Chapter THIRTEEN
Sabine — September 16
My father’s tools are not at the salvage yard because anybody put them there.
They are at the salvage yard because the club took the lease on his shed in the spring after he died and moved the contents in one afternoon while I was at Prejean’s, and Bones told me afterwards that they were keeping it all safe, and I said thank you.
I said thank you. I want that in the record with everything else.
I get there at seven in the morning with the truck and there is nobody on the gate because there is never anybody on the gate before eight.
The parts shed is four acres under a roof and my father’s things are at the back of it against the north wall, and they have been there two and a half years, and they are exactly as they were put down.
Nobody has been through them. Nobody has taken anything.
That is the thing I did not expect and it makes me angrier than if they had.
The stick welder. The bottle cart, empty. Four Ridgid boxes and two Kennedys, one of them my grandfather’s. The Starrett level in its wooden case with the felt gone. The two-foot dividers. The trammel bar. The bevel gauge with his thumb worn into the brass.
And the fairing battens.
Eleven of them, in a bundle, tied with the same tarred line he tied them with, cypress, planed by hand, each one a different stiffness and each one with a number burned into the end of it because he had eleven battens and every single one of them did a different job and no two boats in this world
are the same.
There is not another set of those on this coast. He made them decades ago.
I load the boxes first because they are heaviest and I want them at the front axle, and by the third one my hands are shaking, which is not emotion, it is that a Kennedy full of taps weighs about ninety pounds and I am doing it alone.
Then the level. Then the cart. Then the welder, which takes me eleven minutes and a plank and a great deal of swearing.
The battens I carry last, and I put them in the cab, on the seat, and not in the bed.
I am tying the load down when the truck comes.
I know it before it stops. Everyone in this parish knows every engine, and I have known that one since it had a bad lifter and I told him about it and he did not fix it for a year.
Theo gets out and stands there with the door open.
“What are you doing?”
“Loading.”
“Sabine.”
“Get the far strap.”
He does not get the far strap. He comes around the back of the truck and looks at what is in it and his face goes.
“That’s Daddy’s welder.”
“It is.”
“Where you taking it?”
“Home.”
“That’s club property.”
I stop with the ratchet in my hand.
“Say that again,” I say.
“That’s not what I.”
“Say it again, Theo, because I would like to hear it come out of your mouth twice.”
“It’s in the club’s shed.”
“It is in the club’s shed because the club took the lease on our father’s shed while I was at work and moved his life into a parts store.”
I put the strap through. “And nobody asked me. And I said thank you. So I am taking it home, and if you want to make a list of what I have got, get a pen, because I will stand here and tell you every item.”
“Nobody said.”
“Say the word property one more time and see what happens.”
He shuts up.
I finish the strap. He picks the loose end up off the shell and hands it to me without being asked, which is the first thing either of us does right.
“Bones called me at half six,” he says.
“Bones is not on this gate at half six.”
“Bones called me because Nita called Micah last night and told him she’d seen your truck lights out this way at six this morning.”
“Then Nita should mind her road.”
“Sabine.”
“What.”
“Would you look at me?”
I look at him.
He is twenty-nine and he has not slept and there is grease on his neck, which means he has been at the tow yard since dark, which means somebody had him working all night so he would be somewhere.
“I want to say something,” he says.
“Go on.”
“I didn’t know either.”
“Yes you did.”
“I did not know, Sabine. I swear to God. I swear on.”
“Do not swear on him.”
He stops.
“You were in that room,” I say.
“What room?”
“The meeting. The one where it was discussed.”
“I.”
“Theo.”
“Yes.”
“So you were in a room where fourteen men discussed what Auguste Rochelle wanted, and you sat there, and then you went home.”
“It wasn’t.” He puts his hands on his head and takes them off again. “Deuce killed it. Deuce stood up and killed it, there wasn’t no vote, he said no man gets voted into a bed and he walked out and left it, and I went home thinking it was done. I thought it was done.”
“And on the sixth?”
“I found out the same as everybody.”
“Which was when?”
“Eight days ago.”
“Same as Nita,” I say. “Same as Lorraine. Same as Ovide.”
“Sabine.”
“Eight days, Theo.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
And there it is, and it comes out of him at real volume, because he has been carrying it since the sixth and it has to go somewhere.
“What was I supposed to do?” he says again.
“Come to your kitchen and tell you? Me? Tell you what, exactly? Come in your house and sit down at Daddy’s table and say, hey, cher, your man went out to Rochelle’s that night? You think I didn’t sit in my truck outside your house? I sat outside your house the next day for forty minutes.”
“You did not come in.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I couldn’t,” he says. “Because I’m patched.”
And he hears it.
That is the only mercy in the whole conversation. He hears it come out of his own mouth in the open air of the salvage yard at half past seven in the morning, and his face does the thing it did on the dock in August, and he stops.
“That is the answer,” I say.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“That is exactly what you meant and it is the first true thing you have said.”
“Sabine.”
“You sat outside my house for forty minutes and the reason you did not come to my door is that you are patched. Not because you were scared for me. Not because you did not know how to say it. Because there is a rule about what happens in a chapel and you are inside it and I am not.”
“It’s not a rule about that.”
“Then what is it a rule about?”
He does not answer.
“Whose sister are you?” I say.
“Don’t.”
“It is not a hard question.”
“Sabine.”
“Whose sister are you, Theo?”
“Yours,” he says. “Yours. I’m yours.”
“Then say it in that yard.”
He does not say anything.
“Say it at that table,” I say. “That is all I am asking for and it is the only thing I will ever ask you for as long as I live. Stand up and say, that is my sister, and what was done to her in that yard was a shame on this club.”
“They know that.”
“Then it will cost you nothing to say it.”
And he stands there in the shell with his hands hanging and he does not say he will, and he does not say he will not, and after about four seconds I understand that this is the answer and that it is the answer for the rest of our lives.
“You can’t just ask a man to,” he starts.
“Do not tell me what a man can be asked.”
“You don’t know what it’s.”
“I know exactly what it is. I have been standing next to it for four years.”
I get in the cab and shut the door and put the window down.
“I know that a motion is a thing a man makes when he wants something, and I know that nobody in that room has to move anything at all to say a sentence out loud, and I know that you are not going to say it.”
“Sabine.”
“Move away from the truck.”
“Would you just.”
“Theo, I have got eleven hundred pounds on this suspension and I am not going to sit in this yard arguing with you until Bones drives in.”
He does not move.
“I’ll fix it,” he says.
“How?”
“I don’t know. I’ll talk to Dax.”
“Do not talk to Dax about me.”
“Somebody’s got to.”
“Nobody has got to,” I say. “That is the whole thing, Theo, that is the entire thing. There is not one person on this earth who has to do anything about it. It is done.
It has been done since the sixth of September and everybody has had ten days to arrange their faces and now it is the sixteenth and there is nothing to be done, there is only what everybody does next.”
“So what do you do next?”
And that is a fair question, and he asks it properly, and I give him a proper answer.
“I stop,” I say.
“Stop what?”
“The boats.”
He goes very still.
“Sabine.”
“The Ida Ray needs a wear plate and I have told Ro where it is. The Marie Delphine’s bilge pump will be running twenty seconds by October and Ovide has been told twice. The Saint Amelie’s coupling is an eighth out and I have not fixed it and I am not going to fix it.
The Bonne Chance has got a stern tube I have been watching for two years.”
I put my hand on the wheel. “That is everything I know. I have said it all out loud to somebody at some point, and now I am done saying it.”
“You can’t stop.”
“I have stopped.”
“They’ll.”
“They will what?”
He does not finish it.
“That is the part I want you to think about,” I say. “You just started a sentence with they’ll and you could not put an end on it, and neither can I, and we have both been in this parish our whole lives. So think about that on your own time.”
“That’s your job. That’s your income.”
“Prejean pays me. Prejean has always paid me. I have never taken one dollar off that club in my life and every hour I have ever put into those hulls has been billed through Ardeen Marine at the same rate as any other boat on this coast.”
I start the truck. “The only thing I have ever given them for free is knowing what my father did, and they can have that back now.”
“They’ll go to Prejean.”
“Then Prejean will send me. And I will go, because I am not a fool and I have got bills to pay. But I will go and I will do exactly what is on the work order and I will do it at the counter price, and when a man says, cher, what’s this here, and I say, that is a compartment, and he says,
what’s behind it, I will say, I do not know.”
Theo stares at me.
“You’d say that.”
“I would say that with my hand on a Bible in a courthouse in Terrebonne Parish,” I say, “and it would be true, because there is not one line of it written down anywhere in this world.”
“That’s.”
“That is what my father did on purpose, and I did not understand why until that afternoon.”
I put it in gear.
He puts his hand on the window frame.
“Sabine. Please.”
“Take your hand off my truck.”
“Just think about it. Just.”
“About what?”
“Everything,” he says, and his voice cracks all the way. “Just about everything for a couple weeks. Don’t do nothing yet. The anniversary’s November, there’s four hundred bikes coming, everybody’s.”
“Everybody’s what?”
“Everybody’s gonna be watching.”
I look at my brother’s hand on the frame of my father’s truck.
“That is the first time in ten minutes you have said something that was actually about you,” I say.
He takes his hand off.
I drive out through the gate at eight minutes to eight and pass Bones coming in on the shell road, and he lifts two fingers off the wheel the way he has done to me since I was fifteen, and I do not lift mine.
I get the load off at the house by ten and the shed floor is not big enough, so the welder goes under the carport and the boxes go along the back wall and the bottle cart stands where the mower was.
The battens I hang from the rafters on two nails, the way he had them, tied in the bundle, with the numbers turned out.
Then I sit down on the step and look at all of it.
It is a shed full of a dead man’s tools and there is not one job in it.
I have got Prejean’s work and Prejean’s rate and a coupling I am not going to fix and nine hulls in this parish that will start coming apart in a specific order that I could write down on the back of an envelope if there were anybody I wanted to give it to.
At about eleven o’clock the phone rings in the house and it is not a number I know, and I let it ring.
At half past it rings again, same number, and I let that ring too.
Then I go inside and take the phone off the hook, and I stand at the sink and wash my hands out of habit, and the light comes in that window the way it does every morning at that hour,
and I am thirty-one years old and I have got my father’s tools back and there is nobody in the world I can tell about it.