The warm Gulf breeze lifted strands of my hair and made them dance over my forehead. The same warm breeze combed through the moss on the dead cypress trees in the marsh, making it look like some sprawling green animal, lifting and swaying to catch my attention. On a long sandbar, I saw a cottonmouth coiled over some driftwood soaking up the sun, its triangular head the color of a discolored copper penny. Two ducks and a heron sprung up from the water and flew low over the cattails. And then I heard the distant purr of a motorboat as it sliced through the bayou and wove its way closer and closer until it popped out from around a turn.
It was Paul. The moment he saw me, he waved, sped up, and brought the boat close to the shore, the wakes from the motorboat swelling up through the lily pads and cattails and slapping across the cypress roots along the bank.
'Walk down to the shale there,' he called, and pointed. I did and he brought the boat as near as he could before shutting the engine and letting it drift up to me.
'Where were you today? Why didn't you come to school?' I asked. He was obviously not sick.
'I was busy, thinking and planning. Come into my boat. I want to show you something,' he said.
I shook my head. 'I've got to start on dinner for Grandpere Jack, Paul,' I told him, retreating a step.
'You've got plenty of time and you know he'll either be late or not show up until he's too drunk to care,' he replied. 'Come on. Please,' he begged.
'Paul, I don't want anything to happen like it did the other day,' I said.
'Nothing will happen. I won't come near you. I just want to show you something. I'll bring you right back,' he promised. He held up his hand to take an oath. 'I swear.'
'You won't come near me and you'll bring me right back?'
'Absolutely,' he said, and leaned forward to take my hand as I hopped over the shale and stepped up and into the motorboat. 'Just sit back,' he said, starting the engine again. He spun the boat around sharply and accelerated with the confidence of an old Cajun swamp fisherman. Even so, I screamed. The best fisherman often ran into gators or sandbars. Paul laughed and slowed down.
'Where are you taking me, Paul Tate?' He steered us through the shadows cast by an overhang of willow trees, deeper and deeper into the swamp before heading southwest in the direction of his father's cannery. Off in the distance I could see thunderheads over the Gulf. 'I don't want to get caught in any storms,' I complained.
'My, you can be a nag,' Paul said, smiling. He wove us through a narrow passage and then headed for a field, cutting his engine as we drew closer and closer. Finally, he turned it off to let the boat drift.
'Where are we?'
'My land,' he replied. 'And I don't mean my father's land. My land,' he emphasized.
'Your land?'
'Yep,' he said proudly and leaned back against the side of the boat. 'All that you see—sixty acres actually. It's mine, my inheritance.' He gestured broadly at the field.
'I never knew that,' I said, gazing over what looked like prime land in the bayou.
'My grandfather Tate left it to me. It's held in trust, but it will be mine as soon as I turn eighteen, but that isn't the best of it,' he said, smiling.
'Well, what is then?' I asked. 'Stop grinning like a Cheshire cat and tell me what this is all about, Paul Tate.'
'Better than tell you, I'll show you,' he said, and took up the oar to paddle the boat softly through some marsh grass and into a dark, shadowy area. I stared ahead and soon saw the bubbles in the water.
'What's that?'
'Gas bubbles,' he said in a whisper. 'You know what it means?'
I shook my head.
'It means oil is under here. Oil and it's on my land. I'm going to be rich, Ruby, very rich,' he said.
'Oh, Paul, that's wonderful.'
'Not if you're not with me to share it,' he said quickly. 'I brought you here because I wanted you to see my dreams. I'm going to build a great house on my land. It will be a great plantation, your plantation, Ruby.'
'Paul, how can we even think such a thing? Please,' I said. 'Stop tormenting yourself and me, too.'
'We can think of such a thing, don't you see? The oil is the answer. Money and power will make it all possible. I'll buy Grandpere Jack's blessings and silence. We'll be the most respected, prosperous couple in the bayou, and our family—'
'We can't have children, Paul.'
'We'll adopt, maybe even secretly, with your doing the same thing my mother did—pretending the baby is yours, and then—'
'But, Paul, we'll be living the same sort of lies, the same deceits, and they will haunt us forever,' I said, shaking my head.
'Not if we don't let them, not if we permit ourselves to love and cherish each other the way we always dreamed we would,' he insisted.
I turned away from him and watched a bullfrog jump off a log. It created a small circle of ripples that quickly disappeared. In a corner of the pond, I saw bream feeding on insects among the cattails and lily pads. The wind began to pick up and the Spanish moss swayed along with the twisted limbs of the cypress. A flock of geese passed overhead and disappeared over the tops of trees as if they had flown into the clouds.
'It's beautiful here, Paul. And I wish it could be our home someday, but it can't and it's just cruel to bring me here and tell me these things,' I said, chastising him softly.
