Bye Bye Blackbirds
by J. Patrick TravisA light rain was blurring the oblong window facing the courthouse when the phone rang on the editor's desk. Mr. Luquette, the General Manager, was off covering a chamber of commerce meeting regarding the new SuperStore across the highway from the town's limits. It was a hot issue. The big box store threatened Bouleville's small, local businesses and could deprive the town of tax revenue. Because it bought in bulk it could offer lower prices.
Anyway, it was Mr. Fontenot calling from the Wildlife and Fisheries office. He asked for Zach Rawlings, apparently not remembering he'd been gone for nearly a year. When I told him I was the only reporter on duty, he informed me that there'd been a bird kill. We agreed to meet in an hour at the intersection of two parish roads, ten miles to the south, near the Intracoastal Waterway that stretches along the Gulf from Texas to Florida.
The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed that Mr. Fontenot called to speak to Zach, our former editor. In a community of only ten thousand, I figured most people knew that stuff. At the moment there was only four of us reporting, and that's including Mr. Luquette and the new, part-time Society page editor.
When I graduated from high school last year I'd won a summer internship under Zach, and he flat fired my hope for a journalism career. Every day, for three months, he showered me with stories from the history of print media and brought in newspapers from all over, including The New York Times. "There's no more noble work than to be a reporter," Zach said. "This is the Information Age and honest reporters are needed more than ever to inform the people of what's going on in the world."
Fresh out of Vanderbilt, Zach ended up winning two Louisiana Press Association awards and managed to get half a dozen stories accepted by UPI. Within a year, he'd established himself as an intelligent, fair-minded, hard-working journalist. Few locals would go so far as to admit that he might have been the best ever at The News, though, since he wasn't from these parts and, well, he just didn't stay. The ones the locals remembered at the 50 year old, six-day-a-week daily were the ones who stayed ten or twenty years and then went on to become a judge or a state senator.
In addition to assigning me stories, Zach coached me about verbs and how to arrange info in certain orders of importance, depending on whether it was a news story or a feature. He also taught me how to write the lead sentence with the 5 W's in 25 words or less and how to use a .35 mm camera and develop pictures in the darkroom.
One of my favorite duties was tearing off stories as they came spewing out of the UPI teletype machine. Reading the latest news from the wire service made me feel that little Bouleville, down on the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp, was truly connected to the rest of the world. Someday, I dreamed, stories of mine might be transmitted to distant places.
At summer's end, Zach left Bouleville for The Alabama Times, in Birmingham, after a combination of strange events, including a testy investigation of Mayor Duplechain. Sad as I was to see him go, that's really when I became a full-fledged reporter, covering city council and school board meetings. Then, in the fall, I went to State U. and was accepted into the school of journalism. I didn't have great grades going in, so those stories Zach helped me with made the difference, made financial assistance possible.
My mother, who's taught at Boule Elementary for most of my life, cut out some of my stories, placed them in a scrapbook, and showed the collection all around, at her school and at church. My father has always encouraged me to learn his craft of making flutes and fiddles, but before I left for the university he conceded that I might do some good as a reporter.
While I was at State the newspaper hired a lady named Georgia to fill Zach's place, but after a few months, she took a good paying job in public relations up in Lafayette. So, when I came home for the summer, the newspaper was in dire need of a reporter.
Working under Mr. Luquette, however, has been a challenge. Several times he's edited out what I thought were significant quotes by some of the "civic leaders" in my stories. "You're a little too opinionated sometimes," he told me, "just stick to the facts. You've got to be objective, son." What he seemed to like most was going to civic club luncheons. He never tired of telling me how vitally important it was to maintain the paper's respectability in the political and economic community.
It got to be a pattern. When he returned from the luncheons, right before deadline, he'd delete whole sections of my stories, or have me re-write the lead sentence. Once I'd polished off a city council story from the night before and he completely rewrote it so it wouldn't make the mayor look bad. He hadn't even been at the meeting-and he left my byline on the story. It was a total misrepresentation of what really went down. I called Zach long distance to Birmingham about that. He commiserated with me, saying he too had had editors cut paragraphs from his stories. "You've just got to learn to live with compromises in this business," he said.
Anyway, after driving Grandpa's truck to the crossroads, full of curiosity, feeling that I was onto a big story, Mr. Fontenot met me by his wildlife and fisheries truck. He was tall and skinny, with deep creases in his face like the ones in his leather boots, and he had a small, brown mole or wart on his chin. His uniform was dark green, with a yellow and green patch on his shirt pocket. I think he was from the east end of the parish, but after we chatted a while, he said he'd once bought a fiddle for his nephew from my father. He said to follow him.
About five miles down a cracked asphalt, we took to a soft dirt road with ruts in it and crossed by a field of what looked like green beans, followed by a pasture for cows. Before too long we drove up a drive between a farmhouse and a barn and a husky man in faded blue overalls limped off the long, wide porch of the wood-framed house as if he had a bad knee. He had a bit of a Buddha belly. He waved a hand like he was expecting us.
It had stopped drizzling, but the cloud cover still hid the sun. Behind the farmer stood a short, pleasantly plump woman. She wore a long, flower-print dress covered with a familiar Bouleville Fair apron and she was adjusting a dark green garden hat on top of her head.
After introducing me to the Thibodeauxs, who looked to be in their late fifties, Fontenot gathered a cage and some plastic bags and gloves from his truck. Mrs. Thibodeaux was friendly, saying she read The News every day. Her husband eyed my camera and my pony tail and crunched my fingers together with his thick, rough hand.
Walking past the weathered barn, Mr. Thibodeaux hollered at the hounds in a pen to the left to shush up barking. The four of them finally quieted down as the four of us proceeded out into the damp field.
We stepped through the soft sod between the rows of waist-high cane, about a month from ripening into purple, and Mrs. Thibodeaux told us she sure liked watching the flight of the blackbirds. "Just last week our daughter and her husband were over and we watched flocks of them fly over that way, south, toward the Gulf, in the morning, and then over this way, into the trees, in the late afternoon. And now they're all fallin' down dead." Her hands went to her mouth. "It's just awful!"
Past the cane, some thirty yards from the woods, we started seeing the birds. There must have been a hundred of them. A few were fluttering around on the ground, gasping for air, but most lay still as clumps of clay between the green cane stalks. I'd brought my camera, so I clicked some pics as Mr. Fontenot bagged some of the black carcasses.
"Oh my God," Mrs. Thibodeaux said as Fontenot approached one that was barely alive.
Fontenot eyed her for a moment, then he bent down and collected it and quickly scooped it into his portable plastic cage.
Who, what, when, where, and why I thought as I eyed the dead and dying birds. Trudging about, I wrote "black, upside-down wings" and "by green cane" and other such details in my notepad. Echoes of Zach and my journalism teachers at school came to me: to transmit the truth. . .important to our democratic way of life.
Mr. Thibodeaux asked Fontenot what to do with the birds. "You wanna test 'em, or should I just bury 'em in the woods there?"
"I'll collect a few more. We'd better burn the rest," he said, kneeling down to one that flapped its leaden wings once, then again, spasmodically, in slow motion.
The bird didn't even flinch as he bagged it.
The faint, foul odor of death fluttered intermittently in the humid air, and I recalled what an old columnist once said: "the nose is particularly important, for no matter how much stench a newspaperman is exposed to he must never lose his sense of smell."
"What caused this?" I asked, imagining burning birds.
Mrs. Thibodeaux tugged on her floppy bonnet and rolled her eyes, saying she didn't know. Her husband leaned back on his rake: "God knows, but I bet it's something they drinkin'." He looked at Mr. Fontenot, who said, "Well, hopefully we'll find out this time. This is the third kill in a year." He turned face to face with Mr. Thibodeaux. "We'll get an autopsy done on these and I'll send a crew out to dispose of the rest tomorrow morning. In the meantime better not handle them, and keep your dogs away. You never know."
"We're sure gonna miss 'em," Mrs. Thibodeaux said. She was on the verge of tears. "Just look at them." She pointed to one struggling in the mud, wobbling from side to side, lolling its head dizzily. Then it wobbled over on its wings and died with its beak pointed up at the sky.
After a while, the farmer and his wife went back to their house, and Fontenot and I walked into the marshy woods and found more dead birds. It seemed unnaturally quiet. I followed a furrow back toward Fontenot and asked where he would examine them and when he would have some results. "Well, I'll take 'em up to the Lab in Baton Rouge, but, off the record, between you and me-"
He paused, and I quit taking notes.
"Sometimes it's tough to get the folks at the lab to commit to causes. Maybe it's because their science is so good, maybe it's politics, I don't know. The last time they found some contaminant linked to an oil field waste disposal site, but then they said they couldn't be sure because there were natural toxins present, too, that might have caused the kill. Sometimes they blame it on bacteria or a virus, so, what I'm saying is, don't get your hopes up on the results being absolutely clear. You know what I mean?"
I nodded, struggling with the off the record business.
Back at the newspaper office, Mr. Luquette was pounding away on his old manual typewriter, his bifocals perched on the tip of his nose. His bald head glistened with nervous sweat. He wanted to know where I'd been, and before I answered he asked if I'd finished the feature story on Coach Mack.
"No," I told him, "there was a bird kill this morning. I went out there with Mr. Fontenot. I got some pics and quotes. " I told him all about it.
"Well, we need something positive to go with this murder trial up in Iberia, and this SuperStore story's boiling over." He paused. "Coach Mack's a legend. Him retiring is big news, and you know how the sports department is short-handed."
I knew. Tony, the paper's sole sports writer, was on vacation for two weeks. I told Mr. Luquette I'd started the story, but that Rette Robichaux, a local free-lancer, really wanted to write it. I didn't tell him that Coach Mack had cut me from the football team my freshman year and that he always seemed to begrudge me for not coming back out in subsequent years-for opting to play soccer my senior year, the first year BHS ever fielded a team. The old coach hated the way soccer was catching on. Futbol season interfered with his off-season weight training program.
Mr. Luquette kept typing and said to hold up on the bird story. "Let's see what Wildlife and Fisheries finds out first. It could just be they died of natural causes, or a virus."
"Or unnatural causes," I felt like saying. I almost walked out of the office right then and there. I don't know why I didn't. Maybe it was because I didn't want to jeopardize my job and the acclaim it brought me about town, as the first Native American to report for The Bouleville News. Instead, I did as he said and searched the UPI teletype machine and ripped off a few stories. One was about the Columbia spacecraft landing at Cape Kennedy after successfully launching a communications satellite. "Good," Mr. Luquette said, "we'll use that." Another was about a Congressman named Broome who'd spoken at Southwest State up in Lafayette. I didn't tell him about that one.
Broome warned that politics was jeopardizing the American dream. In advocating tax cuts for big business and spending cuts for social programs, he said, "Once upon a time there was a preacher preaching salvation. 'It's free as water,' he said. Then, a little later, a collection plate was passed around. Upon seeing the plate, someone stood up and asked, 'I thought it was free?'
"The preacher said, 'It is free, but when we pipe it down to you, you've got to pay for that.'" Broome said free enterprise is the same way, but "the cost of the pipeline has gotten to be too much."
Seething with disappointment, I asked Mr. Luquette to excuse me. I took the story with me into the bathroom. I knew he'd want to run it. He was in Broome's corner on taxes. Times Mr. Luquette had axed significant quotes came rushing back. Most of all was the time he nixed my efforts to dig into the death of Mitch, my former teammate, who'd mysteriously "fallen" off the Bayou Bridge. After I pissed, I dropped my pants and wiped my ass with the story and flushed.
When I returned, Mr. Luquette turned from his typewriter and his cluttered desk and said it was okay to let Robichaux do the feature on Coach Mack, but to make sure he had it done by tomorrow's deadline. "What you could do right now," he said, "is go find a few file photos, you know, maybe from last season's playoff win, with all his players gathered around him. We'll run a photo today and the full feature tomorrow."
After I found the photograph, he glanced at it and said, "Good. Now, take this and see if you can rewrite it a little." He handed me a press release from a gas pipeline company located in Moganvieux, twenty miles east of Bouleville. "Give 'em a call, play up the jobs angle. And hurry."
The company was embarking on a multi-million dollar project through the Atchafalaya Basin and would be hiring up to a hundred workers. So I called, took notes, and wrote, thinking all the while how the dead blackbirds were going to be killed in more ways than one.
Two hours later, I bumped into Mr. Luquette in the hallway. He said the ladies in the composing room had finished pasting up the pages. We had met the deadline and he slapped me on the shoulder. "Good work," he said, "you're learning."
I forged a smile, but as I departed I felt completely drained of enthusiasm for the job I once wanted more than anything.
At home I walked straight through our old, wood-framed house, tossed my notebook on the side table by the phone and shrugged my mom off when she asked how my day went. I felt nauseated. I stepped on out the back door and walked down to the old oak on the bank of the bayou at the end of our lot. It was drizzling again, misty. I picked up an acorn and whipped it toward the water. It ricocheted off a branch and landed with a soft splash as two sparrows darted up and away. I thought of Zach's words about the need for honest reporters, I remembered Mr. Luquette's command to be objective, and I recalled my university professor's passionate defense of the First Amendment.
Musing on my wounded dream to be a journalist, I heard a spooky spiritual tune from my father's flute drift down through the fog from his workshed back up beside the house. In my heart, I knew Zach was right about compromises, if I was to make it as a reporter; but when the sight and smell of those dead blackbirds surged through me, I braced myself against the oak, leaned over, and threw up into the bayou.
After nothing else was coming up, I spotted my pen on the ground, a pen which Zach had left behind. It must have fallen out of my shirt pocket. It was drenched with milky-yellow puke. Still delirious from retching, I wiped the pen on the grass. Then, crouched on one knee, I flung it with all my might into the bayou, and just as it hit the surface of the water the oblong window of the newsroom shattered, and the whole cloudy ceiling collapsed in a great splash of smoke.