Chapter 4: Monsieur Seb

On Wednesday I carried a pot of white beans and rice out to the crawfish plant on Bayou Teche, because nobody had fed Seb a hot lunch in four years.

I knew that from his freezer.

The plant sat behind a chain-link fence at the end of a shell road.

It was a long gray metal building with a loading dock and a yard full of trucks, and steam came off the roof vents.

Men in white rubber boots and hairnets crossed the yard with plastic crates, and every one of them nodded at me.

Some of them said, "Madame Dolly."

News went around Breaux Bridge faster than the bayou ran.

A foreman with a gray mustache took the pot from me at the gate, though I had not asked him to.

"Monsieur Seb's in the office, madame.

"He doesn't eat lunch."

"He does today."

The foreman smiled.

"Yes, madame."

The office was a corner room over the dock, with a window that looked out on the freezers.

Seb stood at a desk covered in papers.

He wore a hard hat, which he took off when he saw me.

He looked tired and surprised and, for half a second, glad.

Then he put his face back on.

"You shouldn't have driven out here," he said.

"I brought beans."

"I don't eat at work."

"You do now," I said, and set the pot on the desk.

There was a photograph on the shelf behind him, in a silver frame, lying face down.

I did not ask.

He saw me see it and said nothing.

I fed him with a plastic spoon from the lid.

He ate standing up, politely, the way a man eats in front of a stranger.

Halfway through he stopped chewing and shut his eyes.

"Where did you learn this?" he asked.

"My grandmother."

"My mother made it like this," he said.

"The same way, with the bacon."

"Everybody's mother made it like this."