The Hard Blue Sky (53 page)

“I was plain sure.”

She swung her body forward catching her weight on her hands. “I’m not sure.” She sounded miserable; she knew it. And she knew she hadn’t intended to.

A mockingbird settled himself on the top branch of the sweet olive and shook the water from his feathers noisily.

“Look at him,” Perique said.

Annie didn’t turn her head. “I’m not sure,” she repeated.

Perique whistled softly to the bird.

“Nothing to keep me here,” she said.

Under the porch the chickens shifted and squaaked. The bird flew up suddenly and disappeared.

“Scared him off,” Perique said.

“Nothing to keep me here.”

He put one foot up on the railing and brushed the bits of grass off his tennis shoes. “No,” he said, “I reckon not.”

“Maybe I’m gonna get married.”

He went on brushing the top of the shoe. “That right?”

“No reason not to.”

“Yea.”

“Only it’s a lot of trouble to pack.”

“Yea.”

“For two cents I wouldn’t do it.”

Perique shrugged. “What’s keeping you?”

She didn’t believe it. She just didn’t believe it. Even when she knew she should stop, she tried again: “You want me to go?”

“Maybe you got a taste for New Orleans now.”

“You don’t want me to stay?”

Perique was smoothing his left eyebrow with his right finger. “None of my business.”

“Why not?”

“Free country.”

Annie got down from the rail. She stood at the top of the steps. “I reckon you won’t miss me,” she said. “I don’t reckon nobody will.”

“You tell me.”

“Okay,” Annie said and because she had a choice of crying or getting mad, she almost yelled the words across the porch. “I’m telling you: I’m leaving.”

“I be surprised, me, if you didn’t go—if he be willing to take you.”

“There a lot of things you don’t figure out.” She put one finger to her lips, sucking slowly. “You figure nothing right in your whole life.”

“Maybe.”

“Okay, Mr. Smart Jackass. …” She stopped for a minute and caught her breath. Then, quietly, almost without realizing that she spoke: “You going to miss me, for sure … and you going to want me to be back. …”

She walked down the steps and out the front gate. She could feel Perique watching her. But he did not follow her, or call.

S
HE WENT BACK TO
the house, slowly, scuffing her feet in the mud, kicking up the puddles. She wasn’t feeling or thinking clearly any more. She passed her cousin Therese, and stared at her for a minute, not recognizing her.

By the time she had focused her eyes, Therese was a few steps past. Annie turned, but Therese went hurrying off.

(“She look like she going crazy,” Therese said to her own mother. “And I don’t know, me, should I say something or what I’m going do. So I just walk faster.”

“It’s a man, for sure,” her mother told her. “You got to be real extra careful or you get more aching than fun from a man.”

Therese shivered a little, and it was exciting.)

“Neigre,” Annie hissed at her back. But she wasn’t really angry. She wasn’t even surprised. It was like she expected it.

She was a little surprised when she saw the house in front of her—the gray house where she’d been born and where, except for one year, she’d always lived. She walked all around, staring as if she’d never seen it before. She waded in the half-flooded yard but she hardly noticed until she felt the mud ooze over the top and squish inside the shoe. She took them off and carried them, one in each hand.

“Annie?” Adele called.

She went up the back steps to the kitchen, because suddenly she noticed she was hungry. She dropped the shoes by the door.

“You just miss your papa,” Adele said.

Annie looked at the dishes still on the table. “Anything left?”

“Jambalaya,” Adele said. “Only it’s been standing a while.”

“You always nervous about your cooking,” Annie said and went to get a plate. “All the time.”

“Standing don’t help rice,” Adele said, “nobody can tell me it does.”

There was a clean plate on the drainboard. Annie uncovered the frying-pan, took what was left. When she finished, she left the plate unwashed on the table and went to her own room. In a few minutes Adele followed her.

Annie was dragging the suitcases off the shelf directly over the door. They barely missed Adele and clattered to the floor with a puff of dust.

Adele sneezed.

Annie grinned, only it seemed more like she was drawing her lips back across her teeth. “Haven’t been down since I came back from the convent.”

“You going?” Adele said.

“Hell,” Annie said, “I been wanting to get off this stinking island. Ever since I saw what New Orleans was like.”

She yanked the suitcases open and then went over to the clothes rack which was hidden by a curtain of yellow cotton. She pulled it aside and a couple of the thumbtacks which were holding it up came loose. “God damn,” Annie said and gave a couple of harder tugs, dragging the whole curtain down, leaving a little ruffle of ripped cloth.

Her three good dresses were there, one cotton, one soft gray voile (she had brought that back from New Orleans and had never worn it on the island) and one green print silk.

“Haven’t got enough for New Orleans,” she said. “Inky’ll have to get me some more there.”

She took the three dresses and put them in one suitcase. “What you staring at?”

Adele was still in the doorway. “You really going with him?”

“What it look like I’m doing? Going fishing?” She scooped the clothes off the floor, the clothes she had used as a mattress and jammed them into the second suitcase, and then went over to the little dressing-table and took her make-up and powder and the two bottles of perfume and packed them on top. She got her hat—a round-brimmed one with blue cornflowers around the crown—out of the paper bag and looked at it, turning it carefully around on her finger. “It’ll do,” she said, “for a while. For the wedding.”

“I better go see I can find your father.”

“Sure,” Annie said.

She went over and pulled a box of scented soap from under the corner of the bed. When she looked again, Adele was gone. She could hear her out in the kitchen, talking to Claudie.

Briefly, Annie thought, she’s going to like having me gone.

And for just a minute she hesitated. …

She’d wanted to get away. She’d wanted to. And here it was, all here, all at once.

And she’d be getting married too. She’d wondered about that, off and on for years: could she find anybody for a husband? Was there going to be anybody around who’d want her? And she had that too, and not just an island man, nor even one from Petit Prairie or Port Ronquille. But one from the city. One who’d seen a lot, a whole lot. And still wanted to marry her.

That was something you couldn’t forget.

But it was strange now, because it wasn’t at all exciting. It wasn’t sad either. It was just something you had to do because you’d planned it that way a long time ago. If it wasn’t exciting now, you knew it was just because it was too close to you. You’d had a good look at it from before. And decided you wanted it. That was what you had to remember now. And go ahead.

But still … She sat down on the soggy bed and ran her fingers through her mud-splattered hair. … It was lonely now.

Annie got dressed. She put on a bra and tucked the tail of her shirt into her jeans. She took out a pair of leather shoes, then, remembering the water outside, put them in the suitcase, and got her sneakers. They were still wet but she slipped into them and tied the strings carefully.

And she remembered something else too. She went to the big armoire in the parlor, opened one of the doors, and reached up into the top shelf. It was there, of course; nobody would ever think of moving it: the big heavy cut-glass decanter that was one of her mother’s wedding presents—from a cousin of hers who’d struck it rich in the bootlegging business. Annie held it up to the gray light from the window; it was thick with dust and the stopper wouldn’t come loose. (She remembered her mother intending for years to get it loose; but she hadn’t ever got around to it.)

Annie put it on the window sill and stepped back. In spite of all the dust the crystal glowed faintly. So she took it back to her room, opened the suitcases again, and wrapped it up, as careful as she could, in slips and shirts and blouses and skirts. Then she put it in the very center of the suitcase and packed the other clothes around it.

If it breaks, she thought, I’ll feel awful. But it won’t, she answered herself.

Then she heard her father and Adele coming in the front door and she wondered if they were going to notice that the bottle was missing. But they didn’t. And she felt better about it.

Al was very calm. Adele was not. (On the way back to the house, she’d wanted to run. But he’d insisted on walking, holding her arm tightly to keep her with him. “Slow down there,” Al said. “We don’t want to go falling on her neck.”)

They walked through the center hall, and Al stopped in the door of his daughter’s room. “I hear you are leaving, no?”

Annie was a little startled to hear it put into words. “Yea,” she said.

“So,” he said, “come on out to the kitchen and we have a drink on it.”

“Oh,” she said, “okay.”

The three of them went to the kitchen and Al got down a bottle of red-colored anisette and another of Four Roses. “Which is yours?” he asked Adele.

“Nothing, I don’t think,” she said.

He poured a glass of anisette. “Good for you,” he said, “And what you want, che’?”

“Whisky,” Annie said.

“So. …” He poured. “Now we drink to you.”

Annie tossed hers off.

“Is that good for you,” Adele asked, “when you were sick this morning?”

“Settles the stomach,” her father said.

“It does,” Annie said.

“Have another,” Al said. “Do you marry him or just go to the city?”

“We’re getting married,” Annie said stiffly.

“I was just asking,” Al said. “You get packed?”

“If I need anything else you can send it.”

Al was curling both ends of his heavy mustache. “I was thinking, me, here we have a wedding and the groom is not here.”

“I can go tell him,” Adele offered.

“No,” Annie said too quickly. Then she added, “They got an awful lot to do.” It sounded lame, even to her.

Al tugged his mustache harder. “I’m not one for forcing anybody.”

“He’ll be coming up, anyhow,” Annie said and stared down at her hands.

“What?”

“He’ll be coming to get the suitcases.”

“And then we have the drink.”

“No,” Annie said, “I keep telling you. We haven’t got time. We just want to leave.”

Al pursed up his lips thoughtfully. “And maybe you like it better if we don’t be here at all when he come.”

Annie waved her hand at a circling fly. “Maybe,” she said softly.

“What?”

“I said maybe.”

“So we do it that way.” Al finished his whisky. The one umbrella in the house was hanging behind the kitchen door. He handed it to Adele. “Where is Claudie?”

“The back porch,” Adele said, hardly more than whispering.

“We go out that way.” And he was holding the screen open for her. Claudie was there. Al reached down and picked him up.

When Annie looked out the window, they were just turning out of sight on the path. And she yelled out after them: “I just want you to quit pushing me, that’s all.”

She was sorry they’d gone. She couldn’t think of a way to get them back.

She got her bags, lugged them into the kitchen, and sat down to wait. There was only the unsteady drizzle on the tin roof, and the soft calling of the cats around the foundations. She poured herself a drink, and sipped at it. She wasn’t thinking anything. She was just waiting.

Finally she heard Inky at the front door. “I’m in the kitchen,” she called.

He came through the hall, carefully so he wouldn’t track mud.

“I been waiting for you,” she said.

T
HEY WENT DOWN TO
the Rendezvous, with Adele holding the umbrella carefully all the way, trying to keep it over their heads. The rain was hardly more than a mist now.

Al was walking rapidly, with the boy in his left arm. Claudie started to squirm once and he had told him, sharply: “Quit a minute.” And the boy was very still, staring out of his wide blue eyes.

At the Rendezvous Al went in first with Claudie, leaving Adele on the porch to close the umbrella. She had trouble: the catch was rusted stuck. She had to put the handle down on the edge of the boards and step on the catch.

“I was wondering if we had lost you,” Al said when she finally went inside.

He had taken one of the tables near the front door. With the windows all closed ( the way they were now) the back of the room would be hard breathing. She put the folded umbrella down on their table, then changed her mind and moved it to a near-by chair.

“We all ready and waiting for you.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Adele said and then stopped, staring at the table. There were three glasses on it, a pint bottle of PM whisky and in front of Claudie a bottle of beer.

“He going to try some beer,” Al said. “We going to see how good his stomach is.”

“You think … ”

“Got to learn sometime,” Al said. He poured a half-glass and, as the boy reached for it, pushed the hand away. “Wait for you mama.”

“In the morning?” Adele asked uncertainly.

“Never a morning like this,” Al said, “after last night.”

“Hell,” Lacy Livaudais said from behind the bar where he was whittling an English soldier for his youngest grandchild, “you ain’t seen nothing, if they start doing the things they say they going to do.”

“Who?” Al asked.

“LeBlanc, for one.”

Al fingered his mustache. “I expect he believe that.”

“He got reason to be mad, him.”

“Hell,” Al said, “I didn’t say he ain’t.”

“Leastways, lots people around here talking tough.”

“Hell.” Al poured the whisky.

“Maybe,” Lacy said. “But if they just went and did half of what they was saying in here not so much as an hour ago. …”