CHAPTER 35
THE DEACON'S PRAYER
POV: GIDEON
The camp at Bayou Terrebonne stands on twelve cypress pilings over the water, a mile from the nearest road, and the only way to reach it is by boat.
I brought her here tonight because I wanted her to see the herons.
She saw them.
We came up the bayou at dusk in my grandfather's old flatboat, with Madame Odile's cousin's grandson at the tiller, and when we tied up at the camp the sun was going down red over the marsh and the herons were coming in to roost. Hundreds of them.
White and grey and blue, dropping out of the sky in long slow lines onto the dead cypress at the edge of the water, until the trees looked like they'd bloomed.
She stood on the gallery with her hands on the rail and didn't move for half an hour.
"They come every night?" she asked.
"Every night. Since before my grandfather. Since before anyone."
"Where do they go in the day?"
"Out over the marsh. Miles. Fishing." I stood behind her, not touching. "But they always come back to the same trees."
She watched a great blue come in low over the water, its legs trailing, and fold itself down onto a branch like a man sitting down in his own chair.
"Will you ever stop?" she said, without turning around.
"Stop what?"
"Watching me."
I looked at the back of her neck. The white line under her hair, where the pins were coming loose. The faint old mark on the side of her throat that never fully went away.
"No," I said.
She was quiet a moment.
"Good," she said.
Then she leaned back against my chest, and I put my arms around her, and we stood on my grandfather's gallery and watched the herons come home until it was too dark to see them.
She's asleep now.
It's past two. The moon is up over the marsh, huge and white, and the water under the camp is black and full of stars and the sound of frogs. Inside, one lamp. The big iron bed my grandfather hauled out here by pirogue, with mosquito netting hung around it like a veil.
She's asleep in the middle of it, on her left side, facing the door.
Some things don't change.
I'm in the chair by the window. I've been in the chair for an hour.
My shoulder aches the way it does now when the weather turns, a deep throb in the joint where the bullet went through, and the bite on the back of my neck has healed into a small white crescent of scar that I touch sometimes without meaning to.
I'm watching her sleep.
I will always watch her sleep.
***
The sheriff of Saint Bernard Parish called at six this evening, as the boat was pulling away from the dock at Delacroix.
"Mr. Valcourt." Careful. Very careful. "About this afternoon."
"Yes."
"I've got four hundred witnesses," he said, "including Father Guilbeau, who all say the same thing.
Man pushed through the crowd with a loaded revolver.
Man was drunk. Man was the brother of a known Boudreaux associate who died last year.
Man was pointing the weapon at Mrs. Valcourt, who was on a ladder.
" He cleared his throat. "Every one of them says you disarmed him.
None of them can quite remember what happened after that. "
"Isn't that strange."
"Father Guilbeau says he was looking at a boat at the time." A pause. "He was very clear on that. He said it three times."
"Father Guilbeau has always been devoted to the fleet."
"Yes, sir." Another pause. "I'll be writing it up as self-defense, Mr. Valcourt. In defense of your wife. I wanted you to hear that from me."
"Thank you, Sheriff."
"Mr. Valcourt." He hesitated. "My wife was there today. With our girls. She said—" He stopped. "She said she'd never seen anybody lay gold like that. She said it was like watching somebody pray."
I didn't say anything.
"She said to tell Mrs. Valcourt thank you," the sheriff said. "For the halo."
He hung up.
Noemi was sitting in the bow of the boat with her face turned to the wind, and her bare feet on the gunwale, and her hair coming down out of six pins. She'd heard all of it. She didn't say anything either.
She just reached back without looking and found my hand.
***
There are three cameras in this camp.
One on the dock, where the boat ties up. One on the gallery, facing the water. One in here, in the corner above the door, where it can see the bed.
I put them in last month, when I decided to bring her.
She found the one in here within ten minutes of walking in the door.
She stood in the middle of the room with her bag still on her shoulder and turned in a slow circle, looking at everything, the way she looks at an altarpiece before she touches it.
The iron bed. The netting. My grandfather's rifle over the fireplace. The window over the water.
Then she looked up at the corner above the door.
She looked straight into it. She didn't say anything. She tilted her head, just slightly, the way she tilts it at a crack in the gesso.
Then she kissed two of her fingers and held them up to the lens.
And went to unpack.
She knows about every one of them now. In the Prytania house, in the chapel, in Saint Veronica's, in the rectory, in cell nine.
In the shop on Paris Road; I put that one in before I had her name lettered on the door.
She knows there's a box in the basement at Saint Casimir's that writes down every word said on every phone within two hundred yards of her.
She knows I've read every page she's written in the black notebook with her initials on it, and she writes in it anyway, every night, and leaves it on the nightstand where I can reach it.
Last month, she finished watching the nine hundred nights.
It took us four months. An hour or two at a time, in the choir loft, in my chair, with her in my lap.
She'd point at a screen and say what was I doing there, and I'd tell her.
The night she cried because Sister Perpetua forgot her name day.
The night she stayed up until three gilding a single lily for an altar no one would ever see.
The night a man from the bishop's office came to the gate, and she didn't know I was watching, and I put him in the river the following week, and she never knew why he stopped coming.
She knows now.
She sat in my lap and watched the last recording, from the night before I put the key on her pillow. She watched herself sleep on her left side in cell nine. When it ended, she was quiet for a long time.
"You watched every one of those," she said. "Every single night."
"Yes."
"Nine hundred nights, and you never once came through the door."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because you hadn't turned around," I said.
She turned around in my lap and looked at me.
She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.
***
She stirs in her sleep.
She makes the small sound she makes when she's dreaming about the scaffold. I know it. I've heard it through a microphone the size of a grain of rice and through a wall and against my own chest. She turns over, away from the door, toward the window. Toward the chair.
Toward me.
Her eyes open.
She looks at me through the mosquito netting. The lamplight is gold on her face. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't ask what I'm doing. She knows.
She pulls the netting aside and holds out her hand.
I get up out of the chair.
I get into my grandfather's bed and she pulls the netting closed behind me, so we're inside it together, in a little white room of gauze with the lamp shining through it and the frogs singing under the floor.
She takes my face in her hands.
"You were watching," she says.
"Yes."
"Keep watching."
She pulls me down to her.
It's slow. It's slow because the night is long and the camp is a mile from any road and there's no one on this bayou but the herons.
She's warm from sleep and soft everywhere and she moves under me like the water moves under the pilings, patient, steady, pulling.
I kiss the comma on her chin. I kiss the place on her throat where the bite used to be, where there's a faint mark now that never went away.
She puts her hand on the back of my neck, on the crescent scar she gave me, and holds it there the whole time, and doesn't let go.
"Look at me," she says.
It's what I say. She's taken that too.
I look at her.
She comes with her eyes on mine and my name in her mouth, quietly, so quietly the frogs don't stop, and I follow her down into it with her hand on my neck and her heart against mine, inside the white netting, in the middle of the dark water, with the camera in the corner above the door watching us both.
***
Afterward, she lies on my chest and traces the gold on my back with one fingertip, what's left of it, a few bright threads caught in the deepest scars.
She says she'll lay it fresh every year, on the anniversary.
The way Thib laid the saint's halo. She says some things you have to do over and over or they wear away.
"Gideon."
"Mm."
"Today. On the dock." Her finger stops moving. "When I nodded."
"Yes."
"You didn't need me to nod. You'd have done it anyway."
"Yes."
"Then why did you wait?"
I look up at the netting. At the gold lamplight through it. At the shadow of my grandfather's rifle over the fireplace, and beyond it, through the window, the moon on the marsh.
"Because I wanted them to see who I was waiting for," I say.
She's quiet for a long time.
Then she puts her head back down on my chest, over my heart, and closes her eyes.
"Say it," she says. "The thing you say. At the end."
"I don't say anything at the end."
"You do. In your head. I can hear you saying it." She smiles against my skin. "Say it out loud. For the camera."
I lie in my grandfather's bed, on stilts over the black water, with the woman who walked away from a wreck on the Chef Menteur asleep on my chest. The woman who cut a man on my roof.
Who put a hairpin in a man's eye in my mother's room.
Who held my father's hands while he died.
Who poured arsenic into a coffee cup by the cathedral and left a dime on the saucer.
Who climbed a ladder in front of four hundred people and laid a halo and nodded.
I built her a cage. She made it a throne.
My wife.
My queen.
My saint with the knife.
There's no one in the world who'd call either one of us good.
Not the Archbishop. Not the sheriff's wife.
Not the herons. There's a priest in Delacroix who'll never again look straight at a ladder, and a sister in the second row at Saint Veronica's who prays for us every night and doesn't know which one of us she's more afraid for.
We're not good. We never were. We never will be.
We don't need to be.
I put my hand on her hair and look up at the corner above the door, where the little red light is burning, steady, like a sanctuary lamp.
"We're not saints," I say. "We're the sinners who kept the church."