CHAPTER 30
THE FATHER
POV: LUCIEN
Marchand’s men closed both gates at six. A hand-lettered sign on the Washington Avenue side: CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. A van from a restoration company that doesn’t exist, parked across the Prytania entrance. Two men in coveralls with buckets of whitewash, painting the same tomb over and over.
I stand behind the Delacroix tomb in the fog and wait for him.
She stands beside me.
She’s wearing black. A plain wool coat, black gloves, her hair up with the pencil through it. The bruises on her throat have faded to yellow shadows. The gold sits above them, dented at one edge. My mother’s rosary is wound three times around her gloved wrist.
There’s a mark on my neck under my collar. It aches when I turn my head. I keep turning my head.
“Cold, lamb?” I ask.
“No.”
She isn’t. Her hand is steady. I checked. I held it all the way here in the car, and it didn’t shake once.
At 6:58 I hear the side gate.
The creak of it. Then the cane on the shell path.
Slow. Even. A tap, a step, a tap. It comes out of the fog down the center aisle between the vaults, and then he’s there: a white-haired old man in a black overcoat with an armful of white chrysanthemums, walking to his wife’s grave the way he has every Tuesday for twenty-two years.
He unlocks the iron gate of the tomb.
He lays the flowers beneath her plaque. He straightens slowly on the cane. He stands there, looking at her name.
“Remy’s dead,” he says.
He doesn’t turn around. He knew we were here. Of course he knew.
“Yes,” I say.
“On my boat.”
“On her boat.”
A pause. “And the prosecutor.”
“Yes.”
“And the books?”
Noelle steps out from behind the angel.
“Mine,” she says.
He turns.
He looks at her. At her face. At the yellow bruises. At the dented gold. His eyes travel down her arm to her wrist, to the black beads wound around her glove, and stop.
Something happens to his face.
I’ve never seen it before. Thirty-four years, and I have never once seen my father’s face do anything he didn’t tell it to.
“That’s Hélène’s,” he says.
“Yes,” Noelle says.
“He gave you that.”
“I took it.”
He lifts his eyes from the beads to her face. Then, slowly, to me. To my bare wrist. To the mark on my neck that my collar doesn’t quite hide.
“I see,” he says softly.
He folds both hands on the head of his cane.
“I suppose,” he says, “you’ve come to kill me.”
I take the revolver out of my coat.
It’s old. A Smith & Wesson .38 with a wooden grip worn pale by a boy’s hand. He gave it to me in the engine room of the Magdalene when I was eight years old and told me to shoot the man tied to the pipe, and I did.
He looks at it.
“I remember that,” he says.
“I kept it.”
“Of course you did.” He almost smiles. “You keep everything.”
He turns to Noelle.
“Did he tell you,” he says, “that he was the one I sent? To your mother’s room? With the pillow?”
“Yes,” she says. “He told me everything.”
“And you’re standing beside him.”
“I’m standing beside him,” she says, “because of it.”
He studies her through the fog.
Then he laughs. Quietly. The first time I’ve heard him laugh since I was a boy.
“Thieves’ eyes,” he says. “Your mother had them. She sat across a desk from me for eleven years with those eyes, and I never once saw her coming.” He shakes his head. “I should have looked harder at the daughter.”
“Say her name,” I say.
He turns back to me.
“Which one?”
“Both.”
The fog moves between the tombs. Somewhere past the wall, a streetcar bell on St. Charles, far off, like something underwater.
“Claire Arceneaux,” he says.
“And mine.”
He looks at the plaque. At the chrysanthemums. At her name.
“Hélène,” he says.
“What did you do to her?”
He doesn’t pretend. He’s too old and too proud, and there’s no one left to pretend for.
“I opened the balcony doors,” he says. “It was two in the morning. She was on her knees on those beads, praying for my soul, the way she did every night, loud enough that I could hear it through the wall. She’d been to see the priest that afternoon.
I knew what she’d told him. I knew what she’d tell him next.
” He turns the head of his cane. “I opened the doors and I told her she could have the balcony, or she could have me. She looked at me a long time. Then she stood up with her beads in her hand and walked out onto the balcony.” He looks at me.
“She chose, Lucien. She always chose God over me. That was the last time.”
Noelle takes a step forward.
“My mother is alive,” she says.
He looks at her.
“She’s in a room with a window onto a magnolia,” Noelle says.
“She has pink nails. She’s going to be alive when you’re in that wall.
” Her voice is very quiet and very clear.
“I’m going to go and tell her so. Tomorrow.
I’m going to sit on her bed and hold her hand and tell her that the man who put her in the water is in a box behind a brass plate in the dark, and that his son put him there, and that I watched. ”
My father looks at my wife.
For a moment I think he’s going to say something more. His mouth moves.
He doesn’t.
I raise the revolver.
He looks at it. Then past it, at me, the way he looked at me in the engine room twenty-six years ago. A long, patient heron’s look over still water, measuring.
“You were always going to be better at this than me,” he says.
“Yes.”
I pull the trigger.
The sound goes out into the fog and doesn’t come back. The chrysanthemums jump. He goes down against the marble with his shoulder against her plaque, slowly, as though he were kneeling, and then not slowly. The cane falls on the shell path beside him. The silver head rolls a little way and stops.
I stand there.
The fog. The angel. My mother’s name, with his blood on the edge of it now, a thin bright line running down through the H.
Noelle comes to stand beside me.
She doesn’t say anything. She unwinds the rosary from her wrist, slowly, turn by turn, and takes my left hand, the one without the gun, and winds the beads around my wrist. Three times.
Over the pale band of skin where they’ve always been.
She presses the small silver cross into my palm and closes my fingers over it.
“You’re going to want something to hold,” she says.
I look down at the beads.
I look at her.
Marchand comes out of the fog with his hat in his hand. Two of his men behind him with a canvas tarp.
He looks at my father on the ground. At the gun. At my wrist. At her.
“The tomb,” he says. “Today?”
“Today. Third shelf. Beside her.”
“Father Broussard will want to know.”
“Father Broussard will be told.”
Marchand nods. He turns his hat in his hands. “And the parish, Lucien? The papers? What do we tell them?”
I look at my mother’s name.
I look at my father.
I told him once, at a table on the river, what I’d do if he touched them. I told him where I’d put him, and I told him what I’d say.
I always keep my word.
“He fell,” I say.