by Bill Heavey
I was immediately hit by a wave of hospitality unlike anything I’d ever experienced, one that rendered all resistance futile. I’m not inexperienced in southern hospitality. I was born in Birmingham into an old southern family. This, though, was hospitality of a different magnitude, as if it came from a different place and time. I was immediately plied with food and drink, of course, despite having eaten barbecue on the hour drive from the Lafayette airport. Then, within minutes of meeting me, almost all the people on the boat were offering me the use of their homes whether they were there or not. They told me where they hid their spare keys, and urged me to help myself to anything and everything I wanted. A couple of men offered to take me duck hunting. Another offered to take me fishing. One offered to do both. These were people I’d known for twenty minutes.
When the conversation turned to setlining for catfish, I had but to express an interest before Alice grabbed an umbrella-like net that happened to be handy and threw it over the side. Two minutes later she pulled up a quivering load of little grass shrimp, one of her favorite catfish baits. We were soon running down the bayou in her skiff, stopping where she had tied baited hooks to overhanging branches or poles she had stuck deep in the mud. If the pole was bent and wobbled at the boat’s approach, it meant there was a catfish on. If so, Alice grabbed and unhooked it, threw it into the bottom of the boat, and rebaited the hook with deft, practiced movements. If the pole wasn’t moving, she inspected the hook, rebaiting the bare ones and those whose bait she deemed too old. She didn’t use regular fishing line; her line was waxed black twine that looked stout enough to hoist 200 pounds. One piece, severed a few inches above the water, swung slightly in the breeze. “Gator,” Alice said.
Alice’s swamp pedigree was impressive. Her daddy’s side had lived in the swamp for more generations than any of them could reckon. He had fished and hunted the family’s food all his life. “In those days, nobody thought of anything as ‘poaching,’” she told me. “It was just how you did.” A standing joke among Mike and Alice’s friends was how when they were first dating, Mike had invited Alice to go deer hunting. She’d agreed and asked what time he’d be coming. When he said an hour before sunup the next morning, Alice had said, “You want to go deer hunting during the daytime?”
For the next three days, I was shown crawfishing traps, shrimp traps, and duck and deer blinds. I was lent a .270 and guided before first light to the best deer stand, where I sat for a couple of mornings without seeing anything. I was given boat rides and four-wheeler tours and fed constantly. There were hot pork cracklings with just the right amount of too much fat, salt, and crunch. There were stews of duck and squirrel in brown gravy over rice. Fried catfish. Hush puppies. Gumbo and étouffée so complex, with flavors so unbelievably nuanced they would make Emeril slap his mama.
After seventy-two hours, however, Mike decided that what I needed was to go deeper into the Basin. “You need to go duck hunting with Jody Meche,” he announced one morning. “It’s too tame out here to really give you a good idea of the swamp. He’ll take you down to the hunting camp they built after his daddy’s fishing grounds silted in and he had to move the family to Henderson.” It didn’t matter that I had no idea who Jody Meche was or even how he knew these people. When a Cajun takes it upon himself to show you a good time, you don’t have a great deal of say in the matter. The arrangements had already been made. Mike’s nephew, Casey Bedoin, would meet us at the boat ramp and drive me to Jody’s house in Henderson, half an hour away. I had long since given up resisting whatever my hosts had in mind. I had been showered with attention and goodwill to the point that I was a little bit nuts. Had they tied me to a chair, wrapped an anchor chain around my legs, and pushed me off the houseboat, my last thought would have been, Well, this was awfully thoughtful of them.
Jody Meche was sitting in his truck with an aluminum skiff riding on the trailer behind when we pulled up. He greeted me warmly and talked about hunting with Casey for a bit (it had been too warm lately for much activity by either ducks or deer), and then off we drove to a put-in. All Mike had told me about Jody was that he was a crawfisherman and a fourth-generation swamper. Then I remember that Jody was the guy Mike told a story about one evening. The tale began with Jody and two of his sons, who had been out catching frogs one night on Lake Rycade, a body of water off the channel of the Atchafalaya River. It was a place where Jody had fished, frogged, and hunted all his life. But a hunting club believed it had leased exclusive rights to the area from an oil or gas company that “owned” the land and water, and one of its members, seeing the light of an outsider’s boat on “his” water, didn’t particularly care for a trespasser. Jody heard the crack of a deer rifle, followed by the sound of the bullet ricocheting off the water near his boat, and then saw ripples caused by the bullet. “If it’d been me, I’d have gotten the hell out,” Mike said. “But Jody’s different.” Mike said Jody, who was unarmed, told his boys to lie down in the boat, cranked the motor and, at full speed, headed straight for the dock by the light. According to Mike, only a floating log between the boat and the dock prevented Jody from jumping out and “wrapping that boy’s rifle around his neck.”
One look at Jody and you could imagine the scenario. He was a jovial man with an easy manner and a wide smile. But you sensed that there wasn’t much of anything he feared. There are certain men who project a kind of natural physical authority. Jody was one of these. As we drove to the put-in, he told me the crawfish hadn’t run the way he’d hoped last year but that he was expecting better this year.
He was married, with three sons. “I want them to know how to crawfish,” he told me. “It’s a good skill to have if hard times come. But I don’t want them to do it for a living. Between the degradation of the Basin by the oil and gas guys and the way they’re trying to keep us off public water, it’s too hard and uncertain a way to make a living.” I asked why he did it and his smile went wide again. “Because I’m stubborn, I guess. And because I love it too much to quit.” He told me he was skilled at “bending pipe” and could make better money working on oil and gas rigs and other facilities. But he didn’t like working indoors and preferred to be his own boss.
After half an hour, we drove through the gate of a private boat ramp off I-10 and Jody backed the trailer into the water until the boat floated off. Which was how I ended up getting Jody Meche’s high-speed tour of the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel on the way to hunting camp. After showing me the critters and making a trip of half an hour or so, Jody drove the skiff up onto the muddy bank and tied it off to a tree. The spot looked no different from a hundred others we’d passed. The red mud banks extended a good ten feet above the waterline. Once you climbed up, it was all thick bottomland forest, mostly cypress and tupelo. Only a narrow four-wheeler track, invisible until you were looking down at it, hinted at anything beyond. Two hundreds yards down this trail, however, was a large clearing where sat a dozen or more ramshackle buildings of the hunting camp. They included a shed to house the big diesel generator that supplied electricity, another for the dozen or more four-wheelers that members kept here, others for machines I couldn’t even identify. There was a scaffold made from what looked like industrial-grade stainless steel with hoists that looked capable of handling three or four deer at a time, an outdoor fish-cleaning station with a sink and running water, and another station to dress waterfowl that had an electric plucker, a sort of wheel studded with fingerlike rubber “paddles” to remove feathers. Trailers of various sizes—some in use, some long abandoned—stood in the long grass. The main building looked like nothing I’d ever seen. It wasn’t just that the original structure had been added onto nearly a dozen times over the years. It was the way each addition leaned drunkenly against the one before it—a conga line of bunk rooms, with every fourth or fifth room full of chairs and card tables. There was even an overgrown plot that had once been a garden. “That was mama’s,” Jody said. He told me that she had worked that plot righ
t up until she died three years ago. “She was the best cook you ever saw,” Jody said. “She’d come up to camp and make a big breakfast for everybody after the morning hunt during deer season. Got so that guys would come to camp just for her cooking. Wouldn’t even go out to hunt some mornings. Word got out, some of their wives got pretty hot about it.” He smiled at the trouble his mama’s cooking had caused. You got the feeling that a Cajun wife would sooner forgive a man who strayed for sex than a man who strayed for another woman’s cooking.
Over a dinner of fried venison, fried mushrooms, and fried potatoes, Jody told me about his family. His father and grandfather lived in Upper Grand River, a settlement that had amounted to eight or ten families at its height. His grandfather ran a small general store there, the site of dances on Saturday nights. “My father could cut across Whiskey Bay—it was a big, shallow lake then—to Lower Grand River to Henderson, to his fishing grounds, anywhere he needed to go. There was a school boat that my older brothers took to and from the little school over at Butte La Rose. This was all before I was born, late 1950s, early 1960s. But once the Corps dredged the channel, Whiskey Bay got so silted in that you couldn’t get a boat through it, so Daddy moved us to Henderson. He still had to fish, though, so he built a shack right down by the river near here. And he probably slept more nights there than he did with us in Henderson.”
Jody’s father, like his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and maybe further back than that, made his living by the seasons of the swamp. He set nets and trotlines for catfish, gaspergou (freshwater drum), choupique (bowfin), buffalo (a kind of carp), gar, sac au lait (literally, “sack of milk,” a mellifluous word that is somewhat more appetizing than the name by which the rest of the world knows the fish, “crappie”), turtles, and crawfish. “But crawfish wasn’t a big part of his catch. Wasn’t much market for them in those days. Crawfish was bait, you know what I’m saying? He got three cents a pound for ’em. He kept his catch alive in cypress boxes set in the river, and sold it to a buyer’s boat that passed by twice a week, once on its way out and once on its way back to Henderson. That’s where they had an icehouse and a little processing plant and the railroad to take it to market.” (Henderson still numbers just 1,500 people and boasts the highest concentration of French-speaking residents of any county or parish in the country.)
I was trying to imagine life in the lost world of a place like Upper Grand River, where your groceries were primarily what you grew, trapped, netted, or shot yourself. I asked Jody how much of his family’s food he brought home himself. He thought for a moment. “About half,” he said. He thought some more. “Maybe seventy percent if you don’t count vegetables. I can’t keep up with gardening and hunt and fish.” So, I ventured, what was in his freezer back home at the moment? Well, first of all, he needed two freezers because it wouldn’t fit into one. “Right now, I got four squirrels, about a dozen ducks, some rabbits, some leftover wild turkey we deep-fried a while back. Five pounds each or so of deer sausage, smoked deer sausage, and ground venison. I think that’s it. Oh, and some shrimp. Tracy—that’s my wife—likes to eat shrimp year-round.” He sounded almost apologetic at the paucity on hand. It was because the family preferred to “eat fresh,” he said. They usually ate crawfish twice a week when the mudbugs were in season. “Oh, and fourteen frogs,” he added. “They’re for gifts. Everybody loves frog.”
Frank and Loretta Meche had eight children, four boys and four girls, of which Jody was the youngest boy. “Mama used to tell the story of the first time Daddy brought her home to meet his parents. She was fourteen and he was nineteen. And Daddy’s family wasn’t wealthy by any means, you understand, but they were well off compared with Mama’s folks. In her family, the kids only got one pair of shoes a year, you know what I’m saying? Anyway, when Daddy’s mother served the family dinner, she put a whole French duck—what you call a mallard—on that girl’s plate. And Daddy’s mama said that girl just sat there and hardly said a word. After they got married, she told Mama that she’d looked at that whole duck on her plate thinking, ‘My, these people must be rich!’ Ain’t that something?”
In the winter, Frank Meche trapped mink, otter, muskrat, raccoon, and nutria. Jody, more than any of his siblings, always wanted to go along. His father taught him to hang a piece of fish from a pole and to place the pole so that anything jumping up after it would land a foot in the trap. He carried a hammer to dispatch the animals without damaging their pelts. “He really didn’t like killing,” Jody said. “You could see how it pained him. But that was part of his living so that’s what he had to do.” The only time Jody remembered his father disciplining him was when he got his first BB gun and, as boys do, began shooting at songbirds. “He took me aside and he told me he didn’t like to see me doing that. Not mad or anything, but he told me it’s a sin to kill anything you’re not going to use. And he loved cardinals. Loved to see those little red birds. They were special to him.”
I had seen this seeming contradiction before. People who lived close to animals were accustomed both to adopting them as pets and to killing them without remorse. Paula happily ate rabbit while leaving apples and vegetables for wild bunnies in the yard. She had one tamed to the point that it would almost let her touch it. She took me outside to see it in its spot under a bush but gave strict instructions that I was to look at it only out of the corner of my eye. A direct look would mark me as a predator and scare the little bunny. I knew by her tone that I wouldn’t be easily forgiven for scaring it. I’d followed her outside, expecting the animal to be hidden deep within the bush. It was sitting several feet into the lawn, contentedly nibbling something. I walked within a few feet of it. Later, she told me she thought the fox that lived in the park across the street had gotten it because she hadn’t seen it in a while. When it turned up a few days later, she was so excited she called me up and said, “My bunny came back!” She sounded like an eight-year-old.
Dark and early the next morning, Jody put me on a four-wheeler and I tried to keep up as he raced down paths that felt more like tunnels bored through the big woods. When he abruptly stopped at a spot of no particular significance, I thought he just needed to pee. Instead, he shut his ATV down and hauled out an overturned canoe from beneath a bush. He kept a number of such craft stashed throughout his hunting grounds, he said, the better to access his secret spots for deer, turkey, waterfowl, and squirrels. We launched the canoe into the shallow water, using our paddles as push poles until the water got deep enough to paddle in. At every turn, our headlamps lit up the paired red embers of gator eyes. Sometimes they sank slowly into the water and disappeared at our approach, other times they didn’t budge. “Rule of thumb is a foot of length for every inch between the eyes,” Jody said. He said there were a few ten- and twelve-footers in these waters. But cagey old gators that size rarely showed themselves. This suited me fine. A ten-foot gator could kill and eat an adult deer. I was in no hurry to meet one.
Just as the darkness started to lift, we reached what felt like a more open area. Jody paddled toward what became a huge cypress stump. Just as I was about to brace for the collision, I saw the cutout in the trunk just above the waterline. Jody told me to duck and the canoe slid into the cutout. I stood up and unloaded the guns and ammo. At the waterline, he had laid a rough floor of two-by-fours, on which sat two folding chairs. The trunk was seven or eight feet across and had been cut off three feet above the water. There were still holes where the logger had inserted pegs and laid a board across them to stand on while he cut the tree. I wondered how long it must have taken a man to topple a 150-foot cypress that had stood for somewhere between 500 and 1,000 years.
Jody, wearing chest waders, had hidden the canoe beneath a bush and waded back. He pulled himself up into the blind and sat. As the light grew, I could see that we were in a long, narrow “lake” of open water that bulged to about eighty yards at its widest. I suddenly realized that we were in the midst of an entire flock of ducks al
ready on the water and whispered, “Jody!” But he had seen me tense and now tried not to laugh. “Those are my dekes, Bill,” he said. The place was so remote that Jody did something no duck hunter from my world ever did on public water: he’d left his spread of decoys out. “Nobody comes here,” he said. “The only people who know about it are friends who wouldn’t come here without me. Daddy started bringing me here when I was a little kid. His daddy probably did the same.”
With legal light upon us, we each loaded three 12-gauge shells and scanned the sky for ducks. “Got some behind us, Bill!” Jody whispered loudly. “Don’t move!” He began blowing furiously into one of the calls hanging around his neck and pulling a string at his feet tied to one of the decoys. Dekes on the water are good, but actively feeding ducks, ones sending ripples across the water as they bobbed and fed, were better. I kept my head down. By the time ducks had made it from their summer grounds in the upper Midwest to Louisiana, they’d been shot at plenty of times and were on the lookout for human faces. Jody’s blood was up. He called, yanked, and repeatedly hissed at me not to move, although I hadn’t shifted a muscle. The eight or nine ducks made a circular pass over the decoys, then another, lower. They flew around again and seemed to hesitate, widening the circle as they debated whether to keep moving or land. I was rolling my eyeballs hard to try to see what was going on without showing my face. Jody redoubled his calling and jerked that string for all he was worth. At last the birds committed. Waterfowl are at their slowest and most vulnerable in the moment when they set their wings and go into a stall just before settling onto the water. It’s at this moment that the hunter designated to call the shots—and at this moment I realized that duck hunting must have been the source of the idiom—gives the command, which has probably been the same for centuries. “Take ’em,” Jody said.