Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana

by George Washington Cable

Besides, she had the good conscience of having fled from Mr. Tarbox—put U. and I. apart, as it were—and yet without being so hid but a suitor’s proper persistency could find her. Just now he was far away prosecuting the commercial interests of Claude’s one or two inventions; but he was having great success; he wrote once or twice—but got no reply—and hoped to be back within a month.

When Marguerite, after her mother’s receipt of each of these letters, thought she saw a cloud on her brow, Zoséphine explained, with a revival of that old look of sweet self-command which the daughter so loved to see, that they contained matters of business not at all to be called troubles. But the little mother did not show the letters. She could not; Marguerite did not even know their writer had changed his business. As to Claude, his name was never mentioned. Each supposed the other was ignorant that he was in the city, and because he was never mentioned each one knew the other was thinking of him.

Ah, Claude! what are you thinking of? Has not your new partner in business told you they are here? No, not a word of it. “That’ll keep till I get back,” Mr. Tarbox had said to himself; and such shrewdness was probably not so ungenerous, after all. “If you want a thing done well, do it yourself,” he said one evening to a man who could not make out what he was driving at; and later Mr. Tarbox added to himself, “The man that flies the kite must hold the thread.” And so he kept his counsel.

But that does not explain. For we remember that Claude already knew that Marguerite was in the city, at least had her own mother’s word for it. Here, weeks had passed. New Orleans is not so large; its active centre is very small. Even by accident, on the street, Canal Street especially, he should have seen her time and again.

And he did not; at any rate not to know it. She really kept very busy indoors; and in other doors so did he. More than that, there was his father. When the two first came to the city St. Pierre endured the town for a week. But it was martyrdom, doing it. Claude saw this. Mr. Tarbox was with him the latter part of the week. He saw it. He gave his suggestive mind to it for one night. The next day St. Pierre and he wandered off in street-cars and on foot, and by the time the sun went down again a new provision had been made. At about ninety minutes’ jaunt from the city’s centre, up the river, and on its farther shore, near where the old “Company Canal” runs from a lock in the river bank, back through the swamps and into the Baratarian lakes, St. Pierre had bought with his lifetime savings a neat house and fair-sized orangery. No fields? None:

“You see, bom-bye [by-and-by] Claude git doze new mash-in’ all right, he go to ingineerin’ agin, and him and you [Tarbox] be takin’ some cawntrac’ for buil’ levee or break up old steamboat, or raise somet’in’ what been sunk, or somet’in’ dat way. And den he certain’ want somboddie to boss gang o’ fellows. And den he say, ‘Papa, I want you.’ And den I say how I got fifty arpent’ [42 acres] rice in field. And den he say, ‘How I goin’ do widout you?’ And den dare be fifty arpent’ rice gone!” No, no fields.

Better: here with the vast wet forest at his back; the river at his feet; the canal, the key to all Barataria, Lafourche, and Terrebonne, full of Acadian fishermen, hunters, timber-cutters, moss-gatherers, and the like; the great city in sight from yonder neighbor’s balustraded house-top; and Claude there to rally to his side or he to Claude’s at a moment’s warning; he would be an operator—think of that!—not of the telegraph; an operator in the wild products of the swamp, the prairies tremblantes, the lakes, and in the small harvests of the pointes and bayou margins: moss, saw-logs, venison, wild-duck, fish, crabs, shrimp, melons, garlic, oranges, Périque tobacco. “Knowledge is power;” he knew wood, water, and sky by heart, spoke two languages, could read and write, and understood the ways and tastes of two or three odd sorts of lowly human kind. Self-command is dominion; I do not say the bottle went never to his lips, but it never was lifted high. And now to the blessed maxim gotten from Bonaventure he added one given him by Tarbox: “In h-union ees strank!” Not mere union of hands alone; but of counsels! There were Claude and Tarbox and he!

For instance; at Mr. Tarbox’s suggestion Claude brought to his father from the city every evening, now the “Picayune” and now the “Times-Democrat.” From European and national news he modestly turned aside. Whether he read the book-notices I do not know; I hope not. But when he had served supper—he was a capital camp cook—and he and Claude had eaten, and their pipes were lighted, you should have seen him scanning the latest quotations and debating the fluctuations of the moss market, the shrimp market, and the garlic market.

Thus Claude was rarely in the city save in the busy hours of the day. Much oftener than otherwise, he saw the crimson sunsets, and the cool purple sunrises as he and St. Pierre pulled in the father’s skiff diagonally to or fro across the Mississippi, between their cottage and the sleepy outposts of city street-cars, just under the levee at the edge of that green oak-dotted plain where a certain man, as gentle, shy, and unworldly as our engineer friend thought Claude to be, was raising the vast buildings of the next year’s Universal Exposition.

But all this explains only why Claude did not, to his knowledge, see Marguerite by accident. Yet by intention! Why not by intention? First, there was his fear of sinning against his father’s love. That alone might have failed to hold him back; but, second, there was his helplessness. Love made Tarbox, if any thing were needed to make him, brave; it made Claude a coward. And third, there was that helpless terror of society in general, of which we have heard his friend talk. I have seen a strong horse sink trembling to the earth at the beating of an empty drum. Claude looked with amazed despair at a man’s ability to overtake a pretty girl acquaintance in Canal Street, and walk and talk with her. He often asked himself how he had ever been a moment at his ease those November evenings in the tavern’s back-parlor at Vermilionville. It was because he had a task there; sociality was not the business of the hour.