Chapter TWENTY-THREE
Sabine — October 22
He sits in the truck at the end of my drive for nineteen minutes.
I know it is nineteen because I looked at the clock on the stove when I heard him pull in and I looked at it again when he finally shut the engine off, and in between I stood at my own window with a dish towel and watched my brother not get out of a truck.
He comes up the steps at twenty past four.
“Sabine.”
“You have been sat out there nineteen minutes.”
“I know.”
“Then come in or go home.”
He comes in. He does not sit down and he does not take his hat off, and he stands with his back to the counter and his hands behind him gripping the edge of it, which is a thing our father did in this exact kitchen for fifty years.
“I got to tell you something,” he says. “And I want to tell you before somebody else does, because it’s going to be in the hall in a few days and once it’s in the hall it’s everywhere.”
“Alright.”
“The dock.”
I put the towel down.
“Go on.”
“The club took a motion a few days ago to bring it under the hall’s agreement.”
He says it fast, the whole thing, the way you take a plaster off.
“Covered facility. The hall names the crew and sets the rate and holds the key, and the estate gets a facility fee every month whether she turns a wheel or not, and it’s fifteen hundred, and that’s more than that dock’s made since Daddy died,
and it means them boats can come out the water on our ways and there’ll be men down there doing the scraping so you ain’t on that cradle by yourself at seven in the morning.”
He gets all of it out.
I stand there with my hand on the towel and I go through it once, and it takes about four seconds, and there is only one thing in it.
“Who holds the key,” I say.
“It’s the hall.”
“Theo.”
“The hall holds the key. That’s what covered means.”
“Who is the hall?”
He does not answer.
“Who is the hall, Theo?”
“It’s an officer of the local.”
“And who is that going to be?”
“Micah,” he says.
“Micah Aucoin.”
“Yes.”
“Who has sat at that table for six years and who is coming off VP to run the yard and the hall, which everybody in this parish has known for days because Nita told Lorraine.”
“Sabine.”
“So the man who holds the key to my father’s gate takes his instruction from a room I am not allowed in.”
“It ain’t like that.”
“It is exactly like that and there is nothing else it could be.” I am not shouting. I put the towel on the rail and turn around. “That is not a fee. That is rent. They are going to pay me fifteen hundred dollars a month to stop owning a thing I own.”
“You still own it.”
“On paper.”
“It’s your name on the estate, Sabine, ain’t nobody taking your name off nothing.”
“There is one document in the whole of that club, Theo, and it is not a deed.”
I hear how flat my own voice is. “I have got a name on an estate and they have got the key, and if you cannot see which one of those is the real thing then you have not been listening to a single word anybody in this family has said to you your whole life.”
He takes his hat off then. Holds it.
“It’s a good thing,” he says. “It is. I know how it sounds coming out my mouth but it’s a good thing. Fifteen hundred a month, cher. That’s you not worrying about November. That’s you not sat at that table with Prejean’s book working out what forty-one hours is.”
“How do you know about the forty-one hours?”
He does not answer that either.
“Alright,” I say. “Then I will ask you the only question I have got.”
“Sabine.”
“How did you vote?”
And here is the ninety seconds.
He stands in our mother’s kitchen with his hat in both hands and his mouth opens and nothing comes out, and he looks at the floor and then at the window over the sink and then back at me, and it goes on long enough that I could count it.
“Theo.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Say the whole thing.”
“I voted yes.”
“Out loud in that room.”
“Out loud in that room, low end up, in front of everybody.” His voice cracks in the middle of it. “Chief said Fontenot and I said yes.”
“Chief said Fontenot.”
“Yes.”
“He said our name and you said yes.”
“Sabine.”
“Did you lift your head?”
He does not answer.
“Did you lift your head when you said it, Theo?”
“No,” he says.
And that is it. That is the whole thing right there and everything after it is just noise.
“Get out of my house,” I say.
“Sabine.”
“Get out of this house.”
“Would you let me.” He puts a hand up. “Would you just let me say the one thing, and then I’ll go, I swear to God, I’ll go.”
“Say it.”
“It was going to carry,” he says. “It was going to carry with me or without me. Remy moved it and Ro seconded it and it went round that table and every single man said yes, and if I’d have said no it’d have been eleven to one and it’d have carried anyway and then I’d have nothing.
I’d have no patch and no vote and no seat and no way to be in that room at all, and then who’s in there for you? Who’s in there, Sabine? Nobody. Not one person.”
“You are not in there for me.”
“I am.”
“You are not in there for me and you have never once been in there for me,” I say. “You did not come to my door on the sixth of September and you did not stand up on the eighteenth of October and you have not said one sentence in that chapel in three years that cost you anything.”
“That ain’t.”
“And I am not saying that to hurt you. I am saying it because it is the truth and because you have got to hear it out of somebody’s mouth once in your life.”
He is crying now. Standing at the counter with his hat in his hands the way he stood at the foot of the bed in the hospital in Thibodaux when he was twenty-seven.
“What was I supposed to do,” he says.
“Say no.”
“And then what.”
“And then you would have been a man who said no,” I say.
“That is the whole of it. That is all there was ever going to be in it. Nothing changes and the vote carries and the key goes to Micah Aucoin and in a year they take the railway too, and the only difference in the entire world is that when Chief Naquin said the name Fontenot in that room,
our name would have meant no.”
He does not have anything for that.
“That is what a name is for,” I say. “That is the only thing it is for. It is not for a fee.”
“Sabine.”
“Go on home, Theo.”
He stands there.
“Please,” he says.
“I have got nothing else. There is nothing else in me and I am not being hard, I have got nothing left in the tank.” I open the door for him. “Go on.”
And my brother walks out of the house we grew up in, past the doorframe our father marked our heights on when we were children and painted over years later, and he stops on the step and does not turn around.
“You’d have said no,” he says.
“Yes.”
“That’s easy for you. You ain’t got nothing to lose.”
“No,” I say. “Not anymore.”
He gets in the truck and sits in it a long time before he starts it.
I watch him go and then I shut the door and lean my back on it, and I stand there for about a minute with my eyes shut and my hands flat on the wood behind me.
And then I start.
I get the coffee tin out of the top cupboard first, which is where this family has kept paper since before I was born, and I put it on the table and take the lid off.
The deed. The estate letter from Landry the lawyer in Houma who is no relation to any of them, dated April, two and a half years ago. The truck title. My father’s old discharge papers. My mother’s death certificate and his. The Petit Frère’s registration and the Lucienne’s.
I put them in order and put them in a plastic bag and put the bag in the bottom of the duffel.
Then the tools.
That takes me until nine and I do it properly.
Every socket back in its own place. The Starrett level goes in its case with a folded shop cloth where the felt is gone.
The dividers and the trammel bar in the long box with the bevel gauge and the ground-down screwdriver Fry Hebert gave me when I was eleven.
The welder does not go. I stand in the carport for a while with the light on and look at it and do the arithmetic on the truck’s suspension and the fuel it will cost me over eight hundred miles, and then I unplug it and push it back against the wall and put a tarp over it.
The battens I take.
Eleven of them, tied in the bundle with the same tarred line, and they will go on the seat and not in the bed, and they are the only thing I pack that has no use anywhere I am going. There is not a hull in this world outside six that those battens fit. I know that. I put them in the truck anyway.
Then the house.
I do it room by room and I do it slow, and I want to say what it is like, because it is not sad the way people think and I have never been able to explain it to anybody.
It is like stripping an engine.
Not one you are going to rebuild. I have done both and they are not the same job at all.
When you are going to put it back together you label everything and you bag the fasteners by station and you take photographs and you are careful, because every single thing you touch is a thing you will have to touch again in the right order.
When you are not, it is different. You are just deciding, one part at a time, what is worth keeping.
The pot my mother made red beans in for thirty years. Keep.
Everything else in that cupboard. No.
Four photographs out of frames, and the frames stay on the wall with nothing in them, because I am not carrying glass eight hundred miles.
His shirts, which have been in the second bedroom in a box for two and a half years, and I have known for two and a half years that I would have to do something with them one day and I do not do anything with them now either. They stay in the box in the room.
The green tile in the bathroom that my mother chose in 1979 and that does not exist anymore.
I stand in that bathroom at about half past ten with a jug on the shelf that I have had my hand on since I was a child, and that is the only place in the whole house I have to stop and put my hand on the sink for a minute.
I do not take the jug.
At eleven I sit down at the table with the invoice book and work out the last of Prejean’s figures, and I write the second of November in the corner in pencil and put a line under it.
Then I go out to the carport and stand in the dark and look at a shed full of a dead man’s tools with a tarp over the welder.
The cat comes and sits on the step and looks at me.
“I know,” I tell it.
It does not care. It is a cat and it has three houses and mine is the worst one.
I go in at midnight and lie down on top of the bed with my boots off and my clothes on, and I do not sleep for a long time, and the last thing I think before I go is not about my brother and not about the key and not about a man in a house behind the tow yard.
It is that there are eleven days left and I have got a gearbox to do.