“Did it flood?”
“Every year, like clockwork. But he was only sixteen—he had a lot to learn. By the time he was twenty, he knew exactly where and how to build. That cabin is still standing. It’s mine now. You’ll see why it’s floodproof when we get there.”
Antoinette enjoyed the sound of pride in Sam’s voice. The closer they got to Bayou Midnight, the more relaxed he seemed. “And where does your uncle live?”
“He’s built a home on the banks of the bayou, about two miles from my place. There’s a little settlement there now, although Uncle Claude’s house and Leonce’s are off by themselves. They have electricity and water and Leonce even has a telephone. But compared to most people’s, their places are primitive.”
“Leonce?”
“My cousin, Uncle Claude’s son. He’s married to Didi, who’s actually a distant cousin, too. My other first cousin, Martin, lives with Uncle Claude.”
“I’m not sure I’ve got this straight.”
He flashed her a smile that told her it didn’t matter. “That’s only the bare bones. You’ll find that Cajuns are more family-oriented than almost any other group of people. Everyone has his nose in everyone else’s business. And everyone is related to everyone else. Uncle Claude’s more reticent than most. He won’t overwhelm you. You’ll like Didi and Leonce. Leonce works on an Omega Oil rig and fishes and traps when he’s not there. Didi’s the best cook in the bayous.
“Martin’s hard to get to know,” Sam continued. “He doesn’t talk much. The swamps and the marshes are his whole life. He supports himself by fishing and trapping, wouldn’t be caught dead working for an oil company. He served in Nam and came back quieter, even more set in his ways. But he’s a good man. I owe him a lot.”
“Why is that?”
“He took me under his wing when I was sent down here in disgrace. He’s the one who taught me about the beauty of the swamp and about listening and waiting.”
Antoinette was surprised at how much Sam had revealed in such a short time. Away from the city he was a different person. She settled back to watch the scenery pass with Tootsie’s head hanging over her shoulder from the back seat. If she’d had any doubts about spending a weekend in the middle of a place that couldn’t decide if it was land or water, she no longer had them. There was something special here, something that made Sam more alive, more relaxed. Whatever it was, she wanted to share it with him.
They stopped for breakfast at a little café with a sign advertising homemade doughnuts and crawfish stew. The coffee was as black as the bayou flowing beside the café, the doughnuts as fresh as the spring-scented air. They ate platters of sausage and scrambled eggs and listened to the lilting accents of the other customers.
There were some with the Deep South cadence of northern Louisiana and Mississippi; there were others whose word sequences had the feel of France. Sam explained that there were still people along the bayous who spoke Cajun French exclusively but more that only used phrases here and there. Sadly, Cajun French had been nearly extinguished by a government and school system that had, years before, arbitrarily decided it was harmful. Now, even with official attempts to cultivate it, much of the language had been lost except in the most isolated parts of the state.
The rest of the trip passed in comfortable silences and official tour-guide rhetoric. The farther they went, the wilder the countryside. They left the paved road and began to drive along a winding, clamshell path that followed a bayou choked with water hyacinth and duckweed. The road twisted and turned, leaving the banks of the bayou, only to dip back again and again. Eventually it was nothing except tire ruts and trampled weeds.
“Is this Bayou Midnight?” Antoinette wanted to know. They had long ago left behind anything resembling civilization. There were boats dotting the bayou, but there had been no houses for close to a mile.
“Not yet. The road has to get rougher, the water blacker.”
Privately Antoinette wondered if either of those things was possible. Twenty minutes later she no longer wondered. Just as she was sure that Sam had brought her into the middle of this wilderness to make some esoteric point, they made a sharp turn and pulled up in back of a house built on the banks of a natural levee bordering a wide, inky waterway.
“We’re home.”
Antoinette was touched by the simple words. It wasn’t their content but the way they were said that tugged at her heart. He might as well have added that this was the place where Sam Long belonged, where he could laugh and love, where he could be the man he truly was. She felt an overwhelming wave of relief sweep over her. Had she wondered all this time what she saw in the man sitting beside her? Had she really wondered if she was imagining all the qualities she had sensed just because she needed and wanted a man with them? There was no reason to wonder any longer. Here, in this place, Sam had no defenses. When he turned to her, the warmth in his eyes was the only answer she would ever need.
“It’s beautiful, Sam.”
The house itself was small, made of wide, sun-bleached cypress boards raised yards off the ground by pilings. The roof was gleaming tin, built at a steep pitch to facilitate drainage and probably, at one time, to help provide drinking water with the addition of a cistern. To the side of the house and closer to the water was a shed with a small dock built off it. There were huge old trees shading the house with Spanish moss draped from their limbs like ghostly beards. The only movement was the breeze that swayed the very tops of the trees and the approach of a spotted hound in no particular hurry to examine them.
“I don’t see Nonc Claude’s car. He’s off somewhere.”
“Are we going to drive to your place and wait till he comes back?” Antoinette asked.
“We don’t drive to my place. We canoe or take Martin’s pirogue. In the springtime my place resembles a boat more than a house.” Sam got out and came around to get Antoinette. Tootsie bounded out and immediately made friends with the hound, disappearing around the side of the house to investigate her new surroundings.
Hand in hand, Antoinette and Sam circled the house, stepping up onto a wide porch shaded by the overhang of the tin roof. Antoinette was enchanted. “Oh, look, Sam. There on the bank. Look at those spider lilies, growing practically in the water.” She pointed, still holding his hand so that she carried it with her. “And there’s a heron. What a magnificent bird.”
Sam had expected her to be a good sport, but he hadn’t expected this genuine enthusiasm.
“We’ve got all the fish you’d ever want to catch, all the birds and flowers you’d ever want to see…” He hesitated a moment and then added a postscript to test her reaction. “And all the gators and moccasins you’ll ever have a yen for.”
Her eyes widened but so did her smile. “I’m not leaving until I get to see a gator. The moccasins I can do without.”
“Have you ever eaten gator?”
Antoinette sensed the dare in his voice. She responded by stiffening her spine. “Alligator sauce piquante. At Antoine’s, if you must know. And I enjoyed it thoroughly.”
“Good. Didi’s cooking a feast for us tonight. She makes a gator sausage you’ll love.”
“Sounds wonderful.” She gave him a radiant smile. “What else can I look forward to?”
“Swamp rabbit.” Sam looked away, but his expression was too relentlessly nonchalant to fool Antoinette. She loved this side of him, and she was happy to play along.
“I love rabbit.”
“Swamp rabbit,” he said, emphasizing the first word.
“All right,” she conceded. “What is it?”
“Fried muskrat.”
Antoinette stared at the water, counting three more jumping fish before she answered him. “I’m always glad to have new experiences.”
“Then there’s nutria stew.”
Antoinette had seen enough nutrias in her time to be completely revolted by the thought of the big orange-toothed rats on her dinner table. “I will not eat nutrias!”
“Good,
neither will any of the rest of us.”
She faced him, hands on hips, but her mock anger disappeared abruptly at the tender expression on Sam’s face. He cupped her chin with his hands and bent for a long, slow kiss.
“I don’t know about you,” he said finally, pulling away, “but I’m ready to go to my place. Are you?”
She wondered if there was any place at all where she wouldn’t follow him. She nodded, waiting on the porch while he scribbled a note to his uncle about their arrival and about Tootsie. Then, arms around each other’s waist, they walked out to the bank of the bayou to find Sam’s canoe.
Chapter 9
“I never would have expected you to know how to canoe.”
“I never would have expected to use what I learned at Camp Winitonka in the middle of a cypress swamp.” Antoinette ducked, avoiding a long strand of moss hanging from a branch overhead. The waterway they were traveling was so narrow that the branches of the willow and cypress trees on either side of them met in the middle and tangled over their heads. The moss seemed to bind them together.
Sam watched from the back of the canoe as Antoinette instinctively stopped paddling to let him guide them around one of the countless cypress stumps blocking their path. Her paddle dipped into the water once again with a clean, straight stroke, and he silently admired the inherent grace present in that simple movement.
“In the winter this gets so low it takes a pirogue to get through. Nonc Claude and Martin build their own. Martin always says Nonc Claude’s pirogues can ride the dew.”
“I had no idea this would be so beautiful.” Antoinette’s voice was reverent. “It’s not beautiful like the endless views of the ocean or the mountains. Some of it’s plain, almost dull. Then you see a picture, one still, glorious picture like that old dead cypress there against the bank or that clump of willow trees with the sky behind it, and you realize just how breathtaking it is.”
Sam smiled to himself and wondered if Antoinette realized how much pleasure her words gave him.
“No one else has ever been here,” she continued. “No one. I’m sure of it.”
He could have pointed out numerous signs of civilization: the Styrofoam markers leading to hidden traps and trotlines, the cleanly cut stumps of century-old trees, the gris-gris bag hung by a superstitious bayou dweller who was using his special brand of voodoo to scare off predators. He pointed out none of them, sure that Antoinette would rather pretend. He found he liked the fantasy himself.
They startled an egret, which rose, its magnificent white wings spread like the snowy sails of a three-masted schooner before it disappeared into the jungle beside them. A garfish swam to the surface close enough for Antoinette to examine it. It was at least six feet long but less than a foot wide, with the head of an alligator and the body of a fish. Sam quickly explained that the fish’s rows of teeth were sharp enough to rip a large bass in two when he saw Antoinette drag her fingertips through the water.
“There’s so much life here,” Antoinette said softly, wiping her hand on her jeans. “I can feel it fermenting all around me, just out of my sight. It’s like…it’s like this is where everything started, primal and wild and fertile.”
“We’re almost to my place.”
“Sam, how can there be a house here? There’s no land.”
“Remember, the water level’s usually much lower.”
They traveled the rest of the way in silence, neither of them wanting to break the stillness of the swamp. They were almost on top of Sam’s cabin before Antoinette saw it.
She had been prepared for another house on pilings, perhaps on stilts. What she saw instead was a cypress cabin, a smaller version of Sam’s uncle’s, on a flat-bottomed barge. It was anchored at a short dock leading to a rise of land—or almost-land—beyond them. The area was so remote and the cabin so well concealed behind the clusters of trees that she had to blink to be sure it was real.
The sky had darkened as they’d canoed the last mile. In response the frogs had begun a symphony as if they’d been fooled into believing that night was coming. The wind had picked up, necessitating deeper, stronger strokes to guide the canoe, and Antoinette realized she was about to experience her first bayou storm.
“Sam, thank you.”
He realized his eyes had shut at her simple, heartfelt gratitude. He opened them, trying to put the words in perspective, but control remained just out of his reach. There was nothing he could do except let himself be moved by the emotion in her voice. If he had hoped she would be a different person here, a person he could easily walk away from, he realized his hopes were for nothing. If anything, she was more herself, more the woman he could fall in love with.
“There’s a storm coming,” he said finally. “We’d better get inside.” He guided the canoe expertly through the trees and beside the barge. The house had been built on the back two-thirds of the deck, leaving room at the front for the canoe. “Hold on to the barge while I get out so we don’t tip, and then I’ll help you up.”
He was out of the canoe and reaching for her hand before Antoinette had a chance to think about his words. She was beside him and the canoe was on the deck before she could murmur “All right.”
She straightened, arms spread wide to encompass it all—the swamp, the cabin, the man. “It’s wonderful. Perfect.”
He tried to see it through her eyes. He saw a weather-beaten one-room cabin on a rusting steel barge, secreted behind a stand of waterlogged cypress. He slapped lazily at a deerfly and admired the childlike delight on her face. “When you were a child, did you ever have a special place all your own?”
She stepped closer, touching her fingers to his lips. “If I tell you, will you promise not to laugh?”
He nodded solemnly, grasping her fingers and keeping them where she had placed them.
“Mignon and I had a French governess the year I was nine. Charlotte was a child at heart, a Gallic Mary Poppins. She’d nod and murmur polite French phrases whenever my mother told her what to do, then as soon as Mother was out of earshot, she did whatever she thought was best.”
Sam was glad to hear her childhood hadn’t been all formality and fussiness. “And your special place?” He kissed her fingertips.
Antoinette lowered her eyes to his mouth. “There was a shed where the gardener was supposed to keep his tools. He was a mean old man, but Charlotte found out that he was making a real dent in my father’s liquor supply. In exchange for not telling my father, she got him to clean his tools out of the shed, and, with her help, we transformed it into our secret hideaway. We could be ourselves there, laugh as loud as we wanted, call each other nasty names if we were mad, read comic books, chew gum. We could even invite some of the kids in the neighborhood who we weren’t allowed to play with.” She smiled at the memory, glad to be sharing it with Sam. Then she continued.
“One day my parents discovered what had been going on. The tools went back into the shed, Charlotte went back to France and my mother went to an architect to have him design the perfect little playhouse for us. I think I played there exactly twice. Mignon wouldn’t even set foot in it.”
She smoothed her fingers over his lips. “So you see, I’m a soft touch for secret places. And obviously you are, too.”
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Sam put his arm around her shoulders, guiding her toward the cabin. He felt distinctly protective, a feeling he had reserved for only a few people in his life. “You’re going to feel right at home. This isn’t much fancier than a toolshed.”
But it was. The barge was wide and long, large enough to accommodate a substantial dwelling. The cabin had been put together with love and skill, each board fitting precisely against its neighbor to discourage the one thousand and one species of Louisiana insects from setting up residence. There were large windows on three walls, each graced with a fine mesh screen and placed to encourage the free flow of air. But the best surprise was at the back, where a row of doors opened onto a screened-in porch that could only
be reached from the inside of the cabin.
The cabin was sparsely furnished, but Antoinette suspected that each item had been chosen carefully. There were oval rag rugs on the floor, chairs and a cable spool table that looked as if it’d been transformed by a local craftsman, a cast-iron wood stove for heat and a propane stove in the corner for cooking. There were shelves with neatly stacked canned goods and perishable items in jars. Pots and pans and other necessities hung from nails over a counter that was half taken up by an old-fashioned water pump. The effect was primitive but comfortable. There was only one major furnishing that was missing. A bed.
“Come see the porch,” Sam invited.
The bed was on the porch. It sat in the middle, overlooking a view of sky and water and wildlife that Antoinette was sure couldn’t be topped anywhere in the world.
Sam put his arm around her and pulled her closer. “I moved to the porch last time I was here. I’ll leave the bed here until fall, then take it back inside.”
Antoinette was staring at the flowered sheets. The mattress was wide enough for two, although just barely, and it resembled a gigantic pillow more than a Sealy Posturepedic. Somehow she felt reassured. If it had been a narrow, single bed, she would have wondered about Sam’s intentions. If it had been a standard double or, worse yet, a king-size bed, she would have wondered about all the women who had shared it with him in the past. As it was, it was large enough for them both if they stayed entwined through the night. And that was just fine with her.
“Have you ever slept on Spanish moss?” he asked, running his fingers through the hair draped across her shoulder.
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