“Justin Jack Pitre, come back here.”
Justin Pitre, a lanky man dressed in faded Levi's, a rust-and-gold checked flannel shirt, and white rubber knee boots of the kind favored by Cajun shrimpers, stood poised at the doorway. He held an ultralight fishing rod in his right hand, a grease-stained ball cap in his left. The sun would soon make its way into the imposing cypresses that stood northwestward of his cabin. Justin, like his grandfather before him, whom he greatly resembled, liked to be on the water at first light.
He turned to the voice, trying to be forceful. “Aw, babe. I gotta go. They're out there. They're waitin’ for me.”
His wife, Adeline Grace Cheramie, replied with equal determination. Like many modern Cajuns, Grace could speak English without the signature accent of her parents’ generation, but she could use the accent, and certain Cajun idioms, when it suited her. It was a playful affectation that Justin knew all too well.
“Justin, cher, I'm not axin’ for an hour. Just a few minutes.”
Justin declined to quit the doorway. “Grace, stop it,” he said. “Why don't you just come with me? Get your beautiful ass outta bed. You gonna be sorry when I come back with a boat full of big redfish.”
The reply, sweetly plaintive, came from the dark. “Justin, you gonna be sorry if you don't come here for just a second. I got somethin’ I wanna show you, cher. Vien ici, mon cher tit’ choux.”
Justin tried to suppress a grin, but failed miserably. He did manage some exasperation in his voice: “What, Grace? What?”
Grace reached toward a nightstand and pulled the chain of a small bedside lamp. She slowly drew back a patchwork quilt and shrugged out of an oversized T-shirt.
Then she did something exceptionally cruel. In barely a whisper, she said, “Monkey love, Justin.”
“Grace!” Justin replied. “C'mon, baby, don't say that. You know I cain't fight monkey love.”
Grace whispered back. “Monkey love, Justin. Right here and right now.”
Justin tried to muster every ounce of self-control, struggled to keep his distance. But he knew he had already been defeated.
“Adeline Grace,” he said in mock exasperation. “Does your momma know you do things like this to torment your husband?”
Grace laughed her easy laugh. “Torment my husband? Justin, a lotta husbands would give three bass boats to be tormented the way I'm about to torment you. And, baby, it's six in the mornin’. It ain't daylight till at least seven. We got plenty of time to have some monkey love and still get you to the redfish hole. I promise I won't keep you any longer than I have to. Anyway, you have work to do—unless you've already forgotten.”
Justin practically pleaded. “No, I haven't forgotten. But Grace, you know how I feel about bein’ out there by first light. That's when them really big reds are stirrin’. It's when—”
Grace was suddenly out of bed and snuggling into her husband's embrace. “I know it's killin’ you that I've caught a bigger redfish than you,” she whispered, biting on his ear, “but there ain't no redfish in the bayou gonna give you the thrill that I've got in mind. None, baby.”
She paused, then whispered again, “Anyway, you're supposed to be trying to knock me up, remember? Maybe today's the day.”
Justin looked into his wife's kind, mischievous eyes. He smiled at her, shook his head, and took her back into his arms. “You are just too much, Adeline Grace. Okay, a quickie. Awright? Just a quickie and then—”
A wet kiss on the mouth, and an exploring hand, quieted him.
“Why Justin,” Grace said playfully, “I believe you do love your wife.”
Sometime later, in the lemon light of the new morning, Justin Jack Pitre stood on a low bank of oyster shells, one hand on his fishing rod, eyes scanning the water. A handsome saltwater marsh fanned out behind him, an endless river of grass. The bayou stretched before him, a smooth, black ribbon just rendered from the night sky. In a far meander, where the bayou broadened slightly, the first hints of sun were painting the marsh grasses. The air was still but fresh—early October had finally brought cool weather and an end to a sweltering South Louisiana summer that seemed as if it had begun in May.
It was a fisherman's morning: a cool front moving in overnight; the tide just beginning to ebb—a redfish tide, Justin called it. The water lay as still as the sky, save for a gentle eddy at the mouth of the slough where he had come to fish.
“C'mon, redfish,” he said under his breath. “Show yourself.”
A few minutes into the stillness, Justin got the sign he was hoping for. The telltale wake of a fish sped toward the opposite bank, sending a school of foraging minnows into a frantic collective scramble. Suddenly, a second fish noisily took breakfast at the surface in a coppery leap.
Justin was a modern, even experimental fisherman; he mostly used ultralight tackle and artificial baits. But on morning excursions, he paid homage to his grandfather, fishing with the old man's favorite, a minnow locals called the cocahoe.
He reached down to a bucket at his feet, plucked out a squirming minnow, and drove a hook through its upper lip. He flipped the bail of his spinning reel and made a long, looping cast. Minnow and sinker plunked down into the ebbing ripples of the fish's commotion.
Justin felt the minnow bump bottom, then: thwuck!
The redfish slammed the bait with such ferocity that Justin was lucky to hold on to the rod. The reel shrieked as it surrendered line; Justin's yell was just as loud. “Run, you big mother! Run!”
The red obliged, stripping off fifty yards of eight-pound test by the time it slowed and made its first wide turn. Justin reeled in line furiously, keeping his rod tip up and moving quickly along the shell bank toward the fish. The exposed reef ended only twenty yards up-bayou—beyond that a man would bog down thigh-deep in marsh—but it gave Justin a chance to gain line and brace for the red's second run.
Nearing the bank, not fifteen yards downstream, the red suddenly dove deep and seemed to stop moving. Justin pumped the rod, reeling hard, hoping to move the fish away from the bottom. An oyster reef lay below, he knew, and a big red, bumping over the reef, could easily cut the line on an oyster shell.
Justin's prodding did the trick. The red boiled up off the reef like a torpedo. Justin's reel shrieked again, this time louder and longer. “Drag me off the bank, big momma!” he whooped.
He almost regretted saying it. By the time the fish slowed and began another turn, Justin didn't have more than ten yards of line left on the reel.
“Aw, man, what a fish!” he said, herding the red slowly back toward him with firm, steady pressure.
Two hours later, three reds, coppery in the crystal light, lay beached on the shell bank. He'd caught and released six others. He did a rough calculation. The smallest keeper was about seven pounds; the largest maybe twelve. They were perfect sizes for making a courtbouillon, that spicy tomato-based stew that Cajuns so prized, or filleting and throwing on a charcoal grill. Not a bad morning's catch.
He walked to his pirogue beached nearby, fetched a sturdy rope, and strung the reds through the gills. He dragged the fish to the small boat and nudged them into the water. He tied the rope to the rear of the pirogue, deftly stepped in, and, with the reds in tow, paddled off with some effort toward the camp at Crawfish Mountain.
A half-dozen slow bends in the bayou later, Justin caught the first glimpse of his camp in the distance. A tidy, weathered cypress cottage, ringed by dwarf oaks, stood jauntily at the pinnacle of an ancient marsh island—an island known in these parts as a chenier. In this implacably flat wetland prairie that sprawled all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, cheniers provided the only high ground around, some of them forming alluvial mounds well above the floodplain. On the day that Justin's wry grandfather had discovered this chenier, it was the island's elevation—and the random appearance of an itinerant crawfish in a puddle at the chenier's crest—that had prompted him to give the place its unusual name: Crawfish Mountain.
Justin quit paddling and let the boat drift to a stop. This was a ritual, a pause of thanks learned from his grandfather and now repeated in memory of his grandfather. That these scenic, watery surrounds belonged to him still astonished Justin.
He surveyed the blue skies and the mist on the water, the bearded cypresses in the far distance and the mossy, salt-tolerant hackberries on the bank nearby. He marveled at the sun as it stabbed through fog to illuminate dense stands of palmetto. He closed his eyes to drink in the delicious, wild silence.
Justin loved fishing; he loved beer; he loved, on most days, the work that he did with his hands as a diesel mechanic. He loved his parents and his numerous friends. But he loved most fiercely of all two things—loved them in a way that sometimes scared him for the ferocious passions they stirred.
One was this land with its marshy expanses, its serpentine sloughs, its meandering and mystery-tinged hardwood swamps, a place both handsome and unusual for its prospect, wedged in the wildlife- and fish-rich mixing zone between the salt- and freshwater estuaries of one of the great wetlands of the world, a place where a person could catch redfish in the brackish bayous in the morning and black bass in tea-dark waters of a cypress cove in the afternoon.
The other thing Justin loved fiercely was his wife/best friend/fishing partner (and sometimes fishing rival), Adeline Grace Cheramie.
Two thoughts, both pleasurable, stirred in him: one, flash-forwarding to the evening, was contemplating a steaming, spicy pot of redfish courtbouillon casting aromas from the kitchen table; the other, more immediate, was trying to guess whether Grace would be up and awaiting his return, cup of coffee in hand, on the camp's front porch, or still snuggled (warm, naked, and dreamy) beneath the covers of their bed.