James Burke: Half of Paradise

After the spring rains when the first hot days of summer begin, the inland waters of the Gulf of Mexico turn smoky-green from the floating seaweed, fading to dark blue beyond the sandbars where the great white pelicans dive for fish. On an island off the Louisiana coast there is an open-air pavilion among a group of cypress trees, and in those first wisteria-scented days of May one can sit in a wicker chair, drinking chilled wine, and listen to the salt breeze rustling through the overhanging moss, or just sit and watch the whitecaps break against the beach and disappear in an iridescent spray of foam.

Avery Broussard walked up the beach with his duffle bag over his shoulder and entered the pavilion. It was midafternoon and no one was at the bar. Two fishermen sat at one of the marble-topped tables. He drank a draught beer from a thick glass mug filmed with ice on the outside, and watched the fishermen hand-wrestle. One of them was a little drunk, and he laughed loudly and used a profane expression in French when the other man forced his hand down. Avery drank down the cold beer and ordered another. He counted the money in his wallet. He had fifteen dollars, enough to buy a bottle and get him home. He had quit his job on the oil exploration crew that morning, and he wanted to catch the afternoon launch to the mainland in order to be at the house by nightfall. It was three o’clock now and the launch left at four. He sipped the beer and looked out over the beach at the few palm trees and the sun bright on the water and the sandbars white in the distance.

Avery was through with oil crews. Six months ago he had signed on as a jug-hustler on a shooting crew that did offshore exploration preliminary to putting down a well. Later he became a driller’s helper. He got a pay raise, and he liked working on the drill better than pulling recording instruments out of the water ten hours a day with the sun hot on his spine and the skin on his fingers cracked and hard from being wet too long. But now he was finished. Life on the Gulf was fine, but he hadn’t returned home or seen his father in the six months since he had left, and he thought that he had gotten rid of the things that had made him leave. He bought a pint of bourbon and put it in his duffle to drink on the way home.

He walked slowly down the beach towards the landing. The sky was clear and the gulls dipped their wings and circled overhead. He wondered what his father would say when he saw him again. Avery had written home only twice since he started work on the crew. Several times he had wanted to write his father and tell him why he had gone, but he could never find the proper words. His father wouldn’t have understood, just as he didn’t understand when Avery’s older brother Henri had left. The father and the sons were apart in time. Avery hoped that now things could be different from what they had been, and that he wouldn’t have to go away anymore. It’s in you, he thought, like it’s in him. You don’t belong anywhere else. He cut the seal of the whiskey bottle with his pocketknife, peeled it back and unscrewed the metal cap, and took a drink. Generations of inbreeding have put it into your blood. The land, the house, the country around it, and all that goes with it is inside you.

He waited on the dock until the launch came. He went aboard and stood on the bow and leaned against the deck rail. The deckhands cast off the mooring lines and the boat headed for the mainland. Avery looked out towards the Gulf and saw the gray shapes of two oil tankers silhouetted against the sky; he wondered where they were going. Ahead lay the mainland, a long stretch of white beach with a heavy line of trees in the background. Off to the left he could see the salt marsh with its flat expanses of alligator grass and the blasted trunks of cypress trees half submerged in the water. A sailboat came out of the lagoon, tacking in the breeze. He took another drink from the bottle and turned his face into the wind. The air was fresh with the smell of brine. The whiskey felt hot inside him, and he was getting a good edge on. The boat churned inland and passed the sandbars and the salt marsh and neared the dock.

He put the bottle in his bag and walked down the gangplank after the boat landed. Several trawlers were tied up at the dock. The fishermen were spreading out their nets to dry. He walked up the landing, the duffle over his shoulder, past a few boarded shacks and headed down a gravel road that would take him to the highway. There was thick green foliage on both sides of the road and tall gray oaks with hanging moss, and the late afternoon sun cast dark shadows over the lane. He saw a nutria, like a huge rat, swimming in the irrigation canal beside the road. Two cranes flew up over the trees from the swamp, their wings gilded in the sunlight.

Avery came out on the highway and hitched a ride with an old man in a vegetable truck. Riding along, he thought about his family, or what was left of it. His mother had died in childbirth, and his brother had been killed at Normandy. Now it was just his father and himself, and sometimes he wondered if it wouldn’t be better if they were gone, too. His family had lived for over a hundred years in Martinique parish, in the same house, on the same piece of ground which his great-grandfather had bought from the Louisiana government when he came from the West Indies in 1850. His great-grandfather had had a Negro servant who came with him as a free man into a slave country, and the two of them had built a sugarcane plantation that was later to become one of the largest in the southern portion of the state. When the War Between the States broke out, Avery’s great-grandfather had enlisted in the Confederate army, although he spoke only a few words of English, and was made a captain in the infantry; he and his servant were attached to the Eighth Louisiana Volunteers under General Jackson, and at the battle of Fredericksburg he was made deaf by the explosion of a cannon ball and was captured by the Federal army and imprisoned at Johnson’s Island for the remainder of the war.

When Appomattox came he and his servant took turns riding a half-starved mule through the bayou country and moccasin-infested swamps with nothing to eat except a sack of parched corn, until they returned to Martinique parish to attempt rebuilding what was left of their home after the fields had been burned, the stock killed, and the house shelled by artillery. During Reconstruction half of the land was lost to carpetbaggers, and the other half was left unplanted because there was no money to buy seed or to hire manual labor.

The great-grandfather was killed in a duel in 1870 by a Spanish aristocrat who made a profitable living as a scalawag and who had tried to buy the Broussard land at one-third of its value. Rebuffed, he had joined forces with the carpetbag government in an attempt to prove that Mr. Broussard was the leader of the night riders which terrorized the Negro voters. The Spanish aristocrat won his duel, but he was shot dead two weeks later on Rampart Street in New Orleans. A witness to the shooting said that a well-dressed Negro had approached the Spaniard, asked his name, then pulled a dueling pistol from his vest and fired from three feet. No one knew the Negro, nor did they ever see him again in New Orleans, but some believed him to be the servant of the man whom the Spaniard had killed in a duel sometime before.

Over the years the land was lost in pieces until Avery’s father, Rafael Broussard, owned only twenty acres of the original two-thousand-acre tract. Now there was no one left save Avery and his father and a Negro named Batiste who was the grandson of the servant the first Broussard had brought with him from the West Indies in 1850. The twenty acres of land was mortgaged, and it no longer produced enough cane to pay their expenses.