The Hard Blue Sky (33 page)

“Yes,” said Father Ryan, “for sure.”

“And then there is Al Landry’s boat, the last one—là-bas,” he pointed, “and he is out taking his new wife for a ride somewhere.”

The priest nodded.

“And you do not ask me to steal a man’s boat while he is gone?”

“No,” Father Ryan said. “No.”

“And you see the other boats, they gone working.”

“I see.”

“But you be cheerful,” Mike said, “I get this fixed.”

Father Ryan stifled a yawn in the heat.

“Why you don’t come back to the house with me? My wife she be proud to have a priest in her house.”

The priest got to his feet slowly, one knee at a time. This was a different man, he thought, from an hour ago. Altogether different. … And he was beginning now to see what was happening. And he wasn’t sure he liked that any better.

Mike slapped one hand to his forehead. “But I have forgot … you must not have any dinner. … How the dogs they must be growling inside you.”

Stanislaus Ryan was a young man, but he felt very tired. “I suppose I am hungry.”

“I got to have my head examined, letting you starve in front of my very eyes.”

Mike got him by one arm and helped him over the rail like a cripple. “Mother Mary,” Mike said, “how I going to talk to myself for doing this.”

“It’s fine,” Father Ryan said. “I’m fine.”

They walked up the path to the house. They did not meet anyone on the way, Father Ryan noticed, though there must be plenty people around.

And all the time Mike was talking. “I go find that Story LeBlanc … sal au pri—excuse,” and he crossed himself. “And I make him tell me why he go and hide so nobody can find him on a Sunday. … And I take my engine apart, I got to fix it … and maybe LeBlanc he take you, if mine don’t go.”

Soon as they got in the front gate, Marie Livaudais came rushing down the steps and got Father Ryan by the other arm. They led him in the house, both talking now. And he had the feeling that had he stopped, they would have just dragged him along and not even noticed.

There was dinner—ready, and not touched. Father Ryan looked at it, scratched his chin again, and kept on wondering.

They got him to the table, urged him to sit down. They pushed the chair persuasively against the back of his knees.

“Now,” Mike shouted, “la neigre, she will feed you good, no?”

Over by the stove his wife said something without turning around.

“And don’t you bring none of the children in here.” Mike yelled out the window: “When we got a priest for dinner you got to eat later.”

There was a murmur and then crying of kids.

“They must be hungry,” Father Ryan said.

“Bunch of cannibals,” Mike scowled. “Not more than two days ago, when we was having shrimp … ”

“Boiled shrimp,” Marie said, “plain cold boiled shrimp.”

“And one of ’em , he can’t stand the sight of another one, and he pick up a shrimp and throw it. And before we got chance to grab anybody, that dish—big, big platter, you can put four duck on it and no spilling over—that dish is all gone and the shrimp they is all over the room.”

“Got on the wall,” Marie said. “Smell.”

Father Ryan sniffed. “I can’t tell,” he said.

Mike patted him gently on the back. “The Father, he is so polite, him!”

“It’s the seminary, for sure,” Marie said. “They teach to be polite in the seminary.”

Stanislaus Ryan opened his mouth, then closed it again.

Mike bent down, staring into his mouth. “You was going to say something, yes? Shut up! the Father, he going to say something.”

“I wasn’t,” Father Ryan said. “Nothing.”

Mike looked disappointed and straightened up again.

A couple of black heads appeared at the window. “Filez d’ici!” Mike roared.

“They must be getting hungry,” the priest suggested.

“Don’t go being sorry for them,” Marie said.

“And you shut up too,” Mike said, “with us waiting for food and getting fainter and fainter.” He waved his hands again.

“Mo’ pere, don’t go being polite, just to save our feelings. …” He opened the armoire that stood in one corner of the kitchen. Down on the bottom, behind the dresses and coats that were hanging there, was a bottle of wine. He took it out, a gallon jug, and held it to the light. “Marie, her cousin’s husband, made it.”

She had the glasses on the table. Mike poured them. Father Ryan tasted carefully.

“Oh …” he said, “orange wine.”

“Shu …” Marie nodded. “My cousin’s husband don’t make nothing but the orange wine.”

“And the best, che’,” Mike said. “Let’s us not go forgetting to say that.”

“How you like it?” Marie asked.

“Very fine.” The wine was strong and very sweet.

“And you have nothing like that back where you come from?” Marie asked.

“In New Orleans?”

“That where you from?”

He nodded.

“You not from Ireland?”

“Marie, you getting mixed up, for sure,” Mike said. “That was the priest before, name of Gillespie.”

“Oh,” Father Ryan said.

“He went and left.” They had found him one morning tossing oyster shells at imaginary cats in the church yard. “Thought it was you,” Marie said. Father Ryan shook his head.

They had dinner while the kids stood outside and watched them, and occasionally squabbled among themselves.

“And do you think you’re going to get that engine fixed this afternoon?”

Mike slapped his forehead. “I have forgot. I am having such a fine time eating dinner with you, it had gone out of my mind entirely.” He jumped to his feet, knocking the table so that the dishes rattled together.

“I’ll come with you,” the priest said.

“But no …” Mike picked up a rocking-chair and carried it to the front porch. “Down at the boat it is hot and there is no reason you should sweat like me. … You sit here, and my wife, she be out to keep you company when she finish cleaning up back there.”

“I could help.”

Mike smiled, sadly, so that the missing-teeth gaps at the sides of his mouth showed. “And what you know about engines?”

“Well, now … ”

“You know about God,” Mike said; “me, I know about engines. … I come get you when I have it fixed.”

He bowed Father Ryan into the rocking-chair and left him.

Stanislaus Ryan put his elbows on the arms of the chair and his chin on his hands, as he watched Mike out of sight. You could hear people laughing and yelling far off, but around the house it was very quiet. Even the children, back in the kitchen, were quiet; they must be getting fed.

There was a telephone on the island somewhere, he remembered. Later on, he would have to use it to tell the housekeeper back at the rectory at Petit Prairie that the CYO would have to meet without him—if the engine didn’t get fixed in time. And he didn’t really think it would.

Marie came out, carrying some sewing in her hands, a bright yellow and red piece of cotton. He looked from her to the spot where the steady, square, plodding back of her husband had disappeared. “Such fine liars,” he muttered.

“Pardon”
she said and cupped a hand around her ear. “But I did not hear, me.”

“It was nothing,” he said. “And I wasn’t talking to you.”

It was nearly six o’clock before the engine was fixed. Mike sent a kid up to tell Father Ryan.

“It sounds right now, no?” Mike asked him.

Father Ryan cocked his head and listened. “You didn’t have a hard time with it.”

“Mother Mary, but I had a time, for sure!”

“You didn’t get dirty,” he pointed out.

“Ah, but I am smart and the Marie she get mad if she got to wash too much. … I take off my clothes.”

“All of them?”

“Down to the underwear … right now my underwear, they are filthy.”

Father Ryan shook his head and got on board.

“I been thinking,” Mike said.

“I know,” the priest said.

“You know what I been thinking?”

“Only maybe,” the priest said.

“It being so late now,” Mike said, “and it ain’t far out the way to Catfish Bay … it wouldn’t take long.”

And the technical charge, Father Ryan thought, what would it be: kidnapping? He had heard of this happening—to doctors, to priests; and there’d been the stories back in the seminary. … But he’d imagined it somehow as more dramatic.

He almost chuckled. Well anyway, he thought, a sense of humor helps. And he could see that he was going to Catfish Bay, like it or not.

For a second he wondered: What would they do if I said no? Would it ever get violent. …

It was a silly idea, he thought, but it wasn’t sinful. There was no reason why he shouldn’t. It was irregular, and maybe it wasn’t done in the best religious spirit, but then what was. … And God would be one to understand. …

And if he said no, there’d be more engine trouble for sure again. And just as sure he wouldn’t be getting home tonight.

If you started looking into people’s motives too closely—well, who would you admit … They’d just as soon keep him here all night. And he had the five-o’clock Mass. If he didn’t turn up, the old boy would be furious, and so would the other assistant. And they’d be as rude to him as they could without sinning. It wouldn’t be very pleasant all together.

“I think we might go by there,” he told Mike.

M
UCH LATER THAT NIGHT,
toward midnight, the
Bozo
came back and docked quietly. There were five or six men on her, and they had the lines in place in a couple of seconds. They left the boat then, walking off their separate ways quickly. The moon had made the white shell paths bright, almost, as daylight.

Mike said: “Quit asking me … and get the god-damn kids outa here. Why ain’t they in bed? They oughta be in bed.”

Marie hissed at the kids, who disappeared. You could hear them scuffling softly in the loft overhead.

“I need a drink, me.”

Marie moved to the armoire.

“No, god damn … I don’t want no wine. … Where you hide the bottle whisky?”

She reached under the sink, behind the boxes of soap powder, and got out the bottle.

“Right there?” he said. “Right out in the open where every kid can get at it. … You losing you mind?”

“Did they find it now? … You tell me did they get any?

He looked at the bottle and grunted. “Full soap powder.”

“Wipe it off,” she said. “Ain’t nobody making you eat it.”

He poured himself a drink. “Quit asking me. …”

“I ain’t said nothing.”

He took a couple of swallows of whisky straight. “There a way for doing things,” he said, “and a way not. We did it wrong. … The priest now, he didn’t want to go. And when we got there, he was in a hurry to get off again. And the candles, they kept going out. And there wasn’t nobody could tell which way they was pointing.”

He put his feet up on the kitchen table. Little bits and pieces of mud crumbled off the soles and scattered on the oilcloth.

“Tell me I’m messing you kitchen,” he said and squinted at her with one eye tight shut, “go on and tell me.”

“You hear me saying anything?”

“Good thing,” he muttered into the glass. “I push you head around back.”

“I ain’t said nothing. … You hear me saying nothing?”

“Jesus God,” he said. “And then the priest, he says, ‘I told you it wouldn’t do no good.’ … If he wasn’t no priest, ordained and in church, I push him over right there and let the gars have a work at him.”

He crossed his feet and a little more dirt fell on the table. “We tried,” he said, “no son of a bitch going to call us not men for trying.”

Overhead the kids giggled softly.

“Ain’t they asleep yet?” he said.

“They all excited for sure,” she told him. She was standing over by the stove, hands on her hips, her bare feet planted far apart. That was the way she did when she expected to stand a long time. “And I expect they are listening.”

“Good!” He banged down his glass on the floor by his chair. “Pour me another drink. … And maybe it learns them to stay out the swamp. And maybe it don’t. … You pour the whisky like an old aunt.” He yanked the bottle away.

She did not answer. She went back to her position in front of the stove. He drank the whisky in short nibbling gulps. The kids were very still, and there wasn’t a thing moving outside.

“And that Eddie …” he shook his head.

He was silent so long that she finally asked: “What about Eddie?”

“I come back, the pit of my belly froze up. Only just now the likker is warming me.”

“What about Eddie?”

“I wouldn’t want to be him,” he said. “Looking at his face from the outside, I wouldn’t be inside him for nothing.” He stared up at the dark uncovered beams of the ceiling, stained almost black by years of cooking under them. “Not for nothing.”

“You go back tomorrow?”

He nodded, very slightly.

“And the shrimp, they are running too. I hear that from Gary Alonzo.”

“Maybe,” Mike said, “I hear the same thing. The other men, let them go out. The Livaudais, they got something got to be done.”

“You want another drink?”

He shook his head. “Can’t have no hangover on me in the morning.”

“Listen,” Marie took a couple of steps toward him, “you going to talk to the kids, no? You going to talk to them?”

“What for?”

“While this is all in their minds, you going to talk to them about not going too far back in there. Like …” she hesitated for a moment, “Henry done.”

“Yea,” he said, “only not now.”

She clucked her tongue. “I wasn’t asking you to do it now. Only sometime.”

“Yes,” he said. “For sure.”

She picked up a rag out of the sink and went over to wipe the fingerprints off the door of the icebox. They were greasy. She sprinkled a little soap powder on the rag and worked at them.

“We go again.”

“You think,” she said still scrubbing away, “he might be living yet?”

“He shoulda know better. He know enough not to go so far he can’t get out. Whyn’t he stay where he knew his way?”

“He wasn’t a stupid kid,” she said.

“He knew better, for sure. … If he stay where he knew.”

‘You think … maybe?”

He just shook his head to answer.

“Quit looking like that,” Eddie said to Belle. “I’m going back, me. First thing in the morning.”