Oil stories: Gone to Water

A year on from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, this specially-commissioned story is set in Louisiana, where Pa Claude and Jackie are going out fishing on the bayou The dawn looked more like a sunset. The horizon was a luminous peach-colored line, and rising above it were gray commas of cloud with copper bottoms, each the size of a small town. The old man came onto his back porch holding a cup of coffee and looked east over the sound, his great grandson dawdling behind, hands in his pockets, a willowy boy of nine. Claude Ledet was eighty-eight, his skin a sun-eroded fabric of pale craters and burgundy spots. He looked down to his little wharf hugging the island. “We goin fish today, down to the mouth of the river.” “The river?” The boy’s voice sailed high in the question. “The Mississippi,” his great grandfather snapped. “Don’t you know nothing?” The boy grinned, goofy and sweet. “I know it’s a long way off, Pa Claude. For your boat.” The old man turned west, looking for weather. Sometimes he would see what was there, sometimes his mind would layer memories over the present, and he would see what was there last year, or the decade before that, or sixty years earlier when he’d built his little frame house high up on pilings. The day before, he’d seen the big wooden oyster lugger The Two Sons go by, loaded down, and he’d waved at his cousins Henry and Rene where they sat on the deck sorting what they had dredged up from their lease, even though Henry and Rene had been dead of old age for many years and The Two Sons lay sunk and rotting in Lake Borgne. Sometimes he saw things from several different decades at once, steam tugs, coastal sail boats, brand new Chris Craft mahogany yachts, jet skis carrying windblown children racing above the swells, time-wandering images floating side-by-side and overlapping like a bowl of fresh shucked oysters. Claude looked down at the boy. “Why you here?” “Aunt Brenda couldn’t come stay with you today. She’s at the doctor with the flu.” “That oldest girl couldn’t come?” “Suzie?” “That’s right. So many come around to visit with me I can’t keep ‘em straight.” The boy gave him a long look. “Great-aunt Suzie’s your daughter.” The old man nodded west. “Get two rods off the porch and my box. I’m goin bail the skiff.” “Her friend’s husband got killed in that rig accident about three weeks ago. It’s a big mess out in the Gulf.” “My radio’s burnt out and that damn television don’t make no sense to me at all.” “Everybody’s talking about it. You haven’t heard?” Claude put a hand to his stubbly chin. “We need some crackers and potted meat and a jug of water.” The boy settled a baseball cap down on his curls. “I didn’t know we were going fishing.”

Posted by on April 20, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.