The Hard Blue Sky
Shirley Ann Grau
THE HARD BLUE SKY
I The White Afternoon
II Isle aux Chiens
III Sea Change
IV The Marsh
V The Other Island
VI The Way Back
VII The Lower Part of the Sky
A Biography of Shirley Ann Grau
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
Gus Claverie }
Didi LeBlanc
Mercy Schesnaydre island kids
Joey Billion
Burt Richaud
Inky D’Alfonso: crew of the PIXIE
Hector and Cecile Boudreau: a young couple
Julius Arcenaux, the grocer } Cecile’s parents
Philomene, his wife
Perique: a young man
Ferdinand and Carrie Lombas: Perique’s parents
Annie Landry: a sixteen-year-old girl
Al Landry: Annie Landry’s father, recently widowed
Adele: the new wife Al Landry brings from Port Ronquille
Claudie: Adele’s son by a previous marriage
Therese Landry: Annie’s cousin
Beatriz Valdares: a South American girl; Annie’s roommate at the convent in New Orleans
Eddie and Belle Livaudais: parents of
Henry, who is 18
Pete, who is 16
Robby: Eddie Livaudais’s six-year-old bastard
Chep Songy } Belle Livaudais’s brothers
Ray Songy
Jerry: Chep’s son
Mike Livaudais } Eddie’s brothers
Phil Livaudais
Marie Livaudais: Mike’s wife
Lacy and Andrée Livaudais: cousins of Eddie Livaudais
Mamere Terrebonne: the oldest person on the island
Anthony Tortorich: from the other island
BACK IN THE WIDE deep curve of the coast to the west of the three mouths of the Mississippi, the Gulf is brown and muddy. Always. Only, when the sun is very bright and the sky a hard blue, the water can look clear. And the fishermen, at least the ones who take people from New Orleans out on charter, pick up a couple of dollars now and then betting on just that.
All along this northern edge of the Gulf there is almost no solid land, just the marsh grasses that dapple in the wind like the Gulf itself—prairie tremblant, they call it—its tracks only an occasional trainasse, a trail cut for a pirogue, and the twisting network of bayous that run sluggishly to the four points of the compass and drain finally into the Gulf. For three or four hundred miles the coast is like that. With one exception: a chain of three islands.
They are right on the edge of the marsh, about a mile apart.
They are a kind of bridge across the mouth of a wide deep bay that extends four or five miles north into the marsh. The islands are all the same shape—a long narrow strip. They are all different sizes.
The smallest of these, hardly a half-mile long, is to the east. It is the lowest too and seems to be sinking. During any storm now the water sweeps right over it.
But there were trees once. If you look around you can see the old roots, bleached white as driftwood. And there is a single stump left, a hollow trunk maybe five feet tall, and splotched by mold. At its bottom there is a pool of water—of rain water. It varies some summer and winter, but there is always a little. Mosquitoes breed there—in spring it swarms with wigglers. And dozens of little lizards, their bodies turned brown against the bark, come and feed on them. Birds come too, mockingbirds and ricebirds and sparrows, and blackbirds, and they hop around in the tough brown-yellow runner grass and pick at the lizards. Sometimes they yank them right off the sides of the stump. And sometimes too a woodpecker works for the maggots in the bark. Under his steady hammering the old tree shakes. And the lizards all stay out of sight in the roots and the ground. And the other birds have to search through the grass and out along the driftwood and logs that have piled up at the east tip. Out there—in the logs and the twisted driftwood—on sunny days, the gators lie. And sometimes their tails move faster than the birds.
In almost the very center of the island there are two posts, crooked now but still standing. They were put in deep and steady and the storm water has only tilted them a little. The posts are all that is left of a pigpen. Thirty years or so ago, when the island was higher, Ray Hébert brought his pigs across to leave them there during the summer. (His wife couldn’t stand the smell of the sty in her back yard. It wasn’t any worse than anybody else’s, but under the hot July sun they all smelled, people said, like death itself.)
But his pigs were always slipping through the fence rails and heading down to the east end because it seemed marshy there and cool. And the alligators got them, one after the other.
They call it Isle Cochon now, and they leave it to the birds and the alligators and the fiddler crabs and the lizards.
The next-sized island is the one off to the west, called Terre Haute. It is a couple of miles long and fairly high: only during very severe storms and hurricanes does the water wash over it. (During one hurricane the water was several feet deep over the whole island—but that didn’t happen often.) And it has trees and grass, even if the grass is mostly brown and the oaks are burned off at an angle by the spray. Oyster fishermen and trappers live there—fifteen houses or so (built high on stilts out of reach of flood water) and enough kids to make them noisy. And on the north side, the bay side, the slips for the four or five oyster-luggers.
The third island, the one in the middle, is the highest and the best. It is only about a half-mile wide, like the others, but it’s nearly four miles long, a slow gentle sweep up to a curve at the east end. The land itself rises slowly from the brown sand beach on the south to the little shell ridge overlooking the back bay. There is a heavy bank of oak trees that begin just beyond the sand and an irregular line of very tall palms. (One comes down almost every September in the storms but there always seem to be plenty left.) Under these trees there are houses, better houses than on Terre Haute, good tight houses, built at least five feet off the ground—hurricane water sweeps right over this island too. There are about twenty-five of these houses, tin-roofed and painted, some of them, in bright pastels. And to the back of the island, in the little curve like a toe on the east end, are the wharves for the boats, Biloxi-luggers, they call them, and a small icehouse. Sometimes the shrimp, or the fish, are cleaned and packed on the island.
The houses are all down at the east end, all in maybe a mile-long strip. The rest of the island has nothing but oaks, their trunks and branches twisted by the wind and the spray; oleanders with branches thick as a man’s arm, and covered with pink and white and red flowers in the spring and summer—only, their smooth, dark pointed leaves are poison. Hibiscus and its midsummer flowers. Wisteria and bougainvillea so thick you have to cut your way through. Chinaberry trees with their tiny whitish purple flowers in March—and the stifling rotting smell of the yellow berries on the ground in December. And in the marshy spots, reeds that rustle and crackle their hollow stems together in the slightest wind, canes six feet high or more in patches where stories say there were painters once.
The painters were killed off, a long time ago. There is nothing on the island, except rabbits and maybe an occasional muskrat that floats over from the mainland on a tangle of grass.
And the dogs. Whole packs of them. Some nights you can see lines of them sitting out on the sand bars at the western end of the island, howling out across the Gulf at the moon. Trappers a couple of miles back in the marsh beyond the bay swear they can hear the dogs there, if the wind is right. There isn’t much to eat, and the animals are always bony: they live on rabbits and birds and whatever they can steal.
When the bitches go in heat
, packs roam up and down the whole length of the island, snorting and yipping, rooting under houses, tearing down clothes that are spread to dry across bushes, splashing about in the swampland beyond the back ridge.
They’ve given the island its name. People call it Isle aux Chiens.
THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE on the island now are a mixture of French and Spanish mostly, though an occasional very dark child shows Indian or Negro blood. They are nearly all related, one way or the other. They are all fishermen, too, and they have the fisherman’s dislike of the land: there is not a single large garden on the island, though things grow well. In most of the yards there is only a pepper bush by the door—there’d be no cooking without its small glossy red and green peppers. And on the porches there are ferns in old lube cans. Only one or two of the women have little patches (carefully fenced from the rabbits) of parsley and green onions and chive. And a mirleton vine growing on the fence, some okra and a few tomato plants. There are no flowers except wild ones—with a single exception: Easter lilies. Every house has at least a few bulbs, and the women take great care of them, better care, in a way, than of their children, who have the run of the island, unwatched.
It is an island of fishermen, and when times are bad they turn to trapping. Some of the kids grow up and go into the towns or on to New Orleans, but enough of them stay on the island where their fathers lived and their grandfathers, and back two hundred years. There is not much going on there now, but Isle aux Chiens has had its good times, times when money was easy to get. And all a man had to be was willing and strong and not afraid. Prohibition was one of them.
A man who knew his way through the maze of the bayous could almost name his own price then, as boat after boat of liquor came up from Cuba, unloaded, and slipped in small boats through the bayous to New Orleans.
A young man could make real money. The old men, too crippled with rheumatism to move, sat on porches and watched, enviously, and lied to treasury agents, and lied to the courts and alibied their sons and nephews and cousins free—and made a little money for themselves. Some of these old men, sighing at their own helplessness and their creaking joints, began to remember the stories they’d heard, stories of another time when money was easy to come by—stories of Jean Lafitte and Louis Chighizola and Dominique You. Of pirates and smuggling when the island was first settled. When the deep little harbor inside the curve of the island was crowded with sailing-ships.
But that was back before anyone’s memory. Even prohibition was a long time past. And the money from it was gone years ago.
THE WHITE AFTERNOON
“GUESS WHAT I SEEN from the top of that old tree there,” Robby Livaudais said, “guess what?”
He was just another island kid, small for his age and thin, with black eyes set too close together over the high bridge of his nose. Like the other boys’, his head had been shaved in June; now, in early August, the stiff black bristles stood straight up, unevenly. He was wearing a pair of striped overalls fastened on just one shoulder; the other strap had been torn off. The legs had been cut off, too, when the knees were worn through, and never hemmed. There was a fringe of thread on them now. Whenever Robby had nothing else to do, he would set himself to unraveling a bit.
“I seen a sailboat heading right this way.”
“Go way, and quit bothering us,” Gus Claverie said.
“I seen a boat and I bet it Jean Lafitte coming.”
The other kids did not look around. They were pushing the old tire that Menton Schesnaydre had hung by a rope from the strongest limb of the chinaberry tree.
Didi LeBlanc said: “It my turn.”
“Leggo,” Mercy Schesnaydre said.
They all yanked at the tire. Joey Billion, who was sitting in it, kicked at them.
“Jeez. …” Gus Claverie gave the tire a spin, a hard spin, making it whirl on its heavy rope. Joey Billion fell out on his back.
“Look at him,” Didi giggled, “making a big old puff of smoke.”
Joey sat up and, twisting around, began to examine the back of his thighs. He picked out a couple of cinders and flicked them away.
“You know what I seen?” Robby repeated.
Gus put his leg through the tire and pushed himself off. Joey had to fall flat again as the swing whizzed over his head. Gus kicked at him, but missed. Joey laughed and rolled out of the way.
“I get me a knife and cut that there rope.”
“Yaaa, toe cheese!” Gus went swinging back and forth, hanging by one arm and one leg.
“What you see?” Didi asked. Her hair was slightly longer and she was slightly taller—except for that, she looked like a boy. She was scratching her head with both hands as she asked Robby: “What you see?”
“A sailing-boat.”
“A what?” Gus put down one leg and with a puff of dry dirt stopped the swing.
“Way, way out.”
“It ain’t there.”
“They ain’t no sailing-boats,” Joey said.
“The Mickey Mouse now, that ain’t got no sails.”
“Not the Mickey Mouse nor the Saint Christopher, nor the Hula Girl nor the Captain Z.”
Gus pushed the swing back and forth slowly. “There ain’t nothing you see I want to look at.”
“Bet it’s somebody out shrimping and waving a handkerchief.”
“Bet it’s somebody been blowing his nose and drying the handkerchief,” Didi said.
“I seen Lafitte coming,” Robby said.
The afternoon got too hot for swinging. Joey went home. The others lay face down in the shade for a while and sweated.
“My Aunt Marie, she been by Arcenaux’s this morning,” Robby said and stared straight up into the sky. “She got a box sweet crackers. A big box.”
They turned and were looking at him. Robby sat up and squared his shoulders. “She give me one to feed the fish this morning.”
“What fish?” Mercy asked.
“The ones I’m growing under the house.”
Didi giggled. “Got a mess of old half-dead fish.”
“They growing all right.”
“They stink.”
“You got to show us,” Mercy said.
Marie Livaudais was lying across the bed, in her slip, dozing on the heat of the white afternoon, and listening to the sounds all around her. The buzzing drone of wasps building a nest under the eaves outside the window. The sleepy squak of the chickens. The muffled talking of kids outside. Then the squeaking board in the kitchen. She did not bother to get up or open her eyes. She yelled: “Get out and stay out! Or I come fix you!”
There was a pause, a little pause and some soft brushing sounds.
“I hear you climbing out that window,” she yelled.
Outside a kid giggled softly, behind his hand.
She listened again: nothing. She let herself slide back into her doze, wondering idly what they had taken.
They finished the box of graham crackers and stuffed it in the cracked trunk of the old chinaberry tree. Burt Richaud came, jangling a small net bag of marbles.
“I ain’t gonna play,” Robby said. Burt Richaud did not pay any attention. With the tip of his bare toe he drew a large circle in the soft dirt. Then he squatted down and stared at it.
The kids came up and stood around, waiting, carefully outside the circle line.
Burt put a single bright blue marble in the center of the circle. Then he stepped back and took out a cat’s-eye. He held it up, between two fingers.
“That’s a pretty one, for sure,” Didi said.
“Never seen one so pretty,” Mercy said.
“My papa brought it from Petit Prairie.”
“Just a old marble,” Robby said, and kicked with his heels in the dust, like a rooster.
“Bastard,” Burt said. “Get out of here.”
“He ain’t got a mother,” Didi said, “and he ain’t got more than half a papa.”
“Ain’t so,” Robby whispered. But he let Didi push him away.
&nbs
p; The kids began their game. Robby watched them from a distance, quietly. Then he walked over to the tall thin palm tree. He squinted up along the trunk which curved very slightly away from the beach. And he began to climb.
Marie Livaudais scratched at her head. The sounds of the kids—the giggling and the laughing—irritated her. And the window shade kept blowing up in the light breeze and the sun flashed in her eyes. She recognized one of the voices: Robby’s.
She wondered sometimes why she had offered to take him. As if she didn’t have enough kids of her own. …
He was a Livaudais all right. Looked like them. She saw that the very first time she ever laid eyes on him, that day the priest from Petit Prairie brought him over to his father.
He was three then, and had been staying with his mother. But she had found a husband. A man from Biloxi, a foreman in a lumberyard and a good steady man. She had told him Robby was her nephew, and just stopping with her for company.
When the time came for her to go to Biloxi, she took Robby down to the priest and told the name of his father, and left the boy there.
So Eddie Livaudais got his illegitimate son to raise. And because his wife, Belle, wasn’t one to be kind to her husband’s bastards, Marie Livaudais had taken him in.
And me, Marie thought, I got to go opening my big mouth, and go saying I put him with my kids. All together. …
It was too hot for the pillow. She pushed it to the floor and bent her arm. The window shade flapped closed again. She sighed and stretched.
Robby was at the top of the tree. He yanked off a couple of the small hard yellow dates and, leaning out away from the trunk, he squinted carefully and dropped them. Didi LeBlanc jumped straight up in the air. The other kids looked at her without moving. She stood with her hands down stiff at her sides, her mouth wide open, her eyes shut, screaming. From the tree Robby dropped another date, but missed: it plopped into the dirt. Didi kept on screaming.
A little gust of wind released the spring and sent the shade flying up. Marie Livaudais heaved herself out of bed, mumbling softly under her breath. The damp slip stuck to her legs and she yanked it free as she went out on the porch.
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