Fiction by Louis Bourgeois
Although Louis Bourgeois has resided in Oxford, Mississippi for nearly three decades, he is a native South Louisianan whose French ancestors arrived a generation before the Acadian Exile. He is the Executive Director of the Mississippi non-profit arts coalition, VOX PRESS, and is the Director of the Mississippi Prison Writes Institute, a literacy agency that serves incarcerated writers and artists. Several books by Bourgeois are forthcoming over the next five years in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation.
Lemuel Lombard
for Raymond Bertonnire
Lemuel Lombard, an ex-rumrunner and an old friend of the family, took me on my first duck hunt. I was twelve and had never been duck hunting, and in this part of the country, Southeastern Louisiana, a boy of twelve who hasn’t been on a duck hunt is looked down upon and regarded as slow-witted. Most boys around here find themselves in a duck blind by age three, and by age six, these children are fully able to handle a shotgun and kill ducks. Their fathers see duck hunting as a way of life.
I had a father too, but he had given up on duck hunting after he and my mother were split up and divorced when I was four years old. He had also given up his taxidermy business, duck mounts were his specialty, and he took up work in a lime packaging plant on the outskirts of New Orleans. Duck hunting and taxidermy reminded my father of better times, and he didn’t want to be reminded of what he had lost and would probably never have again. It didn’t seem to bother him that he was depriving his son of his heritage.
Actually, my father’s taxidermy work was not very successful, commercially speaking. He used antiquated equipment and techniques that gave his work the look of something that might have existed fifty years earlier. His work just looked plain wrong. When hunters spend their hard-earned cash on having their duck or goose mounted, they expect a certain lustrous optimism to be prevalent in the mount. They want a deer that is more alive in death than it was in life, or they want their Pintail to be spiraling from some unknowable direction and caught forever in midair with that look of Canadian bliss which generates a sense of coziness as the mount hangs from the wall of their hunting lodge or living room.
Coziness. My father’s work lacked coziness and people stopped sending their kill to him. From what I remember of them, my father’s mounts always seemed overworked. There was a grayness about his work that left the customer somewhat confused about what they wanted and what they received. My father’s work lacked commercial appeal, yet in an artistic sense, his work was intriguing. Yes, taxidermy is an art too. Although, my father’s mounts lacked that cozy and healthy aspect people so much desire, they did not lack originality and permanence. Many of his mounts are still around some thirty years later, and every one of them indelibly stamped with my father’s idiosyncratic depiction of Life-in-Death.
The night before Lemuel Lombard took me on my first duck hunt, I read voraciously on the subject. At this time, I didn’t live along the bayou. I lived with my mother and her husband in St. Tammany parish in the pine tree region of Rural District Six, or as it is most commonly called by the locals, the Sixth Ward. This contrast in landscapes between the bayou and the pine tree tundra region fascinated me as a child and I wrote a poem about this contrast called “Between the Pines” when I was eleven or so. An old nun who taught grammar at the Catholic School I went to liked the poem so much she had it published in the school’s literary journal.
Where my mother lived, the land had no configuration other than innumerable lines of pine trees planted specifically to be harvested by a paper mill company in Bogalusa, Louisiana. There were some areas where the trees had been cut down that gave the semblance of something approximating prairie land, and these areas were highly prized by Woodcock and Snipe hunters and children of the region, such as myself, who were starved for some sort of difference in the land, something other than lines of trees stretched out in flat unchanging order.
The marshland of East-Orleans Parish was more exotic and exciting than the pine tree country. My grandmother operated a marina called The Fisherman’s Rest where you could rent a skiff and fish all day for five dollars. You could also launch your boat into the bayou for two dollars or fish off the wharf for free. All of the supplies needed for fishing or hunting could be bought from my grandmother at reasonable prices and that would save you a trip to New Orleans, which was a nerve-wracking fifteen minutes away. It was a very popular place when I was a child and attracted all kinds of people from New Orleans and beyond. It was an eclectic place where dialects blended together like ingredients for good gumbo.
Social hierarchy existed only momentarily as determined by who caught the most and largest fish on any given day. It might sound foolish to some, but the Fisherman’s Rest was a kind of utopia. It’s the only place I’d seen where nature and commerce came together authentically: buying and selling seemed to have a real need for each other in such a way that even my Marxist soul didn’t protest very much, really not at all. Business on a fundamental level has never seemed as real to me as it did back then and probably never will again, since my grandmother’s place has long since been sold and turned into a shipyard for the military. The house where she lived and worked for fifty years was long ago leveled flat and now an enormous corrugated building stands in its place overlooking the same bayou, Bayou Sauvage.
This morning, as I made preparations to write a novel concerning this region, I found an old photograph of me and Lemuel Lombard, pointing our shotguns at the camera, and this prompted me to tell the story of my first duck hunt, which really wasn’t a duck hunt at all. So, is it that I will merely tell stories of time past? Perhaps, but more importantly I will write of a place that really isn’t understood. For it is my belief that Southeast Louisiana does not operate by way of the same symbolic system as the rest of the United States. One does not watch the seasons pass here in continuity, nor does one even speak the same language as the rest of the country, well, not exactly. Someone once said that South Louisiana is too full of life and death to be considered a true state of America. Whoever said it was right. A writer from this region must also be too full of life and death.
Lemuel came for me at 4:30 in the morning. He knocked incessantly at the window for which there was no need. I was already up because I hadn’t slept hardly at all through the night. I had the worst case of “duck fever” and had spent most of the night reading about duck hunting in contemplation of killing Brants; French Ducks; Snow Geese; Teal, green, blue and cinnamon; Spoon Bills; Pintails; Widgeon, both European and American; Wood Ducks; Bufflehead; Scoots of all kind that flock to this part of the country; Masked Duck; Mergansers, hooded and common; and most of all the highly prized and rarely seen Harlequin Duck.
Lemuel had already loaded the boat. I sat at the bow of the skiff holding my well-oiled Remington 1100 twelve-gauge which I had gotten from my father’s collection of rarely used guns. Lemuel cranked the old nine horsepower Johnson that he borrowed from my grandmother and we headed out to one of his duck blinds in a place called The Minutes, which is a sort of lagoon that stretches from Lake Borgne south to the headwaters of the Chef Pass. My grandmother told me The Minutes was created by the hurricane of 1915 which is reported as being much stronger than Betsy and Camille. For a number of years, my grandfather, Louis Jeanfreaux, used to hide his rum boats in The Minutes if he suspected a raid along the bayou.
Lemuel worked for my grandfather during Prohibition when my grandfather ran a lucrative rum running business. Lemuel, from what I can gather from written and oral accounts, was in charge of the distribution of the rum, which almost always was smuggled in from Cuba onboard nine fifty-foot cabin cruisers that my grandfather had built especially for rum running. Chef Menteur, the geographical location where this story is taking place, was an excellent place for such trafficking of illegal goods. One could take a direct route from Lake Borgne to the Gulf of Mexico and make the trip to Cuba in about a week. Also, Chef Menteur is only about twelve nautical miles from the Port of New Orleans, meaning there was less pressure from the law from the Gulf through the Chef Menteur rather than navigating from the Gulf up the Mississippi River to reach the Port of New Orleans, where the main black markets were. Besides, there are so many bayous and tributaries running through Chef Menteur that a local could easily thwart the imminent presence of the Feds. From what I can gather, Louis Jeanfreaux ran the business side of things and Lombard was second in command of this operation that consisted of thirty or forty men. He handled the actual transport of the rum to New Orleans by leading the other rum smugglers to Cuba and back.
Lemuel Lombard was not, at the time of my first duck hunt, an old man but an aging man. He was around sixty, short and stout, and he had a full head of grey hair which formed a disorderly crest along the center of his head. He had this look of scholar and prisoner. His speech was quite clear but syntactically South Louisianan. This desultory verbal syntax is almost inescapable for a native of this region, including this writer. He had a high-pitched almost squeaking voice that I enjoyed listening to. It was quite different from my father’s voice which was guttural and garbled. Lemuel’s voice had a tinge of the North in it, by which I mean anyone north of Baton Rouge. I had always been fascinated by Northerners; they seemed like a different race of people really. For instance, it was Northerners who published Field and Stream magazine of which I was a voracious reader. Their way of hunting was not the same as ours in any respect. They followed the rules of sportsmanship to a fault, whereas down here, the rule was to kill as much as you could without getting caught.
Sometimes when I stayed with my mother in Rural District Six, I would camp out among the pines, between the pines as it were, and lie in my sleeping bag and look into the sky with all its stars and think there was a place called Canada, mystical and beyond any beauty I had known. I would form the word Canada in my mouth and I wondered how those people lived and what they thought about. I wondered what they thought of Louisiana which really isn’t a Southern state at all, even though it’s about as far south as one can go, unless you count Florida, but who in their right mind would want to go to Florida? I would lie between the pines and think of snow, which I hadn’t experienced at that age, because we get so little of it around here, and when we do get it, it’s seen as almost Apocalyptic. I would think of Canada and the Great Horned Owl, which I considered to be a truly Canadian bird, although their habitat ranges as far south as Central America, a place I didn’t think about at all if I didn’t have to. Perhaps the migratory paths of the ducks are what led to these Canadian thoughts? Even as a child, I thought it strange that I should feel nostalgia for The Great White North, even though I’d never been there.
Lemuel wouldn’t let me help him prepare for the hunt. He had a great respect for my grandmother, and I guess he considered it a privilege to take the first great grandson of Louis Jeanfreaux on his first duck hunt. After he dropped me off at the blind, he hid the skiff in a cane patch about a quarter mile away, and then he paddled back in the pirogue and spent about twenty minutes putting out the decoys. Finally, he made his way to the blind and hid the pirogue behind it in a special alcove he made of rozo cane that blended well with the blind. This is necessary of course, for ducks have excellent vision and will scare at the least sign of anything that doesn’t look a part of the natural landscape.
Dawn broke and we saw nothing in the sky but shore birds even though the best duck hunting begins right when the sun comes up. On the lagoon, only a few straggling marsh hens and poule d’eau skimmed across the water, well out of shooting range. The wind stopped blowing, and it began to get hot. In December it can get as hot as a June day around here. Gnats and mosquitoes swarmed around my head, pouring out of the cane where they live until it warms up even a little. The floor of the blind was made up of an old shipping plank nailed onto four 2x4’s and you could see clear through the slats to the muddy ridge of the marsh. I saw a black snake slowly making its way through the mud under our blind, and I said to Lemuel, “There’s a snake under us,” but he was unperturbed and said, “Don’t worry about him. If you don’t bother him, he won’t bother you. Ever eat snake? Snake is good and good for you. It’s got something in it that if you eat it it’ll ward off diseases.”
Lemuel caught sight of the snake, and we both watched it crawl into the water. Lemuel raised his shotgun over the cane and shot the snake.
“Go get in that pirogue and get that snake Lucas. I’ll make you some snake stew out of it when we get back. I’ll show you how to skin a snake and dress it proper like.”
“I thought we were hunting duck,” I said.
Lemuel said, “Ain’t likely we’ll see any today. It’s too hot and there’s no wind. There’s nothing to push the ducks, but we’ll try anyway. Sorry it’s such a bad day for your first hunt. Now, get that snake before he floats away.”
I was reluctant to obey him. It seemed like a stupid idea to me. We came way out here to The Minutes to hunt duck not snake, and I had not the least bit of interest in eating snake. But he was a close friend to my grandmother, so I obeyed him. I pulled the pirogue from the alcove and paddled out to where the snake was. I picked the snake up with the end of the paddle and tossed it to the bow of the pirogue. Then I heard a shotgun blast and an eruption of water about ten feet to the left of me. Lemuel guffawed and hollered from the blind, “Not only will you be eating snake tonight but nutria too!”
I saw the brown furred water rat floating ass end up in a swell of blood. I paddled over to it and picked the nutria up by its cold bare tail. It weighed a good twelve pounds. Lemuel laughed and laughed from the blind. He said, “You’re having a pretty good first hunt son.”
I paddled back to the blind, hid the pirogue, and sat back down next to Lemuel Lombard. He looked at me and smiled. I was growing slightly annoyed and somewhat frightened at the same time. He said, “You want some root beer son?” Then he laughed again and held out a silver flask. He said, “You’re a bit young to drink, but one or two swigs won’t hurt you none. It’ll give you a little spirit.” I took the flask from his hand, sniffed it and handed it back to him.
Lemuel said,” I didn’t take you for the whisky type. You’re too smart for that. I can see it in your face. Your grandmother tells me you’re some kind of genius according to those nuns. Any of that true?”
I said, “It’s not that I’m a genius so much, it’s just that they like my writing. They published a poem of mine in the school journal. I’m no genius though. I can’t do any math and I’m pretty bad in French.”
Lemuel said, “You can’t do French? Hell, French is your native tongue. Je parle un peu de français!”
I said, “La plupart des gens ne parlent plus français en Nouveau Orléans,” and felt sort of exhausted from speaking that much French at once and getting it more or less right. Lemuel smiled and took another sip of his root beer.
We sat silently in the blind for about ten minutes and watched a flock of geese scan the horizon about a half a mile away. Lemuel tried calling them in on his goose call, but they just kept flying until they disappeared beyond the skyline.
“Those bastards just don’t like us Luke,” Lemuel said. Then he said, “Your grandfather could call a goose in from five miles. Never seen anything like it before. You never knew your Grandpa Jeanfreaux did you?”
“No,” I said, “He died about five years before I was born, but I’ve heard a lot about him.”
Lemuel said, “Well, he was an incredible man anyway you look at it. I was with him even before Prohibition and was with him when he died with his boots off in bed. I didn’t think that would ever happen. He had to use a tank to breathe with. Hell, he practically died in my arms. All those years of hard living caught up with him in the end. Don’t know why it hasn’t caught up with me yet. I was there when he spoke his last words. He said, ‘Lombard, I don’t want to be forgotten. I don’t care about my soul; just don’t let me be forgotten.’ Now what was I supposed to say to that? I told him I wouldn’t let him be forgotten, but how am I supposed to do that? He was already a sort of legend as it was. He shot those cops in his own boat and got away with it. He killed all sorts of men and never got caught and when he was in jail in Atlanta for tax evasion, he taught himself Latin and Hebrew in two years’ time. He never spent one day of his life in school, but goddamn if he wasn’t the most educated man I’ve ever known. That’s what reading does for you. After he got out of jail in ’36, he didn’t do nothing but read, and he even got a little religion too. A man can do anything if he reads, and it doesn’t matter who you are. I never took to reading myself, although I can read. Hell, I went to the same school you’re going to now. Those nuns make sure you can read. But I never could stay still long enough to get through a whole book unless I was forced to. I would always get too nervous and feel like I’ve got to do something after two or three pages or I’ll just bust to pieces right then and there. That wasn’t your grandfather though. After he got out of prison, he’d read that Mason Bible all day and all night, and there ain’t but about twenty different languages you got to know to read that book. That was Jeanfreaux though–half murderer and half priest. He could shoot a cork out of the water at a hundred yards and recite Latin poetry at the same time. You’ve got to make sure he’s not forgotten. You’re the only one who can do it so far as I know.”
Lemuel stood up and took a piss out of the back of the blind. When he stood, a pair of wayward teal flew out of the decoys. I jumped up and shot all three of my shots and missed all three times; Lemuel zipped up his pants and laughed and said, “That’s all right, boy, you’ve got to learn. Give me that shotgun.” He took the shotgun from me and unscrewed the chamber bolt and pressed his finger hard against the chamber spring, which holds the shotgun shells in place. The spring, known as a “plug,” flew out of the chamber mechanism and landed in the cane. Lemuel retrieved the spring out of the cane and threw it into the water.
“There,” he said, “Now you can hold five shells in your gun.”
“You’re not supposed to do that,” I said. “You’re not supposed to take the plug out like that.” The night before I had read the Federal Regulations Guide on Hunting Waterfowl in the United States of America, which states that the hunting of any migratory bird in America is the legal domain of Federal Jurisprudence. Hunting duck with the chamber mechanism dismantled to allow your shotgun to fire more than three shots is in violation of Federal Law and carries a penalty of up to six months in prison, if you get caught.
Lemuel looked at me kind of disappointed; after all, he was only trying to help, and said, “You need to not worry too much about all them rules. You’ll never kill anything if you follow all those rules. Jeanfreaux wouldn’t have worried about them. Now don’t be soft boy. I know you’re a smart kid and all, but don’t be soft. You’re with Lemuel Lombard; you don’t have to worry about all them rules with me here. I’ve seen your grandfather shoot game wardens before. Now you and I will do what we damn well please out here. This is our marsh. Your grandfather was the first to settle this place. Hell, he dug most of these bayous with dynamite and rakes, back before Prohibition and the Depression. Hell boy, this is your marsh and you don’t have to concern yourself with some sorry ass Yankee game warden.”
I looked up to Lemuel who was still standing and said, “A game warden can put you in jail and a federal game warden can put you in jail for a long time. I don’t want to go to jail.”
Lemuel got more and more irritated about my attitude toward hunting laws; he said, “You see any game wardens out here son? Don’t worry about no game wardens I tell you. If we run across any, I’ll take care of them myself. There’s too many laws as it is. If we don’t stand up against these Yankees they’ll take away all our rights. I’d love to see a game warden right now. That would really make my day, to see some two-bit Yankee son-of-a-bitch looking like a fool in a gray uniform lording his power over the animals. Now you think about it, a game warden is the stupidest cop of them all. Hell, he ain’t even a real cop, like a veterinarian ain’t a real doctor. Now, I know you’re a smart kid, but what do you think your grandfather would say if he heard you talking like that? Talking like you’re frightened and willing to betray your own home to a bunch of Yankees dressed up like cops.”
Lemuel was beginning to frighten me. My stomach began to tighten like it did when my father lost his temper. Lemuel kept taking swig after swig of his root beer, his whisky and coke. I sat in silence and tightened my grip on the shotgun. I thought about shooting him much in the same way I thought about shooting my father when he once took me rabbit hunting, the only hunting trip we took together. My father walked ahead of me in the woods with his shotgun in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I walked behind him about ten feet holding my shotgun firmly in both hands and thought about what it would feel like to unload three rounds into my father’s back. I’ve never told anyone this before. It surprised me to see on my father’s face no indication of what I had been thinking about, an almost overwhelming impulse to shoot him. This was how I felt now in the hunting blind with Lemuel; I was considering the real possibility of killing Lemuel Lombard, claiming when the time came that it was a “hunting accident.” It wouldn’t be that hard to get away with it. I wondered if he felt the same way. He could easily shoot me once in the back of the head and act like the whole thing was a hunting accident by saying that I, Lucas Jeanfreaux, was just a careless child on his first duck hunt who didn’t have enough sense to get out of the line of fire.
Lemuel had probably killed no less than a dozen men in his life, what was there to stop him from killing me way out here in the marsh where there wasn’t anyone or anything to stop him from doing otherwise? There was no one hunting nearby, for we were in a rather secluded lagoon, the more popular duck hunting spot was a good mile away, and there were especially no game wardens to save me. I could kill Lemuel or he could kill me. Perhaps, we could kill each other. I was quite frightened for both of us, whereas Lemuel Lombard appeared not to be frightened by anything, save running out of whiskey.
But after he took the last sip of whiskey in the flask, he reached down into the gray duffel bag of sorts he had under the wooden bench of the blind and pulled out and opened a new fifth of Old Granddad 100 proof. He began to drink copiously from the bottle. What really scared me at this moment was not his whiskey drinking so much as the silence between us. Lemuel had quit talking and drank steadily from the bottle, and he wouldn’t sit down. He stood and drank.
The sun was fully over the horizon now, and although it was only about 7:30 in the morning, it was hot. I sat and scanned the skyline while looking at Lemuel from the corner of my eye. It was completely still, no wind blew from any direction, and even though I had never been duck hunting before, I knew it was going to be a bad day for duck hunting, and had been since we first arrived, having only a dead snake and a dead nutria to show for our efforts.
Lemuel finally sat down, which eased the tension between us at least a little. Sweat poured from his face as it did mine. Lemuel drank from the whiskey and ran his sweaty palm through his burly grey hair. He seemed worried and irritated at the same time. Perhaps I wasn’t much of a hunting partner. I didn’t feel like a hunting partner, I felt vaguely out of place. I noticed that Lemuel’s hands were slightly shaking, whereas my hands were steady and held the shotgun firmly. Lemuel finally turned to me and said, “Don’t worry none about what I said. I’m not trying to scare you. Just trying to do you some good, that’s all. Look, if we don’t see anything in the next twenty minutes or so we’ll move to another blind.” He took another sip of whisky and clenched the butt of his shotgun.
Lemuel began blowing into his duck call. A flock of black ducks spiraled down slowly from above us from where they seemed to be miles in the sky. Lemuel was the finest of duck callers. He motioned me to keep my head down to just about where his knees were bent and blew the sounds of dthat, dthat, dthat, dthat, thdig, thdig-thdig-thdig, thdig, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack. A feed call. The ducks rapidly descended, but instead of coming in over our decoys where we could get a shot, they flew outside of our decoys about sixty yards from our blind. They were really out of shotgun range, but Lemuel jumped up anyway and hit the lead duck with one shot, and it fell for what seemed like a minute and at an incredible distance from us. It is to this day one of the finest shots I have ever seen made on land or water, and it was to be the only duck we would shoot that day, the day of my first duck hunt.
Lemuel told me to pull out the pirogue and retrieve the duck. I paddled out past the decoys and picked the duck up out of the water and threw it at the bow of the pirogue where it landed on top of the snake and nutria. As I paddled back toward the blind, I caught sight of a sizable alligator making its way out of the water and into the marsh. The alligator had a beer can in its mouth. I heard Lemuel shout from the blind, “Shoot that son-of-a-bitch before he goes up in the grass.” I didn’t want to kill the alligator, but I was becoming bored and restless so I turned the pirogue around to where I could get a better aim, but before I could shoot, Lemuel began banging away, and I could hear shotgun pellets fall into the pirogue like light hail on a tin roof. Some of the pellets fell into my hair and onto my back. Lemuel hit the alligator and it writhed until it turned belly up on the shore of the marsh and twisted in tumultuous agony until the body stopped moving and only the tail flickered up and down with spastic energy. The beer can was still lodged in the alligator’s mouth.
As I paddled back toward the blind, my mind still on the falling pellets and on the thought that I just might not make it out of the marsh alive with the state Lemuel Lombard was in, I noticed that he’d stripped off his clothes save his underwear. He had a half bottle of whiskey in one hand, his twelve gauge in the other, and a cigarette between his lips. His body was covered in sweat as was mine. It was only 8:00 in the morning, but it was already around 90º and very humid; so humid in fact that I thought it might rain, even though the sun was out and there were only a few clouds. This kind of heat is not uncommon in December around these parts, and I have spent Christmas day in similar weather where everyone wore t-shirts and shorts instead of sweaters and jackets.
As I pulled up to the blind, Lemuel bellowed, “We’ll cut his tail off before we leave. Alligator tail is the best meat in the world.” I’d never eaten alligator and had no desire to do so. As I neared the front of the blind, Lemuel’s shotgun went off. I could tell by the way he bent down to pick up his cigarette pack that it was an accident, the shot missed the stern of the pirogue by inches and hit so hard and close that it soaked my shirt. I stopped paddling the pirogue and began to drift away from the blind. Lemuel responded in a flat tone, “Sorry about that son, I’m a little waxed and anything’s liable to happen. Look, there aren’t any ducks flying because of the weather and because there’s just too many people hunting these days. This is your first hunt and I want you to kill something. You and me are going to kill whatever we goddamn please. That’ll show them.”
I didn’t say anything to him and paddled back to the blind and pulled the pirogue on shore and hid it. I was making my way through the blind when I saw Lemuel raise his shotgun with one hand, the other was still holding the whiskey bottle, and shoot it almost directly above his head. I saw something fall from the sky that was the size of a small child and splash hard on the water. Lemuel exclaimed, “Goddamned Pelican! I ain’t seen a Pelican in years. Get in this blind boy. We’re going to kill whatever we see.”
We began to kill, even though what we were killing was highly illegal, but Lemuel made me do it, no matter what came within shooting range, and sometimes out of shooting range. Lemuel would shake me on the shoulder and demand that I blast whatever was before us out of the air or out of the water. He got drunker and drunker and even once jokingly held his shotgun to the back of my head and said he was tired of killing animals. I think he could tell I didn’t like killing all of these Cranes, Herons, Pelicans, Storks, and so forth, but he made me kill them, for hours. Lemuel never let up and every now and then he would just shoot off his gun for no reason, just aiming at nothing and no one. By the time Lemuel was ready to leave, we had no less than a hundred federally protected birds floating in the water all over the lagoon. We shot Great Herons, Blue and White Magnificent Frigate birds, Olivaceons, Cormorants, American Phalaropes, the legendary Roseate Spoonbill, Double-Crested and American Cormorants, Brown and Red-Footed Boobies, Masked Boobies, Brown and White Pelicans (the brown is our state bird), Storm Petrels, Glen waters, the Yellow-Nose Albatross, Pied-billed and Western Grebes, Common and Red Throated Loons, Ospreys, Red-Tailed Hawks, American Kestrels, Sandpipers of all kinds, Marbled Godwits, Curlews, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, Ruddy Turnstones, Dowitchers, Parasitic Jaegers, Great Skeas, Laughing Gulls, Blacklegged Kittiwakes, Common Terns, Ancient Murrets, Flycatchers, Mockingbirds, Prothonotary Warblers, a Scarlet Tanager, a Bronze Cowbird, Boat-Tailed Grackle, Baltimore Oriole, Hammer Juks, and other species much too difficult to identify for this novice. All in all, we killed enough illegal birds to easily receive a life sentence apiece and the payment of fines of about a million dollars between the both of us.
Around noon, Lemuel decided it was time to leave. He was still drinking whiskey and showed no signs of fatigue. He had his pants back on, but he remained bare chested. There were empty shotgun shells and dead birds all over the lagoon. I took the pirogue to get the boat and began gathering the kill as Lemuel told me to do. I still had a desire to shoot him in the back, and once, while I was picking up a Scarlet Ibis near the blind, when he was still standing and drinking whiskey, looking out at the marsh in the opposite direction of where I was (perhaps he was on the look out for game wardens), I raised my shotgun and clicked open the safety and centered my sight on his back for several seconds before he slowly turned to face me. I lowered the gun and moved in such a way as to make it appear as if I was getting the shotgun out of the way so I could scoop down and pick up a bird out of the water. Nonetheless, he smiled and exposed a full set of decaying teeth and said, “You’re not ready for that lesson son. Perhaps some other time. Man is a different meat than these birds.” Then he laughed and fired his gun off five times above his head. The pellets fell gently on both of us, and he said, “Pick up those birds son and go cut that gator’s tail off. We’re going to have us an interesting dinner tonight. Always remember, you must eat everything you kill. It’s not right to kill for no reason. If you kill anything, save a man, you’ve got to eat it. Hell, they’re even people who eat man meat.”
We didn’t leave The Minutes until 2:00 that afternoon. I was again at the bow of the boat, and Lemuel drove with one hand on the motor stick and the other holding yet another fresh bottle of whisky. The air had that smell of sticky blood and lead in it. The boat was overflowing with dead exotic birds. Lemuel made no effort to conceal the claws, the hooked bills, the arm-length necks, the purple and scarlet colors of our irredeemable and felonious deed.
As we made our way through the trestles of the Chef Pass, I began to feel a long-awaited sense of relief. We would be at the Fisherman’s Rest soon, and with a little more luck, we might yet escape the law, which Lemuel didn’t seem in the least bit worried about now that he had put on a new whiskey buzz. But as we approached the last quarter mile stretch of Bayou Sauvage, Lemuel jerked the boat with a full turn of the motor and headed left toward Pappy’s Ditch. My stomach began to tighten again, and I thought about jumping out of the skiff and swimming to the shore and walking the rest of the way home. But I thought this would make Lemuel angry, and I didn’t want to make him angry. A boy swimming across the bayou would be an easy target for Lemuel Lombard. Besides, I still harbored thoughts of killing Lemuel Lombard. The boatload of dead sacred birds began to have a strange effect on my mind; it made anything, including murder, a real possibility.
Before I could get my thoughts together properly, Lemuel said, “Don’t worry. We’ll go home soon. It’s just that I want to solve our duck hunting problem. There are just too many people hunting these days out here and we’re going to do something about it.” We were going down Pappy’s Ditch headed for the Washout Lagoon. The Washout Lagoon yielded a certain kind of water grass that ducks found irresistible, and the place was overcrowded with duck blinds. The Washout Lagoon also had several bayous and tributaries leading to it that made it accessible at many points around Lake Ponchartrain, Lake Borgne, Lake Catherine, and the Chef Pass. This particular bayou we were traveling, Pappy’s Ditch, was dug with dynamite and rakes by my grandfather, Louis Jeanfreaux, before Prohibition when he trapped for a living. But in the year 1919, Pappy’s Ditch wasn’t so much a trapping route as it was a battle zone. There was A group of hunters and trappers from Brownsville, Texas who came out here to take over the marsh. They needed new trapping grounds because they had exhausted their own. The people along Bayou Sauvage, of whom I am a descendant, were having none of it, and as legend has it, they killed many Texans in the bayous and lagoons of this region. Right about the time of these “trapping wars,” Congress enacted the 18th Amendment, making it illegal to make or sell alcohol in the United States. It was then that Louis Jeanfreaux stopped trapping altogether, and along with his best friend and war partner, Lemuel Lombard, turned to rum running as a way of life.
As we approached Washout Lagoon, no less than two dozen duck blinds could be seen. It was early afternoon and all of them appeared to be vacant. Under the bow of the skiff where I was sitting was a five-gallon metal tank which was kept there in case the main tank of the outboard ran out of gas. Lemuel shovel-nosed into a blind and ordered me to spread gas on it and set the blind on fire. He threw a box of matches in my direction and it landed near my feet. I was scared and angry and didn’t like this business one bit. I decided I wasn’t going to take any more of Lemuel’s drunken insanity and reached for my shotgun that was lying on the next seat over in front of me, but Lemuel swiftly had his gun in hand before I could grip mine enough to aim. He pointed the shotgun in my direction and said, “Boy, why would you want to shoot your grandpa’s old friend. Now, you straighten up and get away from that gun. Jeanfreaux would have approved of this here act that we’re doing. There are far too many people using up our marsh. Me and your grandpa fought for the right to live in the marsh back in 1919. We’re just going to clean this place up a little bit, that’s all, no big deal, and you’re going to help me. Someone’s got to teach you right from wrong. Someone’s got to teach you the ways of the marsh. Someone’s got to teach you how to be a man. I’m sure your grandpa would have approved. I’ve seen the man do much worse things than burn down a few old lousy duck blinds. I know you’re a genius and all, but too many books take away from your manhood. Books without action don’t mean a thing. I’m only doing what your grandpa would have done. He would have showed you the difference between right and wrong. He would have gotten you to act like a man and told you in Latin how to do it. Now, you throw some gas on that blind and burn it.”
He put the shotgun across his knees and took out a cigarette and lit it. I did what he said, not caring anymore about what would happen if some hunter caught us burning down his blind and Lemuel, more like than not, killing him for protesting the destruction of his property. The dead birds were beginning to smell, they gave off a kind of deep fish smell. The birds stiffened in the wind and they looked less exotic, less noble, in their postmortem rigor.
It was about a half an hour before dark when I lit the last blind in Washout Lagoon. It was the kind of evening when the sky turns yellow and crimson, making the world seem deeper and more profound than it really is. I didn’t have to finish off all the blinds in the lagoon, for Lemuel Lombard had passed out long before I burned the last, but I began to like burning the blinds, and burned them all without Lemuel’s insistence. His hand hung out of the skiff and a mild current pushed it back and forth as if it were the hand of a dead man. The whole marsh was on fire, and it felt like I was in a movie. I still considered killing Lemuel, but instead, I watched myself throw the dead birds, one by one, into the burning blind. The last bird I threw into the fire was a Black-Necked Stilt and I thought in my tortured French, Pour tuer c’est mal parce’que il fait le monde sembler irréal.