The Hard Blue Sky

by Shirley Ann Grau

  “Jesus,” Cecile said softly to herself. The baby was crying in earnest now. So she went into the bedroom and picked up the sugar tit and tucked it into his mouth. “Feels kind of like a hurricane been through here.”

  She stood looking down at her own hands for a while, her square strong hands, the only ring a thin band of gold that was already a depression in the hard brown flesh.

  “I used to worry with things like that,” she told the baby. “Then I got married, me, and there wasn’t time anymore.”

  Annie had made her vaguely sad. So she tickled the baby’s foot and grinned back down at him. “Seems like there’s just time for all the business of living and nothing else.”

  She’s not doing anything right now, Cecile thought, not even living. When she starts that business, there won’t be any time.

  She went back to fix supper, Hector would be coming home. Even as she worked, the little feeling of irritation and unhappiness moved along with her.

  She stopped and shook her head. Maybe I’m getting ready to menstruate, she thought, feeling this bad. Or maybe the sun.

  She put the rice on to boil and had another cup of coffee. If it was the sun, she hadn’t noticed it before.

  ANNIE WAS SIXTEEN THAT summer and her figure had just begun to fill out: she was slow for the island.

  She wasn’t the prettiest girl on the island that summer, by far, but there were men who wanted her, who looked at her out of the corner of their eyes when she went past. There were two or three she could have had that summer, if she had known how to go about it. But they were waiting for her to give some signal, and she did not understand. As for Perique, she had hardly seen him since the night he had come drunk to her house.

  She was alone most of the time—her father was hardly ever home—and she did not seem to mind. She took to sewing: to making great full gathers of skirts in brilliant cotton … and to letting out her other clothes, for she was putting on a little weight that summer. You could see her angular body begin to soften and take on curves.

  When her Aunt Justine (who had taken care of Annie since her mother’s death over a year before) noticed the change, she was relieved. “She begins to look like a woman, no?” she asked her husband one day when Annie had just left their front porch.

  He cocked an eye. “Not to my taste—non.”

  His wife sniffed. “And there was times when I thought, me, that she wasn’t going to make it.”

  “Girls is hard to kill.”

  “Last year, when I think she is going crazy, I wouldn’t give a picayune for her chance.”

  “With the other girls her age she is still a runt.”

  “All the same,” his wife said, “Annie, she is growing up. And only last year I have wondered about her.”

  For the two months after her mother died—from taking castor oil with a stomach-ache—Annie Landry wandered around, aimless, with a lost and frightened look. There were times when she did not even seem to see where she was going.

  Her father said: “She will die if she keep up this way.”

  “No,” her Aunt Justine said. She was a calm practical woman, with close-set blue eyes and a big well-shaped head on top of a long rangy body. Since his wife’s death, she did the housework for her husband’s brother, along with her own. She was a strapping fine woman with muscles that never got tired. “I will see what I can do.”

  So she scolded the girl, as much as she dared. “Look at you … look how you droop around the house like a sick gull. Doing nothing all the day long, and your poor papa working and worrying too. He must do the cooking too, without me. You, you do not lift a finger nor stir.”

  Annie did not say anything.

  “Look at me!”

  She lifted her eyes. There was no expression in them at all.

  “Mother of Mary,” her aunt said and waved her hands. “You do not even have the pride to get angry, you.”

  Annie’s pale blue eyes stared at her, without blinking, their lids just a little puffy.

  Her aunt left, upset in spite of herself. “She don’t feel nothing, her. She don’t feel nothing.”

  When she’d gone, Annie walked down to the beach, found a large piece of driftwood, kicked most of the sand off it, sat down, and stared out at the empty Gulf.

  During those weeks, her face broke out in pimples. Her aunt treated them with oil of camphor. And scolded. At first Annie said: “Let me alone”—but finally she did not even bother. She spent most of her days lying on the grass in the sun, even the white hot noon sun, where she could feel the warmth go through her body and reach the hard cold center of her stomach and melt that too. When she was soft and warm all through, when the sun was so hot that little white spreckles would dance in front of her closed eyes and she could feel the day all around her like a sea—then she would fall asleep.

  If her aunt or her father called her, she would put both fingers in her ears and go back to sleep. If they found her and shook her, she would only get up, moving slowly to keep the wonderful world intact around her, and walk away, unanswering, to find another spot.

  “She is losing her mind,” her aunt said and threw up her hands. “And so young a one to do that.”

  During the short hard early-summer rains, Annie went out just the same, so that the rain would make a mat of her short blond hair and run down over her ears and into her eyes. She would cock her head and squint her eyes and stare straight up into the falling points of light. When she came back finally, her jeans and shirt would be soaked through, and covered with mud. Her aunt tried to make her wear a bra.

  “It ain’t decent, her showing through the cloth that way,” she said. Annie only shook her head.

  “Let me alone,” she said, tiredly. “Just let me alone.”

  The nights were worse. She would toss and whimper until she fought her way back into consciousness. There was one dream, recurring and recurring: three balls, yellow, bright yellow each one; she could see them rolling across the ground. And she could see the ground clearly too, she could see the little round nasturtium leaves and the full pink clovers.

  Even when she was sitting bolt upright in bed, her eyes wide open, she gasped and shivered: the shapes followed her right into the room.

  Sometimes, when it was bright moonlight, she would wake up and find herself staring at the knob on the door. Her eyes were stuck so she couldn’t seem to move them. And she could feel a knob growing inside her, growing and growing, deep in her stomach, growing and pressing on her insides and pressing on her lungs until she couldn’t breathe. And she would have to stagger up and pull open the door and send it slamming back into the wall, before she could catch her breath again.

  Once there was an oblong piece of light on the ceiling over her bed—coffin-shaped. And there was a shadowy face at one end. She held her breath, and stared at it, afraid to blink, afraid that if she did, the tiny hold she had on the world would break and she’d go tumbling into the place where the dead were, without light and without feeling.

  She did not call, though she could hear the steady hard breathing of her father in the next room. She waited until the shadow was gone and the fluttering in her stomach had stopped. Then she got up and, holding her eyes wide open with the fingers of one hand, she went outside.

  There was the small damp smell of the one rose bush, a yellow climber, and the winey odor of the sweet, olive. There, the tall dark green bush by the edge of the porch. She squeezed the tight waxy flowers between her fingers and sniffed. The sharp odor went through her head and she felt better.

  Two cats were hunting, she saw their flattened shapes slip across the shell path. Something scratched across the tin roof of the house: a bird or a rat. And beyond everything was the sleepy sound of the Gulf. She stretched and rubbed her hands down along the sides of her body. She pulled up the top of her pajamas and scratched her stomach, slowly and hard, so that her nails left long red marks.

  There was a handline out on the porch, curled in a circle on the flat to
p of the railing. Her father had forgotten it. He’d been checking his lines the evening before, talking about going up to Lake Catherine, where the croakers were running.

  She picked up the line and left, her bare feet making a brushing sound over the dewed grass. The cats leaped away, yeowling.

  She looked after their sound, not seeing anything in the dark, smelling only their heavy musk. “You just look at me and yell,” she told them in a whisper. The cats made no sound or move. She went on talking to them, enjoying the sound of her own voice in the empty night. “You go ahead and yell. You can’t do anything to me. Not a thing, not a single thing, you.”

  She stooped and rolled up the legs of her pajamas to keep them dry and went on. She heard the cats rustling in the leaves behind her.

  It was getting toward morning—there was the clear feel of day in the air—but the stars were still as bright as midnight. In an opening between the high oleander bushes she stopped and stared up at them, the millions of worlds spinning in big circles: it made her dizzy.

  The night was very quiet, just the rustling of the hot night breeze that smelled of salt and swamp—the sweet thick odor of swamp. Mosquitoes sang around her ears and a big night beetle got tangled in her hair. Her fingers found his round hard body with the frantically clawing legs and threw him down on the ground. Then she left the path and cut through the fields, little meadows of creeping tiny yellow flowers with round leaves, to one side the line of oak trees, to the other the slight rise of shell mound that marked the north end of the island. Beyond that was a few feet of salt grasses and then the bay and then more salt marshes on the mainland.

  A lean brown rabbit jumped from almost under her feet. She stopped and tried to follow his path, but the stars were not bright enough. She bent down and pulled a leaf and licked the dew from it. The trees on the edge of the field all slanted back away from the sea spray, flat and angled like the roof of a house. And right over them, just barely touching them, was the thin sliver of a new moon. Annie turned her back, closed her eyes, and made a wish.

  She walked until she came to a rickety landing, just a couple of boards to make a narrow fishing-catwalk. She had been there so many times and she did not need to hesitate or feel her way. Balancing easily, she walked out to the end, squatted down, and dropped her line.

  Just the smell of dust and sand moving on the night wind. And the flat stretch of island with its little oaks and its tall skinny palm trees, more like skeletons than real trees.

  With her free left hand, she began snapping splinters off the boards and crumbling them between her fingers.

  The little piece of moon was reflected in the quiet water under the landing. Squinting through the boards she could see it. There were little flecks of stars reflected too. She stared at the water until she wasn’t sure any more which was up and which was down; and she was afraid to let go of one moon for fear the other would be gone too.

  Across the reflection of the moon, her mother’s face floated, sharp and dead, a funny smile stitched into the lips.

  Annie whimpered, deep in her throat, the way a dog would.

  The line jerked, cutting into her palm. She forgot the moon and the face. She’d hooked an eel, a big one. She slipped off the top of her pajamas, wrapped it around her left hand, and shifted the line there. She sucked at the gashes on her right hand and spat the salt taste of blood down into the water.

  She didn’t kill it. She carried it back to the house. It squirmed the whole way, splattering her body with slime. She put it on the kitchen table and went back to bed.

  The eel was refusing to die; she heard it fall from the table and beat against the floor. She heard the muffled cursing of her father, and, as the thrashing in the kitchen continued, his slow stumbling steps. She peeped out the window: the earth was still black, but the sky over to the east was turning gray with morning. She rubbed her cheek and the tip of her nose against the pillow and went to sleep.

  A couple of days later her father decided to send her to the Ursuline convent in New Orleans where her great aunt was Mother Superior. He was afraid to tell her, himself, so he sent his sister-in-law.

  Annie listened and then said, dry-eyed: “Sure.”

  “Now you are being sensible.” That was her aunt’s favorite word. There was even a little bit of praise in it. “Too much grief for you here.”

  “I don’t care,” Annie said.

  (That evening her aunt said to her uncle at supper: “You think she been fond of her mama, her, with all the taking on she is doing. After her pestering the life out of that poor woman, rest her soul, never giving her a minute’s peace. They spoiled the girl, sure, spoiled her rotten.”)

  “You feel better when you get away. It be good for you che’.”

  “Yea,” Annie said.

  “I call your papa.”

  He came so quickly, they both knew he must have been standing out in the front yard waiting. He came hurrying into the room, stumbling a little over the high door sill, his eyes squinched almost tight closed, one hand rubbing his gray mustache.

  “I’m going,” Annie told him.

  He tugged at the ends of his mustache, trying to curl them up. “That’s good. That’s good.”

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say. His sister opened her mouth, then closed it, and finally said: “That’s sensible, che’.”

  Annie walked away, very slowly. They didn’t look out the windows, but for a long time they could hear her crying outside.

  So she went in to New Orleans with her aunt. Her father did take them up to Petit Prairie in his boat: they could catch a bus there for the five-hour drive to the city.

  There were heavy rain clouds in the east and it was beginning to drizzle the way it did every afternoon in July. Flickers of lightning jumped from cloud to cloud.

  “Lot of heat lightning there,” her father said as he carried the bag over to the bus—a blue-and-yellow-painted job: one of the old public-service buses from Baton Rouge.

  “It is just like always,” his sister-in-law said.

  The first heavy drops fell and smattered in the dust as he put the bags inside the bus.

  “What you say?” He nodded to Gil Carnot, the driver, who was leaning against the front bumper, smoking a long thin cigar.

  Gil nodded back.

  “Well,” her father said, and rubbed his hands on the sleeves of his shirt, “now we fixed.”

  Her aunt said: “You will come get me tomorrow some time.”

  Her father nodded.

  Annie looked from one to the other, her eyes suddenly focusing. “I won’t be back tomorrow.”

  They looked at her, startled by the tone.

  Then her father said: “I got to get going. I got things to do.”

  “I take care of her,” his sister-in-law said.

  “And you have a comfortable ride, Justine.”

  She tapped him on the chest with her palmetto fan. “We will be all right.” He kissed her good-by.

  He hesitated in front of Annie. “Be good,” he said. She did not answer.

  “I will take care of her,” Justine said. He nodded and left.

  Annie turned and watched him walk away—a short, almost bowlegged man—toward the dock where his boat was. “Bye!” she shouted. He looked over his shoulder and waved. His mustache was smiling.

  Justine settled herself carefully, arranging the back of her skirt so that the light silk cloth would hold its sharp-pressed pleat. “A lady should know how to sit. …”

  Annie did not answer, so she nudged her. “Your skirt is right?”

  “Oh sure,” Annie said.

  “It does not look right,” her aunt said, “you have a big bunch there in your lap.”

  “It’s just like that.”

  “Stand up and I see.”

  “No,” Annie said.

  Her aunt shrugged, and began to use her palmetto fan hard, the muscles of her forearm rising. The little beads of perspiration on her upper lip, among the sho
rt black hairs, disappeared. Then, when the driver climbed slowly into his seat, and the whole floor of the bus began to vibrate with the engine, she closed her eyes, turned on her side, and fell asleep, snoring gently.

  Annie shifted in her seat. The skirt felt strange—she hadn’t had one on since her mother’s funeral—and the stockings were burning hot on her thighs. There was a funny little ache behind her eyes and a kind of bubbling feeling in the middle of her head.

  She had been to New Orleans once before, for Holy Week. That same great-aunt had got them tickets for the Holy Thursday and Good Friday services at the Cathedral. She and her parents went in especially for that—for the long services full of chanting and organ music and incense in thick white trails like ribbons. She hadn’t been more than ten then, so small that she got stepped on in the crush to get in the church, so small that she had to stand on the pew to get one glimpse of the altar: three gold domes sparkling under dozens of candles. The rest of the time she’d sat very quietly and listened and smelled and stared up at the ceiling with its pink and blue and gold angels. And when the procession passed down the aisle right by her, one of the altar boys, the one carrying the incense bowl, began to sneeze.

  She did not remember the trip in. So all the way, she sat almost without moving, her elbow bent on the window sill, her head leaning out the window.

  When, after the long stretch of swamp, she saw the city, gray and smeary with rain, straggling out along the east bank of the river, she shook her aunt. The woman woke with a gulp and a little cough.

  “Look.”

  Her aunt rubbed her eyes. “We are there.” She combed out her hair with her fingers and settled her hat straight. “Fix your stockings, che’.”

  Annie straightened the seams without taking her eyes from the window.

  “And comb your hair: You have been holding your head out the window, no? I can tell.”

  “No,” Annie said.

  Her aunt sat, staring straight ahead, her lips pursed as if she were whistling, her fingers tapping the slightly worn edges of her purse. Her gold-rimmed glasses had slipped far down, almost to the end of her nose.