Chapter 3 Samuel, SJ and Jason Kennedy
Samuel Kennedy was sitting in the dappled shade at the bottom of his neatly tended lawn that sloped gently down from the back of his house to the mouth of Lokchapi bayou and the eastern shore of Lake Cavelier. His back was leant against the stout buttress of a Cypress tree, tall and majestic with a deep red trunk it stood silhouetted against the waters of the bayou mouth and the lake beyond. Samuel cooled his feet in the lapping waters, for the time of year the heat and humidity was abnormally intense, it was more like high summer than late spring. Above him a Great Blue Heron flapped its wings twice and with long outstretched legs settled on one of the highest branches in the crown of the tree overlooking the sparkling waters below.
The sun was now at its midday height, diamonds sparkled across the water as the light glinted off of each little ripple as it passed by. A heat haze shimmered far out above the lake making the dark canopy of the magnificent Cypress swamp lands dance and sway in the swirling air. The sky was a beautiful deep blue and there was not a cloud to be seen, not one that any person could see, except for Samuel Kennedy. His mind was full of them, deep blue stormy thunderheads were rolling across his consciousness, their dark menace was overpowering. As he sat, he stared out across the waters, looking at nothing, his eyes seeing but his mind not registering the beautiful panorama. As the clouds in his mind built, a hollow darkness enveloped him, he grimaced, screwing his eyes tightly shut and clenching his teeth in preparation for the onslaught that he knew was coming. Seconds later his body relaxed as his conscious mind abandoned its initial battle, his head sagged forwards. It was a bad day for Samuel Kennedy, this was nothing new to him, it was a constant in his life that pursued him relentlessly and would capture him in its zombie embrace whenever it chose to intrude.
For over thirty years it had stalked him, some days the world was tolerable and other not. Often he could go for weeks functioning in an outwardly normal manner, the world always seemed grey to him but he functioned. At other times he would be the energetic, focused fun loving family man that he and others recognized as Samuel Kennedy, but at other unpredictable times the storms that grew within his mind built and built to become an oppressive dark, lonely nightmare that could last for days often weeks and sometimes for months.
Samuel’s wife who he lovingly called SJ could read the signs, she could see it coming by the look in his eyes, they became dark, distant, often looking down at the ground or squinting as if being blinded by some bright light.
SJ was outgoing, funny, physically fit, possessed a stunning figure, took pride in her appearance and was beautiful with light brown blonde hair that cascaded down to her shoulders. She had a very sharp mind, a good business brain and was good at solving other people’s problems, however her own problems which mainly concerned Samuel were a constant in her life that were seemingly unfathomable and at times weighed heavy on her shoulders.
Samule and SJ’s son Jason was a very handsome, well presented, intelligent and caring young man in his late teens who got on extremely easily with girls and seemed to attract them with ease. He had an infectious laugh and studied hard at college although he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life, university was an option but as yet he was undecided.
Jason could tell as well, he had not long turned seventeen and as he matured his tolerance of his father’s mood swings and his retreat in to the depths of his mind was growing thin. He didn’t really understand why or how his dad could lay for days or weeks in bed whilst his mom worked hard all day long in her salon. In his mind it wasn’t fair, ever since he was young he knew when daddy was not well, he did not know why, he just knew.
“Is Daddy unwell, he’s gone awful quiet?”
Jason would ask of his mom.
“Its ok Jason, daddy just needs some quiet time, he’ll be fine again you’ll see…., don’t you go worrying yourself.”
SJ would answer softly, she would then grit her teeth and mentally prepare herself for the coming tempest that would blow through their young family on its erratic, destructive course. Often tears would well up and she would have to turn away from her son wiping them briskly away.
Samuel Kennedy was forty seven, he had been a smart man in both mind and appearance, quick witted, funny with a certain style and attention to fashion, but in the last few years his appearance had become shabby with a certain unkempt look and his mind ricocheted around moving through varying levels of conscious thought and motivation. His sharp perceptive and creative mind was lurking somewhere behind the slow, often mumbling or confused façade but it rarely showed itself these days. He was more than able to smarten himself up if he put his mind to it, really concentrated on having a shower, a shave, getting a short crew cut and putting on some clean stylish clothes. But again this was a rarity as these types of thoughts or actions seemed to have no place within his tortured mind.
Today as he sat in the cool shade of the lone Cypress, his conscious mind was detaching, nothingness loomed large within his mind and his appearance was if anything, odd. He was unshaven, his dark hair was greasy and unkempt and his clothes hung on him like rags. He wore old worn out jeans, with rips and tears, threadbare in places and a T-shirt stained with food, sweat, dirt and dust. His two Labrador gun dogs Mr. Pooh or just Pooh for short, and Moo padded up besides him quietly; they sensed his mood and were subdued. Pooh sat and leant against his master, following his gaze looking out across the sparkling waters while Moo curled himself up on the other side in the darkest patch of shade and gentled nuzzled a crumpled and stained denim leg.
Samuel did not move initially, his head stayed sagging forwards, deep within his mind it fought a final skirmish to try and fend off the relentless onslaught of darkness and dread. Slowly his head lifted and a hand reached sluggishly out and patted Pooh gently on the head.
“Good boy… how are you feeling today?”
He mumbled to Pooh, Pooh’s tail waged slowly back and forth in the dust at the edge of the lawn, he turned his head upwards, tilted his head slightly to one side and looked inquisitively into his masters deep, dark eyes. Samuel then turned his attention to Moo.
“Good Boy Moo,”
Samuel mumbled again as he affectionately scratched him gently behind his ear. Moo responded by dropping his ears back and looking up with what can only be described as a very sad and mournful human expression, his tail wagged back and forth but his body stayed stock still. As the three friends sat together in the shade they were joined from above by the large male Blue Heron that had only just perched on a branch high above some minutes earlier.
He had nested in the same lone Cypress tree for the last ten years, Jason had named him Mr. Heron and that was the name that the family used for the magnificent bird. Mr. Heron had flapped noisily out of the highest branches then circled around in a wide arc over the lake to come and land some six feet away from the three of them at the waters edge, there it stood in a foot of water watching Samuel, Pooh and Moo. Samuel smiled as it came into land remembering his first meeting with the beautiful bird and for their part the dogs wagged their tails, their friend had arrived.
This was the same bird that some twelve years earlier had been blown out of its nest on a stormy mid May night. Pooh as a very young puppy had found it one morning at the bottom of the Cypress tree and then lay besides it for most of the morning guarding it. It was only when SJ noticed that Pooh had not returned up the garden to lay in his new bed in the shade of the verandah that she alerted Samuel and they had both gone in search of him. It didn’t take long to find him because as soon as little puppy Pooh heard them approaching he let out a series of excited barks and didn’t stop until they had found him guarding his injured patient and new friend.
The poor little chick had fallen from the large single nest that was some one hundred feet up near the top of the canopy and at some point on the way down injured its right leg quite badly, it had a break halfway between its right foot and ankle.
They had taken it in and set its right leg with a small splint made from a wooden lolly stick tied with wool. They were both sure that it would stay on long enough to give the damaged leg some chance of healing before the wool would eventually rot away and the splint would fall off. They spent three days feeding it up with fish that Samuel and Jason caught early each morning, it was constantly hungry so SJ fed mashed fish to the chick every couple of hours. On the fourth day they took the difficult decision to return it to its nest.
The parents were still there and feeding the others chicks high up in the nest so SJ suggested that the best they could do was return it home and hope that the parents didn’t reject it. It was washed with water to remove as much human smell as they could, dried then placed in a small backpack. Samuel then spent a nerve racking forty minutes climbing up to the nest through the braches of the Cypress with his precious cargo on his back. As he neared the nest an indignant parent emitted a series of ‘go, go go go’, calls which quickly changed to ‘awk awk awk’ alarm calls before it noisily flapped its large wings and took to the air. As it left the nest it let out a series of loud and unnerving ‘frank, frank, frank’, calls before disappearing from sight.
Quickly Samuel swung the pack off of his shoulder, reached inside and took the little chick out. He then reached up and over the edge of the large twiggy nest and dropped it in. Immediately the nest above his head reverberated with an excited twitter of ‘Tik, tik, tik, awk, awk, tik, tik, tik, tik, awk, awk sounds as the patient was reunited with its siblings.
Samuel immediately started to make his way back down, carefully, branch by branch he descended. When he was about twenty feet back down the trunk he saw one parent come circling back over the lake toward the tree, With its legs outstretched and another loud flapping of wings accompanied by a series of loud ‘Roh, roh, roh, roh”’, calls it landed back on the edge of the nest. He half expected to see their injured patient get flung out by the parent but it wasn’t. SJ standing far below on the lawn strained to see what was going on through the branches and hanging moss. She spent a nervous twenty five minutes waiting for Samuel to return to the ground and as he made his way carefully back down she also expected to see the poor chick ejected and come bouncing off of the branches all the way back down to the ground.
It was with relief that Samuel arrived back at the base of the Cypress and as far as they both knew their chick was still in the nest. It was some eight weeks later in mid July that the chicks fledged. There were three in all, scruffy birds in teenage plumage, one they recognized immediately hopping around in the lower branches of the majestic Cypress had a distinctive deformity half way between its right foot and ankle. The leg had a rounded swelling at this mid point and it also had a slight kink, but apart from these visual signs of injury it seemed to work perfectly well.
They saw it a couple more times over the course of the next few weeks then saw nothing of it for the next seventeen months, then one December day it returned as a large handsome male bird in full and magnificent adult plumage. They knew it was their Mr. Heron because of its distinctive deformity half way between its right foot and ankle, the rounded swelling at this mid point and its slight kink.
It took up residence in its parent’s old nest and spent some weeks renovating it before being joined in the February by an equally stunning female. Mr. Heron took up permanent residence high up in the lonesome nest at the top of their Cypress tree and over the years since has successfully raised, with a couple of different females, nine families in all.
After this brief return to reality and a happy journey back though his memories Samuel’s arms sank slowly down hanging limply at his sides, his head sagged again, the memory faded and the dark clouds closed back in.
From her clean crisp kitchen, music drifted from the radio out across the lawn down from the house to where the slow drifting waters of the Lokchapi bayou widened out into the waters of Lake Cavelier, it was such a perfect place to live. SJ looked out of her open window with sadness at the four silhouetted figures at the waters edge, she watched as the dogs stayed in their positions quietly guarding their master and Mr. Heron stood perfectly still looking down into the murky depths of the lapping waters. Samuel sat unmoving, his head bowed and his arms hanging at his sides, a minute or so went by before she shook herself out of her daydream.
SJ knew that the lonely figures would be in exactly the same place in four hours time when Jason came home from college, maybe Mr. Heron would have gone fishing by then but she was sure that Samuel and his two guardians would be there.
She glanced up at the clock, ‘must get a move on’, she thought to herself, it was twelve twenty and she had her first appointment of the day at twelve thirty. That gave her ten minutes to get ready for her days’ work, brush her hair, and put on her happy smiling face.
SJ was a very skilled and experienced hairdresser and beautician who focused her business on hairdressing, waxing, eyebrow threading and eyelash enhancing, she had set up in business twelve years ago when they first moved into their beautiful home. She had built the business up from scratch, gaining herself a very good reputation with many loyal clients living in the small towns and villages that fringed the bayou and Lake Cavelier and further back into the deeper wooded parts of the country, she also had clients that travelled from the much larger towns of Spicebridge and Ville Platte. It had been a struggle to begin with because SJ was a city girl originally with city views and opinions which were fast paced and fashionable, whereas in and around Lokchapi the pace of life was much slower and the opinions and views that she initially encountered dated back fifty years. She was also told quite frankly by one of her first clients,
“Yuh nod from from roun these pards are yuh gal?……., we does thangs diffrund roun he-ya, none of them fancy city ways, thas’s fuh sho-wa.”
It came as quite a shock, but as time passed she eased herself into the local community and became accepted relatively quickly, which was a relief to her.
SJ heard a car pull up their short drive and she thought to herself, ’early again, why can’t they keep to their appointment times, they are either, really early or really late’.
With that she rushed upstairs, brushed her hair up and clipped it into place with a coupe of dark shiny hair clips, straightened her uniform in the mirror, raced down stairs and was just in time to open the door to her for her first client of the day.
“Hi Marybelle.”
She chimed cheerily.
“Oh.. , good day to yuh SJ.”
Marybelle replied as she stepped in through the door into the cool shade of the house.
“Oh thad’s bedder SJ, nudin like a bid of cool shade an a happy smilin face to greed yuh, Ids so dam hot out there again.”
She continued as she followed SJ to the small room on the side of the house that SJ used as her salon.
As the hours passed the two dogs made themselves more comfortable by their master’s side in the shade of the Cypress and after a while they both dropped off into the land of dreams. Pooh’s feet twitched from time to time or he would gently growl and Moo would wag his tail with excitement as their dog dreams progressed throughout the long hot afternoon. Mr. Heron darted his beak down into the waters from time to time and on each occasion came back up with a fish firmly grasped in his beak, after about half an hour with his friends he opened up his wings and with a leap and three mighty flaps drew himself up into the air and went in search of an afternoon meal. He returned later after a successful hunting trip out across the lake and landed again at the waters edge with his three friends, the dogs noticed but Samuel was completely oblivious to anything going on around him. After another half an hour or so he left his friends again and went in search of more food to return a couple of hours later. All afternoon Samuel sat motionless; his mind in another place or time, thinking of everything or completely nothing, only Samuel knew what was going on inside or maybe he didn’t, his eyes showed nothing, just blank and staring and his brow was furrowed into a deep frown.
SJ worked on through the afternoon, scuttling between her studio and kitchen to pour each new client a fresh glass of cool home made lemonade which she loaded up with plenty of ice. Each time she walked past the kitchen window she would glance down the garden to see three figures, unmoving in the shade of theCypress. She often wondered on days like this when the humidity was rising as fast as temperature how her lovely, caring two dogs, with their thick coats, stood the heat. She did know however that whenever Samuel was like he was today, they would stay with him, maybe occasionally having a quick paddle or swim at the bayou’s edge, but that would be all. When both dogs were younger she used to call them into the shade of the house where at least the whirring ceiling fans were doing their best to circulate some sort of a breeze, there they would lay panting, out of the heat of the day. But that would only last for a half an hour or so and then they would be up and gently barking and pawing at the door to be let back out with Samuel.
On her final lemonade mission to the kitchen just before Jason arrived home from school SJ’s gaze was caught by Mr. Heron as he rose out of the water with a large silvery fish in his mouth, his strong wings flapped hard as he gained height until he perched high up in the Cypress were he was normally to be seen. She stopped and looked at Mr. Heron as he busied himself with eating his slippery feast before meticulously preening his feathers. As she watched this beautiful bird, her mind wondered back to the day some eleven years earlier when they as a family had moved into their lovely house by the mouth of Lokchapi bayou and Lake Cavelier.
I hope you enjoy your reading. It is available on Kindle and a free copy can be borrowed for download at https://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Blue-Heron-Howard-Moore-ebook/dp/B00KK6BWLK..
Howard Moore
