Chapter SEVEN
Sabine — August 9
I go because my brother has not called me in a week.
That is the whole reason and I am not going to pretend it is anything else.
In this family you do not fix a thing by saying you are sorry, you fix it by turning up somewhere and eating, and if you do not turn up then the not-turning-up becomes the thing, and in six months it is a wall neither of you built on purpose.
So I put on a clean shirt and I get there at one and there are forty vehicles on the shell.
The clubhouse yard when the families come in is not what people think it is.
There is a rope swing off the water oak and there are eleven children under the age of nine running a circuit between the swing and the shed and the ice chests,
and there are three tables of food under the awning and every one of those dishes came out of somebody’s kitchen at eleven o’clock this morning.
Lorraine Sonnier has done the potato salad she does.
Somebody has brought a sheet cake with no occasion on it.
The men are at the far end by the shed with their backs to all of it.
“You came.”
Nita Aucoin has my arm before I am four steps in.
“I came.”
“Theo said you wouldn’t come.”
“Theo says a lot of things.”
“Theo said you wouldn’t come and I said, that girl will come, because that girl was raised by Lucien Fontenot and Lucien Fontenot never in his life let one of these gatherings go past out of pride.”
She steers me at the tables. “Eat something. You’re thin. Don’t tell me about the yard, I know about the yard, eat.”
Nita is fifty-two and she has been married to Micah Aucoin for twenty-nine years and she runs everything under that awning the way Deuce runs everything past the shed, and the two of them are the only people in Port Ardeen who have never once been afraid of each other.
I get a plate I do not want. It is easier.
Theo is at the horseshoe pit with two prospects and he sees me and comes over and stops about a yard short.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“You eat?”
“I have got a plate.”
“That’s not eating.”
“Theo.”
“I know.”
We stand there. He looks at the plate and I look at the pit.
“The Lucienne back in the water?” he says.
“In a few days.”
“You do the whole bottom yourself?”
“Prejean sent a boy for the last of it.”
“Which boy?”
“The one with the ears.”
“That boy’s useless.”
“He is useless,” I say, “but he is useless at the speed of two people, so.”
And that is the apology, both of them, and it is done, and my brother’s shoulders come down about an inch and he goes back to the horseshoes.
Dax is at the shed end with his father and Bones and a man I do not know, and he sees me across the whole yard and lifts his chin about half an inch, and I lift mine back, and that is all we do in front of people and it has always been all we do.
Then I see her.
She is sitting under the water oak in one of the folding chairs, on her own, in the shade, with her ankles crossed and a bottle of Coke she has not opened.
I do not know her. That is the first thing. I have been coming to this yard on and off for four years and before that I came here with my father when I was a girl, and I know every woman under that awning by her mother’s maiden name, and I have never seen this one in my life.
She is maybe twenty-five. She is dressed for a yard, not for a party, and she is sitting in the chairs where the wives sit and nobody is sitting with her.
“Nita.”
“Mm.”
“Who is that?”
Nita looks up from the ice chest and looks across and looks back down and says, “That’s Rochelle’s girl.”
“Auguste Rochelle.”
“Mm-hm.”
“What is Auguste Rochelle’s daughter doing in this yard?”
“I couldn’t tell you, cher.”
“Nita.”
“I could not tell you,” Nita says, with the lid still in her hand, “because nobody has told me, and I have been standing at this ice chest for two hours waiting for somebody to.”
She shuts the lid.
“Deuce brought her in,” she says. “Twelve o’clock. Walked her up from the gate himself and sat her in that chair and got her that Coke, and then he went back to the shed, and she has not moved and nobody has gone over there.”
“Not one person?”
“Ro’s wife went over. Made about ninety seconds of it and came back.”
“And said what?”
“Said she was polite.”
I look across the yard.
She is not doing anything. That is what gets me.
A woman sat alone in a strange yard for two hours does something, she gets her phone out, she looks at her nails, she finds a child to talk to.
This one is sitting with her back straight watching the men at the shed end, and every so often she looks at the awning, and once she looks at me.
I look at the potato salad.
“Eat,” Nita says.
At three o’clock the heat goes flat and everybody who is going to move has moved, and there are nine or ten of us in the folding chairs in the shade of the awning with the children gone quiet in the shell dust, and this is the part of these gatherings that I actually come for.
Lorraine tells the one about her son’s truck.
Ovide tells the old one about a trawl door and puts an alligator in it, and I say, there was no alligator, and Ovide says, cher, you was not born, and I say, that is exactly how I know.
Fry Hebert’s wife tells about the doctor in Thibodaux.
And then somebody says the Doucet boy’s name.
I do not catch which one of them says it. It goes past me sideways, that poor Doucet boy, and Lorraine says something about his mother and the church, and Fry’s wife says, the boat, and Ovide says, on the water, hah, twenty-two, and everybody makes the sound people make, and it moves on.
I did not know. I have been on that dock two weeks with a dead man in my pilings and nobody said one word to me about a boy off the Bonne Chance.
I am still sitting with that when Nita says, “That is nothing. Y’all want to hear about Angelle Trahan?”
And four women say oh no at once, and one of them laughs before the story starts, which is how you know.
“Tell it,” Lorraine says.
“You’ve heard it.”
“Sabine ain’t heard it.”
Nita turns in her chair and looks at me and settles her elbows.
“Before your time,” she says. “Before mine, near enough. This is nineteen eighty-five, eighty-six, and there was a girl named Angelle Trahan and she was with one of the patched men, and I will not say which one because his people are still in this parish.”
“They know which one,” Lorraine says.
“They know which one but I am not saying it.” Nita waves her hand. “And she had his baby. Little boy. And when that baby was about four months old, she took him and she went.”
“Went where,” I say.
“That’s it, cher. Nobody knew. She went out of this parish in the night with a child on her hip and a bag, and she did not tell her own mother where.”
“Because he beat her?”
Nita looks at me.
“No,” she says, and she is not offended, she is answering a fair question. “No. He was not a beater. That is what makes it a story. He was a quiet one, that one. She just decided.”
“Decided what?”
“That her boy was not going to grow up in this yard.”
Nobody laughs at that part. That part goes down flat and correct like a fact off a chart, and Lorraine nods, and Fry’s wife looks at her hands.
“So,” Nita says. “So they went and got her.”
“How long,” Lorraine says, on cue, because she has heard it and she knows where the beats are.
“Eleven months.”
“Eleven months,” Ovide says, shaking his head, admiring it.
“Eleven months and they found her outside Beaumont. And I will tell you how they found her, because this is the part.”
Nita puts her Coke down. “It was not police and it was not a man looking. It was that her sister put a child’s name on a church list in Beaumont for the Christmas thing, and a woman in Port Arthur who was married to a man who used to run with them saw that name on a paper on a wall in a church hall,
in December, eleven months later.”
“On a wall,” Lorraine says.
“On a wall in a church hall in Port Arthur, Texas.”
Somebody whistles.
“And they went and they got the baby,” Nita says.
I say, “And her?”
Nita picks her Coke back up.
“She stayed there,” she says.
“Stayed.”
“They did not lay a hand on that girl, and I want that said, because people tell it wrong. Nobody touched her.”
Nita drinks. “They took the boy out of that apartment at seven in the morning and they drove him home and his daddy’s mother raised him right here in this parish, and Angelle Trahan is alive today as far as I know, and I believe she is in Lake Charles.”
“She never came back for him?”
“Came back for him with what, cher?”
And that is the moment. That is the exact moment, and I feel it go into me like a bad rung on a ladder.
Because Nita does not say it cruelly. She says it the way you would say a boat does not float without a plug.
Came back with what. With whose lawyer. Filed in which parish.
In front of which judge, in a courthouse where the bailiff’s brother is in that shed, in a parish where the man in the gate booth at the port and the man at the union hall and half the people in the clerk’s office have somebody in this yard.
There is no paper. There was never going to be any paper. There is no line anywhere in the world where a woman like that gets to stand up and say the word mine.
“And that,” Nita says, “is why Remy is such an ugly child.”
The awning comes apart.
Lorraine Sonnier has to put her plate down. Ovide is coughing and slapping his knee at the same time. Fry’s wife has her whole face in her hands and she is howling into them, and one of the older women is wiping her eyes and saying, Nita, Nita, no.
“Forty years old,” Nita says over the top of it, “and still got a face like Beaumont.”
And across the yard Remy Guidry, who is the Sergeant at Arms of this club and who has never in my life said more than nine words to me at one time, turns around at the shed end because he has heard his own name, and Ovide shouts something at him in French,
and Bones puts his beer up in the air and shouts something back, and everybody under that awning screams laughing.
He is laughing too.
He knows the story. Of course he knows the story. It is his story, it is about him, and it has been told in this yard at every party since before he could walk, and he is standing at the shed end with a beer in his hand laughing at the eleven months it took them to bring him back.
I sit in my folding chair with a plate on my knees and I do not laugh.
I am not able to. It is not a decision I make, it is a thing my face declines to do, and I sit very still with a fork in my hand and I look at the shell dust between my boots and I run it the way I run a job, all the way through, both directions.
Four months old. Eleven months. A name on a paper on a wall in a church hall in another state, in December, and they came the same week.
Not a hand laid on her. That is the part everybody repeats, and they repeat it because it is the proof that these are not bad men.
Nobody touched Angelle Trahan. They just took the child and drove home, and forty years later she is alive in Lake Charles and her son is standing forty feet from me holding a beer, and he is one of them,
and he does not know her name well enough to have said it out loud once in the four years I have been coming here.
That is what it costs. Not your life.
I put the plate down on the chair beside me because my hands have started to do a thing I do not want anybody to see.
“You alright, cher?” Lorraine says, still wiping her eyes.
“Heat.”
“Get in the shade, then.”
“I am in the shade.”
“Then get in the better shade.”
And she laughs and goes for more ice, and I sit there.
Across the yard, under the water oak, Rochelle’s daughter is looking straight at me.
She has heard all of it. She is sixty feet away with her ankles crossed and the whole awning has been screaming for a solid minute and she has not smiled once, and when I look up she does not look away and she does not nod, and after a second she turns her head and looks at the shed end,
where the men are.
I follow it.
Dax is standing with his back half to us and his beer down at his side, and Deuce is talking, and Bones is laughing at something, and my man is not laughing at anything. He is standing in that group the way a man stands in a photograph he did not want taken.
He does not look at her.
He does not look at her for the entire time I am watching, and I watch for a while, and there is a thing about a man not looking somewhere that is different from a man not knowing somewhere is there.
I leave at half past four.
I say the right things to Nita and I take the dish Lorraine puts in my hands and I tell Ovide there was no alligator, and Theo walks me to my truck and says, that was good, you came, and I say, yes, and he says, next time?
And I say, we will see.
I drive out down the shell road with the windows down and the dish sliding on the seat, and I get about four miles before I pull over onto the grass by the Kadair bridge and sit there with the engine running.
Nobody touched her.
They just came in the morning and took him, and there was not one single place on this earth she could go and say it was hers, and everybody I ate lunch with today thinks that story is funny.
I sit there a long time. Then I put the truck in gear and drive home and put Lorraine’s dish in my sink, and I do not tell anybody what I have been thinking, because I could not have said what it was I was thinking about.
There is no baby. There is no reason for any of it.
I am thirty-one years old, I have got a gearbox at the yard and a hull going back in the water in a few days, and it is the ninth of August and nothing has happened.
I wash the dish. I put it on the rack upside down.
I do not sleep well and it is the heat.