Down on the Batture

Molytones

- 62 Molytones “There’s not a man alive can beat my molytones,” says Alcide Verret over his gas stove.“I cooks them nine different ways.” We are standing in his tiny kitchen as he ladles out a serving of this strange fruit. Bayou Sorrel is running in the background, about a half mile from where it meets the Atchafalaya River and continues down to the Gulf of Mexico. The Atchafalaya used to be the Mississippi in its time, and would already be the Mississippi again if the threat of that recapture hadn’t animated Congress to put a billion-dollar barrier upstream to hold the process back. Every year, though, it’s a risk, and over a long enough period of time the Atchafalaya will win. In the meantime, here is Alcide on the Sorrel batture with a house the size of a carport and a garden as big as a ball field. “They molytones,” Alcide continues, “the man come out to get some and I said to him, you got to buy a pair.” Blue eyes are twinkling under his thick gray hair. His hands and neck are reddened to the rim of the shirt, and from there the skin is entirely white.“The man said,‘A pair?’ and I said,‘That’s right. It’s the onliest way they going to grow.’” He picks two fresh fruits from a green vine by the doorway and shows me, head to tail. The tail end has a little point on it which he fingers gently.“That’s the male,” says Alcide. I didn’t see molytones again for a long while. I couldn’t even find their name in the dictionary, and when I asked my mother-in-law, who cooked about anything, she said that she was stumped too. ; - 63 Molytones I forgot about them until an afternoon, many years later, when I was walking on the levee by the Corps of Engineers and saw a vine crawling up the fence with wrinkled, green softballs hanging on it. I said to a fellow nearby that they looked familiar, and he said, “Merlitons,” which does appear in the dictionary. Once you notice something you start seeing it everywhere, and, sure enough, the following week I came across the same vine clinging to the side of Campagno’s restaurant just three blocks from the woods. I went inside and there they were on the menu, Alcide’s molytones, deep fried and salted, which is enough to sell anything down here. We ordered them every time we went in. Alcide and I now sit at his table. It is high noon outside. The life of the swamp does not fight the heat, it rises and falls with it, and so Alcide gets up early to run his fish traps, returns to hoe his garden , and maybe goes out in the evening after raccoons. Come noon he’s in the shade. We are eating molytones two different ways and neither of them fried, which is a trick in itself because the insides of this fruit are gooey and near-tasteless. It takes a cook to fix them. I remember going fishing with Charlie Bosch, whose family goes back to the settlements at Des Allemands, and we got to his camp late and starving. Charlie pulled out some merlitons, tomato paste, onions, and a can of oysters, and by the light of a Coleman lantern he whipped up a dish that you would have paid a hundred dollars for at Arnaud’s, easy. Cajun men do food. “I could live away from the river,” Alcide is saying while wiping his plate.“I could live in a big town, New Iberia, lots of places, wouldn’t have to hit a lick at a snake.” He looks at my bowl.“Here, have some more, don’t you like my molytones?” Alcide grew up on the banks of Bayou Chene across the main Atchafalaya. There used to be a town there nurtured by fishing and small crops on the ridges until the cypress boom. The logging changed life as dramatically as the oil boom would a half century later, sending the men deep into the swamps to cut down the tall trees, open routes to float them out, and sell them for the houses of the region. Swamp cypress boards have lasted for a hundred years, - 64 Molytones and could last a hundred more. Cypress...