CHAPTER 34
THE BLESSING OF THE FLEET
POV: NOEMI
The ladder is the same ladder.
I climb it barefoot.
It's the twenty-fourth of April. Six months since a man with a gold tooth leaned on the gate on Dauphine Street and asked me to take a ride. The sun is out over Delacroix, hard and white, and the bayou smells like salt and diesel and crawfish boil, and the whole town is on the dock.
Shrimp boats line the bayou from one end to the other, bow to stern, forty of them, hung with flags.
Red and yellow and blue pennants strung from every mast to every rail.
Children running along the bulkhead. Old men on folding chairs.
A brass band on a flatbed truck by the bait shop, playing something loud and happy and slightly out of tune.
Father Guilbeau, the parish priest, in a white stole with a silver bucket, walking along the edge of the dock and throwing holy water at the bows as they go by.
And beside the dock, on a pedestal wrapped in white lace, the saint.
He's plaster, six feet tall, old and chipped, and the town has carried him down to the water every April for sixty years.
Saint Peter, fisherman, with a net over his shoulder and a key in his hand.
His paint's been touched up so many times his face has gone soft.
But the halo is the thing. The halo is the only real gold he wears, and it has to be laid fresh every year, on the morning of the Blessing, in front of everyone.
For forty years, Thib laid it.
Four years ago, his hands were too bad, and he sent me up the ladder instead.
This year, they asked for me by name.
***
Thib is at the foot of the ladder when we get there.
He's in a wheelchair now. His hands are worse, knotted up in his lap like driftwood, and his nephew pushed him down the dock from the parking lot so he could see.
He's wearing a clean white shirt buttoned to the collar and a straw hat, and when he sees me coming along the dock in my own paint-stained jeans and one of Gideon's shirts with the sleeves pushed up, he takes off the hat.
"Chère," he says.
I kneel down on the planks beside his chair.
"Mr. Thib."
He looks at me for a long time. At my face. At the ring on my hand, the halo, and the plain gold band under it. At the kit bag over my shoulder, which used to be his.
"The sign painter came to see me," he says. "After he did your door. He cried in my kitchen." He sniffs. "Old fool."
"He told Gideon the same."
Thib's eyes go past me, up the dock, to where Gideon is standing a little way off with his hands in his pockets, not coming closer. Letting me have this.
"That one," Thib says quietly. "He came to me the day of the Blessing, four years ago. With blood on his collar. Asked who you were." He turns his hat in his ruined hands. "I told him your daddy was going to ruin you."
"I know."
"I didn't know then what he was going to do about it."
"Neither did I."
He looks at me. His eyes are very sharp, the way they always were when I laid a square crooked and he made me lift it and lay it again.
"I heard about the café," he says. "About Ambrose."
I don't say anything.
"I heard what was in the tin." He puts his hat back on his head. "I told you never more than a pinch."
"You did."
"Did you listen?"
"No."
The old man laughs. It comes out of him wheezing and cracked, and his nephew looks alarmed, and Thib waves him off with one knotted hand.
"Good girl," he says. "Go on up, chère. The size won't wait."
***
I'm on the ninth rung, with the size already laid on the halo, a thin clear gleam on the old plaster, and a book of leaf in my left hand and the tip in my right.
I look down.
I can see everything from here.
Sister Perpetua, Mother Perpetua, standing by the bait shop in her habit with a paper plate of crawfish, laughing at something Madame Odile has said.
Clothilde beside them. Sister Agathe a little apart from them, in the second-row place, even here, with her hands folded, watching me with an expression I can't read.
She came on the church bus. She asked to.
Clémence's two new boats, tied up near the head of the line, freshly painted white with red trim. The first one is called the Marie-Therese II. The second one, the bigger one, has a name I didn't know about until this morning, painted across the stern in gold letters a foot high.
LA REINE.
Clémence is standing on the deck of it in black trousers and a white shirt with her sleeves rolled up, and her father's rings on the chain at her throat, and Ansel is standing on the dock beside the boat with one hand on the rail.
Not on her. On the rail. An inch from her hand.
They're not looking at each other. They're so carefully not looking at each other that Clothilde has been watching them all morning with her hand over her mouth.
And at the back of the crowd, by the road, where the cars are parked on the shell, in a black coat he doesn't need in April, standing very still with his hands in his pockets while children run around his legs and the band plays—
Him.
In the same spot. I know it's the same spot. He told me. By the second telephone pole from the bend in the road. Where he stood four years ago with a handkerchief pressed to his head and blood running into his collar.
He isn't bleeding this time.
He's watching me.
I've always felt it on the back of my neck. Today, for the first time, I feel it on my face. I look at him across the whole crowd, and he looks back, and neither of us looks away.
Then I turn back to the saint.
***
I lay the first square.
I hold my breath. The wind wants it. It always does on the bayou. I wait until the wind drops, and I lay it on the size at the top of the halo, and it takes, and I let my breath out.
And I hear the band.
That's what's different. Four years ago, I didn't hear it. Gideon says I didn't hear anything, not the band or the priest or the children or the dogs, that I was so far inside the leaf that the whole world went away.
Today I hear all of it.
The trombone, sliding. A little girl shrieking with laughter by the bulkhead. The splash of holy water on a hull. Father Guilbeau's voice, bless this boat and all who sail in her. A gull. The engines of the shrimpers idling in the water, forty of them, like a heartbeat under everything.
I hear it all, and I don't lose the leaf.
I don't have to go away from the world anymore to be quiet inside. I can hold my breath and hear everything at once.
I lay the second square.
And the third.
And from the ninth rung of Thib's ladder, with the leaf on the tip of my brush and my breath held, I see the man in the crowd.
***
He's not looking at the saint. That's how I see him.
Everyone else in Delacroix is looking at the boats, or the priest, or the band, or me. Four hundred people looking at the things you look at on the day of the Blessing.
He's looking at the back of the crowd.
At Gideon.
He's big, heavy in the shoulders, in a stained Saints cap and a flannel shirt too warm for April, and he's moving through the crowd toward the front, toward the ladder, slowly, one shoulder at a time. He has his right hand inside the front of his shirt.
I know his face.
I've never seen it before, and I know it. The broad forehead. The small mouth. The shape of the jaw. I sat on a crate in a cold room on Paris Road and looked at that face above a hand wrapped in a bloody rag, and it said you and me got business.
Lonnie's brother.
He must be. He has Lonnie's face, ten years older and twenty pounds heavier and drunk, I can see it from here, the way he walks, the way he doesn't care who he knocks into.
He's coming toward the ladder.
Not for Gideon. For me. He's figured out what everyone on the river has figured out: that you can't get near the Deacon. That he has more locks than Fort Knox.
But the Deacon's queen goes up a ladder once a year in front of the whole town, barefoot, with nothing in her hands but a brush.
I don't call out.
I don't scream. I don't climb down. I don't point.
I look at the back of the crowd.
Gideon is already moving.
He's already seen him. Of course he has.
He saw him before I did. He sees everything.
He's coming through the crowd from the back, fast, not running, the way he crossed my room the night of the magnolia, three steps where anyone else would take ten.
People turn to look at him and step out of his way and don't know why.
I turn back to the saint.
I have one square left. The last piece of the halo, at the bottom, where it meets Saint Peter's shoulder.
I put the leaf on the tip.
I hold my breath.
Below me, somebody shouts.
***
I don't look.
I lay the square. The wind drops for me, the way it does if you wait. The gold goes down onto the size and settles and takes, and the halo is whole.
Then I look.
Lonnie's brother is on his knees at the foot of the ladder, six feet below me.
His right arm is bent the wrong way at the elbow. There's a pistol on the dock planks beside him, a black revolver, spinning slowly to a stop. His Saints cap has come off.
Gideon is standing over him.
He has the man's collar in one hand. He isn't looking at the man. He's looking up at me, on the ladder, with the halo shining gold behind my head.
The band has stopped.
It stopped in the middle of the song. The trombone player is standing on the flatbed with his horn down by his side.
Father Guilbeau has his silver bucket in one hand and his aspergillum in the other, and holy water is dripping off it onto the dock.
The children have stopped running. The old men are half out of their folding chairs.
Four hundred people.
Every one of them is looking at the foot of the ladder.
Gideon looks at me.
He doesn't ask. He's never needed to ask me anything but once, on an altar step, and I've already answered.
I look down at Lonnie's brother. At the back of his neck, bent, the skin red and sunburned where the cap was. At the revolver on the planks that he was going to point at me in front of the priest and the children and the saint.
I look at Gideon.
I nod.
Gideon picks the revolver up off the dock.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't make a speech. He puts the barrel against the back of the man's head, the way you'd put your hand on the head of a child to bless it, and he pulls the trigger.
The sound goes out over the bayou and comes back off the water.
Lonnie's brother goes forward onto the planks.
A gull lifts off a mast, screaming.
And then nothing. No one screams. No one runs. Four hundred people on a dock in Delacroix stand in the April sun and look at the Deacon standing over a dead man at the foot of a ladder with a revolver in his hand.
He puts the revolver in his coat.
He looks up at me.
I climb down.
***
I take the rungs slowly. Barefoot. The seventh rung with the new wire. The brush still in my hand. When my feet touch the dock, I'm standing a yard from the body, and I step around it without looking down, the way I stepped around the man in Hélène's blue room.
Gideon holds out his hand.
I take it.
We turn around together, and face the crowd.
Nobody moves.
Mother Perpetua has her hand over her mouth.
Sister Agathe has her eyes closed and her lips moving.
Madame Odile is holding her sister's arm.
On the deck of La Reine, Clémence Boudreaux is standing very straight with one hand on the rail, and beside her, on the dock, Ansel has put his hand over hers, over the rail, and she hasn't moved it.
At the front of the crowd, a man takes off his hat.
He's old. A shrimper, with a face like a walnut and a tattoo of the Blessed Virgin on his forearm. I don't know him. He takes off his hat and holds it against his chest.
Behind him, another man does the same.
Then a woman beside him lowers her head.
And then, from somewhere in the back, from the old men in the folding chairs, from the crowd by the bait shop, I hear it. Low. Not a shout. Something people say under their breath, the way they'd say amen.
La reine.
La reine.
It goes through the crowd like the wind going through the flags. Nobody says it loudly. Everybody says it.
On the flatbed truck, the trombone player lifts his horn to his mouth. He plays one long note, low and slow. Then the drummer comes in under him. Then the rest of them.
The song they were playing when it stopped. From the beginning.
Father Guilbeau looks at the body on the dock. He looks at the Deacon, and at me. He looks down at the silver bucket in his hand.
Then he turns back to the boats, and dips his aspergillum, and throws holy water on the next bow in line.
Bless this boat, he says, in a voice that shakes only a little, and all who sail in her.
***
Behind me, on his pedestal, Saint Peter stands with his net and his key and a whole new halo, shining.
I laid it with my own hands. I heard every note of the band while I did it. I watched a man come to kill me, and I didn't stop, and I didn't scream, and I didn't look away from the gold.
And then I looked down and nodded, and a man died, and I didn't look away from that either.
Gideon's hand is warm around mine.