The Hard Blue Sky (56 page)

“We got need of him.”

“Where’s Eddie at?” Marie said. “I ain’t seen him around.”

“At Petit Prairie,” Belle said, “with Pete.”

“I thought maybe he come back.”

Belle shook her head. “He got to be there.”

“Ain’t really thought he be back yet.”

Belle sat down on the railing. “We got room at our place,” she said, slowly. “And I come to get Robby.”

“I don’t know, me,” Marie said hesitantly.

“We got place,” Belle repeated, “for him now.”

“Okay,” Marie said. “I pack up this stuff.”

That was the way Robby Livaudais came to his father’s house.

It was one of the things the island would have talked about for weeks, if they had had time. But too many other things were happening.

They took his things up to the attic room that had been Henry’s. He put his clothes away and he hung up the board stuck full of the butterflies he had caught.

Then he slipped out and stayed away until dark. Later, as he had always done, he went for supper to Marie Livaudais’s.

She shook her head and sent him right back to his father’s house. His father’s wife was waiting for him. They had supper and then he went up into the new room, up the narrow stair, that was really just a ladder, tripping over his own clumsy feet.

The whole attic was empty. He listened. There wasn’t a single sound of breathing. He had never been in a room alone before.

For a while he walked around, jumping on the other bed, fingering the fishing-tackle that stood in the corner, opening drawers and looking in.

“Thought I told you to go to bed,” his father’s wife called up to him.

And so he had to go into the little front compartment. He stretched out on the bed, still dressed, and kept very quiet. But he kept his eyes opened and he kept the light burning, the one that stuck out of a socket on the wall.

Until his father’s wife called up again: “I can plain see that light burning through the cracks.”

There was no help for it: he had to reach out and switch off the light. He stared straight at it, trying to keep a little bit of light stored up in his eyes—but it turned into a red worm and disappeared.

“You ain’t a kid no more,” she called.

He kept his eyes open in the dark. And listened to the strange sounds as the house swayed slightly in the wind. The sharp cracks as the furniture popped and settled. And the smells that were unfamiliar. …

He shivered and made himself stay very still.

The morning would come, the way it always did, and he could go out. And he could go see what Gus Claverie and Joey Billion were doing. And wouldn’t they be surprised when he told them he had changed his house. Wasn’t one of them had done that. Most people, they just stayed in the house where they were born. And none of them changed. The way he had.

He would tell them that in the morning. And he would tell them too about the room that was his now. A whole room all for him.

The shutter rattled. And he wondered if a loup-garou were banging away out there.

With his eyes and his ears closed it was just like any other place. He could imagine. … He tried. It worked.

He kept at it. And after a bit he convinced himself he wasn’t there at all.

I
T WASN’T THE STORM
that was bothering Mamere Terrebonne on the following day. She’d seen too many of them, been in too many of them to bother any more. It was the winter. She could tell that it was coming. Already the wet, black nights felt different. It wasn’t just that they were cooler—the rain would make them that way—but they weren’t the same. The air wasn’t the steady even air of summer, not any more. It was quivering and nervous.

And the man—his name was Jean Cheramie, she’d been married the same day as his grandmother or his great-grandmother, she couldn’t remember which, in the old church, the one with the real gold cross over the altar, bright and gleaming that morning—had stopped coming. She didn’t hear him any more, didn’t hear the soft rubbing of the wheels of his little cart on the sandy road, nor his voice calling out the names of the vegetables he had brought over from Petit Prairie and wanted to sell. She missed his shouting; a voice like his you could hear all over the island, nearly.

Mamere Terrebonne lifted her head and stared up into the branches of the pecan tree. She didn’t do that often; her back had grown so stooped it hurt to straighten it out now. She could remember, just barely, when her whole body had been slim and bending as the new branches on the oleanders. She could just barely remember. … Now she put both hands to her back and straightened it slowly, staring up into the highest branches of the tree. As she watched, the wind pulled a handful of leaves away.

It was blowing for sure. …

But the wind didn’t bother her. The house had stood steady before, even when water came right up to the level of the floorboards and her father had got down on his hands and knees and with an awl bored holes in the floor to let the water in—to keep the house from washing clean off its foundations.

The house would stand.

And if there was a storm—that was nothing. Maybe even a hurricane—that was not much more. It wasn’t the storms. It was what the storms indicated: the beginning of winter. It had nearly sneaked up on her. But she had found out in time, and everything was all right.

Every winter Mamere Terrebonne had had a struggle with death, every winter for the past ten years. Though she locked the windows and put the heavy bar across the door, he still managed to find his way inside. She had seen him so plainly once—by the light of her kerosene stove. Each year he came earlier. The first time had been in January, when she heard him rattling the shutters and pounding at the door in the heavy salt winds before he managed to slip through a crack somewhere with the winter cold.

Each year earlier—and she wasn’t going to take any chances. She had got the food from the grocery. And now she would have to get the shutters up.

Up in the sky now, the gray heavy clouds broke up for a minute and the sun came out. She held out her hand and felt the warmth. And shook her head. Sun was hot, hot as summer. But it was a winter-colored sky. No mistake. In summer it was a soft gentle blurry blue that stretched from tree to tree. It pulled farther away in winter, until it was very high and very blue and very hard and winds came out of it.

She sighed and let her body relax into its bent arc, the position that was natural for her now. No mistaking a sky like that. …

There were other signs too, now that she came to look for them, signs that she had been seeing for weeks and had not wanted to interpret. The yellow leaves lying curled like pods under the gardenia bush. The red flowers falling off the Rose of Montana. The wild honeysuckles that had finished blooming and pulled back close against the shelter of the house foundations. The yard was empty, except for the dead things: the burned-out yellow light bulbs her great-grandchildren brought her from the grocery store and which she stuck in the ground to edge the walk. Their smooth yellow glass was gleaming under the bright sky. Mamere stood right over them and saw her ownself reflected, the sun over her shoulder small and flat like a dime.

Somebody passed by. “Hi,” they said, “what you say?”

She didn’t bother looking closer. She lifted one hand in a half-wave. And, since that hand was up, she lifted the other, and they both pulled down firmly on the brim of her hat.

It had been a light gray hat once, but time and rain and sweat had stained it almost black. She remembered when her husband had bought it, she could see him standing out in the garden, wearing it. She could see him clear as anything, the felt of the hat soft to the touch and glowing. He’d been a man; the only man for her. Even after they’d had that one big fight and he’d gone off, she hadn’t even been able to look at another man, even though she’d wanted to—when the pain had turned into anger and she’d wanted more than anything else, more than breathing even, to hurt him, even if he didn’t know it. But she hadn’t. Though she had been pretty then and young still and there’d been men who were willing. People would have understood too—even his own family—and they wouldn’t have blamed her: when a man leaves his wife he can’t complain about what goes on in the house. But she couldn’t, anyhow. Though she hated herself and lay on the bed for hours crying. Nothing her mother had said could quiet her. Finally they’d got the priest to talk to her. That had done no more good. She lay very quietly, her face buried in the pillow while he was there; the very minute the door closed behind him, she had started crying again. She had stopped only when she could cry no more. Then she got up, her face still swollen and ugly, and she’d gone out to the garden.

She began working with a man’s shovel—it was early spring then—and she planted a garden. It was a garden like the island had never seen before—things sprouted overnight from under her hands. He walked over them when he came back, carelessly, not seeming to know that they were there—the beans and the corn and the peas that she’d been so careful of. “I been to Houma, me,” he said and came inside. He hooked his thumbs in his belt in the way he had, and looked around the house; his eyes stopped at the colored picture of the Virgin that was hung over the dish cupboard. “I got that in church on the Feast of the Assumption,” she said. His eyes moved from it and finished looking over the rest of the house. Nothing else had changed. “Houma’s a good place,” he said. And he took off his hat and dropped it on the oilcloth-covered table. It was all he had to show for his six months’ work. But it was a beautiful hat. And it was new then. …

Mamere Terrebonne went down into the yard. The front walk was dry; but then it had been made that way specially. It was really a shell bank, raised a couple of inches above the level of the rest of the yard. She walked on it now, and the bottoms of her boots were dry while the rest of the yard swam in mud.

A levee, she thought, I’m walking the levee.

Just outside the front gate there was a little boy, three or so. He was squatting down, digging at the sandy ground with a sharp piece of slate. He wore only a plaid shirt, and under it was his naked bottom, mud-caked and streaked.

She was a little surprised to find him here. Most of the kids ran when she appeared. He was so busy he hadn’t even noticed. She watched him for a minute, one of her crippled rheumatic hands rubbing her face. Then she prodded him in the middle of the back with her cane. “Go tell your mama she got to put some clothes on you.” He scuttled off sideways, looking at her all the time, one hand raised up, grabbing for his back.

Like a touloulou, she thought suddenly, just like a touloulou crab.

He looked familiar. He would be one of her grand-children’s children. She could not remember just which one now, there were so many of them living in the houses built around hers, built any which way so that the paths to her house were all twisted as they passed around the yards and fences and cisterns and privies.

She raised her cane and shook it at the boy. He began to run on his quick unsteady legs. He had pulled the shirt high up and bundled it against his chest as he ducked around a tree.

Mamere Terrebonne stood staring at the twisted bark of the pecan tree, and the last bloomless sprouts of the lilies around it, the white spider lilies that in summer had a heavy sweet smell, even on this island where the sea winds carried off most odors.

There was the steady sound of the surf, Mamere could hear that—not summer’s sound, the quickened nervous insistence of September. She sighed and shook her head. She had come so close to forgetting the job she had to do.

She made her way slowly around the house, putting her feet one after the other carefully along the brick walk. The bricks were sinking in the sandy soil; parts of the walk had almost disappeared.

Around in the back of the house, behind the cistern that her grandson last year had painted bright red, was the mirliton arbor, the vines bare now, the wood of the arbor showing still new—it wasn’t more than a couple of years old, the one that they had built for her after a storm had taken down the other.

She put out one hand on the arbor as she walked along its length. There had been fine mirlitons—big and a good light green, their meat soft and tender as a flounder. They didn’t grow so big on the second arbor; they didn’t like new wood; she could have said that, but it had been nice of the boys to make it for her. And it didn’t really seem to matter so much to her whether the mirlitons grew fine any more.

She had reached the end of the arbor and stood holding on to it with her left hand, not because she was weak but because she liked to feel things under her hand.

Things had changed in the garden since she had planted it first. So many things, not just the leaves and the vines that you expected to change each season or each year, but the things that you wanted to be permanent, arbors and trellises. The iron-pipe trellis—low and fan-shaped—that her husband had built so carefully, built to stand, it had come down, in the same September hurricane that had lifted the church and dropped it piece by piece into the back bay, the pretty church with the real gold cross on top the altar dome.

It seemed that when you built things up again they were less good. The church was smaller and nobody put up a gold cross for the winds to throw into the bayou. And her husband hadn’t even bothered to go find his trellis; they had let the climbing roses spray upward and then down again to run along the ground.

She reached the hollow chinaberry trunk. In it were the heavy wood shutters from her house. She peeped in, her eyes blinking from the dustiness. They were there, the shutters with their wood so worn that the grain stood up in it like veins. She took one and tried to drag it out; it was too heavy; there were warnings twanging up and down her back. She turned away with a sigh. She would have to wait until somebody came to fix it.

Not ten minutes later her grandson Ferdinand came. And inside an hour, he had all the shutters up and the big storm doors too. She sat on her porch and watched. When he had done, he came over—the brown-black mud spattered to his waist—and talked a bit to her.