“A Letter Worth Keeping”

This past weekend, I was doing some fall cleaning, going through boxes of things I had packed up and carried around for the last twenty-five years.

Birthday cards from when I turned thirty. Cards from our wedding. Random letters and little notes from people I hadn’t thought about in years.

Apparently, my idea of cleaning has always been putting things in a box and letting my future self deal with them.

Well, my future self finally opened the boxes.

Among all those things I kept, I found a letter from Mrs. Virgie LeBleu, thanking me for helping honor her husband, Mr. Conway.

I had kept it all these years. Reading it again took me back home to Cameron Parish.

Back to Granny and Papa. Back to Mr. Conway and Mrs. Virgie. And back to a time when many people may not know or remember that leaving Cameron Parish required a little planning and a whole lot of patience.

If you were going to Lake Charles, you had better pack a lunch.

Maybe two.

Growing up in lower Cameron Parish, crossing water was part of going anywhere. We had to deal with rivers, canals, bridges, and ferries. You could have somewhere to be and leave the house on time, but that didn’t mean the ferry or draw bridges were going to cooperate with your plans.

Growing up in a rural parish, going to “Town,” as we called Lake Charles, meant getting to the Gibbstown Ferry and sitting in a line that sometimes seemed to stretch on forever.

Doctor’s appointment. Shopping. Going to the movies. It didn’t matter. You waited your turn.

Then, coming home, you got to do it all over again.

I guess those ferry lines were some of my first lessons in patience. I can’t say I always appreciated the education.

I remember going with Granny Audrey and Papa Berton to Monkey Island to visit Granny’s niece, Robbie Bourg, and Bennie. We waited for the ferry going over, then waited again to get back home.

Years later, when I worked for the Sheriff’s Department and patrolled western Cameron Parish, I was still crossing the ship channel on the Cameron Ferry.

By then, I had plenty of experience waiting. That didn’t necessarily mean I liked it any better.

As a child in the 1970s, I remember always having to take the Gibbstown Ferry to go to “Town" . Then, somewhere along the way, there was a bridge.

I don’t remember watching it being built. In my memory, one day we were waiting on a ferry, and the next we were driving across the Intracoastal Canal.

Of course, a bridge doesn’t just appear. Somebody has to recognize the need, push for it, and keep pushing until something gets done.

Mr. Conway was one of those people.

Conway LeBleu was a state representative who served Cameron Parish and parts of Calcasieu Parish from 1964 to 1988. But to me, growing up, he was Mr. Conway.

He and his wife, Mrs. Virgie, were good friends with my grandparents. I remember him being so nice and kind to me, and I remember feeling that he looked out for the people back home.

As I got older, I understood more about what that meant.

Those ferry crossings affected people’s everyday lives. They also mattered when a hurricane was coming and everybody needed to get out. In Cameron Parish, a dependable way across the water was something families had reason to care about.

Mr. Conway understood that. He helped advocate for getting the Gibbstown Bridge funded and built, along with the Ellender Bridge.

As a child, I enjoyed the convenience without knowing much about the work behind it. Years later, I could appreciate the people who had helped make it happen.

Mr. Conway passed away in 2007.

Several of us thought naming the Gibbstown Bridge after him would be a fitting way to honor his service. People would cross that bridge every day. His name belonged there, on something that had helped the community he cared about.

I learned early on that if you want something, sometimes you have to take the initiative and ask for it. So that's what I did. I asked for it.

So in 2008 I wrote a letter to my state representative, asking for help getting the bridge renamed in Mr. Conway’s honor.

In 2009, the Louisiana legislature approved the request and the Gibbstown Bridge officially became the Conway LeBleu Memorial Bridge.

I was glad I had helped. Mr. Conway had done something that mattered for the people of Cameron Parish, and now his name would remain part of the place he had served.

Not long after I received a letter in the mail. Mrs. Virgie wrote to thank me.

She had lost her husband. Helping preserve his name meant something to her, and she took the time to let me know.

That was the letter I found in the box.

When I first received her letter, I knew it was worth keeping. But reading it again years later gave me time to think about everything behind it.

I had written a letter because I wanted someone to be remembered.

Mrs. Virgie had written one because she wanted me to know she was grateful.

Neither of us could have known that, years later, I would be sitting among old birthday cards and wedding notes, reading her words again.

By then, her letter had become part of my own history. It brought back people I cared about and reminded me that something I had taken the time to do had mattered to someone else.

You don’t always get to know that.

Sometimes you help, do what you think is right, and move on. Life gets busy. Years pass. The memory settles somewhere in the back of your mind.

Then you open a box.

I started that weekend trying to decide what I could get rid of. Mrs. Virgie’s letter reminded me why I had held on to so many of those things in the first place.

There was a person behind that piece of paper. A friendship with my grandparents. A man who had been kind to me when I was little. A community he had worked to help. And a wife who wanted me to know that remembering him had made a difference to her.

Years ago, I helped put Mr. Conway’s name on a bridge.

This past weekend, Mrs. Virgie’s letter brought all those memories back to me.

When she wrote it, she wanted me to know that something I had done mattered to her. All these years later, her words mattered to me.

I don’t think she could have known how much I would appreciate that letter one day.

But I’m glad she wrote it.

And I’m glad I kept it.

So I kept it.

Again.

At least you ain't Aunt Tillie

Aunt Tillie could tell you about nearly drowning in a hurricane, fighting off a monkey, or spending two days in an overturned car like she was telling you about going to the grocery store.

Just another day in the life of Aunt Tillie.

Tillie Murphy Mudd was my great-great-aunt on my Granny Audrey Savoie  Daigle’s side of the family. She was my Grandma Cooney’s sister, a Murphy on her father’s side and a Quinn on her mother’s side. Born in 1911, she died in 2005 at the age of 95.

When I was growing up, we would go to her house every Easter to hunt eggs. Back then, she was simply Aunt Tillie, the lady whose house we went to for Easter or came over to Granny's for Sunday lunch. It took me getting older to appreciate just how much life that woman had survived.

Granny often talked about Hurricane Audrey striking Cameron in 1957. She told us about the people who were washed away (over 500 perished), the families who lost loved ones, and the ones who somehow lived to tell about it.

One of those survivors was Aunt Tillie.

She and her mother, Annie Laura Quinn Murphy, were riding out the hurricane in their house in Cameron. Tillie said they woke up to the wind blowing and the Gulf coming toward them from the south. By the time they realized they needed to leave, water was already covering the road.

There was no getting out in the car.

They stayed in the house and prayed.

Then the wind and water lifted the house off its foundation. For a while, it floated. Then it broke apart.

Tillie tried to stay with her mother, but the storm pulled them away from each other.

She remembered waves washing over her and grabbing for anything that might keep her afloat. Somewhere in all that water and wreckage, she caught hold of a floating door.

As the storm carried her inland, she became tangled in barbed wire from a fence. There were branches and debris all around her. She remembered seeing snakes and dead animals—nutria, alligators, and cows.

Tillie floated about twelve miles north of where her house had stood, all the way to the Intracoastal Waterway. A rescue boat finally picked her up, and she was taken to St. Patrick Hospital.

Granny said that two days after the storm, her and Papa went to the hospital looking for survivors.

They walked right past Aunt Tillie’s room.

They did not recognize her.

She was so badly cut, bruised, and swollen from the wire and debris she got tangled in, that her own family could not tell who she was. Granny said it took another two days before Tillie could speak well enough to let the hospital staff know her name.

Her mother, my great-great-grandmother Laura Quinn Murphy, did not survive.

I think about that part now. The Aunt Tillie whose house we visited for Easter had been pulled away from her mother, in that very yard, in a hurricane and carried miles inland through barbed wire and wreckage. As a child, I knew the story. I don’t think I understood the weight of it.

Years later, Tillie was visiting her daughter in Houston and babysitting her granddaughter when she saw a monkey out in the yard.

Now, most people see a strange animal in the yard and leave the door shut. But Tillie called her daughter, who told her it was the neighbor’s monkey.

Apparently, that made opening the door seem reasonable.

The monkey came inside and went wild.

Tillie tried to protect her granddaughter and get it back out of the house. The monkey fought her the whole way, biting, scratching, and pulling her hair.

She said that money tore her up but all she could think at the time was to protect her granddaughter.

In fact, Aunt Tillie said fighting that monkey was worse than going through Hurricane Audrey wrapped in barbed wire.

That is quite a statement coming from someone who had done both.

But the craziest part was what they learned afterward.

It wasn’t the neighbor’s monkey.

It was another monkey.

I have always wondered - how was it possible  that so many people in Houston, Texas had pet monkeys that you could get them mixed up.

Then, when Tillie was in her late eighties and living in Bryan, Texas, she had another ordeal.

She was driving to the store one day when her car went off the road and flipped into a ditch. Apparently, the ditch was so steep and deep that nobody knew she was down there.

She wasn’t found for two days.

Two days in an overturned car, in her late eighties.

Aunt Tillie lived through things that would have been enough for several lifetimes. Yet she could tell you about them so matter-of-factly that you almost had to stop her and think about what she had just said.

So whenever you’re having a bad day, remember Aunt Tillie.

You could be wrapped in barbed wire, fighting a monkey, or lying upside down in a car somewhere.

It could always be worse.

And somehow, Aunt Tillie lived long enough to tell us about all three.

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.

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