Under the Bayou Moon

by Valerie Fraser Luesse

  “The men hunt, fish, and trap—there’s a big market down in Morgan City,” Doc went on. “That’s where they sell what they don’t need. Some o’ the younger ones have found paying work on the oil rigs or big shrimpers in the Gulf. And some of them pick up extra work from the timber companies that operate around the Atchafalaya River. Anything they can’t make, catch, or shoot, they buy at the general store. And when they don’t have money to pay me, why, they pay me however they can, sometimes with chickens, sometimes a pig—whatever they have. Sick young’uns can’t wait for payday.”

  “My uncle’s mercantile back in Alabama works the same way,” Ellie said. “Thursday is chicken-plucking day. I just never saw it happen in a doctor’s office. Speaking of which, why am I here—in your office instead of the school board’s, I mean?”

  “I know it seems strange, but my office doubles as the town hall. If something comes up that involves the whole community, we use the dance hall, but when only the men need to get together, we just do that here or at Chalmette’s.”

  “Did you say dance hall?”

  He chuckled and nodded. “You’ll soon see that Bernadette has a fine sense of rhythm.”

  “Are you from here, Doc?”

  “Born and bred,” he said. “I worked my way through medical school and spent a few years on the staff at a hospital in New Orleans. But I was never happy there. I guess I always felt the pull of the bayou—must’ve been God’s way of telling me I was needed here. What about you, Ellie? What convinced you to come all the way from Alabama—and all by yourself?”

  She pulled an envelope out of her purse and held it up. “Your letter had a lot to do with it. To tell the truth, I’m not sure what I’m doing here. I just knew I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. Guess I’m trying to figure out where that is.”

  Doc nodded. “I remember that feeling. You’ll have to decide for yourself if Bernadette is the place of your calling, but I can tell you this much: You’ll never find another community that needs you more. That’s part of the reason I stay. I have to spend a couple of days a week working at the hospital in Lafayette to pay the bills, but I’m here the rest of the time and can’t imagine being anyplace else.”

  Ellie felt something soft brush against her leg. She reached down and picked up a red hen that had wandered away from the others and let it settle onto her lap.

  When she looked up, Doc was smiling at her. “Farm girl?”

  “Oh yeah,” Ellie said. “Daddy raises cotton and Mama’s in charge of the henhouse—which means I was in charge of the henhouse till I left for college.”

  “I understand you graduated from Alabama Polytech?”

  Ellie raised her right arm and shook an imaginary football pom-pom. “War Eagle.”

  Doc smacked himself on the forehead. “I’ll never be allowed back into LSU stadium if word gets out I’ve recruited a rival Tiger to teach in Bernadette.”

  “What grade will I be teaching, Doc? I don’t think I saw that in my letter from the school board.”

  “No, I expect they left that out on purpose for fear you wouldn’t come. You’ll be teaching the lower grades.”

  “Grades?” Ellie leaned forward in her chair, her eyes wide.

  “All the children under age eleven will take their lessons with you on the ground floor, then they’ll go upstairs to Miss Etta Harrison—most of them stay with her till they’re fourteen or fifteen. After that, the boys go to work, and the girls help out at home till they get married.”

  “But I’ve never taught more than one grade at a time. How many kids are we talking about?”

  “People around here tend to have large families. Best guess, I’d say no more than forty or fifty.”

  “Fifty?”

  The hen stood up, flapped its wings, and clucked a few times before settling back down in Ellie’s lap. She ran her hand over its feathers to settle it down.

  “Now, don’t worry. We can recruit one of the older girls in the community to help you keep order. There’s usually one or two mamas willing to give up some of their help to bring a little extra money in. We don’t pay much, but a little’s a lot when you don’t have anything.”

  Ellie was speechless. To come all this way—uproot herself when everybody back home warned her not to—only to learn she had landed herself in a school with precious few resources. She’d do well just to keep the children in the building, let alone make a difference in their lives.

  “I expect I know what you’re thinking,” Doc said.

  Ellie stroked the hen as much to calm her own nerves as to relax the bird.

  “You’re wondering how quickly you can make it back to Alabama. But just hear me out first. Till we built our school, the children on the bayou had to paddle downriver to the bus stop and then take a ride every morning and every evening. It’s too much to ask of them, Ellie. Children shouldn’t have to paddle a boat and ride a bus back and forth just to get an education. It’s not fair, especially for the little ones. For the longest time, all the school board did about it was complain that the Cajun children were a hindrance to the others because they couldn’t stay awake in class.”

  Ellie let out an exasperated sigh. “Well, I guess not! They were exhausted.”

  “We finally convinced the board that if they’d let us have our own school, we’d build it ourselves—which we did, down to the last nail. The town pays Miss Harrison, and the powers-that-be provide one teacher for the lower grades—usually a bad one.”

  Ellie had stopped petting the chicken, which rubbed its head against her arm, reminding her of her duties. She ran her hand over its feathers, thinking how strange it would be anyplace else to discuss a new job with a chicken in her lap, but somehow it made sense in Bernadette, Louisiana.

  “There’s something I don’t understand, Doc,” she said. “If school is so important to the people here, why don’t they like teachers?”

  Doc removed his glasses and wiped them with a white handkerchief he took from his shirt pocket. Ellie thought his eyes looked sad without the protection of the lenses. He put his glasses back on, folded the handkerchief, and returned it to his pocket, then reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a sealed envelope, which he handed to Ellie. She saw the school board’s insignia in the upper left corner.

  “Those are your instructions from the board,” Doc said. “You can read them after you get settled in, but I’ll go on and tell you the part that’ll answer your question. About twenty years ago, the federal government decided that anybody moving to the United States from another country had to assimilate and ‘become American,’ which, to a bunch of politicians, meant everybody had to sound the same.”

  “How so?”

  “Cajun people who’d been speaking French since they moved here a couple of centuries ago were told their language was un-American, unacceptable, and strictly prohibited in public schools.” Doc grew more emotional and animated as he spoke, his voice rising, his hands waving in the air. “That, of course, was in addition to the prejudices against them already present in Louisiana. Being called backward and having their native tongue openly mocked—years and years of that have made many Cajun parents ashamed of their own language. And their children—by official mandate now—can be punished if they speak it in school.”

  “Punished? How?”

  He slapped the top of one hand with the other. “A ruler whack on the hand, writing ‘I will speak English only’ over and over on the chalkboard after school, public humiliation like standing with their nose in the corner of the classroom . . .”

  Ellie crossed her arms. “I’m flat-out not doing that.”

  “They’ll say you have to,” the doctor countered.

  “They can say whatever they want.”

  The doctor leaned back in his chair and smiled. “A rebellious nature will make you feel right at home in Louisiana. I apologize for getting so worked up, but we’re talking about the education—the future—of our children.”

  The chicken st
ood up in Ellie’s lap, ruffled its feathers, and then sat back down. She scratched its soft neck. “Why does the state of Louisiana even care what the people do in a town this small and remote? I think the children need to learn English, but what harm could possibly come of letting them speak French too, especially if that’s how they communicate with their grandparents?”

  “Absolutely none,” Doc answered. “And I’m not sure the state would be so adamant about stamping out French if it weren’t for pure old-fashioned Louisiana politics. There’s a powerful state senator named Roy Strahan—‘Big Roy’ to his cronies. He’s gotten filthy rich off shady dealings to buy up oil rights all over the state, and he recently got his son, Boone, made the superintendent of education. Never mind that young Boone’s college degree is in forestry. He knows absolutely nothing about educating children. Big Roy let him work for the park service for a few years before he decided it was time for Boone to enter the family business, which is crooked politics. The senator always has Junior right there when he takes to the stump to preach on progress, promising to stamp out ‘the scourge of French’ so Louisiana can join the rest of America in the great march forward, now that the war’s over.”

  “Do they honestly believe that?”

  “The Strahans believe in the Strahans, or at least Big Roy does,” Doc said. “Apparently, he means to pave the way for Boone to follow in his footsteps whether he wants to or not, and the state department of education’s as good a place as any to start. It’s got plenty of visibility—not much of a budget but a valuable pulpit.”

  “And you don’t think Boone’s up to the job?”

  “I’m telling you, Ellie, Louisiana has schoolchildren without food to eat, children who don’t get proper medical care and don’t have warm clothes in the wintertime—all worthy pursuits for the superintendent. But no, the senator would rather have his boy devote himself to making sure innocent bayou kids aren’t bilingual. If you ask me, it’s just an excuse to snoop around down here, looking for oil. And they’ve been helped along by an evangelist named Brother Lester Dobbs who believes French is the language of Catholics and Catholicism is idol worship. He travels all over Louisiana preaching to packed tents filled with people all too ready to believe that anything they don’t understand must be evil.”

  “How often does the superintendent come down here?” Ellie asked.

  “The last one came the first Monday of every month—and let me tell you, he was a true believer. He really thought French speakers were holding back the whole state. It’s an unfortunate quality of human beings that we’re prone to condemn the unfamiliar. I don’t have any reason to expect better from a Strahan, but I’ll reserve judgment till Boone makes his first appearance. In any case, the end result of all this nonsense is that we have a community full of Cajun children who either hate school or are scared to death of it.”

  “Children can’t learn when they’re afraid.”

  “No, they can’t. I agree that all of these children need to learn English—they’ve got to be able to speak it, read it, and write it if they want to get on in the world. But to punish one—especially a little one—because he slips into French now and then? That’s not right.”

  “How on earth will I ever convince the people here to let me teach their kids?” Ellie asked.

  “They’ll send their children to school because they want them to learn, in spite of all the obstacles and hardships the state has thrown at them. These folks have a sad history, Ellie. The British banished their ancestors from Canada because they wouldn’t take sides with them against the French. Acadian people were put on ships to who knows where—with no regard for keeping families together, and no notion of where they were being sent. You had parents who never saw their children again, husbands and wives separated forever. And now here they are, nearly two hundred years later, persecuted just because they sound different from the rest of us and want to raise their families their own way.”

  Doc reached into a desk drawer and pulled out two books, which he handed to Ellie. One was a French-English dictionary. The other was a thick volume called Acadiana. “Cajun French is a little different from what you’ll find in this dictionary, but it will at least help you start learning the language,” he explained. “And this history will tell you what you need to know about them.”

  “You say ‘them’—you aren’t Cajun yourself?” Ellie asked.

  “No, my father came here from a little town in southern France, and my mother’s family is German, but they settled in the bayou. I’ve always felt the most at home here. I guess that’s what makes me so mad about the way my community is being treated. These are some of the warmest, most openhearted, truly interesting people you’ll ever meet—probably got finer musicians and storytellers in Bernadette alone than you’d find in ten states put together. But all this interference with their language and their children has made them suspicious of people from the outside, and I don’t blame them one bit.”

  “You think they’ll give me a chance?”

  “I do. But I won’t lie to you, Ellie. None of our other elementary teachers has stayed more than a year, and the one you’re replacing was the worst we’ve ever had. She didn’t care a thing about the kids and seemed to enjoy punishing those who broke the English-only rule. She wouldn’t even live here—commuted from Morgan City and decided after a couple of months that it was too much of a hardship for her to teach five days a week, so she only came for three. That said, I believe the families here will bring their children to school, and once they do, I have every confidence that you can win them over.”

  “Sure hope you’re right.”

  “I generally am,” Doc said with a grin.

  “I want to thank you for your letter, Doc,” Ellie said. “Every time I thought about backing out, I’d read it again and find my courage.”

  “Well, I’ll never regret anything I did to persuade you to come.”

  “You mentioned housing?”

  “I did indeed,” Doc said. “My wife, Florence, says the bayou makes her claustrophobic, so I had to build her a house on the river, but we still have the cabin I grew up in. It would put you close to some of the local families and help them get to know you. And it’s yours, free of charge, if you want it.”

  “That’s awfully kind of you, but I’d have to pay you something.”

  “For a cabin standing empty? No, you won’t owe us a thing. And if you find you aren’t at ease in the bayou, why, you’re welcome to come and stay with us on the river, or we’ll help you find a place in Morgan City.”

  “I’m sure the cabin will be fine,” Ellie said. “I wouldn’t want to spend all my time traveling back and forth. I want to be part of the community, especially being so far from home.”

  “What if you decide you miss home too much to stay?”

  Ellie looked down at the hen and ran her hand over its feathers. “I can’t go back, Doc,” she finally said, looking up at him. “Whatever I’m meant to do with my life, it’s not in Alabama. I don’t know if I’ll find it in Louisiana either, but I do know that I keep my promises, and I’ve promised to teach these children this year.”

  The doctor looked out the screen door—at what, Ellie couldn’t see. Then he turned back to her. “They’ve never had a teacher like you, Ellie. Most young women from the outside don’t want to live in the bayou or become part of our community. We’ve had to make do with teachers who didn’t even have college degrees, or recent graduates who finished at the bottom of their class and couldn’t get a job anywhere else. The only one who’s stayed is Miss Harrison, and she’s seventy-five years old, retired from the public school system, with no family and no place to go. Can’t hear it thunder and forgets herself from time to time, but what can we do? She at least reviews the basics, mostly because she doesn’t remember teaching them the week before. Everybody pitches in to pay her a little bit to supplement her retirement, which isn’t much, and we all look after her. You’re the only one who’s come because you wa
nted to be here. You’re the only one I’ve felt was truly led to Bernadette.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Ellie said.

  “That’s all anybody can ask. Why don’t you use my phone to call your family and let them know you’re safe? Then I’ll introduce you to the bayou.”

  FOUR

  DOC HELPED ELLIE UNLOAD her teaching supplies at the school and park her car at the town landing on Bayou Teche. He carried her two suitcases to a bass boat tied to a tree on the bank and put them in. Then he took the overnight case Ellie was carrying and helped her into the boat before untying it and climbing in himself. He pushed off with an oar and then moved to the rear seat to crank the motor.

  “Most of the locals paddle, but I’ve got a touch of bursitis that’s acting up again,” he said as they took off. “Also, I’m lazy.”

  A warm wind blew Ellie’s hair away from her face as the boat glided across water that began as a clear, narrow channel but soon opened into a maze of towering, bald cypress trees, clusters of water lilies popping up here and there. Back home, the land, river, and sky were all distinct from each other. Not in this place, where ancient trees rose out of water and into the blue. It was beautiful and mysterious, and Ellie was smitten right away. She reached over the edge of the boat to trail her hand in the water.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Doc said with a wink. “Alligators!”

  Ellie quickly drew her hand back. “Duly noted!” she shouted over the motor noise. Alligators notwithstanding, she couldn’t stop smiling as they traveled a watery wonderland of moss-draped trees filled with exotic birds you didn’t see on the Coosa River back in Alabama. Fallen logs became sunporches for sleepy turtles. Now and then a bullfrog or two would leap off a lily pad and splash into the water. Ellie kept her eyes peeled for snakes and alligators but saw none, though she knew a place like this was likely crawling with them.