River Music: An Atchafalaya Story

Chapter 7: Return to the Basin

c h a P t e r 7 Return to the Basin A few months after Earl moved to Houston, Eula, now eighty, fell and broke her shoulder. Earl quit his engineering assistant’s job at Stone & Webster, closed up his apartment , and went back to Berwick for two months to care for her. As soon as she could get by on her own, he returned to Houston and began working at the reprographics firm where he pulled Remote Sensing together after hours. “That’s when the lights started,” Earl said. Although no one knew it at the time, return to the Basin 105 Eula was beginning to suffer from Sundowner’s syndrome, a manifestation of dementia that brings on confusion after dark. For her, it took the form of seeing lights outside the house and sometimes spotting people she suspected of shining the lights on her. As her hallucinations increased, she began calling the Berwick police at all hours to investigate the ghosts. “I kept getting messages from the local police chief on my answering machine,”Earl said.“I talked with him about it some,and then one night, an old friend called and said, ‘You gotta do something—get someone to sit with her, or move back here. She’s really afraid to be alone.’” Neither Earl nor Eula had any money to hire a caretaker,and no other relative stepped forward, so by July 1998, the solution seemed obvious. In a corner of his heart, Earl looked forward to leaving the city—it hadn’t worked out the way he’d envisioned. But mostly, he was horrified by the prospect of living in Berwick,where jobs were scarce and a Cajun man with a doctorate in music was more exotic than an albino alligator. When the 2000 census results were released,his fears were confirmed.Just two-thirds of the adult population in St. Mary Parish (total 53,500) had completed high school. About 3,000 had earned a bachelor’s degree, and only 836 held graduate degrees.The unemployment rate was close to 9 percent,and in 1999, some 20 percent of all parish families lived at poverty level. “It was like—what am I going to do back there?” Earl said. “It kept me up many a night.” From Houston, Earl contacted school systems within an hour’s drive of Berwick and says he received encouragement from aTerrebonne Parish personnel director in Houma. “He told me, ‘We’re going to have a job for you—a new position in the gifted and talented program,’ and I thought, that’s great—I’ll have my hand pick of the students, I can talk to them about music history and theory, and we can work on instruments . . .” A few weeks later, when he’d relocated to Berwick, Earl drove over to Houma to meet the man who promised him a contract would be “in the mail.” Everyone knows how those promises usually turn out. 106 chapter 7 “That’s to be expected down here,” Earl says. “A lot of talk and nothing happens. “This is one of the most unartistic places,anyway,”he adds.“Athletics dominates the school system, and the coaches become the administrators , so there’s a cycle in place. That and the oil industry are run like the military. There are a lot of good old boys. I remember what Clement Greenberg said of the abstract expressionists:‘These guys are really alone.’ Well, I’ll tell you about being isolated. “I saw coming back to Berwick as the beginning of the end—or,more positively, the end of something, the beginning of something else.” Added to his disappointment in the local culture he’d once fled, Earl at forty-four, was, as his mother’s caregiver, trying to make peace with living and composing in his old childhood bedroom, three feet across the hall from Eula’s. In his first months back, Eula required a knee replacement and literally leaned on Earl for support and rehabilitation. She also required a psychiatric evaluation to confirm the dementia diagnosis. “The doctor wouldn’t talk to me about her unless she took that test,” Earl said. “So we had to do it. She was so pissed at me afterward she hit me with her purse.” So began the last stage of Earl’s relationship with his mother, which continues today, twelve years later. Before, during...