Everybody's got a story to tell. The trick is finding someone to listen. It doesn't matter how good our stories are, they remain silent and abandoned in the echoes of our minds until another human allows us to unfold them. In ancient times the recorded history of man was passed down by word of mouth. Not the grandiose events that changed our futures, but the day to day mundane details that carved a person's time. That history chronicled by each candle on this trip around the sun, both the good and the bad.

Jimmy Mandell had such a story to tell. Except Jimmy never felt anyone would want to hear about him or his life. Not about the beatings his Daddy gave his Mother in the old worn down line shack out on Route Two beyond the swampland called Bayou St. Pierre. The times Jimmy and his six brothers and sisters huddled in the rafters of the shack and heard his mother plead in her broken English for him to stop. The Cajun woman, drug from her roots by the Lake Charles electrician she'd met in a honky-tonk, now realizing it was too late to crawl back to her clan and beg forgiveness. No, she'd done left the bayou of her childhood life to flop down with the man down on another bayou near them nigger shacks.

Henry Mandell had lost his electrician's union card after one too many bouts with the bottle followed by one too many bouts with the foreman. Tossed out on his ear he went wildcat, searching the backwater sites for jackleg labor paid under the table, doing wiring with one eye while he kept the other eye out for the labor goons searching to break his legs for doing non-union work. Louisiana was a great state as long as you belonged. What you belonged to made all the difference in the world as to whether you lived under or over the rock in the swamp. Right now Henry Mandell and family were barely visible under that slimy, moss covered rock at the edge of Bayou St. Pierre.

Jimmy was about to go into the tenth grade when his life changed. A skinny sixteen-year old kid going to a Catholic high school, he hated his classes and especially the way he was treated by his peers. They all knew he was part of a mixed marriage, half Cajun, half white. The only thing worse was to be a Redbone, the name the southern Louisiana white people cast upon those of Cajun heritage who had crossed the color barrier completely and married into the Black race.

He was a scrawny kid in a skeletal body rapidly trying to catch up to a fast growth spurt. From the year he'd left the junior high over on Lakewood Road he'd grown five inches reaching just an inch short of six foot tall. The basketball coach had given him a careful eye in his first week of gym but after seeing the awkward gait and complete lack of coordination he'd walked away, cursing his luck and the growing reality of another losing season. Such was the luck of Plainsville High, home of the Cougars. Never fielding a winning tem, always striving just to break that .500 mark each season in sports and in life.

The major employment was the paper mill twelve miles to the east and on good days the wind would keep the noxious odors off the backdoor steps of the homes in town. Jimmy often wondered how something as good smelling as a fresh cut tree could smell so bad going through some dirty old paper mill. His worst nightmare was ending up on the work floor of the paper mill, waiting for the five o'clock whistle to blow to step across the street to the line of dirty smelling, dimly lit bars trying to wash the stink and taste of the mill out with a few bottles of cold Jax beer.

This was where his father was along with his older brother Hank, the son biding his time until he'd reached a salary level that would allow him to save enough money to escape this area with his young pregnant wife and their two young daughters. Pa would come home staggering through the doorway of their line shack after squealing off the blacktop to spin to a dusty stop in his eight-year old Ford truck. The smell of stale beer would proceed him through the door, the family clustered together in fear of his anger and his dark moods, praying both would be on vacation just this one night, please Jesus.

Jesus must not have been very fond of Cajun half-breeds down on Bayou St. Pierre because more nights than none he'd ignored the family prayers and a rip roaring drunken brute of a man would stagger through the small doorway demanding his dinner and another beer. If everyone was lucky, since the resultant dinner had to be delayed until the head of household's arrival every night, only a half a dozen slaps or swats would accompany the meal for the most part. Jimmy often was the brunt of this abuse, partly because he was the eldest male still living at home and partly because he'd drawn the unfavorable luck of placement seating close by his father's huge right hand.

"Well Jimmy Jo, tell me what them friggin' nuns dun taught you today at that there fancy high school," Henry growled, gnawing on the fat end of a fried chicken drumstick, his mouth jammed full of hot meat while his left curled around the middle of an icy cold Jax beer.

Jimmy Jo - as his father called him - glanced up trying to gauge the response that had first popped into his mind with the possible retaliatory result his father could launch at him. His temper wind gauge couldn't come up with a good fix so he launched the verbal response, firing at will, so to speak, telling his story and hoping his father wanted to here it.

"We're studying the Louisiana Purchase Pa," he said smiling at the thought this piece of history would please his father.

"Louisiana history? The Purchase you say? Well do tell." Here he paused to laugh with a big belly-shaking bout, stopping only long enough to tilt the beer bottle back and gulp down the remainder of his beer. Pa was no stupid, no. He'd gone to Lake Charles High and actually graduated even if he was not one of the top persons in his class. Deep down in that alcohol sogged brainpan was an intelligent man, well read and abreast of the latest news. It was just all the alcohol and problems of daily living got in his way of success.

He waved the empty bottle at his wife and she scurried to get another out of the refrigerator, praying it wasn't the last one. Did I remember to buy another twelve-pack last Saturday at the Piggly Wiggly? she thought in a moment of panic at the possibility this was the last bottle.

"Did them penguins tell you how Napoleon pulled the wool over them fancy Frenchie's in Paris? No, expected they didn't. See old Bonaparte was really a shrewd bastard. He had all this land here in America and he offered the French aristocracy prime parcels if they would give up their holdings in France and pay him a king's ransom. Got that picture? Good. Now what happened is after all these Frenchie's did just that, they got here to these here lands and guess what?"

Jimmy shook his head in the negative, praying the story would have a happy ending at least for him but knowing his father was heading for another downer of a punch line, something that would degrade his mother's heritage of lifestyle and somehow, indirectly his life and heritage too.

"Well ole Bone-a part sold this here land to the good old U.S. of A. and all them land deeds given by him were deemed invalid. The U.S. of A. done made what was called the Louisiana Purchase and bought all that land for themselves. Screwed them land barons good, he did. Unfortunately a lot of them still made out, running in illegal slaves from the Caribbean to work their plantations after import of slaves was abolished. Old Jean Lafitte, that no good pirate sum-of-a-bitch was the ringleader in this trade. Weren't your kin related to that pirate bastard Lucille?

Lucille Gilroy had been raised in a strict Catholic upbringing in a good Cajun home, taught to respect her elders and be proud of her heritage. Unfortunately a particular wild streak had brought her out of the parishes to the string of dance halls between Lake Charles and Sulphur heading towards the East Texas line. Now she glanced up to the man she had married thirty-two years ago. No longer did she see the handsome blonde crew-cut worker fresh off a building project, his shirt cleaned and pressed as were his Levi's. Smelling of Old Leather and that male smell that somehow escaped the Cajun fishermen she'd grown up around, her sense of passion was aroused by the beat of the country band and the two-stepping male who gripped her just a little lower than normally allowed in polite society and whispered sweet nothings into her ear as they twirled.

The polished cowboy boots and the straw Stetson perched on top of the crew cut completed the ensemble, the complete look making her heart flutter and all senses of caution cast aside. Here was a man with a story to tell and she wanted desperately to listen to every word of it. She wanted to drown in his aura, absorb his inner being and breath the same air he breathed.

"Iffen you say so Pa," she whispered, the sound barely audible even in the hush of the dinner table. She said a silent prayer that it would end here but seeing the man's drunken state and the way he was polishing off this beer, she knew it would be a long night before he passed out asleep and left her to her peace. She silently started another Hail Mary knowing it would not stop the painful reality of what lay ahead but finding some solace in the quiet strength of prayer to persevere the life she had been cast. ......(cont)