Marshland Trinity
THREE LOUISIANA STORIES BY
CHRIS SEGURA
Copyright 1982, 1997 by Chris Segura
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved
Win or Lose, Ink
111 Concord Street
Abbeville, LA 70510
Dedication
Marsh Passage and The Lost Ones are dedicated to John Walter McGuinn Boudreaux, my friend, and to the memory of Wallace Lovell, my teacher, as they were when published in Marshland Brace.
In a Kingdom of the Moon is dedicated in a special way to the memories of my mother, Doris, and my brother, Mickey, both sorely missed.
CONTENTS:
Dans Royaume de Ia Lune (In a Kingdom of the Moon)
Tranasse
Prologue
In the last year the marsh was the same as it had always been, Josef Dimanche poled his pirogue farther than he had ever gone. The muskrat were plentiful. And though the channels changed and mixed, though the surface blew in the wind and drifted with the tides, the intricate balance of earth and water, death and life continued, seemingly omnipotent. In constant change, changeless. Comme l'homme garçon, as they said, an aged child.
Josef Dimanche was young then, and strong. He held the balance of the moment in his muscles. Obedient to each nudge of his feet, to each push of his pole, the pirogue shifted and swung and glided deeper. He had come this far to experiment, but he had also come this far because his prowess needed exercise. He had learned well as much as could be taught him, and he constantly observed and tried to understand as well as he was able. But his true existence was within his muscles, thoughtless and brutal and superb.
To this he had attached his woman and the life swelling in her far behind him. He lived within the marsh part of each year, and the time he was not within the marsh was spent preparing or planning to return. All around him consciousness lived and breathed and fed and procreated and died, and he was part of that but as a higher species, not so much a ruling one as one that is indomitable.
The experiment was a simple one but one he knew other trappers would not approve. It was simply to set traps around the muskrat beds, the domed homes of the chief fur producer of the marsh. To set them in a circle around the homes and not the trails the animals took to forage and feed.
The prow of the double-pointed boat broke from the tight channel and into a network of little ponds. About the curving shores and on tiny islands within the ponds, the rounded, graying beds of grass and sticks rose from the marsh like the sculptured domes of a city. Josef Dimanche believed this was virgin ground, that these animals had never seen a human being.
Against the bank he held the pirogue and planted the pole tight against it for anchor. He took up his forked walking stick and hung the chains of traps across his shoulders, then stepped into the marsh itself. It was a warm day in winter, and swarms of mosquitoes rose up from the grass. They buzzed and clouded thick about his face, tortured by his blood.
Then he saw the snake. And seeing, only then did he smell the odor, musky, heavy, thick. The serpent drew back in tight curves, not coils. Josef Dimanche was not afraid. He knew the snake had neither range nor aim. Awakened early by the unseasonable warmth, it had its winter skin, the very covering of its eyes. The forked tongue licked out to hear him.
"Oh, fat one," he said to the thick-muscled serpent, "you have fed yourself on frogs and mice and lived to reach your muscled length by fleeing here where none would go. But I have come and now you show your deadly white and threaten me."
It was not uncommon among the people of the marsh to be bitten by a snake. But Josef Dimanche hated the cottonmouths more than most because of an incident of his childhood. So he raised his stick high. Fishhook fangs drew back, but Josef Dimanche struck first. He broke the snake's back and it writhed and thumped against the floating grass and mud. He did not strike again. He had learned from hard experience the mystery of snakes. He was content merely to kill, so he watched and did not strike again.
"But if I had the traiteur Snake Man's magic," Josef Dimanche said, and the dying snake licked at the words, "I would have ringed you with the toe of my new rubber boot as I once saw the Snake Man do upon the dusty levee top. I, though, would leave you here to die. I would not have broken the circle and let you crawl free. I would have left you here to starve and grow as narrow as a worm."
He paused, then, and pondered, watching a rice bird perch upon a roseau stem.
"Perhaps it only works upon the dust," he said.
The rice bird darted his glance to Josef Dimanche then to the dying snake. Josef Dimanche took from his trouser pocket the flat little bottle. Drinking was still new to him so he was still enamored with the gray, powerful feeling and the glaring tones existence took. It was a bout of strength to him. Josef Dimanche needed testing. He tipped the bottle back, let in the biting taste. Through squinted eyes he watched the ricebird, through grimaced lips he spoke to him.
"What a strange rice bird," he said, "to sit upon a roseau stem and watch a dying snake when there is so much grain to gather to your craw. What care you who feeds on grain if meat dies writhing in the marsh?"
The snake flexed, curling one more great slow time, showing the lighter gray of the belly, and was still. Josef Dimanche walked on and found a low-scooped trail where otter and mink slide through the marsh beneath the bending grass. This is where he would set his traps if he were not experimenting. But instead he walked on to the domes and set the traps around them. He had set almost all the traps before he saw the child.
The child was sleeping, curled on one of the domes of grass and sticks. He slept in shivers because his clothes were wet. His face was tucked beneath his arms as some wild things sleep to protect eyes from the insects. Josef Dimanche went soundlessly toward him.
About his face, the insects flowed with each breath like a tide. The breathing was a whimper. A small hand brushed at a swollen ear, then settled on his neck. There were large welts on his cheeks.
He was the second son of Vasito Lopez, of those who lived the entire year within the marsh. As one will seek to learn by touch the true nature of a new and wondrous thing, Josef Dimanche reached out his hand. He touched the head of Etienne.
Instantly, the boy was off the dome and running through the marsh. Josef Dimanche overtook him. His great strength overwhelmed the boy, brought him to the cypress pirogue, and by that boat to his home, a shack upon the levee of Bayou Chien, behind two young cedars. The boy said nothing. Josef Dimanche spoke French, and the language of the Lopez family was an ancient form of Spanish. And the father always spoke for them.
The father stood between the cedars as they walked up the levee from the bayou. The cedars and the man and the shack behind him darkened in the setting sun. Etienne walked past him to the shack. They spoke somberly but not of the boy. They spoke of the strange, orange-toothed creature Lopez called coypu which had begun to invade the marsh. Lopez cursed the coypu and said it would drive the muskrat away. Dimanche had not seen sign, yet, of this, so he merely listened and did not allow himself alarm. The américain called the animal nutria, but for the rest of his life Josef Dimanche would think of him as coypu.
Finally, Josef Dimanche took to his boat and poled himself away. And then he heard the blows. Josef Dimanche had never been whipped as a child and therefore knew only of victory. And he believed strength carried the responsibility of judicious restraint. And he did not believe children should be beaten. But each man lives his life alone, and each man has his own house. So Josef Dimanche took from his pocket the flattened bottle and tried not to hear the sound of blows that fell without a protest from the child.
He heard also, far down the watercourse and singular and distinct, still rare, the cry of the new animal of the marsh. The coypu's cry is a dying baby's weak wail, though a full-grown male makes the sound. The light failed, then, to a deep, dark blue. A grosbec, night heron, lifted from the water almost at the cypress prow. On dark, purple, wide, and graceful wings, he flew the twisting channel.
The moon rose, then, and lit the way.
Monologue
Quickly I grew weary of the town. As soon as decency allowed, I made ready my return to the marsh. I did not wish to hear more of Etienne Lopez. I did not wish to watch my daughter in shame. And so, as soon as decency allowed, I made ready my return to the marsh.
The night before my return, my daughter, for she is a good woman nonetheless, prepared my supper and packed my supplies. I had had my daughter take the kitchen tools, and thus after I ate I sat and saw for the first time in my home how bare is death. My home in town would now have no need of kitchen things. But more than the tools of nourishment had been stripped away. It was my intention to strip away the pain that resides in memory. Instead I was left this bare reminder of her death.
I had not had strong drink since those moments of my young man's strength, and yet I craved it now. My daughter, still washing dishes, spoke over her shoulder to me.
"Papa," she said, "do not go, please? It is too soon, and it is not necessary."
I did not answer. I had given enough time to the ritual. A man can mourn alone as well as in the sight of others. . And I had never liked to stay in towns. People who live in towns want silly things. They speak of unimportant and unpleasant things. Now they talked of murder and of murderers as though their talk could bring the terror to them, for what purpose I do not know.
My daughter dried her hands as she sat down at my table. She put the drying rag upon the table. Never in her long years had her mother put a rag upon that table except in cleaning. My daughter folded her hands upon the table before her. Her hands were white and wrinkled from the water.
"Papa," she said again, "please, do not go back into the marsh. It is too soon, Papa."
"What care you for old rituals?" I said, and was instantly sorry I had said it. For it hurt her. Such things, once said, linger in the air like smoke on a windless day. "I have stayed a proper time. And a man has his work."
She looked down at her water-wrinkled hands, probed a tiny cut in one finger. The skin around the cut was dead, lifeless, bland. Suddenly, she looked up at me, into my eyes. Her eyes were like her mother's, dark gray with fine black circles around them. But her mother's eyes no longer saw. My daughter's eyes studied mine and I refused to drop my gaze.
"Papa," she said softly, "wait until they find Etienne Lopez? Papa? Just until then."
"No."
She dropped her eyes again. It was growing late. My grandson would need her. I did not like the thought of the man with whom she lived giving comfort to my grandson, Little Josef. That was a wicked thing to think, I know, for comfort with affection is far too rare a thing to have denied. But there were certain proprieties.
"Go home to your son," I said, and this time her eyes filled with wetness but did not overflow. She knew I would have liked to say, "and to your husband."
This man with whom she lived was good, a man I would have chosen, but he was not her husband. Such things bring scandal and worse.
"Stay, Papa, until they find Etienne Lopez. Little Josef and I will stay with you here, in this house."
And then, you see, I was both angry and weary with sorrow. The anger welled inside me strong, for she had bribed me with her virtue. But sorrow welled inside me like the depths of the great sea.
"Go home to your son, daughter," I said, "and leave an old man to live what life remains."
My daughter wept, then, with sobs she tried to hold inside her. Even as she left the house, she wept. I, too, was filled with sorrow, and took her tears to bed with me. That night I dreamed of water running, and of rain, but when I awoke the land was dry.
The aged pirogue was still sunk and the water inside it had become as clear and green as rainwater in the cistern. The edges of the pirogue's sides rose and fell as if in greeting, as I poled the flatboat beside it. The other boats, also, were moored correctly as I had left them. The boat of LeBlanc, the trapper, was not there.
It was late in the morning to be running traps, but perhaps as I suggested he was setting a new line along the levee by Lac L'Oignon. I unloaded the supplies onto the little pier. The cypress pirogue's lines above the water were perfect. It was good to think of the water keeping the cypress pure from drying cracks. The cypress, like our people, is born with his feet in water. Only closeness to water can sustain him, even after death.
Not all I saw was good that morning I returned to the marsh, however. Near LeBlanc's little shack was a pile of trash. In that marsh, at least, this was not permitted. What could not be eaten and would neither burn nor rot must be removed.
And the big house had been used. The wood stove in the bedroom had been improperly stoked and not attended. A board cut too long had been burned in it, and the end would have fallen to the worn old planks had the cast-iron lid not held it. With houses old and dry, intelligent men take much care with fire. Also, the bed was soiled.
The northern room had not been used, but I unlocked the door and checked it nonetheless. A musty coldness rushed from the door long locked and closed. It enveloped me with the chill and scent of houses long abandoned. Carefully, I locked the door shut once again.
The rats, smelling flour inside the cabinet, had tried to chew through the wood beneath the screen. I put the flour into a can and patched new screen upon the tooth marks in the wood. Then I put my supplies away and went outside.
The wind blew from the north. Far to the west, it carried smoke heavy like a plume. The fire was near Bayou Cocodrille. Across my line. DesHotel was having a bad year, to come so far east and burn so late in the season to find new trails for traps.
The smoke rose heavy and black from the fire I could not see. Then it curved southward, across the great canal, and toward the sea. Its shadow widened a fan across the marsh, and the smoke quickly lightened into gray. So the wind was losing strength. What sort of weather was in this making?
In the east, over the Iberia marsh, the sky sat strangely purple. It was difficult to interpret with the wind out of the north. Perhaps rain if the wind shifted south. Well, whatever came, I would live with it.
I walked the high bluff of the levee. A butcherbird had hung many kills on the old thorn tree. Lizards and tiny snakes now hung dry and cured, speared on purple thorns. The black-beaked bird flew to the roof of the shack and perched there, watching me. His head darted so he could see the area I walked. His sharp eyes saw everything. He never looked directly at me, yet he knew my every move.
For many seasons I had watched this butcherbird, and I admired his skill. He was a fine hunter. Indeed, he was a great one. From early spring each year his fresh kills dried upon the thorns and he ate of the cured flesh only in the winter months. He was wise and successful. but I never saw him take a mate. It was a thing I considered very curious.
Near the edge of the marsh on the west side of the house a lark had thatched his nest with goose down. Six steps into the marsh I found the pile of feathers hidden beneath marsh grass. Field mice lived beneath it. So many geese would only have been killed for the market. The new gamekeeper would bring charges if he knew. I replaced the grass.
I ate my noon meal then buried LeBlanc's trash. There were no more good young marsh men. It required a wildness and a courage that was no longer approved. And there were, now, other ways for them to make their money. I tried not to plan what I would say to him, as the Savior advised apostles to proselytize.
The gamekeeper came in mid-afternoon. We took our coffee with us from the kitchen and sat upon the dried gray clay of the high levee bluff. This new gamekeeper, although américain, was interested in the marsh. He would learn if he was given time. He knew how to speak politely, which was important, and he spoke in French, though of the other kind.
"Monsieur Josef." he said, "in all your years have you ever seen the marsh so dry?"
"Oh, yes," I said. "There was a time once when deer came to drink from our cistern, for salt had backed up with the tides and the low water and made the very bayous unfit to drink. Before the rains, salt formed upon the low mud banks."
"But this dryness is severe, is this not so?"
"Oh, yes, but we will live."
He smiled. This gamekeeper was a rare one, one who listened well and so heard many things. The marsh fires worried him. This winter, he said, he had seen for the first time how in a dry marsh the fire can fly across the tops of the grass.
Once, he said, Uribe, the trapper at Lac Blanc, had set his fire with a northwest wind to burn toward Bayou Noir, and there to cease. But Bayou Noir had been dry so long the fire crept across dead bottom scum. It left behind a blackened, smoldering carpet, and lit the grass on the south side of the bayou. It had burned all the way to the lake, he said.
And at the lake many small animals had been trapped. He asked if in my many years in the marsh had I ever seen a deer trapped and killed by fire. I said that I had not.
Deer, he said, were plentiful. But because of the dryness of the marsh, the ducks had moved across the sea. Many geese had stayed, he said, and asked why this was so. The goose is more a bird of habit than the duck. He will starve before he changes ways or perhaps they were too hungry to continue.
The new gamekeeper said, indeed, the geese were starving. They were, he said, as thin as if they had only just completed their great flight into our land. They were thin and weak, now, and eating the roots of grass. The marsh would not recover in two years, he said, and hunters plagued them terribly. .
And then there was a silence between us. I thought he would now speak things he had come so far to say.
"Monsieur Josef," he said very seriously, "you knew Etienne Lopez?"
"Yes," I said, and nothing more.
"This is what they told me in the town. It is thought Etienne Lopez will now come into the marsh."
I said nothing.
"It is said if this is so, only you will know the way to find him."
Again, I said nothing.
"They have asked the gamekeepers to watch for him. Will you help me in this?"
"Yes. I will watch, but Etienne Lopez will not come into the marsh."
"Why do you not think so?"
"What kind of place is the marsh for a man who must shun other men?"
"A good man can hide here forever. A man such as yourself could live out all his years and not be seen."
"Yes, this is true. But what kind of life would he have? For when the winter chill turns warm and other creatures rule the marsh, he would wish he was in the prison again, or dead. Oh, some have lived here all year long, but they had special powers."
This américain was different, for he did not smile at special powers. "Then, Monsieur Josef, in this matter of Etienne Lopez, you will watch and tell me what you see?"
"Yes. In the matter of Etienne Lopez, I will tell you what I see."
I said this carefully because, like the butcherbird who seems to look everywhere except where he is seeing, I was even then watching LeBlanc unload and hide his illegal kill.
"But I think in this matter there will be nothing for me to see. It would be better for a man like him to lose himself in a forest of other men."
"But in town, they say that Etienne Lopez always shuns other men."
"What do people in towns know of the people of the marsh?"
I was growing tired of this talk. It had pursued me to the marsh. But this gamekeeper was polite.
"You knew those Lopez well?"
"As well as any man. They came into our marsh and trapped for my papa. They came after the Trapper's War in the Saint Bernard. Eustis Lopez, he still had wounds not healed. They were a hard people, but they trapped well and kept the marsh clean."
"Where did they trap?"
"The Iberia marsh."
"If, as they say in town, Etienne Lopez would come back, would he return there?"
"No. Nothing remains. A great storm took it all. Even the marsh is changed."
LeBlanc came to us, then, sat heavily and uninvited before us. He was heavy and always dirty. He had the eyes of drink, watery and red-rimmed. I knew those eyes well. I had stared back at myself with them many mornings of my young manhood. I had never made my peace with drink but only used my will. LeBlanc lacked that sense of will. He brought a bad taste with him. I adjusted my hood, for the north wind was at my back and blowing cold. After some more talk of the marsh, the gamekeeper said:
"I wish I knew what Etienne Lopez would do."
"Mais, Etienne Lopez, you say?" LeBlanc said in English. "That man, him, he crazy, yes. A crazy man, po yi, you don't know what he do, him. For to do what he did? Man, he have to be crazy, him. To piquer … fuck, something, yes. All right. But to kill it like that? And him brother wife, him. But they say she was his woman, too. I don't know, me. That what they say. But if it true, them kids, them, was for him too, some of them, nobody knows. He cut that woman like a calf."
LeBlanc's big dirty finger jabbed up into the air above his head.
"And for to shoot him own brother in the head, him. . . . Pop!" LeBlanc's finger struck his own head.
The gamekeeper and I looked away, then, in distaste. I looked into the south, where the plume was very white. A ricebird settled, wings beating backward, upon the tip of a roseau first bending to the wind, now bending to his weight. Balanced so well on such a weak perch. Yet, what cared the ricebird? If the cane should break, his swift wings would carry him away.
"What they call them, them people from the Saint Bernard? What speak ’spagnol?"
"Islenos. "
"Yeah. That's what. Them, they all crazy, them."
"No, they are men as other men. Their life in that land has not been easy. And in the Trapper's War, they took their land away. It is why Eustis Lopez came to this marsh," I said in the parole, for his words carried grit but he continued as before.
"And you don't think it was a crazy man, him, what done that to that woman over there? And them kids, them, too, yeah."
"I do not think of things I cannot see, things I cannot understand. Some things though known are not to be believed. My own wife died. I buried her last week. I waked her and let them put her in the ground. Yet I do not believe her death. The deaths of wives and the murder of children sleeping are things better not believed."
There was a little silence, and then LeBlanc said, "Huh! Them from the Saint Bernard. Me, I think they all crazy, them."
Then all of us were silent. The rice bird flew away, the roseau springing straight and then bending again with the wind. The smoke plume grew even whiter and less thick in the south. Polite small things were mentioned, and then the gamekeeper went away.
So tired I was of talking, I did not reprimand LeBlanc.
Only a small bit of yellow light came from his shack as I stepped out into the cold night. The moon was already high, like a curved bowl balanced on her edge and spilling stars into the west, her visage bright. There was a partial shadow where the nose would be and a full shadow at the eye. Before she set, she would turn and move below, toward the sea. At almost midnight she would set a little south of west. A nightly search for all her parts, to find them in the days only to lose them once again, what travail!
The visage was reflected in the water of the cistern. Ice already formed around the iron edges of the tank. I sank my bare arms into the rainwater and felt for the best of the traps. I pulled up six, and stood there dripping water on my boots. The kitchen was bright against night.
The old wooden steps bowed down with my weight. Rusty water dripped upon her floor. Her floor. She is no more. And yet I took the mop, dry and stiff from little use, and wiped away the trail. The rainwater was clear upon the boards, and the flakes of rust inside made little veins the color of old blood.
I sat at the table and rubbed my leg through my trousers and heavy stocking. I had been standing long, cooking and working, so the little veins were bulging. The white beans were boiling in the pot. One by one I took the traps up onto the table. I dried them and then oiled them well. I worked their springs, spread wide their jaws, set the latch, then sprang them with the handle of a spoon. They were still taut and fine. I put them in a sack.
I put my breakfast beans into a jar and left them on the front porch to cool. The moon had hidden herself behind the roof of the porch, but the marsh, lighted silver, lay cold before me to the east. North wind had cleared the air before it died. I could even see a town beyond the Iberia marsh, glowing like a glass bowl turned over.
The bits of wood I gathered were already frosted with ice. I made the fire in the wood stove of the bedroom. The blackened tongue of the wick rolled down, the kerosene lamp went out. In the darkness of the lonely room glowed only the orange-blue streaks of light from vents in the old iron stove. A winter hand of loneliness gripped at my heart. I breathed the dark, vacated air, stripped off my outer clothes, the stocking for my veins.
I got into the sagging bed, beneath the weight of blankets thick and old. The hand about my heart now squeezed so that I turned my eyes against the streaks of light, then turned them back again. Part of me could not bear to see the loneliness in there. And yet, I had to seek the warmth, light licking at the truth.
In time I slept.
How bright and warm it is this day she first comes with me into the marsh. The marsh stretches rich and flat and golden in the autumn sun. The southern breeze holds north of us great clouds of mosquitoes newly hatched by the heat.
We are so completely alone. I put my arm around her. She is such a tiny woman. One might think her waist would break in our embrace. Her eyes are gray with black rings along the outer edges. I tell her something of the marsh, something of the tides, of how the moon's tides bring life into the waiting marsh. .
My arm outstretched points to something in the south.
She smiles and holds her cheek against my chest. My shoulders bulge the brown cloth of my shirt. I lead her to the door. She is shy, but finally obeys.
In the hard new bed, brought to the marsh with so much waste of precious bateaux space, she clings to me to keep my sight from her. For the room is filled with daylight, and she is shy and though well married I have yet to see her nudity. She clings to me. I kiss her lightly. I kiss her braided hair. Her muscles are so taut. Her eyes glisten with tears, and yet she smiles again. She is smiling gently inward at herself. I kiss her lightly. I pull the blanket over us and do not try to look at her.
Expended in the night, I sleep. And while I sleep, the winds change and blow, now, from the north. I pull the blankets over us. I try to stretch a cramp from my leg, but still it aches.
The northern gale winds slap the windows, slap the doors that bang against the house, and cold rushes in with gusts that rattle at the cabinets, rattle beneath the bed. I gather her to me for warmth, for now she must be cold.
And cold, she is. And lax and soft. Her skin, now puffy white hangs loose about her jaws. Wrinkles rim her eyes in lunar curves. She stares at me, not seeing. I shrink from her. I sit up in the bed.
And there was nothing. No wind. No woman in my bed. The stove's fire smoldered. There was no longer any moon. A rattle of rats in the kitchen. Soft, encroaching cold and an old man's dreams.
Yet, in the morning, the beans I had put upon the porch were gone. A back door had been left open to the night. Rats ran from the opened cabinet as I entered the kitchen. And my newly oiled six traps were missing. How bold! My six best traps.
Far down the bayou, LeBlanc poled crudely as I walked to the high point of the levee bluff. Once, he almost dropped the pole, and a curse carried to me from across the marsh, for sound travels wonderfully across the marsh. I did not call him back.
Inside the house, I pulled the shotgun from its case. I wiped away the heavy oil and took three shells I had reloaded with light shot. Two of them I slipped into the chambers of the barrels. One, I put into my shirt. Then I put the house in order. The veins in my leg ached terribly, even with the tight stocking holding them.
I left the old one resting in her water and took another pirogue. Before I entered the marsh, the sky was blue in the way a teal wing patch changes darkly in the sun. I took the old trail Antoine Mestayer dug that year to reach his special pond, but turned from it on the first natural channel that I found. Twice, flights of ducks came from my back to cross my head and linger over water to my front but I did not fire.
When I was close enough to reach the lovely water, I hid myself and the third flight – these of dosgris – came over and then circled to the pond. I rested in the grass while they grew easy. It was a fine marsh, still.
Papa would have had me set a trap for ducks in that little piece of water that probed for a new channel. Poor ducks, they have only their wonderful eyes and almost no intelligence. Wonderful eyes and wonderful wings, but almost no intelligence, no defense for treachery. A baited corridor of wire will snare a dozen as they crowd into the trap and then cannot turn around.
Once, as an experiment, I left a poule d'eau inside the trap each morning as I gathered the ducks of the night before. A poule d'eau is not a duck, but he stayed three weeks until I released him. Papa, he would have been angry to see me release the poule d'eau, for he considered it a waste of both my effort and the bird. But it did not matter, for the same poule d'eau was inside the trap next morning. He was well cooked by noon.
Using a point of high grass to hide me, I pushed the pirogue silently ahead, then, toward the three dosgris. I got so close I could almost strike them with the pole. I fired high, so only a few pellets would strike them in their heads. All three were dead in one shot. It was not sporting, but I was not hunting. I was gathering meat, and there is a difference.
I hid myself again inside the grass and feathered the ducks in the field. Other ducks flew peacefully over me and settled in the pond to talk and feed unmolested. I listened to their happy, curious talk. I also heard two otter pups playing, splashing in the sunlit water not very far off to my left. Were they older and I younger, I'd walk the marsh and gather up their pelts. And, though otter pups in play are a joyful thing to see, I made no move. I had the sight of their uncles and ancestors as pups playing stored up in my mind. So I only listened and went home.
Harsher sounds greeted me as I moored the pirogue in the slip behind the house. It was the sound of chopping. A sound like that of an axe biting into driftwood still soaked with water from the sea. And mixed with it was the sound of bone splintering.
The legs were extended over a wooden block, a block already patterned with many cuts. The hatchet fell. The furry dead feet flew, toes curled by severed sinews. Flesh and fur stuck to the bit. The hatchet fell again and the forelegs were severed. Bone splintered.
Then he shifted the corpse, positioned it so that the head rested on the block. This time the blade smashed jaws. White back teeth for chewing broke dully, and orange front teeth for biting hung limply from the gashed flesh and skin.
So these were the inheritors of my marsh and my profession, a brute with dull, stiff, and ugly ways, and a beast, it seemed, designed to destroy all that we knew. A brute who tried to do a surgeon's job by using an axe with a dull bit, and a beast that devoured all, that seemed to reproduce itself each morning before rising. Even its hides were almost impossible to cure. They were well suited to each other.
The brute did not even notice as I crossed behind him and went to hang my kill upon the rafters of the porch, so dull he was. I sat, instead, upon the porch and leaned against a post. My rubber-booted foot I set upon the boards. I stroked the swollen veins.
My God. Once, I battled frost so thick my feet crunched four inches deep into the lacelike cold. That winter of the great ice storm. I killed the muskrats in their traps and flayed them on the spot. My thin skinning blade slit them with an artist's deft, swift strokes. They were gentle, worthy, even dainty creatures who ate only of the three-cornered grass that grows in bunches by the ponds. Their bared flesh steamed as the skin peeled back and as they tumbled to the icy marsh, tossed clear of the trail.
I took only skins, and prey was so scarce that winter that predators stalked behind me, waiting for the leavings of my trade. At first they went before, and killed the squealing rats that fought as any creature would, cornered by death. But the meat-eaters of my marsh soon discovered this was wasted work. They let me do the killing.
I forced my cramped leg straight, then stood. I knotted the dosgris heads together with a piece of twine, and hung them from the rafter. Their gutted bellies gaped, gashed open to their tails. Flesh split and forced apart, the holes were like three women's parts, but jagged, bloody, unfit for looks of love. My mind was foul. I grimaced, spat, and went into the house.
I boiled coffee as my blood cooled. The sounds of hacking stopped. I took my coffee out to talk to him. He was seated at the scraping bench. The pointed scraping board was covered with the stretched tight coypu skin. It jutted up between his thighs.
He held the knife incorrectly, and as he scraped he cut the pelt and patches of fur burst through. Inexcusable. I wrenched the knife from his hands. Coffee spilled across my fingers and I dropped the cup to the ground. He looked up, disbelieving, and I stuck the point of the knife into the bench between his thighs.
"If you cannot but waste the hides," I said, "cease stealing traps to catch them and go into some other marsh to plague the starving geese."
His lips then formed obscenities, English ones.
"Mais ...' you old bastard," he said. "Old men ... I could kill you ..." And he stood and drew back his fist, broad and hairy, as if to strike me. But then he calmed, cunning. He even smiled.
"Monsieur Dimanche," he said, now in the French, "did you not say when I came here that I could use your traps to set my lines? I only took a few. And you get a share of all the hides they snare."
"What worth is there in a share of worthless hides? Ripped through carelessness and chopped from carcasses. No. You hunt for the market. I found your kill. I hunted at a time when it was right. I did not slink and hide my kill, nor did I worry starving geese."
He tried to speak, but I would not give him time.
"It is no longer justified. Now, it is a sin. And the traps, yes. Yes, the traps stored against the rust in the water of the cistern, those are yours to use. But do not invade the home in which I sleep to steal from me those I have oiled and readied. Is it your great ignorance that makes you have to steal your traps? Do you not know how to care for them? Better that you shoot your starving geese."
He smiled, then. His teeth were yellow and brown.
"The geese," he said, "the geese. I would not have mentioned them. I would let you have your old man's way. But who are you to speak of stealing and of geese? You, who creeps like one of your precious rats to where I hid my game and takes away my plumpest bird?"
"I do not know of what you speak."
"Nor I of your 'stolen' traps. 'Josef Dimanche, Josef Dimanche, grand old master of the marsh.' Ha! Old and wasted and wilting for his dead woman. Me, I …"
"Enough! Enough of you!"
My own words shocked even me, so accustomed I had grown to choosing them like clumps of grass in floating marsh, but it put new menace in his face. He took one step toward me, and I knew that he could strike me then. I knew by virtue of his years he was much stronger than me. But I did not step back as he crowded on me, shouting.
"I thought at first it was a fox, some scavenger other than you! But then I saw the prints, shoe prints. You wanted one of the geese and so you stole one to hide the fact that I am as good at hunting as you ever were. Then, like a child, you make up this tale of other thefts. I'm used to it, this type of thing. I've had it all my life! I could kill you, old man! Out here, I could kill you!"
All around the levee bluff the marsh was silent. No bird calls. Only the ever present and uncaring swish of wind on grass.
"Ahh, old men and children," he said, and went into his shack.
Crimes and countercrimes, but I knew my reality. The thing of which he accused me was a trick of his own, one that he used even as he accused me. Could it be that, as with old Desormeaux, the wind has blown away his reason? Regardless, LeBlanc must go.
I went into the house. I took the empty shotgun shell and loaded it with heavy shot. Shot designed to drop a deer five times as far away as a fast-flying teal can fall. I put the loaded shell into the left chamber and propped the gun out of his sight, inside the back door of the house.
I did not knock at the door of the little shack because it was no longer his home. He looked up from the table. He was drinking last whiskey from a tall bottle. Yet another offense,
"You are no longer welcome here," I told him. His face became red, then suddenly went pale. I understood. The marsh was his last place.
"But, Monsieur Josef ..." he started, but I did not let him continue.
"You say that you have heard of me? Then do not waste more words. You are not welcome here."
"M'sieur Josef …!"
"Go at first light. I would have you go now but you would lose your way in darkness. You are not a man of the marsh, that's not easy to forget. At first light, though, you be gone."
I turned and left. He called to me from the door, but I did not turn. I heard him curse me loudly. Things slammed and broke inside the little shack. I went to the scraping bench and removed the damaged hide. Disgusted, I threw it on the ground, took up another pelt.
This hide's ends were jagged, butchered, but I stretched it pink and cold on the scraping board before me. The knife was an old one of mine and I had not noticed that before. Carefully, I began the scraping. The bits of fat and inner skin came smoothly off. In time, the sounds inside the shack subsided, but LeBlanc did not come out.
I stretched my leg before me to let the blood run smoothly through the swollen veins. I scraped hides until the sun began to fail and cold crept in his shadow. LeBlanc, probably drunk, did not emerge to make his afternoon trap run. I would have to find them in the morning. The animals would suffer all the night, be stiff and dead by daylight, and that was wrong but could not now be helped.
The scraped hides I put on stretchers and hung them from the rafters of the porch, near the dosgris which were now cold. They would be frozen by morning. Once LeBlanc had gone, I would make the shack a drying shed. It would be like when I first began to trap without my papa's orders. Except, of course, that now I was old.
The moon rose high in the sky to the south of east. Thick and nearly round, she seemed to have been hovering there, high, waiting for the sun to hide, hovering high over the Iberia marsh to cheat in the race for her last part.
She lustered, and her lower rim was bright like silver finely tooled but as yet unpolished.
When I awoke there was no silver light beyond the window. The moon had set, and a black stillness had settled on the marsh to aid the night, wind-sniffing hunters. Yellow light and shadows came through the kitchen door. They came with whispers. The whispers were my name.
I reached beneath the bed and pulled the gun within easy reach. The shadow of the man danced with the lamp wick light into my room.
"Monsieur Josef? Monsieur Josef?"
And still I lay and did not speak. The man had stopped inside the kitchen door. He would be holding the lamp behind him to cast light into my room and not blind his eyes to darkness. Slowly, quietly, I drew the shotgun into the bed with me. The cold barrels slid down my leg, the hammers tugged at the thick stocking for the veins.
"Monsieur Josef. Monsieur Josef. I have seen him. He is here, Monsieur Josef."
And then his reek came to me through the door. A reek of drink and sweat stale and foul. But the smell of drink, even on his foul breath was to me delicious. It made me long for forgetfulness.
"Stay where you are, LeBlanc," I said, then sat up in the bed, my feet upon the deerskin on the floor, the shotgun still beneath the covers, pressed close against my thighs. I put on the cold old jacket. "Come in."
He came swiftly, then, bent closely to my face so that I smelled the foul, tempting breath, saw each woolly whisker. Suddenly, I, too, stank, felt dirty. His eyes were red with drink and fear. Drink gives fear to some men, to others it gives a form of courage.
"Monsieur Dimanche. I cannot leave you here. Not now that I have seen him here. An old man like you ... I cannot leave you here alone, not now."
"Seen who, LeBlanc? Sit you down, there. Seen who?"
He made to sit, but no sooner had his soiled trousers touched the stack of firewood than he was up, then kneeling, leaning toward me. The lamp shook in his hand. The kerosene splashed inside. I took it from him. I placed it safely on the floor.
He bent his watery eyes downward from mine, covered his forehead with his hand as if he were shading light to see a long way off. It is a liar's trick, a childish liar's trick to hide the eyes' truth against the words. He was a failure at lying, even at lying in his desperation.
"Be still, now, and tell me what you saw. What was it that you saw? Monsieur Satan and his nine friends? The Caller of the feu-bête? He did not singe your beard."
I should not have used the Caller's name. I well remembered seeing him as a boy. Across the marsh he rose and beckoned with his yellow, fiery arm. I pulled the blanket close around me.
"No. No, Monsieur Josef. Lopez! Lopez, I tell you! He leaned over my bed. I saw his face, his mouth, his teeth. He had a knife, Monsieur Josef!"
"Sit you down, man. Sit you down or leave right now."
He settled back, eyes wide, and waited.
"You see only the stuff inside your belly," I said. "Your drink is seeing for you, and thinking for you as well. Go, now, and get some sleep. But leave my land while the morning is still young. Your demons and you are not welcome here."
The Curé d'Ors, it is said, was tormented by demons in his sleep. Once, the devil set his bed on fire. The Curé was a holy man. I, too, have been tormented in my sleep. I, too, have known holy men, and not all of them were priests.
LeBlanc was suddenly standing above me, shouting. His breath called me to drink. He had the lamp in his hand. My fingers touched beneath the blankets the barrels of the gun.
"No! No, no, Monsieur Josef! I cannot go! You cannot stay! He is mad for blood. He killed his own brother. Cut him up! Carved up his brother's wife! He ... shot those children where they slept. And he's come back into the marsh. Into my shack, Monsieur Josef. He came into my shack!"
"Good," I said, my fingers closing on the chambers of the gun. "He can have your shack when you are gone. All those of the family Lopez, they were fine trappers. They kept the marshland clean. True, they rarely spoke, but sometimes this is a blessing."
He came on me quickly. Before I could bring the barrels from beneath the blankets one hand had me by the shoulder. But his face was filled with fear, so I held back the barrels from pointing at his chest. For strength I held my breath until he knelt again before me. I worried about the lamp.
"No, no, Monsieur Josef. No, no." His voice was now a whisper. "I do not lie. No, no. I do not lie. It was him, Monsieur ... He stood beside my bed. His face was as close as mine to yours. He breathed upon my face, that breath." Spittle dripped from the corner of his mouth, into his beard.
"Go now," I said, very angry, now "Do not compound offenses with your cowardice."
He sat back on his heel, then put his open hand before him, as if to keep me away. He sat against the stacked firewood, which scattered, fell around him. His other hand was held against his eyes.
"Monsieur Josef ... I ..." But I could stand no more. My own voice rose, now in a shout.
"Go, man! Go from my marsh. Go! Get out! Leave now! Drunk or not, leave now! Let the twisting bayous confuse you even as the drink has set your mind on fire and shown you terrors for children. Go! Go!"
I shouted as his face turned hard, I pulled the shotgun from beneath the blankets, balanced it across my legs, then took my hands from it. I did not move. I did not give him cause to rush.
His eyes followed the lines of the gun, caressed it, breathing coarsely he rose, and behind him his shadow was huge, blotting out almost one whole wall. He filled his chest with breath and seemed enormous. His eyes then glared with hatred, and I could see that I had been correct. Of course, his tales were lies.
He brought the lamp to shoulder level. His bloated shadow coursed the room, like a ghostly dog pursuing game. The lamp was poised. He looked down on me with hate. My hand went to the ridged hammers of the gun. I caressed the aged metal. He turned and left. His shadow followed slowly, filled the door then vanished.
For a long time I sat at the edge of the bed, listening. Then I sat back against the old brass bars at the bed's head, still with the gun across my thighs. In time I fell asleep.
There was numbness in my leg from the weight of the gun when I awoke. And there was the smell of smoke.
I pulled on my boots, went toward the back of the house, carrying the gun and expecting to see flames in the kitchen. But the flames were behind the house. LeBlanc's shack was burning. Sparks swirled into a graying sky.
I called for LeBlanc, but there was no answer. As a man will do, though there was no hope, I took the pail and went to the cistern for water. The cistern had been drained. The lumps of the arms of traps stored beneath the rainwater level now stared back at me with rust. All around the iron tank, the clay was slippery wet. The spigot was open.
I leaned the gun against the outside wall, took some old sacks from inside the house and went to the great canal. I soaked the sacks and returned in time to beat away the fire at the edge of the marsh. Bats and swifts hunted in the churning cinders above me.
The shack burned quickly, and soon there were no flames. There was only the drifting smoke rising above the marsh and hanging like a dark rain cloud against a bland, gray sky. High, rainless clouds, blown from the sea, sat upon the marsh in all directions. They seemed to hold the smoke down to the marsh.
The marsh was very dry. My body was soot-covered from keeping the fire from the grass. I found a spade and raked the ashes into a pile. There were no bones inside the rubble. And no bottles of the whiskey.
I went down to the boats. His boat was gone and all the others had been sunk. Each keel had been split through.
Holding my breath, I bent and grasped the bowline of the old pirogue, the ancient, one-piece cypress boat. I pulled the line and the bow rose lightly. The water skimmed between my fingers from the line. The pirogue was undamaged. Perhaps it had been moored awash so long LeBlanc thought it was ruined.
I had no water to drink, but I had food, a boat and protection from the cold and rain. And I had most of my traps. I could still make the season work for me.
From a pond inside the marsh where the mud had settled, I took enough water for cooking. I set it upon the cooking stove, and when half had boiled away I knew it would be safe.
The sudden warmth would bring out dormant snakes and mosquitoes. I went onto the porch. The breeze was cooling, pleasant. Already, near the edge of the marsh, clouds of mosquitoes hovered.
The dosgris, were unfrozen. I spun the ducks, inspecting. Only the heads and backs remained. Something had torn their breasts away. I checked the posts for recent clawmarks. There were none. There were no signs on the rafter, either.
The dust at the edges of the house revealed a three-footed chaoui had crossed from the rear, exited at the front. The chaouis are skillful climbers, wary and intelligent scavengers. But no chaoui with one foot curled and dead inside a trap can climb a post, cross upon a rafter and lean down to eat a man-sized meal of dosgris breasts.
On the north side of the house I found dry three-cornered grass which had been cleanly cut, stacked beneath the wall and burned where a north wind would fan the flames. But the shifting winds had put out the fire, or something had. Only part had burned.
On hands and knees, I tried to find the match. I found none. But atop the dirt beneath the house were tiny, blackened specks. Like tiny seeds turned into coal. Specks from sparks of steel scraped on flint to make a fire.
Squatting at the great canal, I washed my face with cooling water. I put the swollen leg into the great canal, and water pressed caressingly through the rubber of the boot. One of the crabs with deformed limbs had been crushed upon the bank. His larger claw had been untouched. It still raised itself in terror, but now from a flattened, jellied mass against the mud. The foot that had crushed it had hovered and then struck.
I followed the print backward, toe to heel. He must have walked along the water's edge in hopes the tide would submerge his tracks before the fire was seen by someone far away, if it was seen at all. There were no more tracks except a slit where the bow of his pirogue had pushed into the clay. It was a pirogue like my old one, with extended keel dipping downward. I did not know of one such other boat still capable of use. Very, very rare and not LeBlanc's.
I took a trick from the butcherbird and searched the shore while pretending to merely gather wood for my old bones' fire. But there was only that one print, as if he had left a sign to show me something I, alone, would find. I decided, then, to stack the wood and rest. Sometimes with rest, the answers easy come.
But answers did not come. The tide came in, instead, and washed all prints away.
I stood above the great canal, holding my plate of dos-gris bones and watching water lap against the smoothly mottled clay. I stood as if an old man finally alone I cared for nothing but my peace, understanding nothing but my loneliness.
I saw nothing, though, across the great canal or on the far banks of the bayou where scrub oaks choked to the water's edge. A marsh hawk perched a rifle shot away, peering with his yellow-circled eyes in his search for game. Had I his eyes, I would have believed everything that I saw. Had he the wits of men, however, he would build a house, make money, wage war, and would not be here, watching with me.