The Book of Lost Friends(26)

Curiosity nibbles as I slog off across the backyard toward the overgrown hedges of oleander and honeysuckle that separate the house property from a small orchard and garden patch, and then the surrounding farm fields.

My shoes are wet inside and encased in five pounds of mud by the time I find a rise of ground that snakes along an irrigation canal. The farm levee lane, I’m guessing. The ghost of a wagon trail traces the top of it, but mostly it’s hidden beneath grass and autumn wildflowers.

A shaft of sunlight pushes its way through the haze overhead, as if to encourage me to follow. Live oaks shimmer in the golden glow, dripping diamond-like liquid from waxy leaves. Their gnarled branches clutch closer together, moss curtains swaying aimlessly beneath. In thick shadow, the road seems eerie, otherworldly, a passageway to another realm, like Narnia’s wardrobe or Alice’s rabbit hole.

I stand and peer down its length, my heart suspended in my chest. I wonder at the conversations this place has heard, the people and animals who have passed along this rise of ground. Who rode in the wagons that hollowed out the ruts? Where were those people going? What did they talk about?

Were there battles here? Did soldiers fire shots across this thoroughfare? Do bullets hide still, encased deep in the fiber and bark of these ancient trees? I know the cursory details of the Civil War, but almost nothing about Louisiana’s history. Now that seems like a deficit. I want to understand this reedy, marshy corner of the world that scratches its existence equally from land, and river, and swamp, and sea. My home for the next five years if I can figure out how to survive here.

I need more pieces to the puzzle, but no one is going to hand them to me. I have to find them. Dig them from their hiding places, from the ground and the people.

Listen, the road seems to admonish. Listen. I have stories.

I close my eyes, and I hear voices. Thousands whispering all at once. I can’t make out any single one, but I know they’re here. What do they have to say?

Opening my eyes, I push my hands into the pockets of my purple raincoat and start walking. The air is quiet, but my mind is noisy. My heart speeds up as I form plans. I need tools to understand this place, to make inroads here. Ding Dongs are tools. Books are tools. But the stories that aren’t in books, the ones no one has written down, like the one Granny T shared with me, like Aunt Sarge telling about farmers pulling wagons to market with mules: Those are tools, too.

Sad thing when stories die for the lack of listenin’ ears. Granny T is right.

There must be other people around here with stories no one’s listening to. Real stories that might teach the same lessons I was hoping to bring out in literature. What if I could make them part of my curriculum, somehow? Maybe they could help me understand this place and my students. Maybe they could help my students understand each other.

I’m so busy walking and thinking, scheming and planning and crafting positive visualizations of how to make next week different from last week, that when I come out of my imaginary world into the real one again, the tree tunnel around the road is gone and I’m walking past an enormous farm field. I have no idea how far I’ve hiked. My mind hasn’t registered a thing.

On either side of the raised lane, neatly planted rows of what looks like spiky grass stand half submerged in water. The sunshine is gone, and the vibrant green seems startlingly bright against the cloudy day—as if I’m looking at it on a TV set and a two-year-old has been playing with the color knob.

I realize now what has stopped me in my tracks and awakened me. Two things, rather. One, I’ve apparently walked right past the judge’s place without noticing, because if I continue beyond this field, I’ll be in the fringes of town. Two, I can’t continue on at the moment. A log is blocking the trail ahead…only it’s not a log. It’s an alligator. Not a huge alligator, but big enough that it’s just sitting there, rather fearlessly sizing me up.

I fasten my gaze upon it, awed and horrified. It’s the largest predator I’ve ever seen outside a TV screen.

“I move him for ya!” It’s then that I notice, in the periphery, the little boy with the bicycle. His dirty shirt bears the evidence of the chicken leg spirited away from the Cluck and Oink earlier.

“No. No-no-no!” But my words have zero effect. The kid makes a run at the gator, pushing his bike like a ramrod.

“Stop! Get back!” I rush forward, with no idea what I plan to do.

Fortunately, the alligator is off-put by the brouhaha. It slinks down the side of the lane into the watery field below.

“You shouldn’t do that!” I gasp. “Those are dangerous.”

The kid blinks, murky light accentuating bewildered wrinkles in his forehead. Wide brown eyes regard me from beneath the impossibly thick lashes I noticed the first day I saw him sitting alone in the empty schoolyard.

“Him’s not a very big’un,” he says of the alligator.

My heart squeezes. His voice and the slight speech difficulty make him seem even younger than he probably is. Regardless, I don’t think a five-or-six-year-old should be wandering all over town like this. Crossing streets and chasing alligators. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”

His bony shoulders rise, then fall under the lopsided straps of a faded, grease-striped Spider-Man muscle shirt. That plus the baggy shorts are really a pair of pajamas.

I shake the tension from my hands, try to get my wits about me. The leftover buzz of fear has me still prepared to do battle.