by Gwen Roland
“Whoooeee, he looks mighty bad, Adam.” Val’s voice came from the other side of the bed. “Do you think we should take his clothes off, or will the skin come with it?”
“Don’t matter if it does, they have to come off. Let’s be quick before he comes to,” Adam said.
Boots shuffled, the mattress rustled, and the bed frame creaked. Loyce backed into a corner, out of the way. She smelled something like burnt cotton and scalded chicken mixed with whiskey. Roseanne’s skirt brushed past, trailing a carbolic fragrance Loyce recognized as the ointment Adam used when he picked up a hot skillet by mistake.
“York’s still blew up? How does that happen?” Roseanne asked, when she came back to stand out of the way with Loyce.
“No one seems to know,” Loyce said. “How bad is it?”
Roseanne took stock of the injuries a moment longer before replying.
“Well, there’s blisters already full of water and looking to be swelling even more inside of his thighs. I can’t imagine how he got burned like that. His palms look pretty raw, and the tops of his hands are sprinkled with smaller blisters. His face looks like it was splashed with hot water. I don’t know what would cause that pattern of injuries unless he was sitting astride his still when it exploded. Is that part of the distilling process?”
“I don’t know,” Loyce replied. “I can smell the difference when he’s using corn or sugarcane to make it, but that’s all I know about it.”
“Well, it doesn’t look life-threatening, but he’s going to be in pain a considerable amount of time. If he hadn’t been wearing thick underwear and pants, his privates would be badly burned.”
Just then steps pounded up the back path and burst through the open door.
“Oh Lordy mercy! How bad is it?” Mary Ann threw her brown felt hat on the floor in exasperation. “I didn’t mean for to hurt him. I just wanted to get him back for turning loose my hogs.”
“Whaaat?” Adam asked.
“I put an old dirt dauber nest in that pressure relief valve to cause him some aggravation. It must of started the still to jumping, and that fool straddled it to hold it down.”
Her footsteps crisscrossed themselves. Then she stood, fists on hips, at the foot of the bed and leaned over to get a better look at York, as if he were the runt in a new litter of pigs.
“He’s had a case of the mean-as-a-snake-itis for the longest time, and I just got tired of it. Turning my hogs loose was too much, and I was bound not to let him get away with it. I never done a thing to deserve the way he’s been treating me.”
“Mmmph.” As York’s senses returned, his voice was muffled and weak but angry.
“Mmmph,” he said again.
Mary Ann picked up his pants. “What? Is there something in here you want? You want to see if anyone stole something while they were hauling your burnt-raw carcass over here? Here’s your billfold, see?”
She held up the worn black leather rectangle. York reached toward it. Wincing with the effort, he yanked the pocketbook from her hands and clumsily opened it with his burned fingers. Slowly he withdrew a small envelope. It wavered in his shaking fingers as he lifted it toward her.
Mary Ann opened the envelope and took out the page of unlined paper. She read aloud.
“Michaud, by next year this time there will be three of us. Please send me passage as soon as you get this letter. I’m looking forward to being in France when my time comes so we can start our family in your country—ours is falling apart. All my love, Mary Ann.”
“Who’s Michaud?” Mary Ann puzzled.
“You tell me.” York blinked his eyes, which were lopsided because of a growing water blister on the right side of his face.
“You think I wrote this?” She waved the little blue sheet of paper, which looked incongruous in her broad calloused hand. “You don’t even know what my handwriting looks like! York Bertram, you’re an even bigger ass than I took you for. How’d I get to know anybody in France?”
“Don’t know. Maybe someone you met at your daddy’s shop, same as I done?” Yelling was easier now that he was coming to his senses. “Why would anyone sign your name on a letter you didn’t write?”
“I ain’t got an idea about that, but I know this ain’t my letter, ain’t never been my letter, I never saw this piece of paper before.” Concern had left her voice. Now she just sounded mad. Loyce winced back from the noise.
“Can I see it?” Adam took a step between the warring couple. Mary Ann handed him the letter and envelope.
He walked to the window and examined the two paper items. “It was mailed from Bayou Chene all right. ‘INSUFFICIENT POSTAGE, SOUTHERN LETTER UNPAID,’” he read aloud. “I’ve never seen a blue postal mark like this. What’s this? June 21? Today’s only June 13. Wait a minute—the year stamped on this is 1861!”
No one had noticed Mame’s slight frame in the open doorway, clutching a bundle of comfrey in one hand. She dropped the comfrey, shuffled forward, and wordlessly took the letter in her left hand. She gently passed her right index finger across the address.
“Michaud,” Mame finally said in a kind of whisper. “So that’s what happened.”
All eyes in the room turned to her. Loyce tilted her head in that direction. As Alcide would describe the scene later, “Right then, the Angel Gabriel himself trumpeting into that room couldn’t of broke our concentration. There was nowhere else to look or listen for any of us, let me tell you!”
Mame’s thin shoulders began to shake, but instead of crying, she was chuckling. The bonnet slid off the pink and green– streaked bun onto her shoulders as she threw her head back and cranked up a laugh like no one had heard since before the drownings. After a while the bed creaked, and York yelped as the old woman dropped onto the foot of the mattress, still cackling with mirth. Then she told them.
“Michaud came the spring before the war started. Wanting to learn all he could about growing indigo, of all things. Where he was from in France, they made their living selling some kind of seashell that blue dye was made from. He said when the indigo plantations over here started taking away that market, it just made sense to try to get into the indigo business themselves—not just his family but the whole region there. Oh, he was quite the figure—tall, with that black hair and green eyes. Swept me right off my feet.” She chuckled again at the memory.
“He was staying right here with Elder, that room up over the store where Roseanne stays now. Bought up a whole sugar plantation and planted it in indigo all at the same time. Everyone told him sugar was the thing to plant out here then, but he was bound and determined for indigo. I was taking care of Josie—it wasn’t long since Maudie passed. Elder knew Michaud and me had taken up together. Two youngsters like us, wasn’t no surprise. And Michaud was a ruckus all by himself, could cheer up a funeral if you gave him a chance. We was all glad for the merriment he brought after what we’d been through.
“He left around Easter and was supposed to come back at harvest time to see how the indigo was processed. But the war started in early summer, and everything changed—I mean everything! For one thing they broke loose that big logjam up where the Red River comes in. When the extra water started coming down the ’Chafalaya, it covered Michaud’s plantation plum up, which was on low ground to start with. He never did come back, so I guess he never knew. I reckon he give up on his blue dye when the war started. That’s when they started calling it Indigo Island, though. I had about forgot that’s where the name came from.”
Mame’s attention swerved away from Michaud back to the envelope.
“I remember when they started using that blue stamp, stopping letters that had postage paid with Confederate money. A few of those letters made it back to the post office during that time, mostly letters meant for our boys gone to the war. It would’ve meant a lot for them to get news from home.”
“Ol’ Michaud!” Alcide said. “Tall fella, Frenchy speech, but not like the Cajuns around here. Sure, I remember him.”
Mame took up her telling again. Her voice was stronger and not so far away as it usually sounded.
“Once the war started, I could understand him not trying to come back, but I wondered about him not answering my letter. Now I see it never got to him. As time went by without us hearing anything from Michaud and my condition got more noticeable, Elder was the one who came up with the idea that we could solve both our problems if him and me would just go ahead and get married. It made sense because I was already taking care of Josie. It was Josie who started calling me Mame, ’cause she couldn’t say “Mary Ann.” I was growing up so fast in the midst of all that and the war to boot, so it wasn’t long before Michaud was as much a part of my childhood as my corn shuck dolls. I haven’t thought about him for years.”
“When Lauf turned out to be one of them early babies, everyone kidded old Elder to no end,” Alcide broke in with a laugh.
“That’s right, he didn’t back up from taking the credit,” Mame chuckled. “He made a good daddy—better’n I was raised with, that’s for sure. Treated Lauf like he was his own.”
“So that’s where Lauf and Fate got them long legs from!” Alcide chortled. “Might be where they got their dislike of hard work, too, seeing as how they came from a line of high-falutin’ business stock.”
“I don’t care where anybody got anything,” York spoke up. “I’m an injured man; do I have to drag myself down to the dock and get a deckhand to help me out?”
This brought a round of argument about the merits of the comfrey and honey compared to the tin of ointment. Loyce didn’t have an opinion because her mind was still on Mame’s story.
“Maybe we should mix them all together so as not to miss anything,” Adam suggested.
“Mais non!” Val offered. “Put the store medicine on one side, with honey and comfrey on the other. See which one works best, once and for all. Me, I’ll go get the honey.”
“Whatever you put on it, what’s he gonna wear until it heals?” Mame asked. “He’s not stepping into pants for a long time, I can tell you that much.”
“Well, I can tell you something else; I ain’t laying abed till it heals!” York’s voice was taking on its normal belligerent tone. Loyce could hear the change even through her distraction.
“The best thing I can think of is a dress,” Mary Ann spoke up. “I don’t have any dresses, but I have an old nightgown that will do. In fact, what difference does it make whether it’s a nightgown or a dress?”
“A dress!” York exploded. “I ain’t putting on no dress or a gown, I’ll tell you that right now.”
“Well, what other ideas you got for covering your blistered privates for the next few weeks?” Mary Ann shot back.
In the noisy debate over how to treat and dress the injured man, only the blind girl noticed that Fate had slipped from the room without saying a word to anyone.
13
It had been three weeks since the explosion. No one needed to spread the news that York was recovering under Mary Ann’s reluctant care. Their arguments could be heard by anyone who paddled past the front of their big house or walked the path behind it. Eventually, the patient was seen stomping around his compound, spraddle-legged under a voluminous nightgown.
The letter that led to the blast shook up more than the Bertram marriage. It shook loose something in Mame, like a clock that gets jarred back into motion after being stopped for too long. That first night she and Mary Ann took turns sitting up with York. The next morning, when her nephew went home in the pony cart, Mame rode alongside Mary Ann, carrying a fresh bundle of comfrey and the jar of honey.
She tirelessly nursed her ailing nephew through the first critical week without coming home. When she moved back to her houseboat, she brought meals to York and Mary Ann from Adam’s kitchen. She tended to York during the days, while Mary Ann kept up with orders at the sawmill and charcoal pit. People began to notice that Mame’s eyes focused on the present, and she carried her end of conversations as if she had not withdrawn for more than a decade.
When asked about the change, she shrugged and said, “I’ve grieved long enough. We lost so many during the war. After, when the sugar didn’t come back, whole families left. Losing Josie, Lauf, and Beatrice on top of the others, it was too much, I reckon.”
She stopped and thought a moment before continuing.
“All those years I paid notice only to the ones leaving and dying. But there was life coming back too. Some young people like York coming home and bringing a wife from outside. New people like the Stocketts moving in from other places. I can’t do anything to help the dead and gone, but these young ones are my family too. It’s time for me to come back. Past time.”
If the letter dragged Mame back into the life of the community, it seemed to drive Fate away. Because of Mame staying with York, several days passed before anyone noticed that Fate wasn’t living at their little houseboat tied up at the post office dock. Debris tangled in his nets as the water fell. No one saw his boat maneuvering the bayous around the Chene. Even though he had often visited around to the other swamp communities, Fate had never been away from the Chene for long. Just when Adam started to worry that they may need to drag the bayous for him, word came that Fate had been spotted upriver around Atchafalaya Station.
The sighting brought as much speculation as his disappearance. Was it a coincidence that he just up and left the very day that letter arrived? Did he think anyone cared that his grandfather wasn’t really Elder Landry? Mame, herself, said she had not kept it a secret from him; she just never thought to mention it. Maybe it would have come up if Lauf had lived, but what with the drownings and all the grief that followed, she just never thought about it. Ever. Even if the news of his father’s paternity startled Fate, why would he just up and leave?
No one felt Fate’s absence like Loyce. She rocked and wondered. Other than when she was away at school, she had never been separated from her cousin for so long. Cousin? Not exactly. What was he now, anyway?
Her little family just kept on shrinking. Somewhere along the way—she didn’t even remember when—she had found out that Josie’s parents were Maudie and Elder, making them Loyce’s real grandparents, not Mame and Elder. The news didn’t affect her one way or the other. How could she miss someone she never knew?
It wasn’t like losing her mother. Loyce still tried to summon her voice, her touch, the smell of her skin, but the sensations faded more each year. Even so, being lonesome for her didn’t fade. It simply changed from the practical needs of a child to the deeper yearning of a young woman needing guidance into the world of adults.
For most of her life Adam, Fate, and Mame had to supply all Loyce had in the way of family. With Adam so busy and distracted, Mame so absent, she depended on Fate for help learning to tie her shoes or navigating the plank walks. He was there for whatever she needed, without ever reminding her that he had lost both parents.
Now the letter had changed all that by taking away Fate—one-third of her remaining family. If Mame and Michaud were Fate’s grandparents, then Fate wasn’t even her cousin. The more she thought on it, the more her anger grew. How was she supposed to act around him now if they weren’t even kin? Is that how he was feeling about her? Was that the reason he was making himself so scarce?
As Loyce mulled over these questions on the porch, inside the post office conversations settled back into routine happenings. Customers were catching up with each other in a steady hum. Children chased around the front yard, bare feet thumping whenever they touched down on the springy plank walks. Chickens fluttered out of the way, sometimes even launching into short flights to the porch banister or a low branch in an oak tree. Boat whistles and bells sounded through the trees. Three steamboats had docked at daylight, their cooks, crews, and passengers adding to the bustle in the store.
A breeze stirred through the open window. Leaf-shaped light filtered through the sycamore tree onto the neat shelves lined with goods. Bolts of bright cloth contrasted with the sun-bleached
bonnets and dresses of the customers. The smell of tarred nets and fresh fish wafted through the window to blend with fragrant cheese, coffee beans, leather, and soap inside. Layered scents of trees, soft earth, and the cow lot drifted in from the back.
“Adam, a body can look forward to coming here now that we don’t have to dig through boxes and barrels for every little thing,” said a customer with one child on her hip and another holding onto her skirt.
“Well, I’d be amiss to take the credit,” Adam replied good- naturedly from the post office corner, where he was bent over a piece of lined paper, helping Madame Gilchrist write a letter. “That’s Mrs. Barclay’s doings; be sure and tell her before you go. I saw her pick up a comb and head out to tackle Loyce’s braid,” he chuckled.
Out on the porch Roseanne was untying the twine and separating Loyce’s lopsided braid into three soft tangles.
“For someone who knits nets, you surely can’t make a braid,” she was saying. “Most of it comes loose and falls around your face.”
“Well, it’s not like it gets in the way of my seeing,” Loyce said, but with none of her usual spirit. “Mame, on her good days, used to braid it up high like you do, but she never showed me how. So I just wind it up, tie it off, and let it be. It’s good enough.”
“For one thing it’s too soft,” said C.B. “What your hair needs is some body.”
She’d arrived unannounced through the back of the dogtrot. Roseanne sniffed. Loyce tilted her head in greeting but didn’t offer a comeback.
“If you’d get you some of that olive wax pomade, you could make it stay in place a week or more,” C.B. continued, patting her own frizz, which Roseanne thought leaned even more toward the greenish side of yellow this morning. “When I couldn’t afford olive wax pomade, I’d use egg white mixed with water, but that can get to smelling after a few days. Even so, when I barely had enough to eat, I’d save an egg in case I needed it for my hair.”