Postmark Bayou Chene (4 page)

I got the music in my blood, don't you know, from both my families—the Irish and the Cajun. My favorite trips?
Mais oui, cher!
The ones that stop over in Bayou Chene. Mostly 'cause I can play music with Loyce and Fate. Me, I love they twin fiddles as good as any I play with down and up these rivers.

I was still in short pants when
mon père
first drop me off at the post office ever time his boat dock at the Chene. Mama's family, they own the boat, but
mon père
, he drive it. I can't count how many times I threw a line since the days when I was so short I had to stand on my toes and throw with both hands. Even now I'm not tall as most men old like me—and that's about twenty—but I got more muscle in my arms and shoulders than just about any of them.

That morning I made a easy throw to the dock man, who caught it just as easy. He pass the eye over a timberhead, while I wrap the loose end around a capstan, taking up all the slack. We toss three more lines and caught and tied 'em. After we put out the gangplank, I done cross over and turn left under the oak trees along the bank. The Injuns done start this path a long time before my people got here, probably a thousand years or more back. Injuns was here so long and ate so much shellfish their shell mounds raise the ground around Bayou Chene higher and higher. 'Course that made white people like the Chene even better, and they start finding their way out here in the 1600s. I learn that and more by passing time with all the kinds of people on the river. Not much for them to do but watch the bank pass by and talk to anyone who act like they listening.

Right then the 'Chafalaya, she was burdened down with snow melted from up north. We was docked where Bayou Tensas poured a load of that water down Jakes Bayou. That time of year
Golden Era
could easy fit down Jakes, but she wasn't headed that way this trip, so I took off walking. I had plenty time while the
Era
took on some bales of moss and who knows what else before going down Big Bayou Chene.

Jakes Bayou, she rummaged along on my right, while the oaks, they bent over the left side of me. It was easy to see why the oaks gave their name for the Chene. Leaves and moss thick as curtains. They shade out everything underneath, don't you know. Me, I could see all the way to houses and gardens on the other side of the island. It was a fine sight.

“Val! Val!” Perry Patin, our cabin boy, run up behind me. Dust flying, mail pouch flapping. “Captain says if you going to Miss Loyce's, drop this off at the post office.”

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.