The train was an hour and a half late. I failed to hear any
complaints on that score from the few passengers who disembarked
with me at Cypress Junction at 6:30 a.m. and confronted an icy
blast that would better have stayed where it came from. But there
was Emile Sautier’s saloon just across the tracks, flaunting an
alluring sign that offered to hungry wayfarers ham and eggs, fried
chicken, oysters and delicious coffee at any hour.
Emile’s young wife was as fat and dirty as a little pig that
has slept over time in an untidy sty. Possibly she had slept under
the stove; the night must have been cold. She told us Emile had
come home “boozy” the night before from town. She told it before
his very face and he never said a word – only went ahead pouring
coal-oil on the fire that wouldn’t burn. She wore over her calico
dress a heavy cloth jacket with huge pearl buttons and enormous
puffed sleeves, and a tattered black-white “nubia” twined about her
head and shoulders as if she were contemplating a morning walk. It
is impossible for me to know what her intentions were. She stood in
the doorway with her little dirty, fat, ring-bedecked hands against
the frame, seeming to guard the approach to an adjacent apartment
in which there was a cooking stove, a bed and other articles of
domestic convenience.
“Yas, he come home boozy, Emile, he don’ care, him; dat’s
nuttin to him w’at happen’.”
In his indifference to fate, the youth had lost an eye, a
summer or two ago, and now he was saving no coal-oil for the
lamps.
We were clamoring for coffee. Any one of us was willing to
forego the fried chicken, that was huddled outside under a
slanting, icy board; or the oysters, that had never got off the
train; or the ham that was grunting beneath the house; or the eggs,
which were possibly out where the chicken was; but we did want
coffee.
Emile made us plenty of it, black as ink, since no one cared
for the condensed milk which he offered with the sugar.
We could hear the chattering of a cherub in the next room
where the bed and cook stove were. And when the piggish little
mother went in to dress it, what delicious prattle of 'Cadian
French! what gurgling and suppressed laughter! One of my companions
– there were three of us, two Natchitoches men and myself – one of
them related an extraordinary experience which the infant had
endured a month or two before. He had fallen into an old unused
cistern a great distance from the house. In falling through the
arms by some protecting limbs, and thus insecurely sustained he had
called and wailed for two hours before help came.
“Yas,” said his mother who had come back into the room, “’is
face was black like de stove w’en we fine ‘im. An’ de cistern was
all fill’ up wid lizard’ an’ snake’. It was one big snake all curl’
up on de udder en’ de branch, lookin’ at ‘im de whole time.” His
little swarthy, rosy moon-face beamed cheerfully at us from over
his mother’s shoulder, and his black eyes glittered like a
squirrel’s. I wondered how he had lived through those two hours of
suffering and terror. But the little children’s world is so unreal,
that no doubt it is often difficult for them to distinguish between
the life of the imagination and of reality.
The earth was covered with two inches of snow, as white, as
dazzling, as soft as northern snow and a hundred times more
beautiful. Snow upon and beneath the moss-draped branches of the
forests; snow along the bayou’s edges, powdering the low, pointed,
thick palmetto growths; white snow and the fields and fields of
white cotton bursting from dry bolls. The Natchitoches train sped
leisurely through the white, still country, and I longed for some
companion to sit beside me who would feel the marvelous and strange
beauty of the scene as I did. My neighbor was a gentlemen of too
practical a turn.
“Oh! the cotton and the snow!” I almost screamed as the first
vision of a white cotton field appeared.
“Yes, the lazy rascals; won’t pick a lock of it; cotton at 4
cts, what’s the use they say.”
“What’s the use,” I agreed. How cold and inky black the
negroes looked, standing in the white patches.
“Cotton’s in the fields all along here and down through the
bayou Natchez country.”
“Oh! it isn’t earthly – it’s Fairyland!”
“Don’t know what the planters are going to do, unless they
turn half the land into pasture and start raising cattle. What you
going to do with that Cane river plantation of yours?”
“God knows. I wonder if it looks like this. Do you think
they’ve picked the cotton – Do you think one could ever
forget-“
Well some kind soul should have warned us not to go into
Natchitoches town. The people were all stark mad. The snow had gone
to their heads.
“Keep them curtains shut tight,” said the driver of the
rumbling old hack. “They don’t know what they about; they jus’ as
lief pelt you to death as not.”
The horses plunged in their break neck speed; the driver swore
deep under his breath; pim! pam! the missles rained against the
protecting curtains; the shrieks and yells outside were demoniac,
blood curdling. – There was no court that day – the judges and
lawyers were rolling in the snow with the boys and girls. There was
no school that day; the professors at the Normal – those from the
North-states, were showing off and getting the worst of it. The
nuns up on the hill and their little charges were like march hares.
Barred doors were no protection if an unguarded window had been
forgotten. The sanctity of home and person was a myth to be
demolished with pelting, melting, showering, suffocating
snow.
But the next day the sun came out and the snow all went away,
except where bits of it lay here and there in protected roof
angles. The magnolia leaves gleamed and seemed to smile in the
sunshine. Hardy rose-vines clinging to old stuccoed pillars plumed
themselves and bristled their leaves with satisfaction. And the
violets peeped out to see if it was all over.
“Ah! this is a southern day,” I uttered with deep
gratification as I leisurely crossed the bridge afoot. A warm,
gentle breeze was stirring. On the opposite side, a dear old lady
was standing in her dear old doorway waiting for me.
