The Hard Blue Sky (8 page)

Slowly and tiredly he walked back to the bedroom and got another shirt, dropping the wet one in a small ball on the floor. Philomene was not around. She’d be visiting next door or at their daughter Cecile’s, a couple of hundred yards away. One thing was sure: she’d be somewhere close. In the last ten years she hadn’t left the island except for her daughter’s wedding.

Julius changed his shoes too, because he could feel how wet the canvas tops had got. And went back to the store.

This time he moved his chair over by the Coca-Cola icechest. He tilted back against it, his arms stretched out along the top. There was just a little cool coming through to the porcelain surface. He stared straight up, sighing gently. Right in the path of his eyes was a cluster of shoes, half-a-dozen pairs, their laces knotted together at different lengths, all hanging from a single big hook, the way you’d hang garlic or gourds.

He cocked his head for a minute listening. Then he shouted: “Get off my porch there. And quit doing that.” And then the scamper of bare feet.

The kids were just about the only people moving around during the afternoon, and lately they had all wanted to carve their initials on the posts of his front porch. He’d chased them off three or four times a day for the last week. He wondered what was so special about his front porch; but there was no telling with kids.

He listened. Then he called again: “I done told you to get off that porch.” There was a pause. “Get the hell off there, you!” And then clearly, the sound of a single pair of feet running.

Julius Arcenaux sat grinning in his chair. The kids never did understand how he knew they were there.

Back when he was a boy he had trained himself to catch the little sounds people make—even the tiny sound of breath. If it was perfectly still, as it was now, he could hear the lightest breathing.

His brothers had teased him about that when he was a kid. “Hey, boy,” they’d say, “you in training for a dog, no? You going to go jumping in the water to fetch us duck?”

Sometimes he’d swing at them, but he was too little to win any fight. So most time he’d just walk away, his ears burning and a dry twitching feeling behind his eyes. Once he’d gone straight to one of the largest of the cane brakes. He’d walked in as far as he could, sliding his thin body between the reeds; then he crawled in the rest of the way, his elbows digging into the soft earth.

He lay flat on his stomach in the deepest part of the brake, squinting into the dusty sifted twilight—the bright noon sun never penetrated the thick growth—and listening: the rustle of the wind passing over the top of the reeds far above his head, the squawk of birds, the bumble of insects as they flew between the canes, and the slither of snakes—little grass snakes and the larger blue runners.

He held his breath so he could hear the other sounds: the busy movement of ants on the earth as little grains of mud rolled away under their feet. If he put his ear to the ground, he could hear a murmuring, deep inside. He sat up suddenly, rattling the cane around. He stared down at the ground, at the crumbling mossy worm-scarred surface. Then he put out one hand, almost afraid and touched a stalk. He let his fingers run up and down it, far as he could reach. He bent his head again and listened.

“I can hear the roots growing,” he told himself. “Me, I can hear them pushing and growing through the ground.”

All of a sudden he was afraid—as if he had come on something he shouldn’t have. The same way he felt when he saw Augustin Billion and the girl lying out one night, close behind the big oak tree back of the Landry house.

He went crashing out of the cane brake, his arms beating a path before his face, but the sharp dry edges cut his skin and left him bleeding.

When his mother saw the cuts, she shrugged and put a pot of salt water on the stove to warm. “Boys always fighting somehow, and you ain’t no different.”

She’d wanted girls; and she’d had boys, six of them. Julius was the youngest and the smallest. “I was getting tired out when I come to bear you,” she told him.

The others were the roughnecks of the island. She’d get sick to her stomach sometimes, seeing them come home after a fight, bruised and cut by knives or socks filled with lead weights from the nets. Sometimes they would fight with lengths of chain, swinging them from their hands like whips.

When they came home, Julius was there, watching. The mottled blue skin, the sight and smell of blood—they excited him so that he could not sleep afterward.

“What?” he would ask his brothers. “What happened?” And they would only grunt and curse under their breath.

Once his father was hurt—Julius remembered that so clear, as if it were a couple of months ago and not near forty years. An accident on the boat left a long gash down his father’s arm. His mother had taken the finest needle and white silk thread and sewed the edges together. Then she went outside and got the newest strongest spider web she could find and brought it in carefully so that it would not break and laid it back and forth across the wound, to make it hold together.

And then she’d put both hands to her mouth and run out of the room. Julius took over, without anybody having to ask him; he knew exactly what to do. He wrapped the rags around and around the arm, perspiring with the effort, so careful to make them even and comfortable.

His father looked at him with a kind of a grin that was just a little lift of the mouth. “Takes after his mother, him. He is going to be a fine nurse.”

His father fell asleep then, right in his chair, even before the bandaging was finished. It was the whisky—his mother gave them all the whisky they could drink before she started work, so that there would not be so much pain.

That day when Julius came out of the cane brake, cut and scratched, his mother asked: “You been fighting, no?”

He pulled up his shoulders and lied: “Oui.”

A couple of days later, his brother Raoul was talking about cane-cutting over in Napoleonville. Then spotting Julius, he grinned. “For what do you listen, dogaree?”

“Nothing.”

“You don’t know what it is about.”

“But I do.” Julius said something he knew he should not have said: “I know about the cane.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard it growing.”

“Holy mother!” his brother said. “You never even seen sugar cane.”

Julius did not answer.

His father asked: “Where you heard the cane?”

Julius dropped his head and tried to move away.

His father caught him by the shoulder. “Where you heard the cane?”

“Down beyond the Robichaux grocery, I heard it.”

Raoul pounded both hands on his knees as he laughed. “We have an idiot who hears things but does not know the difference between sugar cane and all the others. He would try to eat a fishing-pole.”

“Let him alone,” his mother said.

He followed her outside. “I did hear the cane.”

“I got to go get the clothes in. Come along. What else you heard?”

He took a quick look into her face, but there wasn’t any laughter there, just a serious question. “What else you heard?”

“I hear the sun come up in the morning; and I hear the leaves come out the stalk; and I hear the worms crawling in the ground. And when I sit and watch a moonflower open, I can hear that, me.”

“And what does it sound like, that?”

“It creaks, like.”

“Next time,” his mother said, “I will listen.”

Julius Arcenaux stretched and shifted in his chair. That had been such a long time ago.

He cocked his head and listened to the hum of the mud daubers building their nests on the underside of the drainpipe just above the window.

The dogs were still yelping—they were closer. A man’s voice shouted at them.

Julius Arcenaux got to his feet and stood for a minute, hands scratching his thighs. He kept his nails short, very short, or he bit them, and the soft skin made no impression on the khaki pants. “God damn.” He rolled up one leg at a time, and methodically scratched. The heat made the skin prickle like a nest of ants.

Outside the man’s voice yelled again: “Hi, hi, hi!”

Julius grinned. That would be the dogs, all right. Packs of them roamed all over the island.

When he was a boy a whole pack had gone running over him. He’d lain on the ground, screaming, until one of his brothers jerked him up to his feet and felt him all over, carefully, looking for broken bones, and laughed at him for being afraid.

To this very day, Julius thought, his brothers thought he was a coward because he had never liked to fight and because he hadn’t taken his place on the boat with them.

Maybe, Julius thought, or maybe not. “I can’t help what I am, me,” he said aloud.

And he hadn’t been scared that day when the painter had almost jumped him. That had been ten or fifteen years back, when his daughter was still little. He’d taken her into the swamp. They weren’t going anywhere in particular, just fooling around because he hadn’t wanted to stay home. It was early spring, he remembered, because the girl had reached over the pirogue and pulled a handful of crawfish from under a big fallen branch. He’d taken one look at the grayish things and motioned her to throw them overboard, they were that small.

He’d gone on, paddling the pirogue slowly, until there were too many vines to see the bright sun overhead and the water was still and gleaming with slime and the cypress knees were covered with green mold. He felt a prickling down his back, and out along his fingers, right to their tips. He’d always felt that way about the swamp.

The narrow strip of water passed between mounds covered with thick green bushes and splotches of colored flowers.

He saw the small low hibiscus bush with a single flower, big and yellow as the sun through a Gulf mist. And he wanted it, though he knew it was a silly thing for a grown man to be picking flowers. With one quick flick of his paddle he drove the sharp bow of the pirogue up on the land—it was a shell mound: he could tell by the sound—and started for the flower. The growth was denser than he’d thought. He put his arms up to shield his face and let the weight of his body push through. He took two steps and was considering giving up the whole idea, when something made him shift his arms slightly and look through them.

The painter was right there, not ten yards away, on a low branch about level with his head.

He’d never been so close to a live one before, so close he could see the flecks of color in the eyes and the fringe of tiny burrs on the left ear. And the muscles along the flanks rippling.

The shotgun was back at the pirogue. And the girl was too small to use it.

Because of the god-damn flower, he thought. And because he was so stupid as to leave the gun in the boat.

It hadn’t been more than three seconds, all of it. Then Julius found himself staring at an empty branch. He squinched his eyes and looked harder, not quite believing. The painter had disappeared, so quietly that not a single leaf shook.

His eyes still fastened on the place where the animal had been, Julius began backing to the pirogue. Slowly, carefully, his body stiff and erect, he moved back, his eyes jumping around in the leaves and the branches and the vines, looking.

And when he dropped his arm, the girl had the gun ready for his hand.

He let her paddle the pirogue back, while he sat with the shotgun ready and watched.

He hadn’t been scared then, though he had been close to getting killed and the girl with him. He didn’t even bother telling about it when he got home. It would just scare his wife and make her argue every time he wanted to go out. And as for his brothers, he didn’t care what they thought, not any more.

He had once. When he was still a kid. He’d tried his hand at fishing with them. Only, with the slightest bit of weather, with just a little wind, and just the smallest roll to the boat, he couldn’t work anymore. The smell of the nets and the fish and the water and the taste of the brackish spray—these made him sick. So sick that there was nothing to do but sit on the deck, hold to the wood rail with both hands and hang his head over the side, while his father and his brothers stood around laughing.

After a couple of trips he gave up fishing and took a job in the grocery.

His brothers thought he was a coward. When he was young, he was almost afraid to go home when they were there. He was that afraid of their joking. Until he thought of a way to stop them.

“You got nothing to laugh at,” he told them. “All those days you looking at fish and shrimp, me, I’m looking at all the girls what come down to the store.”

That hushed them for a minute. Then Pierre, his second oldest brother, said: “Nobody but a dogaree like you be satisfied with just looking at the girls.”

“Me, I ain’t said nothing like that.” Julius lit a cigarette and slanted his eyes down. “While you all gone they don’t just come down to the store to talk, certainement.”

“That ain’t so,” Pierre said.

“You ain’t there to see.”

In the quiet he walked across the room, clacking his heels on the bare boards, loud as he could, and into the kitchen. He kissed his mother lightly on the top of the head. “What we got for supper, che’?”

She looked at him, her head tilted sideways a little. And the small amused look in her eyes made him swallow hard. He was lying, and she knew it.

A couple of days later, when he was getting his own breakfast in the kitchen, she stood in the doorway. She was a tall thin woman, no hips and no breasts—more like the outline of a woman’s figure than the woman herself. It was hard to imagine a man wanting her (though Julius’s father did and made no secret about it), hard to imagine a kid growing in the narrow cavity between those thin bones.

“You are late this morning, no?”

“Maybe.” He was and did not care. There was a dull ache at the base of his skull.

She walked across the room to the mirror and began combing her hair. She kept it short and clipped—she did it herself with a scissors every Sunday afternoon—while all the other island women wore theirs long and in a knot at the back.

“You don’t care if you never see the grocery again?”

“Maybe.”