Pillars of Salt

Pillars of Salt

Prologue

November 20, 1980

Lake Chevreuil, Louisiana

Auguste Savois lifted his tackle box into the back of his bateau, the flat-bottomed river boat tied to his makeshift dock of weathered cypress boards on stump pilings. Toward the east, along the horizon, the moonless sky was already beginning to fade to the same iron-ore gray as the pier and the canal. Auguste trudged back to the unpainted cypress shack built on stilts by his father, where Auguste had lived all his seventy-four years. His wife of the last fifty of those years, Angelle, was pouring milk in Jamie’s jelly glass as Auguste walked into the kitchen for the metal ice chest.

“I put you some boudin in there,” she said, smiling at the husband she had spent her entire adult life waiting on.

“Ah, you’re a good woman,” the old man replied, patting Angelle gingerly on the bottom that seemed to fill up a good portion of the kitchen. “You put us plenty to drink in there, I know.”

“I put you some water.”

“And some beer?”

“Of course, cher. I put in two Coca-Colas for Jamie and two beers for you. You don’t need no more than two beers when you’ve got your grandson along,” she said, her crinkly smile reminding Jamie of the dried apple doll he had seen at the Stuckey’s where his father had stopped on the trip from Opelousas yesterday afternoon.

“Finish up that egg, boy,” Auguste said in the sternest voice he could feign, taking a noisy slurp of his Community coffee. “We’ve got us some sac-a-lait to catch, and it’s almost sunup.” Auguste grabbed two slickers from the hook by the door, slid the ice chest off the counter, and headed back out to the bateau, letting the screen door smack against the jamb. A few crows squawked their discontent and flew off.

Auguste arranged the ice chest and the cane poles, then folded the slickers and stuffed them under the seat, just in case. He pulled up the net filled with bait fish and sloshed them into the shiner bucket, then shoved the bucket next to the tackle box. He heard the screen door slam again in the distance, heard Jamie thumping across the overturned soft drink crates Auguste had confiscated from Bergeron’s General Store to provide a walkway through the muddy batture, the land between the levee and the canal.

“Hah, you finally finished?” Auguste laughed when Jamie arrived breathless, carrying his last piece of toast, his brown wavy hair still standing on end. Jamie was only eight, but Auguste was proud of Léon for raising such a strong, independent boy. Léon’s wife Jeanine had left them when Jamie was only four, insisting that she couldn’t care for such a precocious child and running instead to the arms of the palm tree salesman who had passed through Opelousas from Pensacola more often than necessary ever since he had sold a tree to Jeanine one lonely Monday morning.

“Allons, Jamie,” Auguste said, pulling the bateau close to the dock as Jamie stepped in and found his seat. Auguste shoved off and stepped in as easily as a much younger man, finding his seat in front of the Evinrude and easing the bateau away from the dock. “Here, put on this life vest, boy. You know what your MaMaw made me promise,” Auguste said as he shoved the orange vest at Jamie. “I think we’ll pass by Lake Chevreuil this morning.” Jamie grinned, buckling his vest as he chewed on his last bite of toast, then held both sides of the bateau that chugged slowly with the current of the Delcambre Canal.

Within the hour, they found a spot in the cyprière, the cypress grove that bordered Lake Chevreuil near Oka Chito Island. In the distance, they could see the eerie silhouette of the jack-up oil rig rising from the placid lake against a sky that was beginning to lighten. Closer to shore, the tower of the salt mine rose above the salt dome that formed Oka Chito Island. Jamie baited the hook on his cane pole and swung his line among the cypress knees while Auguste tied up to a cypress tree.

Before long, the two anglers had strung a dozen sac-a-lait, bream, and catfish onto the stringer. Jamie was glad his father had been called to Houston on oilfield business. Otherwise, Jamie would be sitting at his desk with the other third graders right now, no doubt beginning the Pledge of Allegiance. He thought about ‘Tee Jack as he watched his peaceful cork bobbing on the water’s surface. Too bad his best friend couldn’t have escaped school three days before Thanksgiving break as Jamie had. ‘Tee Jack would have liked the feel of pulling five or six sac-a-lait every hour out of the shallow lake.

But while Jamie was staring absently at his cork, suddenly it flopped on its side and began racing toward the distant rig. “Paw Paw, look! It must be a big one!” he exclaimed. “I can’t hold my pole!”

Auguste, who had just landed a sac-a-lait and was re-baiting his own hook, dropped his pole to reach for Jamie’s. “Here, boy. Hand me that pole. You’ll drop it if you ain’t careful.” As Jamie turned to hand it to Auguste, the pole slipped from his hands and sped toward the open water, following the cork. “Aye Yee!” Auguste yelled. “That ain’t no fish, no! Look here, boy! All those limbs and debris ain’t supposed to be racing like that! What the hell’s going on?”

A rapid current had begun hurtling everything on the lake’s surface toward the oil rig. Leaves and chunks of driftwood raced past the bateau. Cranes and gulls, herons and mallards, all began flying in the opposite direction, shrieking their warnings. “Is it the end of the world, Paw Paw?” Jamie shrieked, wide-eyed with fear.

“Hell, I don’t know, me. What the hell! Say your Hail Mary’s, boy. Something is bad wrong here!”

Auguste’s bateau was straining against the rope tied to the tree. “We got to get out of here, boy,” Auguste yelled over the roar as he started the motor so he could put enough slack in the line to untie it. Once free of the stump, he revved the motor at full throttle out of the cyprière and back toward Delcambre Canal, passing the limbs and driftwood that sped in the opposite direction. He noticed that the debris seemed to have slowed down until he realized that the limbs hadn’t slowed down at all; instead, the bateau, even at full throttle, was sliding backward!

“We’ll have to try to make the island,” he hollered over the roar of the water. As Auguste fought the current, Jamie, holding the sides of the bateau with a death grip, watched as the distant jack-up rig listed to one side. Jamie saw a lifeboat fleeing the tangled rig and heard what sounded like screams audible above the roar of water.

A ten-foot swell heaved Auguste’s bateau high but mercifully left it upright. The jack-up rig in the distance screeched a last gasp as it finished its descent, landing on top of the lifeboat, and plunging its passengers into a watery grave beneath tons of twisted metal. As the derrick disappeared beneath the surface, Jamie saw only a remnant marking the tomb, the mast from the top of the boom crane, which slipped into the hole moments later. The massive whirlpool plunged the remnants of the lifeboat and twisted metal down what had become a 150-foot waterfall, the largest ever in Louisiana, swirling the flotsam out of sight beneath the surface of the lake that was known to be only 11 feet deep.

“I got to bail out, Jamie,” Auguste screamed over the roar, “and try to get us to that solid land over yonder. You stay in the bateau, or you’ll sink in this mud, sure!” With strength he didn’t think he had, he was able to push the little boat a foot or two ahead, then drag his body horizontally after it. When he became unable to continue pushing against the weight of the sliding mud, Auguste hoisted Jamie into the mud, where the pair were able to pull their way slowly on their bellies the last ten feet to solid ground.

After a grueling several minutes, Auguste and Jamie heaved themselves onto dry land, drenched in black slime, Auguste’s beard crusted with thick, dripping mud, Jamie’s tears streaming little canals through the mud on his cheeks. Auguste would swear that a merciful God wanted them to survive, even though one of his doctors later attributed his burst of strength to adrenalin, along with his younger years of physical labor as a derrickman in the Gulf.

Shortly after the pair had reached the island, sirens and lights from emergency vehicles out of Delcambre and New Iberia began arriving on the scene. Rubberneckers in piper cubs from New Iberia airport began circling to view the destruction they heard about on police band radios.

Besides the oil rig, barges, and tugboats, most of the buildings of the salt mine on the shore were also sucked into the hole. Cars, a mobile home, ancient giant live oak trees, even some houses were being pulled into the widening cavern. Auguste and Jamie saw the land slide from beneath one of the largest homes on the island and leave it dangling on the edge, its screened sunroom hanging six feet out over the churning foam. A chopper descended and hovered directly over the house to get a closer look, then rose again as the house and the land it rested on plunged into the chasm.

A police car appeared on the road behind Auguste and Jamie, its flashing lights ironic against such disaster. Spotting the mud-drenched pair, the officer stopped, grabbed blankets from his trunk, and hurried over to wrap them up against the November chill. Amidst the horror, Jamie had failed to notice his teeth chattering and his body shivering convulsively, possibly from being wet on a chilly morning, possibly from shock, most likely from a combination of the two. When he felt the warmth of the blanket around his shoulders and noticed the strong arm of the policeman that guided him to the car, his knees became weak, and his tears began anew.

~

Earlier that morning in New Iberia, Marlisa Daigrepont woke with a start and sat bolt upright. She had begun having the nightmares shortly after the wedding, and no amount of Charles’s reassurances placated her. Charles held her close, caressed her silky nightgown and reached one hand into her thick auburn hair, cradling her scalp and coaxing her cheek close to his chest. The trembling subsided and Marlisa slumped onto Charles’s shoulder.

“Stay home with me today, Charles,” she pleaded.

“Bébé, you know I can’t do that, no. There ain’t nothing I’d like better than to curl up in bed with my bride all day,” he said. “But you know I got no choice. Brad can’t handle it alone. You know they cut our crew to the bone. Come on, ma chère. Don’t make it harder than it already is to leave you.”

Charles Daigrepont, a rough-hewn Cajun with hair the color of the strong coffee he drank, becoming flecked now with salt at the temples, was master electrician at the Oka Chito Island Salt Mine. He understood why Marlisa, having lost her father in a gas pipeline explosion fifteen years ago in St. Francisville, was petrified at the notion now of her husband being 1300 feet beneath Lake Chevreuil. That’s one reason he never told her how run-down the new owner had allowed the mine to become.

Charles had often tried to persuade her to come with him on visiting day to ride the cage down the shaft to the vast underworld, invisible to the residents overhead who lived their own lives, visited their neighbors for coffee in the early evenings. [JH1] He argued that upper layers of the mine boasted galleries fit for Goliath, 65 feet wide and 100 feet high, separated by 75-foot salt pillars, the workers like ants scurrying in their underground colony. Both gallery and pillar size were even greater at lower depths. Charles thought Marlisa would lose her claustrophobia if she would enter the mine one time and see the immensity and strength of it. So far, Marlisa had refused, complaining that the cage “hung by a thread” from the head frame, and Charles had no response.

Sometimes he questioned his choice of a bride twenty years his junior just two years after his divorce. Jack Brouillette, his one-time best friend, and the burly foreman on the 1500-foot level had warned him of the dangers of marrying a twenty-three-year-old, but Charles had followed his heart instead of his brain. If he felt he was rearing another daughter at times, his confidence in his choice was renewed during their frequent passionate intervals of lovemaking unlike anything he had ever experienced.

Charles pulled Marlisa down on the bed beside him to hold her close. She was pliable in his arms, yielding to his caresses, as he kneaded her arms, her hair, her back. It was moments like this that Charles knew, Jack Brouillette be damned, his marriage to Marlisa was anything but a mistake. It was during these moments of lovemaking that he felt alive, that he felt young again, that the nose bleeds from the perpetual salt contamination didn’t frighten him.

An hour later, Charles creaked down the shaft with Brouillette, whose bulk dwarfed the cage, the smell of Marlboros clinging to his muskrat-brown Oshkosh jumper and unkempt hair of the same color. Jack was not an educated man. Over the course of [JH2] the thirty years that he had served in the “bowels of hell,” as he called the mine, he had clawed his way up through the ranks from laborer, to driller, to powderman. He survived the layoffs four years ago and achieved his current position as foreman at the 1500-foot level.

“Yie Yee. Back to the old salt mines, eh, Daigrepont?” Jack chuckled in his rasping morning cigarette voice, using the cliché literally as only salt miners could.

“Yeah, yeah. Another day,” Charles said, still wearing the contented grin of a man tingling from the lingering warmth of the firm body next to his just sixty minutes earlier.

“Mable and I are going to the honky-tonk tonight. You and Marlisa come along with us.”

“Nah, Jack, can’t do it on a work night. You go tomorrow night, we’d probably meet y’all.”

“I hear ya, sha. Les nouveaux mariés se coûcher tôt,” Jack teased, slapping Charles on the back.

Charles bristled at the allusion to his conjugal activities, aware that Jack Brouillette disapproved of his April-November marriage. Or perhaps it was Mable, twice Marlisa’s age, fifty pounds overweight, and prone to jealousy.

When Charles didn’t respond, Jack broke the silence. “So, my friend, how’s Marlisa making out?”

“Oh, Marlisa’s fine, Jack. In fact, she’s about the finest woman I ever met.”

“Yeah, brother! I hear ya!” Jack laughed as the cage jerked to a stop at the 1300-foot level and Charles stepped out.

“Y’all have fun tonight, Jack,” Charles called as the cage rumbled on down the shaft.

Jack’s bass voice boomed back up through the shaft as the cage groaned out of sight. “Gonna pass a good time, us!”

Charles clocked in, poured a cup of coffee, and began leafing through the log from the previous night. Bradley Dubois, the only electrician on Charles’s crew, sat down beside him and lit a cigarette.

“What’s it look like today, Charlie?” Bradley asked through a cloud of exhaled smoke.

“Looks like they’re having a few problems with that main conveyor belt. We need to take a look this morning,” Charles said, not raising his eyes from the logbook.

Before Charles had his second sip of coffee, his two-way radio beeped. The conveyor tender was on the other end.

“Yeah, Frank. What ya got?”

“Hey, mon, the breaker feeding number 3 conveyor tripped. Got somebody to take a look?”

[JH1]This clause creates a clarity issue for me. An "and" in place of the comma is one way to clear this up, if it is intended that the residents are the people visiting their neighbors.

[JH2]Consider changing to "Over" or "For" or "During"