The Hard Blue Sky (11 page)

He would have to fix her, he thought, and answering himself he demanded: How? And he realized suddenly that there was nothing he could do. He could not hit her, his own sons wouldn’t stand for that. If he found a new girl and told her about that, she would just shrug—she’d found out about others. He could put her out, but she would just move in with one of the kids.

“Nothing you can do, p’tit.” He jumped. Mamere Terrebonne was grinning at him. There wasn’t a tooth in her mouth, just the bare and bright pink gums.

Julius walked quickly out the door. On the porch he felt glass crunch under his shoes—the front window
was
out. He’d been crazy to use a shotgun inside. With glass costing the way it did. … Maybe he’d just put a regular window back in—be safer in hurricane season too.

But there were things he had to do first.

He went down the steps, not looking at the people gathered in the yard, not paying them the slightest mind. His throat was tight and burning, but he kept his head up. And he was very careful of his feet. He had to be steady, he thought; one foot after the other, one almost in a line with the other, but not quite.

And behind him, he heard his wife say: “He must be drunk, him. He don’t walk that good sober.”

He kept walking on, not looking down, letting his vision be a kind of triangle, from the sides of the path to a little way ahead. He watched the bushes and the trees pass him; he saw each leaf terribly clear, and each flower. As he walked he counted the petals on a red oleander. And saw the designs in the bark. In the top leaves of a little scrub oak a hummingbird was sitting, his wings closed, resting.

“I will kill the dogs,” he said.

And he went on.

The gate to his daughter’s house was closed.

He kicked it in with his bent knee. He walked up the path that was carefully swept with sand and lined with big shells: his daughter was a fine housekeeper, he thought; a fine girl.

He wondered if she had heard about the store. A thing like that went around the island fast as a brush fire—with kids running in all directions, carrying it.

The way rabbits spread a brush fire, he thought, on their own coats.

He reached the porch and, crooking one finger to his daughter to follow, opened the screen door and went inside. In the sudden duskiness he could see nothing. And he knew exactly what chair he wanted. He would have to ask.

“Where is the big red chair?” The words were an effort that left him breathless. A hand on his arm led him and another on his shoulder pushed him down. He felt the chair, sat bolt up right for a minute studying it to be sure it was the right one, and then passed out.

T
HE NEWS MOVED FAST
with kids to carry it from door to door.

It wasn’t half an hour before everybody on the island knew what had happened down at the grocery. Most of them went down to see for themselves so that all afternoon there were plenty of people around. It was almost like a picnic or the pirogue races over at Lafitte. Philomene sat in her chair, nodded and smiled.

The three Livaudais men—Eddie, Henry and Pete—went down together. Henry was in his pajama pants (he had been napping when Pete yelled the news up to him), and he hadn’t bothered changing. He didn’t even bother pulling the cord tighter, until the girls began to whistle.

Eddie said to his son Henry: “You got a girl, no? That why you don’t want to get cut up?”

“I ain’t turn chicken,” Henry said, “don’t you sweat about that.”

But just then Robby came running up and Eddie turned away to shadowbox with him. When his wife wasn’t around, he was always happy to see his bastard.

All that afternoon, until long past suppertime, Mamere Terrebonne hung around the grocery. It was hard to tell exactly what she was doing, but whenever anybody saw her she was busily walking around the building, or digging in the heap of glass on the front porch. She circled the building at least three times, moving slowly and carefully, looking at almost every board in the walls. Then she poked around with her cane in the heap of glass on the front porch, until she had sorted it all out into four piles, according to size.

During the afternoon there were plenty of people there, but around suppertime they left. And only the kids came back later.

But it wasn’t until about eight o’clock, just when it was getting good and dark, that Mamere Terrebonne pulled her hat down, low so that it almost covered her eyes, and started home.

Maybe it was all the excitement. Or maybe it was just the way things fall out. But that night Mamere Terrebonne had another one of her attacks. And the worst one yet.

She lived alone, in the same house she had lived in ever since she was married, in the cluster of houses that belonged to her relatives, her children’s children. (Her children had grown up and died, some of them, and her husband too, and even some of her grandchildren.) She cooked for herself—she ate very little now, and that mostly fish, like a seagull. And she cleaned house for herself, and she padded around in the little front-yard garden, not growing much, hardly doing more than stirring up the soil with a stick.

At night she would light the lamp (she had never had the house wired for electricity), and she would sit under it, making flowers of the fins of shrimptails, twisting the flowers into wreaths and bunches.

She was never alone at night. Her family saw to that. After all, who would know if the old woman died during the night, or needed help? Every night one of her great-grandchildren slept there.

There were plenty of them, half grown, from six to twelve. And they took turns. All day long they played and ate at their own houses. But at bedtime they headed for the little canvas cot in the corner of Mamere’s bedroom, next to the big old feather double bed that she slept in, the one that had belonged to her mother. And they would go home for breakfast.

They were company for her too, those nights when she’d napped so much during the day that she wasn’t at all sleepy. Then she would put away her flower-making and take the lamp and go into the bedroom, where the kid was already asleep. She would wake him up, prop him up in bed, and talk at him. If he fell asleep in the middle she didn’t particularly seem to care.

It made her family feel better to know that the old woman had somebody with her. And she got on a lot better with kids than with adults. They had more patience with each other.

Mamere had had her first attack two winters back, when she fell out of bed and lay on the floor stiff as a board and not able to say a word. Steve St. Martin was sleeping there that night and he sat up, holding the cover around him, because it was a cold night in February and there was a little skim of ice on the fresh-water pans left on the back porch. He stuck out one toe and gave the figure on the floor a little prod. Then he hesitated for a minute, chewing on one corner of the quilt, not quite sure what to do. And anyhow he was so sleepy, his eyes kept closing. He lay down again but didn’t sleep. He kept seeing the figure half wrapped in the covers lying on the bare floor boards. He reached over and touched one hand. It felt cold.

He got up, dragging his quilt with him, and lit a fire in the round barrel-shaped kerosene stove. The wick smoked; it was too high. And the crank stuck. He had to use both hands to turn it down. The quilt fell off his shoulders. Though he slept in a pair of cotton overalls and a sweater, he began to shiver. He pressed his hands to the outside of the stove. The tin was still cold; there was only a faint beginning tinge of warmth. He looked again at the blanketed figure alongside the bed. And backed out of the bedroom. The front door was closed and latched against the cold. He couldn’t manage it alone. So he climbed on a chair and opened a window and pushed back the shutter. He clambered through it and dropped down on the porch.

It was so different at night. He stopped for a minute and looked around, trying to be sure of his directions. There wasn’t a thing stirring; it was only cold and dark. A single bright star was caught in the top of the oak tree.

He ran all the way home. And inside of ten minutes there were flashlights and lanterns coming from all sides and somebody had started out to get the priest from Petit Prairie. By mid-morning, by the time the priest had come, Mamere was sleeping quietly with a little smile on her face. She had won. Only sometimes she muttered something about M’sieu Mort.

That was the way it happened the first time. And the second time was just like it. Except that it was late summer. And the kid was Addie Monjure.

He woke up when he saw that the lamp was still burning. And he took a good look at Mamere and went racing out of there. He’d always been a kind of nervous boy, and this upset him so that he began to scream. He had the whole end of the island up in no time at all. Some of the men came out with their shotguns; they hadn’t been exactly sure what was happening.

Perique Lombas took his little launch, the
Tangerine,
and went off to fetch the priest, while the women did what they could for Mamere.

And Addie Monjure, he ran right straight home, and got under his own bed, though it was so low you wouldn’t have thought that there was room for a single living thing underneath. He stayed there, scared and sniffling a little. And nobody could get him to come out. And his mother finally couldn’t take the sounds any longer. So she got his father and his biggest brother to lift the bed right off from on top of him. And a tough time they had of it too, for Addie got hold of the slats, and held on with all his strength. And when they finally got the bed up, he came with it, hanging like a crawfish under a log.

And his mother had to sit and hold him in her arms all the rest of the night and promise him that he wasn’t ever going to die. She didn’t have a minute to get over to Mamere’s until the morning came.

By that time Perique had come back with the priest. And it was just the way it had been before. Mamere was alive and asleep. So the priest gave a long look at Perique, and thought of his lost sleep, stifling a yawn.

And Perique shrugged, for he knew what the priest was thinking, and he said: “If you had seen her when I leave here—you think she would be dead by morning too.”

So the priest opened the door of the bedroom and peeped in. Rita Monjure, who was watching alongside the bed just then, stood up and bowed politely to him. He said a quick prayer and made a quick sign of the cross and closed the door.

The priest was a young man, named Ryan, from New Orleans. He had a square head on a thick neck, and legs that were so far apart that he rolled when he walked. He had been to the island before, many times. He was the youngest and the huskiest of the priests over at Petit Prairie, and he always got the distant night calls.

But he was a good-natured man, and he didn’t mind. And anyway he was young and very strong and sleep didn’t mean too much to him. So he came out on the porch and took off his coat, because already the day was getting hot, and took out his handkerchief and wiped the dust and the sand off his black bag which contained the holy oils and the holy wafers. Then he ran the handkerchief over his own face which was turning sweaty-red in the heat. And went across the way to Ferdinand Lombas’s house, and had a few whiskies with the men there.

T
HE
L
IVAUDAIS WEREN’T RELATED
to Mamere Terrebonne—not directly anyhow—so that when she had her attack, their living wasn’t changed much. The whole family went to the house the following morning and asked after her, but that was all.

When they passed by Marie Livaudais’s yard and saw Robby playing there, the four pretended not to see him. The kid ducked around under the porch: he would always disappear when his father’s wife came by.

Eddie was going straight from Mamere’s down to the boat. Pete was going with him, and Chep Songy was all ready and waiting at the dock.

“You change you mind, huh?” he asked Henry.

Henry shook his head. “Going home with Ma.”

His father took off his cap and scratched his bald top. “You got so much money you don’t have to work anymore?”

Henry grinned. His teeth were narrow and pointed and slightly irregular. “Maybe,” he said. It going to be a good day.”

“I’m tired working,” Henry said.

Belle Livaudais chuckled. “Livaudais men,” she said, “stubborn like crabs.”

Eddie looked annoyed. “When he running lucky …”

“Me, I was born lucky,” Henry said and put one arm around his mother’s shoulders. “And I’m going home with my girl here.”

Belle smiled more gently and her thin, almost Indian face cracked into wrinkles. “Crazy,” she said, “all the Livaudais. …”

Eddie shifted from one foot to the other. He wanted Henry with him. Needed him on the boat. But he was a man now, for all that he still lived at home. … Eddie was hesitating on the edge of ordering him to come. …

“Oh hell,” Pete said, “we get along without him.” For all that he was sixteen—two years younger than Henry—Pete was broader in the shoulders and weighed a good twenty pounds more.

“Sure you do,” Henry said, “You get along fine without me.”

“Oh hell,” Pete said and scratched his underarm, “you come along.” His thin pimply face sulked.

“Not this time, man.”

His father shook his head and didn’t argue. The boy was a strange one, for sure. Always was. Wanting to go off and be by himself. A kind of wild one.

“Jesus,” Eddie said, “leave the son of a bitch here. And let’s us go make the money.”

Grumbling, Pete followed his father down the path. He stopped once and looked back at his brother, hopefully.

Henry and his mother went home. They did not talk much on the way. They didn’t have to.

On the porch, with the screen open in her hand, Belle said: “That Pete now, he going to miss you being with them.”

“Maybe,” Henry said.

“You feel all right, no?”

“Sure.”

“I hear about the way you don’t want to fight down at the dock.”

“Jesus,” Henry said.

“So,” his mother said.

“I ain’t been scared,” he said.

“So.”

“Look, I been telling you. I ain’t scared.”