Epilogue #2
She took out a photograph. Small, square, black and white, scalloped edges. A woman in her seventies on the steps of a house, squinting, one hand up against the sun.
She put it on my desk and turned it to face me.
"That's my grandmother," she said. "That's 1954.
And I have been looking for her mother's mother for thirty-one years, Miss Broussard, thirty-one years, and there is nothing.
There's no census, there's no church, there's no stone.
I have three names from three different aunts and none of them agree. "
"Okay."
"And on Sunday my nephew put one of them into that index of yours."
"Which name?"
"Rosalie. The one my aunt Verna swore by and my aunt Loretta said was wrong.
" Her hands were flat on the handbag. "Loretta's been dead since 2011 and I want you to know that I sat in my kitchen on Sunday night and I said, out loud, Loretta, you were wrong, and then I apologized to her, because she raised me. "
"That sounds about right for a family."
"It's exactly right for a family."
She stopped. Her chin went. She waited for it to stop going, which took a moment, and I did not fill the moment, because that's what my whole job turned out to be.
"Page two thousand and six," she said.
I didn't say anything.
"Rosalie," she said. "Age fourteen. From the Gambia, it says, though who knows what they knew.
Four hundred and fifty dollars, in 1824.
" She wiped her face with the flat of her hand, briskly, annoyed at it.
"And a name, Miss Broussard. The buyer. There's a name.
And that name is on a building I drove past twice a week for eleven years taking my mother to dialysis. "
The air conditioning cycled. Somewhere out in the parlor a tour was starting.
"Would you like to see the volume?" I said.
"Can I?"
"You can see it today. It's in a case in the room at the end of the hall, and it's open to page one hundred and four, but I'm the curator, and I can turn it to two thousand and six, and you can stand there as long as you want. Nobody will bother you. If somebody bothers you, tell them I said."
She put her hand over her mouth.
"I brought her picture," she said, from behind it. "I don't know why. I thought — I don't know. I thought she should be here."
"That's exactly why," I said. "That's the whole reason for all of it."
I got up. I went to the cabinet by the window, and I took out a blank accession form, and I set it on the desk and uncapped my pen.
She looked at it.
"What's that for?"
"You're going to want to donate the photograph eventually," I said.
"Not today. Maybe not this year. But someday you'll decide your grandmother should be in the same building as her grandmother, and when that day comes I don't want you to have to find the courage twice.
So we'll start the form now and it'll sit in a drawer with your name on it until you're ready, and if you're never ready that's a fine outcome too. "
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Do you do that for everybody?"
"I've done it eleven times since April," I said, "and four of them have come back."
Then I clipped the form into a folder and set it aside, because there was a better order to do this in.
"The volume can wait four minutes," I said. "Tell me about the photograph first."
So she did.
The house on the steps was on Preston Street. The squint was because her grandmother refused, on principle, to be photographed in her glasses. The hand up against the sun was because somebody had told her to hold still and she had decided, at seventy-one, that she would hold still her own way.
Her grandmother's name was Willa Mae. She made a pound cake that people drove for. She could not read and hid it for sixty years by memorizing hymn numbers. She died in 1979 in a chair.
I wrote all of it down, because that is the job, and because in ninety years somebody is going to want it and there will be no aunt left to ask.
Then we went down the hall.
I turned the page to two thousand and six and stepped back to the doorway and let her have the room.
She stood there thirty-five minutes. At some point she took the photograph out again and held it flat against the glass of the case, face out, so that the two of them were on the same side of it, and she stood like that a while with her arm getting tired and did not lower it.
I did not go in. That's not modesty. It's that the room was, for thirty-five minutes, not a museum, and I have spent my whole career trying to make that happen and have managed it maybe six times.
That night I drove down to the camp, which takes an hour, and which I do three or four times a week, and which I have stopped describing as an hour with feelings because it stopped being one somewhere around November.
The generator works. The porch is rebuilt. There's a light on at the top of the stairs that Bishop put in specifically because I said, once, in passing, in September, that the stairs were an angle no building code had ever endorsed.
He was at the table with the eastern contracts spread out and a cat sitting on the exact document he needed.
"Consignment."
"Don't."
"She's on the lease renewal."
"I know she's on the lease renewal, and you're going to say the name again, and I want you to know I've stopped finding it funny."
"You said it first."
"I said it to the cat," Bishop said, "which is a private matter between me and the cat."
I told him about the woman from Hammond. All of it, the aunts, Loretta, the building on the dialysis route.
He listened the way he listens, which is completely, with his hands still.
When I finished he didn't say anything for a while.
"Rene would've hated this," he said.
"Would he?"
"Every day of his life. And then he'd have driven to Hammond." He pushed the cat off the paper, which accomplished nothing. "That's the thing I keep landing on. He wasn't wrong that it'd cost something. He was just wrong about who ought to pay."
"That's practically a eulogy."
"I already did the eulogy."
"You did four sentences."
"They were good sentences."
"They were excellent sentences," I said, "and you have now told me so yourself on three separate occasions, and I want the record to reflect it."
"Noted," he said.
That's his word for it. Mine's an accession form. Same job.
Later we sat out on the porch with the netting moving and the bay doing its nothing, and the cat took the good chair, and Bishop said, without any preamble at all, in the dark:
"He told me to marry you."
"You've mentioned."
"I'm mentioning again."
"Bishop Thibodeaux," I said, "if you are proposing to me on a screened porch, at night, in August, in this humidity, with a cat present—"
"I'm not proposing."
"—then I want it understood that my answer is going to be extremely long, because I'm a curator, and we do provenance first."
He laughed.
"I'm not proposing," he said again. "I'm telling you it's coming, so you've got time to write it."
"That's the most considerate thing anyone has ever done for me."
"Mm," he said.
And out past the pilings the water went on quietly eating the state, the way it does, the way it will, and somewhere in a case in a building in the city eight thousand four hundred and sixteen people were on a page with the lights off, being read tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that.