The Man Who Cursed The Lilies
By CHARLES TENNEY JACKSON
From Short Stories
Tedge looked from the pilot-house at the sweating deckhand who stood on the stubby
bow of the Marie Louise heaving vainly on the pole thrust into the barrier of crushed
water hyacinths across the channel.
Crump, the engineer, shot a sullen look at the master ere he turned back to the crude oil
motor whose mad pounding rattled the old bayou stern-wheeler from keel to hogchains.
"She's full ahead now!" grunted Crump. And then, with a covert glance at the single
passenger sitting on the fore-deck cattle pens, the engineman repeated his warning,
"Yeh'll lose the cows, Tedge, if you keep on fightin' the flowers. They're bad f'r feed and
water--they can't stand another day o' sun!"
Tedge knew it. But he continued to shake his hairy fist at the deckhand and roar his
anathemas upon the flower-choked bayou. He knew his crew was grinning evilly, for
they remembered Bill Tedge's year-long feud with the lilies. Crump had bluntly told the
skipper he was a fool for trying to push up this little-frequented bayou from Cote Blanche
Bay to the higher land of the west Louisiana coast, where he had planned to unload his
cattle.
Tedge had bought the cargo himself near Beaumont from a beggared ranchman whose
stock had to go on the market because, for seven months, there had been no rain in
eastern Texas, and the short-grass range was gone.
Tedge knew where there was feed for the starving animals, and the Marie Louise was
coming back light. By the Intercoastal Canal and the shallow string of bays along the
Texas-Louisiana line, the bayou boat could crawl safely back to the grassy swamp lands
that fringe the sugar plantations of Bayou Teche. Tedge had bought his living cargo so
ridiculously cheap that if half of them stood the journey he would profit. And they would
cost him nothing for winter ranging up in the swamp lands. In the spring he would round
up what steers had lived and sell them, grass-fat, in New Orleans. He'd land them there
with his flap-paddle bayou boat, too, for the Marie Louise ranged up and down the Inter-
coastal Canal and the uncharted swamp lakes and bays adjoining, trading and thieving
and serving the skipper's obscure ends.
Only now, when he turned up Cote Blanche Bay, some hundred miles west of the
Mississippi passes, to make the last twenty miles of swamp channel to his landing, he
faced his old problem. Summer long the water hyacinths were a pest to navigation on the
coastal bayous, but this June they were worse than Tedge had ever seen. He knew the
reason: the mighty Mississippi was at high flood, and as always then, a third of its yellow
waters were sweeping down the Atchafalaya River on a "short cut" to the Mexican Gulf.
