Chapter NINETEEN
Sabine — October 13
They start coming in at nine and by half past ten the shell road past Sacred Heart is bikes both sides for six tenths of a mile.
I know it is six tenths because I drove the length of it looking for somewhere to put my truck, and the parish put a milepost in front of the Naquin place in 2003, and I came off the end of that line at the marker and had to turn around in the Bergeron drive.
I park at the co-op and walk back.
I go inside for the mass because he would have wanted me inside, and I get a seat at the back on the left, three rows up from the door, and I am on the aisle with a woman I do not know on my other side.
Fry Hebert taught me to open oysters when I was eleven.
That is the thing I sit there with while the church fills.
Not the roof and not the money and not anything that happened this month.
He taught me to open oysters on the tailgate of a truck at the Fontenot dock when I was eleven with a screwdriver ground down flat, and he told me the trick is you do not fight the shell, you find the hinge and you let it tell you,
and I have used that on about four hundred things since that had nothing to do with an oyster.
The church is full at eleven and there are men standing three deep at the back and out into the yard.
I count the cuts I can see from where I am and I get to about ninety and stop, and they are not all Cottonmouth, there are patches from Baton Rouge and Slidell and two Mississippi charters and men from clubs I do not know, and out on that road there are three hundred bikes.
Lisette Hebert is in the front pew with her sister on one side and Nita Aucoin on the other.
She has got a black dress on that she has had a long time and her hair is set. She turns around once, at about ten past eleven, to look at the back of the church, and I do not know what she is looking for and I do not think she does either, and she turns back.
Deuce reads.
Theo is on the left side, eleven rows up, and I can see the back of his neck and the top of his cut and the word LOUISIANA across his shoulders, and I look at that for most of the hour because it is a thing to look at.
I do not see Dax anywhere. They are all at the front and they are all the same shape from behind.
They carry him out at ten to twelve and the bikes start out on the road and it goes through the walls of that church like weather.
The hall is a hundred yards behind the church and it is where every wedding and every funeral in this end of the parish has been for generations, and by one o’clock there are four hundred people in it and the tables are down both walls and the women have been cooking since the night before.
I go because leaving is worse.
I get about eleven steps in and Ovide Thibodeaux is at the drinks table with a Styrofoam cup and he sees me and turns his whole body away.
Not a glance. Not a nod he takes back. He turns around and puts his back to me and starts talking to a man about a truck.
That is the first one.
It goes like that for about an hour and I want to be accurate about the shape of it, because it is not one thing happening, it is forty small things not happening.
Lorraine Sonnier is at the end of the food table and I go down that side on purpose. She is putting foil over a pan and she has to look up and she does look up, and she says, “Sabine,” and then she picks the pan up and carries it to the kitchen.
Fry’s mother’s neighbour, who I have known my entire life and who I put a water heater in for at cost in April, says hello to the woman standing beside me.
Chief Naquin nods. That is one. Chief Naquin nods at me from about twenty feet and does not come over, and I take it, because it is more than anybody else has given me.
Theo does not come near me.
He knows I am here. He came in at half past twelve and he saw me inside four seconds because we have been finding each other in that hall since we were children, and he went to the far wall with two prospects, and he has stayed on the far wall.
I get a cup of coffee I do not want and I stand at the back by the trestle where the coats go, which is the worst place in that hall and always has been, and I stand there because it is the only place where a person can be standing on their own without it looking like a decision.
At about half past two I hear it.
The hall is loud. There are four hundred people and a kitchen going and there are men outside the doors talking with the light behind them, and there is a group of five or six about fifteen feet from me, and one of them is Ro Sonnier’s brother-in-law,
who runs a lift truck at the container yard and has never been on a boat in his life.
He says it at exactly the volume a man uses when he wants it to carry.
“Well, it’s them Fontenot boats, ain’t it.”
Somebody says something I do not catch.
“No, I’m saying. Every one of them hulls come out that yard and there ain’t a one of them right. That’s four boats down in a month, hah? Four. Ida Ray, Bonne Chance, the Saint Amelie been sitting since August.”
Another voice, lower.
“I know it. I’m just saying what everybody’s saying.” He drinks. “Old man built them things and then he went and died and left them, and now there ain’t nobody knows what’s in them, and Fry Hebert’s laying in a box up the road.”
And that is it. That is the whole thing.
I stand at the coat trestle with a cup of coffee in my hands and I do not move, and I do not turn my head, and I do the thing I have been doing my whole life, which is take a broken statement apart to see which piece is bad.
The Ida Ray went out on a wear plate that I told Ro Sonnier about on the fourteenth of September, standing at that bench, with the pump in front of me. Groove in it you could put a nail in. Nine hours. I said the words nine hours out loud to a man who has run boats for thirty years.
The plate is in Prejean’s loft. Second shelf on the left. Fan belt on top of it.
And I went up that ladder on the fourteenth and stood in the dark holding it and put it back in the box.
I did that. That is a true thing about me and I have known it for a month, and I have gone over it at two in the morning more than once and I have always come out the same place, which is that Ro Sonnier was told, and Prejean was told, and Chief Naquin ordered a new one from Houston on the fourth,
and every single man in this hall who could have stopped that boat from sailing knew what she had in her.
That does not make it not mine. It makes it mine and theirs.
But it is not the hull.
That is the piece that is bad, and it is the piece the whole port is going to keep, because it is the easy one.
My father’s boats have been running through that pass for thirty-one years and there has not been one seizure and not one man lost, and the thing that killed Emile Hebert is a wear plate that any yard on this coast will sell you for two hundred and ten dollars.
I put the coffee down on the trestle.
By four o’clock it is round the hall.
I can watch it move. That is the thing nobody tells you about a place like this.
You can stand at the back with your hands empty and actually see a sentence travel, because it goes in at one group and comes out at the next one shorter, and by the fourth time it has lost the name of the boat and it is just them Fontenot hulls,
and by the fifth somebody says it to a man from Slidell who has never heard of my father.
Nita Aucoin comes over at about half past four.
She is the only one. She comes across the whole hall with her chin up and stands beside me at the coat trestle and does not look at me, and we both look at the room.
“You’ve been stood here two hours,” she says.
“I have been stood here three.”
“I know.” She folds her arms. “I’ve been watching.”
“Then why did it take you three?”
“Because I’ve been holding that woman’s arm since nine o’clock this morning and she wouldn’t let go of it,” Nita says, “and I’ve got no shame about that and I’ll not apologise for it.”
“I did not ask you to.”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
We stand there.
“They’re saying it’s the boats,” she says.
“I heard.”
“It’s Sonnier’s people saying it. Because Ro’s been walking around like a dead man for a month and it’s got to go somewhere.”
“I know where it has got to go.”
“Sabine.”
“I know exactly where it has got to go, Nita, and I would rather it went there than anywhere else, and I am not being brave about it. It is arithmetic.”
I keep my eyes on the room. “There are four hundred people in this hall and they have got to eat and go home and sleep tonight, and every one of them has to have a reason that lets them do that. And nobody in Port Ardeen is going to put the reason where it belongs.”
Nita does not say anything for a while.
“No,” she says. “They ain’t.”
“So it is a dead man’s boats.”
“Sabine.”
“He is not here to mind.”
Nita’s mouth goes and she puts her hand up to it.
“I’d like to say something to you,” she says.
“Do not.”
“I’d like to say it.”
“Nita, if you say a kind thing to me in this hall I will not be able to stand at this trestle any more, and I have got about another forty minutes in me and then I can leave without it being a departure.”
She takes her hand away from her mouth.
“Alright,” she says.
And she stands there beside me for the whole forty minutes and does not say one more word, and I have thought about that since, and it is the only decent thing that happened to me that day.
At about ten past five I see him.
He is out through the side door in the light with a group of them, and he has got his back to it, and I am looking at the shape of a man in a doorway at fifty feet, and I know it the way I know an engine on a shell road.
His hands are bandaged. Both of them, across the palms, the kind of dressing a man does himself and then a woman does properly afterwards.
He does not come in.
He has not come in the whole time. I have been in this hall three hours and forty minutes and he has been outside that door for at least two of them, and I understand, standing at the coat trestle, that he has known where I was standing for two hours the same way I have known where he was.
Then somebody moves and I can see past him, and Lisette Hebert is out there in the light on a folding chair with her sister, and Dax Landry is crouched down on the concrete in front of her with his bandaged hands on the arms of that chair, and he is not talking. He is just crouched there.
And she has her hand flat on the top of his head.
I leave at twenty to six.
I do not say goodbye to anybody because there is nobody to say it to, and I get out through the coat door and down the side of the hall and out onto the road, and it is six tenths of a mile back to the co-op past three hundred bikes.
I walk it slow.
And that is the whole day. Nobody put a hand on me and nobody said one ugly word to my face, and Chief Naquin nodded and Nita Aucoin stood beside me for forty minutes and Ovide Thibodeaux turned his back at a drinks table,
and by dark the entire port has decided that my father’s hulls killed Emile Hebert.
I got to my truck at the co-op at about six and sat in it.
There was a man at the pumps filling a can and he looked over at me the way you look at a truck sitting in a lot, and then he worked out who it was, and he looked away.
And I said it out loud in the cab with the windows up, because there was nobody left to say it to.
“He taught me to open oysters.”
Then I drove home.