I heard pans clanging, furniture cracking, Grandpère's howls and curses. A small chair came flying out the door and splashed in the swamp before it quickly sunk. A pot followed and then another. I stopped my canoe and waited. Moments later, Grandpère appeared on his galerie. He was stark naked, his hair wild, holding a bullwhip. Even at this distance, I could see his eyes were bloodshot. His body was streaked with dirt and mud and there were even long, thin scratches up his legs and down the small of his back.
He cracked the whip at something in the air before him and shouted before cracking it again. I soon understood he was imagining some kind of creature and I realized he was having a drunken fit. Grandmère Catherine had described one of them to me, but I had never seen it before. She said the alcohol soaked his brain so bad it gave him delusions and created nightmares, even in the daytime. On more than one occasion, he had one of these fits in the house and destroyed many of their good things.
"I used to have to run out and wait until he grew exhausted and fell asleep," she told me. "Otherwise, he might very well hurt me without realizing it."
Remembering those words, I backed my canoe into a small inlet so he wouldn't see me watching. He cracked the whip again and again and screamed so hard, the veins in his neck bulged. Then he caught the whip in some of his muskrat traps and got it so entangled, he couldn't pull it out. He interpreted this as the monster grabbing his whip. It put a new hysteria into him and he began to wail, waving his arms about him so quickly, he looked like a cross between a man and a spider from where I was watching. Finally, the exhaustion Grandmère Catherine described set in and he collapsed to the porch floor.
I waited a long moment. All was silent and remained so. Satisfied, he was unconscious, I poled myself up to the galerie and peered over the edge to see him twisted and asleep, oblivious to the mosquitos that feasted on his exposed skin.
I tied up the canoe and stepped onto the galerie. He looked barely alive, his chest heaving and falling with great effort. I knew I couldn't lift him and carry him into the house, so I went inside and found a blanket to put over him.
Then, I pulled in a deep fearful breath and nudged him, but his eyes didn't even flutter. He was already snoring. I went cold inside. All the hopes that had lit up were snuffed out by the sight and the stench rising off him. He smelled like he had taken a bath in his jugs of cheap whiskey.
"So much for coming to you for any help, Grandpère," I said furiously. "You are a disgrace." With him unconscious, I was able to vent my anger unchecked. "What kind of a man are you? How could you let us struggle and strain to keep alive and well? You know how tired Grandmère Catherine is. Don't you have any self-respect?
"I hate having Landry blood in me. I hate it!" I screamed, and pounded my fists against my hips. My voice echoed through the swamp. A heron flew off instantly and a dozen feet away, an alligator lifted its head from the water and gazed in my direction. "Stay here, stay in the swamp and guzzle your rotgut whiskey until you die. I don't care," I cried. The tears streaked down my cheeks, hot tears of anger and frustration. My heart pounded.
I caught my breath and stared at him. He moaned, but he didn't open his eyes. Disgusted, I got back into the pirogue and started to pole myself home, feeling more despondent and defeated than ever.
With the tourist trade nearly nonexistent and school over, I had more time to do my artwork. Grandmère Catherine was the first to notice that my pictures were remarkably different. Usually in a melancholy mood when I began, I tended now to use darker colors and depict the swamp world at either twilight or at night with the pale white light of a half moon or full moon penetrating twisted sycamores and cypress limbs. Animals stared out with luminous eyes and snakes coiled their bodies, poised to strike and kill any intruders. The water was inky, the Spanish moss dangling over it like a net left there to ensnare the unwary traveler. Even the spiderwebs that I used to make sparkle like jewels now appeared more like the traps they were intended to be. The swamp was an eerie, dismal, and depressing place and if I did include my mysterious father in the picture, he had a face masked with shadows.
"I don't think most people would like that picture, Ruby," Grandmère told me one day as she stood behind me and watched me visualize another nightmare. "It's not the kind of picture that will make them feel good, the kind they're going to want to hang up in their living rooms and sitting rooms in New Orleans."
"It's how I feel, what I see right now, Grandmère. I can't help it," I told her.
She shook her head sadly and sighed before retreating to her oak rocker. I found she spent more and more time sitting and falling asleep in it. Even on cloudy days when it was a bit cooler outside, she no longer took her pleasure walks along the canals. She didn't care to go find wild flowers, nor would she visit her friends as much as she used to visit them. Invitations to lunch went unaccepted. She made her excuses, claimed she had to do this or that, but usually ended up falling asleep in a chair or on the sofa.
When she didn't know I was watching, I caught her taking deep breaths and pressing her palm against her bosom. Any exertion, washing clothes or the floors, polishing furniture, and even cooking exhausted her. She had to take frequent rests in between and battle to catch her breath.
But when I asked her about it, she was always ready with an excuse. She was tired from staying up too late the night before; she had a bit of lumbago, she got up too fast, anything and everything but her owning up to the truth—that she hadn't been well for quite some time now.
Finally, on the third Sunday in August, I rose and dressed and went down, surprised I was up and ready before her, especially on a church day. When she finally appeared, she looked pale and very old, as old as Rip van Winkle after his extended sleep. She cringed a bit when she walked and held her hand against her side.
"I don't know what's come over me," she declared. "I haven't overslept like this for years."
"Maybe you can't cure yourself, Grandmère. Maybe your herbs and potions don't work on you and you should see a town doctor," I suggested.
"Nonsense. I just haven't found the right formula yet, but I'm on the right track. be back to myself in a day or two," she swore, but two days went by and she didn't improve an iota. One minute she would be talking to me and the next, she would be fast asleep in her chair, her mouth wide open, her chest heaving as if it were a struggle to breathe.
Only two events got her up and about with the old energy she used to exhibit. The first was when Grandpère Jack came to the house and actually asked us for money. I was sitting with Grandmère on the galerie after our dinner, grateful for the little coolness the twilight brought to the bayou. Her head grew heavier and heavier on her shoulders until her chin'-rested on her chest, but the moment Grandpère Jack's footsteps could be heard, her head snapped up. She narrowed her eyes into slits of suspicion.
"What's he coming here for?" she demanded, staring into the darkness out of which he emerged like some ghostly apparition from the swamp: his long hair bouncing on the back of his neck, his face sallow with his grimy gray beard thicker than usual, and his clothes so creased and dirty, he looked like he had been rolling around in them for days. His boots were so thick with mud, it looked caked around his feet and ankles.
"Don't you come any closer," Grandmère snapped. "We just had our dinner and the stink will turn our stomachs."
"Aw, woman," he said, but he stopped about a half-dozen yards from the galerie. He took off his hat and held it in his hands. Fishhooks dangled from the brim. "I come here on a mission of mercy," he said.
"Mercy? Mercy for who?" Grandmère demanded.
"For me," he replied. That nearly set her laughing. She rocked a bit and shook her head.