Chapter 6 #2
"Yes I did," he said, "because that's how it was put on a table in front of me, in 1974, by a man who was not a good actor either, and he got it from a woman who did the same thing, and if I'd slid it across that table like a phone bill you'd have said no in four seconds instead of forty minutes.
" He shifted, badly. "The ceremony's the only thing we ever had.
There's no vault, Bishop. There's no ring, no oath.
There's a tin box with a pelican on it and a man being weird about it in a kitchen.
That's a hundred and fifty-one years of security. "
I sat there.
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," I said.
"It worked on four generations."
"It didn't work on me."
"No," Rene said. "It didn't. And I've had fifteen years to think about that, cher, and I've decided it's because you weren't scared of me, and the reason you weren't scared of me is I never once hit you." His hand moved. "Which I'd like credit for, since we're settling up."
"You get credit."
"Write it down," he said. "You people write everything down now."
"Where is it," I said.
"Barataria Bay. There was an island there in 1938 with a brick cistern under a house, and there's no island now, there's four feet of water and marsh grass, and the cistern's still there because brick doesn't care.
" He rattled off a description of an oyster lease boundary, a wreck, and a bearing off a channel marker that had been renumbered twice, and I wrote every word of it on the back of a hospice menu, and then I read it back to him twice and he corrected me both times, on a detail so small I'd have missed it, because he was a Thibodeaux and even dying he was accurate about water.
"Who's with you," he said.
"Eleven people."
"From out there?"
"From out there."
"They know?"
"They know there's a thing and they know it's mine and they came anyway."
Rene made a sound. It took me a second to recognize it as a laugh.
"That's the whole trick, isn't it," he said.
"That's what I never had. I had a parish.
A parish is forty people who'll bring you a casserole and not one who'll get in the boat.
" His hand moved a little on the blanket.
"You went and found eleven who'll get in the boat and you did it in a desert.
That's the only smart thing anybody in this family has done since 1874, and you did it by accident, running away. "
"It wasn't an accident."
"Cher, it was entirely an accident and you're going to spend twenty years pretending otherwise at parties." He almost got the mouth-thing to happen again. "Let me have it. It's the last funny thing I'm gonna get."
"Take it."
"Mm."
"It's in a lead case in a cypress box," he said. "It'll be wet. It'll be bad. Don't let anybody open it on the boat."
"Okay."
"Bishop."
"Yeah."
"When you get it." He turned his head. "Don't sell it.
Don't donate it to somebody who'll be careful with it.
Careful's how it stayed lost." His hand moved on the blanket, found mine, and it weighed nothing at all.
"Put it where everybody can see it at once.
All at the same minute. You understand me?
Not a exclusive. Not a auction. Everybody, at once, so there's no one door for a man to put money in front of. "
"That's what she says too."
"Then marry her," Rene said, "and stop wasting my time."
I laughed. It came out wrong and I put my other hand over my eyes.
"Hey," he said.
"Yeah."
"Roux," he said. "You still rushing it?"
"Every time."
"Mm."
He went out around two in the morning and it was not peaceful and I'm not going to write down what it looked like.
Sister Agathe was there and I was there and it took a long time and none of it was dignified, and the last clear thing he said was not to me, it was to somebody named Marie who had been dead since 1991.
At four fifteen a woman came in with a clipboard and asked me questions about arrangements.
At four forty I signed something.
At five I walked out into a parking lot in Marrero where the sky was going gray at the edge and the air was already thick, and Delphine was standing by the truck with two cups of terrible hospice coffee, and she didn't ask me anything.
She handed me a cup.
"I've got the location," I said.
"Okay."
"He gave me a bearing off a marker that doesn't exist anymore. And an oyster lease line."
"Okay."
"Marisol can work with that. She can pull the old survey plats, and there's a NOAA set from '38 that would—"
"Bishop."
"—and the lease boundaries are recorded in Jefferson Parish, so if we—"
"Bishop."
I stopped.
"Not yet," Delphine said. "You can do all of that. You're going to be so good at all of that. Just not in the parking lot at five in the morning."
"I don't know what else to do."
"I know."
"I don't know what else to do, Delphine."
"I know," she said. "Get in the truck. I'm driving."
"You don't know the way."
"There is one road, Bishop. There is famously one road."
"There's two."
"There is not."
"There's the one road and then there's the way you go if the one road's flooded, which it is, because it rained Tuesday."
Delphine stood in the parking lot with two cups of coffee at five in the morning and closed her eyes briefly.
"Fine," she said. "You navigate. I drive. You are allowed to say left and right and nothing else."
"That's not how—"
"Left and right," she said. "Those are your words. You've had a night. You get two words."
And so we went home to Lafitte at dawn with a man saying left and right in a truck, and about six miles in, in the middle of nowhere, at a bend where the water was up over the shoulder on both sides and the sun was coming up pink off it like the whole world was on fire in a nice way, I said, "Right," and then I said, "He asked me if I'd eaten. "
Delphine kept both hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road.
"That's three words," she said gently. "That's fine. You can have more."
So I got in the truck, and I didn't feel one thing the whole way back, which I understood even then was a bill I'd be paying later, at a time and place of the bill's choosing.