A bored sigh from Mama Ilene, pivoting to the pile of peels.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The Blue Bull?” said Papa Roy, shoulders rising. “The Blue Bull? Only the jewel of the vicinity, the diamond in the rough, the sho-‘nuff, God-given prince of the bayou.”
“There’s bulls around here?” asked Eli.
“There’s some foolishness,” said Mama Ilene.
“It ain’t no farm cow, Eli, ain’t no common creature,” said Papa Roy. “This here what I’m talking ‘bout is a bonafide bull frog. But not just any old frog. Ain’t nobody ever been able to catch him and they’s in general not that hard to catch. If you’d seen him, you’d know: as sparkling as a swimming pool and as long as my arm. Wouldn’t you think that a catch like that makes a hell of a song when it opens its mouth?”
“What you plan on doing with that blue frog anyway?” said Mama Ilene. “I know you ain’t gon’ eat no ‘prince of the bayou,’ and I don’t want you to be like all them men, stringin’ everything up by its legs and puttin’ pictures of their dead bodies all up on the church bulletin.”
“I don’t want to eat him,” said Papa Roy. “I just want to see him with my own eyes. I just want to pay my respects. How often is a blue frog born into such a small place in this world?”
“You think they ain’t got blue frogs in big places?”
“Well, I sure ain’t heard of but one Blue Bull these past ten years. And ain’t nobody seen him since the spill. And I have a feeling he out there by the boat launch just a couple miles down.”
An image developed in my mind, of a sheet of scrap paper and a Tupperware of Crayola—my kindergarten art class. Red and yellow make orange, my teacher said, pointing to a faded poster of a color wheel. Blue and yellow make green. I had scribbled the colors over themselves to watch it happen for myself. So a blue frog could mean a simple genetic mishap, I thought. Not enough yellow pigment in its skin. A birthmark, but all over. Scientific.
“I wanna see!” cried Eli, sliding out of view on his belly.
“Ain’t nothin’ to see out there,” said Mama Ilene. “It’s almost supper time.”
“Don’t listen to her, Eli,” said Papa Roy. “We can go look tonight”—a glare from Mama Ilene—“after supper. We oughta catch a few, anyhow, and cook up some legs for tomorrow. Maybe if you kids catch ‘em your grandma will finally eat one.”
“I ain’t eatin’ no frog, Roy,” she said, flicking the point of her knife in his direction. “I just ain’t gon’ do it.”
“We’s all animals, Ilene. We’s all in the circle of life.”
“I,” she said, closing her eyes, “am a lady.”
“That’s ‘cause you married me,” Papa Roy said, pulling his overshirt out like suspenders. “If the Blue Bull is the prince, then you know I’m the king of this neighborhood.”
“Well, your majesty, if we all just gonna start naming ourselves and frogs whatever we please, then I declare myself queen of this kitchen, and you gonna sit here and stir these potatoes until they as mashed as your brains.”
Eli lay his head and arms across the table, formless as a rag doll.
“And only then,” said Mama Ilene, pausing in her work, “can you go catch them frogs.”
Papa Roy pushed off the back of the chair and sashayed to my grandmother, pulling her sideways into a bear hug until she squirmed away, smiling. My eyes wandered the corners of the room looking for clues that may have encouraged Ma to run away from all this when she was young, anything that might have convinced her to trade her children for fairy dust, those neat white lines that turned our home into a lair for monsters. But there was nothing.Whatever had sown for my mother had sown from the inside out. And that was scariest of all.
After supper, as the sun prepared to set, Eli and I tugged on some rain boots Mama Ilene handed out to us. Worn and wiggly, but still good. Papa Roy and I hooked his trailer—a flatbed of wooden planks supported by rusted, iron braces on gravel-dusted tires—to the back of his truck, then yanked one of two canoes he kept in the backyard onto its surface. Eli and I jumped into the backseat.
I had been the only person in my old class to admit to reading a homework assignment on weather patterns, about tropical depressions and the pressure in the atmosphere that squeezes rain from clouds. The sky hadn’t burst quite yet, but the air seeped like liquid, gathering and congealing: the kind of electric weather that turns a whole herd of cows in the same direction, and sets dogs to barking at nothing at all.