The Hard Blue Sky (17 page)

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Authors: Shirley Ann Grau

BOOK: The Hard Blue Sky
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A couple of days later her father decided to send her to the Ursuline convent in New Orleans where her great aunt was Mother Superior. He was afraid to tell her, himself, so he sent his sister-in-law.

Annie listened and then said, dry-eyed: “Sure.”

“Now you are being sensible.” That was her aunt’s favorite word. There was even a little bit of praise in it. “Too much grief for you here.”

“I don’t care,” Annie said.

(That evening her aunt said to her uncle at supper: “You think she been fond of her mama, her, with all the taking on she is doing. After her pestering the life out of that poor woman, rest her soul, never giving her a minute’s peace. They spoiled the girl, sure, spoiled her rotten.”)

“You feel better when you get away. It be good for you che’.”

“Yea,” Annie said.

“I call your papa.”

He came so quickly, they both knew he must have been standing out in the front yard waiting. He came hurrying into the room, stumbling a little over the high door sill, his eyes squinched almost tight closed, one hand rubbing his gray mustache.

“I’m going,” Annie told him.

He tugged at the ends of his mustache, trying to curl them up. “That’s good. That’s good.”

He couldn’t think of anything else to say. His sister opened her mouth, then closed it, and finally said: “That’s sensible, che’.”

Annie walked away, very slowly. They didn’t look out the windows, but for a long time they could hear her crying outside.

So she went in to New Orleans with her aunt. Her father did take them up to Petit Prairie in his boat: they could catch a bus there for the five-hour drive to the city.

There were heavy rain clouds in the east and it was beginning to drizzle the way it did every afternoon in July. Flickers of lightning jumped from cloud to cloud.

“Lot of heat lightning there,” her father said as he carried the bag over to the bus—a blue-and-yellow-painted job: one of the old public-service buses from Baton Rouge.

“It is just like always,” his sister-in-law said.

The first heavy drops fell and smattered in the dust as he put the bags inside the bus.

“What you say?” He nodded to Gil Carnot, the driver, who was leaning against the front bumper, smoking a long thin cigar.

Gil nodded back.

“Well,” her father said, and rubbed his hands on the sleeves of his shirt, “now we fixed.”

Her aunt said: “You will come get me tomorrow some time.”

Her father nodded.

Annie looked from one to the other, her eyes suddenly focusing. “I won’t be back tomorrow.”

They looked at her, startled by the tone.

Then her father said: “I got to get going. I got things to do.”

“I take care of her,” his sister-in-law said.

“And you have a comfortable ride, Justine.”

She tapped him on the chest with her palmetto fan. “We will be all right.” He kissed her good-by.

He hesitated in front of Annie. “Be good,” he said. She did not answer.

“I will take care of her,” Justine said. He nodded and left.

Annie turned and watched him walk away—a short, almost bowlegged man—toward the dock where his boat was. “Bye!” she shouted. He looked over his shoulder and waved. His mustache was smiling.

Justine settled herself carefully, arranging the back of her skirt so that the light silk cloth would hold its sharp-pressed pleat. “A lady should know how to sit. …”

Annie did not answer, so she nudged her. “Your skirt is right?”

“Oh sure,” Annie said.

“It does not look right,” her aunt said, “you have a big bunch there in your lap.”

“It’s just like that.”

“Stand up and I see.”

“No,” Annie said.

Her aunt shrugged, and began to use her palmetto fan hard, the muscles of her forearm rising. The little beads of perspiration on her upper lip, among the short black hairs, disappeared. Then, when the driver climbed slowly into his seat, and the whole floor of the bus began to vibrate with the engine, she closed her eyes, turned on her side, and fell asleep, snoring gently.

Annie shifted in her seat. The skirt felt strange—she hadn’t had one on since her mother’s funeral—and the stockings were burning hot on her thighs. There was a funny little ache behind her eyes and a kind of bubbling feeling in the middle of her head.

She had been to New Orleans once before, for Holy Week. That same great-aunt had got them tickets for the Holy Thursday and Good Friday services at the Cathedral. She and her parents went in especially for that—for the long services full of chanting and organ music and incense in thick white trails like ribbons. She hadn’t been more than ten then, so small that she got stepped on in the crush to get in the church, so small that she had to stand on the pew to get one glimpse of the altar: three gold domes sparkling under dozens of candles. The rest of the time she’d sat very quietly and listened and smelled and stared up at the ceiling with its pink and blue and gold angels. And when the procession passed down the aisle right by her, one of the altar boys, the one carrying the incense bowl, began to sneeze.

She did not remember the trip in. So all the way, she sat almost without moving, her elbow bent on the window sill, her head leaning out the window.

When, after the long stretch of swamp, she saw the city, gray and smeary with rain, straggling out along the east bank of the river, she shook her aunt. The woman woke with a gulp and a little cough.

“Look.”

Her aunt rubbed her eyes. “We are there.” She combed out her hair with her fingers and settled her hat straight. “Fix your stockings, che’.”

Annie straightened the seams without taking her eyes from the window.

“And comb your hair: You have been holding your head out the window, no? I can tell.”

“No,” Annie said.

Her aunt sat, staring straight ahead, her lips pursed as if she were whistling, her fingers tapping the slightly worn edges of her purse. Her gold-rimmed glasses had slipped far down, almost to the end of her nose.

The bus passed the edge of the convent’s grounds. They got off.

“Now,” her aunt said, “there. That is some place, no?”

There was a wire fence and line upon line of pecan trees that had been planted in precise straight rows years ago and had grown very tall and dense. The ground under them was dark and mossy and without a speck of grass.

“The gate is this way here,” her aunt said. “You take the big bag.”

It was drizzling very lightly. Annie could hear its soft whispering sound in her hair. They walked around the corner following the fence, and passing a church with a high pyramid of steps and a brass rail running down the middle.

“There,” her aunt said. “Over there we are.”

She had to lift her head to see: the heavy carved-wood doors set in a gray cement arch. There were two narrow iron stairways curving up to it, one on each side.

“You go that way,” her aunt said pointing to the left, while she herself started up the right.

Annie climbed slowly. Halfway up, she had to put the suitcase down, and rest, the stairs were that steep.

She stayed at the convent for ten months—until one day, almost without thinking about it, she wrote a letter to her father, saying she was very homesick—but looking back, she couldn’t believe it had been that long. Probably because she didn’t remember it as a whole. She remembered just little bits and pieces. Her great-aunt’s face, brown and wrinkled with a crinkled quivering little chin and a sharp beaked nose, with a white circle of starched linen for a cap and a wider circle of shiny smooth linen for a collar. The long dark halls, with black linoleum in a narrow strip down the center. The dark formal parlors, wood-paneled and smelling of furniture polish, with straight high-back chairs of heavy oak, claw-footed. And the windowless vestibule before the leather-padded chapel doors: dark pillars and black-red carpet and a single red vigil light burning. And Mass on winter mornings, before the heat had come on, when her knuckles turned red with little white criss-crossings, when even the candle flames looked cold and unsteady.

She was tired all the time. Mornings when the bell rang to wake up the convent, she could hardly open her eyes. Her body seemed so long and heavy on the bed she did not think she could raise it up ever again. She fell asleep during Mass, even in the cold; once she slipped out of her pew and clipped the side of her head against the floor. All that winter she felt that her body was not part of her at all. She felt stiff and strange, her legs and arms hurt. And when she looked in the mirror she saw under her eyes heavy black circles with little cobweb lines of veins in them.

Evenings she learned to crochet because there was nothing else to do. She finished a pale green stole, folded it in a drawer and did not wear it. Then she began a bedspread, the same color, because it was the only yarn the convent had.

She shared a room with a South American girl whose name was Beatriz Valdares. She was short and very dark, with the figure of a nursing mother. Her family had sent her out of the country when the rifle bullets of revolutionaries crashed into their living-room. So Beatriz waited impatiently, writing long letters home, four and five pages at a time, in violet ink. Though she had been at the convent three months, she had learned hardly any English.

She and Annie disliked each other immediately. They divided the room by a chalk mark down the rug. And when Beatriz left for the week-end—she was always gone visiting friends—she would point to her side of the room, double up her fist, and shake it.

The very first week Beatriz went to her cousin who was a nun and complained that Annie talked in her sleep all night long. But there were no empty rooms in the convent and so she came back in worse humor than before. That night she shook Annie so hard that her fingernails dug into her arm, and left little blood marks.

Annie lay quietly, and tried to remember what she’d been dreaming. Finally she pulled the covers over her head and tried to go to sleep.

Lying there, without moving, she heard Beatriz get up. There was the faint rustle of a taffeta robe and then the very faint creak of a door. Annie sat up and switched on the lamp to be sure: the other bed was empty. She looked at the clock: it was five minutes to twelve.

Annie turned off the light. Her head was hurting, and she felt too tired and sick to be curious.

Occasionally during the months that followed, she would wake up and find that Beatriz was gone. She noticed that it was always the same time—a few minutes to twelve—and that Beatriz would be gone a little less than an hour. Annie did not care. It was a long time before she was well enough to be curious.

Then, one night, in the very early spring, when she heard the door close softly, she got up and followed. She did not stop for a robe or for slippers, though the floors were icy cold and she shivered inside her flannelette pajamas. She caught only the tiniest flash of the robe down at the far end of the dim hall, so she followed, walking on her heels to keep the boards from squeaking. She did not realize where she was going until she got there: down the narrow side steps to the door that led to the back garden, the dark grove of pecan trees she had seen on her first day. The door was open about an inch. She tried peeping through, then put her shoulder to it and pushed. It grated softly—she turned and raced up the stairs to bed. She was asleep before Beatriz returned.

It was not until the next day she figured out what had happened. It was so simple, she should have thought of it sooner. Beatriz had a man waiting for her. It couldn’t be anything else.

When Annie saw her next, she couldn’t help staring at her.

The girl frowned. “Que rayos te pasa?”

Annie looked at her, imagining what it must be like those cold nights down in the dark of the pecan trees. And she started giggling. Only it wasn’t so much a giggle as a laugh that caught somewhere back in her throat. Finally she had to turn over and pull the pillow over her face to stop.

The next time Beatriz slipped away, Annie got up too. She stopped to pull a sweater on over her pajamas. She peered down the hall, but remembered the outside door and the sounds it made when opened. She went back into her room and leaned out the window, leaned far out, trying to see. No use: they would be around the corner of the building.

It was a bright night, with an almost full moon. There was just a sliver gone. The trees, which came up to the level of the second story, were still and silver-colored. The peaked bell tower of the church was spotted and moldy in the light.

And she saw something else: the broad ledge of the window sill continued like a belt around the building, trimmed here and there by grinning gargoyles and curly-maned lions.

She swung herself out on the ledge, and stood up, slowly. She balanced herself carefully, swinging her weight from one leg to the other, back and forward, getting the feel. The ledge was too narrow for balance with both feet together, but with one hand holding to the brick wall, she could walk easily, her feet crossing one over the other.

She stopped to rest at the first of the gargoyles. She hooked her arm around his cement neck and looked about. Straight down, through a break in the trees, she could see the clipped grass. The moon was so bright she could almost pick out each single blade. Above—she craned her neck back—the brilliant misted sky with only faint touches of stars. And quite suddenly she wondered what it was like on the island—it was a clear night; the bay would be flat and gleaming, with just little wrinkles like an old mirror. And on the boats the rough decks would look soft and smooth as teak; their stiff tarry nets would be soft delicate folds.

She sniffed. But there was no smell of salt or marsh. Only the clean odor of cut grass and the faintly murky odor of the old building.

She inched on until she had reached the corner of the building. She peeped around, down into the pecan grove. She still could not see anything. A lion’s head ornamented the corner. She stopped for a minute, thinking. She would have to step around that projection; she would have to make the right angle turn without losing balance. For a minute or so she stared at the lion that blocked her path. In the moonlight she could see every grain of cement that made up his face.

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