“We got a radio,” Al said.
“Little one for me, white, so it goes by my bed … Jesus!” She stopped suddenly and looked at him. “You all dressed up.”
He was wearing his one dark suit, you could still smell the moth balls on it faintly. He took off the jacket and hung it over the foot of the bed, folded carefully so that it wouldn’t muss. He pleated a handkerchief and put that in the pocket.
“What goes on?”
He took off his white shirt, and folded it on top of his jacket.
“Go away,” he said, “I got to change my pants.”
Annie went out in the hall and waited. When he came out again he was wearing his old khaki pants and an undershirt. But he still carried the good suit and shirt over his arm.
“What goes on?”
He walked through the hall toward the front door. “I be back tomorrow evening.”
“I’m still asking what happening.”
“I’m getting married,” he said. “I’m going over to Port Ronquille and get married.”
Annie just stood staring after him. And when the screen door slammed shut right in front of her, shaking dust into her eyes, she didn’t even blink.
IT WAS THE STRANGEST day in Claudie’s life. They had been traveling such a long time. And he had been sick twice. Twice his mother had to take him out of the wheelhouse and sit down on the deck with him and put one hand under his forehead and hold his head over the side. Each time, when they finally came back, the man laughed and slapped him on the back.
It was the vibration of the engines and the way the boat slipped and jolted on the surface of each wave. Not that he hadn’t been on boats before—he and the other kids of Port Ronquille had gone scurrying over each fishing-boat that came in the bayou and tied up. But those boats had been steady, only bobbing a little with a passing wake. He’d never been on a moving boat.
He was so tired. It had been a funny day. When he woke up first, and went wandering into the kitchen, nobody was there. He looked into the plates stacked on the table and rubbed his fingers over them. Then he hunted through the rest of the house. His mother was always around—only this time she wasn’t. She just wasn’t. He went out to the back steps and sat down and planted both elbows on his knees and whistled for his cat. The sun was warm and high: he had got up later than usual, he could tell.
When his mother did come, she was all dressed up in a blue hat with yellow flowers on the brim, and a blue dress with a white lacy collar that he hadn’t seen before. He hugged her legs and felt that she was wearing stockings, which she almost never did. There was a man with her. His name was Al; Claudie had seen him around the house before. Each time he came he brought a present. The last had been a big red ball—only some dogs had taken it off the front porch and chewed it up.
She gave Claudie his breakfast on the back porch—bread and jelly and a cup of hot milk with a couple spoonfuls of coffee. The minute he had finished eating, she washed his face at the kitchen sink and dressed him in the white cotton suit he wore only to church on Sundays. He started to say something, but she hushed him quickly. When he was dressed, she took his hand and led him outside. And they watched, while some men he didn’t know took the furniture out of their house and put it on the deck of this boat—that looked and smelled like all the other fishing-boats. They tied it down and covered it with black tarpaulins.
His Uncle Dan left the store and came down to the dock, standing off a little on one side, watching, not saying anything. His mother hadn’t noticed, she was so busy scurrying back and forth, and watching to see how each single piece was put on. But the man Al, who was with his mother, he had noticed, though he didn’t give any sign: Claudie could tell from the sidewise flicking of his eyes. He had bright black eyes and sometimes they scurried over to one corner for a quick peep and then jumped back to the middle.
And for some reason—he didn’t quite know why—Claudie imitated the man, never looking at his Uncle Dan directly, but only peeping from the tail of his eye.
When everything was ready, his mother took his hand and got on board with him, while the man freed the lines and dropped them on the deck.
His mother looked around for the first time, just as the man went in the cabin and spun the wheel and the bow swung away from the dock. His uncle turned away—twisted around on his heel and walked back to the store, spitting in the bayou as he went.
His mother turned around too, and went into the wheelhouse. And in front of everybody, because they were still so close to shore that everyone could see, she kissed the man.
For a couple of minutes Claudie stood on the deck and watched the way the land pulled back and shrank. All of a sudden his mother came popping out and grabbed him by the hand and took him in the little cabin and hugged him. “Poor bébé, I have almost forgot about you! “
“See,” the man said to him, “the house where you use to live.”
His mother stood him up on the little bunk and pointed. “Là-bas.”
Nothing looked familiar.
The man reached down and pulled his hair. “I can whittle, me. I going to make you all sorts of things. Make you a dog. With a real tail. Hear me?”
Claudie stared at the man. Already the white shirt, and the way the little whiskers sprouted out into a mustache was beginning to look familiar.
“Answer him,” his mother said; “he’s you papa now.”
Claudie looked at the face very carefully—at the way the eyebrows straggled out at the edges to meet the hair.
Claudie hugged his mother. He reached up far as he could. Her thigh and her hip felt warm and hard and familiar, the way they always did. He buried his face in her shirt and pushed his face in hard, until the cloth hurt his nose and mouth. And then he took a deep breath, smelling her, smelling the warm musky mother odor.
He would have liked to stay there, his eyes closed, his hands pulling the cloth around his head, but his mother pushed him away. “Sit up here,” she said, “and look out the window.”
He could see some houses, like the pictures in the books he had at home. “You used to live there,” his mother said.
He shook his head. He did not believe it.
The man laughed. “Don’t!” his mother said.
Claudie looked at the houses again. They were pictures. If he could just get closer to the window, he could touch the paper. And rustle it.
“You remember the house?” his mother asked.
He hung his head. There’d been a bed once—he got out of it this morning, a long time ago, that had a cover of red-and-white and blue-and-white squares. And a picture that hung on the wall and a candle under it that his mother lit every night. And there were the doodlebugs that he’d brought in yesterday, all tight in a ball and put under his bed. He’d meant to look for them again this morning, but he hadn’t got chance.
“You ain’t going to be sorry?” the man said.
His mother didn’t answer. She tossed her head and dropped her eyes a little bit and her finger played a steady little tap-tapping on the wood of the door.
Claudie began to cry. The tears spurted out of his eyes and dropped on his shoes. His mother talked to him, but he was so busy crying he did not hear her. Finally she shook him, hard, so that the tears splashed out of his eyes and he could see again.
“Mickey,” he said.
“Oh God,” his mother pushed back one strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead.
“What’s the matter?” the man said. “He get hurt or something?”
His mother straightened up—she had bent down to talk to him—and kept pushing back the hair with short jerky strokes. “The cat.”
The man whistled, long and low.
“But it’s his cat. And I meant to bring it.”
“Well,” the man said, “you want to go back for it?”
His mother was quiet for a minute. “No,” she said, “I wouldn’t go back in that store and ask Dan where the cat is at. I’d just as soon have the gars ch
ew me to pieces.”
Claudie began crying again softly.
His mother picked him up and put him on her lap as she sat on the bunk.
“Listen, ’tit macac, listen at me.”
He twisted around and looked up in her face. He reached out one finger and touched the hair over her ears.
“You tell me what color that minou was.”
He frowned.
“You tell me now.”
He thought for a minute … the cistern in the back yard where the shingles were falling off. There been a snake there one day, wriggling across the damp ground.
“What color Mickey was?”
“White.”
She laughed. “How you like that now … all the fuss and you don’t even know what color.”
She got up again and went and stood alongside the man as his hands moved the little wheel back and forth. A wheel so little that it looked like his hands could smash it.
Claudie curled himself back in a corner of the bunk, between two packages and right next to the gilt-framed mirror his mother had wrapped in the quilt from her bed.
“Don’t you break that mirror,” his mother said.
The man glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “Seven years’ bad luck, boy.”
Claudie pulled away a little. He shook his head—violently, so that his ears began to buzz. And because that amused him he kept it up.
His mother put her hand down on top of his head and stopped him. “Quit that, fou-fou. You shake your brains out.”
He giggled and pulled his knees up to his chin and then rested his chin on them. He sat quietly for a while and sang a song to himself: “White cat, white cat, white cat, white.”
After a little he yawned and went to sleep.
He woke again when the boat began to pitch. He scrambled out of the bunk and grabbed his mother’s leg.
“What’s the matter with you? We just come out the bayou. Nothing more.”
The boat was moving like a rocking-horse. He climbed up to his mother’s waist and clung there, so he could see out of the window. No land on either side. Only water, bright blue under the sun. He squinched his eyes from the glare and twisted his head. A little bit of spray, like rain, spotted the windows.
“What you want to see, dogaree?” the man said.
“The island going to be right over there,” his mother pointed. “You watch for it.”
He climbed down and started to walk across the deck. But the tossing confused him and he lost his balance. He sat down hard.
The man laughed. “You break it, dogaree?”
He sat on the floor with his hands out one on each side of him, and studied his mother’s face carefully, to see if she was afraid. She wasn’t. She was excited; he had never seen her so excited; she could hardly sit still; her foot kept tapping the floor or her fingers the glass. When one part of her became quiet, another part began to move.
He sat still, where he had fallen and thought about it. And then he felt his ears get cold and his mouth get salty. His mother heard his little choking and she grabbed him up and got him outside, but not quite far enough that first time. He was sick on the deck.
His mother dragged him back inside, him feeling light and empty. “He ain’t going to make a sailor,” she said.
“He get used to a boat,” the man said. “It just take a little time with some people.”
“Poor bébé,” his mother said. She pulled out a brown paper bag from among the other bundles. “I got maybe something for you.” Her hands rummaged around and paper rattled. “Here. Yes.” She held out a handful of the small round oyster crackers. “These make you feel better.”
He took them and held them in his own hand. He put a single one on his tongue and let it melt there until there was just a pulpy flour-tasting mess.
He did not move until he was sick again.
This time his stomach kept turning itself over and over and emptying air into his mouth as his mother held him there, over the low wood rail. When his eyes were open he could look directly down at the water. He saw how it came in flat bits, like the kaleidoscope toy he had got at Christmas, that shifted and changed and was never still for one minute. It wasn’t blue either, but a kind of gray-blue, streaked with froth, and you couldn’t see down through it.
His mother pulled him to his feet and took him back to the cabin. “Mary Mother,” she said, “maybe he’s going to do that the whole way.”
“It ain’t far,” the man said. “It ain’t far at all.”
“He ain’t got anything left to throw up,” his mother said.
Claudie stood, swaying back and forth with the motion of the boat, letting his head hang and swing too, so that the floorboards passed back and forth in front of his eyes.
“Stop him swinging his head like that,” the man said. “That just making things worse.”
His mother picked him up and sat on the edge of the bunk and held him in her arms, all the rest of the way. He put his head as far under her arm as he could.
The man said: “There it is.”
His mother almost dropped him down on the floor, she was in such a hurry to get up.
And he scrambled up her leg and made her hold him too, so that he could see.
There was land on two sides now. On the right, the thin green line of marshes, an edge of grass that reached back, far as you could see from here, without a single tree or a single rise of ground. Just grass, shifting and moving and showing little shadows when the wind blew over it. Ahead was the island, thick clusters of oak trees and a few thin tall palms.
“It look nice,” his mother said slowly and in a very quiet voice. Claudie cocked his head and looked at her; he could tell she was uncertain. And he waited to see if they should turn around and go back.
“It’s a fine place,” the man said. “You’d know if you was ever out before.”
“No,” his mother said; “I never thought to come here, me.”
Claudie kept staring at her. He didn’t understand her tone. He had never heard it before.
She turned down to him, giving him a swat on the rear. “Why do you stare at me, macac?”
The man picked him up in one arm. Claudie had not been this close to him before. He could smell the strong sweat odor from the white shirt. He squirmed a little and tried to get down. His mother did not smell like that. She had a soft warm smell, not sharp and metallic. But the man paid no attention to his movements.
Claudie looked over the shoulder to his mother. But she was staring straight ahead and there was just a little bit of a smile curling up the corners of her mouth.
“Which end is your house?” she was saying.
“In the middle,” the man said. “But back from the landing. Way back. Where there’s a little shade on a hot day.”
Claudie squirmed and kicked, and the man let him down. He ran for his mother and tried to pull her skirts around his head, but she only lifted him up too. He hung his head and whimpered.
“What the matter with you, dogaree?” she said. “Don’t you want to see where you going to live?”
He thought about that for a while, until finally understanding, he lifted up his eyes and frowned at her.
“Ah … that got a rise out of you, no?” she pointed. “There. That where we going to live.”
He shook his head.
“Yes we are.”
He shook his head again. That wasn’t where they lived. The place where they lived had a street of gravel out front and a front porch and four cane rockers on it. And his room had yellow and blue linoleum on the floor.
He shook his head.
“Sure,” his mother said. “That other place,” she said, “we don’t live there. It wasn’t no more than a picture.”
He whimpered again and put his face down in her shoulder. He wasn’t sure any more.
“I’m sure glad we put that tarpaulin on the stuff,” the man said. “There’s more spray than I figured on.”
“I reckon it’s dry.”<
br />
“Sure,” he said. “They fixed it so it would stay dry in most any sort of weather.”
“Maybe,” his mother said slowly and doubtfully.
“Look, che’,” he said, “nothing got spoiled coming across.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do without I got my things.”
“Look,” he said. “They all there. Nothing gone overboard.”
She smiled suddenly and slipped her arm through his. “I ain’t nothing but sort of edgy.”
He kissed her on the cheek. His breath, heavy with tobacco, reached over to Claudie. The boy sniffed and then sneezed.
They were coming to the dock. The man let the boat in slowly, the engine idling. The hull touched with a soft bump. He opened the door and shouted: “What you say, there, Perique!”
The tall thin boy, who was sitting on a keg on the dock, had not moved until then. But he stood up and got the stern line and dropped the big loop over the post. Then he slowly secured the one at the bow.
“Perique, hey, come here,” the man called. “I got somebody for you to meet.”
Perique came back, his rubber-soled shoes making soft little padding sounds on the boards.
“I got married. And this is my wife, here.”
Perique grinned. “Vieux couillon! If you ain’t the one.” He bowed very formally to Adele. “God make you happy.”
“And now, man, how about us taking some of this stuff off?”
“Sure,” Perique said. “Let’s us go.” He saw Claudie standing in the middle of the wheelhouse, right where his mother had set him down. “And who the hell we got here?”
“That’s Claudie,” his mother said. “My son.”
“How you, dogaree?” Perique said. Claudie slipped behind the door. “He don’t want to talk, him.”
“He’s scared,” his mother said.
The two men began pulling back the tarpaulins. His mother came and took Claudie by the arm, and sat down on the deck close to him. “Bébé, listen at me. I got something to tell you.”
He looked at her. Now that the boat was steady he was beginning to feel much better. He even grinned a little bit.
“No,” his mother said, “listen at me.”
The Hard Blue Sky Page 17
