Early Thursday (eBook)

CHAPTER TWO

June 1957

The dreams had begun before the drowning. It felt like my whole life had been hurtling through time and space like a meteor streaking to that one last moment. Is that the way it is? We live our lives for that one climactic moment when we die? That night, I woke up fearful and couldn’t sleep. I sat up and leaned against the iron headboard. I blinked my eyes to adjust to the dark. The night was black, but I could see the white frame of the windowsill glowing in the soft light of the stars. Many times, I was secretly afraid. I couldn’t relax because I was afraid Papa would come into the bedroom and flip the mattress with me still in it. I listened. My senses pricked to the screaming point. I heard my brother Bobby’s steady breathing in the twin bed next to mine. I heard Pooch on the floor, his breath also steady. I heard the gentle, rhythmical snoring of the Gulf that lay in a crater several hundred yards away. The Gulf reminded me of Papa. There was something deep and dangerous underneath, if only I could understand him.

I tried to remember the dream but could only feel the confusion. I threw my legs on the side of the bed. It was the first time I realized that I was the least loved by Papa, if loved at all. Sadness filled me and overflowed into the room around me. I saw the aura of myself turn my collar up and walk away. I got out of the bed and followed, groping through the dark, carefully opening the door and making sure the screen door didn’t bang shut. Pooch followed me, or us. It was strange. I stepped across the dew-covered St. Augustine grass, bent down and cuddled him.

“I know, my good old Pooch, you love me the most,” I said and felt the rise of tears.

I tried to convince myself of the many reasons that I could come up with for Papa’s meanness toward me. There was more than I knew at that time, but back then, I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Papa must have known. I resolved to try to do something special for him or to make him proud of me in some way. Maybe then he would love me. This was different. The fear was a different kind of fear. It wasn’t about Papa. I didn’t know why I was so unsettled with a clammy feeling of foreboding. Was it the dream? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. All I wanted was to sleep under the stars so that I would know that God was still in charge, and my problems were nothing but dust in the wind. A mulberry tree grew next to the front porch, and I had rigged a hammock high up in the tree for those fearful nights. I climbed the tree feeling the rough fuzz underneath the glove-like leaves brushing my face. Pooch curled up at the bottom of the tree. I crawled into the hammock, and it molded around me like a cocoon. I fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of the exact occurrence of what happened to me when I was drowning—the barreling through the waves, grasping for anything, and letting go of everything. I dreamed of floating face down with the incredible ability to focus. I heard a woman calling my name, but as I came to consciousness, I realized that it wasn’t the lady in the tree calling me, but this time it was Mama.

“Walt, Walt, wake up.”

Mama came to the front porch. She was calling me into the world of things to do. I heard the front door open again, and Papa came out and picked up the hoe that lay against the house. High above in my hammock, he poked me in the back.

“Up and at ‘em, Boy,” he said in his gravelly morning voice not yet tempered by his morning coffee. Papa looked at me as I came down the tree. “Why were you in the tree?” he said.

“Don’t know. Scared I guess.”

“You scaredy-cat, you can’t give in to fear. Dying is dying whether you drown in saltwater or pass out in your beer,” Papa, known by everyone in the community as Man LaCour, said.

“Or fall off the stupid roof,” I said. “A Leeeeeeee,” I yelled with all my might, but he didn’t hear me. Éli, my friend, the idiot-genius stood astride the pitch of the roof, glorious in his devotion to ritual. “I guess,” I said, and my voice cracked—the dead giveaway of a boy entering puberty. “I guess that’s why we have guardian angels for all the drunks and idiots.” Papa sliced his eyes at me.

“Boy, where’d you come from? You act like an old woman.”

Papa left me on the porch to watch Éli’s ritual by myself. The door slammed. You would think I would have gotten used to it by now because every morning at sunrise, since Uncle Baby picked him up on Highway 27 going toward Cameron, Éli braved the slick, slant of the roof to stand on top of Uncle Thib’s Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler bar and serenade the fleet of fishing boats that lined the dock. The shrimp boats rocked on the dark water, the skeletal rigging black against the sky. Today was no different. Through the overgrown vines and roses on the front porch, I watched Éli’s silhouetted figure. His dark jacket flapped in the breeze. His arms stretched out like a tightrope walker. One hand gripped his violin, a world-class violin at that, and the other held the bow. There was a big mystery surrounding Éli’s violin that no one had figured out yet. It was a Stradivarius. It was supposed to be a secret, but most of us Cajuns didn’t give a big cahoot about that. Just so it worked for the fais-dodo on Saturday night. Éli staggered. My body tensed.

“For Pete’s sake why do you have to get on the roof? Why not the dock? Why not the stupid dock?” I said under my breath. Éli’s total lack of self-preservation was part of his condition. His foot slipped. I gasped. “How can anyone be so smart and so dumb all at once?”

Éli bent his knees to regain his balance, stood upright, his back to the sun, facing the wind, and the magnificent, fog-shrouded Gulf, not letting anything mess up his ritual because change was not part of his small vocabulary or his life. I exhaled. Éli lifted his violin and tucked it under his chin; then he lifted his bow and drew it across the strings, trying to understand the very air and properties of the water. The faint strains of sea-groaning notes filled the air. The sun hovered on the horizon flooding the Gulf and inched up the dark sky. Éli played with freshness, as if it was the first time he had seen a sunrise.

Spiders had been busy in the hours before dawn. Their webs strung up and down the barbed wire fence, netted diamonds of dew and every now and then a mosquito or fly. Spiders and shrimp fishermen had something in common. They both had to cast their nets at the right time of day for a good haul, and even then, they might get lucky or they might not catch anything. The beauty of the morning was nature’s irony because the weather could change to threatening in no time. I opened the screen door and stepped into the front room and tossed my leather gloves on a chair. I controlled my voice to hide my excitement that the weather would be too bad for shrimping today.

“It’s going to rain. Éli is playing some kind of funeral music.”

“That’s hogwash,” Papa said.

“Éli is a barometer. He knows,” I insisted.

“The idiot don’t know when to come in from the rain.”

“Mama says he’s a miracle.”

“He’s retarded for God’s sake,” Papa said.

Soft light aproned around the bedroom door where my mama, Mary Effie cooed to the four-month-old Baby Faye. Baby Faye babbled. Mama had heard our conversation because she appeared sleepy-eyed at the bedroom door wearing her faded robe and holding a squirming, curly-headed Faye.

“Miracles come in strange packages. God doesn’t make mistakes,” she said, and turned her attention back to the baby.

“It will be a miracle if I can put food on the table,” Papa said. “Miracle is just another word for hard work.”

Mama walked around the room in the opposite direction of Papa, bouncing Baby Faye in her arms, stopping in front of the window, and swaying quietly. Papa paced in front of the window; the radio roiled static. Papa and the radio charged the air with electricity. He stopped at the window, parted the curtains and stared at the gathering clouds, those darkening-by-the-minute clouds, stalling over the Gulf, daring the wind to move them until they were emptied. He squeezed his eyebrows and squinted his eyes as if to will the weather to change. Shrimp fishermen were dependent on the weather, just like the farmers, except the farmers usually wanted rain and the fishermen did not. A little rain never scared anyone, but a thunderstorm and rough seas made everyone sit up and take notice. The radio announcer’s baritone voice trailed in and out of the static.

“It has been reported that there is a disturbance in the Gulf that’s worth keeping an eye on,” the radio announcer said. “News out of the New Orleans Weather Bureau reports that the ship the SS Terrier radioed that it unexpectedly experienced thirty-five to forty miles-per-hour winds, probably a tropical depression developing in the Bay of Campeche in the lower Gulf of Mexico. The depression looks like it is moving northward. We will keep an eye out for further bulletins and forward them to you as they come in.”

Mama and Papa paused and looked at each other. Fear held their gaze—their lives balancing on that second of knowing. It was June, a little early for the hurricane season, but storms were real in the Gulf south where we lived. Bobby stepped out of the bathroom sporting a bandaged, stubbed toe—a Kick the Can injury. Bobby—with his sleepy, black eyes, face glowing with...