When I came out, the sky had turned yellow and purple and was full of dust blowing out of the cane fields. The oak trees in front of the school throbbed with birds, and when the wind changed, the air smelled like a lake that has gone dry. It was an evening when the colors of the sky and the earth and the trees seemed out of accordance with one another. The end of summer in South Louisiana is usually like sliding over the crest of a torpid season of heat and humidity into autumnal days that ring with the sounds of marching bands and smell of burning leaves and the damp, fecund odor of the bayous. But this year was different.
The skies were red at morning, and at night churning with clouds that looked like curds of smoke from giant oil fires. Afternoon showers turned into violent storms, with trees of lightning bursting across the entirety of the sky. I have never given credence to apocalyptical theology or prophecies, but this year I felt a sense of foreboding that I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t based on an intuitive knowledge about the future, either. I had seen the show before.
It is hard for someone who has not experienced a hurricane to understand the terror of being inside one. Perhaps the fear has its roots in the unconscious. Psychiatrists say the most terrifying moment in our lives occurs when we are delivered out of the birth canal from the safety of the womb-unable to breathe, shuddering against the light, knowing we will die unless we receive the slap of life. Supposedly that moment is sealed forever in a corner of the mind we wish never to reenter. Then one day the world of predictability, the earth itself, caves under our feet.
That moment came for me on a seismograph drill barge anchored by deep-water steel pilings in a bay west of Morgan City in the summer of 1957. On board were 160 pounds of canned dynamite and boxes of canned primers and spools of cap wire that were tipped with a vial of nitroglycerin gel that could be detonated with either an electrical spark or a hard knock against a steel surface.
No one anticipated the ferocity of Hurricane Audrey or the tidal wave it would push ahead of it. Our company chose to ride it out. That experience was one that will remain with me the rest of my life.
The tide dropped at sunset, and for miles there was hardly a ripple of wind on the water. The sky was lidded with clouds that were the color of scorched pewter, but the horizon was still blue, glowing with an iridescence that seemed trapped behind the earth’s rim. We went to bed on the quarterboat with a sense of peace about the storm, convinced it was passing far to the west, perhaps over in Texas, and that our fears had been unfounded.
At dawn, the miles of flooded cypress and gum trees surrounding us were thick with birds of every description, as though none of them could find a proper tree upon which to rest. At 9 a.m. my half brother Jimmie and I were building explosive charges for the driller, screwing six cans of dynamite end to end, then screwing on a primer that would attach to a second string of six cans, doing this three times until we had a charge of eighteen cans that we would slide down the drill pipe with the cap wire whipping off the spool behind it.
Without any transition, the sky erupted with lightning, the barometer dropped so fast our ears popped, a line of whitecaps shot from the mouth of the bay into the swamp, like skin wrinkling, and the miles of flooded trees surrounding us bent simultaneously toward the water.
I turned away from the drill and the wind struck my face as hard as a fist. The tarp that was used to shade the drill deck, one that was made of heavy canvas and inset with metal rods and brass eyelets, ripped loose from the pilothouse and disappeared in the wind like a discarded Kleenex. What happened next was an event of such magnitude and intensity that neither Jimmie nor I nor anyone else on board would ever quite understand it or the natural causes that created it. Some thought it was a waterspout. Some believed a secondary system, one with its own eye, had passed over us. But whatever it was, it carried its own set of rules and they had nothing to do with the laws of physics, at least not as I understand them.
There was no sound at all. The wind stopped, the water around the drill barge flattened, then seemed to drop away from the steel pilings, as though all the water were being sucked out of the bay. The gum and cypress trees and willows along the shore straightened in the stillness, their leaves green and bright with sunshine, then the world came apart.
All the glass exploded from the windows in the pilothouse. The instrument shack, made of aluminum and bolted down on the stern, was shredded into confetti. The crew chief was shouting at everyone on the deck, pointing toward the hatch that led down to the engine room, but his words were lost in the roar of the wind. A curtain of rain slapped across the barge, then we were inside a vortex that looked exactly like millions of crystallized grass cuttings, except it was filled with objects and creatures that should not have been there. Fish of every kind and size, snakes, raccoons, blue herons, turkey buzzards, a pirogue, uprooted trees, possums and wood rabbits, a twisted tin roof, dozens of crab traps and conical fishnets packed with enormous carp, hundreds of frogs, clusters of tar paper and weathered boards-all these things were spinning around our barge, sometimes thudding against the handrails and ladders and bulkheads.
I got to my feet just as an avalanche of water and mud surged across the decks. It stank of oil sludge, seaweed encrusted with dead shellfish, sewage, and human feces. The driller, who had been huddled under a pipe rack, vomited in his lap.
Then the sky turned black with rain, and in the west we saw lightning striking the shoreline and in the wetlands and in fishing communities where our relatives lived and in small cities like Lafayette and Lake Charles, and we were glad that it was them and not us who were about to receive the brunt of the storm, even the tidal wave that would curl over Cameron and crush the entire town, drowning over five hundred people.
I USED WEE WILLIE BIMSTINE and Nig Rosewater’s agency in New Orleans to go bail for Cesaire Darbonne. Willie and Nig kept my name out of the court record, but Cesaire was released from jail on Wednesday morning and was at my house ten minutes after I arrived home for lunch with Molly.
He removed his straw hat before he knocked on the door. I invited him in but he shook his head. “I just come to t’ank you,” he said.
“It’s not a big deal, Mr. Darbonne,” I replied.
“Ain’t many people would do somet’ing like that.”
“More than you think.”
He looked out at the traffic on the street, his expression neutral, his turquoise eyes empty of any thoughts that I could see. He fitted on his hat, his skin darkening in the shadow it made on his face. In absentminded fashion, he scratched the chain of scars on his right forearm. “You ever want to go duck hunting, I got a camp and a blind. I know where the sac-a-lait is at on Whiskey Bay, too,” he said.
“I appreciate it, sir, but you don’t owe me anything,” I said.
He turned his eyes on me. They were almost luminous, full of portent, and for just a moment I was sure he was about to tell me something of enormous importance. But if that was his intention, he changed his mind and got in his truck without saying anything further and drove away.
“Who was that?” Molly said behind me.
“Mr. Darbonne. He wanted to thank us for getting him out of the can.”
“Your food is getting cold.”
“I’ll be there in a second,” I said, still looking down the street, where Cesaire’s truck was stopped at the traffic light in front of an 1831 antebellum home called the Shadows.
“What’s bothering you, Dave?” Molly said.
“I’ve never had a more perplexing case. It’s like trying to hold water in your fingers. The real problem is most of the people I keep looking at would probably have led normal lives if they hadn’t met one another.”
“Start over again.”
“I have. None of it goes anywhere.”
She kneaded the back of my neck, then ran her fingers up into my hair, her nails raking my scalp. “I’ll always be proud of you,” she said.
“What for?”
“Because you’re incapable of being anyone other than yourself.”
I closed the door and turned around. I wanted to hold her, to pull her against me, to whisper words to her that are embarrassing when they are spoken in a conventional situation. But she had already gone back into the kitchen.
AFTER LUNCH, I returned to the office and once again got out all my notes on Yvonne Darbonne’s death.
