Chapter 8
Bishop
Barataria Bay at five in the morning is the color of an old nickel and about as friendly.
We had two boats. A twenty-four-foot bay boat Amos had rented off a man named Prejean who asked no questions and accepted cash with the grace of a professional, and a flat-bottomed skiff with a push pole for the last hundred yards, because where we were going had eleven inches of water over it at low tide and a bottom that would take an outboard's lower unit as a souvenir.
"There," she said, and put her finger on a piece of open water that had nothing in it.
"That's water."
"That's an island," Marisol said. "That's an island from 1938 with a house on it and a cistern under the house, and then that's the '65 storm, and then that's sixty years of the Gulf eating this state at a rate of a football field an hour, and now it's water.
" She looked up. "The cistern's brick and it's below the original grade, which means it's below the mud, which means it's the only thing out here that stayed put. "
"How confident?"
"Eighty."
"Marisol."
"Ninety, and if you tell anybody I said ninety I'll deny it."
Torren went in at six ten with a hookah rig off the skiff, because tanks are a nuisance in eleven inches of water and a good way to lose your gear.
Here's what diving in a Louisiana marsh is: it's not diving. It's crawling through coffee. Visibility is measured in inches and the inches are optimistic. You do everything by hand. You put your hand out and the mud tells you what it is.
Torren was down forty minutes on the first go and came up with nothing and a cut across his palm from an oyster shell that went four stitches later.
Second go, fifty minutes. Nothing.
Third go he came up so fast Amos thought something was wrong and had a hand on him before his mask was off.
"Brick," Torren said. "Curved. Two meters down, under about a foot of silt, and it's laid, it's not fill, there's mortar."
"How big?"
"I found an arc. Feels like a barrel, maybe two and a half meters across."
Amos looked at me.
"That's a cistern," Amos said.
Amos threw up twice over the side between eight and nine, which he attributed to the chop and which was the heat, and which he denied with such vigor that Reyes eventually put a wet towel on the back of his neck without comment and Amos left it there without comment and that was the whole conversation.
"You want to sit down?" I said.
"I'm sixty-one."
"That's not a no."
"It's a no with a reason," Amos said, and went back to the pump.
Around nine thirty a game warden came by, which is the single most Louisiana thing that can happen to you at any moment of any day, and looked at eleven people and two boats and a dog.
"Y'all lose something?"
"Anchor," Amos said, before anybody else could speak.
The warden looked at the hookah rig, the dredge nozzle, the survey plats taped down under a cooler lid, and the sixty-one-year-old man with a towel on his neck.
"That's a lot of gear for a anchor."
"It was a good anchor."
The warden considered this for a while.
"Y'all got life jackets?"
"Yes sir."
"Alright," he said, and left, and that was law enforcement in Barataria Bay, and I have thought about it many times since with real affection.
Delphine, from the bow: "Did that just work?"
"That worked."
"He knew that wasn't an anchor."
"Of course he knew. But he asked a question and got an answer that let him leave, and that's the transaction." I coiled a line. "Nobody down here wants to know things. Knowing things is how you end up in a deposition."
It took four more hours. There's no way to make that part exciting.
It was a hand pump, a dredge nozzle, three men taking turns, a dog barking at a pelican for the entire duration, and Delphine on the bow of the skiff with a plastic tub of distilled water, gloves, and a face like a woman waiting outside surgery.
At ten forty Torren came up holding a corner of something.
Cypress. Black with age, soft on the surface, hard underneath, and iron-strapped at the corner.
They got it up at eleven o'clock with two straps and a great deal of profanity, and it came out of that water like the state was reluctant to let it go, and it sat on the deck of a rented boat dripping mud, and everybody stopped talking.
"Don't," Delphine said.
Nobody had moved.
"I know nobody's touching it," she said, "I'm saying it out loud for my own benefit.
Nobody opens that on this boat. If that lead case is intact there's an atmosphere in there from 1938 and if it's not intact then what's in there is a block of wet paper that will come apart in your hands like a wasp nest, and either way we get it to a lab, and I want everyone to say yes Delphine. "
"Yes Delphine," said eleven people and, arguably, the dog.
That's when the other boats came.
Three of them, from the northeast, and they came in a way that told you everything, which is that they came together and slow. Two center consoles and one thirty-foot cabin boat with a man standing on the bow who was wearing a linen shirt in a marsh at eleven in the morning.
"That's a Gallery boat," Marisol said quietly.
"How do you know?"
"Because it's clean."
They stopped forty feet off. Close enough to talk, far enough that nobody had to decide anything yet.
The man in linen was about sixty-five and looked like a photograph of a man. He had two lawyers with him. I knew they were lawyers because nobody else brings a folder onto a boat.
"Mr. Thibodeaux," he said.
"That's me."
"My condolences on your uncle. I mean that sincerely. Rene and I spoke perhaps four times a year for twenty-two years and I found him a very serious man."
"You're the church money," I said.
Something crossed his face. Not shame. A kind of distaste at the phrasing.
"I represent an association of families," he said, "with a shared and long-standing interest in the object on your deck. That interest has been maintained honorably, at considerable expense, for a hundred and fifty-one years, and it has been maintained in your family's hands for every one of them."
"Say your number."
"Mr. Thibodeaux—"
"You came out here with lawyers and a checkbook and a linen shirt. Say your number and let's stop performing."
He said a number.
I want to be careful here, because I've told this story at two tables since and both times somebody has asked me to repeat the number and then gone quiet.
It was more money than the Iron Compass has made in twenty-nine years of operation.
It was more money than the club will make in the next twenty-nine.
It was, specifically, enough money to rebuild the yard, clear every note, put every man in the club into a house, and fund Marisol's survey work until the sun goes out.
Amos took his hat off. That's all he did. He took his hat off and held it.
"Before that," he said. "May I say one thing that isn't a negotiation?"
"You can say it. I'm not agreeing it isn't."
"Fair." He put his hands in his pockets, which on a boat is a statement about balance and confidence. "My great-grandfather's name is in that book. On the buying side."
Nobody moved.
"I've known that since I was nineteen," he said.
"I was told by my father in a study in the Garden District in almost exactly these words: there is a document, we do not discuss it, and one day it will be your responsibility.
And I have carried that for forty-six years, and I want you to understand, Mr. Thibodeaux, that your family and mine have been in the identical position, at opposite ends of the same rope, for a hundred and fifty-one years. "
"That's not the identical position."
"Is it not?"
"You get the house," I said. "That's the difference.
That's the entire difference and it's the only one that's ever mattered.
My family got four hundred dollars a quarter and a rule about not going north.
Your family got a wing of a hospital named after them.
Don't stand on a clean boat and tell me about the rope. "
"I have never claimed—"
"You just did. Forty seconds ago. You said identical." I put a hand on the tarp. "You're not carrying the same weight as me and you never have. You're carrying the fear of a phone call. That's real, I'm sure it keeps you up. It is not the same weight."
The lawyer with the folder said something quietly to him. He waved it off, which I respected.
"And in exchange," I said.
"The object is transferred to a private conservation trust."
"Which does what with it."
"Conserves it."
"Say the true version."
"Mr. Thibodeaux, I am not going to be baited into—"
"Delphine," I said.
She stepped up beside me. She was in a wet T-shirt with mud to the elbows and she had never in her life looked more like a professional.
"They'll deacidify it," she said, "photograph it for their own records, seal it, and put it in a facility that does not accept research requests.
In about eleven years there'll be a quiet fire or a quiet flood or a quiet deaccession, and the paperwork will be immaculate, and there will be a very sad press release.
That's the standard sequence. I've watched it happen to three collections in my career and I could not prove a single one of them. "
The man in linen looked at her with what I'd call professional respect.
"You're the curator," he said.
"I am."
"Your institution is eleven months from insolvency."
"Fourteen. Your information's stale."
"I could solve that this afternoon."
"I know you could," Delphine said. "That's what's making my hands shake. I want you to understand that clearly, because I don't want anyone standing on this boat thinking I'm brave. I have a boiler that costs nine hundred dollars to sigh. I'm not brave. I've just done the reading."
I looked at my club.
Eleven people. Two boats. A dog. Nineteen hundred miles from home, in a heat that had put three of them on IV fluids at a clinic in Marrero the day before, none of them paid a dollar for any of it.
"Cade," I said into the phone. He'd been on the line since the boats came in, listening, which is our procedure.
"I heard it," Cade said.