Basile

by Monica L. Bellon-Harn

JP Valery

Fred’s Lounge serves its last beer at noon, so with the sun high I am pushed out drunk on the memory of men and women dancing a feis-do-do. Words of lost life and love on a wave of accordion and fiddle reverberate in my head. Motorcycles with license plates from California or New York line the edge of Fred’s entrance, people looking for the myth of the Cajun man. I climb up into my rented Chevy pick-up truck and look in the rearview mirror searching for him too. I coast across old Highway 90, connecting prairie Cajun towns. I have no need for the rush of I-10 to bypass the rice and sugarcane fields this afternoon. With my window down I hear the rustle of the cane stalk and raise the radio volume to listen to the dis ’n dat. My life in Philadelphia is just a dream, and I have been here all along.

For decades my memory returned to this place, my dreams a belted kingfisher always migrating home. But today I am driving through the landscape of my youth, fast approaching St. Mary’s where my adolescent knees grew bruised on hard floor. I pull my Chevy into a parking spot as far from the church as possible. I want to slip in after the ritual begins, a ghost in silent observation, but I hang back and light a cigarette. Slowly approaching the church threshold, I hum the melody of a long lost hymn that floats from open windows, take one last drag, then push the door and enter through the narrow opening to look toward the altar at the casket in which my father lays.

From my back pew, the sun gleams through red and blue stained glass and shimmers on my khaki pants. The paint around the windowsill is peeling and a thin crack marches steadily down the wall. My foot taps the edge, and the hollow sound reminds me of the piers holding this structure high in preparation for a hurricane to roil the nearby slow-moving bayou. One season the relentless water flushed the dead from their graves in the parish cemetery, but the church survived to serve the living, so they can remember.

Once the casket passes down the aisle I head out behind a line of people exiting the church. Standing on the front stoop I watch the group promenade toward the cemetery and notice a man walking toward me. Pearl buttons on his shirt catch the sunlight. His rounded shoulders ride along with each beat of the heel of his cowboy boot on the asphalt. As he nears, he tips his hat and I recognize my brother. He maintains his forward stride past the scent of the purple, rose, and white blooms that stretch across the boundary of the cemetery until he stops in front of me.

​“Did it take that long to hitch a ride home?” Widman says.

“The driver took the long way around,” I reply.

“Glad to see you anyway,” he says.

We watch the casket in the distance being lowered in silence.

“Who left the message?” I say.

“Wife did,” he replies. I wait.

“She was in Eunice, so she stopped by the library and they helped her look you up on the computer,” he explains.

My assistant left a message from an anonymous call. It read, Jesse’s gone, Rosary Thursday, Funeral Friday. I paid too much for an airline ticket, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask for a bereavement rate.

Widman and I walk back toward the church parking lot and our feet fall in step. He points across the road to an empty lot that once held the house we grew up in with a father who sat in a red vinyl recliner and stared absently at a television. Nothing remains.

Widman grabs my shoulder, and we head out without a word.

“What you eat up there with those Yankees?” he asks.

“Nothing good to speak of, so I keep Tabasco in my pocket,” I reply.

“Hell, no one north of I-10 can make a gumbo as far as that goes,” he says.

“They have a Cajun bistro in my neighborhood run by a guy from Chicago. I went there once, sent my food back, and left with the bill on the table,” I say. He grunts with approval.

We pull through a chain link fence wrapping his property and park under an aluminum carport. Widman heads to the back room to take off his suit, and his wife Ada appears from the kitchen.

“Hey Jack, whisky or beer?” she asks as though I lived next door.

“Whiskey,” I say and sit in one of three recliners resting against a panel wall. She sets my drink on a TV tray.

​“How you been?” she asks.​

There are so many answers to the question, more than I can attach to words. The summer I graduated high school I started working on our father’s road crew. In the mornings I would drag myself from the place where I lay and feel for bruises from a fight I wouldn’t remember the night before. Then I would climb in the bed of a work truck, and rest my head against the sideboard. A brown paper bag crumpled in my pocket held two meat sandwiches wrapped in wax. I always gave one to a man named Peanut because he was empty-handed.

One morning the brakes screeched and we fell back in the bed. “Get your sorry ass digging boy,” my father said as he opened the gate and threw me a shovel. He pulled a white bucket with water from the cab and set it next to the road. I stood by the truck wheel and he pointed to the middle of a field. “Six feet, we got a pipe to lay,” he said as he drove away.

Peanut lifted one hand in a wave as they disappeared. I laughed and waited for them to turn around, for him to holler at me to jump back in, but no one came. The sun beat down, and even though my shirt was soaked in sweat, I kept it on because the burn would be worse. I slashed into the clay, and after hours I looked up from the pit I had created. When I heard the roar of the truck approach, I tried to scramble out.

My father yelled from the cab, “You gonna get out boy or stay for a while.”

I looked across the edge of the earth as I pulled my body up, and I saw the men laughing, except Peanut. He watched me in silence, and when I returned to the truck, he gave me back half of the sandwich I had given him. I left the next day with a suitcase in hand. I heard the refineries were hiring, so I headed west as far from Louisiana as a single hitch might take me.

​Widman walks in from the back in overalls. “You know the day I walked out of this town it was raining like hell. I sat at a diner outside of town with hardly a dime in my pocket. I could hardly by a cup of coffee to drink,” I say. Widman laughs.

“Some man in a big ass Cadillac swerved in. He stunk like whiskey but I got in anyway. He careened all the way to the Sabine taking swigs from a bottle of Early Times. He took a piss at the Texas border, and I took the wheel,” I add. Widman laughs again.

“That son-of-a-bitch got me job working in the refinery, and it turned out I had a talent for oil and gas,” I say. Widman walks across the room and puts on a Merle Haggard album.

“Then you headed North,” he says.

I walk out the screen door with a fresh whiskey in hand. If I kept walking I would come to the same road I took when I left. Over the years I wanted to send mail with clippings of each promotion, photos taken of me with men in suits, airline tickets of my travels — fragments they could assemble into a mosaic of my life. A few times I held a pen to an envelope only to put it down.

A door slams and Widman joins me. He has an envelope in his hand. In it is a picture of our mother. She stands by an empty chair with expectant eyes. Her dress is covered in polka dots and she carries a small clutch in her right hand. Her face is frozen in time, forever eighteen, the age she left after giving birth to me. Widman tells me to open my hand and he shakes a small tin ring into my palm.

“Her wedding ring,” he says. “She used to sit on the back porch with a box fan at the door of the room, blowing away the humidity and keeping the mosquitos from lighting on her skin. I would rest my head in her lap and twist that ring around and around her finger as she searched the horizon waiting for our father.”

​I hold it in my hand and think of the daughter I didn’t have to give it to, so I hand it back. Ada walks outside to join us.

“Keep it,” she says as she eyes the envelope. “My girl is long past wanting something like that. Got a scholarship to LSU and she thinks she got more going than we can understand.”

​“How is she?” I ask.

​“Gone is how she is,” she replies and she sips her drink. I hear Widman breathing.

“Just like you,” she says after a beat. “Just like we all should be, but look where we sitting.”

​Widman says nothing until Ada heads back into the house. I picture him flying up to Philly. I would pick him up at the airport and show him the Liberty Bell. I wonder if he’s ever left south Louisiana, if behind the curtains that cover their closet openings there are suitcases or souvenirs.

“When you heading back?” he asks.

“Soon as I finish this drink,” I say with a swallow.

“Guess there’s nothing here to make you stay,” he says.

“Never was,” I reply.

“It was right for you to come, pay respects. It was right for Ada to call,” he said.

“Was it?” I ask.

“Jack, the only thing I could say about that man we watched get lowered today was that he could sure drink. That’s all he did, maybe all he could do,” he says.

As I head west to the airport, I pass a sign of a smiling crawfish in a pot of boiling water proclaiming “Buy Louisiana” to an audience that never arrives. The wheels of my car on the asphalt are a singular sound. There is Nathan Abshire’s corner. He played the accordion. Once men from some place across the Sabine in west Texas recorded Nathan and sold his tunes while he worked his trash collection job. The feed store down that raw dirt path is where revelers in masks made of ribbon and cloth from old, worn dresses prepared for the annual chicken run. Women plucked the birds for gumbo to start Mardi Gras and we danced late into the night until we piled into friend’s sleeping porches, safe from mosquitos, and listened to the plaintive wail of a lone voice telling our story. The back of the Chamber of Commerce sign asks me to come back soon. From France and Nova Scotia, then pushed to no man’s land, we made our lives in the Lousiana swamp and prairie. Then, like castaways searching the ocean for boats, we drifted away, one by one.

*

Monica L. Bellon-Harn lives in southeast Texas, where she works as a professor in speech and hearing sciences.