Chapter FIVE
Sabine — August 2
Prosper Naquin has been running crab traps out of the Fontenot slip since before I was born and he has never once come up that bayou fast, and he comes up it fast at ten past seven in the morning.
“Sabine.”
“I hear you.”
“Sabine, cher.”
I am on the marine railway with a scraper in my hand and the Lucienne up on the cradle with her bottom half done, and I do not turn around, because Prosper shouts about everything.
“Sabine, there a man in your pilings.”
I turn around.
He is standing in the boat with the engine still in gear and the boat walking sideways against the current, and he has the crab hook in his fist like he means to hit somebody with it.
“Where.”
“Under the railway. Third piling. He come up on the tide, him, he wedge.”
“Alive?”
“No, cher.” He crosses himself with the hand holding the hook. “No.”
I put the scraper down on the cradle rail.
The tide is running out and there is four feet of water under the railway apron and the light is coming across flat, and I go down the ladder and get on my knees on the wet boards and look between them, and I see a shirt first.
It is a blue shirt and it is not a work shirt.
He is face down and hung on the cross brace by the belt, and he is turned so the current has him swinging slow, out and back, out and back, and he has been in the water long enough that I am not going to describe what the water did.
Then he swings out and comes back and the sleeves come around.
The sleeves come around and there is nothing at the end of either one of them.
I sit back on my heels.
“You see it?” Prosper says.
“Yes.”
“His hand, cher, his hand, they ain’t.”
“I saw it, Prosper.”
“That mean something. That mean something, that.”
“Go up to the shed and do not touch anything.”
Here is what my father taught me, and he taught it to me the year I was nineteen, standing in his own yard with a welding rod in his hand and the doors shut.
He said: if a thing comes to you, you call it in. You call it in inside ten minutes because the first question is always going to be why did it take you an hour, and the only good answer is that it did not.
And then he said: after that you do not say one word.
He said, they are going to be nice to you.
They are going to be so nice to you that you will want to help.
They will ask you easy things you know the answer to, and you will answer them, and it will feel good, because a person likes to be useful.
And then twenty minutes later they will ask you a hard one, and you will answer that one too, because you have been answering for twenty minutes and stopping now looks like something.
He said, so do not start. Not with the weather. Not with the tide. You give them your name, and where you were, and then you stand there and be a woman who is upset, which will not be a lie.
I call it in at seven eighteen.
They come at eight. Two units and then a third, and then the coroner’s van from Ardeen at nine forty, and by then there are eleven people on my dock and four of them are neighbours standing at the shell road end with their arms folded.
The detective is a woman about fifty in a shirt with the sleeves rolled and boots that are not new. She comes down the apron and looks at the railway and the cradle and the Lucienne up on it, and then she looks at me.
“Ozene,” she says. “Parish.”
“Sabine Fontenot.”
“This your dock?”
“Yes.”
“In your name?”
“My father’s estate. Mine and my brother’s.”
“That’s Theodore.”
“Theo.”
She writes it. She is not writing anything she does not already know, and I understand that this is a thing they do the same way I put a straightedge on a surface I have already looked at.
“You found him?”
“Prosper Naquin found him. He came up the bayou and told me and I looked and I called.”
“You looked.”
“I got on the boards and looked between them, yes.”
“You didn’t go in the water.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was dead.”
She looks up from the pad.
“Fair,” she says.
They get him out at eleven. It takes four of them and a backboard and a long time, because he is hung on the brace, and I stand at the top of the apron where they put me and I watch the whole thing and I do not turn away, because turning away is a thing people remember.
When they have him on the boards they put a sheet over.
Ozene comes back up.
“You knew him,” she says.
I do not answer that, because it is not a question.
“You looked at his face when they turned him,” she says. “Then you looked at the ice house truck decal on your own gate post.”
“There is no decal on my gate post.”
“There’s a rectangle where one was.”
I do not answer that either.
She waits about eight seconds. She is good at it. She waits like a woman who has waited a lot of people out and enjoyed it.
“Alcide Poche,” she says. “Ice house driver. Twenty years. Wife’s name is Odile. Everybody in this parish knew that man, and I have got four people up on that road who all made a noise when we turned him, and you did not make one.”
“You want me to make a noise?”
“I want you to ask me a question.”
“About what?”
“That.” She tips her chin at the van. “Anybody. Anybody at all, Miss Fontenot. Everybody asks me something. What happened to him. How long he was in. Was it an accident. You’ve been standing on this dock four hours and you have not asked me one thing.”
“Alright.” I fold my arms. “How long until I can put a boat back in that slip.”
Ozene laughs. It comes out of her before she can stop it and she is not happy about it.
“Two days,” she says.
“Thank you.”
She puts the pad in her back pocket.
“He didn’t have hands,” she says.
I say nothing.
“I’ve been at this nineteen years. I’ve had four out of that channel with no hands. Nineteen years and four, and every one of the four was a man everybody liked, and every one of them washed up somewhere that meant something to somebody.”
Nothing.
“Your daddy did work for people,” she says.
“My father built boats.”
“He built boats for people.”
“He built boats for anybody who paid him.”
“That’s the same sentence, cher.”
“It is not,” I say. “One of them has somebody’s hand in it and the other one is a business.”
That is the only thing I say all day that I should not have said, and I hear it come out of me, and I stop.
Ozene looks at me for a while.
“Card’s on the post,” she says. “You’ll find it when you take the tape down.”
Theo comes at three.
I hear his truck on the shell before I see it and I know the sound of it the way I know every engine that has ever come down that road, and it comes too fast and stops too hard.
He gets out and he does not shut the door.
“Are you alright.”
“I am fine.”
“Sabine.”
“I am fine, Theo, I have been fine since seven o’clock.”
He comes down the apron and stops where the tape was and looks at the pilings and his face does a thing I have not seen it do since our father’s kitchen.
“Where,” he says.
“Third one. Under the railway.”
“Under the.”
He stops.
“He was hung up on the cross brace,” I say. “By his belt. He came in on the flood and the tide left him.”
Theo sits down on the cradle rail.
He is twenty-nine years old and he is my brother and I have known every one of his faces since he was four days old, and I know the one he has on right now, and it is the same one he had on a fish box on the twenty-fourth of July with his hat in his hands.
“You knew he was coming up,” I say.
“What?”
“Not here. I am not saying you knew he was coming up here. I am saying you were not surprised that he came up.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Theo.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He had no hands.”
“Sabine.”
“Everybody in this parish is going to know what that means by suppertime and half of them already do, and the other half are going to pretend they do not, and you are sitting on my father’s cradle telling me you do not know what I am talking about.”
He stands up.
“Don’t do this on the dock,” he says.
“Then get off my dock.”
“It’s my dock too.”
And there it is.
“No,” I say. “It is not.”
“It’s in both our names.”
“It is in both our names and one of us is on it. One of us is on it at seven in the morning with a scraper, and one of us has been paid out of a boat’s take for three years and has not put a hand on a boat since our daddy went in the ground.”
“That’s not fair.”
“When did I say fair.”
“You want me to what, come scrape hulls?” He puts his arms out. “You want me down here on my knees with you? That’s the life you want for me, that?”
“I want you to say what this dock is.”
“It’s a business.”
“Say it again.”
“It’s a business, Sabine. It’s the family business, and it’s been the family business since before we were born, and it pays.”
“It pays who?”
“It pays us.”
“It pays you,” I say. “Ardeen Marine pays me. Prejean pays me. Every dollar in my hand comes out of a gearbox I put back together with my own two hands, and this dock, this dock right here, has not taken a paying job that was not the club’s since the year our father died.”
“Because the club is the work.”
“The club is not work. The club is a customer with a key to the gate.”
“Sabine.”
“And I want you to hear what you said. You said it is a business. A business is a thing you can shut. A business is a thing where a man comes to your door and you say no, we do not do that, and he goes away and takes his money to Golden Meadow.” I point at the pilings. “Can you say no?”
He does not answer.
“Can this dock say no, Theo?”
“You can’t just.”
“Then it is not a business. It is a leash. And it is a leash with a very long line on it so you never feel it until something comes up on the tide and lands on your own boards.”
“That is not,” he says, “that is not what that was.”
“Then what was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know.”
“I don’t know, Sabine, I swear to God.”
And that is the first thing he has said in five minutes that I believe, and it is worse than the lying, because he is telling me he did a thing without being told what the thing was.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Deuce takes care of us,” he says.
“Deuce.”
“He does. He took care of us when Daddy went. You know what he did at that funeral. You know what he paid.”
“I know what he paid.”
“Then don’t.”
“How much was it, Theo?”
“What?”
“The funeral. You keep telling me what Deuce paid. Tell me the number.”
“I don’t remember the number.”
“Eleven thousand four hundred,” I say. “I remember the number. I remember it because I was going to sell the Petit Frère to cover it and Deuce came to that kitchen and put his hand on my shoulder and told me to keep the boat.”
“So then.”
“So then we kept the boat, and the boat runs for him, and it has run for him for two years.”
Theo looks out at the water.
“He was fifty-eight,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“His heart was fine.”
“Sabine.”
“He went to Ochsner in the January and they said his heart was fine. He went to Dr. Hebert twice and Hebert said fine, and he saw two more in New Orleans about the stents and both of them said the same word, and then in March he sat down in that kitchen with a cup of coffee and his heart stopped.”
I hear my own voice going flat and I do not stop it.
“Four doctors. Four. And every one of them said fine, and I have never once said this out loud to another living person, and I am saying it to you.”
He turns around and there are tears on his face.
“You think that,” he says.
“I do not think anything. I have got no paper and no name and nothing I could carry to that woman up there with the pad in her pocket. I have got a man who was fine and then was not.”
“You think Deuce.”
“I did not say a name.”
“You said it.”
“I said four doctors.”
“You said it, Sabine.” His voice cracks in the middle of it. “You stand there and you say it about the man who put money in our hands, and Dax, what about Dax, you gonna say it about him too? You lay down with them people every night of your life and then you stand on this dock and.”
He stops.
We stand there.
The tide is all the way out now and the pilings are showing green to the waterline and there is a smell coming off the flats the way there is every day at the bottom of the tide, and it is the smell I have woken up to my entire life.
“I am going to say one more thing,” I say, “and then I am going to go and finish that hull.”
“Don’t.”
“He wanted out.”
“Sabine.”
“In the February. He said it to me in the shed with the doors shut. He said, I built six of them and that is all I am building, and I am going to tell them so.” I make myself look at him. “And in the March he sat down with his coffee.”
Theo does not say anything for a long time.
Then he says, quiet, “You never told me that.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because you were twenty-seven and you had just prospected and you would have gone straight to them with it.”
He looks at me like I have hit him.
Then he walks up the apron and gets in his truck and sits in it for a while without starting it, and then he starts it and goes, and he does not go fast.
I finish the hull.
That is what I do. There is a third of the Lucienne’s bottom still to scrape and I get back on the cradle and I do it, and it takes until dark, and when my arms give out I stand there in the last of the light and look at what I have done and there is a line straight down her keel where the new work
meets the old and you can see exactly where I stopped in the morning and started again in the afternoon.
You can always see it. That is the thing about a hull.
It does not matter how good you are. There is a difference between the part you did before and the part you did after, and it is there forever under the paint,
and every time she comes out of the water for the rest of her life somebody will be able to look at that line and know that something happened in the middle of that day.