Chapter 12: Bayou Interlude

Ricocheting out of New Orleans came a car five strong, speeding under weeping willows drooping out from marshes and chrome-colored rivers. Seated in the middle of the back, Maurice untangled clumps of tobacco and rolled them into fine tips like an old Plains Indian. Laurianne became documentarian and narrated the history of the destination, Lafayette, an old encampment teetering on the banks of a bayou deep in the jungle, west of the Mississippi River. Founded by the French, it was the refuge of their Acadian brethren when they were expelled from Canada and Maine by the British Crown after Montcalm lost his battle to Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham. Here was the other half of that field in which I sat with Natacha: the result of the intermingling of Acadians with local Americans—Cajun culture. Laurianne said we might run into some old stragglers who still speak French.

I sailed down a long dirt road with great oaks forming columns on either side of us, the orange summer sun sinking through the interstices of leaves. Children swung at baseballs in the sand, squirrels leapt after one another and up and down trunks. Lafayette was more familial, more rustic than New Orleans, the other Louisiana, but just as proud and lazily sprawled under the wide southern heat.

After I stomped on the emergency—the brakes no longer trustworthy—I discovered