Bayou Dreams

CW: Mentions of death by accident and swearing.

‘I remember the day you left because the trees were covered in silver and the sky was on fire.’

Osprey’ warbled overhead, as a procession of husks moved in staggered steps, to the tolls of the bell, and my mother’s tears. The dirt in my hands was one wet clump, the soil still holding onto the rain from a week ago. There was no actual rain this morning, just a small reserve of sprinkled relief that the summer heat attacked, and made the reporters crow that the drought had finally broken, and another storm would press through our small town any day now. I’m not going to argue with the words of one man, our small box of a TV doesn’t deserve the verbal abuse from the likes of a forty-year-old woman, it's not his fault that weather reports now remind me of her. But my propensity these days to hold my tongue and cauterise the wound everyone seems to like planting a knife in is starting to rot. My mother’s dissatisfaction and now my sister’s untimely death, it's all tangled together in one big jarring mess that will see my internal systems shutting down, and my mind fragmenting before my eyes.

The dirt falls from my hand and onto the casket, the iron nails are bulging on the side of it the heat absorbing into the wood with a fickle-minded focus to destroy. Not that it matters, Val’s body is in a perfect state of rigor mortis. I’d never seen a dead person before. Death in the bayou consistently came in the form of bloated alligators and torn-up possums, but when they’d pulled the cloth back, the precinct room light flickering I’d thought the still body of my sister to be horribly inadequate. As if they’d just plucked her off the street, which by all accounts they really had.  I’d taken a seat, and like flies to spoiled food the staff had congregated about and brought me endless glasses of water alongside words of support. The sound of their voices is starting to replace Val’s.

Two days later once the reports had been filed, the body transported and the paperwork signed – no we did not want to donate her organs, yes, we would be burying her – I finally sat down to braid through the wild dandelions now crowning her head, dye her white wedding dress silver and cover her bruises with the offcuts of lace I’d stolen. By the end, she looked the part of a fair maiden living in the valleys and dips that made up some distant Romanian forest. 

 It’s a horrible thought, and one I stuff into the recess of my mind where I keep everything else including talks of this place - an unmarked graveyard where too many bodies would be upturned if someone were to go through with a digger. It sat in a dense wilderness of falling trees shredded by flame and turned into black corpses, with broken stone hedges to mark the fallen.

It's morbidly destitute and a place Val had made us promise she would never go. She wanted to be turned to ash and lost on the wind, mother had disagreed vehemently and argued that not being a part of the sanctity of a place christened by the catholic church was the first step to purgatory. Val hadn’t cared, she also hadn’t written a will, so when she did die the validity of her claim was word of mouth and Mother - even in her state, knew best. Val had always been the bright spark between us, the toiling hands set to change the world, while I was her older wearier sister resigned to my fate as a misbegotten weed.

I grabbed mother’s wheelchair, pushing it across the hard dirt packed with rocks and listening to her frustrated cries as she tried to understand how her tenuous relationship with her daughter could cause such heartache.

“She was a stupid girl, I always knew it, I just didn’t realise it would be enough to kill her.”

She was dead because a car hit her on the way home from work, in a town bigger than ours with folks of standing and universities for learning. She’d fought her way there, teeth bared as only my family could do, with a bloody focus and unwillingness to forfeit.

She left and my mother hated her for it, the star jewel of our family with enough words to fill the spaces where I was lacking. Sometimes when we were younger and the world became too much, she’d sit me down by the open fire pit swatting away at the mosquitos as she stared into the bayou.  

“I want you to know Cas that whether you choose to speak or not, don’t matter to me.” She had the token bastardised speech born from our backwater ideocracy with the lilt of city twang she copied from the TV.

“I know mama says otherwise, but one of these days I’ll get us out of here, to the real world.” I looked behind us at our trailer, wheels indented with sticks and one side peeled back like a tin can from a peeved bear, the windows were tapped down the roof more tarp than corrugated metal and plastic. And just yesterday my foot had gone through the thin wooden steps which had receded further into the ground as climate change made the swamp swell. I was pre-emptively preparing myself for the trailer to simply sink into the ground and take us with her.

I gazed at Val beneath the fading moonlight, washed-out golden locks on a face burnt red from the mid-day sun and thought if one of us could succeed it would have to be her. So, I saved up the money working down at the local thrift shop, pennies and notes of change I pocketed away for her schooling and long nights of essay writing on the feminist perspective of Jane Eyre. I listened to her fears in our shared room, one gust of wind away from collapse and held her when she trembled from the anxiety. 

“I’m constantly walking Cas, and sometimes I wonder where to.” She was a creature made up of metaphors my Val, whose oyster shell of hope would sometimes overflow into my own. So, when these moments would weigh her down, I would mouth to her, ‘your safe, you’re here, and tomorrow the world will be waiting for you.’

It didn’t matter that the car wouldn’t start most days, and when it did oil would leak from the side. It didn’t matter that my uniform sat gathering dust mites in my cupboard with that new clothes smell of formaldehyde still carefully pressed into the stiff fabric. It wasn’t mine anymore, it was Val’s, it was for the dream she had to finish school, the first of our family. I didn’t look at it anymore for fear I would grab it off the hanger and try it on, to see if it still fit over the plump lines of my breasts and mounds on my hips, to see if my dreams were still there or if they’d died once I hit twenty-one. Maybe that was why I hated Bran so much, he took a part of her and never gave it back.

Val met Bran at eighteen at the back of our local diner, where the trash piled up by the back door and wafted around the smell of two-day-old soggy meat and warm milk whenever someone went out. I remember him like I do most vexations, with veritable clarity; he was an oily fish on the cusp of manhood, with no future prospects and the attitude of a person who discussed the need for better policies in our country and then when ballots were run refused to vote. He was an ugly thing with wide cheekbones and a narrow mouth that he had a terrible habit of using to incite arguments, only to grab at the crumbs with his silver fork and point out in that haughty voice how wrong they were and how politically correct he was. 

I wasn’t one to judge, for my late-night hook-ups were quite affairs with professionally bad lovers. But Val had those stars in her eyes that spelled late nights waiting for her husband to come home. Maybe that was cynical of me to believe such a thing, but as years had passed my existence had turned from singular to co-dependent. I was desperate for her to escape so I could vicariously live through her. 

In the end, it didn’t matter, he’d up and left her a year after marriage and been quick to hitch himself to the suburban life with the white picket fence and ivy trills around the veranda, I knew that because he’d invited Val there to sign the divorce papers, she’d been crying when I picked her up, a mocktail glass in hand. “She was so nice Cas, and every time she looked at him she had stars in her eyes.”

I despised him as any sister would, the instinctive protectiveness quick to surge and slow to deflate. Even dead I was resolute in keeping her safe, even if it meant ignoring her ex's calls and not telling him the date of the funeral. 

Val would be angry at me for that. Much like she was the day she left. 

“Excuses Cassandra, that’s all they are! And yet you let them drive and control you!”

She threw a sports bag onto the bed shoving in clothes with wild abandon. At twenty-two and newly divorced an anger had possessed her, one that drove her away from us and into the world. 

“I can’t Valentina, not while mother is still here, not when she needs me to take care of her.” I signed. ‘Not when your life has no place for me, not when the world is finally starting to take notice of you.’

She walked out of the room, heavy steps moving the floors and making the water jug shake.  

Mother white-knuckled her bible refusing to look at Val, refusing to see the tears she stubbornly held back. I followed after her the web of our bond needing to be satiated to prepare for the separation a phone call could not fix. Not when I couldn’t talk to her.

“Let me organise things here and then when I have saved up enough and I know mother has support, I will come and find you.” My hands moved in quick motions, so fast I worry still to this day that she missed what I had tried to tell her. I worry that she thought I had abandoned her.  

“She’s leaving us you know, for good.” Mother said 

The trees were covered in silver and the sky was on fire from an eclipse that came once every few years, but all I could see was Val’s back as she walked away from me. 

‘I know.’ I thought, ‘I fucking know.’

...

The years passed in a blur of colours. Sullen and macabre now that Val was gone. The waters seemed darker, with more algae rising to suffocate the plants, a fire had raged through the wildlands, bearing the tree's innards to the world. Mother had worsened but that was common the doctors had said, for Alzheimer's patients. They gave me the brochures for local nursing homes and sent me on the way. I shoved them so far back in my desk I was positive that they’d been swallowed up into some great abyss. Not yet, it was too early for that so I took a breath and pushed onward, mending clothes, paying the nurse who came three days a week, sending money to Val and waiting for the day I thought my life could finally start. 

…

A phone rang somewhere, a faint buzzing roiling about with my excitement. My fortieth birthday and come and gone a couple days ago, I’d been to visit mother for a bit of cake and aggressive dialogue – her short-term memory was stuffed, but her long-term frustration at her two daughters remained ever present- before returning home and getting to listen to Val’s voice when she called me. I didn’t text her I was coming; to tell her that I’d booked the plane ticket already and packed my luggage a week earlier because my patience had ebbed, and my heart seemed to jolt intensely whenever I locked up my trailer. ‘Third last time I lock up, second last time I lock up, last time I lock up.’

She’d sounded bubbly with a tinge of tiredness; Val had blamed it on early morning seminars and poor public transport. “Did you know the bus stops running after six pm? How am I meant to prioritise study when my last class of the day ends after eight and my work begins at ten? I’m this close to packing a blanket and just sleeping at work.” I hummed in response, begging my mouth to move and form the words I wanted to say, when that didn’t work, I took to sighing loudly, not that Val had minded. 

The phone rang again. I left my suitcase by the door the text-to-audio app ready to assist as I went to pick up the home phone, my world was ablaze and then suddenly it wasn’t, suddenly the thunder was rolling in and the skies were opening up, the rain pounding against the windows. The ten-year drought had finally broken and so had I.

“We’re very sorry to inform you that your sister has passed, we will need a representative of the family to come down to the station to identify her. Our condolences go to you and the rest of the family.”