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Summer 2008 Issue
$3.95 [ buy ] |
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I became a journalist at 19, a published novelist at 50. Despite the long span between those two events, they spring from the same inspiration: growing up in a storytelling family on the banks of Bayou Black, La.
My dad, Rex Wells, was an only child and had moved with my grandparents to Cajun Louisiana from backwoods Arkansas near the end of the Great Depression. My grandfather, William Henry Wells, grew up with four siblings on a hardscrabble farm near the tiny town of Des Arc, and by the time my dad had come along, he’d ditched farming for coon hunting, trapping, catfishing and moonshining — anything to distance himself from the direct influences of drought and the boll weevil. They lived far from town along a primeval river bottom in a wood shack with a dirt floor, a wood-burning stove, coal-oil lamps and an outhouse in the back. My dad got his first .22-rifle when he was 7 years old and roamed the woods rather freely, often alone. By age 10, he was an expert fisherman and could skin any fur-bearing critter. These skills he acquired from my grandfather Willie, who was also an expert at tending his still, running whisky, taking all-night coon hunts with his prized black-and-tan coonhound, Ole Henry, and violating all manner of game laws to put a little extra food on the table or cash in the piggy bank. |
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This life spun off a fair number of stories and since my grandparents lived with us on and off over the years, my five brothers and I got a good download of their 19th-Century-like Arkansas life. We were required to eat supper together at the kitchen table every night. And after Grandpa Willie dispatched grace—half-heartedly mumbling so that nobody but God could understand anything but the “amen” part—we would tuck into Granny Wells’ squirrel stew and dumplings or my mother’s Cajun gumbo and listen to the adults swap tales.
Everybody had a story.
My dad ended up marrying into a big, gumbo-cooking Cajun clan named Toups. From my mother, Bonnie, we would get stories of hurricanes, floods and family plantations lost in long ago murky times on the bayous. If Grandma Toups was around, we’d hear hair-raising tales of the Loup Garou, the Cajun version of the werewolf. Dad, a U.S. Marine, spent three insane years of combat in the Pacific. He didn’t talk much about the fighting. But he loved to tell the story of how, before the Japanese ruined his life by bombing Pearl Harbor, he’d gone on a goodwill tour around the world as a spit-and-polished captain’s aide. In Australia, he discovered that almost every eligible Aussie man was already off fighting the Germans. To be a handsome leatherneck parading around with the service’s best uniform in a nation of under-attended women was a thing he never got over. I loved that story as much as my mother hated it.
The prize yarn-spinner of them all, however, was Grandpa Willie. He had a million stories, but the one that stuck out was the tale of the monstrous splay-footed coon that had mystified every serious coon hunter along the Bayou Des Arc bottomlands by outrunning and outwitting packs of dogs, generally avoiding getting treed and always, somehow, slipping away if he did get treed. Fellows would set out traps and find them sprung in the morning, that coon’s signature splay-footed track mucking up the ground all around, as though he were taunting people.
Since coon hunting in those parts was an enterprise taken as seriously as stock trading is today, that coon took on a mythic aura, and Grandpa Willie resolved to dedicate his life to adding the critter to his hide collection. After much raccoon detective work (“I had to think like a coon,” Grandpa Willie was fond of saying), he figured out that coon’s nocturnal feeding habits.
One night, he and Ole Henry, camped out under a giant hackberry tree and waited for that sly ole coon to come to them. He did, and as he warily slipped down from the branches at dawn, satiated on hackberries, Ole Henry waited until that coon was on an exposed part of the tree trunk. Then he went to bawling. The startled coon froze long enough for Grandpa Willie to switch on his carbide headlamp, get a bead on the critter with his .22 and shoot him dead. It was not just a good shot but pretty much a miraculous shot, to use a cliché of modern sports parlance, with the game on the line. Grandpa Willie figured that if he missed a coon that canny, he’d never get another crack at him.
That coon weighed 30 or 40 pounds or, if Grandpa Willie had had enough beer, 50. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d heard the story of the splay-footed coon and Ole Henry so often that I’d throw up my hands in a crucifix formation, as if I were warding off a vampire. Yet the truth is my biggest regret is that I never taped Grandpa Willie so that I could listen to the story over and over again, and make my daughters, who pretty much grew up in the Yankee suburbs, listen to it, too.
After starting college, I succeeded in flunking out after just two semesters. That, and because I was broke, inspired me to apply for a part-time reporter’s job on my weekly hometown newspaper. It was offering $1.87 an hour. Until then, it had not occurred to me that you might get paid for telling, or at least writing, stories. Given that I had completed high school English with at least a B average and came from a storytelling family, I considered myself reasonably qualified. The most pointed question I was asked by the editor-owner was whether, as a fellow named Wells, I might be related to “Catfish Willie” Wells, another moniker Grandpa Willie had earned, because of his knack for catching lunker catfish that lived down in the muddy waters around the Main Street Bridge in the nearby town of Houma. Grandpa Willie’s record was 51 pounds on a cane pole. And whenever he caught a fish over 30 pounds, he’d ring up the newspaper and ask, “Wanna take my picture?” Usually, they did. But if they had more pressing stories, Grandpa Willie, a man with perhaps an inflated sense of catfishing’s importance in the universe, would take matters into his own hands. He’d put his lunker cat into a rusty washtub in the ratty trunk of his rusted green Chevrolet, drive over to the newspaper office and wander up the wooden stairs to the second-floor newsroom with the fish slung over his shoulder, dripping slimy catfish water everyplace.
| In the same way a person becomes a master coon tracker or squirrel skinner, a storyteller’s success depends not just on some natural inclination, but in a commitment to master the terrain. |
They took his picture, all right—I’m guessing to get rid of him.
So the question of my relationship to Catfish Willie was a loaded one. But in our part of Cajun Louisiana, where 95 percent of the surnames were French, we happened to be the only Wellses in the phone book. I could not easily dodge the answer. Yes, I confessed, Catfish Willie was my grandfather.
The editor looked at me, smiled and said: “If you’ve got half the gumption of your grandpa, you’ll probably be good at this job.” You could say I got my first job on the back of Grandpa Willie’s fish stories.
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