Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/108

 at him from a prehistoric past. This lovely dark-complected woman with the affectionate smile, spoke and uttered his name. With that word, he thought of his father, Clayton Le Claire, Sr. He could see him again, walking out of the home place, dressed in beige trousers and puffing on a long, dark cigar. How handsome and vain he had looked. Even now, in his memories, he strutted and held his head high as a peacock.

Like floating myths, the figures of his mother and father moved before him, moved on the earth where he was born. He remembered the roughness of his home; the sand road before it; the great cypress and pine forest; the silent bayou running through it; the things that crawled under its greenish water; and the mud chimney of his grandfather's home. His grandfather—how good and kind he had been when he had brought his few belongings into the little room that was to be his … after the pine box had been placed in the hole dug deep in the crusted earth.

The word "Mother" formed on his moving lips now as he sat there, eyes closed. Again, he felt the grief of that day. It was a grief of time past. It was a man's dream of being a child again … but it was impossible to be a child any longer.

He heard the hollow loud knocks the chunks of dirt, tossed into the hole, had made on the pine box. He saw again the fresh mound between the high weeds and grass. The small group of people surrounding it. The grave of his mother with only a few bouquets of garden flowers around it; one of roses, tied with a string; and another, some yellow-centered blooms squeezed tightly together and placed in a cracked fruit jar. He saw the freshly-turned red soil surrounding the two bouquets; the muddy bayou laying so silently between the old cemetery and the pine woods; and they wove themselves again into his wandering mind.

"Your mother wants you to come live with me, Clayton," his grandfather had said in French. "She's going to sleep now. Don't cry, no. You'll be my boy … you want to, yes?"

Bewildered over the strangeness of everything, the absence of his father, the place they had lowered his mother; and, afraid of what his father would do to him now that his mother would no longer be home, the seven year old boy had clung to his grandfather. "I'll go 98