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.”
“Poor bébé,” she jerked the comb through the thick hair, “you have a harder time growing up than the others.”
He stood up. “I got to go.”
“Stay … when you have put some meat on those bones, the girls will look at you twice or maybe three times. … I will fix you some fresh coffee.”
Looking back he could think about that time calmly, even be amused by it. Time when every girl that came in the grocery looked beautiful to him, and he kept staring at the bodies under the dresses. Once somebody had said—he’d forgot just who—“Stop undressing me with your eyes, p’tit.” And everybody around laughed. And he’d tried to think of something to say and hadn’t even found a single word.
“Just like a muskrat,” the girls would say, and that was the nickname they gave him. “He got ideas just like a muskrat.”
And then he decided to get married.
He met the girl in a strange way. It was winter. The balls of the chinaberry trees were yellow and falling; there was already the faint rotting odor of them on the ground. He was fishing from the end of the pier when he heard the kids come up, heard them laughing and talking and throwing rocks into the water. He glanced over his shoulder: they were from Petit Prairie; they’d come on the boat that brought the priest over for the yearly christening.
Julius went back to staring at his line where it entered the water that was faintly green tinged with floating grass. He closed his eyes and when he opened them a couple of minutes later, there was a girl climbing out of the water, right alongside his pole. And behind him were the other kids shrieking and slapping their knees with laughter.
Climbing out, the girl was shouting back at them, breathless and not so very loud. She didn’t seem to notice that he was there, though she grabbed hold of his leg to lift herself over the edge.
He did not move to help her. He was still not sure that he was seeing anything more than the dazzle of the sun in his eyes. He kept staring at her through half-closed lids. She was wearing a pink dress, with little prints in it, little flowers and little diamonds of black. The cotton stuck to her body—she wasn’t wearing any underclothes because of the heat. He didn’t see her face once. He didn’t think to look. There was just the cloth stuck to the skin with little green wrinkles and beads of water and bits of green marsh grass, and under it, the clear outline of her body. As she scrambled to her feet, the oval line of her thigh was right on a level with his eyes.
She’d been swearing like a man when she came climbing out of the water. The words kept coming back to him, each with a tingle of pleasure. Two weeks later when he went over to Petit Prairie himself, to see if she was married, he still didn’t know her name.
Every Saturday morning, the bachelors of the island—and occasionally the married men, if their wives couldn’t stop them—would head for a week-end at Petit Prairie, a two-hour trip by boat, if the weather was good. Sometimes, if it was during trapping season, they brought along the pelts to sell, but there wasn’t much of that. Mostly it was a pleasure trip.
They would take one of the boats and a couple of cases of beer and a bottle of wine apiece.
When they tied up at the dock, the deputies of Petit Prairie sighed and shrugged and went home. They couldn’t be expected to object to things they didn’t see. So they didn’t leave home at all. They worked the gardens that their wives tended all week and did whatever carpentry had to be done, or sat on their own porches, all alone with their wives and maybe one or two of their kids.
Nothing lonesomer than a deputy on week-ends, people said.
Julius had gone to Petit Prairie with the other men a few times, not very often, because he couldn’t drink that much. Once they had to carry him on the boat for the trip home: he had quietly passed out.
Then he decided to go to Petit Prairie to see about getting married. So one Saturday morning he collected his pay from the grocery and walked down to the boat. He was early; they were not yet ready to go. He sat down on the engine-hatch cover and waited until they lugged the last case of beer aboard, stowed it on the shady side and covered it with a tarpaulin to keep it cool.
It was Saturday, and he was sure that the girl would be at the market or along the single street sometime during the afternoon. Most people would come that way, he knew. So all he had to do was wait.
First he walked up and down the line of stores: grocery, meat market, café, bar, dry goods, dance hall. There were nothing but horses in those days—roads were too bad for cars—and the saddle horses and the carts were tied two deep to the hitching-stands along the banquettes.
One of the island men passed him, and pounded him on the back. “There what you looking for, dogaree.” He pointed unsteadily to a house a couple of hundred yards down the street: a house like all the others—small and wood frame, with a paling-fence in front, and a screen porch and shutters to cut out the glare of midday. The girls were sitting in the front yard, in rattan chairs, and wearing bright-colored dresses: red, blue and yellow. And on the steps was the landlady, in black silk, wiping her second chin with a white handkerchief, and fanning herself with a wide palmetto fan.
Julius pulled away. He stopped in the bar and had a glass of beer. He drank it slowly—because it was a hot sticky day—and looked around the room. There were women with their husbands, and some single girls giggling together at a table over in the corner, baskets of groceries on the floor. He finished and went outside, the beer still bubbling in the back of his throat. He spent the rest of the afternoon walking up and down the small stretch of street, not more than three blocks all told, looking. When he got tired of walking, he perched on the hitching-racks and looked. And when he got thirsty, he went back to the bar for another beer.
Finally he saw her, turning into the dry-goods store. First thing he recognized was her stiff-legged determined walk. She was wearing a pink dress again—that must be her favorite color, he thought—and a man’s hat stuck on the back of her head. And a necklace of flowers made from the pink tails of shrimp.
He followed her inside and stood behind a table piled with overalls and watched her. She bought a child’s shirt. His stomach knotted up as he thought she must be married.
As she left he noticed that the hat sat so far back on her head because it perched on a heavy roll of plaited hair.
He asked the man behind the counter, an old man with a big beer belly and a bald sun-blistered head: “Who’s that there?”
The old man just looked at him, squinting because he was nearsighted.
“What she called?”
The eyes narrowed even more. The pointed chin stuck straight out. “For what you want to know?”
Julius hesitated for a minute, then walked out. He spotted the girl down the street, half a block ahead. He followed, casually as he could, hands in pockets, his lips pursed as if he were whistling.
Julius noticed a child playing out on the banquette with a rubber ball, bouncing it and counting. Just as he was passing, she missed. The ball rolled right to his feet. He bent and picked it up. Then he squatted, holding the ball tight in his outstretched fist. The little girl reached out one hand and tapped his knuckles. He kept his hand closed. She pulled at his fingers. With his other hand, he pointed. “What’s her name?”
The little girl blinked.
“You tell me her name.”
The child turned around and looked.
“Tell me.” The hand holding the ball nudged hers.
“Philomene Labiche.”
“You sure?”
The child nodded and reached for the ball again.
He held it. “Where she live?”
“Down there.”
“Far?”
“Là-bas.” The little girl sniffled. Two big tears began rolling down her cheeks.
He gave her the ball and walked quickly away and, following Philomene, found the house where she lived.
He went back to the boat to think out what he should do. He stretched out on the deck, his head propped on the wood rail and stared straight up at the sky while it turned from blue to powdery yellow to gray to black with freckles of stars.
Then, because he had gotten very hungry, he went over to the café for dinner. He still did not know how he should meet her. He had no close relatives in town who could go speak to her father. He had some distant cousins, but a man didn’t send a distant cousin on anything like that. Then, while he was eating his jambalaya, he had the idea. He almost choked on a piece of shrimp he was so surprised: it was that simple.
The church was a wood building behind a dried brown square of grass and weeds, criss-crossed by wagon tracks and beaten down by feet. Back of the church was the cemetery, row on row of whitewashed brick vaults. And next to the church was the rectory, a small shingled house.
There was no doorbell. He knocked on the wood frame of the screen door. There were four large holes at the bottom of the screen. On the edge of one a large fly was sitting sleepily. He heard the shuffling steps of the old housekeeper. The face appeared, wrinkled like a raisin, with tiny eyes and hair pulled up into a tight knot directly on top of the head.
“I want to see the priest,” he said.
She peered at him, her nose pressed up against the screen of the door, the red tip criss-crossed by the black wires.
“I want to see the priest … about my wife.”
She pursed her wrinkled blue lips together. “Euuuuuuu.” She was enjoying what she was imagining.
“I will talk to the priest.”
She shrugged and opened the screen.
He sat down in the parlor, in the middle of the large sofa, upholstered with cracked leather and spotted with mold. There were two other chairs and a rocker to match, all of heavy square oak. Over against the wall, between the two windows, was a square china cabinet, with glass doors. On the top shelf were half a dozen or so books in brown bindings. Julius squinted at them. The titles were almost worn off the backs. He spelled out the letters carefully: St. Augustine. The last two books had fallen down and the others leaned against them. They had been that way so long their covers had warped into that arc. On the shelf below was a cross-shaped reliquary; the glass was wavy and Julius couldn’t see much of it. On the last shelf there were two little vases and a sea shell.
The old woman came back. “He be here soon,” the dry rattling voice said. “It is almost to the time he go to bed. So he be here.”
“I wait,” Julius said.
He sat very still and waited, breathing as shallow as he could. Odors of town houses always upset him: a mixture of kerosene from the lamp burning on the table, of greens cooked a long time ago, of faint fish and the sweet-like odor of mice in the walls. For a minute he thought of asking the old woman if he could not sit with her in the kitchen. But he only got to his feet and looked out the window. The church was right there: he looked out at the planking of the walls.
He heard a mumble of voices in the kitchen and then the priest came into the room. The door stuck when he tried to open it: it had warped and he had to put his shoulder to it, so that he came crashing into the parlor, panting a little and tugging at his collar.
He shook hands quickly; his palms were wet and his face smeared with perspiration. “Now …”
Julius moved his tongue in his mouth before he tried speaking. “I want to marry Philomene Labiche.”
“So?” the priest said. “Does she?”
“No.”
The priest shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I can do nothing about that.”
&nbs
p; “I never met her.”
The priest blinked his brown eyes rapidly. “Eh? Eh?”
Julius explained patiently: “I never met her, me. So I don’t know whether she would like me or not.”
“Go meet her, my friend. Go talk to her.”
“I can’t do that,” Julius said. He took a deep breath. “I want you to go tell her.”
The priest was looking at him. One large puffy lid slid down and covered its eye.
“I got no family here. The way some people do. Or they could do it.”
“You just seen her?”
Julius nodded.
The eye opened. “Who are you, my friend?”
“Julius Arcenaux from Isle aux Chiens.”
“And you can support a wife?”
“You ask people. You ask people what sort of a place I got.”
The priest nodded and sucked his tongue through his teeth with a little plopping sound.
“Tell her I want to marry her, me,” Julius said, “in church, proper. And tell her papa I will come talk to him.”
The priest said, yawning: “They will come to Mass tomorrow. You stay for both Masses. They will come to one or the other. And I will talk to Gus Labiche.”
Julius sat staring at the rusty green-black cassock. Of the line of buttons down the front, most were missing. He found himself counting them.
“They will let her marry me?”
The priest scratched his stomach. Another of the buttons popped off and rolled along the floor.
Julius looked, but the floor was so dark he saw nothing. He felt around with the palms of his hands until he found it. The priest nodded.
“It may be they will be glad to see her in a house of her own, and out of theirs.”
“And her, do you think she will marry me?”
The priest yawned again. “You look like a man. You find a wife, certainement.”
“I want her, Philomene Labiche.”
“But he is wood-headed! Mo ’tit, we try. In the morning we try. Now go away.”
Julius went back to the boat to sleep. Since he was the first back, he got the single bunk. He lay there, wide-awake most of the night, listening each time one of the other men stumbled from the dock to the deck and peered in the cabin and saw him in the bunk and cursed him and turned around to find a place on the deck.
The Hard Blue Sky Page 7