We drove out into the parish, crossed the wooden bridge over the bayou at the end of the blacktop, and bounced along the yellow, rutted road by the edge of Joe’s Shipyard. Shrimp boats, rusted oil barges, and quarter boats used by seismograph companies were moored along the docks in the dead water, and Negro children were fishing with cane poles for bullheads and gars among the cattails. The driver was out of beer, and we stopped at a tavern filled with deckhands, fishermen, and doodlebuggers (seismograph workers), and I bought him a round at the bar and a carton of Jax to go.
The road followed along the edge of the bayou and the cypress trees that hung out over the water. The expanded swell of the trunks at the waterline was dark from the wake of passing boats, and white egrets were nesting in the sand, their delicate wings quivering as they enlarged the depression around them. I had fished for bream, sacalait, and mud cat under every cypress on that bank, because they always came into the shade to feed in the hottest part of a summer afternoon, and there was one tree that had rusted mooring chains nailed into the trunk with iron stakes that the bark had overgrown in stages until the chain looped in and out of the tree like a deformity. My grandfather said that Jean Laffite used to tie his boat there when he was blackbirding and that he had buried a treasure between two oaks on the back of our property. The ground around the two oaks was pitted with depressions and ragged holes that cut through the roots, and as boys my older brother and I had dug six feet down and scraped away the clay from around the lid of a huge iron caldron, hollowing out the hole like sculptors, to prize up the lid with our shovels and finally discover the bones of a hog that had been boiled into tallow.
We hit the section of board road that Shell Oil had put in three years before when the road had washed out again and the parish refused to maintain it any longer, since the only people who used it were my father and the two or three doodlebug companies that were shooting in that part of the parish. The boards twisted under the tires and slammed upward into the oil pan, and then I saw the mailbox by the short wooden bridge over the coulee.
I paid the driver and walked up the gravel lane through the oak trees. The house had been built by my great-grandfather in 1857, in the Creole architectural style of that period, with brick chimneys on each side and brick columns supporting the latticework veranda on the second story. The peaked roof was now covered with tin, and the foundation had sunk on one side so that the brick columns had cracked and started to shale. The decayed outlines of the slaves’ quarters were still visible in the grass down by the bayou, and the original stone well, now filled with dirt and overgrown with vines, protruded from the ground at an angle by the smokehouse. My father had held on to forty-three acres since the depression, when we lost most of the farm, and he had refused to lease the mineral rights to the oil companies (he called them Texas sharpers who destroyed your land, cut your fences, and gave you a duster in return), but in the last few years the only sugar cane had been grown by Negroes who worked on shares. His Ford pickup truck with last year’s tag was parked in the shed, and there was an old Buick pulled onto the grass at the end of the lane.
The swing on the porch twisted slightly against the chains in the breeze. I tapped on the screen door and tried to see inside into the gloom.
“Hello!”
I heard someone at the back of the upstairs hallway, and I went inside with a strange feeling of impropriety. The house smelled of dust and a lack of sunlight. For some reason the only detail that caught in my eye was his guns in the deer-antler rack above the mantelpiece. The.30-.40 Kraig with the box magazine on the side, the lever-action Winchester, and the double-barrel twelve were flecked with rust and coated with cobwebs in the trigger guards and barrels.
“What you want here?”
I looked up the stairs at a big Negro woman in a starched nurse’s uniform. Her rolled white hose seemed to be bursting around her black thighs.
“I’m Mr. Paret’s son.”
She walked down the stairs, her hand on the banister to support her weight. There were tangles of gray hair above her forehead, and I knew that she was much older than she looked.
“You Mr. Iry?”
“Yes.”
“He figured you’d be home this week. I just give him his sedative, so he won’t be able to talk with you too long. After he takes his nap and has his supper, he can talk a lot better to you.”
“How bad is he?”
“He ain’t good. But maybe you better wait on the doctor. He’s coming out tonight with your sister. She stays with him on my night off.”
“Thank you.”
“Mr. Iry, he talks funny because of that medicine. He’s all right after his supper.”
I walked up the stairs into his room. It was dark, and the only light came from the yellow glow of sun against the window shade. Small bottles of urine were lined on the dresser, and there was a shiny bedpan on a stool at the head of the tester bed. His curved pipe and tobacco pouch rested against the armadillo-shell lamp on the nightstand. I didn’t know that his face could look so white and wasted. The sheet was pulled up to his chin, and the knobs of his hands looked like bone against the skin. He ticked a finger on his stomach and squinted into the glare of light from the open door with one watery blue eye, and I saw that he couldn’t recognize me in the silhouette. I eased the door closed behind me. He smiled, and his lips were purple like an old woman’s. He moved his hand off his stomach and tapped it softly on the side of the bed.
“How’d they treat you, Son?”
“It wasn’t bad.”
“I thought you might be in yesterday, from your letter. I had that nigra nurse make up your room for you. Your guitars are on the bed.” His voice clicked when he spoke, as though he had a fishhook in his throat.
“How they been treating you, Daddy?”
“They like my urine. The doctor takes it away every two days after the nurse puts stickers all over it.” He laughed down in his chest, and a bubble of saliva formed on the corner of his mouth. “They must not have much to do down at the Charity except look at somebody’s piss.”
“Daddy, did Rita and Ace put you in at Charity?”
“They got families of their own, Iry. It costs fifteen dollars a day to keep that nigra woman out here. They ain’t got money like that.”
I had to clench my fingers between my legs and look away from him. My sister and brother had married into enough money to bring in the best of everything for him.
“Look at me, Son, and don’t start letting those razor blades work around inside you. The one thing I regret is that my children never held together after your mother died. I don’t know what they done to you in the penitentiary, but don’t take your anger out on them.”
His watery blue eyes were starting to fade with the sedation, and he had to force his words past that obstacle in his throat. I looked at his white hair on the pillow and his thin arms stretched down the top of the sheet, and wondered at what disease and age could do to men, particularly this one, who had gone over the top in a scream of whistles at Belleau Wood and had covered a canister of mustard gas with his own body.
“Why don’t you go to sleep and I’ll see you later,” I said.
“I want you to do one thing for me this evening. Cut some azaleas by the porch and take them down by your mother’s grave.”
“All right, Daddy.”
“I know you don’t like to go down there.” The light in his eyes was fading away like a quick blue spark.
“I was going down there anyway,” I said.
His eyes closed, and the lids were red against the paper whiteness of his face.
I had heard stories about the effects of intestinal cancer and how fast it could consume a man and his life’s energy, in spite of radiation treatments and the morphine shots to take away the pain, but you had to look at it to make it become real.