Grace Pitre sat up on the feather mattress, rubbed sleep from her eyes, and brushed back a flour-sack curtain. She peered out of a small, screened window that afforded a handsome view of a bend in the serpentine bayou below. A great blue heron, long legs trailing, rose squawking from the bayou's edge and flapped up through a gauzy mist.
She figured by the sun's slant through the trees that it wasn't any later than nine. It was Monday. The weekend had blissfully melded into the workweek, since the Pitres were taking a few extra days at the camp.
Justin was off on another early-morning redfishing jaunt, and Grace had only a faint recollection of the squeaking of the screen door as he'd slipped out into the muted dawn light. She'd fallen back into a deep, blissful sleep.
Rising from bed, stretching, Grace tossed on a pair of jeans (neglecting underwear), a tattered T-shirt that said lagniappe on the bayou, and a light green cardigan. She was medium tall and slender. She had piercing, limpid green eyes, a disarming smile, and mass of wavy golden hair, which she'd pulled back into a French braid. Even in simple camp garb, Grace Cheramie Pitre cut an extremely fetching figure.
She walked from the camp's tiny bedroom to its slightly roomier kitchen, grabbed a cheap aluminum pot from a propane stove, and stepped out into the day. On the broad cypress-planked porch, Grace surveyed the morning as she drew water for coffee from a weatherworn cypress cistern mounted on stilts at the porch's south end.
It was a perfect day: crisp, cool, bright as a ripe fall apple. She felt a sudden pang—it was likely Justin had gotten into the redfish. It was a day with redfish written all over it.
Damn!
After all, she was Ned Cheramie's daughter, actually one of six of them, and Ned was something of a legend among Chacahoula Parish redfishermen. When absolutely no one else was catching reds, Ned caught them. Ned fished with live bait but also invented his own top-water redfish lures, which worked with spectacular success. No one had thought to fly-fish for reds till Ned almost single-handedly proved they could be caught that way.
Ned had done his best to pass his knowledge on to his daughters, but only Grace, the second youngest, had been interested. Well, interested was a vast understatement. While her sisters and girlfriends went to cheerleading practice or primped for dates, Grace spent every Saturday morning possible (on Sunday the family went to mass) in her papa's skiff speeding down the bayou, usually with a pirogue in tow, en route to one of Ned's numerous secret redfish holes. Ned's fetish was fishing reds on the flats, where accurate sight-casting to the easily spooked fish required considerable skill, and where the fish, from strike to finish, fought in a fury of speedy, thrashing runs.
Grace had proved a bright pupil, occasionally outfishing Ned himself. She numbered a forty-pound bull red to her credit—five pounds bigger than Justin's biggest, and a source of (mostly) good-natured rivalry between them. (Ned had a fifty-pound monster mounted on his wall.) But Grace had also gotten something else from her father. Over time, she'd become a gifted amateur naturalist. She knew fish, fowl, and flora and could name a dozen types of marsh grass. She knew, by common and scientific names, all manner of trees, wild shrubs, birds, even aquatic plants. Redfishing, she now understood, was the passion that had brought her to these interests.
Redfishing had brought her Justin Pitre as well. They'd met five summers earlier on an overnight fishing trip with mutual friends to Isle Dernier—Last Island in English. It was one of a dozen small barrier islands that formed a sandy necklace between Chacahoula Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It was an astonishing fishery, attracting huge runs of spawning bull redfish in the late summer.
Grace had shown up in serious fisherman mode and was chagrined to find that the couple she was fishing with, Marie-Anne Gautier, a friend since childhood, and her husband, Dale Lockett, an affable expatriated Texan working the Oil Patch, had invited an unattached man to join the company. Grace was twenty-four at the time and without a serious suitor. Though she never lacked for male companionship if she wanted it, Grace was both fiercely independent and fun-loving; she'd simply decided she was too young to settle down.
When Marie-Anne revealed the interloper would be Justin Pitre, a close pal of Dale's and a fisherman perhaps as serious as Grace, Grace was unimpressed. She knew him; they'd gone to Chacahoula Parish High School together, but he was three years her senior and they ran in different circles. She vaguely remembered Justin as something of a cutup, and maybe cocky as well, and anyway, she was here to fish, not fend off a man.
Yet, within an hour of Justin's arrival on an unbearably muggy August day, an absolutely unbelievable thing had happened: she'd fallen madly in love—as had Justin, though, being the determinedly independent people that they were, it would take another couple of weeks for their heads to surrender to what their hearts well knew. They spent the first half of the night sitting on the beach, fanning away mosquitoes, trading redfishing tips and swamp lore and discussing the worrisome erosion of the low country they both so loved. When Justin described Papa Jack's legacy and invited Grace— as if he had known her forever—to come and spend some time at the camp, her reply was “When do we leave?”
They spent the other half of the night making joyful love in Grace's tiny pup tent, heat and mosquitoes be damned. They caught nary a red, and for the first time—ever—neither of them cared. They were married, at the camp, exactly three months later, a development that roundly astonished everyone who knew them.
And on their wedding night, Justin read aloud Papa Jack's letter bequeathing him the camp and told Grace the story of how his twenty-year-old grandfather, making a rare visit to the town of Black Bayou to sell muskrat pelts, spied the seventeen-year-old Myrsa Daigle walking down the wooden banquet in Black Bayou. It didn't matter that she was the educated daughter of a well-to-do town doctor and he was the barely literate son of an illiterate muskrat trapper living in a shack with his extended family on a faraway chenier. Jack stopped, introduced himself, took her hand, and begged Myrsa to allow him to come calling. Not two months later, when both families saw a fire that neither could put out, they were married and spent sixty-seven years together before Myrsa passed away; Jack followed her three years later.
Before meeting Justin, Grace would have dismissed this as one of those charming but exaggerated tales that ramble around in certain kinds of families. But now she absolutely believed it. Both Mere Myrsa and Papa Jack had passed away before Grace met Justin, but the story gave her a strange kinship with two people to whom Justin was still almost mystically attached.
On this pristine fall morning, Grace, walking back to the camp's screened door carrying her pot of cistern water, could remember the wedding as if it had been yesterday. She couldn't believe how quickly five years had slipped by. Family and friends had marveled (and a few had worried) about their breathless courtship. But Grace never had a doubt. As she was prone to say in moments of girl talk, “Some people have love. Some people have love and sex. We have love, sex, and redfishin’. Oh, and the camp. What else do you need?”
Right now, Grace needed a cup of coffee. She reentered the camp, brewing up a pot the way her momma, and her momma's momma, did, ladling boiling water a tablespoon at a time over the dark-roast grind. She poured the steaming coffee into a large white mug, decorated with a blue crab, claws cocked, stirred in two heaping spoonfuls of sugar, and walked back out onto the front porch. She sat, feet propped up on a weathered crab trap, in a creaky rocking chair that had belonged to Papa Jack himself. From here she could command a high and wide scenic view of the day, and of the bend in the bayou where Justin would appear when he returned from fishing.
Grace replayed in her mind the sensual wrestling match of a morning ago. Over their five years of marriage, she had marveled at their seemingly undiminishable sex life—surely, we can't carry on like horny teenagers forever. Their unabashed spontaneity and unselfconsciousness was the spice; their blissful weekends alone at Crawfish Mountain provided the spice enhancer.
All this had a particular poignancy now. They were trying to conceive their first child, and they both wanted that to happen here at camp. In fact, they were planning on three children and wanted them all to be conceived at the camp.
Grace, a romantic, loved this idea. And Justin hoped his children would be as rooted in this place as he was. He'd practically grown up at the camp and its marshy surrounds. From the time he was old enough to grip a fishing pole, he'd spent a goodly number of weekends and summers in his grandfather's company and tutelage at Crawfish Mountain. He'd celebrated numerous birthdays here, including his eighteenth and twenty-first. Squads of rambunctious boys (and now and then a girl or two) joined these parties. They bunked in tents or in sleeping bags on the porch, and fished and roamed the marshes and bayous under the indulgent supervision of Papa Jack. For Justin, the pull of the camp wasn't simply its spectacular prospect in the South Louisiana fishing grounds, or its wild, rustic beauty. Many of his fondest childhood memories lay here, woven deeply into the fabric of the place.
There was a spectacularly sad memory as well: Papa Jack had passed away here, in his favorite rocking chair on the front porch, a week short of his ninetieth birthday, a man diminished by a series of strokes that had left him confined to a wheelchair. Justin was twenty-five at the time; he'd been the one to find the old man. He'd been the one, in fact, who'd brought him out here in the boat for what turned out to be his last visit, pushing him up the camp's wooden washboard ramp in a wheelbarrow. This visit was against the advice of doctors and the plaintive if muted protests of Justin's own parents.
Justin's youthful optimism had betrayed him. In his mind, Papa Jack was still the swamp lion he'd always been, stronger than anyone else would give him credit for. Justin had never considered that the old man had come to the camp to die, and he'd found himself shocked at first, and then surprisingly inconsolable for years, wondering, among other things, whether he'd hastened his grandfather's demise.
Justin never shed a tear, even at Papa Jack's funeral mass, thinking the old man wouldn't want him to cry. Instead, his grief tugged him away from his gregarious nature into a cocoon of chronic, low-grade sadness. It had been the entry of Grace into his life that had finally brought him out of it. And it had been Grace who had finally convinced Justin that what he'd really done was heroically honor Papa Jack's last wishes.
Grace idled through her first cup of coffee, immersing herself in the elegant beauty of the day, then rose and returned to the kitchen for a second cup. Back on the porch, she settled into Papa Jack's rocking chair and glanced down the bayou. She spied the distant silhouette of Justin and his pirogue rounding the bend into Surprise Bay, the sprawling, marsh-rimmed lagoon that lapped up against the camp's southern dock. He was still far off, but she could tell that the pirogue was moving slower than his normally brisk paddling pace.
Grace already knew the explanation: he was no doubt towing a bunch of nice-sized reds. Damn, I should've gone!
She took another sip of coffee and then began the trek down the camp's winding ramp to the dock.
“Justin Jack Pitre, you dirty dog!” Grace said as he pulled up to the dock. “Two? Three? Damn, those are nice!”
“Three,” said Justin. “And yeah, they're some good ones. And tough— man, those suckers were juiced this mornin’. They pulled like hell on light tackle. And guess what, baby? The really big one busted up my tackle and got away. Spooled me in ten seconds—a hundred yards of eight-pound test.” Justin held up the rod with its now-lineless spinning reel.
“Damn!” said Grace.
“Aw, well,” Justin replied. “It's just as well. I couldn't stand to break my pretty wife's heart on a beautiful day like today by catching that forty-onepounder and breaking your record.”
Grace was suddenly wide awake. “Hey, cher. You wanna go back?”
Justin laughed. “Now? Well, I was hopin’ maybe to get some breakfast and coffee first. But I figured you'd give me hell for not makin’ you get out of bed.”
Grace reached down and helped Justin out of the pirogue. They walked arm in arm up the wooden ramp to the porch.
Over a breakfast of boudin, fried eggs, shrimp and grits, and toast, Justin reminded Grace that their stay at the camp was winding down—Grace had plans.
“You know, we don't have to leave,” said Justin. “You could skip that shrimp co-op meeting. I'm guessing there'll be plenty of people down at Bayou Go-to-Hell to show the flag. They probably don't need you.”
“Us, Justin,” Grace replied. “You're coming with me, remember? We can't miss that meeting. Daddy's counting on us to be there. He's really riled up about that shipping-channel mess. He's got a lot of shrimper friends down there, and he thinks it's important for the sports fishermen to show some support.”
Justin nodded. “Yeah, well, I'm just glad that project lies twenty miles to the east of us. Anybody who's got freshwater marsh along that route is doomed. There'll be a slow flood of salt water all over that country, and it ain't gonna be pretty. But I just don't think you can fight progress.”
“Justin, as I've said many times, it's not progress. It's a disaster. And it is our fight because at the end of the day it's all one system. If they kill off the marshes twenty miles from us, our place becomes more vulnerable. And, c'mon—if they were threatening to dig that channel through our property, you'd be up in arms.”
Justin smiled sheepishly. “Damn straight I would. But I dunno, Grace, I just don't have the political fight in me. So, yeah, sure, I'll go with you. I just don't think it will do any good.”
“Okay, Justin, let me ask you this. What would Papa Jack do?”
Justin didn't have to think very long. “Raise hell,” he said. “Raise a lotta hell.”