Beginner's Mind

• how to build a variety of traditional Acadian and Cajun houses from the ground up, using traditional materials and antique tools
• how to build a variety of crawfish traps of both wood and net, and what is the best bait to use in which season
• what a rougarou is and how to defeat it
• what weaponry and clothing and other gear were common among both Union and Confederate troops in the late US Civil War--and the slang they used to describe it
• a whole slew of Cajun slang and a handful of truly fantastic Cajun names (my favorite, and the name of a character in my novel: Hippolyte)
• a little bit about flora, fauna, and geography of southwestern Louisiana, including the reed brakes, the marshes and swamps, the prairie grasses, and the cherniers (a delightful name); several marsh birds and gulls, and the beautiful but now-endangered red wolves, and
• a great deal more than I ever thought I would about every hurricane season from 1856 to 1865. (You thought 2005 was bad--you should have seen 1860!)

The old woman stepped from the plank into the marsh where they’d killed the cavalrymen and she waded out till the water was at her chin, then she swam until she could touch again. There the sodden weeds deep in the marsh sucked at her feet and whenever she came this way now she grew nervous, worried that the bodies they sunk in the marsh instead of dumping down the well as she preferred had not forgotten her transgressions and waited there in the murk to pull her down to their revenge. She swam a ways further with her knees bent high and her toes curled, her gaunt arms pulled hard on the water and the salty marsh lapping up her chin to her lips. But finally she could dogpaddle no more and she let down her feet into the soft bottom and mucked up through the weeds to crawl ashore on the sandy bank beyond. She jogged panting up the grassy ridge of the cheniers and paused at the top where she gazed across the marsh to the thin line of the Gulf out beyond. Even from here the soft crash of surf was audible and she could smell the pungent piscine scent of the beach. She put up a hand to shade her eyes and scanned the flat line of the horizon till she found the light blot she was looking for on the rim, and she wallowed out across the marsh toward it. For several long minutes there was only lighter salty marshwater sluicing her ankles and her own huffing breath to match the lick of surf, but after a while she climbed a shallow rise and walked it till she met the girl, standing at the lip of a tidal cove, tossing baited lines out into the water. She wore a boy’s breeches with the legs rolled up and a wide straw hat. Beside her a bucket clacked with a half dozen angry crabs scrabbling inside, seeking purchase enough in the soft wood to escape but never succeeding. The woman said nothing for a while, only watched and caught her breath. The girl’s arm jerked slightly and she sorted among the lines in her fist until she found the one with tension and hauling it in, hand over hand, to collect the small crab that clung there.

A sharp gust rocked them on their small ridge and they were awash in the dueling rush of the rustling trees back on the chernier and crashing Gulf before them. The girl reeled in another crab and dropped it clacking in the bucket. Out on the horizon a bank of clouds was rising up in shades of indigo and steel, a feathery brush drifting down from the lip to the edge of the Gulf. The woman raised an arm and passed her hand over the horizon as though petting the clouds, trying to smooth them out.

You remember the year before the war, all them storms we had?

I remember. It was one them storms brought my family here and another made me near an orphan.

That was a hell of a year, girl. Three hurricanes in two months, just poured on over us like the flood of Noah. God’s own wrath, like we was being prejudged for what only he alone knew we was about to engage in. Did you know the first one hit on the very anniversary of that Last Island catastrophe in fifty-six? You wasn’t here then, of course, but Last Island is a story they was still telling and then here come that trinity of storms. There must be a reason to it, that first hurricane hitting on the same day as its predecessor. Didn’t hurt us much beyond all the wind and rain, was just a rowdy storm but it scared us and we’d no idea what was coming.

The girl reeled in a crab. She sorted the empty lines from her fist and handed them to the woman to coil and tie. She said, Our ship come in to land ahead of the storm, beached our ship right up here in these salty marshes and unloaded us into the water. That old captain must have had some idea. I think I must have had some idea, sick as I was on that ship and glad for land even if it was this old marsh. I don’t recollect, though, was you and yours among them that came to help us up the chernier and into the brake, out to town?

I was among them though I don’t remember you, girl. Hippolyte and Remy was out in the canes doing what they could though it was fool’s work, nigger’s work. I think those boys must have gone into Leesville to get theirselves a drink, though, because I don’t imagine how else he could first have seen you. I didn’t allow no drinking in those days, not in my house.

You still don’t.

Not having any drink about ain’t the same as not understanding the need for one. Times like these change a body’s perspective.

Why was your men out in the canes anyway? You said ain’t no one knew what was coming.

I meant we didn’t know the magnitude of God’s plans, but we sure knew it was something. Like when you was little and knew you’d got in trouble but your mama told you to wait till your papa gets home, and then all that day you know he’s coming but can’t imagine in your child’s head what he’s gonna do. The weather that summer it’d been awful hot, the air so think you’d think it was smoke not just the humidity, and both sunrise and sundown alike was heavy with mist and bloodred in the coming or dying light. We knew for certain the sky was going to break open sooner or later. There here come that cloud, one great one like God’s own anvil somehow floating around up there and waiting to fall on us. They was some strange light in that cloud, not like no lightning I ever saw, not just the blue or yellow flashes you see but all sorts of colors including colors I ain’t even got words for and utterly silent, no thunder ever to reach our ears. And then it just passed on. Weren’t no wind nor rain, just a show of what we was in for. So we all knew something was coming.

They stepped out to the front of the hut, sat in the steamy night on a stump and an upturned bucket. The sky glowed an eerie shade of burnt ocher, a thick quilt of cloud slung low in the sky and the evening light unearthly over the marsh. The air soupy and astir with cricketsong. The old woman rubbed her neck and looked about.

Shoot, the air's so thick now they ain't no breeze.

No, the girl said.

They listened to the song a while, the girl staring seemingly into nothing but her gaze to the sky near the direction of Buford’s house. The old woman watched her watching the brake, and she thought of something to say. Finally she closed her eyes as if in memory and then looked at the girl.

I was dreaming earlier, the woman said. Dreamed Remy come back from the war.

The girl looked at her. You miss him something terrible, don't you.

Don't you?

Sure, mother, I miss him.

You ain’t never even cried over him, I noticed. Ain't you sad your husband is dead?

The girl glowered at the woman, tightened her fingers over her bare knees.

I am sad, yes maam. But he ain't coming back. You and me learned enough about death these last few years to know they ain't no use in pining. They don't come back, they don't even hear you.

The woman leaned on her stool to touch the girl’s hand on her knee. The girl pulled it back and stared hard at the woman.

I'm sorry, the woman said, I am. I didn't mean to accuse you of nothing. And I know you must be lonely, too. An old woman ain't no kind of company for a girl such as yourself. She closed her eyes, then she opened them bright in and smiled at the girl.

I tell you what. I'll find you a good husband. Soon's this war is over I'll go on into Leesburg with you, we'll go to that hotel again and we'll find you someone good to marry.

The girl looked hard at her then out across the brake, in the direction of Buford's house.

The woman continued undeterred.

When this war ends the men'll come back, not just the deserters and the ruffians but the officers, good men of some distinction. We'll find us such a one from among them and get the cane fields going again. Them's part yours now, you know.

I don't know nothing about no cane fields.

You'll learn, we'll find you a good sugar farmer and you'll learn.

The girl made to shake her head but then they heard loud reports out in the distance and they bolted upright, the bucket toppling over. A faint orange glow in the clouds and a black plume of smoke rising out to the west. Another explosion and the rapid pop of riflefire.

Damn, they's fighting out there!

The woman grabbed her by the arm, tugged her toward the hut.

We best get started that direction. We can't wait no more for them to come wandering in to us, we got to get closer.

They dashed inside and dressed quick and silent in the darkest clothes they had, grabbed their various weapons, armed heavier than they'd ever been, and they rushed out into the night, racing stealthily through the rushes toward the ominous glow in the clouds.

As dusk shadowed the brake and the sky glowed hot and gloomy like fired iron, as the cicadas set in and far off the frogs began a song, a spectral figure emerged hat and shoulders from the rippled surface of the backwaters. He carried a long walking stick with which he plumbed the path before him, and tied to the top of the stick hung a heavy black sack. He pushed his way through the weedy murk and emrged onto the damp ground of the brake dripping and naked save the wide black hat on his head. He leaned against the stick and felt carefully over his flesh in the last of red light, picked a few dangling leeches like mutant teats of blood from his wiry thighs and knotted buttocks, then he untied the sack which was in fact a preacher’s cassock looped over a heavy Bowie knife and rotting string of beads. He removed the hat and hung it float atop a clump of reed and he draped himself in the cassock, tied his waist with a rope and hung the beads from the front of the belt and slipped the knife into the rope to hang at his back. He donned the hat and inspecting first the sky and then the dark ground before him, he discerned some sense of direction and struck out through the unseen trails in the reeds. He meandered for some time, the night falling heavy around him till he could no longer distinguish the hem of his cassock from the black ground below it. His own hands seems to float in space like incorporeal spirits guiding him through the marsh. At last he pushed aside a stand of reeds like curtains and stepping into a small clearing of hard earth in the back of which nestled of burrow of reeds with a door. A drift of smoke rose less dark than the darkness around it in a thin cloud from a lifted hatch in the roof. He looked around the rest of the clearing but so no other markers and checked the sky for his bearings but could make out no stars for guidance. He bent low to the ground and laid his stick gently there, then slipped the knife from the rope behind him and crept up on the hovel.

Buford’s shack tilted in the reeds and listed one side half down a slope into the water. It had fallen off its thick cypress blocks. In the night it looked like some giant angular concoction of the marsh slinking back into the muck and water whence it had come. As he approached the side with his knife in his fist to peer in the one side window he still could reach he half-expected to find the blazing eyes of a rougarou leering back at him through the paneless frame, the hot wolfen breath through the dripping teeth the breath of the swamp itself. He saw nothing inside but smelled it nonetheless, though it was a form of death he’d known already these last few years and nothing supernatural about it. He slid down an embankment into water up his ankles and bent to prise open the door, had to wrench askew and climb over the corner of it just to enter. He crouched and waited for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness inside. He heard a scuttle of some creature and felt the matted grizzly fur of a muskrat scrape past his foot but he held his ground and waited still. When nothing else moved he reached into a fold and pocket he’d stitched into the cassock and popped a match with his thumbnail. The inside of the shack wavered in the yellow light like it was underwater, but nothing else moved. A wreck of moldering reeds in one corner, the scent of scat by the wall that cantered into the marsh. His lantern bent and glassless still hung on a nail by the door but it was drained and wickless, pilfered long ago. A pole warped along the far wall, some shards of crockery and some bones he’d collected in his youth and never saw fit to discard. Nothing else remained. His few utensils, his table and two chairs and his bedframe, his old cookstove, everything pillaged. The match expired on his thumbtip and he hissed. He shuffled into the corner where he’d remembered seeing the pile of reeds, popped another match and reached for the bent pole to poke among the damp wreck but nothing emerged save a few insects. He blew out the match and shook it to cool then pocketed the last of the stick, stirred the nest with the pole till he was satisfied whatever had called it home had now absconded, and then he kicked the reeds together into a loose mat and fell back on it to sleep. He lay instead for some hours just staring up into nothing.

During the Civil War, a mother and her son's wife eke a living out of the Lousiana bayou by robbing the bodies of passing soldiers. Sometimes they kill the soldiers first. Into this comes a neighbor deserted from his regiment and hiding in the reed brakes where they live; he brings news of the son's/husband's death. Now both women enter a silent, unacknowledged war of lust and jealously trying to possess the runaway hermit.

For days on end the only sound in the reed brake was the wind in the rushes. There would be other sounds for those who knew how to discern them, the soft crash of a gator slipping from the prairie grass into the muck and water, the rustle of ducks breaking for the sky or the dip of a heron beak as it fished the shallows. But all kept quiet enough that by day few sounds were louder than the sighing of the reeds, and at night the baritone croak of the frogs was cheerless and departed. The two women listened anyway, silent and languid themselves in their meager chores, and when at last they’d catch out of the hot breeze the long-off reports of canonshot or riflefire, they would set aside their baskets of wash and reel in the crawfish traps and the few lines they’d laid, and they would gather their one musket with its fixed bayonet and a long stiff cane they’d sharpened and wrapped with a grip, and they would crawl out into the marsh to lie in wait.

They took almost half an hour to drag the men to the forgotten well in the marsh by a long abandoned homestead where now remained only the well and a packed foundation they alone would recognize. They dragged their pairs of legs to the low stone wall of the well and propped the naked ankles atop the rim. With such a ramp created from the dead legs they bent and rolled the third man like a log up the bodies until his rump hung over the lip and they pushed so he bent in the middle and fell into the well. Echoing up from the maw came a wet crunch of various limbs when he landed in the deep below, the bodies down there already risen past the water line. A cloud of gnats ascended to behold them that had disturbed the deep, and with the gnats came a stench of swollen meat and festered gases like the reek of hell itself. They paid the not gnats nor the stench any heed, bent already to the second body and hauling it up by the shoulders. The girl held the man steady while the old woman shifted the legs until the knees caught and held the rim. They together they lifted his back and pitched him headlong into the well. They did the same for the last body, and the cloud of gnats followed in a descending vortex like a school a fish chasing a proffered meal. The women did not notice; they returned to the trampled and bloodstained clearing to collect their piles. They stuffed what they could into the haversack then slung the straps of the sack over two of the rifles like poles for a spit. The old woman hung the third rifle crossways over her shoulder , the strap bisecting her pendulous breasts, then both women bent and rested the rifle-ends on their shoulders to raise the haversack slung between them. The girl in the lead and carrying the musket and cane pike while the old woman steadied their load. Neither had said one word the entire time, all their deeds by habit unspoken.