Mourning the wild man

It was a few years ago, at the Waffle House in Gray, where I stopped for a snack on my way back to the houseboat I lived on in Bayou Boeuf. I saw a man leaning over what looked like a cup of coffee at the counter, and something about him was familiar. The overall bigness of him, maybe. Or the beard with haphazard strands unkempt as the hair that matched it, long, scraggly hair which, like its owner’s lined face, appeared as if it could tell a story all by itself.

The voice, gravelly and deep, pushed out of a pit somewhere inside this man, forceful in a way that made you listen.

“I come in here on Sundays sometimes,” he said. “After church.”

I nodded, accepting a beefy hand that was calloused but clean and despite that curveball, the mention of church, I realized this was my neighbor from the swamps, Wild Bill Tregle.

I asked no questions about which church or where, feeling blessed that I was considered worthy of the mention. You see, Wild Bill and church is not something people familiar with both tend to string together in the same sentence.

Years of women-chasing, beer drinking, hard partying, nights and days with motorcycle guys who are not the doctors and lawyers who pose with leather and denim on their bikes, raising hell in a bar or whatever jail he landed in, all of these were things Wild Bill freely spoke of, feigning no shame.

In Bayou Boeuf the cypress trees stand tall and big just like Bill, with their beards of moss and a toughness that allows their trunks to live in the black swamp water.

The men and women who come from these forests for many generations tamed them, turning fierce alligators into food and purses and shoes. Many still have the essence – perhaps borne more quietly and privately – of what Wild Bill freely displayed, talked about, bragged about.

Call it Bayou Chutzpah for lack of a better word.

Maybe it’s when the generations turn, when the alpha instinct that fuels such feats becomes less important, when a man of nature does such a good job working within its tough laws that the minor regulatory issues of modern society, like paying fines, registering cars or obtaining some permits, seem less important. Mess up with an alligator and you die. Mess up with the courts you live, and maybe go to jail because they ask for money you don’t have. But still you live.

And maybe this is what makes a guy like Wild Bill, who admittedly scoffed at petty details, so important. You don’t want a world full of them. But a couple here and there is not such a bad thing, maybe.

In Thibodaux or Houma some folks might have met him and said such a man was scary and they would be right. But they probably never saw those hands that could break a bough gently cradled a baby alligator or rub its belly to put it to sleep, or maybe gesture while teaching a young nephew the ways of the wilds.

Wild Bill was if nothing else a “character” and even cops who have had to lock him up for some occasional transgression are the first to tell you that. They will also tell you that he never took it personal when they did their duty.

All of this is why it’s so hard to fathom that this giant of a man died last Wednesday. Not just that he died, really, because Wild Bill would be the first to tell you none of us is getting out of here alive. But that it wasn’t a gator’s thrashing tail or the venomous sting of a snake, a bar fight or some other issue arising from what happens when a wild man must consort with people, somehow it isn’t fitting.

No, it was his heart, a heart some people say was so big there was no bottom to it, with the blood pressure problems and such, that in the end did him in, at the age of 57.

So Monday everyone got together at St. Andrew the Martyr, the church there on La. Highway 307, to pray Bill up and to remind St. Peter and all the rest in heaven that a man who spent a lifetime making people laugh and making it right with nature deserves a set of wings, which of course they must make extra sized.

Over the next few days, if the weather turns especially nice and the heavens seem to smile, it’s likely because Wild Bill is cracking some pretty good jokes and regaling the angels with his stories.

And then there is the matter of his alligator sauce piquant. His cooking was introduced to no less an authority than Martha Stewart, who filmed a segment of a television show with him once.

We who are left behind will mourn, not just because Bill is not around but because that means another Louisiana original is gone and they are getting harder to find these days.