Chapter TWENTY-FIVE
Sabine — October 25
The tool roll is the last thing I own that is still on their property.
Fourteen years of my own and about forty years of his in one canvas roll, tied, and I put it down on a bench in that yard on the fourteenth of September and walked away from it, and I have not been able to decide since whether that was a thing I did or a thing that happened to me.
I want it back.
That is the whole of it. I am going in a week and I am not going eight hundred miles without my father’s wrenches, and I am not going to call anybody and ask for them to be brought to me, because then it is a favour and then somebody stands on my step.
So I go and get them.
I mean to go at midnight.
I have thought about the timing for three days, sitting at that table with Prejean’s book, and I have got it worked out.
There is a party on the twenty-fifth. Everybody in this parish has known about it for days.
It will be loud until two and there will be a hundred and something people in that yard, and at midnight there will be enough of them, and enough drink in them, that a woman walking in at the far end of the shed and picking a roll of tools off a bench is a thing nobody notices at all.
I leave the house at half past eight and I do not know why I leave at half past eight.
That is not true. I know why. I could not sit in that kitchen any longer.
I park at the co-op.
It is a mile and a bit from there to the clubhouse if you go along the shell and then cut across the back of the fuel dock, and it is a walk I have done since I was a girl because that is how you got to a party when you were fourteen and did not have a car.
There is no moon and the security light on their gate post has been broken since August, and I know that because Chief has been meaning to fix it since August.
So I come up on that yard in the dark on foot with no headlights and nobody sees a thing, and I stop at the corner of the fence about thirty feet off the gate where there is an oleander that has been there my whole life, and I stand behind it like a child.
The yard is lit up.
Lights strung off the awning to the water oak and back to the shed.
A hundred and sixty people. There is a hog on a table and there are bikes parked in rows on the shell and there is a generator running somewhere behind the horseshoe pit, and I have been in that yard for a hundred nights like this one.
And then the radio goes off.
I did not know he was going to do it at nine. I want that said, because I have been asked since, in a manner of speaking, by my own self at three in the morning, whether I went there to see it.
I did not. I went for a roll of tools and I got there four hours early because I could not sit still in my own house.
Deuce gets up on the flatbed of the tow truck.
I can hear him from thirty feet outside that fence because a yard with a hundred and sixty people in it goes quiet for that man in about four seconds and because sound carries off shell at night.
He says Emile Hebert’s name.
He says he counted a load twice on the eleventh and asked that it be said, and that his chair is empty and will stay empty until November, and I stand behind an oleander bush in the dark with my hands in my jacket pockets and listen to a man say a true and decent thing about somebody who taught me
to open oysters.
Then he says Micah Aucoin is coming off VP.
And the yard makes a noise, and I already knew, because Nita told Lorraine days ago and Lorraine told the fuel dock by lunchtime.
And then he says his son’s name.
Dax goes up on that flatbed and his father turns him around by the shoulder so he is facing the yard, and takes something out of his jacket in a piece of paper, and pins it on him.
And that yard comes apart.
I have never heard a sound like it come out of that place and I have been in it since I was born.
It goes up off the shell and off the shed roof and out over the water and it does not stop, and there are men with their hands over their heads and somebody whistling with two fingers, and a boy shouting his name over and over.
He is standing on that flatbed under strung lights in front of a hundred and sixty people with a rocker on his chest.
And she is at the bottom of the flatbed.
She has got the cut on. In the open, at the front, at the foot of the truck, with PROPERTY OF HOLLOW across her back where every single person in that yard can read it while they are looking up at him.
And I stand behind that bush and I do the arithmetic.
Not about her. About the dates.
The sixth of September was the night. The fourteenth was the yard.
The twenty-fifth was the rain in my kitchen.
The eighteenth of October was the vote on my father’s dock, and the nineteenth I drove to his house and knocked on his door and gave a man eight hours in the dark to say one true thing, and on the twenty-fifth of October he is standing on a flatbed getting the thing he bought.
Seven weeks.
He bought it in seven weeks, and it worked, and it worked exactly the way he said it would when I made him stand on my mat and say it out loud.
I do not cry. I want that in the record with everything else.
What I do is stand there until my hands hurt, and then I look down and see that I have got both fists closed in my jacket pockets, and I open them, and I walk away from the fence and around the back of the shed the long way,
because the tool roll is on the bench and there is nobody at that end of the yard.
The bench is where it was.
The roll is on it. Nobody has moved it in six weeks.
It has been rained on twice and dried twice and there is a bloom of rust starting on the canvas where it sat in a puddle, and everything around it has been moved a hundred times and it has not, and I stand there in the dark with my hand on it and understand that somebody told them not to touch it.
That is the thing that nearly does it. Not the flatbed. That.
“Sabine.”
He is about fifteen feet away at the corner of the shed and I did not hear him come and I have got very good ears.
“Deuce.”
“That’s yours.”
“It is.”
“Nobody’s had a hand on it. I said not to.”
“I know,” I say. “I could tell.”
He comes about halfway and stops, which is a thing that man does, and he has got no drink in his hand and he is not drunk and it is nine o’clock at night at his own party.
“Walk with me to the gate,” he says.
“I have got a truck at the co-op.”
“Then walk with me to the gate and I’ll not keep you.”
I pick up the roll and I walk with him.
We go down the outside of the fence, not through the yard, and he takes us the way that keeps a shed between us and a hundred and sixty people the whole distance, and he does that without saying anything about it and I notice him do it.
At the gate he stops.
“I’m going to say a thing to you,” he says, “and I’d like to say it right, so let me say the whole of it.”
“Go on.”
“You’re not to come on club property again.”
I do not say anything.
“Not the shed, not the yard, not the tow yard, not the salvage. Not for a job and not for a funeral.”
His voice does not change at all. There is nothing hard in it and there is nothing sorry in it.
“That’s from me and it ain’t going to a vote and there’s no man in that yard’ll be told a reason. If somebody calls you for a boat, you send them to me.”
“Alright.”
“And I’ll tell you why, because you’re Lucien’s girl and I’d not have you working it out on your own for a year.”
“You do not have to.”
“I do.” He puts his hands in his pockets.
“There’s a hundred and sixty people in that yard tonight and about forty of them been not saying your name since September. And there’s men in there that watched what happened on the fourteenth and never opened their mouths,
and they’ve got to sit at a table with each other for the next twenty years. And every single time you come up that road they’ve got to look at it again.”
“So it is for them.”
“It’s for the club.”
“That is the same sentence.”
“Yes,” Deuce says. “It is.”
I stand there with a rusted roll of my father’s tools under my arm at the gate of a place I have been coming to since I was a child.
“You’re owed better,” he says. “I’ll say that once. I had it in my head to come out to that dock myself on the fifteenth and say it to your face before you found out any other way, and I didn’t do it, and there ain’t a good reason. There’s only reasons.”
“And the dock?”
He does not blink.
“That’s done,” he says. “That went to a vote and it carried and I voted for it.”
“Fifteen hundred a month.”
“Fifteen hundred a month and a crew and the hall behind it, and I’d tell you it’s a good deal and I’d be telling you the truth, and I’d also be telling you a thing that ain’t got much to do with what it is.”
“Say what it is.”
“It’s a key,” Deuce says.
And that is the only time in my life I ever thought well of Thibault Landry.
I look past him.
Down the length of the fence and through the gate and across a hundred and ten feet of lit shell, and I can see the flatbed and the lights strung off the awning and the crowd still around it,
and I can see a man with a rocker on his chest and a woman standing next to him with his name across her back.
I look at that for about four seconds.
Then I look back at his father, and I say the six words.
“Your boy bought that with me.”
Deuce Landry does not say anything at all.
He stands at his own gate on the night his son gets the flash and he looks at me, and something goes across his face and is gone, and he does not answer me, and there is no answer.
“Goodnight, Sabine,” he says.
“Goodnight.”
And I walk out of that gate and up the shell road in the dark with a roll of tools under my arm, and behind me the radio comes back on.
I did not sleep.
I got back to the co-op at about ten and sat in the truck for a while and then drove home, and I put the roll on the kitchen table and sat down and looked at it, and at about two in the morning I got up and started carrying things out to the truck.
I had said the first week of November. I had it in pencil in the corner of Prejean’s book. The Lucienne’s gearbox on the second, and then I would go, because he is sixty-seven and has paid me every week for eleven years and never once been late.
I could not do it.
That is the plainest way I can put it. I sat at that table at two in the morning on the twenty-sixth of October and understood that I could not stand in that yard for another eight days and be a woman who is being talked about,
and I could not do the gearbox with Micah Aucoin’s letter coming to my house in an envelope with a local number on it, and I could not drive past that gate every day of the week knowing what I had watched from behind a bush.
So I wrote Prejean a note.
I have never told anybody what was in it.
It was four lines and it took me forty minutes and the last line was that the Lucienne’s input seal is on the second shelf in the loft in a box marked Jabsco, which was a lie, because I put it there myself at half past four in the morning on my way out of this parish so that it would be true.
The truck is loaded at six.
Six tool boxes, the welder in the end because I decided at four o’clock that I was not leaving it, a duffel with paper in a plastic bag in the bottom, four photographs out of frames, my mother’s pot,
and eleven fairing battens tied with tarred line on the seat beside me where I can put my hand on them.
I do not walk through the house one last time.
I lock the door and I put the key in my pocket and not under anything, because it is my house and I am not giving it to anybody, and the cat is on the step and it looks at me and I say, “The Bergerons will feed you,” and it does not care.
And I drive out at ten past six with the sun coming up on my right.
Out the shell road, past the co-op, past the church, and at the Ardeen road you go left for Golden Meadow and right for the causeway, and the causeway takes you east.
I went right.