Postmark Bayou Chene

by Gwen Roland

  Don’t know why he had to ask. They all knew I’d be heading out to see her soon as my feets they hit the bank. I took the pouch and hung the strap over my own shoulder.

  “Shore ’nuff, Patin, but don’t you want to walk up there with me?”

  “Naw, Captain says I gotta stay on his watch till noon, then I’m going berry picking. Tot’s gonna pay me a dime a bucket.”

  He took off back the way he come, and me, I turn across the island toward the post office. The path cut through where York Bertram had his sawmill, a charcoal pit, a whiskey still, and a two-story house. York hisself was dozing by a big pile of wood that he was turning into charcoal. The steam, she go pht, pht in the cool air.

  “Got anything for me?” he asked, not wasting a bonjour on me. “Save me the trip to the post office?”

  York, him is all the time looking for a way to save some time or money, like he needs more of that stuff than most people. His eyes watered from watching the fire all night. You got to keep it from blazing up or smothering under that cover of dirt. Most people that sold charcoal hired boys to watch the fires, but not York. He probably sat there through the night, him counting the pennies he done saved in a year by doing it hisself.

  I went through the mail sack.

  “Well, let’s see here,” I says, “looks like something being sent back to Mary Ann is all.”

  York, he squinched up his eyes at the envelope. M. A. Bertram, Bayou Chene, Louisiana, the return address said. Then SOUTHERN LETTER UNPAID was stamped in blue over a name and address I didn’t know: M. Poussant, Hautes-Pyrénées, France.

  I guess York didn’t know the name too. He was still squinching at it and didn’t even notice when I told him au revoir and then yelled over to Fate carrying that dog across the clearing.

  2

  As postmaster, Adam had his own take on the situation:

  Come right down to it, I’d have to side with Val and say it all commenced with the letter, but then again, I am partial to mail.

  I do know Loyce and Fate are always gonna argue about something, and Val’s always ready to egg ’em on. That morning I paid attention with one ear; you get used to that if you watch over as many people as I do. Sure enough, they settled down from yelling to plain old arguing before I finished straining the milk. I set the bowl in the icebox so Loyce could get to it when it was ready for skimming. Then I picked up the mailbag where Val had dropped it on the bench and went on across the hall to take up my official position as Bayou Chene postmaster. Most people think of me as just the storekeeper, but without the post office we wouldn’t have a store or much of anything else here on the Chene.

  I take care of the mail for about three hundred people. Everyone calls it the Chene, but we’re scattered on islands all over this part of the swamp where the ’Chafalaya comes charging full force through Lake Mongoulois, bringing water down from the Red River and the Mississippi. The main river channel pours through Big Bayou Chene, where the largest paddle wheelers follow it down through Lake Chicot, then Grand Lake, and on to the Gulf. But a lot of that water branches off around Big Bayou Chene into a maze of quieter bayous all sizes and shapes.

  Our houses and houseboats are settled in along these bayous. Jakes Bayou, where I keep the post office, shoots off from the big river a little upstream of Big Bayou Chene, which is why we get quieter water. Oh yes, there’s Big Bayou Chene, Little Bayou Chene, and even Bayou Crook Chene, where it makes whopping big loops.

  There’s plenty bayous like Jakes Bayou—named for people alive, dead, or just lost in history back there somewhere. Take your pick, there’s Bayou Jean Louis, Bayou Cozine, Willie’s Bayou, Murphy’s Bayou, and more. There’s a whole run of unlucky-sounding names like Bloody Bayou, Dead Man Bayou, Blind Bayou, and Graveyard Bayou. The one where some people look for buried treasure is Four Hundred Dollar Bayou.

  There’s more bayous out here than names for them; if you want to name one, go ahead. Somebody else might name it something else next year or the year after. Just let me know where you settle so I can send your mail out when someone goes that way. No matter if you don’t come in for months, I’ll hold your mail. That’s my sworn duty, and I take pride in doing it right.

  As for the mess in the store they all talk about? It’s not nearly as bad as they put on. There’s a path right through the fish traps and around the dry goods tables. Sure, you have to navigate a little around the salt blocks and the barrels of tar, sugar, or flour, but the coffee bean sacks are easy to see. What all that mess of goods amounts to is just about everything Cheners can’t dip or wring from the swamp. You have to keep your eye on the clear spaces and even understand that sometimes the path moves around, depending on what’s come in and gone out recently, but it’s there. You just have to look for it.

  That day, as usual, when I reached the post office side and set the mail sack on the counter, I took out the packages first—prescription medicine for Ida Mendoza’s seizures and eyeglasses that Pie Richard had mailed off to be fixed more than a month past. Those seizures could make Ida fall down any time or place, and she got nervous when her medicine was low, started skipping pills. And Pie can’t tell whether she’s grabbing an egg or a chicken snake in the nest without her glasses. I set those two packages on the counter to remind me in case one of their neighbors came in. If no one came, I’d walk across the island before dark and deliver them myself. Just one more thing when you have a lot of people to watch out for. I picked up the first handful of letters and slid them into pigeonholes nailed to the wall behind the counter.

  Of course, everybody goes on about how neat the post office corner is compared to the store. Well, that’s the way my wife, Josie, set it up when she started sorting the mail right there in that corner after she finished third grade. Back then Josie’s pa, Elder Landry, was the postmaster, and Mame Landry ran the store. Josie wasn’t much more than a big kid when Elder died, but she took over the rest of the post office work as if he were still postmaster. She kept that corner neat as a pin until the night she died.

  None of us will likely forget that night when we lost half our family—not just my dear Josie but her brother, Lauf, and his wife, Beatrice, as well. Fate and Loyce were around six years old. Josie and I had lost two babies before Loyce was born and had hoped for more to come.

  Beatrice was supposed to have a few more weeks before her next baby came, but her labor started. There was nothing else to do but put Beatrice in the boat and set out across Lake Mongoulois in the dark. It would take twice as long to go over there and bring the midwife back. The last Mame and I saw of them, Lauf was standing up rowing, and Beatrice was sitting in the bottom. Josie was on the bow, holding a lantern, not so much to see but to be seen.

  As anyone can tell you, even on a dark night the glint of water can guide you between the banks. So, the danger is not what you might run over but that a big boat could run over you and never even know it. That’s what happened. No one heard them cry out, no paddle wheeler ever claimed to be the one that hit them. They just never made it across the lake.

  When they didn’t come back and we eventually faced up to what happened, Mame went daft. So, you might say I lost her too. She had been more than just a mother-in-law. My own mother signed up to be a census taker around the Chene while I was in college. During months of rowing around these bayous asking about other people’s families, Mama and her partner took a notion to get married themselves. They moved back to his home in New Iberia and later to Chicago when he inherited a family business there. Mame looked after me, along with Lauf and Josie. Of course, we were mostly grown by then.

  After the drownings I grieved for Mame just like I grieved for the dead ones. Her hair turned white overnight; if you don’t believe it, ask anyone who knew her back then. Later years, when she let it down, you could see the black part hanging almost to her knees. There was a sharp line where the black stopped and then white went all the way up, no gray at all. In summer the white part would turn pink, green, and blue as her
bonnets faded from her sweat.

  Mame never was big, but after that she shrunk down to mostly bones, and she pretty much hid out under that bonnet. Tending the flowers and vegetable garden around the store was sort of her comfort. We all got used to seeing her crouched over the plants with her hatchet or butcher knife, chopping out the weeds. She looked like a bundle of rags that someone intended to put away but hadn’t decided where. Her back started to curve from all that squatting so that she eventually had to sew her clothes in two pieces—a top and a bottom—that way she could make one side longer to cover the hump.

  As years went by, she didn’t seem unhappy, just sort of removed. These tuneless Latin-sounding hymns would come floating out from beneath her bonnet. It was a puzzle where she picked up that music, since back then we only had the Methodist church out here. I figured the musical memory must be from her childhood and brought escape from her loss. If you walked by, she’d break off humming and nod her head but mostly didn’t bother to look up to see who spoke to her.

  She stopped cooking and even stopped eating with us. Eating was the last thing on my own mind, but Fate and Loyce didn’t have anyone else, so I started figuring out how to get plates to the table with something on them. As far as I could tell, Mame just passed through the kitchen now and then and picked up a piece of cornbread or a baked sweet potato. I’d see her eating out of hand while squatting on her haunches looking over her work in the yard.

  Everybody handles grief their own way. For me reading and cooking became a comfort, just like pulling weeds seemed to comfort Mame. While she plunged into despair after the drownings, I suppose I just sort of waded in over my head. My own grief got buried under trying to raise a blind daughter alone, keep the store and post office open for the rest of them, and halfway looking after Fate and Mame.

  It seemed like all those details started to cover me up like moss in a grove of oaks. I gave up fishing but still couldn’t get ahead of all there was to do. Deliveries came to the store, and I just stashed them in any vacant spot. Customers got used to searching for things they wanted to buy or had ordered, so I just left out the pry bar and hammer for them to open the crates and barrels. It got to where layers of dust told me how long something had been part of the inventory.

  Sometimes I just let everything go and lost myself in a book. At first it was Little Women, one of Josie’s favorites as a child. A strange choice for a man, you might say, but all that domesticity was a comfort to me. Besides, it was about a parent trying to handle everything alone, like me. Mrs. March seemed a lot better at it than I was, but I noticed that the book didn’t mention who did the washing of all those big skirts and petticoats.

  Later I spent a lot of time in The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s story about traveling all over the world. He went just about everywhere and didn’t back up from saying when he didn’t approve of something. Before Josie drowned, we used to take turns reading that one aloud to the rest of the family. She’d get to laughing so hard, I had to take over from her most nights.

  Come down to it, which book I read didn’t matter. Mostly I just took comfort from handling the pages and breathing deep of the covers she treasured. It brought her close to me again.

  I know some say I’m lazy, especially when they come in and see me sitting on a case of canned goods with my nose in a book, but that’s not the whole story. As a U.S. postmaster, the mail is my sworn duty. Along with sorting what comes in, I help people get their packages and letters ready to go out of this swamp and into the world. Sometimes I write down the most personal kind of information for my customers who can’t do it themselves—applications for war widow pensions, notes to relatives about births, letters telling the inside story of marriages, not to mention the death notices of every man, woman, and child who dies here with relatives off somewhere. I know the secrets of every family on the Chene, a privilege I don’t take lightly.

  And when it comes to the store, why, every baby still gets weighed on my dry goods scale until they pass the twenty-pound limit. That hasn’t changed since the days of Elder Landry. And don’t forget that letting people serve themselves when I’m busy doing something else is an advantage if a customer is short of cash; he just pays what he has in his pocket and writes what he owes in the account book. Some people say my way of doing business hasn’t turned a profit since Josie died. Can’t say whether that’s true or not, but I know it’s kept goods flowing through the Chene and helped more than one family during hard times. Still and all, I’m probably not as good at running the store as I am at being postmaster.

  The morning that dog showed up, I was just about finished sorting the letters when the screen door opened and slammed shut again. I knew from all the commotion coming with her it was Mary Ann Bertram. She’s married to Mame’s nephew, York Bertram.

  Mame’s baby brother, Martin, settled in Plaquemine after the war. He never came back, even for a visit, but his son, York, moved here a few years ago, bringing his bride, Mary Ann. They’ve made a good run of the old homestead where Jakes Bayou splits off from Lake Mongoulois and takes its own winding way down to Lake Chicot. The Bertrams had a sugar mill on that point before the war. Now York’s turned it into a place to make lumber, charcoal, whiskey, and I don’t know what all.

  York’s plum crazy about machines—in fact, that’s how he met Mary Ann. Her pa has a big machine shop in Plaquemine, and York was always fooling around in the shop with her brothers.

  Mary Ann, now, it’s critters she loves, especially those horses that pull her wagon. She does a handy business delivering goods from the Jakes Bayou dock all around our island, including to my store. That morning she brought a hunk of ice for my icebox. Mary Ann is as jolly as York is glum.

  “Adam Snellgrove, I’ve seen pigpens cleaner than this! If there was another store around, I’d shop there.” She always starts talking soon as she gets through the door, sometimes before.

  I’m tall, and her blue eyes were even with mine as she pushed her way through the merchandise. Instead of a bonnet, she pulls a felt hat down over her hair and ties it with a leather cord. As usual, a man’s flannel shirt was tucked into canvas work pants, which were tucked into tall rubber boots. She gets her rough-and-tumble ways from being the only girl in her family.

  “Well, you’d be the expert there,” I said. “How’s that new litter coming along on those Dr. Legeare vitamins?”

  “Eating like hogs, ever one of ’em. Never saw a turnaround so quick on a bunch of runts.”

  “I don’t remember who ordered those vitamins or even what kind of livestock they were for, but I’m glad they came in handy,” I said, and I meant it.

  Mary Ann has helped all of us at one time or another with our animals. You’d never know she wasn’t from the Chene—in fact, only been here a few years.

  “Hmmph,” she grunted with the effort of moving a crate. “There’s no telling what’s packed away in here. If you’d ever clean this place up we’d all know.”

  She swiped a cloud of dust off a pair of black rubber boots and checked the size on the bottom before placing them on the counter.

  “That rooster spurred another hole in York’s boot, the left one again. I told him not even you are going to sell me one boot, so tally up this pair. It’s gonna aggravate the tar out of him to have those two extra right boots. Whatcha wanna bet he’ll be dancing a jig trying to get the right one spurred next time. Any mail for us today?”

  “Nope, I just got through sorting what Val brought in,” I said. Just then Alcide Verret pulled open the screen door. The old spring waited a bit before slamming closed behind him. I always listened for the time it just couldn’t pull anymore. Then I’d change it out. That meant looking for my extra springs, and I hadn’t gotten around to that yet.

  Cide’s suspenders were run up as short as they would go, but he still crossed them in the back, trying to take them up a little more. He might be short, but he’s thick and strong. I’ve seen him pull a crosscut saw with two men on the other
end, holding up his part and talking the whole time. Might be why people rarely notice how short he is. Or how old. He’s foggy about when he was born, but no one on the Chene can remember a time when he wasn’t here.

  “What a rain last night! I had to kick my way through drowned frogs just to get to my pirogue this morning,” he said.

  Cide’s always good for a colorful take on a situation. He also likes the ladies, and he winked up at Mary Ann, who snagged him right up in a headlock and ruffled his white hair. The ladies like him back.

  “Speaking of drowned, Fate pulled a dog out of the bayou this morning,” I said. “Don’t know if she’ll make it. Loyce has her over in the kitchen drying out.”

  “Couldn’t she swim?” Mary Ann let go of Cide and looked back at me.

  “Probably real good,” I said, “But she was tied to an empty skiff. No telling how far she come. It’s black with blue trim, not from anywhere close to here.”

  “Guess somebody’ll be pulling up a body on their net anchor ’fore long.” Cide shook his head in sympathy.

  Mary Ann stomped to the other side of the breezeway to inspect the box and give us all advice for the dog’s recovery. By noon the story of the mysterious skiff and its passenger had made the rounds, and the dog had officially picked up the name Drifter.

  At that time none of us knew about the letter.

  3

  Two weeks later the little dog was still hanging on but was more mysterious than ever.

  “Fate, how about scraping the leftovers into this, and I’ll see if I can get Drifter to eat a bite,” Loyce said, sliding a pie tin across the table.

  Fate wasn’t surprised when it stopped just short of the edge. They had been practicing such diversions for so long it was second nature.

  “Half-inch, not bad,” was all he said.