding.

  “My nephew Remy—he lives with me. He’s seven. Remy . . . he had a rough time last year. I thought . . . I guess I thought I’d stop by and . . . and . . .”

  He was searching for the right words when she gave him a big smile. “You thought you’d stop by and tell me if I’m mean to Remy, I’ll be sleeping with the alligators?”

  “Something like that,” he said, smiling at her in spite of himself.

  “Listen, Raphe,” she said, “I don’t believe in punishing children for speaking the language they grew up with. Don’t get me wrong, they need to learn English. It’s the only way for them to live and work outside the bayou if they should ever have to—or want to. But to humiliate a child just because he can speak two languages instead of one is cruel and stupid. And I’ll say that to Big Roy and Little Roy, or whatever his name is, and the rest of the department of education if they ever ask for my opinion, which is highly unlikely.”

  A brief silence fell between them before she picked up one of the quilts from the chair. “Are you in a hurry or can you help me with something?”

  “No.” He closed his eyes and shook his head as he corrected himself. “No hurry, I mean.”

  “I’m trying to hang curtains and figure out how to rig up some quilt racks on the wall so I can brighten up this awful room. But I have to be able to get the quilts down at nap time so the children can lie on them.”

  “Nap time?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You gonna let the boys and girls sleep—in school?” Raphe had never heard of such a thing. School was about memorizing and ciphering and trying to stay awake.

  “Just the little ones,” Ellie said. “The older children can make it through the day fine, but the first and second graders need to rest for a while after they’ve had their lunch or they’ll be too tired to concentrate in the afternoon. Will you help me?”

  “Sure.”

  She led him to a box of supplies from Chalmette’s. “I bought some dowels that might work—just need to figure out how to mount them on the walls. I thought I’d hang three quilts between the outside windows and then three more between the shutters open to the dogtrot.”

  Raphe knelt down and rummaged around in the box of supplies to see what he had to work with. Then he went to the rocker and picked up one of the quilts, which was well made and heavy. “You gonna need something stronger than those dowels,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He went to his truck and sorted through scrap lumber till he found some pieces that would work. “Show me how you want to hang them,” he said to Ellie. He watched as she took a blue-and-yellow quilt from the rocker, folded it lengthwise a couple of times, and then draped it over her arm.

  “Something like that, maybe, so it hangs long and covers up a lot of that heinous drab wall?”

  Raphe nodded, took note of the quilt’s length when it was halved, and set to work on the first rack. “Try this one,” he said when he was finished.

  She draped the quilt over the rack just as she had held it on her arm, looked up at Raphe, and smiled. “Amazing what a little color’ll do. Now get busy.”

  He gathered more lumber and finished the racks so Ellie could hang her quilts, which brought a dramatic change to the brown walls, splashing them with rings and squares and triangles of cotton cloth in every color of the rainbow.

  “You make these?” he asked her.

  That brought an exasperated sigh from her. “You think all women should stay home to quilt and cook?”

  He had touched a nerve without meaning to. “I think all women should do as they please,” he answered calmly, as if he hadn’t noticed the rancor in her voice. “I just wondered who made quilts this fine.” Raphe ran his hand slowly over the blue-and-yellow one with its intricate circular patterns and felt the fine stitching with his fingertips. He turned to see Ellie watching him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  For a split second, she looked like she was about to cry, which affected Raphe more than he would’ve expected. Gazing at her delicate face with the fine bones and full mouth, he asked, “Is Ellie your real name?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  She was smiling again, thank goodness. “Well, now you have to guess what it’s short for: Melanie, Adele, or Mary Nell.”

  He shook his head. “None of those.”

  She looked startled, like a deer jerking its head up from a stream at the sound of a snapping twig. “How did you know?”

  “Because you are none of those,” he said.

  For a moment, she stared at him, wide-eyed and silent. “It’s . . . Juliet. My name’s Juliet. But nobody’s called me that since I was about four.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Juliet. I can see it. But which name do you feel?”

  Again she stared at him straight on, without hiding behind flirtatious laughter or a clever remark like so many women did. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before. I guess I’d have to try on Juliet and see how she suits me. What about you? Are you really Raphe?”

  “Christened Raphael,” he said, “but only Mamou—my grandmother—called me that.”

  “And what do you choose—Raphe or Raphael?”

  He thought it over. “Raphe, I think. I believe Raphael is too much name for me.”

  “Well then, Raphe,” Ellie said, “would you allow me to tell you the story of my quilts even though I’ve behaved badly?”

  “Oui.”

  “Merci,” she said, giving a small curtsy in her overalls. She pointed to the quilt in blue and yellow. “This one’s called Cathedral Window. It’s really hard to sew, which is probably why it’s the only one my Mama Jean makes. She’s my grandmother on my mother’s side, and she doesn’t mind telling you that her Scottish ancestors were smarter, stronger, braver, and generally better than everybody else. But she’s always in my corner. We’re really close. She made this one, and Mama made the purple one just like it in the center over there. Hey, they look really good the way you hung them opposite each other.”

  “Merci,” he said.

  “The two on either side of this one are called Rail Fence, and they’re really old. My great-grandmother on Daddy’s side—he called her Mamie—she made those out of flower sacks. The little flowers on the fabric are all faded, but I still think they’re beautiful. Mamie had nine children—nine—but three of them didn’t live to grow up. That happened a lot back then.”

  “It happens still if you’re too poor to care for your children,” he said.

  There it was again—that startled, wounded expression on her face.

  “You are not to blame, Juliet,” he said, regretting that his own words had brought her unexpected pain. “Tell me about the others?”

  She nodded, still looking at Raphe, not the quilts. Finally, she turned to the breezeway wall with the open shutters. “The ones on either side of the Cathedral Window over there are called Arkansas Traveler. My Aunt Joyce made one, and Aunt Vivian made the other. In our family, we call the four of them—my mother, the aunts, and Mama Jean—‘the sisters.’ Daddy started it, and the rest of us picked it up somewhere along the way. ”

  “So you brought them with you to Louisiana—tes soeurs. Your sisters.”

  He watched as she looked around the room and then smiled, nodding in agreement. “Oui,” she said, “I guess I did. My soeurs.”

  Raphe wondered why such a woman was alone—and what had made her so sad way down deep below her smile. “I should hang your curtains and get out of your way.”

  “You’re not in my way—but I’d sure appreciate it if you hang my curtains.”

  One by one, he lifted the four rods with white cotton curtains over the outer windows, where they fluttered in the afternoon breeze. Then he surveyed the room with approval. “Now it looks like a cabin i
nstead of a jail.”

  “Let’s hope I can convince the kids that I’m their teacher, not their warden,” she said. “Hey, can I ask your opinion about something?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I bring the desks back in, I’m gonna put them two deep in a circle all around the room. So I thought I’d paint something on the floor in the center—something from a storybook like the yellow-brick road from The Wizard of Oz or maybe Humpty Dumpty sitting on his brick wall. It’ll have to be simple because I’m not a very good painter, but do the children here know those stories?”

  Raphe shook his head.

  “Can you tell me a story they would know—something familiar I could paint on the floor? Maybe a folktale that has something to do with the bayou?”

  “I might know a few,” he said.

  She offered him the rocking chair and took a seat on the desk, her legs and bare feet dangling above the floor. He sat down in the rocker and absently scratched his jaw, mentally riffling through the catalog of bayou tales he had heard all his life.

  “Lotta the old stories, they’re kinda scary,” Raphe explained. “Prob’ly to help keep the children from going where they got no business at night—like le feu follet, lights floatin’ around the bayou at night. You’ll be so glad to see ’em in the dark swamps, but they don’t mean to guide you—they mean to lead you in the wrong direction so you get lost and drown. And the Rougarou—in the daytime, he looks like everybody else—could be your neighbor, your cousin, your best friend—but at night he’s got the body of a man and the head of a wolf, and he’ll hunt you.”