Daddy’s Money: A Memoir of Farm and Family

9. Where the Saltwater Can’t Get at the Rice

CHAPTER 9 z Where the Saltwater Can’t Get at the Rice MOTHER’S words brush my arm with foreboding like the wings of a moth. Searching the family archives for letters, I’ve found the one Mother gave me on July , , before she, Dad, and Nancy traveled to Europe. Among other things, she writes of the homeplace and the farm. Jo, One never knows what might happen when we leave home so, if it does, remember to love and cherish this home and farm. . . . Remember Daddy & Granddaddy have worked their life away for you kids. . . . Love, Mother & Daddy At the time of Mother’s writing, I’m twenty-one, married, and two weeks away from delivering my firstborn, Charla. Nancy is eleven. I’d known ever since my teenage years that Mother and Dad fervently wanted the farm to stay in the family, but until my mother’s warning note, I’d given scant thought to loss, heritage, history, and my place in them. I began asking questions—not enough, I now realize—about Grandfather’s journey that transformed an immigrant cabinetmaker into a farmer, bringing him to land that had known the Quapaw and the buffalo. Daddy was my grandparents’ only child, born after they adopted America. In a stoic photo of the young family, Grandfather Garot wears z  a three-piece suit and a tie, his eyebrows and hair black as a grizzly’s. Grandmother has donned a blouse and ankle-length skirt. Dad is probably four or five at the time of this photo. He stands as still as Lot’s wife. The trio could be the poster family of the s: the father seated; the mother standing, one hand on her husband’s shoulder; the child’s hand resting lightly on his father’s knee. Of course, as was the custom of the Victorian day, nobody smiles. According to Dad, Grandmother sailed from Belgium to New Orleans to marry Grandfather, forbidden to do so by her parents, who threatened to disown her. When she ran away in , she was twenty, my grandfather twenty-nine. Granddad was barely a preteen when he left Belgium for America in . In Charleroi, his father had been a coal miner, then a joiner, and fairly well-to-do. His sons—Adolph Joseph, Victor Joseph, and Pierre Joseph— were set to follow him in the custom-cabinetry trade. Something soured between the Protestant Garot family and the Catholic community, however , and gradually the work disappeared. (Adolph long maintained but could not prove that the Catholic Church in Charleroi commandeered much of the family’s funds.) Whatever the stressful cause, the clan—comprised of Great-grandfather Leon Joseph Garot, Great-grandmother Marie Therese (Scarceriaux) Garot, and seven children—decided to leave Belgium. An overriding question , of course, must have loomed: where to go? I wonder how they decided. Nine people uprooted themselves from family, friends, country, town—all that represented home. I wanted details of that road that had made all the difference. I wanted stories. One relative remained alive who might offer them—Victor Girerd, Dad’s first cousin, one year older than Dad. Victor’s mother was Grandfather Garot’s sister. Hoping she might have passed down family anecdotes and hoping Victor at ninety-three would remember them, I phoned him. z My husband and I arrive at Victor’s house near DeWitt on a July day obese with heat, in . As we step out of the car, the Delta light blinds  z Where the Saltwater Can’t Get at the Rice us, sudden as a stroke. Charles and I, living now in Little Rock but raised in this flat country, well remember its sledgehammer heat and light. Standing at Victor’s back door, we remark that we’ve never entered a farmhouse through the front door except to pay condolence calls. Victor invites us through the ragtag kitchen into the living room. A bachelor, he’s lived most of his life in this house, on this farm, raising rice. Heat pillories the room; I welcome the knock and hum of a window airconditioner . “I haven’t seen you in a while,” Victor says, with a familiar accent, giving a French inflection to certain words as Dad used to do. He invites us to sit, rustling into the kitchen for glasses of iced tea. I follow to help, reminding him how he used to enjoy singing in the Methodist...