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And I trembled.

And I was afraid.

And I had every reason to be.

15

Gone but Not

Forgotten

.

Time dripped by like molasses. Sometimes the

sun looked like a wafer pasted on the sky, barely moving toward the horizon. Everything began to irritate me: the days without the slightest breeze, the overcast nights shutting away the stars and the moon, mosquitoes and dragonflies circling madly over the water or the tall grass, the screech of a night owl. Things that I had barely noticed before or even enjoyed were suddenly oppressive.

Mama was right about my swelling up faster than I had during my previous pregnancy. I saw the bloatedness in my face and felt it in my legs. I tried to eat less and Mama bawled me out for that.

"It's not food that's doing this to you, Gabriel. You can't diet like some lady worried about fashions. You need to keep up your strength," she warned.

But it wasn't just worry about my plumpness that stopped me from eating the way I should. These days I had little interest in anything that had interested me before, and that included food as well. Mama did her best. She made all my favorite things. Most of the time I ate more than I wanted to eat just to please her. She knew it and shook her head sadly as I moved mechanically at the table and around the shack.

I couldn't shake off this shawl of depression, no matter how I tried. With the feud between Mama and Daddy growing worse and worse every passing day, and with every day passing without my hearing a word from Pierre, the world turned gray, the flowers dull. Even when the stars were out, they lost their twinkle and resembled nothing more than flat white dots staining a shroud of sable. All the songs of birds became dirges. The swamps never looked as gloomy, the Spanish moss draped like curtains closing off the light. My precious canal world had turned into a maze of loneliness and melancholy.

I spent my days working beside Mama and listening to her stories about people she treated for this or for that. She rattled on and on, trying to fill the deep silences that fell between us. To cheer me up she would talk about things we would do in the future. She even began to describe how we would change the shack to accommodate the baby.

I attempted a little bit of reading every night, but my eyes would drift off the page and I would sit there for long intervals before realizing I was staring at nothing, my mind blank. It frightened me to see how I was dying in small ways. Mama had often told me about people she had known who had pined away when a close loved one had passed on. She said their absence created too great a hole in the hearts of the mourners, and eventually those hearts just stopped beating. I wondered if that would happen to me.

Occasionally either Mama or I would find something Daddy left for us on the front gallery. He was trapping and harvesting oysters for a living. We learned he had taken his things and gone to live in his daddy's old swamp shack. Usually he left some canned goods, sometimes some pralines. Mama didn't want to take them, and often left them there. I would bring them in before the bugs or field mice could get to them and I would put them away, but Mama would pretend she had never seen them or didn't know from whom they had come. She wouldn't discuss them either, or anything that had to do with Daddy for that matter. The moment I would mention his name, she would draw up her shoulders and sew her lips closed.

If she said anything about him, it was along the lines of "He's where he belongs, finally."

I couldn't help feeling sorry for him, no matter what he had done. One day when I was just strolling mindlessly along the canal, he came along in his pirogue. I heard him call me and then he poled to shore to show me the muskrats he had trapped, forgetting that I hated to see any of my precious swamp creatures caught and killed. As usual, there was the stink of whiskey on his breath.

"How's that woman you call Mama?" he asked, anticipating no hope of reconciliation.

"The same," I said.

"I just did what I thought was right and best," he claimed. "And I ain't ever going to apologize for it."

"I'm sorry, Daddy," I said.

"Yeah. Me too. Sorry about a lot of things," he muttered. "I'll come by later this week and leave something. She takes what I leave at least, don't she?"

"Not willingly, Daddy," I revealed.

He grunted. "Just the same, I'll come by," he added. As he poled away from the shore, he turned to me and said, "Those rich people ain't giving up on you, Gabriel. You don't close your ears and eyes like your mother, hear?"

I looked after him, surprised. What did he mean? What else would be said? Was Pierre included in his reference to those rich people?

Before I could ask, Daddy was pushing hard and moving away quickly, his long arms extended, the muscles in his shoulders and neck lifting and stretching with his effort. I watched him disappear around a bend. My heart hadn't thumped this way for a while. I thought about what he had said; in fact, I couldn't get it out of my mind, but it wasn't until nearly a week later that I heard any more about it, and how I heard was as surprising as what I heard.

It happened one night after dinner. Mama wanted me to accompany her to visit the Baldwins. Maddie Baldwin was pregnant with her fifth child, but she had been having complications, which included the most intense back pains she ever had. Her ankles were swollen something terrible too. Mama was afraid I was heading in the same direction.

But if there was anything I wanted to avoid these days, it was seeing another pregnant woman, especially one who was having problems. I told Mama I would rather stay home. She promised to return as soon as she could.

I sat on the gallery in her rocker after she left. I was just rocking gently, listening to the monotonous song of the cicadas and peepers, when suddenly a sleek, long white limousine appeared. It was so quiet and so unexpected, it looked as if it had popped magically out of the darkness. It came to a stop in front of our shack and the driver stepped out. He looked my way, spoke to someone in the rear, and then started toward me. I stopped rocking and waited, holding my breath.