Cajun Adventure, Post-Hurricane Rita
(continued)
I had said, “Why are you home from school?”
“I’m sick,” she said, stretching out the “i” in “si-i-i-i-k.”
“You don’t look sick.”
“I got lice,” she explained. She pronounced the word “lice” short and sharp.
Like all kids, Kirsten was glad to be part of the work project. She worked for at least a half-hour before she got tired of it.
Still paranoid about my neck and shoulder, I sanded gingerly all morning. Anna pushed hard against the wall, and wound up hurting her back around the shoulder blades. While Bob and B.J. tried to get an electric sander to work, we hand-sanded the whole house. The only things we skipped were the ceilings.
After lunch, we returned to yard clean-up, moving our attention to opposite side of the house from where we had cleaned up on Monday. It was fun to be outside again, especially after getting covered with the white dust from the drywall mud. There was so much dust on my watch I wondered if it would still work (it did). B.J. told me that apprentice drywallers always get the job of sanding, and do it for days on end. He said when he did it, he never used a mask because masks bothered him. Between all that dust over the years and his habit of stopping often to smoke cigarettes, his lungs must have been in rough shape.
Anna and I fell in love more than ever with Kirsten that day, and also with Lucky. Lucky was one of the many dogs that haunted the place. He was a chihuahua mix, all brown soft fur, maybe 15 pounds, sweet as could be. Anna and I couldn’t stop picking him up and petting him, and he loved the attention.
“Take him!” Dolores said.
“Take him!” Huey said.
On and off all day as we worked, Anna and I talked about taking Lucky. We even talked about neutering him once we got home; it was obvious Lucky was a ladies’ man. Huey was horrified by that idea.
“No! That’s mean. You’d turn him into a gay dog,” he said.
In the end, rationality won. At the end of the day, we hugged everyone goodbye, including Lucky.
Just as we got in our car to leave, my cell phone rang. It was Joe. He wanted us to pick him up from where he was doing storytelling that day, in St. Martinville, “on our way home.”
We had allotted just about enough time to take a nap and eat before our planned dance outing to Randol’s. And I was NAVIGATED OUT. Picking up Joe was the last thing I wanted to do. But of course I said “yes.” Joe had explained that the way he lived without car and house was by doing nice things for people. He put gardens in all the homes of the siblings with whom he stayed. He cooked for them also, as he planned to do for us tonight.
Of course we got lost finding Joe, but finally worked our way to where he was thanks to stopping and asking for directions and contacting Joe again on a cell phone with a dying battery. As we drove to Immaculata with Joe navigating, he pointed out crawfish ponds. I had heard about them from Huey and Dolores, but didn’t know what to look for. Joe pointed to the little plastic traps sticking out here and there in a field we were passing. He explained that when rice fields or cane fields “rest,” they’re used for crawfish ponds. The fields are flooded and the traps capture the crawfish and make it easy to harvest the little creatures.
Joe had me take a short detour through the Lake Martin swampy wilderness area. Beautiful, spooky witches’ hair hanging off gnarled trees everywhere. (Witches’ hair is my name for Spanish moss.) We looked for gators. No luck.
One of the roads we took that evening was “Forty Arpent Road.” Joe explained
about arpents. “The early settlers who lived here had a rule that you don’t build a house closer than 40 arpents from the bayou – so you wouldn’t get flooded. The 40-arpent line was considered a safe distance from the bayou.”
I wonder if all the flooding would have happened if people today followed the 40 arpent rule.