The Hard Blue Sky (13 page)

He put the shotguns in, and got in himself. Then slowly he paddled through the marshy grass into the open water of the bay. The hollow shell of the pirogue danced on the tops of the sharp little waves. He shipped his paddle and let the boat swing around until it was broadside to the island. And he listened. There was a cow complaining; and some kids were screaming. Funny, he thought, no matter when you listened around the island—day or night—there’d be a kid yelling.

He looked down at the water: there were pieces of seaweed with orange berries. He fished one out, looked at it and smashed one of the berries between his fingers.

He wondered how it would taste to the fishes. He sniffed, but the berries had only the faint smell of decay.

He threw the tuft straight up and watched the sea gull dive after it. And miss.

He laughed. “Ain’t so fast as all that,” he said aloud to the small white body and the widespread fanning wings.

He looked back at the island, let his quick black eyes run back along the arc to the far end where the riggings of the boats stuck up into the small piled heaps of the evening clouds. There were little faint flickers of heat lightning up there.

He wiped the sweat off his lip with the back of his hand. He lifted his paddle and squinted out along its surface. Then he dipped it in the water, turned the pirogue and headed across the bay, with long slow strokes, not hurrying but moving just the same, and not looking back.

Inky shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and scratched at his ear irritably. He had got out the paper to refinish the little rough spot on the cowling that had been bothering him. But he didn’t feel like doing it anymore.

The afternoon sun was slanting down low now so that the rigging of the fishing-boats made criss-cross shadows on his own deck.

He stood up stretching and looking across the bay. Halfway down the curve of the island he saw Henry’s pirogue. He shielded his eyes and looked again. Then because he had nothing else to do, he went below and got the field glasses.

Inky recognized him. Damn, he thought, I’m seeing him everywhere. Coming or going. Solemn like a pelican.

After a few minutes Inky got tired of watching and put the glasses away.

A
ROUND SIX O’CLOCK, WHEN
the yard was mostly in shade and it had got a little cooler, Belle Livaudais dragged the charcoal pot from under the back-porch foundation. She tipped it over, sending sprawling out into the light the beetles and spiders and fat black roaches that had lived inside. Then she took a broom and swept clean a spot in the yard, about twenty feet from the house.

“Henry,” she called. “Henry, hey!”

She put the charcoal pot in the center of the swept circle. “Henry, hey, Henry, hey, c’here.”

Inside the small white-painted house with a steep tin roof, a voice yelled: “He been gone this last hour.”

She straightened up, put her hands on her narrow hips and sighed. “You got to come then,” she said, “I ain’t got the back for hauling water today.”

“Okay,” the voice said, “okay, lemme get my pants on.”

She stood alongside the charcoal pot and rubbed her hands up and down her back.

Funny, she thought, how it had never been right since after the last baby. Not a hurt, no, but a little ache …

“You coming right down out here, no?”

“Lemme get my pants on.”

She stretched herself now. She was a tall woman, with narrow shoulders and narrow hips. All in one line, like a pencil.

She sighed again. That had worried her once, when she was a girl, a long time ago. A very long time ago; she could hardly remember being young.

She looked at the kids sometimes, never walking when they could run, never sitting if they could stand; and then tumbling down asleep when they got tired. She had trouble sleeping; it had started after the last baby died—nights when she’d lie in bed, eyes wide open, not tired, not even restless, just content to stare up at the black ceiling. And she could dream, even awake, even with her eyes wide open. All the things she’d wanted to do. All the things that she’d wanted to happen to her. And hadn’t.

She got the bag of charcoal from the porch and shook some into the pot.

She almost laughed now, remembering. She’d been so worried about her figure when she was a girl. There was just a cracked piece of mirror in her bedroom. (It had got smashed when she and her sister had one of their fights; and they each took half.) Some days she would slip off her dress and her shift and stand looking at her hard bony chest with the strips of muscles running up crosswise under the arms. And she’d be almost ready to cry. Somebody told her rice was the thing to eat. And she’d made herself almost sick, eating it.

She’d got herself a husband though. Best-looking man on the island in his day, and a Livaudais too, tough as they come. He wanted her spare hard body. She was lithe and muscular as a boy. She did a boy’s work too, every day of her girlhood.

She went to bed with him, demanding no promises, asking for nothing, not even love.

Then she stopped seeing him. All of a sudden. Not another man—she knew as well as anyone Eddie might have killed him. She just stayed home, and every evening he could see her sitting on the porch with her parents. If he came near, she went inside.

So he married her.

Belle Livaudais squatted down and started the fire in the little pot. A mosquito settled on her thigh. She slapped and then scratched away the black speck with her fingernail.

The old women had been so upset when she’d come to get pregnant. They’d gone to her husband Eddie and told him to move out of the house quick or the mother and baby would die, for sure.

She could remember that, so clear, though it was near twenty years ago. …

She’d been over at her mother’s. There was a hammock in the yard there, hanging between two mulberry trees. A regular ship’s hammock. Her father had got it somewhere. (Nobody ever asked where he got things: he just picked them up when he was away from the island.) And she’d been lying there swinging gently, and staring up at the little green nubs of the berries (it was early spring). She’d been laying with one hand on her belly, trying to feel the life in there. And when she’d come to going home, Eddie wasn’t there, just two old women, her own grandmother and another one whose face she’d even forgotten. They both lived there with her until the child came. And Eddie, he had moved down to the other end of the island, to stay with his brother’s family. He wasn’t allowed to come back to the house at all.

The old women had worried about her narrow hips … but she hadn’t. They rubbed her belly with lard every morning while she dozed. She was very calm. Nothing came near to her. Not even the gossip that Eddie and the Hébert girl were sneaking something at night. Nothing.

And the baby was delivered so easy. She smiled to remember.

It was true, she thought, that she hadn’t had many. Only three, and two had lived. But they had all been boys, fine healthy children. Even the one that had died. … He’d been the prettiest of all, she thought sometimes. Though she couldn’t close her eyes anymore and bring up his face, smooth and round and white. Yes, she nodded to herself, time was playing tricks on her again.

She blew on the charcoal.

Time worked that way. Like the sand and grass over in the marsh. Whatever stood on it slipped down into it and disappeared. Not so fast you could see it going. But still after a while, it was gone.

She hated time, she thought. Forever cutting off things behind you, and then in a while cutting off what you remembered of those things. And leaving you just a little narrow spot of present and near past to stand on.

She stared down at the smoking coal. She felt herself balancing on a narrow point. With time behind her, gobbling up her connections with the past. Time pushing her ahead.

“Nothing left to see behind,” she said aloud, “and nobody could never see forward.”

She stirred the coals with a thin twig. “Except they was a saint,” she added.

“Jesus, Ma,” her son said, “you ain’t so old you got to be talking to yourself.”

She looked around at him, not really seeing him, but still balancing on that point time had left her.

“Jesus,” he said again, “what the matter?”

She shook her head, very slightly. “Ain’t nothing.”

“You looked at me so funny.”

“Nothing,” she said. The dizzy balancing feeling was gone now. And she was back squatting on the ground alongside the charcoal pot, her eyes smarting from the smoke. And a job of work to do.

“You can get the big washtub for me, no?” she asked.

“Okay,” he said, “want me to fill it?”

She sat down on the ground. “And what I going to do with an empty washtub?”

“Okay,” he said.

“Fill up the tub at the pump,” she said.

“Jesus,” he said, “why can’t I use the bucket?”

“It ain’t clean.” She stirred the coals again. “It had oysters in it.”

“I wash it out,” he said.

She shook her head. “Ain’t going to be clean enough. And I want clean water, me.”

He shrugged. “I give up.”

He got the tub off the back porch, filled it almost full, and then grabbing both handles, staggered across the yard with it. The water sloshed and splashed on his stomach. He lowered the tub down on the charcoal pot and more water splashed to the ground and made little round balls in the heavy dust.

He said: “What you doing that got to be done just so fine?”

He noticed the small pile of white cloth under the chinaberry tree and went over to look. His mother was still blowing gently on the coals.

“First Sunday coming,” she said, “and they get used for Mass.”

He lifted up first a long narrow white strip of cloth embroidered along one edge. Then the other, a long white lacy gown—a priest’s surplice. He dropped them back in a pile again.

“So they get used,” he said. “But why you washing them?”

“They got dirt in them.”

“They got mildew on them. I can smell it.”

“More reason.”

“Jesus,” he said, “and that what I near to broke my back lugging the water for.”

She didn’t answer. While she waited for the water to boil, she went and found the one spot of soft grass under the mulberry tree, smoothed it with her hand as if it were a bed or a sofa, and sat down.

Pete went over and patted her shoulder, letting his hand rest there for just a minute. “Don’t knock youself out.”

“The pants is torn.”

He glanced down at his knee. “They been torn.”

“Why you ain’t said something to me?”

“They all right.”

“Ain’t no son of mine going to walk around with his skin showing.”

“Make it cooler,” he said.

She glanced up at his face, saw that he was teasing. “Go on,” she said, “go back to what you was doing.”

“Your water ain’t boiling.”

“Ain’t no water boil in a minute.”

He squinted up into the sky. “Jesus,” he said, “look at that hawk there.”

“Where Henry go to?”

“How’d I know.” The hawk had disappeared, but he kept squinting, trying to see it.

“He didn’t say?”

Pete laughed. “He don’t ever.”

“Why he ain’t told me he was going?”

Pete grinned. “You was down at the church.”

“He like to be alone sometime, him.”

“He want to be alone a long time, this time,” Pete said. “I seen the load of stuff he took.”

“Maybe he get us some deer.”

“Yea,” Pete said.

“Be nice to have some deer, no?”

“Yea,” Pete said.

“Shake up the fire some, che’.”

He did, and then headed back into the house.

She called after him: “Maybe this time I cook it with wine, no?”

T
HAT WAS THE NIGHT
it rained—a short, hard storm, with little square stabs of lightning and a stiff, chill wind.

Old Boudreau shook his head and said that it felt like a little hurricane and that meant a bad September for sure.

Eddie Livaudais, when the thunder woke him up, thought of his son (safe up in the marsh he would be, sheltered from the waves, but wet anyhow). And he chuckled to himself—teach the kid to stay home, maybe.

Down in the brakes and the hackberry thickets around the houses, the dogs began to howl. And Rita Monjure who was staying with Mamere lit all the lamps in the house, and looked at the clock every ten minutes to see how much longer it was to daylight.

When morning did come, the wind was still blowing hard, but it was bright and clear—just some little straggly bits of cloud that disappeared in an hour. And the wet ground and the leaves steamed under the sun.

Around noon, in the hottest part of the day, Mamere began to stir around, and to mumble. And Rita Monjure, who was going home just then, dead tired from no sleep, walked the extra distance over to the grocery to tell the people there that the old woman was pulling through. Then she plodded on home, chased the kids off her front porch with a mop and a series of yells that scared even them, drank four cups of cold coffee and went to bed herself.

Mamere Terrebonne opened her little eyes that were tucked way back in her wrinkled brown face (for all the world like the face on a gingerbread doll), and she called for some anisette. When the women who were watching up with her—Cecile Boudreau and Justine Landry—said no because the doctor had told them so the last time, the old woman fell to swearing softly.

Cecile clapped her hand over her mouth and went over to look out the window. She found it funny—this old woman who had been almost dead, and who was lying in the middle of her bed now, covered with quilts in August, and cursing in the old fashioned roundabout way.

Justine Landry was shocked. “You been so close to God,” she told her grandmother, and went to get some of the medicine the doctor said to give if she got excited.

The hands were curled on the edge of the bedsheet. One on each side, Justine thought, like the claws of a bird that was lying on its back, dead.

“God, He is close to me,” Mamere said, though she was panting just a little. “He never leave me, Him.”

Justine got one hand behind the old head. “Take this, Mamere.”