MEMORIES OF WATER:

LOUIS BOURGEOIS

1.

My first memory: no wind blows from the lagoon, and the air is thick with humidity, the smell of fiberglass and creosote pilings suffuse the shell-laden yard, with a hard smell that burns the eyes and nose. My father, bearded, and his long brown hair falls to the middle of his back, as he aggressively scrapes the chalky barnacles off a red skiff that lies on a row of dusty culverts. I see the sweat pouring from his face and arms as he works the hammer and chisel in straight lines on the bottom of the upturned skiff. He wipes his forehead and calls to me; he calls my name through the early morning half light of summer. I do not respond; I have turned away from him and am looking across the marsh where birds as large as school children are filling up the dark branches of an enormous cypress tree.

2.

I was standing on the wharf, noticing how the worn dried out mops that hung from the rafter post looked like faceless old women. I would sometimes play with these old ladies, while other times in the late evening air, they would frighten me and I wouldn’t go anywhere near them – sometimes they scared me as much as Popeye on one of the wooden grey skiffs. Someone had nailed a jaundiced rubber Popeye head on the tip of the bow. It looked very old and faded, and it made me sad and somehow nostalgic for a time long before my birth; a whistle shrieked through the morning air from the shipping yard next door. I walked to the end of the wharf to see what was going on. My grandmother was in one of her fiberglass skiffs, the tide jostled the skiff against the huge black hull of a ship. The captain was on the dock surrounded by officers, and sailors in white. He made a gesture with his hands, and everyone, including my grandmother, bowed their heads and prayed. I could not hear the prayer; the words were muted in the strong wind. They finished and looked up to the bow of the ship, and the captain handed down a bottle of champagne to my grandmother in the skiff. She held the bottle above her head and broke it across the steel hull of this ship named Alcedia. The shattering of the bottle was loud enough to penetrate the heavy wind, and it woke me up out of a kind of trance. My grandmother’s long white hair flowed all around against the massive hull of Alcedia.

3.

They have left me alone on a shore of large slabs of broken concrete. Behind me is a thick patch of rozo cane where gnats hover in small dark clouds in the late evening light. Above, my father and his three brothers fish from the stern of an abandoned rusty barge. They seem so distant against the ochre and crimson sky, and they do not look down. They talk about their wives’ breasts and about the war overseas. They have just returned from Vietnam, their black beards short and thick and their hair dark brown as long as Jethro Tull’s. They are smoking joints and drinking whiskey and beer, the faint crackling of a radio plays hard rock. My father has hooked a fish, he is gentle with it, he does not want the line to break. It is a large sheepshead, and it dangles suspended in the air, as my father reels in the fish in the final light of day -- they are laughing and laughing, and I below am afraid of drowning in the night.

4.

I was very young and afraid of crabs. The fishermen often left crabs in the skiffs where they would scuttle under the floorboards and couldn’t be seen until it was too late. I was jumping from skiff to skiff in the late evening air as I always did, while the fisherman came in for the day, and my grandfather cleaned the skiffs. A crab bit me on the heel of my foot as I lingered too long looking at a speckle trout swim back and forth in the skiff’s live well. I jumped backward out of the skiff and ran at top speed, forgetting where the wharf ended and the water began, and finally the water covered me, and all I could see was the dissipating orange rays of the sun. I tried to reach the surface, but I kept on drowning until my grandfather’s ancient arms pulled me out of the bayou. On the wharf, he beat me and beat me on the back, and brown silt erupted from my lungs in large clots. He carried me inside, and my grandmother gave me a bath in a large zinc tub filled with brown brackish water. After she bathed me, she wrapped me in a large white towel and sprinkled me with powder. From the bedroom, I could hear the faint weeping of my grandfather, and in a voice as distant as the horizon, he said in his native tongue, Lucius a marché sur l’eau aujourd’hui et il s'est presque noyé.