The Other Joseph Read online

  Our farm was flat level except for at the back of one pasture, near the pond, where a tube of ground about six feet high and ten feet wide came snaking out of the pinewoods for thirty yards. For some reason, before I was born even, my father named that mysterious buckle of land after the place he claimed the Civil War had been lost. Cemetery Ridge. Dad used to say that Lee, sickened by the hell at Gettysburg, had leaned way too much on religion, deciding if victory for the South was God’s will they’d be able to take that high ground. So a faith experiment, in Dad’s opinion. A faith experiment by a man known as much for his self-­control as for his piety. A man who had finished West Point without a single demerit. A man not prone to acting rashly. An honorable mistake, but a mistake all the same. “General Lee,” Pickett had cried, “I have no division now.” Generals gamble, and boys die.

  So for years that was my family’s joke name for our own miniature ridge —­all the way up until the winter day in ’88 when a briar-­scratched graduate student from New Orleans came calling. He went by Ethan, if memory serves, and he was convinced Cemetery Ridge was actually a small section of an ancient Indian mound that lay mostly in those paper company pines. For the past month Ethan had been roaming all through that corporate forest on the sly, surveying and taking soil samples, and now he was hoping we would let him poke around on our land as well.

  “Guy’s a homo,” Tommy whispered to me.

  My brother’s hair was long and ragged that winter, and when he talked he’d hook a finger through his brown bangs to keep them off his face. That impish grin. High school Tommy always looked like a surfer to me. Some The Lost Boys, California kid now stuck in Louisiana.

  “A dork,” I said, ten years old and wanting to play too.

  Tommy snorted, then laughed.

  “Frick and Frack,” said Dad. “Quiet.”

  At first I think our father, being a history teacher, was embarrassed he hadn’t seen Cemetery Ridge for what it might really have been, but in the end his curiosity won out over his pride, and he threw in with Ethan. Dad and Tommy and I spent the day with him in our pasture, watching the surveying of Cemetery Ridge, and a month later Ethan came to show us an aerial photo that had the contours of the entire spread-­eagle hill drawn on it in white grease pencil. We saw the outline of a creature flattened like roadkill in the pinewoods. The hill had four legs and a head, and the tip of a long and curling tail trespassed onto our property. This was maybe a thirty-­five-­hundred-­year-­old effigy mound, Ethan told us. A very rare thing. Older than Stonehenge. Older than the Great Pyramid of Giza. In fact, except for a dirt bird over in Poverty Point, he didn’t know of another effigy mound in all of Louisiana. I thought I was looking at a weasel, but Ethan was thinking panther. It might even be a prehistoric depiction of the Underwater Panther, he explained —­a water monster many Native American tribes were documented to have worshipped.

  But after that we never heard from Ethan the grad student again. Maybe he got his Tulane Ph.D. and left for some far-­off place. Maybe he stopped believing. At one point Dad was communicating with archeologists from the state, but they were dubious. Though northeast Louisiana does have a number of Indian mounds, those state archeologists thought our hill in Lincoln Parish sat a shade too far west to be an Indian mound of any sort, much less an effigy mound. Still, they seemed interested enough until the paper company bosses got involved. Political strings were pulled. No one was getting access to their land without a judge’s order, and eventually that hill was forgotten by everyone but us Josephs.

  And perhaps the hill wasn’t some outlier Indian mound but a trick of geography. Maybe a hill was just a hill, I mean. Nevertheless, my father would spend a good portion of the nine years he had left on this earth obsessed. What was once Cemetery Ridge became the tail of the Panther Mound to him, and that same June, the day Tommy departed for basic training —­choosing the navy over college and breaking my parents’ hearts —­Dad gave us each a little steel vial strung on a neck chain. A silver necklace for Mom, dog-­tag ball chains for me and him and Tommy. The vials were about an inch and a half long and had been filled with Panther Mound dirt. Tommy is leaving us, said Dad. But this is our home, and this is our family. We’ll keep these on us to remember that.

  Tommy wept. A thing I’d never seen. Then he hugged our parents good-­bye and punched me in the arm. He earned his SEAL Trident at nineteen just like he promised, and less than three years from that arm punch he would deploy during the buildup to Desert Storm. One of those four vials probably tumbles along somewhere in the Persian Gulf now. Another two lie buried in Louisiana. That only leaves mine. And though I’m no warrior, and though I suspect this stolen dirt may be cursed, I’ll die too before I let anyone free it from my neck.

  After the 2005 double punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the good ­people of Muncie, Indiana, had sent a bookmobile slash computer lab they called a Cybermobile down to Grand Isle for us to use —­and in ’07 that bus was still parked in the lot of our wrecked library. It had pictures of Garfield the orange cat painted on both sides. He was reading a book while merry mice looked on. When I wasn’t offshore that was where I’d go to check my e-­mail, but there was seldom any point. I didn’t have any family, just a Labrador named Sam, and the few humans I considered friends weren’t really big on computers.

  But still I would go there, and two days before my accident I’d clicked on the e-­mail that would roust me from nearly a decade of hibernation, a summons from the great wide open that, ultimately, would start me on the boomerang journey from Grand Isle to California and back again:

  Dear Mr. Joseph,

  You don’t know me, but I think a navy guy named Thomas Muir Joseph was my birth father. He was born in Ruston, Louisiana, on April 17, 1970, and was living in San Diego in December 1990. Was that your brother? Please don’t be too freaked out. I only want to talk, and I hope you do too. Yes, no, please write me back.

  Joni

  Holy fuck. It had seemed impossible to believe. The sort of e-­mail you might get from some spam-­slinging con artist. But this person was definitely describing Tommy —­Ruston, the birthday, the hat-­tip-­to-­a-­dead-­naturalist middle name Mom had chosen for him —­and he had indeed been stationed across the bay from San Diego, at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. I read and reread that e-­mail, but before I could decide whether to type a reply to Joni no-­last-­name at [email protected], the librarian told me it was time to lock up the Cybermobile for the day. I spent a mostly sleepless night, then shipped out on a morning crew boat for my hard-­luck stint on the Loranger Avis.

  Below deck, the crew boat Deborah Ann looked like the inside of a passenger jet. Reclining, tray-­table-­in-­front-­of-­you seats —­seven rows of them cut into threes by port and starboard aisles. I was sitting at a port window, surrounded by five of the hands who’d been rotating two weeks on, two weeks off with me the longest. Little Owen and then little Darius to my right. Malcolm, Mud Duck, and Jimbo in the row ahead of us. I avoided ­people for the most part. These were the only folks I was really at all close to, but they didn’t stick around Grand Isle any more than required.

  Jimbo and Darius lived in Texas.

  Malcolm, Lafayette.

  Owen, Kenner.

  Mud Duck, Arkansas.

  I knew the names of their sons and their daughters, of their girlfriends and their wives and their ex-­wives —­and though sometimes they invited me to leave Grand Isle and visit them in mainland America, I never did. They understood why someone with my past might choose to lie low and live year-­round on the island, but what they didn’t get was why I took it to such an extreme. Why in general I treated Grand Isle like a penal colony, only venturing across the bridge on rare occasions. It’s not that I delight in solitude. I don’t, actually. But I’d come to prefer the comfort and security of seclusion over the uncertainty of the unknown, and if the guys called me a hermit for that, so be it.
<
br />   But then [email protected] sent me an e-­mail and confused things. The Deborah Ann was quiet save for some tired, half­hearted conversations —­forty or so men trying to sleep or bullshit their way through the two-­and-­a-­half-­hour ride to the Loranger Avis —­but me, I was slumped against the clammy window and thinking. Bayou Rigaud tracks the north side of Grand Isle, and our hundred-­foot slave ship was leaving that channel, coming around the narrow island as we entered Barataria Pass. Strong, deep waters there. Our outlet to the Gulf.

  “What’s black and blue and hates sex?”

  I could hear the grin in Malcolm’s voice without needing to see him. These digs were a specialty of his. He knew a book’s worth of pedophile jokes, and he’d been rattling them off since before we left the dock. “My God,” I said. “Enough already. It’s early.”

  But Malcolm had turned around in his seat to look at me, perching his chin atop the headrest like a sixth-­grade bus bully. And though Owen and Darius had their eyes closed, I knew they were listening. Mud Duck and Jimbo too, for that matter.

  “The twelve-­year-­old in Roy’s trunk.”

  The guys all snickered but didn’t fall out. They’d heard better from Malcolm, and he slid back down his hole. The Detroit Diesels had throttled up, and we were full into the pass now, chugging along at fifteen knots, the wake casting out behind us growing to swells of four, five, six feet. To starboard, through the across-­the-­hull windows: glimpses of the east end of Grand Isle and the coast guard station, the oak and hackberry of the state park. To port, through my own window: the risen sun over Grand Terre Island and the brick, granite, and cemented-­shell ruins of Fort Living­ston, almost two hundred years old and fading.

  Malcolm again. “Say what you want about child molesters, at least Roy drives slowly past schools.”

  A parting gift, I guess, because he was on his feet, leaving with Mud Duck and Jimbo to go bother the captain in the wheelhouse. I waited until they were in the aisle and gone before bumping at Owen with my elbow, then I reached over to poke Darius on his knee. They really were sleeping this time. Owen wiped at his face. Darius yawned. A small, dark-­skinned white man and a small, light-­skinned black man. Me, I’m neither big nor small, just five foot ten and wiry. Rig work is a burn-­calorie job. I still weighed what I had as a college boy.

  “Can I ask something?” I said.

  “When you kill him, use a twelve-­gauge, brah,” said Owen. “A double-­barrel so no plastic gets left. Bang, bang. Buckshot, or maybe turkey loads, to his melon.”

  “Gangster,” said Darius. “Cops can’t be tracing no shotgun.”

  I shook my head. “Y’all know I had a brother, right?”

  They nodded, and I told them about the e-­mail. They both took it all in. Ready for me to let them give counsel, but not interrupting. The Loranger Avis had satellite Internet, plus a ­couple of computers in the common room for the hands to share, and I was wanting to know if I should send an e-­mail of my own when we made the rig. “So?” I said.

  “That was yesterday?” Owen asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, well,” said Darius.

  Their advice was to walk away. “At best you’re getting set up for the take,” Owen explained. “At worst you’re getting a teenager in California.”

  “You don’t want no teenage girl in your life,” said Darius. “How’d that work out for you last try, dog?” He laughed and reclined his seat, pulled his Houston Texans hat down like a mask.

  I turned back to the window. We were almost out the pass, and some sports in bay boats were clustered near the Grand Terre shoreline, casting sparkle beetles for speckled trout. They quit fishing and motored up as the Deborah Ann grew level. Aiming their bows at us, toward that coming wake that might have swamped them or run them aground.

  By the time the Deborah Ann reached the Loranger Avis I’d also let Jimbo and Mud Duck and even Malcolm in on my secret, but they were all of the same mind: this was either a scam or a sick prank. Malcolm can be sincere when he’s not performing for an audience, and as we watched the others line up to crane-­ride the Billy Pugh personnel basket onto the rig he made me promise I’d wait a day or two before rushing to a computer.

  And yet on my first night bunking on the Loranger Avis sleep didn’t come much better for me than it had in my Airstream on Pearl Lane in Grand Isle. I won’t say that Dear Mr. Joseph e-­mail was the reason I lost my finger the next day, but in ten years of working the oil patch I’d never once been injured —­and only an exhausted man would have been idiotic enough to feed his pinkie to an electric hoist.

  I made up my own mind about writing “Joni” while I was at the hospital in Cut Off. Word about maritime injuries and mishaps tends to spread quickly among the ­people with ties to that dangerous world, but I spent three nights in Lady of the Sea with no visitors other than a Loranger Drilling goblin bent on taking my statement for his incident report. The only person to even call was my neighbor and yellow Lab babysitter Jack Hebert. Jack was retired from flying spotter planes for the pogy fishing fleet, lived with his wife, Ada, and her sister in a Pearl Lane single-­wide he’d lifted onto pilings. He collected my mail and, for a hundred dollars a stint, looked after Sam whenever I was away working. Walked him and fed him and such. Jack and I weren’t buddy-­buddy, but we did have a symbiotic sort of relationship. That is, Jack would do things for me if I threw enough money his way.

  So I had nobody, not really —­but, I realized, with this Joni here’s a slight chance that maybe I do.

  The doctors discharged me home, and I hitched a ride south on Highway 1 with a gravel hauler. Thirty-­five miles later he dropped me off at the dock so I could retrieve my car —­a four-­door Chrysler LeBaron I’d had since I was eighteen —­then that goofy Cybermobile was the first place I went. Nothing new from j67789@gmail

  .com. My left hand was a mitten of bandages, but I pecked out a reply with my right: Call me at this number, Joni. I’m skeptical, but I’ll talk.

  Afterwards I drove to Pearl Lane, and when I pulled in Sam began kangarooing against the front of his kennel, eyes glowing in the headlights. I set him free, gave him some love, scratching at his throat until he was trembling, then I unpacked my duffel bag and shaved, cleaned myself up. I was anxious and restless and thirsty, all on account of that e-­mail, and though I felt bad putting Sam back in the kennel so soon after returning to him, at nightfall I went to Carl’s Lounge.

  About a week after my thirteenth birthday. January 1991. I’d stayed home from school with a fake cough, and I was taking a break from game shows and my back-­of-­the-­closet Playboy when a black car came crunching down the gravel road to our farm. Two men in U.S. Navy dress uniforms climbed out, others watched from the car. I answered the door, understood what it all meant, but they weren’t going to tell me anything. The chaplain or maybe both of them were wearing Old Spice, and even now the smell takes me to that day.

  My parents were over at the high school still, so the three of us sat outside and waited. We were on the porch swing, and the chaplain put his arm around me when I began to cry. It was cold, but I didn’t think to invite them inside and they didn’t ask. A snafu on their part, catching me home alone. Then finally my parents came rolling up in the truck. Dad was a gentle man, but he spiderwebbed the windshield with his fist when he saw us. Mom was out the door before the pickup stopped moving. Her legs collapsed under her, and I ran down the steps. I was hugging Mom, and Dad was hugging me. A forlorn tangle of Josephs hearing a voice like God’s. Sir, ma’am, there’s been a helicopter crash. Your son is missing.

  At dark my parents made room for me in their bed and we lay there side by side, out of things to say, holding hands like I was still very young and we were off walking together on some sunny afternoon. I didn’t know how bad nightmares could be until that night, and even then I felt as if one Roy Joseph was moving out so another could move
in. The child me is someone I can hardly remember.

  A year later a memorial ser­vice was held in the high school gym for my lost-­at-­sea, body-­not-­recovered brother. Tommy had been officially declared dead —­a non-­hostile casualty swallowed up by the Persian Gulf —­and after so many unanswered prayers even Mom wanted nothing to do with a church by that point. The same woman who once told me that the more she learned about science, the more she believed in a Creator. And though the navy never gave us any reason to hope, and though by then we’d let go of any delusions Tommy might be found, my parents refused to call that service a funeral, not without any remains to bury. The nearest decent Lincoln Parish cemetery was in Ruston, about eight miles to the west, and we’d gone there the week before so they could choose a site for a memorial stone. They bought a plot in the shade of a grandfather water oak, then put a deposit down on three others adjacent. I probably wasn’t supposed to hear that part, but Mom and Dad were living in such a trance in those days sometimes they seemed to forget I was around.

  Like I said, a year of desperate, praying-­for-­a-­miracle purgatory followed that visit from the Grim Reaper Corps before my parents gave up on the dream that Tommy, or at least his body, might ever come back to us, and his SEAL team platoon was stateside when we had the memorial ser­vice. The full thirteen had flown out to pay their respects, along with some senior officers and enlisted from the higher commands —­and all of Dry Springs was in attendance, of course. There was a repast at our farm following the ser­vice, and though I should have stayed home with my parents, after the repast I caught a ride to a house across the highway from the Pilgrim’s Pride chicken hatchery for another sad party.