I’d be up all night.” She opens her truck door. Stops one more time and gives me the same perplexed look I got when I asked Granny T to speak to my classes. “You need to lay off that stuff in the evening. Messes with your sleep.”
“You’re probably right.” Lately, I don’t sleep, but I blame job trauma combined with financial stress. “Well, if I miss you tomorrow, you’ll leave a bill for me? Or drop it by the school?”
“I’ll stick it in your screen door. Got no interest in that school.” She departs without further niceties.
I’m reminded that Augustine operates under some unwritten code I neither understand nor can communicate in. Trying to decipher it is like being tucked in the back bedroom of my father’s New York apartment, sitting on the edge of a daybed with my suitcase between my knees, listening as my dad, his wife, and my grandparents conversed in rapid-fire Italian, and wondering if my little half sisters, lying in their beds in the adjoining room, could understand what was being said. About me.
I push that memory aside and hurry back into the house, where I trade my work treads for the duck shoes I used on rainy college campus days. They’re the closest things I have to boots, and they will have to do. Hopefully, I won’t be wading through anything too deep in order to find this levee lane. I want to at least give it a try before the rain starts again.
Curiosity nibbles as I slog off across the backyard toward the overgrown hedges of oleander and honeysuckle that separate the house property from a small orchard and garden patch, and then the surrounding farm fields.
My shoes are wet inside and encased in five pounds of mud by the time I find a rise of ground that snakes along an irrigation canal. The farm levee lane, I’m guessing. The ghost of a wagon trail traces the top of it, but mostly it’s hidden beneath grass and autumn wildflowers.
A shaft of sunlight pushes its way through the haze overhead, as if to encourage me to follow. Live oaks shimmer in the golden glow, dripping diamond-like liquid from waxy leaves. Their gnarled branches clutch closer together, moss curtains swaying aimlessly beneath. In thick shadow, the road seems eerie, otherworldly, a passageway to another realm, like Narnia’s wardrobe or Alice’s rabbit hole.
I stand and peer down its length, my heart suspended in my chest. I wonder at the conversations this place has heard, the people and animals who have passed along this rise of ground. Who rode in the wagons that hollowed out the ruts? Where were those people going? What did they talk about?
Were there battles here? Did soldiers fire shots across this thoroughfare? Do bullets hide still, encased deep in the fiber and bark of these ancient trees? I know the cursory details of the Civil War, but almost nothing about Louisiana’s history. Now that seems like a deficit. I want to understand this reedy, marshy corner of the world that scratches its existence equally from land, and river, and swamp, and sea. My home for the next five years if I can figure out how to survive here.
I need more pieces to the puzzle, but no one is going to hand them to me. I have to find them. Dig them from their hiding places, from the ground and the people.
Listen, the road seems to admonish. Listen. I have stories.
I close my eyes, and I hear voices. Thousands whispering all at once. I can’t make out any single one, but I know they’re here. What do they have to say?
Opening my eyes, I push my hands into the pockets of my purple raincoat and start walking. The air is quiet, but my mind is noisy. My heart speeds up as I form plans. I need tools to understand this place, to make inroads here. Ding Dongs are tools. Books are tools. But the stories that aren’t in books, the ones no one has written down, like the one Granny T shared with me, like Aunt Sarge telling about farmers pulling wagons to market with mules: Those are tools, too.