Chapter 23 #3
"And I kept at him," Storm says. "Four times over about six weeks.
Sat in his kitchen in Baton Rouge with a woman makin' coffee in the next room and a girl's drawings up on the icebox, and I told him he was a better man than the outfit he was in, and I told him we'd have somethin' clean, and I told him he'd sleep at night.
"And on the twenty-ninth of September he said yes."
Everything in me has stopped.
"Sixth of October a fella walked a dog on the levee road out past Erwinville," he says, "and there was a truck sittin' there with the door open and the dome light burnt out, and your daddy was in it, and he'd been there most of two days."
I put both hands flat on the boards.
"They didn't hide it," Storm says. "That's how I know it was them.
They didn't take the truck and they didn't take his wallet and they left him on a road that a hundred people drive, and that's not a robbery, that's a notice, and it was addressed to me and every man who'd said yes to me, and every one of us read it.
"Charter got signed on the twenty-sixth of October.
Twenty days after we buried him. And I put his name on it sixth in line where it would've gone, and I have stood in front of that paper every New Year's for twenty-two years and read it out loud, and there ain't a man in that buildin' ever asked me why, 'cause they think it's honor. "
He finally looks up at me.
"It ain't honor," Storm says. "It's a receipt."
I can't say anything for a while.
He waits. He doesn't fill it and he doesn't touch me and he doesn't get up, and I sit on a step above a fifty-two-year-old man in a yard in the dark and my whole chest is a fist.
"The money," I finally say.
"There wasn't anything else."
"Twenty-two years, Storm."
"Twenty-two years and one month." He puts the hat down on the step.
"November of oh-four I drove to Baton Rouge and I sat in your mother's kitchen where I'd sat in his, and I told her what I've told you, and I told her I'd send what I could every month till one of us died, and I asked her for one thing.
"I asked her not to bring you back to Rosalie. Not for a funeral, not for a visit, not ever."
"Why."
"'Cause the Gallow Kings knew Emile Doucet had a wife.
" His voice doesn't change. It hasn't changed once.
"They didn't know he had a daughter. Man kept a picture in his wallet and never said a name out loud in that clubhouse one time in six years, and I know that for a fact, 'cause I asked every man who came out with me and not one of 'em could tell me if you existed.
"So I asked her to keep it that way. And she did. And she took the money and she never told you where it come from, and I have hated her for it and been grateful to her for it, some days both inside an hour."
"You could have written one line."
"One line with my name on it in a house in Baton Rouge is a piece of paper that says this girl is connected to Storm.
" He shakes his head slowly. "You want me to say I got it wrong.
I might have. I've had twenty-two years to think about it and I still can't get it to come out any other way, and I'd like to, 'cause I'd rather have been wrong than have been right about what those men would do. "
He doesn't cry.
I want to put that down, because I keep expecting it and it doesn't come.
There's nothing performed about any of this.
He sits there with his hat on the step and his forearms on his knees and he tells me the worst thing he's ever done in a voice like a man reading a inventory, and the only thing in the whole twenty minutes that gives him away is that he cannot look at me for longer than about four seconds at a time.
"I'm sorry," he says. "That ain't worth anything and I know it. But nobody ever said it to you and somebody ought to."
"Say his name."
He looks up.
"You said 'your daddy' six times." My voice is doing something. "Say his name."
Storm's jaw goes.
"Emile," he says.
And it comes out of him nothing at all like it does on New Year's.
At the truck he stops with his hand on the door.
"Can I ask you somethin'?"
"Yes."
"That coat." He doesn't turn around. "Is it in that house?"
"It's on the kitchen table."
He stands there a long moment with his back to me and his hand on the handle of a truck door.
"Would you let me hold it?" he asks.
So I go inside past Havoc without saying anything and I come back out with my father's cut folded over both arms, and I hand it down to a man standing in a dirt yard in the dark.
He takes it like it weighs a great deal more than it does.
He doesn't unfold it. He doesn't look for the rockers or the name or the hole in the lining.
He just stands there in his own headlights holding a dead man's coat against his chest with both hands, the way you'd hold something that had been handed to you at a hospital, and he does not make one sound.
Two minutes, maybe.
Then he gives it back, and he says thank you, and he gets in the truck and drives out of that yard, and I stand in the dirt holding my father and watch his taillights all the way to the trees.