Chapter 4
Bishop
The camp is nine miles down a road that stops being a road about two miles before it admits it.
I hadn't planned on taking her there. I want that understood. What happened was:
We drove down to Lafitte to look at the rectory records, and the rectory records were at the diocesan archive, and the diocesan archive was closed, and by the time we found the deacon who had a key it was six thirty, and by the time we got out with photographs of four pages it was eight, and by then the system Marisol had mentioned four hundred miles ago had stopped being a rumor in the Gulf and started being a thing with a name.
And then the road flooded behind us.
Not dramatically. That's the part people from elsewhere don't get. It doesn't roar. It just — arrives. You look at a road and it's a road, and you look again in forty minutes and it's a shallow brown lake with a road's opinion about it.
"We can walk it," Delphine said, out of the truck, hands on her hips, looking at the water.
"We could."
"So let's walk it."
"You know what's in there?"
"Water."
"Yeah," I said. "And what else."
She looked at the water a while longer.
"I'm going to need you to not say the word," she said.
"Alright."
"Because if you say the word I have to know it, and right now I only suspect it, and suspecting is a much nicer way to live."
"The camp's up the levee half a mile. Dry the whole way."
"Is there a bed?"
"There's two."
"Are they at least in different rooms?"
"There's one room."
Delphine closed her eyes briefly. "Of course there is."
The walk up the levee took twenty minutes and she talked the whole way, which I figured out around minute four was a strategy and not a personality.
"Talk about anything," she said. "Just keep noise happening."
"You scared?"
"I'm a woman from New Orleans walking a levee at nine at night with a man she met on Tuesday, in a state where the wildlife has a dental plan. I'm managing."
"Nothing out here wants you."
"Everything out here wants me. That's the entire ecosystem's business model."
The camp came up out of the dark the way it always did — you don't see it, and you don't see it, and then you're under it, twelve feet of piling and a set of stairs that my grandfather built at an angle no building code has ever endorsed.
Delphine stopped at the bottom.
"It's on stilts."
"It's on pilings."
"Bishop, it's a house on legs."
"Water comes up."
"How far up?"
"There's a mark inside," I said. "I'm not gonna show you the mark tonight."
The key was where it had been in 1998, which was on a nail under the third step, which tells you everything about my family's relationship with the concept of security.
Inside smelled like cypress and kerosene and thirty years of a man who cooked with too much cayenne. Two cots. A table. A radio. A shelf of paperbacks swollen to twice their printed width. A dish rack with one bowl in it.
I stood in the doorway and looked at the bowl for longer than I meant to.
The generator was dead. Of course the generator was dead. I got up under it with a flashlight in my teeth for twenty minutes and established that it was dead in a way I could not resurrect at nine at night with a multitool and a bad attitude.
So it was hurricane lamps, which the camp had four of, because my uncle owned very few things but the things he owned were all for exactly this.
And it was rum, because he owned that too, and it was crackers and a can of sardines, because that's what a Thibodeaux camp has in it in perpetuity, regardless of season, ownership, or the death of the owner.
"Sardines," Delphine said.
"Sardines."
"For dinner."
"For dinner in a house with no power on a night when the road's underwater. Cher, in this situation, that's a tasting menu."
"Do you have crackers that aren't from an administration?"
I checked the date on the sleeve. I put the sleeve down.
"We'll do the rum first," I said.
"What is this," Delphine said, after the first sip.
"Rum."
"This is not rum."
"It's my uncle's rum."
"Bishop." She held the glass up to the lamp. "This is the color of a fence."
"He got it from a man in Grand Isle."
"That's not a brand. That's a witness statement."
I laughed. She was pleased about it and pretended not to be, and I watched her be pleased and pretend, and that's around the point in the evening where I stopped being able to lie to myself about the shape of the situation.
We sat on the screened porch because the inside of the house was ninety-one degrees and the porch was eighty-eight and moving.
The storm came in the way they come in — an hour of pressure, then a wind that arrives all at once like somebody opened a door at the other end of the world. Rain on tin. That sound is the whole reason people stay in this state, and I will fight about it.
The mosquito netting over the porch cots moved in the wind. Lamp flame ducked and came back. The bay out there was white where it broke and black everywhere else.
"Okay," she said. "Talk."
"About what."
"You."
"That's a big drawer to open."
"I've been in a truck with you for eleven hours and I know two facts.
Your name is a chess piece and you left.
" She pulled her feet up onto the chair.
She was wearing her sister's clothes still, a T-shirt from a 10K she has never run, and she had her hair up off her neck with a pen through it, and the lamp was doing what lamps do, which is flatter everybody, which she did not need. "Why'd you leave?"
"They wanted me to hold it."
"The consignment."
"The arrangement. My uncle put a tin box on the table when I was twenty-three and I looked at it and I said no."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't want a life I couldn't put down."
"Nobody gets one of those."
"Some people get less of one."
She thought about it. She's a good thinker. She doesn't do the thing most people do where they use your pause to load their next sentence.
"What was your father in for?" she said.
"Manslaughter."
"Did he do it?"
"He did it."
"For them?"
"For them."
"So." She turned the glass. "Your father did a killing to keep a box lost, and your uncle asked you to take over the box, and you said no, and everyone in your family has decided you're the coward."
"That's the file, yes."
"That's a stupid file."
"It's the only one they keep."
Rain on the tin. Somewhere out in the marsh something hit the water and the frogs went quiet and started up again.
"Ask me something," I said.
"You're offering?"
"I'm getting tired of being the only file open."
"Alright." She pulled her feet in tighter. "What's the club?"
"That's a broad one."
"Everybody I've ever met with a patch on their back has explained it to me in about nine seconds and I've never once believed any of them."
"Because they're selling it," I said. "It's not a brotherhood and it's not a family and it's not a business, and everybody who tells you it's one of those three is trying to make you feel something."
"So what is it?"
"It's twelve people who agreed on a rule set." I turned the glass. "That's it. That's the whole thing. You show up, you vote, and you eat the vote when it goes against you. Nine years ago they voted to take a job I said no to and I loaded the truck the next morning and never brought it up again."
"That sounds like a cult."
"A cult's got a man at the top who's right."
"And you don't?"
"We got Cade," I said, "who's wrong about four times a year and says so out loud in a room, which is the only real difference between a club and a cult and it is a big one."
Delphine considered that.
"Why'd it work for you?"
"Because nobody down here ever gave me a vote," I said.
"Not once. My whole childhood was grown people telling me what was already decided in 1874.
And I rode fifteen hundred miles and sat at a table with a hammer on it and somebody said, all in favor, and I put my hand up, and it was the first time in my life anybody counted me. "
She didn't say anything for a while.
"That's the least sideways thing you've said all night," she said.
"I'm tired."
"No," she said. "You're not tired. You're just out of the parish."
"My father sold antiques," Delphine said.
"Badly. He was the most honest antiques dealer in the state of Louisiana, which is a sentence that has bankrupt built into it.
He died owing forty-one thousand dollars to a man named Sonny who came to the funeral and cried harder than we did.
" She drank. "So I understand a family that hands you a thing. "
"That's not the same."
"No," she said. "But it's the same shape, and I'm trying to be nice to you, so take it."
"Alright."
"See, you did it again."
"Did what?"
"You take the hard sentence and you put it down flat and then you say alright and the drawer closes." She pointed the glass at me. "You've done it four times tonight. I've been counting."
"You count things."
"I count everything. I once counted the ceiling tiles in a divorce lawyer's office and I wasn't even getting divorced, I was there for a friend." She drank. "Do you want to know the number?"
"No."
"A hundred and eighty-four, and one of them was in backwards, and I have never recovered."
I laughed, and the porch took it, and the storm took some of it too.
"That's your word, isn't it. Alright."
"Is it?"
"You say it like a door closing. Gently. But closing."
I looked at her over the lamp for a second too long.
"Ask the thing you actually want to ask," I said.
"What's in it?"
"I don't know."
"Bishop."
"Delphine, I have never known. Nobody in my family has ever said the word out loud. That's not a figure of speech. There's a word, and it exists, and I have watched three generations of adults get to the edge of it and stop and start talking about the shrimp season."
"That's terrifying."
"It's Tuesday, where I'm from."
She put her glass down.
She got up.
I want to be accurate about this, because I've told parts of my life sideways for so long that I've lost some of it, and I'm not losing this.