Blood in the Lake Read online

  And that was the first day. On Wednesday, the second day of the search, probably one hundred people had volunteered to help in any way they could. A diving crew from St. Martin Parish arrived to start an underwater operation in Lake Peigneur. The State Police helicopter crisscrossed miles of swamp in the four-parish area of Iberia, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Vermilion. Air boats borrowed from their assignments with seismic crews in the Atchafalaya Basin scoured the honeycomb of canals and bayous draining into Vermilion Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Still, no sign of PawPaw or his truck. Nothing. By night, the ache in my stomach told me we weren’t searching for PawPaw. We were searching for his body.

  Thursday, still nothing. The tropical storm remained in the lower Gulf and had reached hurricane strength. A system of low pressure was scheduled to move into south Louisiana by the weekend. If so, the storm would be sucked northward and onshore over the vulnerable marshes and lowlands along the coast. Our coast. Everyone got testy.

  After three days without results, we stopped telling each other there could be any good explanation for PawPaw’s disappearance. I no longer recorded the details of each search operation. The sheriff, if he noticed, didn’t ask me why. With no other subject on anyone’s mind, and nothing more to say, everyone just stopped talking.

  I’d already missed two days of class and we were only allowed three cuts. If I wanted to stay on track to finish in December, I couldn’t let attendance cause me to fail a course. I slipped away and drove to Baton Rouge and back, telling only Mom and Aunt Tut. Mom had her hands full, especially chasing after what seemed like an unlimited supply of kids produced by the prolific Boudreaux family. Why the hell didn’t they keep them at home? This was no family party. It was serious.

  In a house full of long faces, Uncle Bub was the exception. His devotion to the operation never lessened. He bumped himself over to the big house first thing each morning and climbed into the vehicle with anyone who had a new idea about where to look next. He was always the last person to leave at night. I tried to sit with him as much as I could. “I know my daddy would never, ever leave me without saying goodbye,” Bub must have told me a dozen times.

  Uncle Bub’s story had become part of the family lore. Now, watching Bub struggle to keep control of his emotion, it came back to me.

  When Bub was born, a curve in his spine twisted his tiny body to the left. His right leg bent in at the knee, and then out again to the right. His right arm had a bend also, and his right hand had only three fingers, no thumb or little finger. In her five-year-old innocence, Aunt Dora said her baby brother looked like a “broke puppet.” The family doctor sent him to New Orleans to see the specialists at Big Charity. They operated on Bub twice before he was five years old, then said more surgeries would have to wait until he stopped growing. For now, he said, Bub would have to use a wheelchair. PawPaw and Mama B feared he’d never walk.

  PawPaw built special ramps so Bub could get around the house and yard, even down to the dock so he could fish like his brothers and sisters had before him. In the summertime, Mickey Brown, the nephew the Alexanders had taken in for vacations after the boy’s dad walked out on Mr. Alexander’s sister, came over a lot, at least until an unfortunate incident with a litter of kittens made PawPaw ban Mickey from his yard. Thinking back now, I suppose the kittens met some catastrophe, but I never heard the details.

  When Uncle Bub was six, PawPaw and Mama B enrolled him in first grade. They expected him to go to Coteau Elementary where all the others in the family had gone, but when the first day of school came, the bus took Bub to the special building the school board had fixed up for the handicapped at the old air base. PawPaw waited out the first six weeks. He and Mama B had only been through the eighth grade and were no experts in education, but it seemed to them all the school did for Uncle Bub was teach him how to pledge the flag, take his shoes and socks off and on, and color pictures of balloons. They weren’t even trying to teach him to read. One night PawPaw, sputtering mad, pounded the kitchen table and told Mama B he’d had enough of that special school. The next day he went to see the principal, who blew him off.

  PawPaw climbed back into his truck and drove straight to town. He pulled up at the School Board office in the old Texaco building on the highway to St. Martinville and barged into the office of the Superintendent of Education, steaming. So say, or on dit que to use PawPaw’s expression, PawPaw said, “maybe my boy can’t walk, sir, but he sure enough can think. You have him stuck in there with all those retards. It ain’t right!”

  The school bus wasn’t set up to handle a wheelchair, and the handicap van went only to the special school at the base, but the superintendent offered a compromise. If PawPaw could get Bub to the regular school, have someone there at lunchtime to take care of his needs, and pick him up again when school was over, he could go to Coteau Elementary right close to the farm.

  And that’s what they did. PawPaw taught Bub to pull himself into and out of the truck, and he and the boys drove him to school every day until the end of May. Mama B had never driven a car before, but PawPaw put her behind the wheel of his truck and gave her lessons. She passed the test and got her license. When school opened again in the fall, and PawPaw was busy in the fields, Mama B took over the job of delivering Bub to school. For the next eleven years she drove Bub there and back from August planting time, through grinding, and until the mills shut down in late January. Then PawPaw and the boys took over again.

  Eventually, Bub had more surgeries and traded the wheelchair for crutches. He was never the best student in the class, but he did just fine. When Uncle Bub bumped down the aisle to receive his high school diploma, the whole family was there, most of them in tears. I was just a little girl, but I remember it well. Uncle Bub knew how different his life would have been if it hadn’t been for PawPaw’s persistence.

  By Friday afternoon we had received one bit of good news. Tropical storm Hannah was a shoo-shoo. The winds had decreased to seventy-five miles per hour. The National Weather Service downgraded the hurricane watch to a warning, predicted a path straight north across the Gulf, and narrowed the point of projected landfall to Marsh Island due south of Iberia Parish. Lake Peigneur faced a weekend of drenching rain, but, barring some drastic change in the upper wind patterns, we wouldn’t be battered by a storm surge bringing floodwaters to our doorsteps.

  But still no sign of PawPaw.

  Mom, who’d always been the assistant mother for this family, had the lion’s share of the work operating the big house for all the people who kept coming by. When day was done, she collapsed from exhaustion. One night I met Dad in the kitchen warming two cups of milk. “Mom can’t sleep, Mandy,” he said. “Nightmares.”

  Dad carried the milk back to the bedroom and placed the cups on the nightstand. I left him stroking Mom’s back to soothe away her shudders.

  Saturday night the tropical storm swept in on schedule, pounding the rooftops with punishing rain. Wind bent the live oak branches down to the ground, toying with the hundred pound limbs like they were twigs. Pecans tap-danced on the rooftops. Windows creaked. That night I woke with a start and sat straight up. “Where are you, sweet PawPaw?” I whispered into the darkness. For the first time since he went missing, I hoped my dear grandfather was at peace with the Lord and not stranded on some side road with only his old truck for shelter. Or worse yet, out wandering through a fog-bound swamp. I hoped that my dad, who was spending a lot of time with Taddy, had prepared my little brother for the prospect of bad news.

  On Sunday afternoon, just short of a week after PawPaw disappeared, Uncle Ti took a call from the sheriff. I watched him reach out his left arm to steady himself on the back of a chair. His face reddened and then sagged like a jack-o-lantern in the October sun. A family crabbing in Delcambre Canal, just down from the far side of Lake Peigneur, had sighted a large metal shape under twenty feet of water just this side of the drawbridge linking Iberia to Vermilion Parish. The object could be a truck.

  The sheriff cal
led in a favor from a supporter conducting a dredging operation in the Basin. He agreed to move some equipment over to the canal and attempt to bring up the submerged object. The sheriff asked if a couple of the family members, not the whole clan, please, could come on out to the canal, just in case. Uncle Ti and Mom knew the job was theirs. My dad had been called back to the firehouse to relieve one of the men who had been on duty all through the storm watch, so Mom gave me the high sign to come along as their driver. Uncle Ti, Mom, and I slipped out of the house. We didn’t want Uncle Bub to know where we were going.

  We stood on the bank of the Delcambre Canal, arms entwined, watching muscular men in black T-shirts handle ropes and pulleys on the deck of the work barge they had moored some thirty feet up from the bridge. Between the shoreline and the barge, the massive form of the sheriff commanded the bow of a sleek rescue vessel, one boot up on the gunwale like George Washington crossing the Delaware. Near the barge, glistening black wetsuits broke through the surface of the water and back-pedaled away from the operation. With gloved hands, they signaled a come on to the crew on the barge.

  “Pull her up, men!”

  The awkward shape of a pickup truck rose up from the muck, a grinding, sucking, splashing gorgon, dripping muddy ribbons of marsh weed. The sheriff’s rescue boat nudged closer. Leaning from the deck, a deputy extended a crowbar and pried open the passenger door of what now clearly appeared—a white truck. The deputy drove the instrument into the suspended wreck and pulled a long, heavy bundle through the opening.

  Mom gasped at the sight. “That’s PawPaw’s jacket!” A hoarse whisper.

  The deputies lowered the sodden load onto the deck of the sheriff’s boat, and the sheriff gave a quiet order to return to shore. The crew didn’t hurry. They offloaded the package onto the dock and closed ranks, shielding the body from our eyes.

  The sheriff caught sight of a photographer in the wings: Dee Hall from The Daily Iberian. Dee received a dagger look from the sheriff that said don’t you dare put this in the paper. From the pockets of the light khaki pants hanging from the body, the deputies pulled out a quarter, two pennies, and a medal of the Blessed Mother on a silver chain.

  “No wallet,” the sheriff mumbled to the deputy by his side.

  Behind him, Mom and Uncle Ti clung to each other. The sheriff turned around. “I hate to ask you to do this, but if you could identify...” He didn’t finish the sentence, thank God.

  I stepped in front of Mom to do the job for her. Uncle Ti pushed me aside, but not before I saw where a ragged stab wound had sliced through the center of the shirt, exposing pulpy, peach-colored flesh.

  Underneath tattered rags hanging from steel grey skin, I recognized our PawPaw. Not his twinkling blue eyes but grey-white stones. Not lips parted to tell again a story I’d already heard scores of times. Thin blue lines pulled apart to reveal a gaping hole. No teeth.

  A scream pierced the hush. Ti Pierre raised his arms and cried to the heavens.

  “In the name of God, who could do such a thing?”

  I reached to support my mother so she wouldn’t fall to the deck. She sank onto my shoulder and sobbed until the ambulance took the body away.

  Sheriff Landry touched Mom on the back.

  “We’ll get whoever did this, Mimi. I promise you. And I promise you, for this he’s gonna die.”

  A Celebration of a Life

  MOM SAT NEXT to me on the worn sofa in the central hall of the old house. Aunt Tut, Mom’s favorite sibling and my favorite aunt, sat in a rocker at her side. Mom tossed her head in the direction of a large poster-sized photo, angling slightly off-kilter on the opposite wall. She spoke to her sister, barely above a whisper. “We were all there with PawPaw for his birthday celebration, just a month ago, Tut. The whole Boudreaux clan.”

  “I’m so glad we did that. Look at your granddaughter Sophie-Claire. Barely two years old and her deep curtsy is worthy of a presentation at the Sugarcane Farmers’ Ball.”

  Mom looked older these days, her eyelids darker, new wrinkles played around her mouth. But the pinch of her eyebrows eased at the mention of my older brother’s little girl. The first grandchild is special.

  “And look at your Taddy, Mimi. The little trouble maker!” Aunt Tut continued. Bless her for turning Mom’s thoughts to her precious little ones.

  In the picture, my brother Taddy had made bunny ears over the head of Uncle J. Allen’s boy, little Jay.

  “There’s Taddy’s best fishing buddy, Aunt Tut,” I said. “Right after Dee took the picture, Jay started hopping around the yard with his arms drawn up like a T-Rex. Remember the sound effects?”

  A smile cracked through Mom’s melancholy expression. “Little Jay’s non-stop grunting was about to drive your Aunt Mathilde crazy. Jay knows a heck of a lot about dinosaurs; I’ll give him that. But tell me this, who could know whether those animals growled, barked, or roared like a lion?”

  “Jay’s guess is as good as anyone’s,” I said.

  The photographer from The Daily Iberian had come out to Lake Peigneur to cover the event. He arranged the family members in front of the old cistern. My Dad wore his firefighter uniform, a rare treat for his admiring nephews. Dee Hall’s camera caught Billy Boy Bienvenu, Aunt Tut’s ten-year-old, as he raised his arms in the air like Rocky Balboa. Aunt Tut’s daughter Eula Mae gazed lovingly at her boyfriend, the one who would soon break her heart. I could study the family picture many times and still find details I hadn’t noticed before.

  The newspaper ran the photograph on the front cover of the Sunday supplement. Dee then blew it up to poster size and presented a copy to PawPaw as a gift. PawPaw hung it in the hall where he could look at his family every day.

  “Mimi, I do believe I see a little of that blackberry wine sparkling in PawPaw’s eyes,” Aunt Tut said.

  Mom broached a delicate subject, which only a dear sister could do. “It was really good to see Burt, Jr., Tut. He’s looking great.”

  “Yes. Six months working on the farm with J. Allen put color in his face and, I pray to God, took the craving for drugs out of his system. He leaves tomorrow for a landscaping job Dora found for him in Atlanta. Pray for him, Mimi.”

  “We all do, Tut.”

  No one counted the number of people that day, but we’d all tapped an index finger on the faces in the photograph many times since. We were sixty-two, not counting the three grandchildren in the oven, as we say. Not everyone was family. A few of my cousins brought girlfriends and boyfriends to meet the relatives who were swept into the crowd. PawPaw enjoyed the toddlers most of all. He laughed aloud as they chased each other around the yard, trampling through mounds of clover. Like a litter of three-month-old kittens, he said.

  After the picture taking, Uncle Ti pulled out the family treasure map. Every family around here has one, and every family thinks theirs is truly authentic and will one day make them rich. Almost two hundred years ago, the pirate Jean LaFitte made the lake his winter headquarters and, legend has it, buried his plunder on the shores. When the site of Jefferson House was known as Orange Island, fortune hunters digging for pirate gold found salt, a valuable commodity for the Confederacy. Even now, every few years someone uncovers a round piece of metal, sets off a flurry of rumors, and the treasure hunters arrive. They’ve never found anything except broken pots and animal bones.

  At PawPaw’s birthday celebration Uncle Ti tried his best to interest Uncle J. in a Saturday treasure hunting excursion into the swamp on the other side of the lake, but Uncle J. didn’t bite. He said he wasn’t about to waste his time trying to locate a stake in the ground twenty arpents from a big oak that had probably died of old age a hundred years ago. And anyway, since the catastrophe when Texaco drilled into the salt mine, the lake had an entirely different shape.

  “You’re missing your best chance to be a millionaire,” Uncle Ti told his brother. Uncle J. Allen said he’d settle out his part of the claim for one souvenir doubloon.

  PawPaw beamed at all the teasing, and
then fell asleep on his lawn chair. I remember Uncle Ti and Aunt Tut’s husband Burt had a time lifting him up, carrying him into the house, and settling him in bed. Way too much blackberry wine for an old man who probably could count on one hand the number of drinks he’d had in the past decade.

  Memories of that day sent floods of emotion through all three of us. Mom and Aunt Tut sniffled, but I was angry. What monster would hurt this dear old man? And why? For his few dollars of Social Security?

  About four o’clock the sheriff’s unit pulled up at the end of PawPaw’s front walk. Sheriff Landry had changed out of his camo jumpsuit and tall black rubber boots and into a crisp khaki uniform that stretched tight across his belly. He had dressed for a formal sympathy call on the family. No one recognized the younger man in street clothes who walked at his side. The sheriff came in the front door and greeted PawPaw’s children and many of his grandchildren by name. He introduced the man with him as Ted D’Aquin, a detective on loan from St. Martin Parish.

  “I need to explain a few things to y’all,” the sheriff said to us. “Our top detectives, Buddy Aymond and Deuce Washington, are out of town on another case and won’t be back for a couple days. We can’t wait for them to start this investigation so we’ve called in reinforcements. Ted D’Aquin from St. Martin is very good. He’ll be lead investigator until our boys get back, and I promise you he’ll do it all right. What D’Aquin does holds up in court. You know we don’t want any mistakes that will scr—mess us up.”

  We listened politely, all but Uncle Ti, that is. Ti scowled in the sheriff’s direction and bellowed out his gripes.

  “Look, Sheriff. You’d better get your friggin’ detectives back here right away. We’ve already lost a whole week. When your boys don’t find a guy right away, most times they never find him at all. We gotta start right now turnin’ this whole area upside down.”