The uncle shakes hands, giving one pump country-fashion, not meeting my eye, and stands off a ways, snapping his fingers and socking fist into hand. He is silent but agreeable. His face is as narrow and brown as a piece of slab bark. He wears an old duck-hunting cap and a loose bloodstained camouflage army jacket, with special pockets for shells and game. The cap is folded like a little tent on his narrow head.
We stroll around the front yard and to the back, which contains a tiny graveyard. The sun has reached the trees. It is cooler. Lucy walks like a housewife going abroad, arms folded, stooping with each step. The uncle keeps up, but in a flanking position, some twenty feet away. His old liver-and-white pointer, Maggie, follows at his heel, her nose covered with warts, nuzzling him when he stops, burrowing under his hand. He talks, I think, to us. He speaks of his bird boxes and points them out. “Ain’t been a bluebird in these parts for forty years. I got six pair this summer. I got me twenty pair of wood ducks down in the flats. You want to see them?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Not now, Uncle,” says Lucy, stooping over her folded arms as she walks.
The uncle, flanking, keeps talking, paying no attention to Lucy nor she to him. “Most folks don’t know how the ducklings get out of the boxes twenty feet high. Some say they climb down the bark using a special toenail. Some say mamma duck helps them down. Not so. I saw them. You know what those little sapsuckers do? They climb out of the hole and fall, flat fall out and hit the ground pow, bounce like a rubber ball, and head for the water.”
The graveyard is a tiny enclosure, fenced by rusty iron spikes and chest-high in weeds. “I can’t cut in there with a tractor, so it doesn’t get cut,” says Lucy.
“I heard they used to cut it with scissors,” says the uncle. “Did you know once there were forty people here not counting field people?” By “they” and “people,” he means slaves.
Lucy, paying no attention, shows me the grave of our common ancestor, an English army officer on the wrong side of the Revolution. It is a blackened granite block surmounted by an angel holding an urn.
“Do you remember that in his will he left his daughter, who was thirteen, an eleven-year-old mulatto girl named Laura for her personal use.” Lucy jostles me. “I wish somebody would leave me one.”
“You seem to be doing fine.”
“He suffered spells of terrible melancholy and harbored the delusion that certain unnamed enemies were after him, all around him, coming down the river and up the river to put an end to the happy life in Feliciana.”
“It was probably the Americans.”
“We come from a melancholy family. Are you melancholy?” she asks. “No, you don’t look melancholy; me either.” I notice that her cheeks are flushed. “He married a beautiful American girl half his age, only to have his first, English wife show up. Both women lived here at Pantherburn for a while.” Lucy gives me a sideways look.
“No wonder he jumped in the river. Which wife are we descended from?” I ask her.
“I’m from the English, the legitimate side; you from the American.”
“Then we’re not close kin.”
“Hardly kin at all. I’m glad,” says Lucy.
We are walking again, the uncle in his outrider position. “I got me a pair of woodies right there,” he says, shaking two loose fingers toward the woods. “You ought to see that little sucker fly into the hole.”
“I’d like to.”
“They’ve long since left the boxes, Uncle,” says Lucy wearily.
“Do you know how he does that? Some people say he lights on the edge and goes in, but no. He flies in. I saw him. I’m talking about, he flies right in that hole. Do you know how he does it?”
Lucy, stooping and walking, is paying no attention.
“No, I don’t,” I say.
“He’s only got about a foot of room inside, right?”
“Right.”
“You know what he does — I saw him.”
“No.”
“That sucker flies right in and brakes in the one foot of room inside, like this,” says the uncle, suddenly flaring out his elbows like braking wings. “I’ve seen him! You want to see him? Let’s
go.”
“All right.”
“Not now, Uncle,” says Lucy.
2. LUCY AND I SIT on the gallery watching the sun go down across the levee through the oaks of the alley, making winks and gleams and casting long shafts of foggy yellow light. She smokes too much, long Picayunes, often plucks a tobacco grain from the tip of her tongue, looks at it.
Lucy fixes toddies of nearly straight bourbon in crystal goblets the size of a mason jar. My nose is running. Perhaps the toddies will help. I haven’t had a toddy for years. An eighteenth-century traveler once wrote of Feliciana and Pantherburn: “There is always at one’s elbow a smiling retainer ready with a toddy or a comfit.” What’s a comfit?
Beyond the oaks, the truncated cone of the Grand Mer facility rises as insubstantial as a cloud in the sunset. A pennant of vapor is fastened to its summit like the cloud on Everest.
We sit in rocking chairs.
“Well now,” I say after a long drink of the strong, sweet bourbon. My nose stops running.
“Yes indeed,” says Lucy.
A duck is calling overhead.
“Is that the uncle?”
“Yes.”
Footsteps go back and forth on the upper gallery. The quacking is followed by a chuckling sound.
“Is he talking to somebody?”
“No, he’s practicing his duck calls. He was runner-up in the Arkansas nationals last year. That’s the feeding call he’s doing now. He does it with his fingers. He’s been doing it six hours a day since January.
“I see.” I take another long pull. The bourbon is so good it doesn’t need sugar. “I was wondering why you wanted me to come.”
“I want you to stay here while Ellen’s gone. It’s all right with Ellen. I asked her.”
I look at her quickly. Is she trying to tell me something? She is. She rocks forward in her chair to look back at me, shading her eyes against the sun. “What if I were to tell you that it is absolutely all right for you to be here? Would you take that on faith without further explanation?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to explain further?”
“No.”
She looks at me along her cheek, eyes hooded.
I take another drink. “I appreciate it, but I’m fine. Hudeen’s taking good care of me.”
“Not as good as I could.”
“I’m sure of that.”
“No, I’m also selfish. Just now I think I can help you with your syndrome. I have an idea about it. And just now I also need you. You’re my only relative besides him”—her eyes go up—“and he’s driving me nuts. He needs you too. It’s all right for you to stay. Vergil thought you were my father.”
“Vergil?”
“You remember Vergil. He’s my only help on the farm, he and Carrie, his mother. You remember him. He remembers you. He drives the tractor, does everything. Unfortunately, I have to pay him a fortune. Nobody gave him to me. Will you stay?”
“You mean tonight or—?”
“Speak of the devil.”
Vergil has come onto the gallery behind us.
I had known him as a child, but do not recognize him. His father, laid up in a mobile home by the gate and living on the Medicaid Lucy got him, I remember as a hale, golden-skinned Ezio Pinza, fisherman and trapper, hearty and big-chested, too big — he had emphysema even then. They, the Bons, are known hereabouts as freejacks, meaning free persons of color, freed, the story goes, by Andrew Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans. More likely, they’re simply descendants of the quadroons and octoroons of New Orleans. A proud and reticent people, often blue-eyed and whiter than white, many could “pass” if they chose but mainly choose not to, choose, rather, to stay put in small contained bayou communities.