Ruby

'God forbid you turn over that flimsy canoe or fall out. He'd probably be too soaked with whiskey to hear your cries for help and then there are the snakes and gators to contend with, Ruby. He ain't worth the effort of the journey,' she'd mutter, but she never stopped me and even though she pretended not to care or want to know about him, I noticed she always managed to listen when I described one of my visits to Grandpere.

How many nights had I sat by my window and looked up at the moon peeking between two clouds and wished and prayed that somehow we could be a family. I had no mother and no father, but only Grandmere Catherine who had been and still was a mother to me. Grandmere always said Grandpere could barely care for himself, much less substitute as a father for me. Still, I dreamed. If they were together again. . . . if we were all together in our house, we would be like a normal family. Perhaps then, Grandpere Jack wouldn't drink and gamble. All of my friends at school had regular families, with brothers and sisters and two parents to come home to and love.

But my mother lay buried in the cemetery a half mile away and my father. . . my father was a blank face with no name, a stranger who had come passing through the bayou and met my mother at a fais dodo, a Cajun dance. According to Grandmere Catherine, the love they made so wildly and carefree that night resulted in my birth. What hurt me beside my mother's tragic death was the realization that somewhere out there lived a man who never knew he had a daughter, had me. We would never set eyes on each other, never exchange a word. We wouldn't even see each other's shadows or silhouettes like two fishing boats passing in the night.

When I was a little girl I invented a game: the Daddy Game, I would study myself in the mirror and then try to imagine my facial characteristics on a man. I would sit at my drawing table and sketch his face. Conjuring the rest of him was harder. Sometimes I made him very tall, as tall as Grandpere Jack, and sometimes just an inch or so taller than I was. He was always a well-built, muscular man. I decided long ago that he must have been good- looking and very charming to have won my mother's heart so quickly.

Some of the drawings became watercolor paintings. In one of them, I set my imaginary father in a fais dodo hall, leaning against a wall, smiling because he had first set eyes on my mother. He looked sexy and dangerous, just the way he must have looked to draw my beautiful mother to him. In another painting, I had him walking down a road, but turned to wave good-bye. I always thought there was a promise in his face in that picture, the promise of return.

Most of my paintings had a man in them that in my imagination was my father. He was either on a shrimp boat or poling a pirogue through one of the canals or across one of the ponds. Grandmere Catherine knew why the man was in my pictures. I saw how sad it made her, but I couldn't help myself. Lately, she had urged me to paint swamp animals and birds more often than people.

On weekends, we would put some of my paintings out with our woven blankets, sheets, and towels, our split- oak baskets and palmetto hats. Grandmere would also put out her jars of herbal cures for headaches, insomnia, and coughs. Sometimes, we had a pickled snake or a large bullfrog in a jar because the tourists who drove by and stopped loved to buy them. Many loved to eat Grandmere's gumbo or jambalaya. She would ladle out small bowls of it and they would sit at the benches and tables in front of our house and enjoy a real Cajun lunch.

All in all, I suppose my life in the bayou wasn't as bad as the lives some motherless and fatherless children led. Grandmere Catherine and I didn't have many worldly goods, but we had our small safe home and we were able to get by with our loom work and handicrafts. From time to time, although admittedly not often enough, Grandpere Jack would drop by to give us part of what he made trapping muskrats, which was the main way he earned a living these days. Grandmere Catherine was too proud or too angry at him to accept it gracefully. Either I would take it or Grandpere would just leave it on the kitchen table.

'I don't expect no thanks from her,' he would mutter to me, 'but at least she could acknowledge I'm here leaving her the damn money. It's hard earned, it is,' he would declare in a loud voice on the galerie steps. Grandmere Catherine would say nothing in reply, but usually keep on doing whatever she was doing inside.

'Thank you, Grandpere,' I would tell him.

'Ah, I don't want your thanks. It's not your thanks I'm asking for, Ruby. I just want someone to know I ain't dead and buried or swallowed by a gator. Someone to at least have the decency to look at me,' he often moaned, still loud enough for Grandmere to hear.

Sometimes, she appeared in the doorway if he said something that got to her.

'Decency,' she cried from behind the screen door. 'Did I hear you, Jack Landry, talk of decency?'

'Ah . . .' Grandpere Jack waved his long arm in her direction and turned away to return to the swamp.

'Wait, Grandpere,' I cried, running after him.

'Wait? For what? You ain't seen stubborn until you've seen a Cajun woman with her mind made up. There's nothin' to wait for,' he declared, and walked on, his hip boots sucking through the spongelike grass and earth.

Usually, he wore his red coat which was a cross between a vest and a fireman's raincoat, with huge sewn in pockets that circled around behind from two sides. They had slit openings and were called rat pockets, for that was where he put his muskrats.

Whenever he charged off in anger, his long, stark white hair would fly up and around his head and look like white flames. He was a dark-skinned man. The Landrys were said to have Indian blood. But he had emerald green eyes that twinkled with an impish charm when he was sober and in a good mood. Tall and lanky and strong enough to wrestle with a gator, Grandpere Jack was something of a legend in the bayou. Few men lived off the swamp as well as he did.

But Grandmere Catherine was down on the Landrys and often brought me to tears when she cursed the day she'd married Grandpere.

'Let it be a lesson to you, Ruby,' she told me one day. 'A lesson as to how the heart can trick and confuse the mind. The heart wants what the heart wants. But before you give yourself to a man, be sure you have a good idea as to where he's going to take you. Sometimes, the best way to see the future, is to look at the past,' Grandmere advised. 'I should have listened to what everyone told me about the Landrys. They're so full of bad blood . . . they've been bad since the first Landrys settled here. It wasn't long before signs were posted in these parts saying, No Landrys Allowed. How's that for bad and how's that for listening to your young heart instead of older wisdom?'

'But surely, you must have loved Grandpere once. You must have seen something good in him,' I insisted.

'I saw what I wanted to see,' she replied. She was stubborn when it came to him, but for reasons I still didn't understand. That day I must have felt a streak of contrariness or bravery, because I tried to probe at the past.

'Grandmere, why did he move away? Was it just because of his drinking, because I think he would stop if he