Chapter TWENTY-ONE
Sabine — October 19
I decided on the fourteenth.
Not in a moment and not at the funeral. I decided at the kitchen table on the fourteenth of October with a bank statement and Prejean’s book and a pencil, and what decided it was a column of figures, because that is who I am.
Four thousand one hundred in the account. Truck is paid. The house is my father’s and there is nothing owed on it and there never was, because he built it himself out of his own pocket and would not have a bank in his business.
Prejean’s board has got me forty-one hours in the next fortnight and eleven of them are on a boat that will not be in the water until December.
That is it. That is the whole picture. I sat there and looked at it and thought, I can sell the truck or I can go while it still runs, and then I sat a while longer and thought about which day.
I picked the first week of November because of Prejean.
That is the only reason. He has got a gearbox coming out of the Lucienne on the second and if I go before that he has got nobody, and he is sixty-seven and he has paid me every week for eleven years and never once been late, not one time, and I am not going to do that to him.
So it is the first week of November, and it is the nineteenth of October, and I have got two and a half weeks to be a person in this parish.
I go to him on the nineteenth.
There is no good way to explain that and I have stopped trying. I have thought about it more than anything else in my life and the closest I have got is this: I did not go for him. I went because I had a question and there was exactly one way left to ask it.
The question is this.
Will he tell me a thing I have not caught him at?
That is all of it. Everything else I know about that man came to me sideways, off Ovide on a road, off Nita in a yard, off my own eyes at sixty feet that day.
In four years I have never once had a hard thing arrive out of his own mouth without a woman in a yard or a lie in a kitchen putting it there first.
So I am going to sit in front of him for one night and give him room, and if he uses it, then whatever else is true, that is one thing that is true.
And if he does not, I can go in November knowing exactly what I am leaving.
I do not tell him I am coming.
His place is two rooms and a stove behind the tow yard and it is the only house I have ever known him in, and I have been there maybe eleven times in four years because he has always come to me.
He opens the door with a towel in his hand and stands there.
“Sabine.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Then let me in.”
He lets me in.
It is exactly the same. That is the first thing. Same two chairs, same table with the burn in it, same kettle, and there is nothing anywhere in that room that says a woman has been in it, not one thing, and I stand in the middle of it and take that in and put it down without touching it.
His hands are still bandaged. Lighter now. The right one is just across the palm.
“Sit down,” he says.
“You sit down.”
He sits down.
“I have got a thing to say and then I am going to stop talking for a while,” I say. “Is that alright?”
“Alright.”
“I am not here to start it up. Whatever you are about to think, do not think it. This is not that and it is not going to become that.”
“Then what is it?”
“It is one night.”
He does not say anything.
“And I want you to understand what I mean,” I say. “I mean tonight, this one, and then tomorrow it does not exist and neither of us mentions it ever again, and you do not come to my house and I do not come to yours.”
“Why?”
And I look at him and think, that is a fair question and you are never going to get the answer.
“Because I want to,” I say.
He puts his bandaged hand flat on the table.
“Alright,” he says.
I stay eight hours.
Here is what happens in those eight hours, and I am going to write it plain because it is the last good thing I have got and I have gone over it so many times it has worn smooth.
He makes coffee at nine because that is all he has got, and we sit at that table and he tells me about the Ida Ray.
Not the run. The boat, on the hard, and what six weeks means, and how they have got the head out of the Bonne Chance and it is in Houma and the machine shop has not called back.
He tells me T-Boy Landry went in the water at four in the morning and got a fist in Fry’s collar and held on, and that nobody in that club has said one word to that boy about it and he does not know how to be the one to start.
He tells me Ovide told Chief at the fuel dock he does not want to go out any more.
That one goes into me sideways and I put my coffee down.
“He said that?”
“With his hat in his hand.”
“That man has been on that water since he was eleven years old.”
“I know.”
“He told me in July there was no such thing as a boat he would not take out.”
“I know,” Dax says.
At about half past ten he asks me what Prejean has got on the board and I tell him. The Lucienne’s gearbox on the second. A generator at the co-op. Eleven hours on a hull that will not be in the water till December.
“That’s not much,” he says.
“It is what there is.”
“Sabine.”
“Do not.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were about to ask me if I am alright for money,” I say, “and I am going to save you, because the answer is that I have never taken a dollar off you in four years and I am not starting on the nineteenth of October.”
He laughs. It is a real one and it comes out of him and it is the first one out of either of us in five weeks.
“You’d have thrown it at me,” he says.
“I would have thrown it and then I would have picked it up, because it is money.”
At eleven he asks about the tools.
“They are in the shed,” I say. “Under the carport. The welder is where the mower was and the boxes are along the back and I hung the battens off the rafters on two nails.”
“How many are there?”
“Eleven.”
“Why eleven?”
“Because no two boats are the same shape,” I say, “so you need eleven different stiffnesses, and he planed every one of them by hand decades ago and burned a number in the end of each one so he would know which was which, and there is not another set on this coast.”
Dax sits there with his coffee.
“I never asked him one thing about any of it,” he says.
“No.”
“Four years I sat on the ladder in that engine room and watched you and I never asked what any of it was.”
“No,” I say. “You did not.”
And there is a space right there. It is about four seconds long and it is wide open, and I sit in that chair with my hands around a cup and I do not fill it, and neither does he.
We go to bed at about half past midnight.
It is his bed and his room and there is not one rule of mine in that house, and I did not bring any with me on purpose, and I will not say much except that he did the thing anyway.
He got up and went to the sink first without being told, with a bandage on one hand, and I lay there in the dark and listened to a man run a tap in his own house at half past midnight because of a rule I made in a different house four years ago.
And afterwards he does not sleep.
That is the part.
He lies on his back with his arm under my neck and I have got my hand flat on his chest and I can feel that he is nowhere near it.
His breathing does not go. It stays high and short for a long time and then it goes quiet in the way a man goes quiet when he is deciding something, and twice, twice, he takes the breath.
I feel it both times. His chest comes up under my hand and stops and lets it out again through his nose.
Both times I stay completely still.
I want to be clear about what I was doing, because a person could read it as cruelty and it was not that.
I was giving him the room. That is all I did all night.
I did not ask him one question after eleven o’clock.
I did not say Rochelle and I did not say the yard and I did not say a single thing that could be answered sideways.
I lay in the dark in that bed with my hand on him and left eight hours of open floor in front of a man and did not put one thing in his way.
At about two he says my name.
“Sabine.”
“Mm.”
And that is it. That is all of it. He says my name into the dark and I wait, and after a while his arm goes heavy and his breathing drops and he is asleep.
I lie there until half past five.
I do not sleep at all. I lie in a bed I have been in eleven times in four years with a man’s arm under my neck and I go through the whole thing from the twenty-fourth of July forward, all of it, in order, the way I go over a job when I cannot find the fault,
and I get to the end of it and there is nothing there.
He had eight hours.
That is what I take out of that room and it is the only thing I take. He had eight hours and a woman lying against him in the dark asking for nothing, and he took the breath twice and let it go both times, and whatever it was he has got, he is going to keep it.
I get up at twenty to six.
I dress in the dark with my back to the bed the way you do in somebody else’s house, and I do it slow because of the floor, and I get my boots and carry them.
At the door I stop.
He is asleep on his front with one arm off the side of the bed and his face turned away and the bandaged hand hanging down, and I stand there in the doorway with my boots in my hand for a while.
I do not know how long. Long enough that the window went from black to grey while I was standing there.
And I think, that is the last time I am going to look at that.
I do not say anything and I do not touch him and I do not leave a note, because there is nothing to write on and nothing to write, and anything I put on that table becomes a thing he can carry around and read again.
I let myself out and pull the door to gently because the frame is swollen on his too, and I stand on the step and put my boots on.
It is cold for October. There is fog off the tow yard and it is sitting on the shell in the low places and the flare is lit up orange in it out over the trees.
I drive home with the window down.
And I am not sad. That is the strange thing and I have never been able to explain it to a living soul.
I am thirty-one years old and I have just walked out of the last night of four years and I drove home along the Ardeen road at ten past six in the morning with the fog coming across the shell in front of the headlights, and what I felt was quiet.
Because I asked it, and I got an answer, and it is a clean answer, and a clean answer is the only thing in this world I have ever wanted out of anything.
I got home at half past. I fed the neighbour’s cat that comes to my step. I made coffee and drank it standing at the sink.
Then I got the invoice book out and did Prejean’s figures for the week, and put the Lucienne’s gearbox on the second of November in the corner of the page in pencil, and after it I wrote a number, which was the number of days.
Fourteen.