Chapter ELEVEN
Sabine — September 14
The Jabsco off the Ida Ray is thirty-one pounds and I carry it on my hip because the handle broke off it in 2019 and Prejean will not buy a new one.
Bones called me at eight. That is worth saying. Remy Guidry called my phone himself and said the Ida Ray’s raw water pump is howling and she is due out in a few days, and I said, bring it to the yard, and he said, Prejean’s got the yard shut for the holiday, bring your tools to us.
So I am walking across the clubhouse yard at half past two with thirty-one pounds of bronze on my hip and a tool roll under my arm, and there is a truck on the shell I do not know, and the shed doors are open, and there are eleven or twelve of them out there in the shade of the awning.
Somebody has the radio on low.
I am about forty feet out when I see her.
She is standing with her back to me at the end of the food table, doing something with the lid of a cooler, and she has her hair up off her neck the way she had it at the gathering, and she is in a black cut.
I stop walking.
That is not a decision either. My feet stop and the pump comes down off my hip and I put it on the shell without meaning to put it anywhere and I stand there in the middle of that yard with my hands empty.
Because a black cut on a woman is one thing and one thing only.
The bottom rocker says HOLLOW.
The top says PROPERTY OF.
The letters are new. That is the thing I go to first, God help me, because that is how my head works.
They are new and they are white and they have not been rained on, and the black under them is that hard new black that has not been in the sun yet, and there is no wear at the shoulder seam where a body moves it, none, not one bit, and I know exactly how long a cut takes to lose that,
and it is a season.
So it is new.
So it is not something old that I am finding out about late. It is new, and it is on her back in this yard on the fourteenth of September.
Nobody says anything.
That is the part.
I have gone over the next eleven seconds more times than I have gone over anything in my life, and I want to be accurate about it because I was accurate at the time, which is my own particular curse.
Under the awning there are eleven people.
Lorraine Sonnier is at the near end of the table with a bowl in her hands.
Nita Aucoin is in a folding chair with her legs crossed at the ankle.
Fry Hebert’s wife is beside her. Ovide Thibodeaux is standing at the ice chest.
Ro Sonnier and Chief and two prospects are down by the shed with the Ida Ray’s pump housing on a bench.
And every single one of them has seen me stop.
Lorraine puts the bowl down and turns and starts wiping a table that is already clean.
Nita looks at me for about a second and a half. Then she looks at her own knee.
Fry’s wife gets up and goes into the clubhouse.
Ovide, who has not kept a thing in his mouth in seventy years, who told me about a bike on the Ardeen road because he could not help himself, stands at that ice chest with the lid up and looks down into the ice.
Nobody is surprised.
That is what I am standing in the middle of that yard understanding.
Not one face in this place is doing the thing a face does when something happens.
There is no gasp and no glance passed between two people and no one going still.
There is only eleven people finding something to look at, all at once, in a way that has been practised.
Which means it is not new to them.
It is new leather and it is old news.
I do the arithmetic standing up, and it takes about four seconds, and it is the worst four seconds of my life.
New letters. New black. A cut takes a week or two to make and this one has not been worn in.
So it has been in this yard days, not months.
And they have all had time to get used to it.
They have had time enough that Lorraine Sonnier has already worked out that she will wipe a table, and Nita Aucoin has already decided she will look at her knee, and Ovide has practised looking in the ice.
You cannot decide those things in the moment. Those are decisions people made in advance, at some point in the last week, at their own kitchen tables, in the car on the way here.
Eight days. Nine.
Nine days of every person I have known since I was a child having a conversation about how they would look when I found out.
Odette Rochelle turns around.
She sees me and she goes white. That is not a phrase, she actually goes white, and her hand comes up to the front of the cut and then stops halfway because there is nowhere for it to go.
And she says, “Oh no.”
Just that. Out loud, across sixty feet of shell, in a voice with nothing arranged in it.
And she starts pulling at it. She gets one arm out of it right there in front of everybody and drags it off her other shoulder and stands holding it screwed up against her chest with both hands, and it is far worse than her wearing it,
because now it is a thing being hidden from me by a woman who is horrified, and everybody is watching her do it.
“He said you weren’t coming,” she says. “He was told you weren’t coming today.”
I do not answer her.
I turn my head and I look for him.
He is not there. That is the last piece. I stand in that yard and I look for Dax Landry and he is not under the awning and he is not by the shed and his bike is not on the shell, and there is a part of me, and I hate it, that is glad.
Nita gets up.
“Sabine, cher.”
“No.”
“Come sit down under here with me.”
“No.”
“Then come inside with me and let me get you.”
“Nita.” I hear my own voice and it is completely level, which I did not expect. “How long?”
“Cher.”
“How long have you known.”
And Nita Aucoin, who has never once in her life lied to my face, does not lie to my face.
“Since the sixth,” she says.
“September?”
“Yes.”
Eight days.
“Did Micah tell you?”
“Sabine.”
“Did your husband come home from that yard and tell you, and did you cook for these people gathering after gathering and let me sit in that chair on the ninth of August and hear a story about a woman in Beaumont?”
“That was August, cher, that was before any of.”
“I know it was before.” My voice does not go up. It will not go up. It is stuck at the level of a woman asking what size a fitting is. “I know exactly when it was. That is not what I asked you.”
Nita’s face comes apart.
“Nobody knew what to do,” she says.
“You knew what to do. All of you knew what to do. You did it beautifully. You have all been doing it for eight days.”
Lorraine Sonnier says, from the table, “That ain’t fair, Sabine.”
And I turn and look at her.
I have known Lorraine Sonnier since I was six years old. She taught me to peel shrimp on that dock. She called me Hollow’s old lady to a man from the ice house in July and I let it go because she meant it kindly.
“Say it again,” I say.
Lorraine does not say it again.
Down by the shed nobody has moved. Ro Sonnier has a pump housing in his hands and he has been holding it in exactly the same position for a minute and a half.
Chief has his back to all of it. The two prospects are standing there with their mouths open because they are nineteen and nobody has taught them the face yet.
I go and pick the Jabsco up off the shell.
Thirty-one pounds. I get it up on my hip and I get the tool roll under my arm and I walk down to the shed, past all of them, past the awning and the food table and the woman holding a black cut against her chest with both hands, and I put the pump down on the bench next to the housing.
“That’s your impeller,” I say to Ro. “It’s the housing that’s cooked. There’s a groove in the wear plate you can put a nail in, so a new impeller will do you about nine hours.”
Ro Sonnier says, “Sabine.”
“Prejean has got a wear plate in the loft in a box marked Jabsco, and he does not know he has it because it came in a job lot years ago. It is the second shelf on the left as you come up the ladder and there is a fan belt on top of it.”
“Sabine, don’t.”
“Do not let the boy with the ears do it. He will torque it dry.”
“Cher, would you.”
“That is the whole job,” I say. “That is everything I know about that pump.”
And I put the tool roll down beside it, which is fourteen years of my father’s wrenches and my own, and I do not take it with me, and Ro Sonnier looks at that tool roll on his own bench like a man being handed a summons.
Then I walk back across the yard.
Nita is standing in front of the awning with her hands out and her face wet and she says my name twice, and I go past her.
Odette says, “Sabine.”
And I stop for that one. I do not know why. I stop and I look at her and she has the cut balled up in her arms and she is standing in the middle of somebody else’s yard in her socks, because she has come out of her shoes at some point, and she looks about nineteen years old.
“He told me you weren’t coming,” she says.
“I know.”
“I would not have.”
“I know that too.”
And that is the entire conversation the two of us have, and there is not one lie in it on either side, and I get in my truck.
I do not slam the door. I have thought about that a lot. I got in the truck and pulled the door to with two fingers and put my seatbelt on, because my hands went and did the things hands do, and then I sat there for a second and looked at the wheel.
In the mirror, they were all still standing exactly where they had been.
Nobody had moved. Nobody had gone back to the cooler or the bench or the chair. Eleven people in a yard, standing, watching a truck.
That is what I took with me.
I got about a mile down the shell road and then I pulled onto the grass by the culvert and put it in park.
I did not cry.
I want that written somewhere because everybody assumes.
I sat on the grass verge with the engine running and both hands on the wheel and I did not make one sound, and what I actually did was start on the list again, the one from the twenty-third of August at ten past two in the morning, and I put it in order.
He said, I said no.
He said, it is club and it is not mine to say yet.
He said, would you rather have it late and true.
He built the door. He stood in my kitchen with a dish towel in his hand and built me a door with his own two hands and asked me to agree to it, and I agreed to it, and I said, do not stand in my kitchen and be relieved at me, and he laughed and put his forehead on my head,
and eleven days later a woman is standing in that yard with his name on her back and it is nine days old and everybody knew.
And there it is.
He does not lie to me. That was the finding. Four items in four years and it frightened me because it meant I was not looking.
And I was not looking, and he did it in the eleven days after I stopped, and he did it with a thing I told him about myself in my own kitchen in July.
The paper.
That is the part I cannot get past, sitting on the grass by that culvert. Not that there is a woman. A woman is a thing that happens to people and it has happened to half the parish and I could have. I do not know. I do not know what I could have.
But I sat at my own table and I told that man the one thing about myself, once, without heat, the way you tell somebody a thing that costs you something.
I told him about my father and the six boats and if it is written down it belongs to whoever holds the paper.
I told him there is one document in the whole of the Cottonmouth MC and it is a piece of leather with a man’s name on a woman’s back, and I told him I will not be a document.
And he said, I don’t need my name on your back to know what you are.
And then he had one made.
He went to a man and he said a size and a colour, and he said his own road name out loud into a telephone, and he paid for it, and he put it in a bag and drove it to a yard.
He did not just do a thing to me. He went and found the one place I had shown him and he put it there.
I sat on that verge for about twenty minutes. Then I turned around and drove back.
Not to the yard. Past the yard, four miles the other way, to Prejean’s, and I let myself in the side with my key and I went up the ladder to the loft and I got the wear plate out of the box marked Jabsco on the second shelf on the left with a fan belt on top of it.
And I stood there in the dark of that loft holding it for a while.
Then I put it back in the box and put the fan belt back on top of it and went down the ladder and locked the door behind me.
Let them find it themselves.