Chapter TWENTY
Dax — October 18
Chief counts the phones and gets thirteen and does not say the number out loud.
Nobody tells him to. He stands there at the box with his hand on the hasp for about four seconds and then he shuts it, and that is how it is going to be from now on, because Emile Hebert’s slot is the fourth from the left and it has been the fourth from the left for years.
Inside there is a chair with nobody in it.
That is a thing we will fix in November.
You cannot leave a gap at a table like that for long or it starts to mean something, and Chief will move everybody down one before the anniversary and nobody will say a word about it.
But on the eighteenth of October it is still there, and there is a hatch cover eleven feet long with twelve men around it and one hole in the middle of the near side.
Deuce hits the wood once.
“Money.”
Nobody says anything, because the man who says the money is dead.
“Chief,” Deuce says.
“I ain’t the treasurer.”
“You’re the secretary and you’ve got it all in your head same as he did.”
Chief clears his throat. He is fifty-four and he has been talking at that table for twenty years and he cannot get the first sentence out, and he tries twice.
“Route ran,” he says. “Two hundred, counted twice, on the water. It come off that boat and it went out of the yard on the fourteenth and it’s paid. Auguste took his eleven and there wasn’t a word out of Sylvain.”
“So we’re straight with Rochelle.”
“We’re straight for one run.”
“And the hulls.”
“Ida Ray’s on the hard. She’ll be six weeks. Bonne Chance’s head is in Houma. Saint Amelie ain’t moved since August. Marie Delphine’s the only thing in this parish that’ll turn a wheel and Ovide Thibodeaux is sixty-one years old and he told me a few days ago he don’t want to go out no more.”
“He said that?”
“He said it to me at the fuel dock with his hat in his hand.”
Deuce sits with that.
“Alright,” he says. “Say the rest.”
“There ain’t a rest. That’s the rest. We got one boat and a man who don’t want to run her.”
And then Bones says, from the far end, “Then we got to talk about the dock.”
The room does not move.
“Say it properly, Remy,” Deuce says.
“Alright.” Bones sits forward and puts his forearms on the wood.
“Six hulls. Every one of them out that Fontenot yard. The slip’s Fontenot, the railway’s Fontenot, the cradle’s Fontenot, the ways is Fontenot, and every gearbox and every shaft and every plate that’s gone in them boats for thirty years has gone in on that apron.”
“We know whose it is.”
“We know whose it is and we been going round it for a month like it’s a hole in the road.”
Bones does not raise his voice. He has not raised his voice once in eleven years at that table.
“That railway is the only marine railway between here and Golden Meadow that’ll take a fifty-eight foot hull, and right now there’s three of our boats need her and we ain’t got the use of her, and we ain’t got the use of her because of what got done in that yard on the fourteenth of September.”
“Careful,” Deuce says.
“I’m being careful. I ain’t said a name and I ain’t said a thing that ain’t true.”
“Go on.”
“So I’m saying it out loud. Either that dock is ours or it ain’t, and if it ain’t ours then this club ain’t in the water no more and we ought to say that out loud too.”
Sundown has not said anything.
That is the thing I notice and cannot do anything with. Micah Aucoin has sat at the low end of that table since the twenty-third of September and let everything come to him, and he sits there now with his hands under the wood and lets Remy Guidry say it, and Remy Guidry believes every word of it.
“Chief,” Deuce says. “What’s the hall got?”
“The hall’s got the servicing agreement on the ways at Ardeen Marine and the tow yard. It ain’t got anything on a private slip.”
“Can it?”
“It can if the slip’s a working yard with hired men on it. Then it’s a covered facility, and then it’s got to be under the agreement, and then the hall says who works it and what the rate is and who’s got the key.”
“And if it ain’t got hired men?”
“Then it’s a man’s own dock and there’s nothing anybody can do.”
“How many men has it got?”
“One,” Chief says. “It’s got Sabine.”
“That ain’t hired men.”
“No. But there’s a boy comes down from Prejean’s about twice a month for the scraping, and that boy’s on Prejean’s book, and Prejean’s under the agreement.”
“So the hall could call it covered.”
“The hall could call it covered,” Chief says slowly, “if the hall wanted to.”
Deuce sits back.
“Then that’s a motion,” he says. “Say it, Remy.”
And Bones says it.
“I move that this chapter take the Fontenot dock under the hall’s agreement. Covered facility. Hall names the crew and holds the key and sets the rate, and the estate gets paid a facility fee off the top, every month, whether it turns a wheel or not.”
“Second,” Ro says.
Ro Sonnier says it fast, before anybody else can, and he says it looking at his own hands, and I understand exactly what that is, because Ro Sonnier has been walking around like a dead man since the twenty-third of September and this is a thing he can do.
“It’s moved and seconded,” Deuce says. “Talk.”
They talk for eleven minutes.
Chief says the fee ought to be twelve hundred a month and Bones says fifteen. Somebody says what about the brother, and Chief says the brother’s patched, so that’s simple. Somebody says what about the sister, and there is about a second and a half of nothing.
Then Bones says, “The sister ain’t been down that yard but for her own self since the sixteenth of September, and she’s told Prejean she’ll work what’s on his board and nothing else. This don’t take her hands off nothing. It puts men on that apron so them boats can come out the water.”
“And she can still work it,” Ro says.
“She can work it. She’d be under the agreement, same as she is at Prejean’s. Same rate.”
“So she loses nothing.”
“She loses nothing,” Bones says.
And every man at that table wants that to be true, and it is not true, and I sit there and know exactly why it is not true and do not say it.
It is not true because of the key.
That is all it is. There is not a dollar in it that hurts her and there is not one thing in that motion that stops her putting her hands on a hull.
There is a key. There is a chain on a gate at the end of a shell road that her grandfather built, and after today the man who decides who opens it is a hall officer who takes his instruction from that room, and the difference between a business and a leash is exactly one key.
She said that to her brother on that apron in August with a dead man’s outline still on the boards. I know she said it because Theo came into the shed that afternoon and repeated it to Bones in front of me, word for word, in the voice of a man telling you something his sister said that was funny.
“Anything else,” Deuce says.
Nobody has anything else.
“Then it’s a vote.”
And it goes round the table the way it always goes, one at a time, low end up, out loud, because there are no hands raised in that chapel and there never have been. You say your own name and you say your word.
“Naquin. Yes.”
“Sonnier. Yes.”
“Guidry. Yes.”
“Landry, T-Boy. Yes.”
And it comes to the low end, and Chief says, “Fontenot.”
Theo does not lift his head.
I am four seats up and across and I can see the crown of his hat and his hands under the edge of the wood and nothing else, and the room waits, and it is not a long wait but it is a wait, and everybody hears it.
“Fontenot,” Chief says again.
“Yes,” Theo says.
Chief does not write it down because Chief does not write anything down.
It comes to me last but for the chair, because the Road Captain votes last before the president in this chapel and that is how it has been since Boots.
“Landry, Dax.”
And here is the arithmetic, and I did it in about two seconds, and I have had four years to look at it since.
If I vote no, it goes eleven to one and it carries anyway, and Bones has to sit there and understand that the Road Captain voted against the only thing that puts this club back in the water.
And Sundown, who has not said one word all morning, gets to lean back and let that number sit in the room until November.
If I vote yes, the club gets its ways and its railway and three boats come out of the water, and she gets fifteen hundred dollars a month off an apron that has not earned a dollar since her father died,
and there are men down there doing the scraping so she is not on that cradle by herself at seven in the morning.
That is what I tell myself. I want to write the actual sentence down because it is important that it be the actual one and not a kinder one made later.
I sat at that hatch cover and I thought: fifteen hundred a month and a crew and the hall behind her, and when the boats start moving again and Rochelle is straight, that dock is protected by this club forever, and nobody in this parish can put a hand on it.
I am buying her something. That is the sentence.
“Yes,” I say.
“Landry, Thibault.”
“Yes,” Deuce says.
“That’s thirteen and it carries.”
“Twelve,” Chief says.
“Twelve,” Deuce says. “That’s twelve and it carries.”
He hits the wood once and gets up and takes the gavel with him.
Theo goes out fast. He is through that door and across the yard before Chief has got the phone box open, and I go out after him and he is at his truck with the door open and his hand on the roof.
“Theo.”
“Don’t.”
“Theo.”
“I said don’t, Dax.” He does not turn around. “I done it. I said the word out loud in front of everybody and it’s done and I ain’t going to stand in this yard and talk about it with you.”
“It’s fifteen hundred a month.”
And that is when he turns around.
“You think that’s what it is?”
“It’s a facility fee. It’s more than that dock has made in two years.”
Theo Fontenot looks at me across the roof of his truck for about three seconds and there is something happening in his face that I do not have a name for, and then he laughs. One breath of it, with nothing in it.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what it is.”
He gets in and drives out.
I ride to her road at half past eight that night.
I want that in the record. I did that. I came off the Ardeen road and turned onto her road and went down it at about twenty miles an hour with the light on, and the kitchen light was on and the truck was there and the shed under the carport was shut.
I went past the house.
I turned around at the end by the culvert where she pulled over on the fourteenth of September, which I did not know then and know now, and I came back up and I slowed to about walking pace outside her gate and I sat there with the engine running.
And I did the arithmetic one more time.
If I go up those steps and knock, I have got to say the sentence. There is no version where I knock on that door tonight and do not say it, because she will ask me what I came for and I have never once been able to lie to her face and there is not one thing I could say instead.
And the sentence is: this club voted today to take your father’s dock, and I voted yes.
And she will say, who moved it.
And I will say, Remy Guidry.
And she will say, who seconded.
And I will say, Ro Sonnier.
And she will say, how did my brother vote.
And I will have to stand on her step and say the word yes about Theo, and I have known that woman four years and I know exactly what that does, and it does not do it to me.
It does it to a man who has been sitting outside her house in a truck for forty minutes at a time since September and cannot make himself go in.
That is what I tell myself, sitting outside her gate on the eighteenth of October with the engine running.
I am not going to be the one who takes her brother off her.
It is even true. That is the thing about all of it, every single piece of it, from a hallway in September to a shell road at seven in the morning to a chair at that table today.
Every sentence I have told myself has been true.
Not one of them has been a lie and every single one of them has been arranged to sit exactly on top of the thing underneath it, which is that I did not want to stand on that step and watch her face while she found out what I had done.
The kitchen light goes off at about ten to nine.
I sit there another minute and then I ride home.
And I do not tell her.
That is it. That is the whole of it. There is nothing else in that day and nothing else in that week and nothing else in the four years afterwards that matters half as much, and I did not do it in a chapel and I did not do it in a bedroom in a house at the end of an alley.
I did it sitting on a bike outside a gate with the engine running, deciding not to knock.