Part 15 (1/2)

Wayne and I do this a lot: look at a place for its move-to potential, even though we are perfectly happy living in eastern Ontario. It's a way of gauging the feeling of a town, I suppose. And this one feels good. It's small enough that there aren't sidewalks in front of the houses: the lawns just feather out toward the road. In place of gaudy signposts, the red-brick streets are inset with bra.s.s wedges that say, ever-so-genteelly, Stop and Keep Right. We watch a pair of mockingbirds eating supper at a blue-berried shrub and follow a drift of white-throated sparrows through the cypresses to the bayou. At one time, Mary told me, there were canary cages hanging under the front verandah of the Excelsior; it was called the Canary Hotel then. The only singing I've heard so far, though, was from the black girl was.h.i.+ng the windows on the balcony above our sunroom, rolling, joyful hymns that I savoured as we ate our grits and eggs and orange-blossom m.u.f.fins.

I expect Wayne to say he loves it here, too, but he says nothing. He doesn't have to. His face is a mask of unease at this sudden plunge into America's Deep South.

11 / SELMALABAMA.

MID-MORNING, I get ready to leave Jefferson, but with reluctance.

”I wish I'd looked at the real estate listings,” I say as we put our things back into the car. We're wearing shorts and T-s.h.i.+rts. The sun, at last, is almost hot. The only thing we have to do now is find a laundromat.

”Why didn't you?” Wayne asks.

”I guess I didn't want to be tempted.” Lee Marvin told us he'd come for a day, stayed for a week, and ended up buying the coffee shop. Lord only knows what would happen if we took our suitcases back into the Diamond Bessie Suite.

But seeing Wayne's disquiet is making me look at Jefferson with new eyes. At the local laundromat, all the women are black. All the housekeeping and wait staff I saw at the hotel were black. In the restaurants, the busboys and cooks, but not the bartenders or waitresses, were black.

Is this evidence of a colour line? Too small a sample to tell, perhaps, but something in the way the maid kept her eyes lowered and punctuated every item with ”Yes, ma'am” as the thin white woman listed her jobs for the day made me think she was exhibiting more than simple southern courtesy.

The women at the laundromat don't seem to be doing their own wash. Their loads are huge batches of white sheets and towels and mattress covers. I put our few things in the washer and walk across the street for a doughnut.

An Asian woman and her son appear to be operating the place. ”Cake or regular?” she says.

”Cake,” I reply, pointing to a chocolate glazed with crushed peanuts. I feel suddenly nostalgic for Tim Hortons. Hippocrates observed that whenever people from one country travel to another, they are often beset with a debilitating la.s.situde. From this, the father of modern medicine concluded that people absorb topographic influences from their place of birth and that separation from them can be injurious to health. He called this la.s.situde ”nostalgia,” from the Greek nostos, to return, and algos, to suffer. I'm not actually suffering; it's just that doughnuts, for me, have more to do with Canada than with the Deep South.

Back at the laundromat, the women have moved outside to gossip with a man who has just quit smoking.

”I can breathe!” he exclaims with the fervour of the converted. ”In just two days, I can breathe good again.”

The laundromat is large and clean and empty. Nothing much to do but read the notices on the bulletin board at the back. An offering of recycled lumber, a hunter green matching sofa and chair. A small poster advertising a Dream Walk on Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, three days from now.

There are candy machines and beside them, as if placed there as a deterrent, a weigh scale. I put in a quarter and stand very still, as the machine directs. The numbers creep upward until I step off in horror. I have gained ten pounds: all those hash browns. The machine grinds on, spitting out my lucky lottery numbers for the day-30, 16, 64-and finally my fortune: ”Things will be better tomorrow.”

I move our clothes to a dryer and, from the rack of religious pamphlets, pluck a book of Christian prayers for all occasions. I thumb through it as we head out of town. There are no prayers for fat travellers about to have a bad day. No prayers for travellers at all.

WE take Highway 2 to avoid the interstate, leaving Texas as we entered it, and cross into Louisiana near Caddo Lake, an eerie stretch of water that spans the border of Louisiana and northeastern Texas. Together with Big Cypress Bayou, Caddo Lake and its surrounding wetlands cover some thirty thousand acres of prime bird habitat. This morning, it is a study in grey: silvery bald cypress trunks rise from mercury-slick waters; moss like heron's wings waves desultorily, though I can see no breeze. Maybe there are birds in the branches. I'm glad we're not here in summer, when the place must buzz with Jet Skis and fishermen. Looking out over the still waters, it's not inconceivable we're the first people on earth-or the last.

I'm wondering what birds might be tucked into the recesses among the trees when suddenly a huge black-and-white-and-red bird dips across the road.

”An ivory-billed!” I call out, braking hard. The ivory-billed woodp.e.c.k.e.r has not been seen for fifty years-the last confirmed sighting was in Louisiana in 1944-but last year a canoeist reported a sighting in Arkansas, not that far north of here. Part of me, the same part that is not entirely an atheist, wants to believe that it isn't impossible that I could be the one to positively identify the last remaining ivory-billed on earth. We are in dense mangrove swamp country, more water than land, Spanish moss hanging from skeletal trees rising from murk and disappearing into mist. Definitely ivory-billed territory.

”Why couldn't it be an ivory-billed?” I say to Merilyn, backing up the car and scanning the trees. In Cuba, I heard a recording of the ivory-billed's call, which sounds like an alien distress signal coming from some distant part of the galaxy.

By the time we get out of the car, the bird, whatever it was, is long gone.

”Pileated,” Merilyn writes in her notebook.

We stop for gas at a small convenience store in the middle of the mist-grey forest. Rain, or possibly overflow from the swamp, has turned the yard in front of the store into a Rorschach of ruts. A single pump stands in the middle like a small lighthouse, the hose trailing on the ground. From the shelter of the store's doorway, a black man in grey coveralls watches me, smoking a cigarette. When he makes no move toward the pump, I a.s.sume it's self-serve, so I get out and pick up the hose. There is no nozzle at the end of it. The man nods and waves us on.

The feeling here is of a once-verdant land now overgrown and swamped, the world immediately after the Flood. We are only a few miles from Greenwood, the boyhood home of John Bentley Mays, the Canadian writer and art critic who spent the first eighteen years of his life in Louisiana. In his memoir Power in the Blood, he writes of Greenwood in the 1940s, when his father was a merchant and cotton plantation owner, as a kind of earthly paradise. The house he grew up in after his father's death in 1947 was surrounded by ”traditional Southern plantings: shade-giving pecans and low figs and taller chinaberry trees and mimosas, flowering redbuds and fruit trees, nandina bushes with bright red berries, and abounding roses.” By the time his Aunt Vandalia died, however, in 1990, the grounds had grown to ruin, overtaken by weeds and poisonous snakes and Virginia creeper, like the woods around Snow White; and now, driving through similar towns and the dark woods between them, it is as though the decay that began in Aunt Vandalia's garden has crept out to engulf all of Louisiana, perhaps the whole South.

MOORINGSPORT. Plain Dealing. Whynot. The names of the towns on the map spread over my knees are forthright. Nothing at all like the wild optimism of those who settled the area where we live. Newbliss. Prospect. Sweets Corners. (Delta, Harlem, and Charleston are also within a half-hour's drive of our house in Ontario: Canadians, in a.s.signing place names, indulge in either nostalgia for where they've come from or unbridled ambition for where they find themselves.) The speed limit in Louisiana drops to a lackadaisical fifty-five. The Don't Mess with Texas signs have been replaced with Don't Trash Louisiana, but everybody seems to anyway. The roadsides are white with fast-food throwaways or, as they are called here, to-go boxes.

Louisiana is a revelation, not only because of the bilingual sign that welcomes us: Bienvenue en Louisiane. After a few miles of moss-draped swamps, we emerge into forested hills: the northern part of the state is-or used to be-a swath of pineries. This is where the South came for the lumber to rebuild after the Civil War. In 1895, Louisiana's stock of standing timber was surpa.s.sed only by that of the Pacific Coast and Idaho. Virgin stands of longleaf, shortleaf, and loblolly pine, cypress, and hardwood covered some 25,000 square miles. By the beginning of the First World War, this sliver of a state led all others in lumber production.

Today, lumbering isn't even listed as a major industry, though obviously Louisiana is still cutting down trees. Palisades of tall conifers flank the road, a screen that almost, but not quite, hides the rough, grey slash of total clear-cut behind. Here and there regrowth has begun, a fur of green, too dense and random to be a replanted forest. Louisianians seem to prefer to leave Nature to look after herself, prolific old dame that she is.

I draw our yellow highlighter line through the town of Trees, which consists of two churches and a boarded-up catfish shop, clear-cut trailing off in all directions, oil donkeys nodding here and there among the stumps. Later, we pa.s.s through Forest, which is marked by the same denuded landscape, though the town is more prosperous, a huge lumberyard parked under the water tower, where the town's name is freshly stencilled, apparently without irony.

We take a back road through farm country to pick up US 80 again. At a crossroads deep in the countryside, we come upon three people sprawled in the roadside litter: an old man, a boy, and a toothless woman. They have margarine containers between their legs and are scrabbling in the dead leaves under a twisted and soaring ancient tree.

”Stop! Wayne! Please!”

I roll down my window.

”Hi there,” I call out.

”How y'all doin?” the woman drawls, leaning back. This is the standard Louisiana greeting. Not h.e.l.lo, but an immediate inquiry into the state of your well-being.

”Good, good,” I say, oddly touched that she's asked. It seems an antidote to the dire prediction of the weigh scale in the laundromat. ”What are you picking?”

”P'cans,” she says, opening the vowel wide and lifting the end of the word the way people here do, not in a California Valley girl upspeak sort of way, but in a singsong, a wavy vocal line that invites you to ask for the rest of the story.

”Can I see? What do they look like?” Apart from our salvaged California almonds, the only nut I've ever picked is a walnut, which comes encased in a big, hard, fuzzy fruit the size and shape of a lime-green tennis ball.

The woman opens her dark fist to the nuts that lie smooth and mottled in her pale palm. They look like big runner beans, nothing at all like the mahogany-coloured nuts we buy at Christmas in our northern grocery stores. She sifts through the leaf litter and picks up another, as if to prove their provenance.

”What do you do with them?” I ask. I'm thinking pecan salad, pecan soup, pecan pie.

”Ah sells 'em.”

I try again. ”Do you have to sh.e.l.l them?”

”No ma'am, ah jist sells 'em.”

ALL ALONG the road we pa.s.s signs that declare We Buy Pecans. I finally get my chance at the Piggly Wiggly where we stop for gas. (I also purchase a can of Jack Daniel's Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey & Cola for Wayne and a double-wrapped half-loaf of bread for our lunch.) I scoop the nuts from a bushel basket, $2.49 a pound. They are sweet and crisp, better than any pecan I've ever tasted. But not as satisfying, I think, as what I might have had from that old woman, had I the courage to ask.

I am keen to buy local produce, to see what grows in the gardens here. The tables of the South, in my mind, groan under a bounty of exotic fare-hominy grits, gumbo, okra, collard greens, mirliton, crawfish, gator, frogs' legs, racc.o.o.n, squirrel, shoofly pie-but other than catfish stands and nuts, we see little unusual agricultural produce. In fact, everything about Louisiana seems familiar. The houses here are just like those at home, ordered, it seems, from the same generic North American catalogue of house plans. The roads are surfaced and striped and signed just the same. People dress like we do, eat like we do. Only the accents are different. If you drive through, never talking to a soul, you could be driving through just about anywhere, except for the parish signs. Louisiana is the only state of the Union divided into parishes instead of counties, just as Quebec is the only province in Canada to hang onto its parishes, too.

Anthills erupt like nipples along the shoulders of the road. The trees are mostly oaks now, nothing exotic about that, but they are festooned with b.a.l.l.s of mistletoe. Near Shongaloo, I stop to take a picture of narcissi blooming along the roadside. The gra.s.s has the fresh, green sheen of spring. We are driving with the windows down-in January.

”That's nothing like home,” I say.

Hippocrates was wrong, I think: we expect difference when we travel. Crave it, in fact. Wayne and I are vaguely disappointed that the birds here are all the usual species that populate our woods-meadowlarks, cardinals, blue jays, kingfishers, yellow-shafted flickers, red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures.

”Similar landscapes breed similar flora and fauna,” Wayne shrugs. ”Similar people, too.”

Maybe it's true. When I think of Louisiana, I think of Steel Magnolias, by Robert Harling, whose home town was Natchitoches, about an hour south of Shreveport. The movie, with its complex cast of female characters, was shot in and around Natchitoches, but the original stage play took place entirely in Truvy's beauty shop. I grew up in small-town southwestern Ontario, not small-town northwestern Louisiana, but I knew those gossiping, fluffy, tough-as-steel-spikes women. I've been to those funerals where you can't stop laughing at the jokes that break your heart.