Hidden Jewel (Landry 4)

"Yes, Daddy." I had my fingers crossed.

We drove on. Through a break in the overgrown bushes and heavy foliage, I saw a young man poling a pirogue. He slipped into a large island of lily pads, and about a dozen sleeping bullfrogs sprang up and splashed around him, making the water pop like bursting bubbles. I had only a glimpse of him, but he looked statuesque and brown-skinned, with a smile of deep pleasure on his face.

We made the second left and Daddy

announced, "There it is!"

My heart began to thump faster. Would we find Mommy sitting on the gallery or wandering about the shack or sitting inside? I hoped she would be surprised but happy we had come for her. We pulled up, and Daddy turned off the engine. For a long moment we both just sat there staring at the shack.

I wasn't prepared for what I was seeing. I suppose I had been romanticizing the shack in my mind for years. Most of my memories were vague, but whenever I thought about it, I conjured up a sweet little toothpick-legged house with a rug of fine grass and beautiful wildflowers. I envisioned it coated in fresh paint, its corrugated metal roof glimmering in the noonday sun. In my memories the canal ran clear behind the shack. Pelicans and egrets hovered; bream leaped out to catch insects for dinner and the heads of alligators with curious eyes popped up to look our way.

Instead, we confronted an overgrown front yard where even the weeds were choking to death. The gallery leaned to the right, and the shack leaned to the left. Some of the clapboard had torn loose, and all of the windows had been shattered, probably by young boys having rock-throwing contests.

Still, my infant memories were stirred. A vision of the gallery flashed in my mind, and in it I felt myself being rocked in a chair and listening to a radio playing zydeco music in the living room. The roadside stand where Mommy had sold her woven hats, baskets, jellies, jams, and gumbo lay broken in the tall grass.

"It doesn't look like anything on two legs was here recently," Daddy commented.

"We better look, Daddy," I said.

He nodded, squeezed my hand and opened the door. "Be careful," he said as I followed. We paused at the foot of the vague front pathway, however. It did look as if someone had traipsed through recently. Daddy and I glanced at each other and then moved faster toward the gallery. The short stairway creaked and groaned under our weight, as did the floorboards. Daddy tued the front door open. It complained on rusted hinges and wobbled.

Something scurried away inside when we started to enter, and I jumped back with a cry.

"Could be a raccoon," Daddy whispered. My heart was drumming so hard I thought I would lose my breath. There was a dank stench and gobs and gobs of cobwebs on the ceiling and walls, but the old furniture was still there. Daddy and I paused and gazed around the living room. Then I looked down at the floor and pulled Daddy's sleeve.

"Someone was here recently, Daddy. See the footprints in the dust?"

He nodded, crouched, and studied them. "Small, like your mother's."

We continued through the house. The kitchen was a mess. What was left of the stove was badly rusted. The door of the old-fashioned icebox had been torn off one of its hinges, someone had been swinging on it. Drawers were pulled out, some of them smashed, and here and there were gaping holes in the floor. Daddy gazed at the stairway.

"Maybe you better wait down here," he suggested. "I don't know how safe that is."

He started up. The steps creaked, but held. I waited at the bottom while he searched the bedrooms and the loom room. He stayed up there awhile.

The shack seemed so tiny to me. It was hard to imagine that Mommy and I once lived here. And now that it was so wrecked, it was creepy. The walls creaked in the wind, and things scurried under the floorboards. There were stains that looked like dried blood on the chipped plank table. I had visions of my great grandpere drunk and raging. Despite the high humidity and heat, my thoug

hts gave me the chills. I embraced myself and looked up the stairway. I hadn't heard any movement for a while.

"Daddy?"

He didn't respond.

"Daddy?" I called, a bit more frantic. A few moments later he came down the stairs slowly. In his hands was the picture of Jean that Mommy had torn off the photograph of him and Pierre together. It looked as if candle wax had dripped over it.

"She was here," Daddy said in a hoarse whisper. "You were right."

Excited by the discovery, we searched the property for more evidence of Mommy's presence, but there was nothing else to be found and no trail to lead us anywhere. Most of the land around the property was heavily overgrown, and Daddy thought we weren't properly dressed to go traipsing through marshland.

"Too dangerous. She couldn't have gone that way anyhow," he said.

"Where should we look for her, then?"

"There's only one other place I know. Cypress Woods," he said with a deep sigh. "She's going back through her past, a journey I hoped we wouldn't have to make."

We returned to our car, and Daddy sat thinking a moment.

"Let's go into town and get something to eat first," he suggested. "Town's not far, but Cypress Woods is the other way. It might be hours and hours before we have another chance to get a bite or something to drink."