The Hard Blue Sky

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “Tough titty, man.”

  Julius sighed and handed him back the penny.

  Henry added it to the change he held and rattled the coins in his closed fist.

  “You know,” Henry said.

  “What?”

  “I’m going to get me one of them cigars there.”

  “First you buying sunburn lotion and now you buying cigars.”

  Henry opened his fist and picked out a nickel and a dime. He put them down on the counter. “You going to sell me one?”

  Julius opened the back of the case and picked out a cigar. When he held it out, Henry shook his head.

  “Gimme the box and let me pick.”

  Julius got the box out.

  Henry picked carefully, turning the cigars over and over. “Looks like the mice been at some of these.”

  “Ain’t no mice in that there case,” Julius said shortly.

  “This one’ll do for me.” Henry put it in his shirt pocket.

  Julius put the box back in the case. “I seen Pete around here just before you come in.”

  Henry swung his legs back and forth, kicking the counter with his heels. “Maybe he can figure it.”

  “What?”

  “Where you keep all you money.”

  Julius hissed.

  “Maybe we ought to go hunting for it.”

  “Maybe,” Julius said.

  “And you be the son of a bitch to take a shot at us.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprise, me,” Julius said.

  Henry tilted back his head and stared at the ceiling. “Maybe you got it buried in you back yard.”

  “Maybe,” Julius said, and went over to his rocking-chair by the window and sat down.

  “You could be keeping it most anywhere on this island, no?”

  “Maybe,” Julius said.

  Pete came in the store. “I been looking for you.”

  Henry scratched his close clipped head. “What you want me to do?”

  “I got this motor, and I can’t get it right.”

  “I said you was crazy to buy that.”

  “Come look at it and see.”

  “Ain’t got time now.”

  “Say …” Pete stared. “How come you buying cigars?”

  He reached out to touch the cellophane wrapping and his brother’s fingers grabbed his wrist.

  “Leave it alone,” Henry said.

  “Since when you buying fifteen-cent cigars?”

  “He did today,” Julius said.

  Henry said: “I been trying to get him to tell me where he keep all his money.”

  Julius lit a cigarette and settled back in his rocker.

  “Let the old bastard alone,” Pete said, “and come fix that outboard.”

  “I been telling you no.” Henry swung the sack of groceries to his shoulder.

  “Jesus,” Pete said. “All that.”

  “I’m taking my time,” Henry said.

  Julius chuckled. “You got enough for two week.”

  Henry held the bag on his shoulder. “I’m tired eating the stuff Ma buys.”

  “She going to like that like a hole in the head.”

  “Ask him what he going to use the sunburn cream for?”

  “Huh?”

  “Squibb sunburn cream,” Julius said. “You ask him.”

  “What you buying that crap for?”

  Henry started for the door. “Jesus,” he said, “can’t I do anything?”

  The two boys walked home.

  “When you going to smoke that cigar?” Pete asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “Sure you do, or you wouldn’t bought it.”

  “I tell you,” Henry said, “when I get all through shooting and I got a pirogue full of duck, then I’m gonna sit back and have that cigar.”

  “Man,” Pete said, “for two cents I’d come with you, me.”

  Henry shrugged and did not answer.

  “I get the screen, man.” Pete held open the door.

  Still carrying the sack over his shoulder, Henry crossed the hall and began to climb the steep ladder-stair that led to the attic.

  “You ain’t going to put the stuff in the kitchen?”

  Henry shook his head. He disappeared through the small square hole in the ceiling.

  Pete went over and yelled up the steps: “Just out in the back yard if you want take a look.”

  A thump on the floor and Henry answered: “What the hell you talking about?”

  “The outboard, man.”

  “Screw you.”

  “Come take a look, huh?”

  “I’m trying to get going.” The bedspring creaked.

  Pete laughed. “Man, I hear everything you doing—you flat out on you back.”

  “Look,” Henry said, “I’m gonna be up all night and working. I got to get some sleep.”

  “Just take one look.”

  Henry said: “When I get back.”

  “You fix it?”

  “Yea,” Henry said. “When I get back.” He lay still and breathed the heat and the quiet. Finally he began to count his own breaths.

  It was near five when Henry left the house. He had slung his two shotguns in their leather-and-canvas cases over his left shoulder and he carried the sack in his right hand. Pete was just coming in. His shirt was streaked with grease.

  “Be a son of a bitch if I can do anything with it,” he said.

  “You quitting?”

  “I got a date, man. I got to change my shirt.”

  Henry started down the steps. “You going to get any?”

  “How’d I know?” Pete shrugged.

  “Who you going out with?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Efetha?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You ain’t going to get none, man.”

  “Quit,” Pete said.

  Henry walked along the docks, the planks shaking under his steps. One of these days, he thought, somebody would fix the boards, but that would be a long time coming.

  He passed the sloop, where they had nearly had the fight a few days earlier. It was a pretty hull, he thought, and somebody sure spent a lot of time painting at it. Those would be teak decks too, he thought. It was something to see with the Hula Girl tied up alongside: the big high bow that was kept painted all right, but looked like somebody had whittled it out of a big block of wood, and hadn’t done a very smooth job at that.

  The man sitting in the cockpit of the sloop nodded to him. Henry nodded back, wondering idly what kind of a fight he would have made that day.

  He was kind of sorry now that he hadn’t. Kind of sorry …

  He could feel his shoulder tighten, and he hitched the shotguns higher. “Jesus,” he told himself silently. And for just a minute his steps slowed down.

  Then he remembered and began to walk even faster than before.

  It would be stupid, he told himself, when he wanted to get going. …

  At the end of the dock, Henry picked up a coil of rope, dropped it into the sack, then headed along the island. He kept his pirogue over by the little rickety landing his father had helped Al Landry build.

  He walked along the top of the shell mound that ran the length of the north side, a kind of levee for the island against the back bay. The sun was beginning to go down and it would be an almost cool night, with maybe a little breeze. That was good, he thought, it would help with the mosquitoes.

  Fifty feet or so in front of him a long dark shape slipped over the shells and into the marsh of the bay side. He wondered if it were a cottonmouth.

  He put the sack carefully in the bow of the pirogue. A couple of bronze-colored mosquito hawks that had been perched on the pier flew up around his head with a tiny, dry crackling of wings and bodies. He watched them: they had found a pillar of gnats, almost stationary in the air, and they shot back and forth through the pillar, dipping, weaving, eating. Higher up in the sky a couple of pelicans pumped slowly along.

  He put the shotgun
s in, and got in himself. Then slowly he paddled through the marshy grass into the open water of the bay. The hollow shell of the pirogue danced on the tops of the sharp little waves. He shipped his paddle and let the boat swing around until it was broadside to the island. And he listened. There was a cow complaining; and some kids were screaming. Funny, he thought, no matter when you listened around the island—day or night—there’d be a kid yelling.

  He looked down at the water: there were pieces of seaweed with orange berries. He fished one out, looked at it and smashed one of the berries between his fingers.

  He wondered how it would taste to the fishes. He sniffed, but the berries had only the faint smell of decay.

  He threw the tuft straight up and watched the sea gull dive after it. And miss.

  He laughed. “Ain’t so fast as all that,” he said aloud to the small white body and the widespread fanning wings.

  He looked back at the island, let his quick black eyes run back along the arc to the far end where the riggings of the boats stuck up into the small piled heaps of the evening clouds. There were little faint flickers of heat lightning up there.

  He wiped the sweat off his lip with the back of his hand. He lifted his paddle and squinted out along its surface. Then he dipped it in the water, turned the pirogue and headed across the bay, with long slow strokes, not hurrying but moving just the same, and not looking back.

  Inky shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and scratched at his ear irritably. He had got out the paper to refinish the little rough spot on the cowling that had been bothering him. But he didn’t feel like doing it anymore.

  The afternoon sun was slanting down low now so that the rigging of the fishing-boats made criss-cross shadows on his own deck.

  He stood up stretching and looking across the bay. Halfway down the curve of the island he saw Henry’s pirogue. He shielded his eyes and looked again. Then because he had nothing else to do, he went below and got the field glasses.

  Inky recognized him. Damn, he thought, I’m seeing him everywhere. Coming or going. Solemn like a pelican.

  After a few minutes Inky got tired of watching and put the glasses away.

  AROUND SIX O’CLOCK, WHEN the yard was mostly in shade and it had got a little cooler, Belle Livaudais dragged the charcoal pot from under the back-porch foundation. She tipped it over, sending sprawling out into the light the beetles and spiders and fat black roaches that had lived inside. Then she took a broom and swept clean a spot in the yard, about twenty feet from the house.

  “Henry,” she called. “Henry, hey!”

  She put the charcoal pot in the center of the swept circle. “Henry, hey, Henry, hey, c’here.”

  Inside the small white-painted house with a steep tin roof, a voice yelled: “He been gone this last hour.”

  She straightened up, put her hands on her narrow hips and sighed. “You got to come then,” she said, “I ain’t got the back for hauling water today.”

  “Okay,” the voice said, “okay, lemme get my pants on.”

  She stood alongside the charcoal pot and rubbed her hands up and down her back.

  Funny, she thought, how it had never been right since after the last baby. Not a hurt, no, but a little ache …

  “You coming right down out here, no?”

  “Lemme get my pants on.”

  She stretched herself now. She was a tall woman, with narrow shoulders and narrow hips. All in one line, like a pencil.

  She sighed again. That had worried her once, when she was a girl, a long time ago. A very long time ago; she could hardly remember being young.

  She looked at the kids sometimes, never walking when they could run, never sitting if they could stand; and then tumbling down asleep when they got tired. She had trouble sleeping; it had started after the last baby died—nights when she’d lie in bed, eyes wide open, not tired, not even restless, just content to stare up at the black ceiling. And she could dream, even awake, even with her eyes wide open. All the things she’d wanted to do. All the things that she’d wanted to happen to her. And hadn’t.

  She got the bag of charcoal from the porch and shook some into the pot.

  She almost laughed now, remembering. She’d been so worried about her figure when she was a girl. There was just a cracked piece of mirror in her bedroom. (It had got smashed when she and her sister had one of their fights; and they each took half.) Some days she would slip off her dress and her shift and stand looking at her hard bony chest with the strips of muscles running up crosswise under the arms. And she’d be almost ready to cry. Somebody told her rice was the thing to eat. And she’d made herself almost sick, eating it.

  She’d got herself a husband though. Best-looking man on the island in his day, and a Livaudais too, tough as they come. He wanted her spare hard body. She was lithe and muscular as a boy. She did a boy’s work too, every day of her girlhood.

  She went to bed with him, demanding no promises, asking for nothing, not even love.

  Then she stopped seeing him. All of a sudden. Not another man—she knew as well as anyone Eddie might have killed him. She just stayed home, and every evening he could see her sitting on the porch with her parents. If he came near, she went inside.

  So he married her.

  Belle Livaudais squatted down and started the fire in the little pot. A mosquito settled on her thigh. She slapped and then scratched away the black speck with her fingernail.

  The old women had been so upset when she’d come to get pregnant. They’d gone to her husband Eddie and told him to move out of the house quick or the mother and baby would die, for sure.

  She could remember that, so clear, though it was near twenty years ago. …

  She’d been over at her mother’s. There was a hammock in the yard there, hanging between two mulberry trees. A regular ship’s hammock. Her father had got it somewhere. (Nobody ever asked where he got things: he just picked them up when he was away from the island.) And she’d been lying there swinging gently, and staring up at the little green nubs of the berries (it was early spring). She’d been laying with one hand on her belly, trying to feel the life in there. And when she’d come to going home, Eddie wasn’t there, just two old women, her own grandmother and another one whose face she’d even forgotten. They both lived there with her until the child came. And Eddie, he had moved down to the other end of the island, to stay with his brother’s family. He wasn’t allowed to come back to the house at all.

  The old women had worried about her narrow hips … but she hadn’t. They rubbed her belly with lard every morning while she dozed. She was very calm. Nothing came near to her. Not even the gossip that Eddie and the Hébert girl were sneaking something at night. Nothing.

  And the baby was delivered so easy. She smiled to remember.

  It was true, she thought, that she hadn’t had many. Only three, and two had lived. But they had all been boys, fine healthy children. Even the one that had died. … He’d been the prettiest of all, she thought sometimes. Though she couldn’t close her eyes anymore and bring up his face, smooth and round and white. Yes, she nodded to herself, time was playing tricks on her again.

  She blew on the charcoal.

  Time worked that way. Like the sand and grass over in the marsh. Whatever stood on it slipped down into it and disappeared. Not so fast you could see it going. But still after a while, it was gone.

  She hated time, she thought. Forever cutting off things behind you, and then in a while cutting off what you remembered of those things. And leaving you just a little narrow spot of present and near past to stand on.

  She stared down at the smoking coal. She felt herself balancing on a narrow point. With time behind her, gobbling up her connections with the past. Time pushing her ahead.

  “Nothing left to see behind,” she said aloud, “and nobody could never see forward.”

  She stirred the coals with a thin twig. “Except they was a saint,” she added.

  “Jesus, Ma,” her son said, “you ain’t so old
you got to be talking to yourself.”

  She looked around at him, not really seeing him, but still balancing on that point time had left her.

  “Jesus,” he said again, “what the matter?”

  She shook her head, very slightly. “Ain’t nothing.”

  “You looked at me so funny.”

  “Nothing,” she said. The dizzy balancing feeling was gone now. And she was back squatting on the ground alongside the charcoal pot, her eyes smarting from the smoke. And a job of work to do.

  “You can get the big washtub for me, no?” she asked.

  “Okay,” he said, “want me to fill it?”

  She sat down on the ground. “And what I going to do with an empty washtub?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Fill up the tub at the pump,” she said.

  “Jesus,” he said, “why can’t I use the bucket?”

  “It ain’t clean.” She stirred the coals again. “It had oysters in it.”

  “I wash it out,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Ain’t going to be clean enough. And I want clean water, me.”

  He shrugged. “I give up.”

  He got the tub off the back porch, filled it almost full, and then grabbing both handles, staggered across the yard with it. The water sloshed and splashed on his stomach. He lowered the tub down on the charcoal pot and more water splashed to the ground and made little round balls in the heavy dust.

  He said: “What you doing that got to be done just so fine?”

  He noticed the small pile of white cloth under the chinaberry tree and went over to look. His mother was still blowing gently on the coals.

  “First Sunday coming,” she said, “and they get used for Mass.”

  He lifted up first a long narrow white strip of cloth embroidered along one edge. Then the other, a long white lacy gown—a priest’s surplice. He dropped them back in a pile again.

  “So they get used,” he said. “But why you washing them?”

  “They got dirt in them.”

  “They got mildew on them. I can smell it.”

  “More reason.”

  “Jesus,” he said, “and that what I near to broke my back lugging the water for.”

  She didn’t answer. While she waited for the water to boil, she went and found the one spot of soft grass under the mulberry tree, smoothed it with her hand as if it were a bed or a sofa, and sat down.