“We talk to him on the telephone.”
“So?” Mamere opened her eyes just a little bit more. “And for what I got to care how you talk to him.”
Ferdinand sat back in his chair. “He say you going to get all right without no priest.”
Mamere stared at the ceiling where a couple of fat black flies buzzed.
“Ain’t no priest you can trust,” Mamere said and then spat in a little arc down to the foot of the bed.”
“Now,” Ferdinand said, “well …”
“Sal au pri …”
Mamere began to moan very softly. “Son of a bitch of a priest … how I’m ever going to get out of this bed.”
Cecile came to the door. “What’s the matter with her?”
Mamere stopped moaning. Cecile and Ferdinand scurried over to the bed to see. The sharp black eyes were peering up at them.
Cecile whistled. “You give us a fright.”
The lids that were like rice paper blinked. “You got to go get him.”
“Huh?”
“Go get him.”
“Who?”
“The priest.”
“Look,” Ferdinand said, “he say he ain’t coming and he ain’t.”
“Go get him.”
“You mean go make him come?” Cecile said.
Mamere’s little eyes closed again.
“We can’t do nothing like that,” Ferdinand said. When Estelle Abadie’s baby was born and the women took one look at it and saw it couldn’t live more than a day or so, the men went for the priest, even though it was the middle of the night. They got him out of his bed and into his cassock, him fussing and arguing all the time. Paul Travigno, who had been an altar boy once and knew what was needed, packed up the little black bag.
They’d have done the same with a doctor, if they needed him.
“You ain’t that sick,” Cecile said.
“Ain’t never going to get from this bed again,” Mamere’s eyes didn’t open.
“Sure you are,” Ferdinand said.
“Got no time. …” And she stopped speaking and would not give any other sign, no matter what they said to her.
It was Julius had the idea finally. Though he didn’t say anything about it until the following day. His wife heard him chuckling in bed that night. But she didn’t bother asking him. She didn’t really care.
The next day he found Ferdinand chopping away the grass around his front door with a sickle. They talked for a minute there, with Ferdinand on his haunches and Julius bent over, but with his head lifted. And in a few minutes Ferdinand stuck the sickle point down in the ground and headed out the little gate. Julius watched him go, and then looked down at the sickle. Finally he picked it up and went to work. In ten minutes or so he had finished the grass. It was one of the few things he liked to do.
Mamere was lying with her eyes open all the way, staring at the ceiling when Ferdinand came in the room. She looked just a little sad.
“With who you tripoté last night, while I am lie here?”
Ferdinand paid no attention. “I have everything fixed.”
She sighed. “There is nothing fix.”
But she was not yelling at him, he noticed, so maybe …
“You want a blessing from the priest. …”
“If I have told you,” she said, “I have told you a million time.”
“Alors …” he interrupted. “I know how you can have the blessing.”
She turned away and stared at the wall.
“A blessing from the priest himself.”
“It is nothing to make joke about,” she muttered.
“Now listen … we take you over to the store. Four, five, six of us men, many as it needs to carry you. On the bed.”
Mamere turned to him, frowning uncertainly.
“Now listen,” he said. “You don’t got to get out the bed, nor move. And we take you down to the store. And by that time, Carrie she got the priest on the telephone and he is all ready. And you pick up the phone and say it’s you. And he give you any kind of blessing you ask for.”
“Enfant …” Mamere began.
And before she could finish he ducked out the door.
Ferdinand ran all the way. He sent his wife scurrying over to start the call, and he found four men to help him with the bed. It wasn’t five minutes before they were carrying Mamere out the door. And it wasn’t ten minutes before they were carrying her back, and her with a big smile on her wrinkled raisin face.
SEA CHANGE
THE NEXT FEW DAYS were like all the days of all the Augusts, white-hot and dusty. Way out, on the rim of the Gulf, was a chain of thunderheads, shining in the sun, their black underbellies flickering with heat lightning now and then. They seemed to stay there, all day and all night, unmoving. The island was dry and brown-looking. The dust from the white shell paths rose up in clouds from under each foot, even the lightest of the children’s, and coated the trees and bushes and got into all the houses. After a bit the women stopped dusting their furniture; it wasn’t much use: in an hour the same gray film would return. On the Pixie Inky had put canvas covers over all the brightwork and washed down the decks carefully, every day. At night it was too hot for mosquito-netting. He smeared himself with repellent and lay down on the bare decks, without mattress or pillow, with only the slope of the bow lifting his head a little.
Yvonne Songy, who had always had asthma, came down with a bad case, so bad that her older brother Jerry took her in specially to Petit Prairie. She would live with her aunt there until the rains came in September and settled the dust.
Henry Livaudais had not come back yet. But no one worried or thought any about it. He had been out as long as five days before. That was just his way. The boy was a born trapper, he liked the feel and the smell of the marsh and the swamps. And he knew how to handle himself too: when he’d come back, his face and hands would be just as clear, not so much as a single scratch from the sawgrass on them.
And people went on pretty much the way they had before, only they went about it more slowly, and they got tired a little quicker.
Annie Landry let herself into the Boudreau living-room, and finding no one there, went to the bedroom. Cecile was changing the baby.
“Hi,” Cecile said. “Where you been keeping yourself?”
“I been around.”
“I was talking to you papa, just last night he come by.”
“I could gone crabbing with Perique and made some money, only I didn’t want to.”
“They buying crabs again, huh?” Cecile finished the diaper and flipped the baby over on his stomach. “Try that way for a while, macac. … I’d gone,” she said.
Annie just shook her head.
“And I didn’t have these two,” Cecile said, “you see how fast I go to pick up money that easy, me.”
“Perique’s been talking about getting a job in Petit Prairie.”
“I been hearing him talk like that for years.”
“Maybe he’s going to.”
“Maybe. And maybe not.”
Annie squinted one eye at the baby. “Man, has he got heat.”
“Don’t tell me,” Cecile said. “I been knowing about it.”
Annie had pulled her white-blond hair back into a ponytail, held by a thick red rubber band. “You like it this way?”
Cecile looked. “Makes you ears stand out.”
“No.”
“You need it hanging soft and loose.”
“No,” Annie said.
“You ask me.”
“Course I only got a rubber now … when I put a ribbon and some flowers on, it’ll be better.”
Cecile shook her head. “Won’t change your ears.”
Annie rubbed both ears, hard. “They’re like my papa’s.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Kind of long and thin.”
“All you got to do is let the hair fall over them.”
Annie made a face.
“You got nice hair
—nobody got blond hair like yours around here—and you don’t want to go slicking it back.”
“I could be making a lot of money today.”
“Shoulda gone.”
“No,” Annie said. “What do I need money for?”
“Don’t be plain ga-ga,” Cecile said. “Everybody always need money.”
“I don’t.”
“Come get some coffee,” Cecile said, giving the baby a final pat.
“Rather have a beer.”
“Got that too.”
“I can’t,” Annie said, “I get too fat.”
“Then stop bothering,” Cecile said.
“Can’t do that either.”
“Okay,” Cecile said, and went into the kitchen.
“I don’t know why people got to rush and drink something all the time.”
“Me, I sort of like it,” Cecile said. She touched the big, enamel coffee pot with one finger to be sure it was warm, then poured herself a cup. She carried cup and pot both into the living-room, and seated herself carefully with the pot on the floor beside her.
Annie followed her.
“Gives me time to get my breath before I start to think about supper.”
Annie made a face. “Always eating.”
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you ever think about it. … Spend all you time cooking and feeding people and more people.”
Cecile hesitated just a minute with the cup at her lips. “I think of that,” she said quietly.
“Just putting food in mouths,” Annie said. “That all.”
“That has come to me, sometimes,” Cecile said very quietly, “and I have wondered about it.”
“So what?”
“Nothing,” Cecile shrugged softly. “And you, do you have the answer?”
Annie was a little upset by her tone, but she went ahead. “It’s dull,” she said, “just plain dull.”
The clipped black head nodded gently.
“Me,” Annie said, “I left the dishes from breakfast. And they still there, cause I couldn’t wash, I was so tired of them.”
“They be full of ants,” Cecile said.
Annie stamped her foot and the coffee pot rattled on the floor. “You know what I’m talking about.”
Cecile nodded again.
“Always feeding something. … Plain stupid.”
“Maybe.”
“So what do you do?”
“Nothing,” Cecile said. “And what you do?”
Annie let her breath go out in a sigh of annoyance that ruffled her lips together. “I’m going back to New Orleans.” And she was a little surprised, because until she said it, she had not thought of it at all.
“Maybe.”
Annie was quiet for a bit as she walked slowly around the small room, staring curiously as if she had never seen a single object before. She walked from wall to wall looking at the pictures: one on each wall. On the south wall, there was a picture of the Crucifixion, a lithograph in red and black. (All over the island, religious pictures were always hung on the south wall, no one could say why, and no one changed.) On the east wall was a brown-wood-framed print with a tiny brass nameplate: Firelights—a beautifully dressed woman, with high-piled hair, gazes dreamily into the fire from which a vision of her lover-to-be smiles at her. The picture was water-stained; they’d found it on the beach four or five years ago, when they were first married. On the other walls were pictures Cecile had done herself with colored pencils: a head of her son when he was about two; a sketch of the wharves when the boats were gone: empty planks and hanging lines and the empty waters of the bay.
Cecile had always been quick with her pencil. She still sketched sometimes, when there was time. She had a way of hitting off likenesses.
Annie said: “Do me sometime.”
“Sure, just as soon as I get a minute or so.”
“And I can put it with the one you did of me, before I went off to school.”
Cecile blew on the top of her coffee and sipped it. “Okay.”
Annie went over to the window that was set so low in the wall that she had to bend a little to see out. All the windows were built that way—built for sitting people. From a chair in any room, you could see out comfortably.
“I wonder,” Annie said, “I wonder why they go and build windows like this.”
“They build like that even in the old, old houses.”
“There got to be a reason.”
“I sure don’t know, me.” Cecile said.
“We always go and do things different on the island.”
“Maybe living out here make it different.”
“They don’t build windows like that, even in Petit Prairie, not even in New Orleans.”
Cecile drank her coffee and did not bother answering. The baby cried in his sleep.
“Does it hurt as much as they say?” Annie stared at the picture of the empty wharves.
“As what say?”
“Having a baby.”
“No,” Cecile said. “It ain’t bad at all.”
“It seems like it would be terrible.”
“No,” said Cecile, “why you want to know?”
“No reason.”
“What you do?” Cecile’s light green eyes peered intently over the coffee cup. “You get yourself a baby?”
“No.”
“You worried about it.”
“No,” Annie said, “I ain’t worried.”
Cecile went on staring at her stomach. “Nothing showing.”
“I ain’t,” Annie lifted her voice with annoyance. “I told you I ain’t. I’m just asking.”
Cecile picked up her cup and walked out to the kitchen. She was staring into the icebox, when Annie came and stood behind her.
“I didn’t mean to yell,” Annie said.
“Just studying dinner.”
Annie said: “I was just trying to figure out something. I got to have babies, I guess.” She hesitated. “You listening to me?”
“I’m listening to you with both my ears.”
“Only it seems like your body would come bursting apart with a thing as big as a baby trying to get out.”
“It ain’t so bad,” Cecile said.
“It seems like it would hurt.”
“Sure it does.” Cecile measured out a cup of rice and began to wash it at the sink. The hard white grains slipped back and forth between her brown fingers. “Hurts and hurts til you think you go flying right out you mind each time the pain come back. And then it’s all done and finished.”
Annie pulled a chair from beneath the board counter and sat down on it. “Cecil’…”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you ever get afraid that this whole island is going to slip right under the water?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Just sand and trees, no rocks to hold it.”
“It’s been here a long time, sure.”
“But if there ever was a real big storm, with waves big enough …”
“Then I reckon maybe we drown.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not, che’.”
Annie stared out the window at the sand walks, the sand-dusted oleander bushes. “I been thinking,” she said, “I been thinking a lot.”
“Like what?”
“All sorts things. Like the way things are here and the way they must be somewhere else.” She tilted back on one leg of the wood chair. “Like what it’s like in California, and what it’s like just over on the ocean side of Florida.”
Cecile was leaning against the sink, listening. Her green eyes under the fringe of uneven dark hair were very serious.
“And if you went straight out from here, if maybe you took the sailboat that tied up here and went straight south, where would you go? And not just where neither. What it’d be like.”
Annie poured herself some coffee in Cecile’s cup and drank it quickly. Cecile strained the cloudy water off the rice and poked at the shiny white grains with the ti
p of one finger.
“So many things I been wondering about,” Annie said. “Funny things. And I never saw them before I come back this summer. … When I come back it was all different. And I wasn’t gone a whole year even.”
“Like what?” Cecile said and rolled a single grain between her fingers. “Like what?”
Annie put the cup down very carefully. “You ever notice,” she said, “how they don’t ever talk about the fishing? How you never know what they were doing all day?”
Cecile nodded.
“And it’s kind of like they got on the boats and went out and disappeared in the morning. Disappeared and then come back. And they weren’t anywhere real at all.”
“I notice.”
“And the beach out there—and nobody swims. Not even the kids.”
Cecile was silent for a minute, remembering. “And when the moon’s out,” she said, “you got to put your head under the pillow, even with all the heat, cause the light’s so bright.”
Annie said: “And the water all around you, so you can’t go anywhere. And it such a little island.”
After a long pause, Cecile said slowly: “You need something to do.”
“I got plenty to do.”
“You aunt, now, she could find you something in New Orleans, for a while.”
“No,” Annie said.
“And you find a man. No girl pretty as you going to stay alone for long.”
“I don’t want to get married,” Annie said. “I just don’t want to.”
“Nobody says you got to.”
“I want to stay here. And everything to stay just like it is right now.
“Bébé, what a thought you got.”
“The way things keep changing … I hate that most of all.”
“Sometimes they get better.”
“No, they don’t,” Annie swung around, her hands jammed in the pocket of her jeans and her dark face flushed with anger. “They get worse and worse. Just when you get to like people one way, they turn around and go another.”
“You don’t got to yell at me,” Cecile said. “I hear you.” Without a word Annie turned and left. Cecile glanced out the window and watched her. She swung over the porch railing and dropped to the ground without using the steps. She hesitated in the yard for a minute, then began to walk away, faster and faster. By the time she reached the road, she was running.
The Hard Blue Sky Page 12