Issue 2:02 | Fiction | Linda Young

 

                                   

Minos

Linda Young (photographs by Laura Berkowitz)

 

Better pass boldly into that other world in the full glory of some passion,

than fade and wither dismally with age. James Joyce from “The Dead”           

 

                       

 

Perhaps if he had been born in another time that was not 1925, Minos would have survived the trauma of his birth. Let me just tell you that he was probably deprived of oxygen, the umbilical cord tied around his neck, the country doctor slow to the rescue. In the Louisiana country where we were both born, myself thirteen years later, causes were assigned to natural phenomena. Minos’ brain damage, childishness, inability to mature were blamed on an exact moment in time: as he moved down his mother’s birth canal, the old mule Brigette thumped by the window of our back room, the slave-like chain that had grown into her leg jangled, a black shadow obliterated the cotton window shade, two diablo horns cascaded upward. Baby Minos sucked desperately for his first breath, taking mucous and embryonic cells and red blood into his delicate lungs.

 

The family early received instructions never to refer to Minos as retarded, or slow, or crazy. He was “touched.” To me, it must have been by the hand of God. What other explanation could there be for a man who came to be a natural hero?

 

Minos’ mother, my grandmother, loved him above all other things on this earth.

 

She saw in him an ability to connect with life that was saintly. Saint Minos. They were inseparable, they tell me, Minos and Grand-mere. How do you grow a special child? You give him structure and love. Grand-mere set up a routine for Minos: wash, dress, eat, milk the cows, feed the chickens, pick the corn, hoe, fertilize, weed, eat, hug, prayers, kiss goodnight, sleep. That was Minos’ life. When he was fifteen, a boy becoming a physical man, hair on his chin, light in his green eyes, his blond hair dancing in the wind, his body bursting, Grand-mere died and was laid to rest with her long-dead husband. So, you see, Grand-pere, who I never met, has no role in this story.

 

Minos had three older brothers; no sisters to rely on after Grand-mere’s passing.

 

They tried, they really did. One was my own father, a kind and memorable man; for the times, an ideal father. But men often lack the gift of consolation. Minos cried every night for months, and the brothers discussed sending him away to Pineville, to cette institution, but they had heard that you die there, of the cold or the heat or just plain old neglect. So the brothers, Henry, Mathieu, and Raymond, took turns living Minos’ routine life, skipping the hugs, prayers, and kisses. In the end, perhaps Grand-mere was right about Minos’ sainthood: that saints are saints because they suffer, are martyred, different, banished, far, far apart from the mad crowd. My father once told me that it was when he noticed that Minos’ green eyes had lost the special sparkle that made him lovable, when his arms grew hard and round, his legs powerful, that the family began to worry. What would the world do with this body of a man? But then, what Minos did showed that he had a reserve of free will, despite the rumblings of Father PreJean who had once told Grand-mere that Minos would forever live in limbo. For the rest of her life she had refused to go to church, spending Sunday mornings at the levee that opened up into a field of bluebonnets.

                                                                                                                                   

Then it was 1942, and the War was raging. I was two years old, Minos seventeen. My mother worked the farm as hard and as long as my father. I was left to be looked after by Minos. I remember his big head thrust in my face, his eyes popped wide and laughing, him pulling his mouth wide with fat, stumpy fingers to make Minos the clown.

 

And the smell of him was the familiar onions and black dirt. I fell in love with Minos and carried him with me as one measure of what a man can become.

 

A man who is really a child may not know how to catch a baby thrown to the air in play. Really, he meant no harm, for it was something he had seen his brothers do. Up I flew into the air, and out from under the house charged Rex, eager to join in play, distracting Minos, so that I plummeted down to earth, my head smashing on the water cistern. My screams brought Mama from the barn. Minos’ yelling and panting could not be stopped, so frightened he had become thinking he had been the cause of my hurt.

 

What happened after was just as well. I was watched, Minos was watched, and for both of us there grew a yearning. Minos reverted to the nightly crying; I slept with my parents; then the brothers were called to war.

 

I cannot remember their leaving. But I remember the strong scents and bright colors of Minos’ leaving. He was seventeen, big and sad. He understood Mama’s dilemma. The night had enveloped the farm in stark darkness, thunder beat at the sky far into the marsh. The cool feel of coming rain fell like a weight on my arms and legs and belly. I lay in only a cotton diaper. Mama was in the kitchen, her humming caressing my life, the smoke from her constantly lit cigarette played in the air. Minos’ big face floated over me like a balloon, the rubbery smile stretched from ear to ear and I laughed, squeezed his nose and thrust my arms up, waiting. He kissed my forehead, my cheeks, my hands, my belly, then vanished through the open window. The noise of his running was like backward thunder. There was no lightning to follow his leaving.

 

How and when Mama knew where Minos had gone is a mystery to this day.

 

Every month on the last Monday we drove out to the edge of the marsh with sacks of food and supplies for Minos. Canned vegetables, preserved figs, blackberry jelly, eggs, bacon, pain perdue and Mama’s chow-chow that sparkled yellow with green spots from the peppers I had chopped on a cool summer night. Our old black Buick crunched and swayed down the mile-long gutted road that was bordered on both sides by clean flowing canals. From the open window the song of passerines came and went, in and out with the wind. The smell of the hackberry trees tickled my nose. Mama held my leg as I stood next to her on the seat, my shoulder bumping the top of her head, my chest pushed forward.

 

When I was seven and the war was coming to an end, Mama gave me the job of hauling Minos’ sacks of supplies to the gate where, some time during the day or night, Minos would come. I imagined him as a giant brown nutria, feral, sleek, free, the sacks in his mouth as he swam gracefully out to the bayou. Neither Mama nor I had seen him in all these years. Then one day I betrayed Mama’s reverie and climbed over the gate and into the brackish wetlands, a trespasser in Minos’ territory. I dreamed of joining him in his adventures, a knight, a boy Joan of Arc, hand of God, the Son, Minos the Holy Ghost.

 

I looked back at Mama, afraid she would call me back to her. I watched her light her first of three cigarettes, her way of passing her fears to the air. While the wind played with her black curly hair, she blew smoke to the west, away from the gate and me. I always imagined that at that moment in her life she was in France with Papa, walking down the country road he had described in the letters she read to me after supper. I remembered him: tall, dark, brave; the man I hoped to be. I dropped the sacks and climbed over the gate, the barbed wire ripping into my leg as I jumped over and into a clump of saltgrass. I felt the blood soak my new socks, and pain jutted as the grass ripped my skin. I felt him before I saw him; the slow vibration of life, the whistle in the mist. His face was purple and green from berries and grass, a camouflage that I came to recognize later. His hair, greasy and braided, reached to his shoulders. I saw brown where his face should be, and all else was the grass and swaying cattails. I knew him from his green eyes and the light that had come back to them. Then I heard the desolate clapping of the peregrine falcon followed by a soft whisper: Mon fils. Tres bein. Ou et mon frere? I yelled, guerre, guerre, guerre as he ran away and into the dark passage between oak trees burdened by clusters of swishing moss. He ran with his legs splayed and crooked as though he were riding a crazy horse.

 

Our visits to Minos’ territory continued until the end of the war. Papa came home, taking over the care of Minos, and I went off to school. Papa rarely took me with him, talked about Minos only with sadness, but stayed away for most of the day when he went to the marsh. I know he did not fear the brackish land the way Mama did. When I was fifteen I was asked to go on the visits to Minos. On the day we rode out in our red pickup, I was stricken by this thought: that Mama had once believed a seven-year-old could protect her from whatever she feared most.

 

I cannot remember how often I climbed the same rotting fence, waited and looked above the swinging grass, longing for the camouflaged face, until Papa left us for a second war in Korea. This time he did not come home. So, I became Minos’ supplier and was determined that he was not to be a drying shadow, a flash of a man.

 

The pounding of my horse Joe’s hooves echoed against the white sky. The July sun had dried up the canals; the last rain had rolled over the salt over a month ago. Bream and hardheads had been trapped in the channels and died. Their silver and green bodies flashed against the black mud. About twenty feet from the unhinged gate, the oil company had laid white oyster shells and the thunder of my horse became a crunching under my body. The world was changing.

 

I did not climb the gate as I had done, but unlocked the rusted lock with the key that Papa had given me the night he left us. Minos, he is a good man, Cecil, take you care of him. How can I say to you so young? Your duty. I go to mine. Here is the key to his world. I unsaddled Joe and swatted his rump. He looked at me, then turned and headed for home. I opened the gate, stood still and watched ivory white gulls hanging magically against the blue sky. Then I headed south.

 

I calculate now that I walked more then two miles toward Price Lake, then turned east, trying to straddle the rim of the salt flats, then made my way to Boston Canal and the old camp that Minos had claimed as a second roof over his world. I knew I had found him when I caught the smell of blue point crab stew and hunger hit me. A clean breeze came from the south; all was quiet, no beckoning of the bird song, no slapping of the water against the shore. Then the scream of the nutria echoed through the air, and I knew

 

I had come home.

 

The gray shack was perched on the edge of the bayou; pockets of foam danced up the brown shore then down into the crevice. The water should have reached to the jutting gallery where Minos stood waiting for me. My chest clenched and I fell onto the wet grass sobbing.

 

Familiar hands, a gentle voice comforted me, and I ate blue point crab stew until my stomach pushed against my ribs. The roux was dark, the rich color of the bayou waters. The sweetest crabmeat floated on the liquid in chunks as big as my thumb. Minos had made ambrosia in an old Community Coffee can.

 

I woke to false dawn and to a feeling that at last all was right with my world.

 

I had slept on a pillow covered with white lace that smelled like magnolias and Mama. Minos had handed me the pillow as we lay on the gallery looking up at the stars. It was folded over and wrapped in a gunny sack. As I unfolded the pillowcase, Mama’s hairbrush fell out; her black hair was still entwined in the bristles.

 

I lost myself in the marsh and refused to go home even when Mama sent the sheriff to bring me back. Minos taught me the art of camouflage, and after four months it seemed that the world had decided to leave us alone.

 

We hunted, ate, cooked, woke up before the sun and headed out to the edge of the sandbanks where the red snapper waited for the trilling stream of shrimp. I was a happy man. Until the oil and gas companies and a well-meaning man named Rockefeller decided that the land belonged to man wholly and tangibly. I did not know that a war was coming and that I would see marshes and weeds and cattails and a hunger that gutted our compassion. And so, Minos and I began our campaign against the intruders. Oilrigs like Christmas trees dotted the evening sky within months of the black-booted surveyors.

                                                                                                                       

We paddled out to the rigs at night, opened valves, unscrewed hoses, emptied water containers, and were so stealthy that we stole food and scattered the man stuff to the fishes and land creatures. One night we found a box of dynamite and began our path

of destruction; or at least Minos’ path. One starry night, I was seized by a drunk rigger, tied to the slats of a pipe, and taken to the parish jail in Abbeville. They could not catch Minos.

 

Mama sprung me, and out of remorse and sorrow I stayed with her, for she was dying. She left me two weeks before I was served with papers to fight for my country.

 

In July of 1969, on a dark morning, I stood on the deck of a navy carrier and thought that Vietnam looked very much like the salt marshes of my home. So I became a fighter, a camouflage of the Mekong Delta. That I was not blown to smithereens was the miracle of my life, that I returned home to Minos whole in body, if not mind, is what the religious call saving grace. I shall not dwell on that time. It is gone, but useful. It has made me, like Minos, want to stand forever in the full, bright anarchy of Louisiana light. There was no other path left for me.

I returned home sometime in 1973, sometime being a hot day, maybe August. I stood in my pirogue ready to head out to Minos’ camp, entranced by the slick oil that massaged the brown water.

 

He had changed. His skin leathery and dark, the hues of the nutria about his eyes, so that when I looked at him full in the face I expected the cry that inflated the swamp at mating season. Bushy eyebrows now hid his once crystal green eyes.

                                                                                                                       

“Mais, why for you come here back, fils?’ he asked, the throaty voice smashing the words into a harsh song. I expected the rush of the bullgator through the cattails.

 

I remember now that I smiled. I sat on a rotting oak log and took off my boots, an eternity of unlacing, then pulled off the boots, feeling the skin peel away with the blood-soaked socks, the symptom of enduring jungle rot, and held my feet up for Minos to see.

 

He laughed, and the rubbery face came back to me in a rush of love. His teeth were white and square, the two front ones like bleached bone. He sat next to me, held his naked feet to the sun and sang: “Garde, fils. C’est good, non?”

 

That night we cooked yellow cush-cush in Mama’s old black skillet. The old family camp was clean, and Minos had used oak panels and shells to decorate the walls.

 

Next to his cot was a wooden box. When he had gone out to wander in the night, I opened it. Minos’ treasure was sparse: Mama’s pearl hairbrush still holding firmly to black springs of hair; my old baseball cap, the one Papa had brought me from New York when he came back from his first war; dead Uncle Raymond’s Purple Heart; and the dried head of a garfish.

           

Every month we made our way through the blighted bayous to the oilrigs, always a cloudy night, always still, so our sabotage could not be detected. The first fire was minimal, sending the riggers from the platform and to the shore. We calculated that our strikes would not kill or maim, and in that we were nearly always successful.

 

We had become a legend, or at least Minos had, for I heard the stories on my occasional sojourns to the jukes and cathouses that dotted the roads that lead into and away from the diminished marshes.

 

“Monkey man, he come two times las’ mont. Blew a fuckin’ hole in da platform cabin, yeah. Scared deep hell outa da big bosses. Tink they be shittin’ in dey pants now. Ain’t gonna call in no feds, no sir, they’s too many deals with the govna fo that. Ole monkey man, he come to be some right coonass hero. Look podna, I tell ya one day he gonna blow his own sef outa da water.”

 

Then there would be laughter all around, putrid breaths filled with beer and boiled crawfish, and the whisper of stolen love from women whose blood had been mixed beyond recognition.

 

By the spring of 1981 we had the schedule of the riggers seven days in and out memorized. We harassed them to distraction; they sent in consultants, engineers, agents. But it was the gas drillers that drove us crazy. They never seemed to give the land one day’s rest, unless the pipes were empty and they capped them for drilling into the future.

 

“Fils, they be a bunch a yella and black peoples on the shale. Whad you tink they come here fo?” Minos had asked me one clear morning when for a short while the pounding of the gas drills had stopped.

 

I followed him to a chenier about a mile from our camp. A ragged family, three small children and a tiny mother and father, sat on discarded green and white rusted oil buckets. (I could still see the letters T E X). They were Vietnamese. A black man and young boy sat on the far side of the sandbank, under an old oak tree. Distrustful thoughts flew from the man’s eyes like fireflies. The young boy held up a gigged frog, its fat legs still kicking.

 

“They just hongry, ” I said. “Let them be, Minos. They got no place else to be. The big men’s gonna chase them away soon.”

 

“Domage,” he whispered and turned away and headed back into the cattail bog.

 

At Christmas, we decorated a land rig with the rotting corpses of animals that had succumbed to the green slicks that the politicians had said would not come. With an old camera I had brought from our farm, I took pictures and went to a Lafayette newspaper office and handed them to a pretty lady behind a desk. Much later, while sipping beer at Boudreaux’s dance club, I heard about the newspaper reporter who had published a story about corruption and graft between the Louisiana government and the oil companies. She won a Pulitzer. Part of her story was about two unknown men who had sabotaged many of the rigs. She called them heroes. I think that all hell broke loose for a while. But I’ll never know.

 

For years, we had stopped eating creatures from the land and waters. We had a garden on the shore of the bayou, and pecans and maypops were still abundant at the edge of the marsh that led back to our old home. Slime had invaded the sweet meat of our beloved blue point crabs and the mealy taste of oil rotted the stomachs of the sac-au-lait.

 

It was a hot June day when Minos told me that his leg hurt. I will always remember the feel of the lump just above his bony knee and the purple oily shadow that surrounded it. Over the weeks the lump seemed to grow and throb. When I mentioned doctors and hospitals, Minos fled, limping into the hollow night. He was in pain, I knew that; so we began a daily schedule: wake up, eat breakfast, garden, spy, eat lunch, take a nap, tell stories, eat supper, brush teeth, kiss goodnight.

 

When Minos’ leg became a purple shadow I knew that he would die soon and there was nothing that could be done. On a cool morning before the sun sped down the bayou and onto our gallery, I left the marsh and visited the deserted old white church on Louisiana Highway 3569, where Father PreJean had declared Minos a soul forever stuck in limbo. When I got back to our camp, Minos had made cornbread and sliced fresh tomatoes. He did not ask where I had gone, for we often went off to our own solitude. That night, the blast rocked and inflamed the eastern sky just as I had finished telling Minos about my last day in Vietnam.

 

Years ago, the wind from the south brought cool salty smells of hope. Now it is all harsh and bitter, inflated with corpses and lost dreams. Today I buried Minos behind our cabin, on the highest chenier, and planted sprigs of Mama’s wild roses that still wrap around the wide porch of our old home. He is wearing a blue shirt, brown pants and no shoes. When I laid him gently down, clods of black dirt rolled into his coffin. I looked into his face seeking forgiveness. He was smiling at me.