The Hard Blue Sky (30 page)

T
HAT
S
UNDAY STARTED THE
way the fourth Sunday in the month always started. Jack Roualt (it was his turn) got up at six o’clock, shook the hangover out of his head with cold water and a whole pot of coffee, and started out in his little boat—the half-cabin fifteen-footer—to get the priest.

He got there a good two hours before the priest was ready to leave. And he spent the time walking up and down the street, watching the girls as they came out from Mass. There was always a line of men, leaning on the rail outside the church. (It had once been a hitching-rail.)

Around ten o’clock the priest was ready, and they headed off top speed for the island. The priest was going to hear confessions before Mass, say Mass quick as he decently could, and go hurrying back for his late, and warmed-over, dinner at the rectory.

And just about that time too, Eddie and Mike Livaudais dropped into their beds for a couple hours’ sleep before they went on with the hunt.

That particular Sunday, no different. Except, maybe, that people got up later than usual, feeling brittle from the alcohol. None of the boats went out working. And the kids played in whispers around the houses or went off to the west end.

It was a little after ten when Al and Adele Landry finished breakfast. One corner of the kitchen was stacked with grocery boxes full of her stuff—she had not had time to unpack that. But there were new curtains at the window—her curtains, from the other house—and her china was on the table. Not bad, she told herself, for two days.

They were quiet, breathing into the hot thick silence of the morning. Adele could almost feel her mind running from one job to the other, deciding what to do and which to do first. And coming always back to the thing that was bothering her.

Finally she said it aloud: “It’s not like you knew where she was.”

“Who?” Al asked sleepily.

“Annie.”

Al stretched and yawned and kicked the table so that the coffee cups rattled and the brown liquid sloshed into the saucer.

“You didn’t hear her,” Adele said, “this morning?”

“Maybe,” Al reached out and patted his wife’s hand, “maybe.”

Adele looked worried. Her heavy brown eyebrows were crinkled. “And that means she was with some man, for sure.”

Al nodded. “My girl, she is not queer, che’.”

She clucked her tongue. “She is a nice girl. But she is too pretty for that.”

“Never too pretty.”

Adele spread her hands out on the oilcloth. “Look now,” she said. “Me, I can be a little careless where I go. I am not so young anymore. And I am never pretty.”

“You out of you god-damn mind.”

“No.” She shook her head. “I know this for a long time, and it does not bother me.”

Al tilted his chair back and stared at her, at the smooth clean lines of the brown hair pulled back from her face into a roll. “Face like a ’tit ange …”

She got up and, taking the frying-pan off the stove, put it in the dishpan. “I am worried about it.”

“I can tell, me,” he grinned. “You just went and put the pan full of grease in your dishwater.”

She yanked it out.

“You are worried, for sure.”

She dipped the pan back in so hard that suds sloshed over the edge of the sink. “When her own father does not worry …”

She stopped and began to scrub out the grease.

Al took a little crayola-shaped cylinder off one of the shelves, went over to the big mirror by the sink, and began to wax the tips of his mustache.

“And we going to fight so soon. …” Her voice was a little unsteady.

“Who fighting?” he asked. “I ain’t.”

She didn’t answer. He put the cover on his tube of wax and put it back on the shelf. Then he came over and patted her behind. “Look, che’,” he said, “what I can do to stop her?”

She did not answer. She hung up the pan.

“See,” he said, “you can’t think of nothing. I can’t think of nothing. There is nobody nowhere can think of anything to stop the kids from doing what they bound to do.”

“Won’t do her no good,” Adele said.

“Maybe,” Al said, “maybe not. Nothing to do about it. Like the hurricane, no? Nothing to do.”

Adele went to church. She left the minute the bell began to ring, and that was the minute the priest stepped off the boat.

Al turned on the living-room radio loud and took a rocking-chair out on the porch. There was a baseball game coming from New Orleans and he didn’t want to miss it.

Adele did not go to confession. She couldn’t think of anything that she had done, anything that might be a mortal sin. And she never went to confession just for venial sins, though a priest had told her once it was a good idea. After all these years she was still afraid of going into that little black box with its musty velvet curtains, and the face behind the little wood lattice.

But she liked going to church. Back home she went to High Mass every Sunday. … The priest came only once a month and there was never a High Mass on the island, Al said. The priest didn’t bother; there weren’t any trained altar boys, and there wasn’t a choir. Maybe, she thought, on Christmas Eve or All Saints’ Day or Easter, Al will get the boat and take me over to Port Ronquille. …

The incense and the singing, and the organ roaring so that her ears tingled—she always sat way back in the church, under the organ loft, so that she could hear the loudest. She would carry the sound in her head for hours after.

The island church was small and white painted. And in black letters over the front door the words
Maris Stella
—there was more to the inscription but it had washed away because nobody bothered repainting more than the two words. The church was set up on the same high foundations as the houses. Under it a couple of chickens and a nanny goat were grazing. The bell was hung from a ten-foot scaffolding built just to the right of the front door.

The steps of the church at Port Ronquille were always crowded just before Mass—people gossiping, people getting a last cigarette before it was time to go inside. Here there was just a stray dog sleeping in the shade of a jasmine bush.

Inside the confessional was empty: she hesitated a moment by the dusty curtain. The church was nearly empty too. Up in the front row, strung out like black beads on a thread, were four black-scarved women. Old women, from their hunched shoulders.

Adele sat down in the second to last pew. A small boy came in the sanctuary, a lighted candle in each hand. He put both on the altar, made a little ducking bow and disappeared.

Up in the front row wood rosaries clattered on the seats. And one of the old women began to whisper to the other, in a high-pitched hissing voice.

And then the priest came out, moving with great long steps that swirled his cassock and shook the whole building. One of the candles went out. He lit it impatiently from the second. Then he sighed and began, pausing only a breath for the responses no one was there to make.

Adele could not follow him in the missal. His words were not clear enough for her to understand. She closed the book and put it on the seat behind her. And watched. He had just whirled to the right side of the altar and began what she knew must be the epistle, when the crowd of people came in. They scurried up the center aisle and stumbled into the pews: women, all women, Adele noticed, and children. Only some half-grown boys. And not a single man.

Adele folded her hands and turned her eyes back to the altar. The second candle had gone out again. But the priest did not seem to notice or mind anymore.

Why did there have to be candles, she wondered. But there were, whole batteries of them, at big weddings and funerals and big holy days. When she got married the first time, there’d been whole lines of candles on the altar and a priest in white, white satin vestments with little tracings of gold thread. She had been close enough to notice that.

It was hard for her to remember now what Bob Reynal looked like. And it wasn’t that long, she reminded herself. She felt a twinge; maybe she should have. She shook her head, very slowly, to herself: she didn’t and that was all there was to it. A year after he died, she had slipped the wedding-ring off her finger—because she was afraid of losing it, she told people—and had rarely put it back. She lived very quietly, and she was no more lonesome than she had been before he’d appeared.

The house, the pension, the boy Claudie—she should have remembered him better. But the house looked just like a dozen others in the town of Port Ronquille; and the money came from a government check; and the boy was her image and nobody else’s.

He was gone, clean gone, the way chalk is when a blackboard’s been wiped with water.

When she thought about it, looked at it that way, she had a funny feeling. She was almost angry with him. He had cheated her. He had not made her miss him. He was just gone. And he had taken his memory with him.

She got to her feet for the Gospel. Some of the people around her stood, leaning against the pew in front of them. Most did not move.

For a minute she was uncertain. But of course not, she told herself. If there was one thing she knew, it was what to do at Mass.

She’d expected a sermon: she rather liked them. But the priest just whirled around and with a
Dominus vobiscum
went on to the Creed.

She sighed very lightly. And went back to her own thoughts.

Al now, if anything happened to him—and she crossed herself quickly—she would miss him.

Nothing will happen to him, she promised herself. He was just one year older. It’ll be me die first, she thought.

A couple of pews in front of her there was a boy Claudie’s age. She found herself watching him. Looked like a nice boy. Was the water on the island good, she wondered. Back in Port Ronquille people said the water was bad. But most of the kids around looked healthy. …

And would they play with Claudie, when they got used to him? They weren’t now, for sure. And it almost broke her heart yesterday to see him stand in the front yard or on the porch and watch the kids go past, busy at something, with never so much as a glance at him.

“They get used to him,” Al told her when she asked him. “Let ’em alone. Kids like to go slow.”

And he said to her: “He don’t look the picture of misery.”

It was hard to tell about the boy, she thought, but he seemed happy. And he had taken such a great liking to his stepsister.

One evening over in Port Ronquille, when Al was visiting her, she’d asked about his daughter, was she pretty. And Al had looked surprised and said no. But maybe Annie had changed in the year she was away. Or maybe her father just didn’t notice.

Adele remembered the stumbling steps she had heard in the hall early this morning. That was natural enough. For a pretty girl. She herself had never done anything like that: she’d never had more than three drinks at any time in her life. And she had never come home just before daylight on a Sunday morning.

But then, Adele thought, you had to be fair. Nobody had ever asked her. She went to the dances at Port Ronquille sometimes when she was a girl. There were always men to dance with her and take her home. But she’d been so quiet and shy and—even in her thought she hesitated at the word—not a bit pretty. There never was anyone hanging around, feeding her drinks, trying to go to bed with her.

“I got to be fair,” she whispered to herself. “I can’t take it out on her.”

And maybe too, as Annie got a little older, she’d get prettier. And there’d be more men.

What was that like, Adele wondered, having all those eyes on you. … She ought to have been sorry that she’d missed that. But she wasn’t. She was still shy.

And who was it last night, she thought. Maybe that tall, terribly thin boy—what was his name—Perique.

She blinked and shifted her eyes back to the altar. The last Gospel … so soon … she stood up. And then the prayers … for the Intentions of the Holy Father, for Peace. The beginnings of each prayer cut across the ragged responses to the preceding one. The priest was in a hurry.

Everything will turn out all right, she told herself. Only a crazy fool worries like me.

Just the same maybe a special prayer. … And she tried to think of the proper saint … St. Ursula maybe, a young girl too. And Annie had stopped with the Ursulines in New Orleans.

But the Mass was over and the people were filing out. And she did not like to stay kneeling while they passed and looked at her.

She knocked over the little prayer bench in her haste. Even at that she was among the last.

Everybody was going home, even hurrying a little in the heat. Everybody except a group standing over by the bell. They had not been in the church, she was sure of that, but now they seemed to be waiting for something. For the instant she stood above them, on the top step, she noticed that they were not wearing hats—though everybody else did in the summer sun—and their hair was combed and shining.

It was a struggle to keep herself from staring at them as she walked slowly past. She was even afraid to look hard enough to see if she knew them … nobody else gave any sign of noticing them.

She did see that they were dressed up. In the hot sun she could smell the clean cotton as she passed by. And even with downcast eyes she could see the sharp fresh creases in their pants.

She would have asked … but there was no one. People bowed to her and smiled, but not one of them stopped to talk.

Because there was nothing else to do, she walked home.

T
HEY WERE ALL
L
IVAUDAIS
men—there was Eddie and his son Pete, and his brothers Mike and Phil, and Phil’s three sons; and there were relatives by marriage: Chep Songy and his son Jerry, and Ray Songy too, both of them brothers of Belle Livaudais.

There were ten of them that Sunday morning, standing in the church yard after Mass. They waited until the church was empty, then they went around to the sacristy door. The priest was just coming out, in his hand his little black doctor’s bag. His face was red with perspiration, and he had taken off his stiff Roman collar.

“A scorcher,” he said gaily.

The men did not smile. Eddie Livaudais cleared his throat, “Father,” he said, “we got business with you.”