Ruby (Landry 1)

"So much for coming to you for any help, Grandpere," I said furiously. "You are a disgrace." With him unconscious, I was able to vent my anger unchecked. "What kind of a man are you? How could you let us struggle and strain to keep alive and well? You know how tired Grandmere Catherine is. Don't you have any self-respect?

"I hate having Landry blood in me. I hate it!" I screamed, and pounded my fists against my hips. My voice echoed through the swamp. A heron flew off instantly and a dozen feet away, an alligator lifted its head from the water and gazed in my direction. "Stay here, stay in the swamp and guzzle your rotgut whiskey until you die. I don't care," I cried. The tears streaked down my cheeks, hot tears of anger and frustration. My heart pounded.

I caught my breath and stared at him. He moaned, but he didn't open his eyes. Disgusted, I got back into the pirogue and started to pole myself home, feeling more despondent and defeated than ever.

With the tourist trade nearly nonexistent and school over, I had more time to do my artwork. Grandmere Catherine was the first to notice that my pictures were remarkably different. Usually in a melancholy mood when I began, I tended now to use darker colors and depict the swamp world at either twilight or at night with the pale white light of a half moon or full moon penetrating twisted sycamores and cypress limbs. Animals stared out with luminous eyes and snakes coiled their bodies, poised to strike and kill any intruders. The water was inky, the Spanish moss dangling over it like a net left there to ensnare the unwary traveler. Even the spiderwebs that I used to make sparkle like jewels now appeared more like the traps they were intended to be. The swamp was an eerie, dismal, and depressing place and if I did include my mysterious father in the picture, he had a face masked with shadows.

"I don't think most people would like that picture, Ruby," Grandmere told me one day as she stood behind me and watched me visualize another nightmare. "It's not the kind of picture that will make them feel good, the kind they're going to want to hang up in their living rooms and sitting rooms in New Orleans."

"It's how I feel, what I see right now, Grandmere. I can't help it," I told her.

She shook her head sadly and sighed before retreating to her oak rocker. I found she spent more and more time sitting and falling asleep in it. Even on cloudy days when it was a bit cooler outside, she no longer took her pleasure walks along the canals. She didn't care to go find wild flowers, nor would she visit her friends as much as she used to visit them. Invitations to lunch went unaccepted. She made her excuses, claimed she had to do this or that, but usually ended up falling asleep in a chair or on the sofa.

When she didn't know I was watching, I caught her taking deep breaths and pressing her palm against her bosom. Any exertion, washing clothes or the floors, polishing furniture, and even cooking exhausted her. She had to take frequent rests in between and battle to catch her breath.

But when I asked her about it, she was always ready with an excuse. She was tired from staying up too late the night before; she had a bit of lumbago, she got up too fast, anything and everything but her owning up to the truth--that she hadn't been well for quite some time now.

Finally, on the third Sunday in August, I rose and dressed and went down, surprised I was up and ready before her, especially on a church day. When she finally appeared, she looked pale and very old, as old as Rip van Winkle after his extended sleep. She cringed a bit when she walked and held her hand against her side.

"I don't know what's come over me," she declared. "I haven't overslept like this for years."

"Maybe you can't cure yourself, Grandmere. Maybe your herbs and potions don't work on you and you should see a town doctor," I suggested.

"Nonsense. I just haven't found the right formula yet, but I'm on the right track. be back to myself in a day or two," she swore, but two days went by and she didn't improve an iota. One minute she would be talking to me and the next, she would be fast asleep in her chair, her mouth wide open, her chest heaving as if it were a struggle to breathe.

Only two events got her up and about with the old energy she used to exhibit. The first was when Grandpere Jack came to the house and actually asked us for money. I was sitting with Grandmere on the galerie after our dinner, grateful for the little coolness the twilight brought to the bayou. Her head grew heavier and heavier on her shoulders until her chin'rested on her chest, but the moment Grandpere Jack's footsteps could be heard, her head snapped up. She narrowed her eyes into slits of suspicion.

"What's he coming here for?" she demanded, staring into the darkness out of which he emerged like some ghostly apparition from the swamp: his long hair bouncing on the back of his neck, his face sallow with his grimy gray beard thicker than usual, and his clothes so creased and dirty, he looked like he had been rolling around in them for days. His boots were so thick with mud, it looked caked around his feet and ankles.

"Don't you come any closer," Grandmere snapped. "We just had our dinner and the stink will turn our stomachs."

"Aw, woman," he said, but he stopped about a half-dozen yards from the galefie. He took off his hat and held it in his hands. Fishhooks dangled from the brim. "I come here on a mission of mercy," he said.

"Mercy? Mercy for who?" Grandmere demanded.

"For me," he replied. That nearly set her laughing. She rocked a bit and shook her head.

"You come here to beg forgiveness?" she asked. "I came here to borrow some money," he said.

"What?" She stopped rocking, stunned.

"My dingy's motor is shot to hell and Charlie McDermott won't advance me any more credit to buy a new used one from him. I gotta have a motor or I can't earn any money guiding hunters, harvesting oysters, whatnot," he said. "I know you got something put away and I swear--"

"What good is your oath, Jack Landry? You're a cursed man, a doomed man whose soul already has a prime reservation in hell," she told him with more vehemence and energy than I had seen her exert in days. For a moment Grandpere didn't reply.

"If I can earn something, I can pay you back and then some right quickly," he said. Grandmere snorted.

"If I gave you the last pile of pennies we had, you'd turn from here and run as fast as you could to get a bottle of rum and drink yourself into another stupor," she told him. "Besides," she said, "we haven't got anything. You know how times get in the bayou in the summer for us. Not that you showed you cared any," she added.

"I do what I can," he protested.

"For yourself and your damnable thirst," she fired back.

I shifted my gaze from Grandmere to Grandpere. He really did look desperate and repentant. Grandmere Catherine knew I had my painting money put away. I could loan it to him if he was really in a fix, I thought, but I was afraid to say.

"You'd let a man die out here in the swamp, starve to death and become food for the buzzards," he moaned.

She stood up slowly, rising to her full five feet four inches of height as if she were really six feet tall, her head up, her shoulders back, and then she lifted her left arm to point her forefinger at him. I saw his eyes bulge with shock and fear as he took a step back.