Epilogue
Delphine
Eight months.
I want to say one thing about that morning, because I've been asked about it in three interviews and I've given the professional answer every time.
The professional answer is that we followed protocol, that the case was opened under controlled conditions, that the binding was compromised but the text block was substantially legible, and that imaging began within forty minutes.
The other answer is that the room went completely silent when the lead came off, and stayed silent for about eleven seconds, and then a conservator named Ines Perrault — no relation, though Bishop went very still when he heard the name — said, "Okay," and picked up a spatula, and started, and that "okay" is the bravest thing I have ever heard a person say.
It smelled like a wet church.
The hand was beautiful. That's the obscenity of it.
Whoever kept it had lovely penmanship and ruled his columns with a straightedge and totaled every page, and there is a place on page nine hundred and something where he has made an arithmetic error and corrected it and written a small tidy corr.
in the margin, and that mark is the thing I dream about.
I left the room at the fourth page. I stood in a corridor with my hands on my knees.
Bishop was there, because he had been standing in a corridor for me the way I stood in one for him, and he didn't say anything, and after a minute I stood up and went back in.
Eight thousand four hundred and sixteen entries.
I was off by five hundred and eighty-four, which Camille has never let go and never will.
The release went exactly the way Bishop said it on the boat.
Same minute, three institutions, no embargo.
Our lawyer — we have a lawyer now, which is a sentence I could not have said last year — called it "the least defensible position in publishing" and then filed the paperwork anyway because she'd read the first sixty pages.
By Friday it was on forty servers. By the following Thursday it was in eleven countries, and the index was crowdsourced by nine hundred volunteers in under a month, which is the part that still makes me put my head down on my desk when I think about it too long.
Three foundations have changed their names.
One of them fought it for five months and then did it on a Friday afternoon in August with a two-line statement, which is how you know it hurt.
A hospital wing is now just a number. A scholarship at a university upriver was renamed for a woman on page four hundred and eleven, age nineteen, sold in 1823, no surname recorded — the association chose her deliberately, because the point was the no surname recorded.
The Beauregard-Fontenot House Museum has money.
I want to be honest about how that feels, because it's not clean.
We have money because we are now the institution that houses the physical volume, and we house it because a dying man in Marrero and a road captain from Arizona decided the safest place for it was somewhere too public to burn.
Attendance is up eleven hundred percent.
We hired four people. We fixed the boiler.
The boiler cost nine thousand dollars. There is no version of this world where the boiler cost less than the boiler cost.
There are still eleven people on some two o'clock tours.
That hasn't changed. But nobody sleeps anymore, and last month a man in the back row started crying in the maritime room, and I took him into my office and shut the door and we sat there for twenty minutes and he didn't say much and neither did I.
Bishop stayed.
I want to be clear that nobody made a speech about it.
What happened was that the Iron Compass has eastern salvage contracts, and those contracts had been run badly out of Arizona for six years, and around month three Cade called and said, in what I'm told is a very Cade way, "You're already there," and hung up.
So now Compass Salvage has an eastern office, and the eastern office is a stilt house on Barataria Bay with a working generator, a rebuilt porch, a new tin roof that Amos helped put on in October while narrating a running argument with the entire concept of "below sea level," and a cat.
The cat came with the house. That's Bishop's position.
The cat was under the porch when we came back in September and has since taken the whole structure and shows every sign of considering us tenants.
Her name is Consignment, which was my idea, and which Bishop said was "the worst joke a person has ever made in this parish," and which he uses, out loud, every single day.
Camille has settled into a rotation. Sad Elvis has been retired.
Current active nicknames: Bayou Batman, the Marsh Baron, and — since the roof — Tin Man.
He answers to all of them and acknowledges none of them, and last month she got him to hand her a beer by saying "Marsh Baron" from another room, and she made a noise like she'd won something at a fair.
There were consequences that weren't triumphant, and I'd be a bad archivist if I left them out.
Two lawsuits. Both dismissed, both expensive, one of them arguing — and I want people to sit with this — that publication constituted the conversion of private property, the property in question being the record of the sale of human beings.
Our lawyer read that filing out loud at a bar and had to stop twice.
A woman on our board resigned. Not one of the cousins. The one in Charleston who had never attended a meeting in nine years attended one meeting, by phone, to resign, and gave a reason so elaborate that Camille has requested it be read at her funeral.
Bishop's aunt Ines has not spoken to him.
Neither have about thirty of the forty Thibodeaux in Jefferson Parish, because the arrangement paid a lot of people's rent and I am not going to be smug about what that means to a family in a parish where the ground is disappearing at a football field an hour.
Nine of them have. One of them, a cousin named Adrien with the sense of a wet dog, showed up at the camp in October, stayed four days, helped with the roof, asked for money exactly once, was told no exactly once, and stayed anyway.
Bishop says that's the most encouraging development of his entire adult life.
And Pauline pulled records after hours eleven times and retired in March and now volunteers three days a week in a room she has organized so aggressively that I am afraid of it.
His father is out in fourteen months. They write. That's all I'll say about that, because it's his, and it's slow, and it's going.
We buried Rene in June in a plot in Lafitte, and Sister Agathe came, and eleven people from Arizona stood in a graveyard in ninety-eight percent humidity in jackets they did not need and would not remove.
I told Amos he could take his off.
"No ma'am."
"Amos, it's a hundred and one degrees and the priest has taken his off."
"The priest is local," Amos said, "and the priest is not from a club, and this is what we wear."
He stood there for fifty minutes in black leather over a shirt and tie, at attention, sixty-one years old, for a man he had never met, and when it was over he was so wet through that Reyes had to walk him to shade with a hand under his elbow, and Amos let him, which is how I knew he'd meant every second of it.
Thirty-one people came. I counted, because I count.
Nine of them were Thibodeaux, which at that point was more than had spoken to Bishop since the release, and I watched him notice the number and then decide not to do anything with it.
He spoke last, and he spoke without paper, which he later told me was a mistake and which was not a mistake.
"My uncle Rene held something for fifty years he never once looked at," he said. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you he was a good man about it, because he'd get up out of that box and correct me, and he'd be right, and he'd take too long doing it."
A sound went through the nine Thibodeaux that was not quite laughter.
"He was a hand," Bishop said. "That's what he called it. And at the end he decided he'd rather be a person, and he had about eleven hours left to be one in, and he spent them all on me. Which is more than most of us do with forty years."
He stopped. He looked at the hole for a second.
"He asked me if I'd eaten," he said. "And I lied. And he knew."
And then the last one, which was the one that got me, and which nobody outside that graveyard has ever understood when I've tried to explain it:
"He said I rush the roux. I do. I'm going to keep doing it, and every time it comes out wrong I'm going to hear him, and I've decided that's the arrangement I want."
Afterward Sister Agathe took both his hands and said something to him I couldn't hear, and he nodded four times and didn't answer, and that night he cooked for eleven bikers and a curator on a camp stove on a porch and stood over the pot for two hours and forty minutes without sitting down once.
It was excellent. He said it was fine. Camille asked for the recipe and he said, "Time," and Camille said, "That's not a recipe, Marsh Baron, that's a tendency," and he handed her the ladle without looking, which meant she'd won.
Which brings me to Tuesday.
Tuesday, four fifteen in the afternoon, a woman came into my office. Sixties, cardigan, enormous handbag, the specific composure of a person who has rehearsed something in a car.
"Are you Miss Broussard?"
"I am. Please, sit."
She sat. She put her handbag on her lap and then on the floor and then back on her lap.
"You're younger than I thought," she said.
"People say that."
"I don't mean it as a compliment. I mean I drove an hour prepared to argue with an old white man."
"You may still get to," I said. "There's a board."
That got the first inch of her.
"I came from Hammond," she said.
"That's a drive."
"It's an hour."
"It's an hour with feelings," I said, and she laughed, which unlocked her enough to open the bag.