The Hard Blue Sky

by Shirley Ann Grau

  She hissed through the door after them.

  Therese let herself drop full length across her bed. She had just been down to the dock: the Hula Girl was gone. And Perique had not come to tell her good-by. … She cried until her head hurt. Then she got up, washed her face, put fresh make-up on, and, with a piece of tarpaulin over her head, started for Adele’s. The cool wet air made her feel better.

  Claudie was nervous. He held on to his mother’s leg and whimpered.

  “Quit,” she said, “this ain’t the storm.”

  He only held her tighter.

  “Look,” she said, as much to herself as to the boy, “we ain’t going to be alone. And even that ain’t so bad … nothing to it. Just a little wind and some little rain.”

  The boy was listening to her carefully. She loosened his fingers and walked around the rooms, which were almost pitch-black with the shutters closed.

  Claudie began to wail, frightened at being left in the kitchen alone. She ran back there, and because the sound made her skin creep, she slapped him, harder than she would have used to do.

  For the very first time, she saw fear, and then hate come into his eyes.

  “I never tell you it was easy,” she yelled at him. “I never did, me.”

  When Therese came, she felt calmer. She even gave Claudie the couple of Tootsie Rolls that she’d been hiding in the china jar on the top shelf of the pantry.

  Julius put down his hammer and took the remaining nails out of the corner of his mouth. He’d finished boarding up the new big front window, the one he should have had sense enough not to buy. He began to take things off the floor and pile them on the higher shelves. He put the sugar and the rice and the flour on the very top. You could never tell when you’d have water inside.

  From the rooms at the back he heard Philomene puffing as she pushed things around. It struck him all of a sudden that he was winded—he had put up the storm door but he hadn’t barred it yet—so he went out on the front porch for some air.

  It was blowing about the same. The clouds seemed a little darker, but that might be imagination. It would be four, five, six hours before anything much happened.

  It was beginning to rain, you could smell it. Julius sniffed at the air. It gave him a funny feeling, this standing on his porch and knowing that he was just about the only able-bodied man on the island. He liked that very much.

  His daughter came along the path; she waved briefly at him and went around to the back. She had left her two kids there, not much more than half an hour ago. …

  And now so soon. … He ducked back through the store to talk to her.

  She had the baby in one arm, and Don was already down the steps.

  “Hey,” Julius called after her.

  She turned and he saw the cut at the corner of her lip, which was beginning to swell, and the bruise on her cheekbone.

  “What happen to you?”

  She grinned with the good side of her mouth. “Shutter fell down on me.” She left with a wave.

  Julius said to Philomene: “You don’t reckon Hector done that?”

  “And would she look so happy, if they had a fight?”

  Julius had to scratch his head and admit that was true.

  The Hula Girl was the last boat out. The harbor, when they had left, was like the harbor that Hector remembered from his childhood—empty posts and lines dangling down into the water, and splintered, weathered boards that looked worn almost through.

  Even the sheltered waters of the bay were rough. The hull shuddered and rolled. They headed straight across, the wind astern.

  Perique sat down on the little bunk next to Archange Boudreau and let his body shift back and forth with the boat’s motion. There was nothing more to be done for a while. Now that he had time to catch his breath he remembered Therese. … Jesus, he thought, Jesus Christ. …

  He’d have to bring her something, a present from Petit Prairie. That would make it all right again.

  And all of a sudden he found himself wondering what a hurricane was like in New Orleans, where Annie was. …

  He shook his head and got rid of the thought.

  Archange Boudreau eased himself into a comfortable position on the bunk, stretched himself carefully, tucked a fresh piece of tobacco in his cheek and began to chew it gently.

  A flock of gulls passed overhead, coming from the south, their feathers a dull white gleaming. They were riding the wind, hardly moving their wings.

  “Là-bas,” Archange said, pointing.

  Through a break in the mist, a boat, almost out of sight in the beginning dark.

  “Was wondering where they all got to, me.”

  “Can’t tell who it is, this far.”

  “They must about turning up the bayou right now, this minute.”

  “We ought to be up there with them.” The mist blew back and the boat disappeared.

  “We going to get there,” Hector said. “We got the wind running with us.”

  “All the same,” Archange shifted the tobacco, “we can’t go no faster and I wish we was there right now.”

  Perique laughed and crinkled his little eyes. “We going to make it. Or maybe we drown.”

  The old man pulled a knife from his shirt pocket and began to clean his fingernails.

  Hector motioned Perique to take the wheel. He went on deck. They were taking a little spray; there was a trickle running out the long slit scuppers.

  With one hand for balance on the lifeline they’d rigged around the cabin, Hector stared back the way they had come.

  “Hey, boy,” Perique called, “ain’t nothing you see out there you can’t see from in here.”

  “You go over,” his father said, “and there ain’t going to be any use even trying to find you.”

  “Why she stay, in place of hiding with the kids? Why she didn’t save herself no beating?”

  Behind them the island was just a clump of trees with a clump of storm-colored clouds resting right on top of them. The heavy rain was almost there, too; you could tell by the color of the haze. The trees would be lashing around like crazy, he thought, and for a minute he saw it all clear: the people running for cover, slamming doors after them, putting in the bolts. She’d be doing that too. He could see her; she’d have stayed on the porch until the last minute, after she’d sent the kid inside. Maybe she’d even stay out in the rain for a while, because it would be cool.

  But she wasn’t one to do that, he thought. She’d be inside, making sure the covers were tight under the furniture, and that the kids were in bed. And then she’d sit down, rocking and waiting.

  He cocked his head at the gray clouds streaming overhead and listened to the wind that was carrying them.

  He was grinning when he turned and closed the cabin door behind him.

  THE KIDS WERE THE last ones inside. They had been running around, excited all of them, in groups, like packs of dogs.

  They had been yelling and singing all through the little drizzle. When their mothers came out on the porches and called for them, they paid no attention. None at all.

  The first drops of rain sent them scurrying home for cover. By this time most of the doors were closed and bolted. And their mothers weren’t in any hurry to open them up. … Let them stay out a while, they thought, get soaked to the skin, be a good lesson. And so the kids kicked at the doors and screamed with fear before they got inside.

  From the Gulf rain moved in on the island, gray and thick.

  The wind whipped it around corners and across open places like streams from a fire hose. Stripped leaves flew by in bunches, like handfuls.

  There was a little rattle of slamming shutters all over the island—all of a sudden. Those were the people who liked fresh air, who hadn’t closed up until the very last minute. Until the rain began coming from every way all at once—so that even the undersides of the porch roofs got drenched.

  It slacked off finally after an hour or so, and then the whole sky filled with a network of lightning th
reads, like a spider web. The gray air was fresh with the clear odor of ozone. On Isle Cochon the one dead tree was split open and two parts fell away so that there was only a splinter left standing, like a toothpick. The dogs down at the western end were howling without a pause—you could hear them over everything else.

  People stayed inside, behind the closed shutters and the barred doors. Some lit candles and fingered their beads. Others began to drink, carefully, knowing that their supply might have to last a long time, and careful too that they didn’t get drunk, but only felt warm and comfortable. Some people played cards and learned new tricks or practiced fancy dealing.

  The lightning passed over too. In the silence the kids squinched their eyes up to the cracks around the doors to see what was going on outside. For a couple of hours there was nothing very much, not even rain. Nobody went out. They were waiting to see what would happen. …

  The clouds shifted and swirled and darkened to a kind of dull greenish color. Under them the winds were very much higher.

  A Biography of Shirley Ann Grau

  Shirley Ann Grau is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author whose novels are celebrated for their beautifully drawn portraits of the American South and its turbulent recent past.

  Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans. A few years later, her family moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where her father was stationed with the army. Grau returned to New Orleans for her senior year of high school, then attended nearby Tulane University, earning a BA in English in 1950. She initially planned to continue into graduate school, but soon found she was far more interested in writing than in scholarship.

  Her first published story appeared in 1953, in the university quarterly The New Mexico Review. Soon another was printed in The New Yorker. Encouraged by these acceptances, Grau began a series of short stories set in her familiar world of the Deep South. That collection, The Black Prince, was published in 1955 and earned great critical attention.

  That same year, Grau married James Fiebleman, a philosophy professor at Tulane. For many years, they split time between New Orleans in winter and Martha’s Vineyard in summer. While starting a family (Grau and Fiebleman had four children), the author completed her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), a story of feuding families on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. The House on Coliseum Street (1961) followed, with an unflinching depiction of a young woman’s life in New Orleans. Her next novel, Keepers of the House (1964), directly confronted one of the most urgent social issues of the time. Considered Grau’s masterpiece, it chronicles a family of Alabama landowners over the course of more than a century. Its sophisticated, unsparing look at race relations in the Deep South garnered Grau a Pulitzer Prize.

  Though she taught occasionally—including creative writing courses at the University of New Orleans—Grau focused on her writing career. Her novels and stories often track a rapidly changing South against the complex backdrop of regional history. The Condor Passes (1971) celebrates New Orleans even as it reveals some of the city’s worst sides, as experienced by one of its wealthiest families. Roadwalkers (1994), Grau’s last published novel, follows a group of orphaned African-American children as they scrape by during the Great Depression.

  In addition to writing, Grau enthusiastically pursues her loves of travel, sailing, dogs, books, and music. She continues to split her time between New Orleans and Massachusetts, and maintains an active presence in the New Orleans literary community.

  Grau’s lilac-covered cottage in Martha’s Vineyard, where she has worked on all of her books “while the field mice played in the walls and scuttled across the floors, while occasional deer scratched themselves on the outside corners,” as she describes it.

  A 1955 announcement for The Black Prince featuring glowing reviews of Grau’s short story collection. “No book is ever as exciting as the first. I found this in my flood-wrecked house in New Orleans, dried it out with a hair dryer,” says Grau.

  Grau and her daughter in Alaska, while on a cruise in 1992.

  Grau at work in a fishing camp on the northern coast of Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana, in 1997. She finds the marshes and swamps on the Gulf Coast “endlessly interesting, with their own terrible beauty.”

  Grau’s German Shepherd, Yoshi, the last of a line that have been in Grau’s family since her childhood. He acts as her writing companion, sitting beside her while she works—“a kind of silent supervisor,” notes Grau.

  Grau’s view of the beach on Martha’s Vineyard. She describes the experience of sitting on the sand while watching the sunrise as “a comforting feeling of belonging, of cosmic happiness if you will.”

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A portion of the material in Part VII appeared originally in the New Yorker in somewhat different form, and all portions of Part II and Part IV in New World Writing and Mademoiselle, respectively, in somewhat different form.

  copyright © by 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958 by Shirley Ann Grau

  cover design by Julianna Lee

  978-1-4532-4724-2

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  New York, NY 10014

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