Chapter 8
Wrenlee
Saturday.
The whole club came out.
I want to say what that looked like from the ground, because I'd spent my entire life understanding that this was a thing my family did alone in the dark, and my grandmother died believing it, and her mother died believing it.
They came out at four in the afternoon and they put the bikes on the boundary road nose-out toward the treeline every hundred yards for two miles, with the headlights on, and they left them running.
"That's a lot of gas," I said.
"It's a lot of gas," Preacher agreed.
"It's not going to help."
"It might not," he said. "But it's the first time in ninety years anybody's stood out here with a Thibodeaux, and I've decided I'd rather be wasteful than late."
Odalys was at mile ten with her charts weighted down under rocks. Delphine at mile eleven. Teodora walked the whole thing with a thermos and a rosary she says is decorative.
Mags sat in a folding chair at mile nine with a shotgun across her knees that everyone agreed would be useless and nobody suggested she put down.
Roach handed me a bag of salt with both hands like he was handing over a baby.
"Roach."
"Yeah."
"It's a bag."
"It's a significant bag."
"You've been holding it for twenty minutes."
"I've been holding it since four o'clock," Roach said. "Teodora took a photograph. I've asked her not to use it and she's made me no promises."
We took up the half mile at five first, which took two hours and hurt worse than laying it.
You take it up by hand too. You can't shovel it. Half a mile of somebody else's work, scraped back into a sack with my fingers, in the exact places my mother's knuckles had braced.
Jonah worked beside me and didn't talk, and at one point I looked over and he was taking it up with his hands bleeding worse than mine, because his hands aren't built for it and never have been.
"Jonah."
"Don't."
"Your hands—"
"Wrenlee, if you tell me I can't do this part I'm going to sit down in this field and cry in front of nine members of a motorcycle club."
I let him do that part.
Then we laid.
Miles ten and eleven, right-handed, in order, in the last of the light and then into the dark, and the club moved their bikes up as we went so that we always had a hundred yards of headlight in front of us and a hundred behind.
It came for us at half past eight.
Not a lunge. That's not how it works. The temperature went and the frogs stopped and then there were people at the treeline.
Six of them. Then eleven. Then more than I could count.
Alton Vige in his good suit. Cecile Rademacher in her green coat with the mended cuff. A boy in a windbreaker who couldn't have been fourteen. Odette Sonnier, nineteen years old since 1961, standing with her hands folded.
They didn't come closer. They stood along the treeline the way people stand at a parade route, and they watched us lay salt, and after a while they began to sing.
All four verses.
"Don't look up," I said. "Jonah. Don't look up."
"I'm not looking up."
"You're looking up."
"I'm looking at the ground, Wrenlee, I'm looking at the ground so hard I can see the individual—"
"Bag."
"Here."
Behind us, down the line, Bear's voice came up out of the dark, off-key and enormous, singing the fourth verse back at them, and then Roach joined in, and then Duckie, who cannot sing and knows it, and then Preacher, and then Cane, and by mile ten and three-quarters there were nine men on a boundary road out-singing forty dead people at the top of their lungs.
Teodora, walking past me with the thermos: "This is the least liturgically correct thing I have ever participated in and I have never been prouder."
At mile ten and a half it tried the other thing.
It stopped singing, and the treeline emptied, and one figure walked out into the headlights and stood in the road forty feet ahead with its hands at its sides.
It was my father.
I hadn't thought of him in six years, which is its own kind of confession. He left in 1998 for Beaumont and never came back and died there in a way nobody in this family has ever described to me.
"Wrenlee," he said.
"That's not even a good one," I said, and laid.
"Baby—"
"He never called me baby, he called me girl, and he'd have been the last person on this road at nine at night, he wouldn't cross a parking lot for me." Handful. Eight inches. "Try somebody else."
It stood there.
And then it did the worst thing it did all night, which was turn and look at Jonah.
"Don't," I said.
"It's fine."
"Jonah, don't look at—"
"Son," said the thing in the road, in a man's voice, easy and warm and about four notes lower.
Jonah did not look up.
He said, at the ground, absolutely level, "You took his boots off."
The thing said nothing.
"You took his boots off and set them side by side on the shoulder," Jonah said, "and my mother had to see that, and she was never the same woman after, and I have wanted to say this to somebody for twenty-two years, so I'm going to say it to you."
"Jonah," I said.
"Bag," he said, and handed it down, and never looked up, and the thing in the road was not there anymore.
The last hundred feet is where she came.
Everything else had thinned out — the faces along the treeline going one at a time as the band closed behind them, losing ground, and losing faces too, because the closer it got to sealed the less it could hold.
Alton Vige went. Cecile went. The boy in the windbreaker looked at his own hands and then wasn't there.
And at the last hundred feet, where the line comes back around to the marker stone at the northeast corner, my mother walked out of the dark and stood in front of the gap.
"Wrenlee Marie."
"Don't."
"You lay that last hundred feet and I don't come home."
"I know."
"You know what's in here with me."
"I know."
Jonah's hand went flat on my back between my shoulders and stayed there, and I want to say for the record that it was the only reason I stayed upright, exactly as I'd predicted, which is the only prediction I've ever gotten right.
"Eighty feet," I said, and laid.
"Wrenlee."
"Sixty."
"Wrenlee Marie Thibodeaux."
"Forty."
At twenty feet, it stopped talking, and something else happened.
Her hands came up to her own face.
And she said, in a completely different voice — cracked, quick, an old woman's, a voice I hadn't heard in eleven years and knew inside a quarter of a second:
"Baby. Baby, don't stop."
I stopped.
"Don't stop," she said. "I've got — I don't know how long I've got, it's ninety seconds, it was ninety seconds last time — Wrenlee, look at me."
I looked at her.
"You lay it," she said. "You hear me? You lay it and you don't sit up at night about it."
"Mama—"
"Eleven years I've been holding the door with my own hands and I could not make it stop, and the only thing I have wanted, every single night, is for somebody to shut it with me on the wrong side.
" She was shaking. "That's not a sad thing.
That is the one thing I want. Don't you dare give me anything else. "
"I can't—"
"You can. You're mine. You can." Her face was working. "Was that him? Behind you?"
"That's Jonah."
"He got big."
"Mama."
"Did you tell him?"
"I told him."
"Took you seven years."
"Took me seven years."
"Well," she said. "Family."
She looked past me at the road, at nine headlights, at a whole club standing out there in the dark, and something went over her face I'll be unpacking for the rest of my life.
"They came out," she said.
"They came out."
"Mama never got that." She swallowed. "You tell them—"
And then she stopped, and her head came up, and she said fast, all in one breath, the way you say something you've been holding:
"Listen. The night the first seal got cut — in '31 — I've seen it, I've been shown it in here, over and over, it plays. There was a man out on the cypress with the knife."
"Mama—"
"He wore a cut," she said. "Wrenlee, he was wearing a cut. Iron Hex. In 1931."
Behind me, I heard Preacher say something under his breath.
"The club was founded in '34," Jonah said.
"Then somebody was wearing it three years early," my mother said, "and that's your problem now, and it's a bad one, and I'm sorry, and my ninety seconds is about—"
Her face went slack.
Then it came back up, smiling, warm, wrong.
"Wrenlee Marie," it said.
I laid the last twenty feet.
It closes like a zipper. That's the only way I know how to say it.
The last handful went down onto the marker stone and eleven miles went taut — you feel it in your teeth, in the ground, in the fillings — and the thing standing in front of me came apart into about forty faces at once, and then into no faces, and then it was on the other side of a line it could not cross, and the boundary of Marrow Bend held for the first time in seven years.
The frogs came back within a minute. That's the part nobody believes. A minute and it was just a field.
I got about four steps and my legs went exactly the way I said they would.
Jonah caught me under the arms and did not make it a whole thing, and I heard him say, over my head, "Y'all go on," and I heard nine men get on nine bikes and go, which was the single kindest act of that entire week.
He carried me the forty feet to the truck and set me on the tailgate and got a blanket out of the cab that smelled like a dog neither of us has ever owned.
"Wren."
"Don't ask me if I'm okay."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were going to."
"I was going to ask if you wanted to sit here for a while," he said, "which is a different question with the same answer."
So we sat on a tailgate at the northeast corner of a town that has been trying to eat itself for ninety years, and the field in front of us was just a field, and after about ten minutes I started shaking and it went on for a good while and he didn't comment on it.
"She got ninety seconds," I said, eventually.
"She did."
"Eleven years for ninety seconds."
"Wrenlee—"
"No, listen to me, I'm not doing the thing." I got the blanket up around my shoulders. "I've been sitting here trying to decide if ninety seconds is a mercy or a cruelty and I've landed somewhere I didn't expect."