Chapter 6
Bishop
The hospice in Marrero smelled like lemon and something under the lemon, and the hallway had a print of a lighthouse on it, and I stood outside room fourteen for probably ninety seconds doing nothing.
Delphine sat down in a chair by the window with her bag on her lap and didn't look at me, which was the kindest available option.
Sister Agathe was maybe seventy and about five foot nothing and she came out of the room and looked up at me and said, "You're the one."
"Yes ma'am."
"He's been describing you for two weeks. You're taller than he said."
"He's been mad at me for fifteen years. That shrinks a man."
"Mm," she said, and I nearly had to sit down, because that's his sound, and she'd caught it off him in two weeks the way you catch a cold.
"How is he?"
"He's dying," she said. "He's dying today or tomorrow. He's clear right now and he won't be by morning and I'd stop standing in my hallway."
"Sister."
"Mm."
"Is he angry?"
She looked at me a long second.
"He's been angry for two weeks," she said. "He's been angry at a nurse named Chantal, at a physical therapist, at the television, at me twice, and at a man named Boudreaux who has been dead since 1996. He is not angry at you."
"That's not possible."
"Mr. Thibodeaux, I have sat with four hundred people at the end and I want to give you a piece of information for free." She folded her hands. "Nobody dies angry at the person they've been waiting for. They can't. Anger takes a future. He hasn't got one."
I looked at the lighthouse print.
"He's got questions for you," she said. "That's different. Those you'll have to sit through."
Delphine, from her chair, said, "Bishop."
"Yeah."
"Whatever he says in there — you don't have to do anything about it tonight. You can just receive it. That's allowed."
"Is it?"
"It's the whole reason people have hallways," she said.
So I went in.
Here's what a man looks like after four decades of being a boot with opinions and then eleven weeks of cancer: he looks like the boot with everything taken out of it.
His hands were on top of the blanket, and they were the only part that was still the right size.
"Rene."
His eyes came open. Took a second to find me. Found me.
"You're late," he said.
"You said on time."
"I said on time, and it's been fifteen years, so."
"You didn't specify a calendar."
"Mm," he said. His mouth did something. It wasn't a smile but it had been one recently. "Sit down. You're blocking the television."
"The television's off."
"I know what it's doing."
I sat.
We didn't talk for about a minute. That was normal. That was the most normal minute of my adult life, sitting in a chair not talking to my uncle while a machine counted something.
"Water," he said.
I gave him water. He took about a teaspoon of it and it exhausted him.
"You eat?" he said.
I had to look at the floor for a second.
"I ate," I said.
"You didn't eat."
"I ate at a gas station in Harvey."
"That's not eating. That's maintenance."
"It had a hot case."
"Cher, a hot case is a threat, not a menu."
And then we were both quiet, because we'd done the sideways part, and there wasn't time for a lot of the sideways part.
"Say it," I said.
"You know it."
"I know some."
"You know all of it, you just want to hear a Thibodeaux say it out loud, which nobody's done since 1874." His eyes went to the ceiling. "You brought somebody. There's a woman in the hall."
"There is."
"Broussard?"
I sat back.
"How do you know that."
"Because a Broussard's the only person in this state who could've found you," Rene said. "Thaddeus wrote things down. Everybody warned him. He was a bookkeeper, he couldn't help himself, he'd have written down his own funeral." Something moved through his face. "Is she good?"
"She's a curator."
"That's not what I asked."
"She's good."
"Alright." He closed his eyes. Opened them. "Then we'll do it fast, because fast is all I got. Ask me."
"What is it."
"It's a book," Rene said.
"What's in it."
And my uncle, who had ducked this question for thirty-eight years, who had made an art form out of the duck, who could turn any conversation into shrimp season inside of four sentences —
— said:
"Names."
The machine counted.
"Whose."
"People they sold." His voice didn't change.
That's what got me. It stayed exactly as flat as it had been about the hot case.
"Barataria and after. Eighteen-o-nine through about eighteen twenty-six, best I understand.
Not just Lafitte's — the ones after him bought his numbering because it worked.
Names, ages, where from, price, and who paid. "
"How many."
"I don't know."
"Rene—"
"I don't know, Bishop, because I never opened it, because opening it is the thing you don't do.
" He got up on one elbow, which cost him more than it was worth, and I put a hand on his shoulder and he let me put him back down, which is how I knew how bad it was.
"I held it. That's it. Four generations.
Your great-great-grandmother Odalie took it on in 1874 because they came to her door and offered her a house, and she had five children and no husband, and she said yes, and I have never once in my life been able to be angry at her about it. "
"They bought her."
"They hired her."
"Rene."
"That's the trick of it," he said. "Nobody in this family was ever bought. Every one of us was hired, and every one of us was paid, and every one of us could have quit, and not one of us did. That's a hundred and fifty years of consent, cher. You can't wash that off by pointing at a rich man."
"You wanted me to take it."
"I did."
"Why?"
He looked at me. And for the first time that night the flatness went out of him, and what was underneath was so tired that it made the cancer look like a hobby.
"Because I thought holding it was the same as protecting it," he said.
"That's what they told Odalie and that's what she told my grandfather and that's what he told me, and I believed it for fifty years.
Keep it lost, keep it safe, keep it out of the hands of people who'd use it.
And I never once asked use it for what, because I knew the answer, and the answer was: use it to be true at somebody. "
"And now?"
"Now I'm dying in Marrero and there's a woman in the hall who knows what it is."
"Did you ever try to stop?" I said.
"Once."
"When?"
"Eighty-nine." His eyes moved to the window, where there wasn't anything.
"I wrote them a letter. Six pages. I was thirty-five and I'd just buried my mother and I had it all worked out — I'd give it back, they could hold their own damn book, and if they wanted a fisherman on retainer they could hire one who didn't know what it was. "
"What happened?"
"A man came to the house."
"And?"
"And he was nice," Rene said, and I have never heard my uncle put that much contempt into one syllable.
"That's the part. He sat at my table and he drank my coffee and he told me about a scholarship.
For your daddy's kids. Which at the time was you.
" He breathed. "He never threatened one thing.
He didn't have to. He just told me the two futures and let me pick, and I picked, and then he thanked me for the coffee and left, and I sat in that kitchen till it got dark. "
"Rene—"
"You want to hear the worst part?"
"No."
"It was a good scholarship," he said. "That's the worst part. It was real. I checked."
I sat with that.
"That's why the bulb," I said.
"What?"
"The dimmer. The dead bulb. Fifteen years I've thought about that bulb, and I always thought you were cheap."
"I am cheap."
"You wouldn't change it because you couldn't stand the room with the light all the way on," I said. "You lived in a brown kitchen on purpose for thirty years."
My uncle looked at me for a long moment.
"Well," he said. "You got taller and you got mean."
"You could've told me at twenty-three."
"You'd have taken it at twenty-three," Rene said.
"That's why I didn't. You'd have taken it out of duty, and duty's the wrong hand for it.
A duty man holds a thing forever." He breathed a while.
"I needed you to be the one who refused.
I just — I didn't think it'd take fifteen years and I didn't think it'd cost what it cost."
"What did it cost?"
"Your daddy."
I didn't say anything.
"When you left, they came to me and asked who was next, and I said nobody, and they went to your daddy," Rene said.
"And your daddy said yes, because he thought it'd bring you home.
And nine months later there was a man asking questions in Westwego and your daddy did what the arrangement says you do when a man asks questions. "
"You never told me that."
"I'm telling you now."
"Rene—"
"You want me to say I'm sorry," he said. "I'm not going to, because I've got maybe eleven hours and I'm not spending them making you feel better. You want absolution, that woman in the hall's got a better shot at giving it than I have."
I sat there in a plastic chair.
"The tin box," I said.
"What about it?"
"On the table. In the kitchen. You put it in front of me."
"Mm."
"What was in it?"
Rene's eyes came around, and something happened in his face that I did not expect at all, which was embarrassment.
"Papers," he said.
"What papers?"
"Payment records. The instruction, written out, from Odalie's time, four pages, in a hand I couldn't hardly read." A pause. "And a picture of your grandmother."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Rene, you put that box on a table like it was a bomb—"