by Richard Ford
“I always assume,” she said, “that these escapades usually involve someone on a lower rung. A stevedore, or a towel attendant at your club.” She was watching Dubinion. He must’ve qualified in her mind as a lower-rung personage. She and my father had been married twenty years, and at age thirty-nine she had taken Dubinion into her life to wipe out any trace of the way she had previously conducted her affairs. I realize now, as I tell this, that she and Dubinion had just been in bed together, and he was enjoying the dreamy aftermath by lying half-naked out on our picnic table while she roamed around the house in her pajamas alone and had to end up talking to me. It’s sad to think that in a little more than a year, when I was just getting properly adjusted at Lawrenceville, she would be gone. Thinking of her now is like hearing the dead speak.
“But I don’t hold it against your father. The man part anyway,” my mother said. “Other things, of course, I do.” She turned, then stepped over and took a seat on the striped-cushion wicker chair beside mine. She set her milk down and took my hand in her cool hands, and held it in her lap against her silky leg. “What if I became a very good singer and had to go on the road and play in Chicago and New York and possibly Paris? Would that be all right? You could come and see me perform. You could wear your school uniform.” She pursed her lips and looked back at the yard, where William Dubinion was laid out on the picnic table like a pharaoh.
“I wouldn’t enjoy that,” I said. I didn’t lie to her. She was going out at night and humiliating herself and making me embarrassed and afraid. I wasn’t going to say I thought this was all fine. It was a disaster and soon would be proved so.
“No?” she said. “You wouldn’t come see me perform in the Quartier Latin?”
“No,” I said. “I never would.”
“Well.” She let go of my hand, crossed her legs and propped her chin on her fist. “I’ll have to live with that. Maybe you’re right.” She looked around at her glass of milk as if she’d forgotten where she’d left it.
“What other things do you hold against him?” I asked, referring to my father. The man part seemed enough to me.
“Oh,” my mother said, “are we back to him now? Well, let’s just say I hold his entire self against him. And not for my sake, certainly, but for yours. He could’ve kept things together here. Other men do. It’s perfectly all right to have a lover of whatever category. So, he’s no worse than a lot of other men. But that’s what I hold against him. I hadn’t really thought about it before. He fails to be any better than most men would be. That’s a capital offense in marriage. You’ll have to grow up some more before you understand that. But you will.”
She picked up her glass of milk, rose, pulled her loose white pajamas up around her scant waist and walked back inside the house. In a while I heard a door slam, then her voice and Dubinion’s, and I went back to preparing myself for Lawrenceville and saving my life. Though I think I knew what she meant. She meant my father did only what pleased him, and believed that doing so permitted others the equal freedom to do what they wanted. Only that isn’t how the world works, as my mother’s life and mine were living proof. Other people affect you. It’s really no more complicated than that.
My father sat slumped in the bow of the empty skiff at the end of the plank dock. It was the hour before light. He was facing the silent, barely moving surface of Bayou Baptiste, beyond which (though I couldn’t see it) was the vacant marshland that stretched as far as the Mississippi River itself, west of us and miles away. My father was bareheaded and seemed to be wearing a tan raincoat. I had not seen him in a year.
The place we were was called Reggio dock, and it was only a rough little boat camp from which fishermen took their charters out in the summer months, and duck hunters like us departed into the marsh by way of the bayou, and where a few shrimpers stored their big boats and nets when their season was off. I had never been to it, but I knew about it from boys at Jesuit who came here with their fathers, who leased parts of the marsh and had built wooden blinds and stayed in flimsy shacks and stilt-houses along the single-lane road down from Violet, Louisiana. It was a famous place to me in the way that hunting camps can be famously mysterious and have a danger about them, and represent the good and the unknown that so rarely combine in life.
My father had not come to get me as he’d said he would. Instead a yellow taxi with a light on top had stopped in front of our house and a driver came to the door and rang and told me that Mr. McKendall had sent him to drive me to Reggio—which was in St. Bernard Parish, and for all its wildness not really very far from the Garden District.
“And is that really you?” my father said from in the boat, turning around, after I had stood on the end of the dock for a minute waiting for him to notice me. A small stunted-looking man with a large square head and wavy black hair and wearing coveralls was hauling canvas bags full of duck decoys down to the boat. Around the camp there was activity. Cars were arriving out of the darkness, their taillights brightening. Men’s voices were heard laughing. Someone had brought a dog that barked. And it was not cold, in spite of being the week before Christmas. The morning air felt heavy and velvety, and a light fog had risen off the bayou, which smelled as if oil or gasoline had been let into it. The mist clung to my hands and face, and made my hair under my cap feel soiled. “I’m sorry about the taxi ride,” my father said from the bow of the aluminum skiff. He was smiling in an exaggerated way. His teeth were very white, though he looked thin. His pale, fine hair was cut shorter and seemed yellower than I remembered it, and had a wider part on the side. It was odd, but I remember thinking—standing looking down at my father—that if he’d had an older brother, this would be what that brother would look like. Not good. Not happy or wholesome. And of course I realized he was drinking, even at that hour. The man in the coveralls brought down three shotgun cases and laid them in the boat. “This little yat rascal is Mr. Rey-nard Theriot, Junior,” my father said, motioning at the small, wavy-haired man. “There’re some people, in New Orleans, who know him as Fabrice, or the Fox. Or Fabree-chay. Take your pick.”
I didn’t know what all this meant. But Renard Junior paused after setting the guns in the boat and looked at my father in an unfriendly way. He had a heavy, rucked brow, and even in the poor light his dark complexion made his eyes seem small and penetrating. Under his coveralls he was wearing a red shirt with tiny gold stars on it.
“Fabree-chay is a duck caller of surprising subtlety,” my father said too loudly. “Among, that is to say, his other talents. Isn’t that right, Mr. Fabrice? Did you say hello to my son, Buck, who’s a very fine boy?” My father flashed his big white-toothed smile around at me, and I could tell he was taunting Renard Junior, who did not speak to me but continued his job to load the boat. I wondered how much he knew about my father, and what he thought if he knew everything.
“I couldn’t locate my proper hunting attire,” my father said, and looked down at the open front of his topcoat. He pulled it apart, and I could see he was wearing a tuxedo with a pink shirt, a bright-red bow tie and a pink carnation. He was also wearing white-and-black spectator shoes which were wrong for the Christmas season and in any case would be ruined once we were in the marsh. “I had them stored in the garage at mother’s,” he said, as if talking to himself. “This morning quite early I found I’d lost the key.” He looked at me, still smiling. “You have on very good brown things,” he said. I had just worn my khaki pants and shirt from school—minus the brass insignias—and black tennis shoes and an old canvas jacket and cap I found in a closet. This was not exactly duck hunting in the way I’d heard about from my school friends. My father had not even been to bed, and had been up drinking and having a good time. Probably he would’ve preferred staying wherever he’d been, with people who were his friends now.
“What important books have you been reading?” my father asked for some reason, from down in the skiff. He looked around as a boat full of hunters and the big black Labrador dog I’d heard barking motored
slowly past us down Bayou Baptiste. Their guide had a sealed-beam light he was shining out on the water’s misted surface. They were going to shoot ducks. Though I couldn’t see where, since beyond the opposite bank of the bayou was only a flat black treeless expanse that ended in darkness. I couldn’t tell where ducks might be, or which way the city lay, or even which way east was.
“I’m reading The Inferno,” I said, and felt self-conscious for saying “Inferno” on a boat dock.
“Oh, that,” my father said. “I believe that’s Mr. Fabrice’s favorite book. Canto Five: those who’ve lost the power of restraint. I think you should read Yeats’s autobiography, though. I’ve been reading it in St. Louis. Yeats says in a letter to his friend the great John Synge that we should unite stoicism, asceticism and ecstasy. I think that would be good, don’t you?” My father seemed to be assured and challenging, as if he expected me to know what he meant by these things, and who Yeats was, and Synge. But I didn’t know. And I didn’t care to pretend I did to a drunk wearing a tuxedo and a pink carnation, sitting in a duck boat.
“I don’t know them. I don’t know what those things are,” I said and felt terrible to have to admit it.
“They’re the perfect balance for life. All I’ve been able to arrange are two, however. Maybe one and a half. And how’s your mother?” My father began buttoning his overcoat.
“She’s fine,” I lied.
“I understand she’s taken on new household help.” He didn’t look up, just kept fiddling with his buttons.
“She’s learning to sing,” I said, leaving Dubinion out of it.
“Oh well,” my father said, getting the last button done and brushing off the front of his coat. “She always had a nice little voice. A sweet church voice.” He looked up at me and smiled as if he knew I didn’t like what he was saying and didn’t care.
“She’s gotten much better now.” I thought about going home right then, though of course there was no way to get home.
“I’m sure she has. Now get us going here, Fabree-chay,” my father said suddenly.
Renard was behind me on the dock. Other boats full of hunters had already departed. I could see their lights flicking this way and that over the water, heading away from where we were still tied up, the soft putt-putts of their outboards muffled by the mist. I stepped down into the boat and sat on the middle thwart. But when Renard scooted into the stern, the boat tilted dramatically to one side just as my father was taking a long, uninterrupted drink out of a pint bottle he’d had stationed between his feet, out of sight.
“Don’t go fallin’ in, baby,” Renard said to my father from the rear of the boat as he was giving the motor cord a strong pull. He had a deep, mellow voice, tinged with sarcasm. “I don’t think nobody’ll pull ya’ll out.”
My father, I think, didn’t hear him. But I heard him. And I thought he was certainly right.
I cannot tell you how we went in Renard Junior’s boat that morning, only that it was out into the dark marshy terrain that is the Grand Lake and is in Plaquemines Parish and seems the very end of the earth. Later, when the sun rose and the mist was extinguished, what I saw was a great surface of gray-brown water broken by low, yellow-grass islands where it smelled like tar and vegetation decomposing, and where the mud was blue-black and adhesive and rank-smelling. Though on the horizon, illuminated by the morning light, were the visible buildings of the city—the Hibernia Bank where my father’s office had been—nudged just above the earth’s curve. It was strange to feel so outside of civilization, and yet to see it so clearly.
Of course at the beginning it was dark. Renard Junior, being small, could stand up in the rear of the skimming boat, and shine his own light over me in the middle and my father hunched in the boat’s bow. My father’s blond hair shone brightly and stayed back off his face in the breeze. We went for a ways down the bayou, then turned and went slowly under a wooden bridge and then out along a wide canal bordered by swamp hummocks where white herons were roosting and the first ducks of those we hoped to shoot went swimming away from the boat out of the light, suddenly springing up into the shadows and disappearing. My father pointed at these startled ducks, made a gun out of his fingers and jerked one-two-three silent shots as the skiff hurtled along through the marsh.
Naturally, I was thrilled to be there—even in my hated military school clothes, with my drunk father dressed in his tuxedo and the little monkey that Renard was, operating our boat. I believed, though, that this had to be some version of what the real thing felt like—hunting ducks with your father and a guide—and that anytime you went, even under the most perfect circumstances, there would always be something imperfect that would leave you feeling not exactly good. The trick was to get used to that feeling, or risk missing what little happiness there really was.
At a certain point when we were buzzing along the dark slick surface of the lake, Renard Junior abruptly backed off on the motor, cut his beam light, turned the motor hard left, and let the wake carry us straight into an island of marsh grass I hadn’t made out. Though I immediately saw it wasn’t simply an island but was also a grass-fronted blind built of wood palings driven into the mud, with peach crates lined up inside where hunters would sit and not be seen by flying ducks. As the boat nosed into the grass bank, Renard, now in a pair of hip waders, was out heeling us farther up onto the solider mud. “It’s duck heaven out here,” my father said, then densely coughed, his young man’s smooth face becoming stymied by a gasp, so that he had to shake his head and turn away.
“He means it’s the place where ducks go to heaven,” Renard said. It was the first thing he’d said to me, and I noticed now how much his voice didn’t sound much like the yat voices I’d heard and that supposedly sound like citizens of New York or Boston— cities of the North. Renard’s voice was cultivated and mellow and inflected, I thought, like some uptown funeral director’s, or a florist. It seemed to be a voice better suited to a different body than the muscular, gnarly little man up to his thighs just then in filmy, strong-smelling water, and wearing a long wavy white-trash hairstyle.
“When do the ducks come?” I said, only to have something to say back to him. My father was recovering himself, spitting in the water and taking another drink off his bottle.
Renard laughed a little private laugh he must’ve thought my father would hear. “When they ready to come. Just like you and me,” he said, then began dragging out the big canvas decoy sacks and seemed to quit noticing me entirely.
Renard had a wooden pirogue hidden back in the thick grass, and when he had covered our skiff with a blanket made of straw mats, he used the pirogue to set out decoys as the sky lightened, though where we were was still dark. My father and I sat side by side on the peach boxes and watched him tossing out the weighted duck bodies to make two groups in front of our blind with a space of open water in between. I could begin to see now that what I’d imagined the marsh to look like was different from how it was. For one thing, the expanse of water around us was smaller than I had thought. Other grass islands gradually came into view a quarter mile off, and a line of green trees appeared in the distance, closer than I’d expected. I heard a siren, and then music that must’ve come from a car at the Reggio dock, and eventually there was the sun, a white disk burning behind the mist, and from a part of the marsh opposite from where I expected it. In truth, though, all of these things—these confusing and disorienting and reversing features of where I was—seemed good, since they made me feel placed, so that in time I forgot the ways I was feeling about the day and about life and about my future, none of which had seemed so good.
Inside the blind, which was only ten feet long and four feet wide and had spent shells and candy wrappers and cigarette butts on the planks, my father displayed the pint bottle of whiskey, which was three-quarters empty. He sat for a time, once we were arranged on our crates, and said nothing to me or to Renard when he had finished distributing the decoys and had climbed into the blind to await the ducks. Something see
med to have come over my father, a great fatigue or ill feeling or a preoccupying thought that removed him from the moment and from what we were supposed to be doing there. Renard unsheathed the guns from their cases. Mine was the old A. H. Fox twenty-gauge double gun, that was heavy as lead and that I had seen in my grandmother’s house many times and had handled enough to know the particulars of without ever shooting it. My grandmother had called it her “ladies gun,” and she had shot it when she was young and had gone hunting with my father’s father. Renard gave me six cartridges, and I loaded the chambers and kept the gun muzzle pointed up from between my knees as we watched the silver sky and waited for the ducks to try our decoys.
My father did not load up, but sat slumped against the wooden laths, with his shotgun leaned on the matted front of the blind. After a while of sitting and watching the sky and seeing only a pair of ducks operating far out of range, we heard the other hunters on the marsh begin to take their shots, sometimes several at a terrible burst. I could then see that two other blinds were across the pond we were set down on—three hundred yards from us, but visible when my eyes adjusted to the light and the distinguishing irregularities of the horizon. A single duck I’d watched fly across the sky at first flared when the other hunters shot, but then abruptly collapsed and fell straight down, and I heard a dog bark and a man’s voice, high-pitched and laughing through the soft air. “Hoo, hoo, hoo, lawd oooh lawdy,” the man’s voice said very distinctly in spite of the distance. “Dat mutha-scootcha was all the way to Terre Bonne Parish when I popped him.” Another man laughed. It all seemed very close to us, even though we hadn’t shot and were merely scanning the milky skies.