Fallen Oak - Attackaps Bayou
Fallen Oak along Bayou Attakapas in Louisiana was a semi-wild place, not quiet a true farmstead, not quiet a working ranch, not exactly a residence either. He rarely used electricity preferring an old coal oil lamp in the old farmstead house with its wide porches. He often imagined it as a place that existed just after the Civil War.
Coal Oil Lamp - Attackapas Bayou
An old man, morose at selling his family’s farmstead to Woody, remembered well the day when a huge live oak had been toppled by a tornado spawned by a hurricane. Tears welled in the old man eyes as he spoke the phrase, Vends Chêne Tombé – Sell Fallen Oak. But the place was to be sold for a series of bad debts before the Sheriff got it and it went to sale. Better that it was sold to distant kin like Woody than to strangers. When Woody asked how homeplace got it name to ease the old man’s tears, he had told Woody that it was July 15, 1931, when the tree had fallen. The old man had lost his entire crop so he remembered it well, how it came to be that branches of trunk of the oak sent down roots back into the rich alluvial land along the bayou, only making the tree yet stronger for its 200 or more years. Woody remembered well his own stories of that day. His mother told him that while she was in labor with Woody at the Fenwick Sanitarium, she gave instructions to the other nurses who ordinarily only assisted his mother as midwife. His mother had her scientific theory: the hurricane had come and in its wake the barometric pressure had dropped bringing the birth of her baby. Tante Tee-Ta, the old black woman that had helped birth and raise him, had her own ideas: the conditions of Woody’s birth marked the day as propitious, yet troubling for the boy. Upon hearing the date the story of the fallen oak, Woody bought the forty acres and the old house with its two side-porch. He often sat on the gallery studying how the old tree had grabbed the rich greeness of the earth and sent it back into the trunk and its other branches.
