Under the Bayou Moon

by Valerie Fraser Luesse

  Remy grinned at her and watched as she took another bite of gumbo. “Miss Ellie, are you my new teacher?”

  She glanced at Raphe as she blotted her mouth with her napkin.

  “Yes,” he answered Remy, “Miss Ellie is your new teacher.”

  Remy put down his spoon, bowed his head, and said, “Merci, Bon Dieu,” making the sign of the cross before resuming his supper.

  Ellie looked to Raphe, who explained, “He thanked God for you.”

  AFTER SUPPER, Remy begged to come along with Raphe and Ellie for the boat ride back to Doc’s cabin.

  “You need to go to bed, Remy,” Raphe insisted.

  “Please, Nonc?” the boy pleaded. “I never get to go on the bayou at night. Please?”

  Raphe sighed and looked at Ellie.

  “This’ll cost you, Remy,” Ellie said. “If we let you come along, you have to promise you’ll tell all the other kids that I’m no relation to the Rougarou. And that I don’t have fangs, at least none that you could see. Deal?”

  “Deal,” he said with a grin.

  “Remy, go upstairs and get your pillow and the blue quilt Aunt Kitty made you,” Raphe said.

  “But why—”

  “Remy, go.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Raphe shook his head as his nephew scurried up the stairs. “This is not like him. Remy never argues.”

  “He’s just excited,” Ellie said.

  Minutes later, they heard the thump of little feet on the stairs as the boy came running back with his blanket and pillow, which he handed to Raphe.

  “We’ll take the pirogue if that’s alright?” Raphe asked Ellie. “It’s slow, but a lot o’ the old folks go to bed early and I don’t want to wake ’em with the noise from a motor.”

  “I don’t mind,” Ellie said.

  Remy ran ahead to the bank lit by a half-moon. Raphe laid the blanket and pillow in the stern of the boat, behind one of two seats a few feet apart in the center, and pushed the boat halfway into the water. As he climbed in, his nephew moved to follow him.

  “Remy, ladies first—always,” Raphe said.

  Remy waited as Raphe held his hands out to Ellie and helped her into the boat and onto the back seat, then motioned for him. “I’ll sit by you, Miss Ellie,” Remy said.

  Raphe stood in the center of the pirogue, his back to Ellie and Remy, and took up a long oar to push them away from the bank. He maneuvered the boat out of the slough, through the narrow canal that had brought them there, and back to the main channel of the Teche.

  Remy’s head was turning this way and that as he tried to take in all the sights of the bayou, from the tall cypress trees to curtains of Spanish moss grazing the water. But Ellie’s eyes were riveted on the tall figure standing before her, his white shirt lit silver in the moonlight, his head slightly turning now and again as he scanned the bayou, effortlessly pulling them through the water. Raphe looked a part of it—of boat, bayou, water, and sky.

  For a while, Remy pelted Ellie with a barrage of conversation, telling her where all the night sounds were coming from and pointing out who lived where in each of the cabins they passed. But the farther they traveled, Raphe paddling through tunnels of trees and watery fields of lily pads, the more Remy’s chatter began to ebb, fading into yawns—occasional at first, but then coming in waves, one after another. Raphe turned to Ellie and smiled.

  She took Remy’s blanket and made a pallet behind their seat. “Here, honey,” she said, tucking the pillow under his head. “Why don’t you lie down on your blanket. We’ll play ‘way up high in the sky.’”

  “I don’t know that game,” Remy said as he obediently lay down, looking up at the sky. Ellie removed his sneakers and folded the edges of the quilt over him.

  “Here, I’ll show you. Way up high in the sky, tell me what you see.” Ellie raised her arm over her head and pointed up.

  “The moon,” Remy said.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Well,” Remy said through a big yawn, “it looks like a big round window with a black curtain hanging over half of it.”

  “That’s a great way to describe it, Remy. Let’s go again. Way up high in the sky, tell me what you see.” Again she pointed to the sky.

  Remy yawned again and pulled the quilt tighter around him. “I see . . . some stars.”

  “Good!” Ellie said. “See if you can count ten of them.”

  Remy made it to five before his voice faded and he turned on his side, curling up in the quilt and falling fast asleep.

  “He’s a goner,” Ellie said.

  Raphe stopped rowing and looked at his nephew. “I knew he’d never make it to Doc’s.”

  He started to row again, but she stopped him. “Would you mind if we just sat here for a minute?” she asked, looking up at a towering cypress they had drifted under. “I just . . . I can’t quite take it all in.”

  Raphe dipped his oar in the water. “Not wise to be under a tree—snakes like the moss. Let me get us to a safer spot.”

  He rowed them away from the tree and into a watery clearing of sorts, with the moon gleaming down on the water, its lily pads and water hyacinth casting shadows on the surface. Raphe and Ellie were surrounded by colossal trees that had to be hundreds of years old. He sat down and laid the oar across the seats, near the edge of the boat.

  “It’s beautiful, non?” he said.

  “So beautiful,” she said. “I’m glad we came in the pirogue so we didn’t spoil the night sounds. You do this a lot—come out on the bayou this late?”

  “Used to,” he said. “About every night—sometimes by myself but usually with my brothers. That was a long time ago.”

  “Your brothers don’t go out on the bayou anymore?”

  “They’re gone. Storm took all of my family except for Kitty and my older sister—Remy’s mother. She died later. So did her husband.”

  “Oh, Raphe—one storm killed your entire family?”

  “Yes. My parents and grandparents, all of my brothers and their families.”

  “I—I just can’t imagine. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry. When did it happen?”

  “When I was seventeen. Hurricane—a bad one. Took half the town. Lot o’ people lost family.”

  “How did you and your sisters—I mean—”

  “How did we live when everybody else died?”

  Ellie felt sick, unconsciously wrapping her arms around her stomach.

  Raphe repeated what he had said to her at the schoolhouse: “You are not to blame, Juliet. We lived because we weren’t here. It’s strange—you can save your life or lose it just by choosing where to be when the sun rises.” He looked up at the moon, and then his eyes rested on Ellie. “My sisters had a friend getting married in Ville Platte that day. Papa didn’t want ’em to go up there alone—takes a couple of hours or more. He wanted me to drive them, so I did.” Raphe shook his head at the memory of it. “I remember being so aggravated that I had to miss a day of fishing to go to a wedding, but you didn’t say no to my father.”

  “Was there any kind of warning?” Ellie was still trying to wrap her mind around a storm killing an entire family. “Any sign that bad weather was coming?”

  “There was talk of a hurricane. Some of the older fishermen said they felt a change in the air. The sky was overcast, and I remember a stiff, cool wind starting to build the day before we left. It had grown much stronger by the morning of the wedding. My sisters kept talking about how glad they were that they wouldn’t be sweaty when we got to Ville Platte.”

  “But it wasn’t stormy?”

  “Not that we could see—the storm was still out in the Gulf—but the weather turned during the celebration after the wedding. By the time we were ready to leave, the wind was very strong, like a tornado was coming. We went to somebody’s root cellar—can’t remember their name—but that’s where we rode it out. Took us a couple of days to get home because of all the trees over the roads. I had to cut our way through with t
he chainsaw Papa kept in his truck. Once we finally made it back here, well . . . wasn’t much left. Water got so high when it came in—over twenty feet—you’d need a miracle to survive that kind o’ water.”

  “What about Remy’s parents? You said they made it through the hurricane?”

  “They weren’t married yet. She met him at the wedding that saved us from the storm. And then he put her right in the middle of another one, promising her the high life in New Orleans. But the high life ended both of ’em. He was shot to death in the street over gambling debts. She used the last of their money to get Remy back here to her family and died of pneumonia a few weeks later.”

  “I just can’t imagine—everybody you love . . . just gone . . .”

  “Do you always do that?” Raphe asked. “Take on the hurts of other people, I mean?”

  “I feel for other people, if that’s what you’re talking about.”

  He shook his head. “No, it’s more than that. You don’t just feel for them. You feel them. It’s a lot to carry, non?”

  They were silently staring at each other in the moonlight when something slammed against the boat, hard.

  Ellie gasped and instinctively moved to get up, but Raphe put his hands out to stop her. “Non—stay where you are,” he said. “You’ll tip the boat.”

  She did as he said, not at all sure why she was trusting a man she barely knew. Peering over the side of the pirogue, Ellie watched as a six-foot alligator swam right alongside them before disappearing into the moonlit bayou. When she turned to face Raphe, her eyes and mouth wide open, he was smiling at her.

  “You should maybe breathe now,” he said.

  Ellie hadn’t realized she was holding her breath. She took a few deep ones to calm herself.

  “You never want to be in the water with an alligator,” Raphe explained. “But most of the time, if you don’t aggravate them or do something to make them see you as food, they’ll be about their business.”

  “Most of the time?”

  “Most of the time. You alright?”

  “I think so.” As she looked at him, she couldn’t stop a smile from slowly spreading across her face. “I just saw an alligator!”

  “You did,” Raphe said, laughing with her.

  “I guess that’s one more good thing about the bayou. If there’s a lull in the conversation, just wait a minute and a ferocious reptile will swim by.”

  “You mind lulls in the conversation?” Raphe asked. He stretched his legs out, resting his hands on his thighs.

  Ellie had always thought you could tell a lot about a man by looking at his hands. Raphe’s looked like a cross between a farmer’s and a musician’s—strong and weathered yet lithe and graceful. “I don’t mind the lulls, but I’ve always been taught that I should put an end to them.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because Alabama women think making conversation is like making a decent biscuit.”

  “Or sewing a quilt?”

  “Exactly. It’s just something we’re supposed to know how to do. Mama always said silence makes a man nervous, so a woman needs to know how to fill it up.”

  “And what do you say?”

  Ellie turned her face to the moon and closed her eyes as she considered Raphe’s question. When she turned back to him, he was staring straight at her the way he had the day before in Doc’s office.

  “I think I’d rather just find somebody I could be quiet with.”

  “That what you’re looking for in Louisiana?”

  “I seem to be looking for everything in Louisiana.” Ellie took a deep breath and looked up into the trees silhouetted against the sky. “It’s a lot to ask of one place, I guess.”

  “Maybe not too much,” he said.

  They stopped talking and listened to a night owl’s call, deep and sonorous as it drifted over the bayou.

  “Raphe,” Ellie said when the owl was quiet, “was the school here in Bernadette when you were Remy’s age?”

  He shook his head. “No. Me and my brothers and sisters used to get up way before daylight to do our chores and then paddle to the school bus stop. We’d ride the bus to Morgan City, go to school all day, then make the trip back. When I think about school, I mostly think about being tired.”

  “How long did you go?”

  His brow furrowed. “Till I was fourteen or so, I think. Then I started fishing and oystering. My papa was a fine mechanic and took up a lotta time with me, teaching me. A couple o’ the bigger towns have marinas that call on me for engine work on the shrimpers between seasons. Helps me do for Remy. What about your family? Everybody go to college?”

  “No, I was the first,” Ellie said. “And if the war hadn’t brought so many jobs to Alabama, I couldn’t have gone either. I was able to work my way through, with a little help from my folks.”

  “Did you like it—going to college?”

  “I was a fish out of water that first year, coming from a little bitty school in a small town. There were all these girls from places like Atlanta and Birmingham and Miami. Felt like I had ‘country bumpkin’ written across my forehead. It took a whole lot of conversations with Mama Jean to keep me from quitting that first year.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I loved hearing those professors from all over the country talk about everything from history and literature to art and music. I just made up my mind that no matter how backwoods some of those girls tried to make me feel, I wasn’t about to let them keep me from learning. And I couldn’t imagine anything better to do with my life than pass that excitement along to small-town kids like me, you know?”

  “I can see you thinking in that direction.” Raphe shooed a mosquito away and ran his fingers through his hair. “Is this your first job—as a teacher, I mean?”

  “No. I did my practice teaching in a little town called Opelika—it’s right there near Alabama Polytech, where I got my degree—and then I taught for a while in Childersburg, Alabama, which isn’t too far from where my family lives.”

  Ellie was startled by a splash in the water.

  “Bullfrog, most likely,” Raphe said. He was looking straight at her again. “What made you come here, Juliet? You have schooling. You have prospects. You have family back in Alabama.”

  Ellie thought carefully about her answer. She wanted to be truthful, with Raphe more than anybody, though she couldn’t say why. “Because I was unhappy. Because I was tired of everybody telling me who I was and what I was supposed to be. Because I almost made a really stupid mistake and got myself engaged to somebody who thought I should give up my life’s work just to make him look better at his. Because I couldn’t breathe in Alabama anymore. What about you? Are you happy in Louisiana?”

  He looked up at the silvery sky as he thought about it. “No,” he finally said, looking back at Ellie, “but I’m home.”

  He picked up the oar and began rowing the pirogue through the cypress trees. Ellie took it as a sign that their moment of truth was over and sat quietly, watching the bayou drift by.

  At last Raphe rowed them into Doc’s slough. Once they were at the bank, he laid down the oar and jumped out, pulling the bow of the pirogue onto the bank. As Ellie stood up, he wrapped his arm around her waist and swung her out of the boat, then pulled the rest of the pirogue onto the bank. He picked up Remy, who barely stirred, sleeping soundly on Raphe’s shoulder.

  Holding his nephew with one arm, he took Ellie’s hand with the other. “Might be a little risky to leave him in the boat,” he said as he guided her to Doc’s steps.

  They climbed the steps and went onto the porch, where Ellie lit the lamp Raphe had advised her to leave outside.

  “Want us to go in with you—make sure everything’s okay?” he asked her.

  Ellie nodded. He followed her into the cabin, where he waited by the fireplace, holding Remy, as she walked through to the back room, making sure there were no unwelcome visitors—human or reptile.

  “All clear,” she said as she
returned to him and set the lamp on the table.

  He was looking down at her in the lamplight, Remy’s head on his shoulder, when she felt a sudden surge of emotion, as if the wave of anger and hurt and disappointment that had pushed her all the way from Alabama to Louisiana was about to break right on top of her and knock her off her feet. Her eyes were stinging and she couldn’t speak.

  Raphe reached down and laid his palm against her face. Ellie slowly raised her hand to rest on top of his. Neither of them moved. Ellie could hear him breathing and feel the warmth of his hand against her face.

  Remy suddenly stirred. “Nonc? Where are we, Nonc?”

  Raphe and Ellie slowly let their hands fall. “We’re on our way home,” Raphe said quietly. “Go back to sleep, Remy.” And then he was gone.

  TEN

  ON MONDAY MORNING, Ellie arrived at the schoolhouse an hour early. Her classrooms were already arranged, her lessons planned, her cookies baked for the children. Still, she wanted to get there early, to settle into her first day before the boys and girls began streaming in. Would the parents come with the little ones? Back home, the answer was yes, but she had no idea what to expect from Cajun families.

  Doc had recruited one of the Toussaint sisters—there were twelve brothers and sisters in all—to help her keep order. Bonita Toussaint was engaged to be married in the summer, but for now, she was happy to help out and earn a little extra money to start her household. For the morning, Ellie planned to get the terrified first, second, and third graders acclimated while Bonita managed fourth, fifth, and sixth.

  “Anybody home?” Doc came into the classroom, followed by Bonita and another young woman about the same age.

  “Ready and waiting,” Ellie said. “And mighty grateful for your help.”

  “Ellie,” Doc said, “I’d like you to meet Bonita’s sister Gabby. She’ll be helping out at the school too.”

  “I can’t thank you enough, Gabby,” Ellie said.

  “It’ll be some fun, fo’ sure,” Gabby said.

  “Doc, where’s Miss Harrison? I don’t think I’ve seen her this morning.”