Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
Dax — October 25
There are a hundred and sixty people in that yard by seven and the Baton Rouge boys have brought a whole hog.
Somebody has strung lights off the awning to the water oak and back to the shed, and there is a generator running behind the horseshoe pit, and the Slidell crowd came in at four with eleven bikes and every one of them shut down at the gate and walked in,
which is the kind of thing my father notices and says nothing about for a year.
Nita has been cooking for days.
She does not look at me when I come under that awning and she does not not look at me either, which is worse and which she has been doing since the fourteenth of September.
“Nita.”
“There’s rice on the end and there’s the hog when Boudreaux’s done arguing with it.”
“Alright.”
“Get a plate before they get at it.”
That is all. She goes back to the pans.
Odette comes at half past seven.
She drives herself. She parks at the gate end and walks in, and she is in a black shirt and jeans and she has got the cut folded over her arm, and she stops about ten feet inside the gate and puts it on there, in the open, with the whole yard able to see her do it.
She has never done that before. Every other time she has come in carrying it and put it on inside.
She walks over and stands beside me.
“You want to say hello.”
“Hello.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
She takes a beer off a prospect who has been trying to work out whether to offer her one for a full minute, and she says thank you and calls him by his name, which she learned in September and I did not.
“Sylvain?” I say.
“At the gate for about ninety seconds. He’s gone.”
“Your daddy sent him.”
“My daddy sent him.” She drinks. “He’ll want to hear that I stood next to you when it went on. That’s the whole errand.”
“Then you don’t have to.”
Odette looks at me for a second.
“That’s the first stupid thing you’ve said all week,” she says.
Deuce does it at nine.
He gets up on the flatbed of the tow yard truck, which is what this club has used for a stage for decades, and Chief kills the radio and it takes about four seconds for a yard with a hundred and sixty people in it to go quiet.
“Y’all know what this is,” he says.
Somebody shouts something and everybody laughs.
“Alright. Alright.” He puts a hand up. “There’s two things and then y’all can go back to it, and the first one ain’t a good one, so I’ll do it first.”
The yard goes properly quiet then.
“We buried Emile Hebert twelve days ago,” Deuce says.
Nobody says anything.
“He counted a load twice on the eleventh of October and he asked that it be said at the table that he counted it twice, and I said it at the table, and now I’m saying it out here.”
My father does not raise his voice on that flatbed and does not have to.
“He was treasurer of this chapter for nineteen years and he never once had a dollar wrong. And his chair’s empty in there and it’ll stay empty till November.”
Lisette Hebert is standing at the end of the food table with Nita’s hand on her arm.
“Alright,” Deuce says. “That’s the first thing.”
He lets about three seconds go past.
“Micah Aucoin’s coming off VP.”
It goes round that yard like a wave. There are men from Slidell and Baton Rouge in there who do not know one thing about this chapter’s business and even they know what that sentence means.
“He come to me and said it himself and he said it decent,” Deuce says, “and he’s taking the hall and the tow yard and he’s taking it with my blessing and this chapter’s thanks, and any man that’s got an opinion about it can come see me and I’ll be delighted to hear it.”
Nobody laughs at that.
Sundown is standing at the shed end with a beer and his arms folded and he does not look up.
“So the flash comes off,” Deuce says. “And it goes on.”
And he says my name.
I go up on that flatbed and my father turns me around by the shoulder so I am facing the yard, and a hundred and sixty people are looking at me, and he takes the rocker out of his jacket in the same piece of paper Boudreaux taped shut that morning.
He does not make a speech about me. He does not say a word about eleven years or about being his son, and I understood afterwards that he did that on purpose and that it was the kindest thing he could have done,
because anything he said out loud would have been the thing men said about it for the next twenty years.
He just pins it on.
And that yard comes apart.
I have been in that yard since I was born.
I have been in it for two funerals and eleven anniversaries and the night they patched me, and I have never heard a sound come out of it like that.
It goes up off the shell and off the shed roof and out over the water and it goes on and on, and there are men I have known my whole life with their hands over their heads, and Bones has got two fingers in his mouth whistling, and T-Boy Landry is shouting my name like a boy at a ball game.
Odette is at the bottom of the flatbed with my name across her back.
Deuce puts his hand on the back of my neck and leans in so nobody else hears it.
“November,” he says.
And I say something back and I do not know to this day what it was.
Here is what the rest of that night is.
The gate is a hundred and ten feet from the flatbed and it is open, because it is always open on a party night, and the shell road runs up to it out of the dark and there is a security light on the post that has been broken since August.
Every vehicle that comes in comes in with headlights.
That is what nobody thinks about until they are standing in a yard waiting. You cannot see a truck at that gate. You can only see two lights coming up a shell road in the dark, and every single set of two lights that came up that road between nine o’clock and half past midnight I looked at.
There must have been forty.
The Baton Rouge boys’ van. Somebody’s wife bringing a cake. Ro Sonnier’s brother-in-law. Two more from Slidell who came late. Lorraine going out for ice and coming back at eleven. The Simoneaux boy in his mother’s car.
Forty sets of lights and I turned my head for every one.
And in between them I stood in that yard with a beer going warm in my hand and did the arithmetic.
She came to my door on the nineteenth. That is six days.
She washed a cup on her way out.
She has not called and I have not called her, and that is the discipline, that is the whole architecture, I am letting her come at her own speed.
But she knows about tonight. Everybody in this parish knows about tonight, it has been in the fuel dock and the co-op and Prejean’s yard for a week, and Nita will have told Lorraine and Lorraine tells the whole port by lunchtime.
So she knows.
And she will not come at nine because she will not come to a thing where a man gets a patch pinned on him in front of a hundred and sixty people.
But she might come at eleven.
That is the sum I do, standing at the edge of that yard with my back to the lights, and I do it about nine different ways.
Eleven, when it has thinned. Or half past, when the Slidell boys have gone and it is just ours.
Or she might not come in at all, she might sit at that gate in the dark for a minute the way I sat outside hers, and she might not even get out, and if I am looking at the right moment I will see the truck stop and I will go down there.
That is the whole of it. That is what the greatest night of my life was.
At about half past ten Bones comes over and puts a hand on the new rocker and says, “That’s a good thing, brother,” and I say, “Thank you,” and he says something else and I say yes to it and I have got no idea what it was because a truck came up the shell road while he was talking.
It was the ice.
At eleven Odette says, “Do you want me to go?”
“What?”
“Do you want me to go. I’ve been stood here two hours and you’ve turned your head about thirty times and I’d rather not be the reason a woman doesn’t come through a gate.”
“She’s not coming.”
“You don’t think that.”
“She’s not coming, Odette.”
“You’ve said that twice in ten minutes,” she says, “and you’ve said it to the road both times.”
She goes at half past eleven. She says goodnight to Nita and she says it properly, and Nita says it back, and I watch that happen across a yard and think about how much work that must have taken over seven weeks and how I have not done one hour of it.
The party goes till two.
At about one, when it is down to about forty people and the lights are still up and somebody has got the radio on low, Chief comes and sits down on the bench beside me with two beers and hands me one.
“Long month,” he says.
“It has been.”
“Y’all going to get them boats in the water?”
“Bonne Chance’s head’s back. It’s not cracked.”
“I heard that.” He drinks. “That’s the first good thing I heard in five weeks.”
We sit there.
“Ida Ray’s six weeks on the hard,” Chief says. “And she’s got to come out on a railway.”
“She has.”
“There’s one railway.”
“There is.”
“Papers went in the hall a few days ago,” he says. “Micah’s got it. Facility’s covered from the first.”
“I know.”
“Fee’s fifteen hundred.”
“I know that too. I told you to make it fifteen.”
“Bones already had.” Chief turns the bottle in his hands. “Somebody’s got to tell that woman.”
I do not say anything.
“Because Theo ain’t going to,” Chief says. “And I ain’t going to. And Micah’ll send her a letter off the hall, and it’ll come in an envelope with a local number on it, and it’ll say covered facility on it in print, and she’ll read that at her own kitchen table in front of nobody.”
“It’s handled,” I say.
Chief Naquin looks at me.
He is fifty-four years old and he has been secretary of this chapter for twenty years and he does not write anything down and he has never once said a hard thing to me in my life.
“Alright,” he says.
And he gets up and goes.
I stayed in that yard until about half past two.
They start pulling the lights down at two and the generator goes off and it gets dark quick, and Nita and Lorraine are carrying pans and the Baton Rouge boys are laying out bedrolls in the shed the way they have for decades.
I walked down to the gate at some point.
I do not remember deciding to. I walked the hundred and ten feet down to that gate and stood in the middle of the open shell road with the yard behind me and the security light broken on the post, and I looked up that road into the dark for a while.
There was nothing on it.
There was nothing on it at eleven o’clock either, or at half past, or at any point in five and a half hours, and I had known that in some part of myself since about nine fifteen and had spent the rest of the night doing arithmetic to get around it.
I stood there with a VP flash on my chest and a hundred and sixty people’s noise still in my ears and I thought about a cup upside down on a rack.
And I still did not get it.
That is what I want written down. I stood at that gate at half past two in the morning on the twenty-sixth of October and I looked up an empty road and I thought, she is angry about the dock, somebody has told her, and I will go out there in a few days.
Monday.
I had everything I set out to buy. It went on me in front of a hundred and sixty people and my father put his hand on my neck and said November out loud, and I could not taste one mouthful of it, and I told myself that was because of a key on a gate.