Sundays

While growing up, Sundays were always the best.

I’d wake up that morning and slowly make my way out of bed. The first order of business was off cause getting to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.

But before I ever got there, I could already smell Sunday lunch.

Granny had been at it awhile.

Some weeks, she’d announce ahead of time what she was going to cook. Other weeks, she’d leave us guessing. Walking down that hallway, I’d try to figure out what was on the stove.

Gumbo was easy.

You could hear her working the pot before the smell of the Cajun Trinity hit you- the wonderful aroma of onions, bell pepper, and celery being sauteed down in a pot. The sound of the chicken browning in the hot oil—that crackling and popping that let you know something good was underway.

She’d stir and turn the pieces, scraping the bottom of the pot as she went.

Those were the sounds of Sunday morning.

By the time I made it into the kitchen, Granny would be standing there in her apron, with three or four dishes going at once. Gumbo, jambalaya, a roast, fresh vegetables, fried shrimp, or spaghetti -whatever she had decided on that week.

And if you didn’t like what everybody else was eating, she probably had something cooking for you, too.

She’d make a main dish for the family, then one or two more for the picky eaters. Preparing a whole Sunday lunch was apparently not enough work. She had to make sure everybody had something they liked- nobody was ever going to go hungry on Sunday at her house.

That was Granny.

Cooking was how she made people happy, and she put a lot of work into making us happy.

I can still picture her standing at that stove. The apron. The pots. Her stirring one thing while something else cooked beside it. Creole seasoning, butter, onions, bell pepper, and celery went into so much of what she made.

A written recipe rarely entered into the situation.

She knew what she was doing.

And then there were the desserts.

She made this fluffy cake with a vanilla flavor and cinnamon that I loved. Ask her about it, and she’d tell you it was just a box cake.

Well, that wasn’t the whole story.

It might have started in a box, but Granny added flour, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, and whatever else she figured it needed.

How it started was never how it ended.

She also made fig cake and syrup cake. To this day, I still have no idea how she made those. I remember eating them just fine. Making them is another matter.

But the dessert everybody fought over was her milk pie.

“Tart a la Bouille,” as we called it in Cajun French.

I can still see her with that rolling pin, flattening the sweet dough for the crust and the top. Even the leftover dough had a purpose. She’d turn it into tea cookies.

She worked her magic with flour, sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg

Then there was the custard for the milk pie.

She made it in a double boiler, stirring and keeping the temperature just right until it was ready. I knew it took some doing, but watching her, you’d think she had never had a batch give her trouble in her life.

We’d all want whatever custard was left over.

Then, once the pie was finished, we’d fight over pieces of that, too.

For a woman who spent so much time making sure everybody had enough to eat, Granny could sure make a family argue over dessert.

That’s what I remember about Sundays. Waking up tired. Making my way down the hallway. The smell of lunch already cooking. Chicken popping in the pot. Granny in her apron, getting everything ready for us.

It was just what happened every Sunday.

Even to this day I just want to wake up on a Sunday morning and hear that spoon scraping the pot just one more time..

Uncle Coe and the Calf

 Uncle Coe and the Calf

AKA Imprinted Memory

After he retired, my grandfather Berton raised cattle and baled hay from our pasture to feed them. He had an old barn that held maybe fifty or sixty square bales. To this day, I can still remember the earthy smell when I walked inside that barn: dried hay, dust, grass, and dirt.

The ceiling of that old barn was only about five and a half feet high. I always figured some Cajuns built it, because nobody else would make a barn you had to constantly duck to walk through. We were always hitting our heads walking inside that old thing.

We used that barn and the attached pen beside it to round up cattle, vaccinate them, brand them, or send them to the sale barn. Branding took six or seven men. I was little enough to stay out of their way, but close enough to watch. They’d bring several cows into the pen, pick one, and wrestle it down.

I remember one time, while they were rounding them up, Uncle Coe grabbed a calf by the tail.

That calf took off, dragging him around the pen while it jumped and kicked its back legs. Coe held on through one lap, then another. By the third trip around, it looked like he might stay attached to her forever.

Then the calf slowed down—just for a second. But Coe kept running.

The calf jumped and kicked, catching him square in the stomach. That stopped him dead in his tracks.

Once we’d stopped being stunned and finished laughing (That's how the Daigles deal with trauma-our own or others), the men went over to check on him. As Coe lifted his shirt, we all started laughing all over again.

There, right in the middle of his stomach, was a hoof print as clear as day.

Well, they say you can’t catch a tiger by the tail, and apparently, a calf isn’t much better.

This is not the culprit. This was a random cow I took a picture of in a random pasture in Cameron.

The Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

 "Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction" 

Or: Things Are Not Always What They Seem

Back in the 1990s, I worked as a Cameron Parish Deputy Sheriff, patrolling the sandy beaches of Holly Beach, Louisiana.

Me on Holly Beach

One weekend, dispatch called about a fight on the beach near the Four Corners Bar. Two men were involved.

When I arrived, I found a crowd gathered in a circle. That is rarely a good sign. Nobody forms a circle to discuss the weather.

I stepped out of my patrol car, made my way through the crowd, and immediately spotted one of the men lying on the ground.

He had a knife sticking out of his leg.

Standing off to the side was the other man.

I asked who had been fighting, and the crowd pointed to the man on the ground and the man standing nearby. At first glance, this appeared to be a fairly easy case to solve. One man had a knife in his leg. The other man did not.

I walked over to the man who was still standing, pulled out my handcuffs, and prepared to arrest him for aggravated battery.

That was when he said, “I didn’t stab him. He stabbed himself.”

Now, during my time in law enforcement, I heard plenty of creative explanations. But “He stabbed himself” sounded like one of the least creative—and least believable.

I told him his story made absolutely no sense, handcuffed him for everyone’s safety, and went to help the wounded man while I figured out what had actually happened.

I knelt beside the man with the knife sticking out of his leg and asked him to tell me what happened.

And this is where the story took a turn.

The handcuffed man was telling the truth.

The injured man explained that the two of them had been preparing to fight. The other fellow was bigger, so he pulled out a knife and warned him to leave him alone.

The bigger man was apparently not impressed. He laughed at him and, using some rather unkind language, told him he was too chicken to stab anybody.

The man on the ground decided there was only one reasonable way to prove him wrong.

He stabbed himself in the leg.

Apparently, his thought process was: I’ll show you what I’m capable of—even if I have to do it to myself.

So there I stood on Holly Beach with one man in handcuffs for a stabbing he didn’t commit, another man on the ground with a knife in his leg that he had put there himself, and a crowd of witnesses who had just watched the whole thing unfold.

True story.

And yes, alcohol may have been involved.

Actually, there wasn’t much “may have been” about it.

The Storm

24 SEPTEMBER 2005

It’s been 21 years since I’ve been back home. 

Not back to Cameron Parish. I’ve been back plenty of times over the years. But back to the home where I grew up. 

 After Hurricane Rita made landfall in September 2005 and destroyed almost everything in its path, there really wasn’t much of a home to return to. 

When the forecasts started showing the eye of Rita passing almost directly over Cameron as a Category 5 hurricane, we knew it was going to be bad. We had lived through hurricanes all our lives. In Cameron Parish, hurricanes were just part of life. But we didn’t know it was going to be that bad. 

 We packed whatever we could fit into an SUV and a pickup truck. My grandparents left behind Magnalite pots. Clothes. Dishes. Pantry full of cast iron pots and pans. Tools. Fishing Rods and Reels.

Audrey Daigle standing in her kitchen summer of 2005, right before Rita's devistation.
Getting her big Magnalite pot ready to cook up something delicious.

I left all my childhood and High school memorabilia, packed away in a trunk.

When you are in the direct path of a storm and landfall is imminent, you have to decide which pieces of your life are worth saving. 

And then we left. 

More than 30 years of my memories stayed behind. 

Two days after the storm, I went back to see the destruction first hand. I had already seen the aerial footage on television. I had seen the pictures and heard the reports. But none of it prepared me for what it looked like when I saw it with my own eyes. 

Driving over the Conway LeBleu Memorial Bridge—the Gibbstown Bridge for all the old people—I started realizing just how bad it was. 

Passing over the bridge for as far south as I could see there were telephone poles leaning nearly on their sides. Mounds of marsh mud four feet high lined the highway for miles. 

Then I started seeing houses. 

Except they weren’t where houses were supposed to be. They were sitting out in the middle of the marsh, some of them miles from where they had once stood. 

That was when I knew. 

The closer I got to home, the less there was. Houses were completely gone from their foundations. Trees had been ripped from the earth. Yards looked like they had been sandblasted. Places that had been green and familiar my entire life were nothing but bare dirt, mud and debris. The strangest part was how disoriented I became. I had driven Highway 82 between Creole and Cameron more times than I could ever count. I knew every curve in that road. I knew where every house was, every mailbox, every little landmark you used without even realizing you were using it. Now they were all gone. I remember going around curves I had traveled my entire life and, for a few seconds, not knowing where I was. 

Everything looked foreign. 

At one point, I nearly drove past the driveway to our own property. 

There were no street signs. 

No mailboxes. 

No telephone poles. 

No neighboring houses. 

Nothing to tell me, This is home. I finally turned into the driveway and drove toward the place where I had spent the first 30 years of my life.

135 Daigle Road-First view of where the house used to be.

And there was nothing left but the steps that had gone up to the front door.

My grandmother Audrey sitting on the front steps of where
the home she knew for 50 years once was.

Everything else was just an empty yard. 

The 2500 sqft house was gone. 

The portable building where they cooked and held Friday night card games was gone. 

The garage that held the freezers of my grandfather J. Berton's bait shrimp and fish were gone. 

The two outdoor buildings where J. Berton kept his tools and garden equipment was gone. 

Everything. 

I remember sitting there stunned, trying to comprehend the emptiness of it. 

You spend your whole life thinking of home as a permanent place. 

Houses change. 

People get older. 

Families move away. 

But somewhere in the back of your mind, you believe the place itself will always be there. You think you can always go back.

Until one day you can't. 

For 21 years, I haven't really gone back to that spot. Maybe parts of me don't want to see an empty piece of ground and be reminded of where an entire childhood once existed. But lately I've been thinking about going back. I'm not sure if it's for Nostalgia or just to Reminisce. Not because I expect to find the house. I know it isn't there.

 But maybe home isn't always the house. 

Maybe sometimes it's just the piece of ground underneath it—and all the memories that never washed away.

"The Mysterious Charlie Ward"

 

Charlie Ward's Oak Tree Circa 2010 (Post Rita)
Old Daigle Homestead Property - Cameron, Louisiana

Charlie Ward’s Gold Earring

When I was growing up, my Granny Audrey used to tell us that a man named Charlie Ward was buried somewhere on our family’s property in Cameron.

She never told the story like it was anything unusual. She said it as casually as someone might mention an old fence line or a tree that had been struck by lightning.

“Charlie Ward is buried back there somewhere," pointing towards a grove of oak trees, and she would say, “And they buried him wearing a gold earring.”

That gold earring was the part that stayed with me.

A grave on the property was mysterious enough, but a man wearing a gold earring in Cameron Parish during the late 1800s or early 1900s seemed almost impossible. Men around Cameron did not wear earrings when I was growing up, at least not the men I knew. They wore shrimp boots, work shirts, pocketknives, and caps stained with years of sweat. An earring—especially a gold one—belonged to pirates, sailors, and men who had traveled to faraway places.

In my young mind, Charlie Ward became all three.

Granny Audrey never gave me enough information to satisfy my curiosity. I do not remember her telling us where Charlie came from, what he did for a living, or how he ended up buried on our property. Maybe she did not know. Maybe parts of the story had been lost before they ever reached her.

That was the way old family stories were passed down. Nobody sat at a table and recorded every detail. Stories were told while drinking coffee, snapping beans, or sitting outside in the evening. Each generation remembered a little less, until all that remained was a name, a place, and one strange detail.

Charlie Ward.

Buried somewhere on the property.

Wearing a gold earring.

That was more than enough to keep my imagination busy.

I pictured him arriving in Cameron by boat, standing on the deck with the Gulf wind blowing through his hair. Maybe he had been a sailor who traveled between New Orleans, Galveston, and ports farther south. Perhaps he had crossed the Caribbean and won the earring in a card game in Havana. Maybe it had been given to him by a woman he loved and could never forget.

Or maybe Charlie Ward was an outlaw.

That possibility made the story even better.

I imagined him riding into Cameron with a stolen horse, a pistol tucked into his belt, and a leather pouch filled with gold coins. He might have been running from the law or hiding from men more dangerous than he was. Somewhere along the way, he found shelter with the people who lived on the property before us. When he died, they buried him beneath a live oak or on a little piece of high ground where the water would not reach him.

And for some reason, they left that gold earring in his ear.

As a boy, I wanted to find him.

I had watched Indiana Jones uncover ancient temples, buried treasures, and things the rest of the world had forgotten. I figured there was no reason I could not do the same thing in Cameron Parish. Indiana Jones had jungles and deserts. I had marsh grass, mosquitoes, mud, and snakes.

I would walk across the property looking for signs. A sunken place in the ground. A wooden cross rotted down to nothing. Anything that might tell me Charlie Ward was there.

Every mound looked suspicious. Every old tree seemed like it might be guarding a secret.

I imagined finding the grave and carefully brushing away the dirt until the gold earring appeared, still shining after nearly a hundred years. In my daydream, I always held it up to the sunlight like some great discovery. Museums would want to display it. Historians would come to Cameron to learn about the mysterious Charlie Ward.

Of course, I never thought much about the fact that I would have been disturbing a dead man’s grave. That is the difference between a boy’s imagination and an adult’s understanding. I was not thinking about bones or death. I was thinking about treasure and adventure.

As I grew older, I stopped searching. Hurricanes changed the land, washed away landmarks, and moved things no man could move. Trees disappeared. Fence lines shifted. Pieces of property that had once been dry became marsh. If Charlie Ward was truly buried there, the land had probably hidden him better with every passing year.

But I never completely stopped wondering about him.

Who was he?

How did he come to Cameron?

Did he have a family somewhere who never knew what happened to him?

And was there really a gold earring resting beneath the Louisiana soil?

I may never know the answers. There may not be a grave marker, a death certificate, or any written record proving Charlie Ward ever existed. All I have is the story Granny Audrey told us.

Still, I believe most family legends begin with some piece of truth.

Maybe Charlie Ward was not a pirate, an outlaw, or a world traveler. He may have been an ordinary man who worked hard, lived quietly, and died far from wherever he had begun. The gold earring might have been the only unusual thing about him.

But to a young boy growing up in Cameron, Charlie Ward was never ordinary.

He was proof that adventure did not always wait in some distant jungle or ancient ruin. Sometimes it was buried in your own backyard, hidden beneath the marsh grass and mud, waiting for someone curious enough to go looking.

I never found Charlie Ward’s grave.

I never held his gold earring in my hand.

But Granny Audrey’s story gave me something that lasted longer than gold. It taught me that every piece of land holds memories, every old name carries a story, and sometimes the greatest treasures are the mysteries our families leave behind.

---

"The Morning After"

Slowly opening my eyes, I could feel the intense rays of the morning sun burning my skin. My head ached like somebody had spent the night pounding on it with a wooden hammer.

I’ve been drunk plenty of times before, but nothing had ever made me feel this bad.

I dragged myself out of bed looking for some aspirin and water. That’s when I noticed my clothes.

Same ones I’d been wearing last night.

What the hell did I drink?

As I rummaged through the bathroom medicine cabinet, I could hear sirens in the distance. At this time of the morning, with hardly any traffic in the Quarter, the sirens echoed off the buildings and seemed to be coming from every direction.

Weird.

Whatever was happening must’ve been pretty bad to have NOPD running Code 3 through the French Quarter this early.

I started my usual morning routine and put on a fresh pot of chicory coffee. As it brewed, I became more aware of the hunger pains deep in my belly.

Except this didn’t feel like hunger.

Sharp, piercing pains shot through my midsection, almost like I’d swallowed shards of broken glass and now they were trying to claw their way back out.

While I waited for the coffee, I flipped on the television, hoping to catch the local weather.

The weatherman was just finishing his forecast when a breaking-news alert flashed across the screen.  

The reporter was standing on the corner of St. Peter and Royal Street.

“Another tourist has been reported missing from the French Quarter overnight,” she said. “This is the fifth tourist to disappear since the beginning of the year.”

Damn.

This city was getting worse every day.

Good thing I wasn’t a tourist.

By the time the coffee finished brewing, the sirens sounded like they were right below my window.

The PD sure was being awfully damned noisy for this probably being some tourist getting their car burglarized overnight or some poor panhandler, off their meds, raising hell in the street.

Then the pain in my stomach got worse.

It felt like something was trying to claw its way out of my bowels.

I walked into the kitchen and reached for a coffee mug. That’s when I noticed my hands.

There was something dark underneath my fingernails.

Dirt.

At least I thought it was dirt.

Where the hell would I have been digging around last night?

I turned on the faucet and started washing my hands. As I scraped underneath one of my fingernails, the dark crust softened and streaked red across my fingertip.

I stopped.

That wasn’t dirt.

It was dried blood.

I stared at my hands.

What the hell did I do last night?

I couldn’t remember one damned thing- yesterday was a total blackout.

Then I heard voices and commotion downstairs.

Now that was strange.

Whatever NOPD was dealing with had apparently followed me home.

I poured myself a cup of coffee and took a sip.

The second I swallowed, it felt like hot lava had hit the pit of my stomach.

My mouth filled with saliva.

I knew what was coming.

I barely had time to turn toward the sink before I started vomiting everywhere—the kitchen floor, the cabinets, the counter, and finally into the sink. 

It came out of me like somebody had opened a spigot connected straight to the pits of hell.

After what felt like forever, it finally stopped.

I stood there breathing hard, staring at the carnage.

What the hell did I eat for supper?

Then I saw something in the sink.

Mixed in with the bile and whatever else my stomach had rejected was the strangest thing I had ever seen.

Something was looking back at me.

A blue eye.

A human eyeball sat near the drain.

Beside it was a man’s gold wedding ring.

For a few seconds, I couldn’t move.

The room started spinning. My mind raced, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.

I stumbled backward and dropped onto a barstool.

That’s when I noticed the clothes on the floor.

A pair of pants.

Shoes.

Neither belonged to me.

Now I was really confused.

I sat there trying to piece together the night before, but there was almost nothing.

Just fragments of memory popping up.

Drinking.

Walking.

Maybe Bourbon Street.

Then nothing.

Footsteps thundered up the stairway.

A lot of them.

Apparently my building had become the center of attention this morning.

Then again, this was New Orleans. There was always something crazy going on.

Especially after a full moon.

I was still trying to remember what happened the night before when my front door suddenly burst open.

NOPD officers poured into the apartment.

“Hands! Let me see your hands!”

Before I could even understand what was happening, they had me on the floor, my arms pulled behind my back and handcuffs around my wrists.

Four officers held me by my arms and legs, dragging me downstairs toward the waiting police cars.

My head was still pounding.

My stomach was still burning.

And all I could think about was that blue eye staring up at me from the kitchen sink.

Then one of the officers keyed his radio.

“One suspect in custody,” he said.

There was a short burst of static.

Then he added:

“The Rougarou has been captured.”

Fishing, not Catching

 

My grandfather, J. Berton Daigle, loved to fish. After he retired, he was on the water at least four or five days a week, and fishing was as much a part of his routine as anything else.

 I remember we had several large freezers in an outside building. One was for frozen vegetables and meats, and the other was Berton's. It was always full of fish and bait.

He would take old half-gallon milk cartons, fill them with shrimp and water, and freeze them. Whenever he went fishing, he didn't measure the trip by time. He measured it by how much shrimp he had. If he ran out of shrimp in an hour, he was done. Sometimes it would take three or four hours, depending on whether the fish were biting
or the crabs and hardheads were simply stealing his bait.

One of his favorite places to fish was an area called North Prong. To get there, he would launch his boat from a tiny ditch on Aunt Ozite's property. Aunt Ozite was Grandpa Pierre's oldest sister.

In some places the little ditch was barely wide enough for his 15-foot aluminum boat to pass through. As we made our way through it, I had to sit in the middle of the boat and duck and dodge the trees and bushes hanging over the water. Every now and then, we would have to watch for a wasp nest hidden somewhere in the branches. Just getting to the fishing spot was always an adventure unto itself.

Another place he liked to fish was Lambert Bayou, a small bayou off of Grand Bayou. It was close to the weirs going into Big Lake, and the redfish were usually biting in that area because they loved feeding on the shrimp and shad running thru l through the weirs.

One of my best memories from fishing with him was finding Native American artifacts along the banks of Grand Bayou. We would pull up to an area he called Shell Hill, and I would walk along the shoreline looking for pieces and shards of pottery. Some were pieces of bowls, with small designs and imprints still visible in the clay. I even found a few arrowheads.

I kept a whole collection of them in a box. I always thought that one day I might donate them to an anthropology or archaeological department. Sadly, when Hurricane Rita struck in 2005, those pieces were lost along with so much of southern Cameron Parish.

Looking back now, all those times I spent fishing or running the crab traps with J. Berton are some of my best memories.

J. Berton was a man of few words. We might have been in the boat for two or three hours and barely said a word to each other. But there was never any need to fill the silence. Fishing with him gave me a chance to slow down and simply be there.

I would sit and watch the water, waiting for that little nibble that might turn into a strike. For those few hours, there was nothing else to think about. No worries. No cares. Just the water, the boat, the bait, and the possibility that the next tug on the line might be a fish.

As I have gotten older, I've come to understand something I didn't realize back then. J. Berton didn't always go fishing for the catching. Sometimes, I think he went simply to get away from everything and spend a few quiet hours with his thoughts.

And whether we caught anything or not, I was lucky enough to be there with him.