by Mike Blakely
Learning the secret about Pearl didn’t lower my opinion of her. In fact, it made her all the more fascinating. You have to remember, a fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t decide his own morals. His glands do it for him. What preachers and church choir sopranos regard as scandalous, a fourteen-year-old boy might consider cause for sainthood. So, when I finally found out why everybody called Pearl “Pearl”—her real name was Carol Anne—her beauty in my eyes doubled, if it’s possible to double an absolute.
If I could see, today, the same Pearl I knew back then, I wonder if I would find her as beautiful. Probably not. I’m more suspicious and critical of women now, as I am of people in general. I haven’t seen pure beauty since Pearl, and that may only be because I remember her as she was that summer. Or more correctly, because I remember her with the memories of who I was then. When the summer was over, that Pearl was gone forever.
Anyway, my new hero, Billy Treat, had a lot more self-control than I did, and he only ogled Pearl for a second or two before heading back down to the wharf with me in tow. We brought all the people injured in the explosion to Snyder’s store and took care of them as best we could until the doctor could arrive from Marshall.
That’s when things started confusing me. I guess that’s when my simple boy’s life became complicated, and it’s been getting more complicated since that day. I was given the job of carrying cold well water in by the bucketful so it could be used to ease the suffering of burns. Every time I entered the store, I couldn’t keep my eyes off of Pearl for very long, of course, but the thing was that she couldn’t keep her eyes off of Billy Treat. And Billy Treat was not exactly avoiding the occasional glance at her, either.
It was odd, because I had never been jealous before, and men gawked at Pearl all the time. But now it was Pearl doing most of the gawking—at my newfound hero. I caught them actually looking at each other once, for a mere second. Their eyes shared some common brand of remorse that I wouldn’t understand for years. Suddenly, it wasn’t such fun having a hero.
The first man Billy saved died before the doctor could arrive. Four of the firemen who had been stoking the furnace when the boilers blew also died. Two of them were never found. Caddo Lake took what was left of them and buried them somewhere. The other two casualties were Captain Gentry and a young man from Dallas who happened to have been walking down the saloon, directly above the boilers, when they blew. We all figured he had been heading for the toilets that hung over the stern.
It would take me years to prove that Judd Kelso murdered all seven of the victims for his own personal gain. When the scalded black man died quietly in the store, Kelso was still down on the wharf, his hands covering his face. I guess even Judd Kelso possessed something resembling a conscience.
4
THE GLORY OF CADDO LAKE DISASTER LEFT SEVERAL MEN UNEMPLOYED. Most of them boarded the next steamer and went to find work. But Billy Treat stayed. Widow Humphry said she was too old to be cooking for her guests and boarders, and since Billy was a cook, she would provide him with room and board plus a small salary to fix meals at her inn. Billy said it would do until he found something else.
This all made me a little nervous at first, because Widow Humphry’s inn was just across the way from Snyder’s store. But after about a week went by, I began to relax. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary going on between Billy and Pearl. I saw him go to the store once for supplies, and I followed him in there to spy on him, but he hardly spoke three words to Pearl.
“Thank you,” she said to him when she gave him his change. That was something, because I had never heard Pearl thank anybody other than me. But Billy only nodded at her before he left. He was my hero, but I thought he must have been a little crazy. When Pearl Cobb came right out and spoke to you, you were supposed to try to speak back. This Billy Treat was a funny character.
One day right after lunch when Cecil Peavy, Adam Owens, and I were chucking rocks at a squirrel in a tree out behind Widow Humphry’s inn, Billy came out the back door and called my name.
“Ben, bring your friends over here,” he said in that detached voice of his.
They looked at me with their eyes popping out. I had been bragging on how chummy I was with the new local hero, but they didn’t believe me till then. To tell the truth, I didn’t believe myself till then. I wasn’t sure if Billy even remembered who I was. I trotted happily to the back porch with Cecil and Adam behind me, to see what Billy wanted.
“Hi, Mr. Treat,” I said.
He waved off the formalities. “Call me Billy. Listen, how would you men like to make a little money?” He was sitting on the porch steps, his sleeves rolled up over his rippling forearms as he adjusted a smart little straw hat on his head.
Us boys just looked at each other with our mouths open for a moment or two. None of us had ever owned more than a nickel at a time. “I guess so,” I said. “How?”
“I need some fresh catfish. The fellows down at the fish camp have been selling me day-old fish, and it just doesn’t taste as good as it should.” He spoke to us in a very professional tone, as if we were negotiating the biggest deal in history. “If you boys could catch some catfish and keep them alive in a holding tank somewhere until I need them, I’d pay you a penny a pound.” .
I looked at Adam Owens in astonishment. “Sure!” I said, speaking for all of us.
But Cecil Peavy was a cynic, even at fourteen. “Is that live weight, or cleaned?” he asked. Cecil made good in life. Last time I saw him alive, down in Nacogdoches, he owned a whole city block.
“Live weight,” Billy answered.
“Sure!” I repeated.
“Wait a minute,” Cecil said. “Where are we gonna keep them? How are we gonna catch them?”
“My daddy has a trotline in the barn,” Adam said. “Never been used. Got new hooks and everything.”
“Do you think he’d miss it?” Billy asked.
Adam grinned and shook his head.
“Where are we gonna keep them alive?” Cecil repeated.
We thought in silence for a moment, then it struck me. “The old horse trough at the Packer place!” It was perfect—a big, round cypress trough, full of spring water, on an abandoned farmstead only a mile from the lake.
“That’s a lot of work for a penny a pound,” Cecil said.
“Take it or leave it,” Billy replied sternly, smirking at him.
Adam and I looked anxiously at Cecil.
“Well, all right,” he finally said. “We’ll give it a trial to see how it works.”
“Good,” Billy said. When he shook our hands, we were bound.
“Go get that trotline,” I said to Adam, all excited. “We can used old Esau’s skiff to run the line.”
“What are we gonna use for bait?” Cecil asked.
“We’ll wade for some mussels.”
Suddenly Billy perked up, and I saw a new light flash in his eyes for a second. “Mussels?” he said. “Do these waters bear a lot of mussels?”
“They’re all over the dang place,” Cecil said.
Billy glanced at a watch he pulled out of his pocket. “I think I’ll come with you,” he said. “I’d like to see these mussels.”
Adam snuck his pop’s trotline out of the barn along with a couple of cork floats and a good supply of hooks. Billy walked with us the two miles between Port Caddo and old Esau’s saloon located on an inlet of Caddo Lake known as Goose Prairie Cove,.
Esau was a friendly old man who drank whiskey all day, but never seemed to get drunk. He was dark-skinned and claimed five-sevenths Choctaw blood. I asked him one time how he figured that, and he said, “I’ve got seven ancestors, and five of them was Choctaw.” I think he was really pure Indian and just liked to pull my leg. He kept his hair cut and dressed like a regular civilized man. With his saloon and fishing camp down at Goose Prairie Cove, he managed to make a living that he supplemented by hunting wild game and running a few hogs in the woods. He had several old leaky boats at his camp and never refus
ed them to us boys.
Esau always ran us off after dark, though, because sometimes fights broke out between drunks at his place. But there were a few knotholes in the walls, and we often snuck back and looked through the knotholes to see what barroom life was like. One night when we were peering through the knotholes, Esau walked casually over to a chair by the wall, sat down in it, and sprayed a mouthful of whiskey in Adam Owens’ eye through a knothole. I never did figure out how he knew we were out there.
Anyway, when we got to the fishing camp, we found Esau and Judd Kelso sitting in the shade of a big mulberry, sipping whiskey. Judd Kelso had been hanging around Port Caddo ever since the disaster. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but he should have been looking for work somewhere. Kelso was not independently wealthy. However, his family lived over at Long Point, not too far away, so it didn’t seem unnatural to me for him to stay in the area after the boiler explosion.
Esau stood up to greet us when we got there. We introduced Billy and they shook hands. Esau offered Billy a whiskey flask.
“I never drink,” Billy said.
Esau didn’t bat an eye, just put the flask in his pocket. We asked him if we could use a skiff to throw mussels in and run a trotline, and he told us we were welcome to, as long as we brought the skiff back.
“Howdy, Treat,” Kelso said, waving glassy-eyed, sprawled across a wooden chair in the shade.
Billy just flat ignored him and went with us boys to the lakeshore. My friends and I waded barefoot into the shallows, towing a skiff behind us. I had worked up a sweat on the walk from Port Caddo, and the water felt good. Billy kicked off his shoes, put his pocket watch in one of them, and followed us in.
It didn’t take long for me to find the first mussel. I was probing through the mud with my toes when I felt it, a hard ridge in the muck. I dug it out with my toenail, then used my foot like a shovel to lift it up to where I could grab it in my hand.
It was a pretty good-sized one, but nothing extraordinary—about as wide as the palm of my hand—a dark brown, clamlike shell plastered with mud. I threw it into the skiff Adam was holding by the rope and went on hunting with my toes. Billy sloshed over to the skiff, grabbed the mussel, washed it off, and studied it. I saw that light in his eyes again. He seemed fascinated.
“How many catfish do you expect us to catch?” Cecil asked, throwing a small mussel shell into the skiff.
Billy dropped the mussel he had been looking at and started feeling around with his feet as us boys were doing. “Enough where I can fry a catfish dinner twice a week or so.”
We hunted for almost an hour, joking and taunting each other, as boys will. Billy hardly said a word to us. He just searched silently for mussel shells, finding a few, studying them, comparing them. I still idolized him, but I was beginning to think he was a little peculiar. “How many varieties of mussels live in this lake?” he asked us at one point. We didn’t know.
When we had waded out to our chins, and Billy to his chest, we finally had enough mussels to bait our trotline. We towed the skiff back to shallower water and sat on an old pier that stuck up just above the water level. We decided to go ahead and open the mussels there, so we could bait our line quicker when we set it out.
There’s a trick to opening mussels. Between those two shells they’re almost nothing but solid muscle, and they don’t open easy. It’s a little dangerous. You’re likely to slip and cut your hand if you don’t watch yourself.
The way Billy had been studying the mussels we found, I was of the opinion that he had never seen one before that day. So, when we got our pocket knives out, I thought I’d show him how to open mussels. I didn’t want my hero sticking himself. And, to tell the truth, I wanted to show off a little.
“Hold it like this, Billy,” I said, “and stick your knife in right here, then twist it open.” I wrestled with the mud-slick mussel shell for some time, poking clumsily at it with the knife, until I finally pried it open. I pulled out the shapeless little animal, threw it in a bait bucket holding a little water, and handed Billy one to try on his own.
His knife moved so quickly that I couldn’t follow it. In less than a second, the shell was open in his hand. He pulled out the mussel and felt it between his fingers, as if looking for something hidden in it. He dropped it in the bait bucket, then ran his finger along the pretty purple inside of the shell. He angled it in the sun to catch the iridescent rainbow sheen of the shell lining. He had that look on his face again. His eyes darted and sparkled, and he almost smiled. Then he grunted, tossed the shell in the water, and grabbed another mussel.
He looked at me and found me staring. “What are you looking at?” he said.
“Nothin’,” I answered.
Cecil and Adam hadn’t noticed anything unusual. They were arguing about where to put the trotline.
“The best place is over on the edge of Mossy Brake, right across from Taylor Island,” Cecil said. “That’s where all them big opelousas cats live.”
“You’ve got to have live bait to catch an opelousas cat,” Adam argued. He didn’t know too much, but there wasn’t a thing about hunting and fishing he didn’t know. “We won’t catch anything but willow cats on these mussels.”
“Maybe some humpback blues,” Cecil suggested.
“Not in Mossy Brake. You have to go out in the Big Water to catch them.”
They went on arguing and shelling mussels until only a few were left. I was listening to them yammer and trying to figure out how Billy could get those mussels open so quickly, when I realized he was just sitting there on the pier with his feet in the water, staring at an open mussel shell in his hand.
It was a big washboard mussel—the kind old Esau scraped his dead pigs down with when he was slipping the hair from them at butchering time. The inside of the shell glistened a kind of pink rainbow color. I didn’t see what had Billy so captivated until he nudged the mussel with his finger. Then I saw him uncovering a perfectly spherical bead of translucence perched on the rim of the shell. Billy Treat had found a pearl.
“Wow,” I said, before I could consider all the ramifications of the find. “Hey, y’all, Billy found a pearl!”
Cecil and Adam stopped arguing and looked. They jumped to their feet and hung over Billy’s shoulders to see. Billy had that faraway look in his eyes again, as if he was thinking of someplace else. It almost seemed like he was afraid of that pearl.
“Hey, Esau!” Cecil shouted.
“Esau!” Adam repeated.
“Billy Treat found a pearl!” they yelled together, as if they had rehearsed it.
Esau rose slowly, but Judd Kelso floundered as if wasp-stung getting out of his chair.
I envied Billy something terrible at that moment, and resented him a little, too. What was he going to do with that pearl? I knew what I would have done with it, if I could have found the nerve. But I didn’t have the pearl. Billy did. And in my eyes, he had nerve enough for ten men.
I had heard about Caddo Lake pearls all my life, and had seen several girls wearing lopsided ones given to them by their beaux who had been lucky enough to find one. But this was the most beautiful one I could imagine. It was fairly large—bigger than a raindrop. It had an overall white color, but little windows of blue and green and red and purple kept appearing within it, blurred and indefinable. A prismatic haze seemed to cling to its surface like a fog.
I smelled whiskey over the stench of the mussels when Esau and Kelso arrived.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Kelso said.
“That’s one of the best I ever seen, and I’ve lived on this lake forty years,” Esau said.
Billy looked up at the old Indian. “Pearls are common to this lake?”
Kelso was squinting his gator eyes, scheming.
“Maybe not common,” Esau said, measuring his words. “But they turn up. I’ve found a couple myself over the years. Nothing as pretty as that one, though.”
“What do people do with them?”
“Well,�
� Esau said, glancing at Kelso. “A young man might give it to his sweetheart, if he’s got one. A daddy might give it to his daughter to play with.”
“Nobody ever sold them?” Billy asked.
Esau wrinkled his old dark face. “They ain’t worth nothin’.”
“They’s worth somethin’ to me,” Kelso blurted. He pulled a large roll of bills out of his pocket and peeled one off. “Here, I’ll give you five dollars for it.”
“Where did you get all that money?” Billy asked, his voice flat and emotionless as ever.
“None of your business. Here’s five. Now, give me that shell slug.”
“For five dollars?” Billy said.
“All right, ten!” Kelso peeled off another bill and shook it in Billy’s face.
“Don’t sell it, Billy,” Cecil said. “Use it yourself.”
I pushed Cecil and he looked at me as if I was crazy, but the whole incident was making me mad. I didn’t want Billy using the pearl the way Cecil was suggesting.
“Use it?” Billy said. “Use it for what?”
Kelso laughed. “I’ll use it. I’ll take it over to Pearl Cobb and get my piston stroked.” He peeled another bill from his roll. “Fifteen. That’s as high as I’ll go, Treat.”
Billy looked up at Kelso. “What do you mean by ‘getting your piston stroked’?” he asked.
Now, even I knew what he meant, and I was only fourteen years old, but I guess Billy wanted to be certain.
“Pearl’s a whore!” Cecil said. He was so red in the face, you would have thought he had found the pearl.
I shoved him hard in the chest. “She is not!” I shouted. I was getting really mad now, and so frustrated I thought I would cry.
“She’ll be a whore tonight!” Kelso said, grinning idiotically.
Billy looked up at Esau.
The old Indian took a sip from his whiskey flask. “She ain’t a regular whore for a man who just wants to spend some money,” he said in his slow, careful voice. “But if you have a pearl—”