The Hard Blue Sky (55 page)

There wasn’t any. She felt cheated. She didn’t want to go back. But she didn’t want to forget. She wanted to have Perique tucked away carefully in a corner of her memory. … And again woman-fashion, she recognized that this memory would be a comfort: when things did not go well with Inky: she could conjure up another image and hide behind it. And if things were ever really rough, she could tell the children about the man who nearly was their father.

She’d remember more about him, she thought, when she wasn’t so tired, and when things stopped happening so fast.

And there was Inky. She loved him and there wasn’t anybody else.

Maybe, she found herself saying silently, she loved him because there wasn’t anybody else. Yet.

She was surprising herself, this last half-hour. Thinking things that had never come to her before. She was surprised but she wasn’t shocked. Things were the way they were. And she was what she was.

She stepped up on the seats, and stood leaning on the boom, her chin buried in the green canvas of its cover, and thinking. Thinking the way she had never done in her life before. The drizzle dripped down her forehead and ran in a little arch around her eyebrows.

Things happened, she thought, and you did whatever it was you had to do to meet them. And they went on past you.

And what you were came out in the way you handled them. And what you were changed from one month to the next and maybe even from one hour to the next. And no use quarreling with the way things were. Or the way you were.

She wasn’t sorry she’d left the island. Not now. Maybe she would be some day. Maybe she’d even go back. You couldn’t tell. But right now was what mattered. She couldn’t remember the past very well. And she couldn’t imagine the future.

So what did that leave her? she thought, and she almost smiled to herself. There wasn’t anything back there. Only there didn’t happen to be much here either. … The suitcases in the middle of the cabin, one of them with the fancy decanter that had been a present to her mother. And Inky.

He was stretched out almost flat, listening to the motor. His hair was so wet now that it looked like he’d gone swimming. He straightened up and put the boat back on course and glanced up at her, a little puzzled, a little worried.

She stepped over and tickled the top of his head with her fingers, the hair was greasy and wet to the touch. And even out here she could smell his hair oil.

She wasn’t happy. But she certainly wasn’t sad either.

She was waiting, waiting for things to happen to her. Things that could be handled and changed. And things that could just be handled. She felt herself grow great and passive in her waiting.

Yes, she thought. It’s Inky now. We’ll go to New Orleans, and we’ll get married. I can get him to do that. He wants to now, but even if he doesn’t. … And we’ll live there, we can have an apartment or maybe even a house.

It’s Inky now. And maybe it will go on being Inky. But maybe it won’t. And if I believed in cards or palms I’d say I could tell.

Maybe it will stay. And maybe, she thought calmly, it won’t.

“What you so busy thinking about?”

“Way things go and change.”

“Don’t you worry about it.”

“I wasn’t,” Annie said.

I
T RAINED FOR FOUR
days.

People wondered if a storm was coming. They listened to the weather broadcasts carefully and they squinted up into the sky and tried to tell. If it were going to be a big storm, the men would have to take the boats away. The harbor would not be protection enough.

During the worst storms, there are very few men on the island: they have gone with the boats, the most valuable things. They take them as far inland, up Bayou Verde, as there is time. The old, old men remain but they are not much use, for they have to be looked after, and their brittle old bones are likely to snap. And the children. And the women. They stay and pull in the wood shutters tight. (Under the clouds the air turns cold and rain comes in swirling eddies, so that the littlest kids cry from cold as much as fright.) And they save what they can and lose what they must.

They have been doing it that way for nearly two hundred years, ever since there were sailing-ships in the harbor, part of Jean Lafitte’s pirate fleet.

But the rain stopped. And the lower clouds blew off and there were just the high black ones, smeared across the sky, like the wind had flattened them over. Every now and then the sun came out, a little weak maybe, and a sort of sick yellow. But whenever it appeared, the women grabbed up the loads of wet clothes they had hanging on their back porches and over the stoves in the kitchens. They hurried to spread the clothes out on the gallery railings in the sun, or they went rushing down to hang them on the lines, even if they had to wade in mud up to their ankles to get there. Everybody knew that clothes dried inside never did smell clean.

Mamere Terrebonne came to the edge of her porch and squinted at the sun, held out her wrinkled old hand and looked at its shadow, and then turned it over and over, feeling the little warmth. Then she went back inside and got her rubber boots: she was going to the grocery and wet feet gave her rheumatism. She brought the boots back out to the porch and sat down in her rocking-chair. She had not had them on since the past spring. She shook each one carefully: a lot of dust and some dead roaches and beetles fell out. She bent down and looked at the shriveled shapes, grinning. “Nothing to eat in there,” she said aloud, “for a ravet, no?”

They were not mates either, these boots, but they were both black and they were both about the same size. She had found them years ago on the beach: she was always finding things. She had a quick eye for an object half buried in the sand. She found the left one first, and people laughed when she came home one day carrying only one boot. But she’d just put it on a shelf in her back hall, along with a couple of old eel traps and a bottle of stuff that was supposed to keep the gars off the dragues, the trot lines. And she forgot about the boot. Until one day, nearly five years later, when she found another. It was a right one, this time. She brought it home, and took the left one down, and stood the pair behind her front door. She had used them ever since.

She put them on this time, and, taking her cane, made her way carefully down the steps. She stood for a minute right in the middle of a puddle, the mud oozing over the tips of the boots, and she grinned a toothless smug grin to herself. Then she made her way to the grocery, the boots making plopping, sucking sounds each step.

She stopped on the grocery porch and cleaned her feet carefully. Inside she could hear Julius laughing with some girl. She grinned to herself. That Julius now, he was some hand with the ladies, for sure. Coeur comme un artichode … leaf for everybody.

She went inside. When he saw her Julius threw up his hand, and ran out from behind his counter to kiss her on both cheeks. Mo tante, he called her jokingly … they were related someway, vaguely, the way nearly everybody on the island was related.

“You look so fine,” he said, and pinched her cheek.

She took the muddy tip of her cane and poked at his chest. “You keep that for the young girls.” She looked around the room to see who else was there—Cecile Boudreau and over there, going through the piles of sweatshirts on the table, trying to find one for his kid, was Hector.

“Look who’s here,” Cecile said to him.

Hector turned and waved. “Hi, Mamere, what you say?”

She grinned at both of them. “I got a check, no?”

“Sure,” Julius said, “you been having a check ever since the fifteenth when they always come for you.”

“I didn’t need nothing,” Mamere said. “Why I should come get it?”

Julius had got the welfare check out of the wire cage that was the post office. He put the envelope down on the counter. “There.”

Mamere bent over until her nose was almost touching it. Then she straightened up. “Ah.”

“For you, huh?” Cecile said.

Mamere nodded.

“People brought you so much you didn’t need it, huh?” Hector said.

“Popular gal,” Julius said, “for sure.”

Mamere sniffed at them, wriggling her nose like a rabbit. Then she began to make her rounds of the grocery. It was always the same. She would begin at one end of the shelf, and stand right in front of it, her nose almost touching the cans. Then can by can she would study the shelves. As she got lower and lower her knees kept bending until, for the last ones, she was crouched almost on the floor—then she would yell for help getting up. Julius would get behind her and put his hands under her armpits and lift her up: she was so light it was easy. Then Mamere would shake herself out and begin on the next section of shelf. When she found a can she wanted she’d take it off and hold it out behind her, not looking around, but clearing her throat loudly. And Julius would take the can and put it with the others on the counter.

“You always was a great one for the women,” Mamere said suddenly.

“Which one?” Cecile said.

“Him. Julius,” Mamere half turned around. “You going to tell me, no?”

“You say so,” Julius grinned, “and it’s so.”

Mamere went back to her careful search of the shelves.

“I can tell you what you was thinking,” Hector said. “Bet me?”

“No,” Cecile said and tossed her head. “And let’s talk about something else.”

“For sure,” Hector said. “Like what?”

“We just had the biggest kind of excitement, and you don’t remember.”

“I’m tired as hell talking about the fires and what we going to do to them,” Hector said, “and I’m sick and tired trying to figure what they going to do to us.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Cecile said impatiently. “I meant Annie going off with her guy.”

Mamere had been holding out her hand with a can of Spam in it, but nobody had noticed this time. So she had turned around and brought it over to the counter. “Ah,” she said, “Annie, she leave. And before her some more of them leave. And maybe they come back. And maybe not. But me, I am always here.”

Hector and Cecile waited while Mamere finished her shopping. Then she carefully and slowly signed the check, and Julius cashed it for her. What was left, she put into the bag that dangled by long green strings from her belt. Then she looked up, and her wrinkled old raisin face grinned happily. “So now we go home.”

Hector took the two largest bags, and Cecile the smaller. And they went.

“Jeez,” Hector said. “This is real heavy—you stocking up for the whole year?”

Mamere did not answer. She was walking fast as she could, the shoes slushing in the mud. Her head was bent down, and she didn’t appear to have heard.

Hector shifted the bag. “Don’t spill anything,” Cecile said.

“Watch out yourself,” he told her.

They put the stuff on Mamere’s kitchen table.

“Got a crick in my arm,” Hector said.

“Got a hitch in my back,” Cecile giggled.

Mamere peered into the bags.

“Look at her,” Hector said, “stick her head clean down in them.”

“Yea?” Cecile said, “look at us—going to get wet.”

It had begun again—flashes of gray rain. They went over to the door and Mamere followed them. It was coming down steadily.

“And me, I got a line full of clothes out,” Cecile said.

Mamere chuckled. “Ca mouillasse.”

“Too late to go worrying about them,” Hector said.

“They was most dry when I put them out.”

“Say, Mamere,” Hector said, “what you make of this funny weather?”

“Seen this before,” Mamere said calmly.

“Bet you have.”

“And I know what coming.”

“What?” Cecile asked sharply.

“Ha!” Mamere said. “So you are so serious now.”

“Sure, I’m serious.”

“I can feel it.”

“I’m asking you what.”

“I can feel it begin to blow and rain.”

“You can?”

“Storm too.”

Cecile had turned her back to the outside and was staring at the old woman. “You mean hurricane?”

“Me, I can see a flag already flying at the station at Port Ronquille.”

“No fooling?”

“See it so clear.”

“Come on, honey,” Hector said.

“I don’t want to get wet.”

“Make a dash,” Hector said and got hold of her left arm.

They began running, trying to pick their way through the puddles of the path. Cecile landed squarely in one, and started laughing. She stopped for breath under the broad leaves of a latanier. Hector, who had gone a few feet ahead, came back for her.

“What the matter with you?”

“That one splashed clean up me.”

“Yea?”

“That why I don’t like skirts, none.”

“Let’s go.”

“Got to catch my breath,” Cecile said, “it felt so funny.”

“Okay,” Hector said. He stepped under the tree, and held a leaf carefully over his head.

“Do you reckon,” Cecile said, “there’s anything to that?”

“To what?”

She pointed with her chin in the direction of Mamere’s house. “That.”

“Hell,” Hector said, “means she heard the radio, that’s all.”

“Huh?”

“Means she been listening to the weather report out of Port Ronquille, same one I heard.”

He took her hand again and they ran the rest of the way home. The very minute they were up on their gallery Cecile asked again: “They say there’s a storm coming?”

“They say maybe.”

“God damn,” Cecile said.

B
ELLE
L
IVAUDAIS WIPED THE
last dish and put it away. She spread the cloth to dry over the back of a kitchen chair and took off her apron. Then she left the house, walking in her determined, stiff-shouldered way.

Marie Livaudais was carrying the plants from her porch to shelter inside. “What you say?”

“I got to talk to you,” Belle said.

“Come have some coffee.”

Belle shook her head. “Where is Robby at?”

“Huh?” Marie shook her head, shocked. It was the first time Belle had ever spoken of the child. The very first time.

“Eddie’s boy.”

“Huh?” Marie stalled. And to herself she thought: She went and blew her top, for sure.