Little Altars Everywhere (20 page)

I tell my big sister, I am entombed here. I will not get out of this town until I die.

5.

Mayors disappear around here faster than catfish. Somebody somewhere removes Catfish from office—and before we know it, Crowell Jeffers is the new mayor. Ex-state senator with blond hair. His family owns that restored plantation home just outside of town on the way to the old cotton gin. He went to Princeton, has
perfect fingernails and no accent. The kind of guy Daddy always mispronounces words around.

It’s not in the
Monitor
, but Johnny Rizzo who has the newspaper stand on River Street told me that Hazelinda took Catfish up to Shreveport for some mental help. I’ve got to hand it to the lady, she manages to hold this press conference for her husband on TV and it takes me by surprise. She says: My husband and your ex-mayor, Mr. Wascomb Belvedere, is very tired. He will need to rest for a long time because he is mixed up and just worn out.

Jesus, there’s something so damn eloquent about her speech that it depresses the hell out of me. I have to leave the office before lunch. Drive on out to Pecan Grove to take a look at Daddy’s rice. Chaney’s out there, and we chew the fat for a while.

Chaney says, How you be doin, Doctor-Lawyer?

For some reason Chaney saw those words on my law school diploma and he always says them like a title—like Bishop or Captain or Judge. Somehow just seeing Chaney, the way he holds that denim cap of his in his hand, makes me feel like things are more solid.

A few weeks later, Catfish sends this letter to Mayor Jeffers’ office. Written on this big sheet of butcher paper, folded up to fit into a regular envelope. Handwriting like a six-year-old’s in different colors and he’s drawn a bunch of fish on it.

The letter says: Dear Thornton I am sorry about the fish forever.

Well, Jeffers and his cronies frame the thing all handsome and hang it in the hall with a brass plaque underneath that says “No Comment” like the clippings from small-town newspapers that
The New Yorker
magazine likes to make fun of.

When I tell Sidda the end of the story, she says, What’s really bothering you, Bay? This has you real depressed.

Me? I say. Depressed? You’ve got to be kidding. Man, I’m the original smiley-face golden boy down here. I love it that you lose your fucking accent and sit up there and laugh at Thornton.

She says, If you feel so bad about Thornton, why don’t you run for political office? Try and change that insane place or at least work on your own feelings about it, instead of being such a cynic.

If I’m a cynic, I tell her, then I’m a goddamn well-paid cynic, which is more than I can say for you, Ms. Thrift Shop, USA! And no, I won’t consider running for office. I’ve got my hands full as it is with my practice and my family.

My sister sounds like she’s trying not to cry. Baylor, she says, it makes me so sad to hear how hurt you are. It’s not just all those dead catfish and that poor crazy mayor, is it? I mean, it’s everything, huh?

I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, I tell her.

Bay, she says, you’re the one who told me I didn’t make it up. It all happened.

Well, I don’t see you down here trying to change things! I tell her. I don’t see you down here witnessing our parents becoming the highest insurance risks on record. You’re the one that escaped two thousand miles away from where you grew up. I’m the one who lives and works here day in and day out. I can’t save this place, goddamnit! I’m not fucking Jonas Salk. You’re the one who never comes home and who still gets sick with the flu wanting to make this town well.
You’re
the one who can’t get Thornton out of your mind—even in the middle of millions of people who will let you be any fucking person you want!

Sidda doesn’t speak for a while. Then she says, You’re right, Baylor. I’m fighting the Thornton Flu. It’s not easy.

I’m trying not to cry myself. I tell her, I know. We must have inherited one of those “bugs” that Mama and the Ya-Yas always got on the morning after.

Then we both kind of laugh a little because the whole thing truly is funny. Not funny ha-ha, but funny tired. Funny sad.

6.

I haven’t talked to Sidda in a couple of months now. I’ve been working my butt off as usual, and in between I play with the twins. They run across the yard, singing and dancing. Sometimes when you laugh at them, they just stare at you, like you’re the one who’s crazy.

I sit on the deck and watch them and smoke a cigarette. Sometimes I remember when I was little and Mama used to make me wear these hand-me-down shoes of Little Shep’s. God, they were ugly-ass shoes. Scuffed-up turd-brown with the toes all crinkled up from Shep’s altar-boy genuflecting. I looked like a fucking goon. All the rest of them used to think it was so funny, the way those shoes stuck out from under my pants. Sidda and Little Shep and Lulu would point and laugh their heads off.

If I was feeling brave, I’d say, Yall shut up and leave me alone! But most of the time I would just stand there with my hands in my pockets, trapped.

When the levee breaks, I’m gonna drown. I’m gonna drown in poisoned water.

I’d wish I could tell my big sister: Please just give me a break. I’m younger than you. You were already dialing the telephone when they first brought me home from the hospital.

Big Shep, 1991

I
watch all the news from my E-Z Boy lounger. I got the chair by the windows back in my room. Originally put it back there so I could hear the TV over the kids’ screaming and carrying on at the other end of the house. Now that they’re all gone, I guess I’ve gotten used to sitting up by myself and watching what’s going on in the world.

They started another war. I was down at the grain co-op last week and Charlie Vanderlick told me his grandson was in a Marine assault unit in the Gulf. Not our Gulf of Mexico, the one farther east.

Then, after a Levee Board meeting out at LSU-Thornton, I saw some graffiti on the wall in the men’s room that said “18 males per gallon.”

Goddamn, I thought, maybe you’ve lived too long.

Back when they first asked me to be on the Garnet Parish draft board in 1965, I got all puffed up. Figured
giving me such a responsibility must of meant they thought something of me.

So I said, Yessir, I’d be proud to.

Our pictures were in the
Thornton Daily Monitor
and I wore a suit like the rest of them. But I was the only one with cowboy boots.

Vivi said, Shep, babe, why don’t you wear your wing tips?

But I said, Vivi, let’s don’t get carried away with this thing.

The rest of the board was your downtown crowd—Neal Chauvin, the lawyer; two businessmen; and that orthodontist who was sending his son to Princeton on my kids’ teeth. They needed somebody to represent those of us who farm out here along Bayou Latanier outside the city limits, and I was the one.

The meetings were at the parish courthouse at six in the evening so the rest of them could walk over from their offices after work. I would go home from the fields first, even though once the weather turned good, Chaney and me didn’t know the meaning of the words “quitting time.” We were making the changeover from cotton to rice back then. Had to get my land leveled perfect and make sure the ridges on the contours held the water like they should. Growing something under standing water was a whole different ballgame from what we’d been used to. We were working with new irrigation pumps and combines—the whole nine yards. Had folks from the Extension Service out there at least
once a week to advise me. You got to try and diversify, so the land you inherited doesn’t get worn out and useless. Not to mention, you also got to plant you a crop that’ll bring in enough cash to keep a roof over your head.

Before the meetings I would shower and shave and put on a suit—foreign to me, but there’s such a thing as civic duty. Never saw any battle myself. Had my seventeenth birthday on a train headed for Navy boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. I wouldn’t wish the kind of homesickness I had on my worst enemy.

Everybody who was anybody was for the Vietnam thing at that point. Get in and get out so the dominoes don’t come tumbling down. They weren’t even calling it a war then, just a “conflict.” Up to that point, I hadn’t ever realized that little swamp over there meant so much to democracy, but then I tend to pay attention to things more local.

Vivi would ask me questions about it, and the only thing I could say was, Well, Russell Long and his people seem to think it’s important, and they’ve been in the know since Year One.

Then in September of ’65, Hurricane Betsy roared across the Gulf of Mexico and hit the Mississippi Delta like no North Vietnamese mortar ever could. She knocked three-quarters of my rice to the ground and all I could do was stand on the carport with the humidity dripping off me and watch. We harvested the puny portion we could, burned off the rice straw,
disked it, then put in wheat. Hurricanes remind you that it’s the Old Podnah who’s in charge, not you.

By the end of that year, we’d put ten times as many more men in uniform than when I first went on the board. I started reading more news, because I wasn’t gonna have the other board members think I was some know-nothing tractor driver when I opened my mouth at the meetings. I read my
Thornton Monitor
, my
New Orleans Times-Picayune, Newsweek,
and
U.S. News and World Report.

One evening I just had to get up and walk down the hall to Vivi’s room. I said, Babe, you still awake? Take a look at this, will you? You’re a Catholic, explain this to me.

And I handed her a picture in
Newsweek
of this Catholic relief worker burning himself up in front of the United Nations building to protest us being over in Vietnam. The picture showed this young boy going right up in flames. You could still barely make out his eyeglasses and the shape of his sweater-vest and ears.

Vivi said, That’s disgusting, Shep. Take it away from me.

I went on back to my room and tried to get some sleep but I couldn’t. I sat up half the night with my asthma inhaler and Herman Wouk.

Christmas that year was good enough, for just having come through a hurricane. Vivi charged everything.

I figured, Well, we can’t have
two
years of hurricanes, can we?

We had a big Christmas breakfast with all kinds of kinpeople over, the little ones going nuts over their toys the way they do. While we ate our turkey and cornbread dressing, the diplomatic muckety-mucks flew all over the globe pulling out the stops. They had a thirty-hour cease-fire, and man, did they burn some jet fuel hopping from one embassy to another.

I thought, Maybe they can stop this thing after all. I hope so. I’m a farmer, not a military recruiter.

Then ’66 rolled in. After the so-called truce, we went all-out to bring the North to its knees. Good, I thought. Bomb the hell out of it and get it over with. I couldn’t barbecue a sirloin without thinking about the G.D. war.

I had boys by the dozens coming in front of me, some of them hardly been shaving for a year. I never used to think nineteen-year-olds were so damn young. Well, we got ourselves into this thing; we got to get ourselves out. But I hated the idea of putting anyone through the hell I went through in the Navy. And I didn’t even know any combat. Boot camp was bad enough. I had never left Garnet Parish without Mama or Daddy before, and I was sick the whole damn time. Had problems with my bowels and ended up in the infirmary, you can’t count the number of times. An obstructed colon, they called it. I called it: Go ahead and shoot me now and get it over with.

Civic duty or not, I could of done without those draft board meetings. I had enough on my hands just trying to run my own farm. I was going all out with the rice. If those Southwest Louisiana farmers could do it, I thought, then so could I. Cotton was a thing of the past by then. It got to where I’d laugh out loud when I’d even hear the phrase “Cotton South.” When it comes to cotton, I’ll wear it, but I sure as hell won’t grow it anymore. It wasn’t nothing but a sure way to go bankrupt.

Not that I didn’t miss it. Not that I don’t still miss it. There is some kind of beauty to growing cotton. First, you got to make sure it survives germinating when the ground is cool. Then summer comes and that plant grows so lightning-fast—it’s like watching a kid shoot up from two to twenty in three hot months. You got to really love farming to grow cotton. Because you got to baby it, watch it every day, give it what it needs at every different stage. Keep the weeds out, watch for the boll weevils and bollworms. You can get emotional with that crop, I tell you. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t better raising cotton than I was with my own children.

And the harvest. The kids used to come out to the fields after school. Vivi would bring a picnic supper and we’d eat under the pecan trees, with the oranges and pinks of the sky. Chaney and Lincoln and the other field hands sitting there with us next to the tin water cooler. Sometimes Willetta would bring out
something special for Chaney, those tall, skinny girls of theirs tagging along. I liked showing off what we’d been working, and in those days my family was actually interested. Not like later, when they got ashamed of how I paid for their clothes and food and cars and colleges. Back in those days, the kids would climb up on the high-bed cotton truck and dive down into that freshly picked cotton like they thought they were in the circus or something. I’d watch them come up sneezing, picking fuzz off their eyelashes, then diving down for more.

Those were good times. Hell, we didn’t even
drink
on those evenings. Just ice tea. And I’d keep working late into the night, because you didn’t want to leave cotton in the field a day longer than you had to. No telling when the rain’d start.

I knew what I was doing then. My father taught me how to grow cotton.

But he didn’t teach me how to sit still at no conference table with a bunch of air-conditioned men. At those draft board meetings, you knew you weren’t part of their crowd, even though nothing was ever said. They had a club so private it didn’t even have a name. Quick sure handshakes. Soft clean hands. Manicured fingernails. When we shook hands, I was always conscious of my calluses and the dirt that wouldn’t come out, no matter how hard I scrubbed. I was the only farmer on the draft board and I busted my butt trying to get my fingernails clean as theirs.

There was something in me that would of liked to say: Listen, you SOBs, my Daddy could of sent me to Tulane too, but we had land to farm. While your people sat up at the country club during the Depression whining into their mint juleps, my father was trucking potatoes across the whole goddamn South to hold on to our land.

But I held my tongue. It was all deeper and sadder and more confusing than I had the words for. Sometimes I wondered if this wasn’t how the niggers felt.

Oh, I watched that war from my E-Z Boy. We’re fighting a jungle war, a ground war, and one in the air. We’re kicking ass now, LBJ said. Only no one was telling those VC bastards. They didn’t seem to get the message. Maybe it was because they didn’t speak English. Hah. They picked our jets off like kites in a storm.

I knew the numbers. We had our draft quotas to meet every month. Quotas everywhere you turned. Started the year with 181,000 and ended up the year with 400,000.

And it wasn’t just Vietnam. Meaner mouths than Dr. King were starting to holler. Whatever his dream was, it seemed like it was turning into a nightmare to me. It was war on all fronts. I just wish my own home hadn’t been one of them. But don’t get me started on that. There weren’t any deferments from the battles in my house.

Christmas came again before I’d even paid off last year’s charge slips. One night I was at Rotier’s Bar hav
ing a drink and a bowl of gumbo with the boys. We were always bringing Rotier shrimp or duck, and the man could flat out turn it into something. If I’d eaten a bowl of that gumbo every time I ordered a drink from that man, my life might of turned out different. Anyway, the place was all decorated for Christmas, little fake trees up on the bar, the Playmate of the month next to it with her pink tits and wearing a red Santa’s hat. And McNamara came on the TV, saying: Progress has exceeded our own expectations. We can now cut our draft in half during ’67.

The only problem was, old Westmoreland kept asking for more boys—and what Westmoreland wanted, he sure as hell seemed to get.

Nineteen sixty-seven. Hottest G.D. summer I can remember. Bigger ground battles, more air assaults, same size body bags, only a helluva lot more of them.

That’s when the calls started coming regular. Nine o’clock at night, that’s when you’d hear the phone ring. I remember the first one. It took me a while to even figure what it was about. It was Mrs. Alma Vanderlick, Charlie Vanderlick’s wife.

I said, Hello, this is Shep Walker.

And she said, Mister Walker, I sure hate to be calling you this late at night. I know how early farmers got to get up. Charlie’s asleep already.

I said, Don’t you worry, Miz Alma. What can I do for you?

Mister Walker, she said, please don’t tell Charlie I called. He wouldn’t never get over it.

Miz Alma, I told her, you people been farming along this bayou as long as mine have. Now, what can I do for you?

Oh Mister Shep, you got to stop them from taking my son Albert to Vietnam. He’s the only one left to farm this place when his daddy’s gone. My oldest boy got him a real fine job with Texaco down in Morgan City. He’s making good money. He ain’t never gonna come back here and farm.

She was crying, and I sat up in bed and tried to un-clench my chest.

I’ll see what I can do for you, Miz Alma, I told her. Let me see what I can do.

She said, Thank you, Mr. Shep. I’m gonna run yall over a jar of my fig preserves next time I’m up your way.

That call shook me up something awful. Good thing I didn’t know it was only the first. Once they started flying those body bags back to Louisiana, there wasn’t any medals or patriotic sweet-talking that could hush up the farm mothers who live up and down this bayou. At least not at night, when their husbands were in bed and the supper stuff was put away, and they got to remembering how they’d danced with those baby boys on their hips at Sunday afternoon pig roasts. Or rubbed Vicks VapoRub onto their chests when the bronchitis came around. These ladies didn’t burn no flags. They looked up my number from the grain co-op phone list.
I was the only country man on the draft board. They called me.

I had a bad taste in my mouth the day Albert Vanderlick stood up in front of us. Boy was asking to be deferred on sole-surviving-son status. He was wearing pressed khakis and a short-sleeve plaid shirt with a necktie. You could smell the homemade starch when he sweated. Healthy-looking boy. Those Dutchmen down the bayou feed their children good, raise them right. I remembered the boy from when he used to tag along with his daddy to the cotton gin. He sat there in front of us with his hands on his knees, fingers spread out. I could see where he’d scrubbed his hands, could tell by the redness around the cuticles. Shoot, don’t I know that look. Don’t I scrub my fingernails every evening of the world out in the utility room so Vivi won’t have to see the dirt up under my nails? Using the fingernail brush, working it up under the nails, scrubbing my palms with Lava trying to get the earth out from in between the creases in my skin.