The Bayou Code

Act I

The motorcycle mail carrier came at dusk, riding through the cypress trees with the kind of slow precision that suggested he knew exactly what he was carrying and was sorry about it. Cathy Durand opened the door and took the envelope from his gloved hand. The paper was thick, cream-coloured, expensive. The handwriting inside was hers, or close enough to hers that it made her stomach turn.

C.L. is well. Do not look.

Catherine Durand was twenty-two, a literature student at Tulane who spent her free time reading Poe and drinking black coffee in French Quarter cafés. She recognised her mother Celestine's handwriting immediately, even in the shortened form, even written in pencil at an angle that Celestine would never normally write. Celestine wrote with precision, every letter formed like a small act of defiance against the chaos of the world.

Cathy called the St. Anne's Catholic Hospital in the bayou. They confirmed that no Celestine Durand had been admitted. She called the motorcycle carrier's boss, a man named Baptiste who had delivered mail through this parish for forty years. Baptiste told her the note came from a woman who signed herself C.L. and paid in cash. Cash only, Baptiste said. No checks. No phone numbers. Just cash and a note.

Act II

Cathy spent three days reading the newspaper. The Times-Picayune society pages, the obituary columns, the church announcements. She visited St. Anne's, where Sister Marguerite, a nun with hands like roots and eyes like water, gave her a cardboard box containing Celestine's belongings: old photographs, a rosary, a small brass candlestick, and a letter Cathy had never received.

The letter was three pages long, written in a hand that was Celestine's but also not Celestine's, as if written by someone who had learned to write like her mother but never quite got it right. Cathy read it by candlelight in her bedroom, the windows open to the sound of cicadas screaming in the heat. The letter spoke of a life Cathy had never known, of a church that was more than a church, of a community that held its secrets the way the bayou holds its fish, deep and dark and full of things that bite.

Cathy found Julian's medical records at the parish hospital. He had been committed to a state facility in 1949 for paranoid psychosis and violence. The discharge summary said he had been violent toward his wife and daughter. The doctor who wrote the summary added, in a postscript that was clearly an afterthought: The daughter appears unharmed. I pray it lasts.

Cathy's entire life had been built on a lie. Her father had not died of a heart attack when she was five, as she had been told at school, at church, at every funeral that everyone else had attended but she had not, because no one had thought to invite a five-year-old to a funeral. Her mother had not raised her alone in a small cottage on the edge of the bayou. Her mother had protected her from something her father represented, and she had done it by erasing him, by constructing an entire life around the absence of a man who was, according to every official record, already dead.

Act III

Cathy rode her bicycle through the bayou to the plantation house. The road was overgrown, the cypress trees arching over the path like cathedral vaulters, their knees rising from the water like the knuckles of drowned hands. The house was dark, the windows painted shut, the porch sagging under the weight of a hundred years of Louisiana humidity.

She found Celestine in the crawlspace beneath the house, hidden behind a trapdoor that opened into a space barely tall enough to stand in. Celestine was thin, her face grey in the dim light, but her eyes were sharp.

Cathy, Celestine said. In Louisiana French. The word for daughter, but the word for something else too, something older and harder, something that meant both blood and choice.

Julian returned at dusk. He saw Cathy. He saw his wife. The confrontation was slow, terrible, and soaked in Louisiana humidity. Julian tried to drag them both back inside. Celestine grabbed a broken mirror shard from the floor. She plunged it into Julian's neck. He fell into the bayou water.

The floodwaters rose. The house groaned. Julian's body was swept away by the current. Cathy and Celestine waded through chest-deep water to safety, the mud sucking at their feet, the water warm and thick.

Act IV

They were in Sister Marguerite's cottage when the flood receded. Celestine's arm was bandaged with sheets torn into strips. Cathy counted her mother's breaths. Neither spoke. Outside, the bayou had returned to stillness. Cicadas resumed their song. The cypress knees rose from the water like the knuckles of drowned hands.

A man in a pinstripe suit arrived at the cottage door at dawn. He held an envelope with Julian's seal. Your husband sends his regards, Madame, he said to Celestine. He is very much alive.

Cathy looked at her mother. Celestine looked at the man. The bayou breathed around them. Somewhere, an alligator slipped silently through the water. Cathy felt something shift inside her, a recognition of the world as it truly was: beautiful, cruel, and full of people who loved each other in ways that destroyed them.

Cathy went back to New Orleans. She wrote her thesis on Southern Gothic literature, a subject her professor called ambitious and her mother would have called necessary. She never returned to the plantation house. But every Sunday morning, she called Sister Marguerite, and every Sunday evening, she sat on the balcony of her apartment and watched the French Quarter wake up, and she wondered whether her mother was still out there, somewhere in the bayou, listening to the cicadas and waiting for the next flood.

Author Note & Copyright: