The man picked up and said, “You told my secretary this was about Clydes dock. Mrs. Thibodeaux, I am the last of the Broussard boys, and I am the parish president now, and my daddy signed that paper with his own hand. What did the casino man tell you?”
I told him. The riverboat casino. The land on both sides of me. The filing that said Clydes dock was unpermitted, and the letter that was coming, and the offer to tear it down for free.
“Unpermitted,” he said, and I heard him almost laugh. “Mrs. Thibodeaux, in 1968 your husband built that dock, and my father, who ran the parish then, granted it a public permit in perpetuity, because every Fourth of July the whole parish ties up to it for the fireworks. It is not just permitted. It is a public landing, protected by the parish. The coffee can under that last cypress board holds the original, with the 1968 seal.”
I walked out to the end of the dock, where Clyde used to sit at sunset, and I pulled the can loose and unfolded the paper, and there was the seal.
The casino man filed that my dock did not exist on paper. My Clyde had the paper nailed under his own cypress board for fifty-six years.
The parish president drove down the bayou himself and stood on Clydes dock and read his fathers signature out loud. Then he had the parish records pulled, and the casinos filing was shown to be false, and the company was fined for filing it.
They built their riverboat downriver, on land they bought honestly. My dock stayed exactly where Clyde sank the first cypress post.
This past Fourth of July, the whole parish tied up to it again, boat after boat, the way they have since 1968. The parish president brought his grandchildren. And we watched the fireworks from the end of Clydes dock, the one that is still ours, and always will be.