After I returned home from school, I decided to take a short walk along the canal before preparing dinner. I strolled down the path through our yard which was abloom with hibiscus and blue and pink hydrangeas. Spring was rushing in this year, the colors, the sweet scents, and the heightened sense of life and birth was all around me. It was as if Nature herself were trying to comfort me.
But my confused and troubled thoughts were like bees buzzing around in a jar. I heard so many different voices telling me to do so many different things. Run, Ruby, run, one voice urged. Get as far from the bayou and from Paul and Grandpère Jack as you can.
Forget running, be defiant, another voice told me. You love Paul. You know you do. Surrender to your feelings and forget what you've learned. Do what Paul wants you to do: live like it was all a lie.
Remember your promise to me, Ruby, I heard Grandmère Catherine urge. Ruby . . . your promise . . . remember.
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 Grandpère 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 Grandpère 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.
"But, Ruby—"
"Don't you think I wish it could be, wish it as much as you do?" I said, spinning around on him. My eyes were burning with tears of anger and frustration. "The same feelings that are tearing you apart are tearing me, but we're just prolonging the pain by fantasizing like this."
"It's not a fantasy; it's a plan," he said firmly. "I've been thinking about it all weekend. After I'm eighteen . . ."
I shook my head.
"Take me back, Paul. Please," I said. He stared at me a moment.
"Will you at least think about it?" he pleaded. "Will you?"
"Yes," I said, because I saw it was the key that would open the door and let us out of this room of misery.
"Good." He started the engine and drove us back to the dock at my house.
"I'll see you at school tomorrow," he said after he helped me out of the boat. "We'll talk about this every day, think it out clearly, together, okay?"
"Okay, Paul," I said, confident that one morning he would awaken and realize that his plan was a fantasy not meant to become a reality.
"Ruby," he cried as I started toward the house. I turned. "I can't help loving you," he said. "Don't hate me for it."
I bit down on my lower lip and nodded. My heart was soaked in the tears that had fallen behind my eyes. I watched him drive off and waited until his motorboat disappeared into the bayou. Then I took a deep breath and entered the house.
The roar of Grandpère's laughter greeted me and was immediately followed by the laughter of a stranger. I walked into the kitchen slowly to discover Grandpère Jack sitting at the table. He and a man I recognized as Buster Trahaw, the son of a rich sugar plantation owner, sat hunched over a large bowl of crawfish. There were at least a half-dozen or so empty bottles of beer on the table that they had drawn out of a case on the floor at their feet.