The Hard Blue Sky

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Father Ryan cocked his head and listened. “You didn’t have a hard time with it.”

  “Mother Mary, but I had a time, for sure!”

  “You didn’t get dirty,” he pointed out.

  “Ah, but I am smart and the Marie she get mad if she got to wash too much. … I take off my clothes.”

  “All of them?”

  “Down to the underwear … right now my underwear, they are filthy.”

  Father Ryan shook his head and got on board.

  “I been thinking,” Mike said.

  “I know,” the priest said.

  “You know what I been thinking?”

  “Only maybe,” the priest said.

  “It being so late now,” Mike said, “and it ain’t far out the way to Catfish Bay … it wouldn’t take long.”

  And the technical charge, Father Ryan thought, what would it be: kidnapping? He had heard of this happening—to doctors, to priests; and there’d been the stories back in the seminary. … But he’d imagined it somehow as more dramatic.

  He almost chuckled. Well anyway, he thought, a sense of humor helps. And he could see that he was going to Catfish Bay, like it or not.

  For a second he wondered: What would they do if I said no? Would it ever get violent. …

  It was a silly idea, he thought, but it wasn’t sinful. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. It was irregular, and maybe it wasn’t done in the best religious spirit, but then what was. … And God would be one to understand. …

  And if he said no, there’d be more engine trouble for sure again. And just as sure he wouldn’t be getting home tonight.

  If you started looking into people’s motives too closely—well, who would you admit … They’d just as soon keep him here all night. And he had the five-o’clock Mass. If he didn’t turn up, the old boy would be furious, and so would the other assistant. And they’d be as rude to him as they could without sinning. It wouldn’t be very pleasant all together.

  “I think we might go by there,” he told Mike.

  MUCH LATER THAT NIGHT, toward midnight, the Bozo came back and docked quietly. There were five or six men on her, and they had the lines in place in a couple of seconds. They left the boat then, walking off their separate ways quickly. The moon had made the white shell paths bright, almost, as daylight.

  Mike said: “Quit asking me … and get the god-damn kids outa here. Why ain’t they in bed? They oughta be in bed.”

  Marie hissed at the kids, who disappeared. You could hear them scuffling softly in the loft overhead.

  “I need a drink, me.”

  Marie moved to the armoire.

  “No, god damn … I don’t want no wine. … Where you hide the bottle whisky?”

  She reached under the sink, behind the boxes of soap powder, and got out the bottle.

  “Right there?” he said. “Right out in the open where every kid can get at it. … You losing you mind?”

  “Did they find it now? … You tell me did they get any?

  He looked at the bottle and grunted. “Full soap powder.”

  “Wipe it off,” she said. “Ain’t nobody making you eat it.”

  He poured himself a drink. “Quit asking me. …”

  “I ain’t said nothing.”

  He took a couple of swallows of whisky straight. “There a way for doing things,” he said, “and a way not. We did it wrong. … The priest now, he didn’t want to go. And when we got there, he was in a hurry to get off again. And the candles, they kept going out. And there wasn’t nobody could tell which way they was pointing.”

  He put his feet up on the kitchen table. Little bits and pieces of mud crumbled off the soles and scattered on the oilcloth.

  “Tell me I’m messing you kitchen,” he said and squinted at her with one eye tight shut, “go on and tell me.”

  “You hear me saying anything?”

  “Good thing,” he muttered into the glass. “I push you head around back.”

  “I ain’t said nothing. … You hear me saying nothing?”

  “Jesus God,” he said. “And then the priest, he says, ‘I told you it wouldn’t do no good.’ … If he wasn’t no priest, ordained and in church, I push him over right there and let the gars have a work at him.”

  He crossed his feet and a little more dirt fell on the table. “We tried,” he said, “no son of a bitch going to call us not men for trying.”

  Overhead the kids giggled softly.

  “Ain’t they asleep yet?” he said.

  “They all excited for sure,” she told him. She was standing over by the stove, hands on her hips, her bare feet planted far apart. That was the way she did when she expected to stand a long time. “And I expect they are listening.”

  “Good!” He banged down his glass on the floor by his chair. “Pour me another drink. … And maybe it learns them to stay out the swamp. And maybe it don’t. … You pour the whisky like an old aunt.” He yanked the bottle away.

  She did not answer. She went back to her position in front of the stove. He drank the whisky in short nibbling gulps. The kids were very still, and there wasn’t a thing moving outside.

  “And that Eddie …” he shook his head.

  He was silent so long that she finally asked: “What about Eddie?”

  “I come back, the pit of my belly froze up. Only just now the likker is warming me.”

  “What about Eddie?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be him,” he said. “Looking at his face from the outside, I wouldn’t be inside him for nothing.” He stared up at the dark uncovered beams of the ceiling, stained almost black by years of cooking under them. “Not for nothing.”

  “You go back tomorrow?”

  He nodded, very slightly.

  “And the shrimp, they are running too. I hear that from Gary Alonzo.”

  “Maybe,” Mike said, “I hear the same thing. The other men, let them go out. The Livaudais, they got something got to be done.”

  “You want another drink?”

  He shook his head. “Can’t have no hangover on me in the morning.”

  “Listen,” Marie took a couple of steps toward him, “you going to talk to the kids, no? You going to talk to them?”

  “What for?”

  “While this is all in their minds, you going to talk to them about not going too far back in there. Like …” she hesitated for a moment, “Henry done.”

  “Yea,” he said, “only not now.”

  She clucked her tongue. “I wasn’t asking you to do it now. Only sometime.”

  “Yes,” he said. “For sure.”

  She picked up a rag out of the sink and went over to wipe the fingerprints off the door of the icebox. They were greasy. She sprinkled a little soap powder on the rag and worked at them.

  “We go again.”

  “You think,” she said still scrubbing away, “he might be living yet?”

  “He shoulda know better. He know enough not to go so far he can’t get out. Whyn’t he stay where he knew his way?”

  “He wasn’t a stupid kid,” she said.

  “He knew better, for sure. … If he stay where he knew.”

  ‘You think … maybe?”

  He just shook his head to answer.

  “Quit looking like that,” Eddie said to Belle. “I’m going back, me. First thing in the morning.”

  BEFORE LIGHT THE FOLLOWING morning, Hector Boudreau and Al Landry were down at the dock. And a few minutes later Eddie Livaudais came, a gunny sack of food over his shoulder, a shotgun in his hand. He was dressed for a long day’s sun too: a long-sleeved heavy white cotton shirt, a pair of white cotton pants and a wide-brimmed straw hat.

  And not three steps behind him came his brother Mike, his wife’s brother Chep and Chep’s son, Jerry.

  Al and Hector moved over to meet them. Eddie was walking along with short jerky steps, his eyes on the ground right in front of him; so he didn’t see them until he almost walked into them. Then he looked up sharply and waved his
hand. “No,” he said, “we don’t need no help.”

  Al Landry pushed back his own cap. “Me and Hector was just wondering.”

  Eddie shook his head sharply. “Four do much as six or eight.”

  “No offense,” Hector said.

  “Hell, man, no,” Mike said, and glanced at his brother. Eddie was terribly nervous; he could hardly stand still at all. “If we need any, we call for you sure.”

  “Look,” Hector said, “lemme run you over to Catfish Bay. … I been wanting to try out that engine.”

  “That’s an idea, for sure,” Al said. “And it save you that much paddling.”

  “Maybe …” Mike turned to Eddie, “you the boss.”

  “You going to paddle far enough,” Hector said, “once you get there.”

  “That’s the idea,” Al said.

  “You got enough paddling,” Hector said, “without making more.”

  Eddie’s eyes were bothering him. He kept blinking very fast. “Okay,” he said.

  Hector got the blowers going. Chep and Jerry put their shotguns and their gear on board and then went to get lines to the two pirogues.

  Eddie did not offer to help. He just stood and watched, blinking.

  “You don’t want to put the sack on board?” Al asked. And Eddie was surprised to find he still had it slung over his shoulder.

  “Hot as hell,” Jerry said.

  Mike chuckled. “You ain’t seen nothing, kid,” he said. “That bothers you, you might just go home straight off.”

  Jerry tested the muscles in his right shoulder. “Don’t reckon I will.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing,” Mike said. “Vieux couillon! But this ain’t nothing at all.”

  Annie Landry sat in front of the mirror and undid her curlers. She brushed out her hair carefully—the shampoo gave it red tints, all right, she thought, but that wasn’t bad either. Then she made up, very carefully, even to the mascara.

  Earlier that morning, she had climbed up to the top of the largest oak tree, the one that grew way in the back, by the pigpen. And from its top she could see the wharf—the boats were all out working, except for the Livaudais’s two, and the Pixie.

  She finished her make-up and stuffed the shirt down into her pants. She ran one finger testingly up and down her legs: she had shaved this morning and her skin still prickled a little.

  Then she walked slowly across the island.

  Inky was in the little clump of trees that reached right down to the wharf. He had got a canvas chair from somewhere, and he was sitting and reading.

  “Well, hi!” he said. “I was beginning to think you’d disappeared for good.”

  “I’ve been around.”

  “Not down here, you haven’t.”

  “I was down yesterday,” she said, “but you were busy washing …” she stopped, remembering she shouldn’t have mentioned that.

  “You damn right I was.” He began laughing, slapping his knees. “That was one on me,” he said. “Spent all yesterday morning washing.”

  Already she was wishing she had not come. But there was no way back, so she went on recklessly. “I’m real sorry,” she said, “but it never happened before.”

  He laughed harder. “You damn right it didn’t.” The book fell off his lap and he stopped to pick it up.

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Oh hell,” he said, “tell me what’s going on around here.”

  “Nothing,” she said, “nothing ever does.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll tell you the news … the bastards I nearly had a fight with—what’s their name?”

  “Livaudais.”

  “Well, they went out somewhere in Hector’s boat, with a couple of pirogues. And then, maybe a couple hours later, Hector comes back alone, and picks up his crew. You know, the crippled man, and your boyfriend, with the tobacco name.”

  “Not my boyfriend,” Annie said.

  He lifted one eyebrow and winked.

  She was uncertain, so that it was an actual pain. She could not look at him. “I got things to do,” she almost whispered and turned away.

  “You have a mean hangover?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Man, I did.”

  She was moving quietly away when he said: “You want to have a drink with me tonight?”

  They had a drink at the Rendezvous, which was almost empty on a Monday night—only Story LeBlanc playing a game of pool with Lacy Livaudais.

  “You’re extra pretty,” Inky said, “when you don’t have that scared look.”

  “They listening over there.”

  “Okay,” Inky said, and stood up. “I know another place.”

  THEY WERE GONE, THE two Livaudais and the two Songy men, hunting for Henry, nearly three days. First the Hula Girl took them across the bay, then up a small deep bayou to a second smaller one, and finally to Catfish Bay—they had taken the priest there only the day before; and if they had looked they could have found some of the floating blocks of wood with bits of candle still stuck to them.

  They changed to their pirogues. And the Hula Girl turned back. From here on, it would be too shallow for the lugger.

  They paddled up through the low salt marsh, looking for some sign, all the way up to the heavy swamp. They spent the night there on the edge. And in the morning, soon as it was light, they went in far as they dared. They went in far as they knew, any of them, and then a little farther, marking their own way carefully. And every hour or so, they fired the shotguns in the air or down in the water. There was never an answer. That night, they lit the cypress torches they’d brought. And Mike Livaudais sent up the flares. They all watched the red and white colors stream out, way, way over the vine tangle tops of the big cypress trees. And they’d waited.

  Mike sent up four different flares, all that he had. And there was only the faint hissing and the sharp searing smell.

  Chep Songy scratched his chin. And in the swamp silence the finger over his beard made a rasping sound.

  And finally Eddie Livaudais lowered his head from the empty night sky where the flares had been. “Let’s us go back,” he said.

  They took the shortest way, and they paddled all night, taking turns now, for they were dead tired. But more than that, they wanted to get out of the swamp—out of the stifling, sulphur-smelling air, the slime-coated water.

  By daylight they were back in the marshes behind Isle aux Chiens. The cranes were still asleep in the little ponds in the grasses: eight or ten white shapes clustered together.

  The still heavy water streaked back from the paddles in a long v. … When they got near the end of the marsh Chep Songy grunted to his boy to stop paddling and motioned toward the shotguns in the center of the pirogue. He fired both barrels from his; the boy added a third.

  “Maybe,” Chep said, as much to himself as to anyone else, “it is three shells wasted, but maybe somebody, they hear and come.”

  Perique Lombas heard them, and got his own boat, the Tangerine, and crossed the bay to meet them. He got there first, cut his motor and sat down to wait. While he waited, he changed the plugs, which had needed doing for some time.

  Perique and Robert Cheramie had built the twenty-foot hull a couple of years ago. They’d worked at it all one summer, getting up before daylight so they’d have a couple of hours cool. And Perique had taken the engine out of his old Ford, which he’d kept for a while on the island, and spent nearly a month working on it, tuning it up, in the shade of the chinaberry tree in his back yard.

  The rest of the car he had pushed back up against the little chicken house, way back in the hackberry bushes. And a storm that September had torn off a limb of the old oak there, and smashed it down on top the car and jarred the doors all open. During the winter storms the grasses blew in and made drifts on the floor that went halfway up to the windows. And that spring, his mother moved some of her hens in.

  He saw the two pirogues finally, put on his motor and went over to pick them up. He didn’t as
k once about Henry. And they didn’t mention it. They all knew that he didn’t have to, that he had his answer already.

  When they came into the dock, there was a kid, standing back a little, by the icehouse, watching them. Only before they had landed, he turned around and disappeared. And they weren’t surprised about that either. It was Pete Livaudais.

  The Tangerine swung into the dock. Perique left the wheel and grabbed the mooring-lines.

  “I’m going back, me,” Eddie Livaudais said. The other men were ashore now, but he hadn’t moved.

  “Ain’t no use,” Chep said.

  The two other men were so tired they didn’t bother talking. They picked up their shotguns and the empty sacks which had had food and water in them, and moved off, dragging their feet and stumbling on the uneven boards.

  Eddie started to get up from the deck. He put his hands on his knees and pushed. But he slipped sideways. Perique put the last loop in his mooring-line and jumped back aboard.

  “My legs, they cramped from being in the pirogue this long,” Eddie said.

  “Sure,” Perique stuck out his foot for a brace and got one arm around the older man, and heaved him to his feet.

  “Got to get some sleep,” Eddie said. “Then I’m going back.”

  Perique got him to the dock. “Leave the stuff,” he said, “I got to go right by you house anyways.”

  Eddie held out his hand, motioning for Perique to pick up the sack. “I be back by morning, me.” He lifted the almost empty sack across his shoulder. “Vec tou mo drigail,” he muttered.

  “Lemme bring that,” Perique said. “I’m going right by you house.”

  Eddie did not seem to hear. Perique followed him down the wharf a little, not quite sure what to do. Finally Perique stopped and stood watching him—moving rapidly, with short little steps like a woman’s, and leaning forward at such an angle you thought he was going to fall any minute.

  He went out again the next morning alone. Like he said he would.

  HE HAD FOUND NOTHING, when he came back two days later.

  He dragged his pirogue only half out of the water and left it. (The Songy boys came down later and carried it the rest of the way up the shell ridge.) He didn’t bother with the gear either, taking only the shotgun and the shells. It was all he could carry. His arms had turned weak as a woman’s. And he had to go home.