The Hard Blue Sky

I
The White Afternoon

II
Isle aux Chiens

III
Sea Change

IV
The Marsh

V
The Other Island

VI
The Way Back

VII
The Lower Part of the Sky

A Biography of Shirley Ann Grau

Inky D’Alfonso:
crew of the
PIXIE

Hector and Cecile Boudreau:
a young couple

Perique:
a young man

Ferdinand and Carrie Lombas:
Perique’s parents

Annie Landry:
a sixteen-year-old girl

Al Landry:
Annie Landry’s father, recently widowed

Adele:
the new wife Al Landry brings from Port Ronquille

Claudie:
Adele’s son by a previous marriage

Therese Landry:
Annie’s cousin

Beatriz Valdares:
a South American girl; Annie’s roommate at the convent in New Orleans

Eddie and Belle Livaudais:
parents of

Henry,
who is 18

Pete,
who is 16

Robby:
Eddie Livaudais’s six-year-old bastard

Jerry:
Chep’s son

Marie Livaudais:
Mike’s wife

Lacy and Andrée Livaudais:
cousins of Eddie Livaudais

Mamere Terrebonne:
the oldest person on the island

Anthony Tortorich:
from the other island

B
ACK IN THE WIDE
deep curve of the coast to the west of the three mouths of the Mississippi, the Gulf is brown and muddy. Always. Only, when the sun is very bright and the sky a hard blue, the water can look clear. And the fishermen, at least the ones who take people from New Orleans out on charter, pick up a couple of dollars now and then betting on just that.

All along this northern edge of the Gulf there is almost no solid land, just the marsh grasses that dapple in the wind like the Gulf itself—prairie tremblant, they call it—its tracks only an occasional trainasse, a trail cut for a pirogue, and the twisting network of bayous that run sluggishly to the four points of the compass and drain finally into the Gulf. For three or four hundred miles the coast is like that. With one exception: a chain of three islands.

They are right on the edge of the marsh, about a mile apart.

They are a kind of bridge across the mouth of a wide deep bay that extends four or five miles north into the marsh. The islands are all the same shape—a long narrow strip. They are all different sizes.

The smallest of these, hardly a half-mile long, is to the east. It is the lowest too and seems to be sinking. During any storm now the water sweeps right over it.

But there were trees once. If you look around you can see the old roots, bleached white as driftwood. And there is a single stump left, a hollow trunk maybe five feet tall, and splotched by mold. At its bottom there is a pool of water—of rain water. It varies some summer and winter, but there is always a little. Mosquitoes breed there—in spring it swarms with wigglers. And dozens of little lizards, their bodies turned brown against the bark, come and feed on them. Birds come too, mockingbirds and ricebirds and sparrows, and blackbirds, and they hop around in the tough brown-yellow runner grass and pick at the lizards. Sometimes they yank them right off the sides of the stump. And sometimes too a woodpecker works for the maggots in the bark. Under his steady hammering the old tree shakes. And the lizards all stay out of sight in the roots and the ground. And the other birds have to search through the grass and out along the driftwood and logs that have piled up at the east tip. Out there—in the logs and the twisted driftwood—on sunny days, the gators lie. And sometimes their tails move faster than the birds.

In almost the very center of the island there are two posts, crooked now but still standing. They were put in deep and steady and the storm water has only tilted them a little. The posts are all that is left of a pigpen. Thirty years or so ago, when the island was higher, Ray Hébert brought his pigs across to leave them there during the summer. (His wife couldn’t stand the smell of the sty in her back yard. It wasn’t any worse than anybody else’s, but under the hot July sun they all smelled, people said, like death itself.)

But his pigs were always slipping through the fence rails and heading down to the east end because it seemed marshy there and cool. And the alligators got them, one after the other.

They call it Isle Cochon now, and they leave it to the birds and the alligators and the fiddler crabs and the lizards.

The next-sized island is the one off to the west, called Terre Haute. It is a couple of miles long and fairly high: only during very severe storms and hurricanes does the water wash over it. (During one hurricane the water was several feet deep over the whole island—but that didn’t happen often.) And it has trees and grass, even if the grass is mostly brown and the oaks are burned off at an angle by the spray. Oyster fishermen and trappers live there—fifteen houses or so (built high on stilts out of reach of flood water) and enough kids to make them noisy. And on the north side, the bay side, the slips for the four or five oyster-luggers.

The third island, the one in the middle, is the highest and the best. It is only about a half-mile wide, like the others, but it’s nearly four miles long, a slow gentle sweep up to a curve at the east end. The land itself rises slowly from the brown sand beach on the south to the little shell ridge overlooking the back bay. There is a heavy bank of oak trees that begin just beyond the sand and an irregular line of very tall palms. (One comes down almost every September in the storms but there always seem to be plenty left.) Under these trees there are houses, better houses than on Terre Haute, good tight houses, built at least five feet off the ground—hurricane water sweeps right over this island too. There are about twenty-five of these houses, tin-roofed and painted, some of them, in bright pastels. And to the back of the island, in the little curve like a toe on the east end, are the wharves for the boats, Biloxi-luggers, they call them, and a small icehouse. Sometimes the shrimp, or the fish, are cleaned and packed on the island.

The houses are all down at the east end, all in maybe a mile-long strip. The rest of the island has nothing but oaks, their trunks and branches twisted by the wind and the spray; oleanders with branches thick as a man’s arm, and covered with pink and white and red flowers in the spring and summer—only, their smooth, dark pointed leaves are poison. Hibiscus and its midsummer flowers. Wisteria and bougainvillea so thick you have to cut your way through. Chinaberry trees with their tiny whitish purple flowers in March—and the stifling rotting smell of the yellow berries on the ground in December. And in the marshy spots, reeds that rustle and crackle their hollow stems together in the slightest wind, canes six feet high or more in patches where stories say there were painters once.

The painters were killed off, a long time ago. There is nothing on the island, except rabbits and maybe an occasional muskrat that floats over from the mainland on a tangle of grass.

And the dogs. Whole packs of them. Some nights you can see lines of them sitting out on the sand bars at the western end of the island, howling out across the Gulf at the moon. Trappers a couple of miles back in the marsh beyond the bay swear they can hear the dogs there, if the wind is right. There isn’t much to eat, and the animals are always bony: they live on rabbits and birds and whatever they can steal.

When the bitches go in heat, packs roam up and down the whole length of the island, snorting and yipping, rooting under houses, tearing down clothes that are spread to dry across bushes, splashing about in the swampland beyond the back ridge.

They’ve given the island its name. People call it Isle aux Chiens.

T
HE PEOPLE WHO LIVE
on the island now are a mixture of French and Spanish mostly, though an occasional very dark child shows Indian or Negro blood. They are nearly all related, one way or the other. They are all fishermen, too, and they have the fisherman’s dislike of the land: there is not a single large garden on the island, though things grow well. In most of the yards there is only a pepper bush by the door—there’d be no cooking without its small glossy red and green peppers. And on the porches there are ferns in old lube cans. Only one or two of the women have little patches (carefully fenced from the rabbits) of parsley and green onions and chive. And a mirleton vine growing on the fence, some okra and a few tomato plants. There are no flowers except wild ones—with a single exception: Easter lilies. Every house has at least a few bulbs, and the women take great care of them, better care, in a way, than of their children, who have the run of the island, unwatched.

It is an island of fishermen, and when times are bad they turn to trapping. Some of the kids grow up and go into the towns or on to New Orleans, but enough of them stay on the island where their fathers lived and their grandfathers, and back two hundred years. There is not much going on there now, but Isle aux Chiens has had its good times, times when money was easy to get. And all a man had to be was willing and strong and not afraid. Prohibition was one of them.

A man who knew his way through the maze of the bayous could almost name his own price then, as boat after boat of liquor came up from Cuba, unloaded, and slipped in small boats through the bayous to New Orleans.

A young man could make real money. The old men, too crippled with rheumatism to move, sat on porches and watched, enviously, and lied to treasury agents, and lied to the courts and alibied their sons and nephews and cousins free—and made a little money for themselves. Some of these old men, sighing at their own helplessness and their creaking joints, began to remember the stories they’d heard, stories of another time when money was easy to come by—stories of Jean Lafitte and Louis Chighizola and Dominique You. Of pirates and smuggling when the island was first settled. When the deep little harbor inside the curve of the island was crowded with sailing-ships.