The Honeymooners

While the rice was settling from our wedding reception, we boarded a white limo and drove for an hour through the southern twilight to Madewood Plantation Home in Napoleonville, La. Set deep in sugar cane fields, the home’s white pillars barely shown through the dark. The limo pulled down a gravel road off of La. Hwy 308 and behind the main house to the front steps of the honeymoon suite. For the next two nights, we would call this large empty four-bedroom cottage our own.

We put the luggage in the room in an exhausted pile and walked to the front porch overlooking the grounds. A chill was biting fast and the only sounds came from the cold wind in the tree branches swaying the Spanish moss that draped the ancient oaks. I rested into a rocking chair, glad to have all the tasks leading up to this night done and lit a cigarette with my new bride beside me. In the dark, we heard thumps from acorns falling on the leaf-covered ground, followed by drops of rain. We made it just in time to stay dry.

The next day, we woke to breakfast in bed and walked the grounds consisting of the main house in front of our quarters, a gazebo area and a cemetery. We wandered through the empty home, up the sweeping staircase, and peeked inside closed rooms finding no signs of another except some racket in the kitchen. Finally, we ran into life outside when a gray four-legged friend pawed around our feet and rolled onto it’s back in search of affection and food. A few purrs and pitiful bellows later, Lindsay met his every whim, scratching his belly and plotting how to get him home. His visit was followed by a man who lived on the premises and said he had lived there for the past 60 years. He called our feline friend by the name, "Tink" and told us he [himself] was born on this plantation, left it only for a little while and returned to work there again. After meeting more of the "help" around this place, I realized a lot of these folks were probably born here. But he traveled on about his day and so did we.

In the main house that night we joined two other couples for a candlelight dinner. Both of them were sight seers to the plantation homes of Louisiana and very proud conservatives. As we were seated, our host placed me and Lindsay at the head of the long oak table and a small bell in the shape of a "mammy" in front of me.

"You are in charge of the bell," she said. "If you need more wine or are ready for the next course, just give it a ring." She then bid us good-night and disappeared through the large door separating us from the kitchen. Before it stopped swinging, the figure idolized in the bell before me emerged with a decanter of wine and a southern drawl from the cotton field of "Roots." The "help" in the kitchen would have made Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. check his watch for the time and date. And every time I saw we were ready for the next course, I could feel the progress of civil rights take two steps back and kick me in the ass when I gave the mammy bell a weak shake. Certainly, they were here, doing this job of their own free will, but strange as it may be, to ring a bell and have someone come runnin' was hard to handle no matter the stereotype.

As conversation progressed into politics, "why Cajun food has to be so spicy," sweetbreads, the best American Express Card and Supreme Court Rulings of Clearance Thomas, the bell ringing for wine got more frequent. Our cultured company were as boring as I was guilty of drinking "free" wine. After tasty piece of pear cake, we returned to our cottage away from the snoots and turned-in since we had to be travel to Galveston, TX for the honeymoon cruise of a lifetime in the morning.

At 4 a.m., there was a scratching outside the door. I thought I heard something, but I didn't want to believe it. This house was too dark, empty and in the middle of nowhere for something other than us to be making noise. So I ignored it. Until it happened again and woke Lindsay.

"What is that?" she said.

"I don't know."

"Go see," she insisted.

"Uh-uh," I resisted.

Now the scratching was in the room. We were being invaded. Slowly, I leaned towards the lamp, clicked it twice and flooded the room with light. We sat up searching the room for the intruder and found him on top of the dresser. Next to a box of left-over wedding cake and petite fors sat the happiest mouse I've ever seen. He turned and looked at us, with a white square piece of cake the size of its head in his mouth, and smiled. With his booty clinched in his grin, he lept into the air and parachuted to the floor. Within a few gallops he scurried into a hole in the hall. There was an honest-to-God rat hole in the wall just like on Tom & Jerry.

The sugar cane season was in full harvest and along with the sudden drop in temperature, our friend was pushed inside for shelter and cake. But I was the husband, and couldn't be scared of a mouse. So I tip-toed across the floor and snatched up cast iron fireplace shovel from the corner.

"Don't kill it!" the wife shouted from the comfort of her bed.

"I'm not!"

"Then what are you going to do with the shovel?"

"Plug his hole up."

I placed the flat end of shovel against the wall covering the hole. But what if he is so jacked-up on cake he pushes it over on his way back for more? So I pushed the leg of the table against it for support. It was then, as I stood in my underwear, my bare feet cold on the hardwood floor of this century-old home, trying to outwit a mouse, that I remembered the movie Caddyshack and how the gopher always had other holes and this piece of vermin probably did too. I skipped across the room and back into bed assuring Lindsay I had fixed him.

We couldn't sleep the rest of the night.