Marie-Ange

His father talked to the boat.

He had always done it. He did it in the dark at four in the morning, at the end of the wharf below the camps at the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean, with the lantern on the post making a small yellow room in the black and the water slapping at the pilings under it, and he did it now, bent over the gunwale with his hands on the painter, very low, in French, the way you would talk to a horse you had had a long time.

“Allons, ma belle. Allons, asteur. On va voir ce que le lac nous a gardé.”

Come on, my beauty. Come on, now. We’ll go and see what the lake has kept for us.

The boat said nothing. She was a lugger, thirty-one feet, broad and low and black-hulled, with one mast and a lug sail the colour of strong coffee and a cuddy forward where you could sleep if you were not tall, and her name was painted on her stern in white letters that his father repainted every Lent: MARIE-ANGE. She had been his grandfather’s and then his father’s, and the name had been put on her in 1894, the year his father married, and his mother had been dead eleven years.

Lucien held the lantern.

He was twenty-one. He had held the lantern at the end of this wharf at four in the morning since he was seven, and he did not need to be told where to hold it, and his father did not tell him. His father did not tell him anything, on the wharf. He talked to the boat. And when he had talked to the boat long enough he stepped down into her, the way he had stepped down into her ten thousand times, without looking, onto the thwart and then the floorboards, and she took his weight and dipped and came back, and he put his hand up for the lantern without turning round, and Lucien gave it to him, and stepped down after.

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They went out under the oars.

There was no wind to speak of, not yet, not in the mouth of the bayou between the camps. The camps stood on either side of them in the dark on their stilts, two rows, wooden, with their galleries over the water and their steps going down to it and their boats tied under them, and here and there a lamp in a window where somebody else was getting up. Old Tregre’s. The Daigles’. The widow Fontenot’s, where the dog was. The dog barked once as they went past, the way it barked every morning as they went past, and stopped.

Lucien rowed. His father sat in the stern with the tiller under his arm and his pipe, not lit, between his teeth, and watched the dark ahead.

They came out of the bayou mouth past the end of the last camp and the lake opened in front of them. You could not see it. You could feel it, the way you can feel the size of a room in the dark: the air changed, and got bigger, and colder, and smelled of salt and weed and a long way, and the water under the boat changed too, from the close slap of the bayou to a long slow lift that came from somewhere out in the black, miles off, and went under them, and went on to the shore.

“Bon,” said his father, to the boat.

They put the sail up. Lucien did it; his father held the tiller. The lug sail went up the mast in the dark with the old sound of the rope through the block, and hung there, and then a breath came off the lake from the north-east, very small, and the sail filled a little, and the Marie-Ange leaned to it, and the water began to talk along her side.

His father took the pipe out of his mouth and put it in his pocket. That meant they were fishing.

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The light came at half past five.

It came the way it always came on the lake in June, from behind them, from the east, from the Rigolets and the Gulf: first a grey line along the bottom of the sky, very thin, and then the sky over it going from black to the colour of a pigeon’s breast, and then the water. The water came last. One moment it was black and the next it was grey, all of it, the whole lake, as far as you could see in every direction, flat and grey and enormous, and then it was white. Not white. The colour of milk in a bowl, with a little blue in it, and the sky the same colour, so that there was no line between them, and the boat hung in the middle of it with her brown sail and her black hull as if she were hanging in nothing.

He never got used to it. He had seen it ten thousand times and he never got used to it. He did not say so to his father. You did not say that sort of thing to his father, and his father did not say it to him, and they had seen it together ten thousand times, and they both looked at it every morning, and neither of them said anything.

Far off to the south, behind them, low on the water, the city. A line of roofs and spires and the dome of the cathedral and the smoke of the morning fires going straight up in the still air, very small, very far, the colour of the water.

They fished.

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They fished the trawl, the little one, a cone of net on two boards that his father had made himself the winter Lucien was twelve, and they fished it the way his father had always fished it, slowly, on the morning breeze, across the flats off the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean where the brown shrimp came in from the Gulf in May and June to feed. Lucien worked the net. His father worked the boat.

It was good. It was the best morning of the season. When they hauled at seven the net came up heavy, and swinging, and when Lucien got it over the gunwale and opened the end of it the shrimp came out onto the floorboards in a heap, grey and brown and alive, jumping, snapping their tails, hundreds of them, a sound like rain on a roof; and with them a crab, and two little fish, and a great deal of weed, and a small flat ray the colour of mud that his father picked up by its tail and looked at for a moment and put back over the side.

“Pas pour nous-autres,” said his father, to the ray. Not for us.

A pelican had come. It was always a pelican. It came down out of the milk-coloured sky from nowhere and landed on the water ten yards off the stern with a great clumsy splash, like a man falling off a wharf, and sat there, very upright, with its enormous beak tucked into its chest, and looked at them with one eye.

Lucien threw it one of the little fish.

His father watched him do it. He did not say anything. He had told Lucien when he was eight that you did not feed a pelican because then it would follow you every morning for the rest of its life, and Lucien had fed one anyway, and it had followed them every morning for three years, and his father had named it, in the end, after a priest they both disliked, and when it stopped coming in the fourth spring his father had been quiet for a week.

The pelican caught the fish in its pouch and swallowed it and looked at Lucien with the other eye.

“Père Bossuet,” said Lucien.

His father’s mouth went in at one corner. He did not look round. He put the tiller over and the Marie-Ange came about, slowly, for the second run.

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They hauled four times and had nine baskets, and at eleven his father looked at the sky and at the water and at the baskets, and said, to the boat, “C’est assez,” that’s enough, and they ran home on the breeze, which had come up now and was blowing steady off the lake, warm, with the sun on their backs.

The camps came up out of the water ahead of them. Two rows of them along the mouth of the bayou, on their stilts, grey wood and green shutters and tin roofs, with washing on the galleries and children on the steps and boats under them, and behind them the shore, and the road along the shore, and the streetcar line on its causeway, and then the trees, and then the city.

Their camp was the fourth on the left going in. His grandfather had built it in 1872 on twelve cypress posts driven into the lake bottom by hand, and it had stood through every storm since, and it was two rooms and a gallery and a kitchen at the back over the water, with a trap in the kitchen floor you could fish through, and a pirogue tied under it for going to the shore.

His grandmother was at the window.

She was always at the window when they came in. She was eighty and could not get down the steps any more without a hand, and she sat at the front window of the camp all morning in her black dress and her white cap with her hands in her lap and watched the lake for the brown sail, and when she saw it she did not wave, and she did not get up, and she did not do anything except begin to sing, very quietly, so that you could only hear it when you were tied up under the gallery.

He heard it now, coming under the gallery with the sail down and his father at the oars. An old voice, high and thin and perfectly steady, from the window above them.

À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener, j’ai trouvé l’eau si belle que je m’y suis baigné.

By the clear fountain, as I went walking, I found the water so lovely that I bathed in it.

She sang it every day. She had sung it every day of his life when the boat came in, the same verse, and then stopped, and called down through the floor, Octave, as-tu du chevrette?, have you got shrimp?, in the old word for them that nobody under seventy used any more, and his father always called back up, Oui, Maman, and that was the only thing his father said to anybody most days until the evening.

“Octave,” said his grandmother, through the floor. “As-tu du chevrette?”

“Oui, Maman.”

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They took the baskets to the wharf at the end of the camps at noon, in the pirogue, three trips, the way they always did, and sold them to Sostène Arceneaux, who bought for the market in the French Quarter and paid in silver and never paid enough, and argued with him, the way they always did, his father saying almost nothing and Sostène saying a great deal, until the price was what it had been going to be.

There were men on the wharf.

More than usual. Fishermen, mostly, from the camps, and two from the boats that came in from the Rigolets, and the old men who sat on the wharf every day on the bench by the ice house with their pipes, and some men Lucien did not know, in collars, from the city, off the streetcar. They were standing in a group at the end of the wharf by the ice house in the sun, close together, the way men stand round a fire, and in the middle of them old Tregre was reading the paper aloud.

He read it aloud because half of them could not read it themselves. He had read L’Abeille aloud on the wharf every day at noon for forty years, the French pages and then the English ones, to the men who could not, slowly, with his finger under the words and his spectacles on the end of his nose, and the men listened and argued and went home. Lucien’s father could not read. He had never minded, much; he had Lucien, and before Lucien he had had Lucien’s mother.

Old Tregre was not arguing. Nobody was arguing. They were standing round him very still and he was reading slowly, and his voice was not the voice he read the price of cotton in.

Lucien stopped at the edge of them with the empty basket in his hand.

“…à huit heures du matin, au large de la côte irlandaise,” read old Tregre. “Le paquebot américain Chesapeake, de la ligne de New York à Liverpool, a été torpillé sans avertissement par un sous-marin de la marine de la République française…”

At eight o’clock in the morning, off the Irish coast. The American liner Chesapeake, of the New York to Liverpool line, was torpedoed without warning by a submarine of the navy of the French Republic.

The men round him did not move.

“…on craint que plus de mille personnes…”

More than a thousand people are feared.

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Lucien looked at his father.

His father was standing beside him on the wharf with his basket, in his old canvas coat with the sleeves rolled, with his hat pushed back, and his face was doing nothing. His father’s face always did nothing. It was a long brown face cut into lines by forty years of sun off water, with pale grey eyes in it that looked at you as if you were a long way off across the lake, and it did nothing now. He stood and listened to old Tregre read.

“…par un sous-marin de la marine de la République française.”

Old Tregre read it again. Nobody had asked him to. He read the line again, slowly, as if he were trying to find out whether it said something else the second time, and it did not.

A man Lucien did not know, one of the men in collars off the streetcar, said something in English, short and hard. Another one said Jesus Christ. One of the old men on the bench by the ice house, the oldest of them, Bazile, who was ninety and had been born before the Grand Duchy had its railway, took his pipe out of his mouth and spat into the lake and said in French, to nobody, the French, and put his pipe back.

Les Français.

Lucien heard it go round. The men on the wharf saying it to each other, low, in French, the fishermen and the old men, all of them, the same two words, the way you would say the name of a relation who had done something you could not believe. Les Français. C’est les Français. And then the men in collars off the streetcar, in English, the French, and looking at the fishermen as they said it, and then away.

He did not know why they looked. Then he did.

He stood on the wharf in the noon sun with the empty basket in his hand, a fisherman of the camps at the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean who had spoken French since before he could walk, who had been baptised in French and confirmed in French and taught his catechism in French by Père Bossuet and his letters in French by his mother at the kitchen table over the trap in the floor, and the men from the city in their collars looked at him for one second and looked away, because a submarine of the navy of the French Republic had sunk an American ship off Ireland that morning, and he was standing on a wharf talking French.

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His father put his basket down.

He did it slowly. He set it down on the planks of the wharf, upright, the way he set everything down, and straightened, and looked at the men from the city, all four of them, one after the other, with his pale grey eyes that looked at you as if you were a long way off.

He did not say anything. He looked at them.

Then he turned round and walked back along the wharf to the steps where the pirogue was tied, and got down into it, and sat, with his hands on his knees, and waited.

Lucien picked up both baskets and followed him.

They paddled back along the row of camps to the fourth on the left. His father did not say anything. Lucien did not say anything. Above them, as they came in under the gallery, his grandmother was still at the window. She had seen the men on the wharf, he supposed; she saw everything from that window. She did not sing. She looked down at them through the floor as they tied up, and said, in her high old steady voice, in the French of a girl born on the river in 1836:

“Octave. Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”

What is it?

His father tied the pirogue to its post. He did it with the knot he always used, without looking. Then he looked up, at the boards of the gallery over his head, through which his mother’s voice had come, and said the longest thing Lucien had heard him say since Christmas.

“Les Français ont coulé un bateau, Maman. Un bateau américain, avec du monde dedans. Plein de monde.”

The French have sunk a boat, Maman. An American boat, with people in it. Full of people.

There was a silence through the floor.

Then his grandmother said, very quietly, the thing she said when somebody on the lake shore had drowned, or a child had died, or the yellow fever had come back to the city, as it had come back the summer his mother died; the thing she had said, Lucien supposed, all her life, for eighty years, at that window.

“Le bon Dieu les garde.”

May the good God keep them.

And then, after a moment, because it was noon and the boat was in, she began to sing again. The same verse. Very quietly.

À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener…

His father stood in the pirogue under the gallery with his hand on the post and listened to her sing it through to the end. Then he climbed the steps to the camp.

Lucien stayed in the pirogue a while longer. Out on the lake, on the water, which was blue now with the noon on it and full of small white waves under the wind, the pelican was sitting where they had left it, very upright, looking at the camps with one eye.