Achille

Achille was first in the queue.

Lucien knew he would be, and went anyway, on the Thursday morning at five, in the dark, along the shore on foot because the first streetcar was not until six, and in past the old fort and down through the streets of the Quarter, which were black and wet and empty and smelled of the river and of coffee from the roasters on Decatur Street, to the Place d’Armes. He went to see. He told himself he went to see.

There was a queue round the Cabildo.

It went round the corner of the old building, under the arches, along the side of the cathedral, and down Chartres Street as far as he could see in the dark, two and three deep, men, hundreds of them, standing, smoking, talking low, in work clothes and good clothes and the clothes they had slept in, and at the front of it, at the door under the arch, where a lamp hung and a soldier stood with a rifle and a sheet of paper had been pinned to the wood, a small dark man of twenty-two with hair that would not lie down, leaning against the door frame with his arms folded and his cap on the back of his head, laughing at something the soldier had said.

He had been there, he told Lucien afterwards, since two.

“Mais pourquoi deux heures?”

“Because Ti-Jean Robichaux said he’d be there at three,” said Achille, “and I wasn’t having a Robichaux put his name down in front of a Daigle in the regiment’s book for the rest of the history of the world.”

Ti-Jean Robichaux was fourth. He waved at them from the queue. He was the motorman’s nephew and he had a wooden leg from a sugar mill accident at fourteen, and he had come anyway, and he was standing in the queue in the dark on his wooden leg with his cap on straight, very upright, the way a man stands who has decided not to be sent home.

Lucien stood beside the queue in the dark by the arch and looked at it.

---

They opened the door at seven.

A sergeant came out. A big grey man with a moustache and the old uniform of the militia, blue, with the pelican on the collar badge, and he stood under the lamp and looked at the queue going round the Cabildo and down Chartres Street out of sight, and said something in French under his breath that Lucien would not have said in front of his grandmother, and then in English, loudly, to all of them:

“One at a time. Name, age, parish, trade. If you can read, read the sheet. If you can’t, I’ll read it to you. If you’re under eighteen go home, and if you’re over forty go home, and if you’ve got one leg, Ti-Jean, go home.”

The queue laughed.

“Et toi?” said the sergeant to Achille, at the front. “T’es qui?”

And you? Who are you?

“Achille Daigle. Vingt-deux ans. Paroisse d’Orléans. Pêcheur.”

Achille Daigle. Twenty-two. Orleans parish. Fisherman.

The sergeant looked at him for a moment. Then he jerked his head at the door, and Achille went in, and the door closed behind him, and the sergeant looked at the next man, and the next man said his name.

Lucien stood by the arch for an hour. He watched the queue go in one at a time. He watched the sun come up over the river behind the cathedral and the pigeons come down onto the Place d’Armes and the first streetcars go past on Decatur Street full of people looking out of the windows at the queue. He watched Achille come out of the door at a quarter to eight with a piece of card in his hand and a face like a lamp.

Achille saw him by the arch. He came straight to him, through the queue, and held up the card.

It said, in a clerk’s hand, in English, with a number in the corner: Daigle, Achilles. Private. 1st Louisiane.

“Achilles,” said Achille. “Avec un s. Like the Greek.” He looked at it with enormous satisfaction. “They’ve given me a hero’s name by mistake. I’m going to keep it.”

---

The regiment was made up in a fortnight.

Lucien watched it happen. Everybody on the lake shore watched it happen. It was the old militia regiment of the Grand Duchy, the First Louisiane, which had paraded on Code Day every year for as long as anybody could remember in its blue with the pelican on the colours and had not fired a shot in anger since the river in 1863, and it had been six hundred men in peace, most of them clerks and shopkeepers who liked the band; and in a fortnight it was three thousand. Volunteers. From every parish. From the bayous and the prairies and the sugar country and the city, cadiens and city men and men from the river and the north, in their own clothes with an armband on the sleeve until the uniforms came, drilling in the Place d’Armes in front of the cathedral every morning at six while the city went past on its way to work and stopped to watch.

They drilled in French. That was what everybody noticed. The sergeant with the grey moustache stood in front of three thousand men in the Place d’Armes and shouted at them in French, and they turned and marched and halted in French, à droite, à gauche, halte, and the people of the city stood along the railings round the square and watched a regiment of the Realm go to war against France in French, and some of them laughed, and some of them cried, and some of them did both.

The men in collars from the streetcar did not come to watch. Or if they did, Lucien did not see them.

---

Achille’s mother said nothing.

She was a thin dark silent woman on the gallery of the Daigles’ camp, three along, who had lost her husband to the lake when Achille was four and had not said a great deal since, and she sat on the gallery in the evenings that fortnight while Achille came and went in his armband, and did not say anything to him, and did not cry where anybody could see her, and every evening when he came in she put his supper in front of him and stood behind his chair while he ate it, with her hand on the back of the chair, not on him.

His uncle said a great deal.

His uncle, Achille’s father’s brother, whose boat Achille had worked since he was twelve and hated, stood on the gallery of the Daigles’ camp the night Achille came home with his card and said, loudly, so that the whole row of camps could hear him, that his nephew was a fool, and that the war was the Englishmen’s and the Prussians’ and the moneymen’s in New Westminster and nothing to do with honest men on the lake, and that it was a war against people who spoke the same language as the Daigles had spoken for two hundred years, and that if the boy wanted to drown he could drown in the lake like his father and save the government the fare; and Achille stood on the gallery and let him say it all, and when he had finished said, Oncle, you said I was a fool when I learned to read, too, and went in.

His uncle stood on the gallery for a long time after that. Then he went in too.

---

Achille gave him the books on the Sunday.

Two of them, from the parish library at the church on Esplanade, which Achille had had out since February and had read twice, and which were overdue. He came along the planks between the galleries in the evening with them under his arm and held them out.

“You’ll take them back for me.”

Lucien took them. He looked at them. One was in French, a history of the Acadians, old, with the spine coming off. The other was in English, a novel, a sea novel, about a ship and a whale, with a picture on the cover of a man with one leg.

“You’ve read them twice.”

“I’ve read them twice.” Achille sat down on the step beside him. “The whale’s better the second time. You know who’s going to win.”

They sat on the step. The lake was going gold. The Marie-Ange was tied under the gallery below them with her sail furled on the yard, and his father was in the cuddy, mending something, they could hear him moving about down there and talking to the boat.

“He hasn’t said anything,” said Achille.

“He never says anything.”

“I know. That’s why I’m saying it.” Achille looked at the boat. “He’d have nobody to crew. If you went. He’s fifty-four. He can’t work the trawl on his own and the boat at the same time, nobody can. He’d have to take a boy, and there aren’t any boys, they’re all in the Place d’Armes shouting à droite.” He picked a splinter off the step. “So you’re not going. And it’s correct. I told you it’s correct. I meant it.”

Lucien did not say anything.

“Somebody has to stay and catch the chevrette,” said Achille, in Lucien’s grandmother’s old word, and grinned, “or the whole Grand Duchy will starve while we’re winning.”

---

The First Louisiane went on the Tuesday.

They marched from the Place d’Armes at nine in the morning, in the rain, in their new uniforms, which had come on the Saturday and fitted nobody, down Chartres Street and along Canal to the station, three thousand of them, with the colours at the front, the old silk with the pelican feeding her young from her own breast, and the band, playing.

It played something Lucien knew and did not know. It took him a block to understand what it was. It was the old air the band played every Code Day, the slow one, the one that the old people called the Grand Duchy’s march and that was really only an old French tune from before the sale, the kind of tune his grandmother sang at the window; and the bandmaster had put it into a new key, a brighter one, quicker, a march, so that three thousand men could step to it. It was the same tune. It was not the same.

The whole city was in the street. On the pavements, on the galleries, on the iron balconies of the Quarter, with flags, the Realm’s and the Grand Duchy’s both, the eagle and the pelican, and handkerchiefs, and the rain coming down on all of it, and nobody went indoors.

Lucien stood at the corner of Chartres and Canal. He had come in on the streetcar alone. His father had gone out on the lake at four as he always did, and had not said anything about it, and had not asked Lucien to come; and Lucien had stood on the wharf at four in the dark with the lantern and watched him row out of the bayou mouth on his own, standing in the boat, pulling the oars standing up, facing forward, the way you rowed a lugger single-handed, and had not got in.

Achille went past in the third company. Lucien saw him. He was in the front rank, on the outside, small and dark and quick under a cap too big for him, with his rifle on his shoulder at the wrong angle, and the rain running off the peak of the cap, and he was singing. He did not know the words; there were no words; he was singing the tune, the old air in its new key, at the top of his voice, out of tune, and laughing.

He saw Lucien at the corner. He did not stop singing. He lifted his free hand off the stock of his rifle and pointed at Lucien, once, hard, and then went past, and the company went past behind him, and the next company, and the band, and the colours with the pelican on them, and Lucien stood at the corner of Chartres and Canal in the rain with Achille’s two overdue library books in his coat and watched them go.

---

He went to the station.

He had not meant to. He followed them. Everybody did; the whole street turned and followed the regiment along Canal Street to the station, a river of people under umbrellas, and in the station yard the regiment broke up into companies and went along the platforms to the trains, long trains, twenty cars each, and the people were held back by the police at the gates, and pressed against the railings, and called names.

He found the third company’s train. He found the car. He walked along the outside of the railing beside it, looking up at the windows, which were full of faces under caps, laughing and shouting and leaning out, until one of the windows was let down on its leather strap with a bang and a head came out of it, small and dark, with the cap gone and the hair standing up.

“Lucien!”

He went to the railing under the window.

Achille leaned out over him. The rain was coming down on both of them. Behind Achille, in the car, men were singing, and somebody had a mouth organ, and the whole train smelled of wet wool and tobacco and the river.

“The books,” said Achille.

“I’ll take them back.”

“Pay the fine. I’ll owe you.” Achille leaned further out, so far that a man behind him grabbed his belt. “Listen. Listen to me. Tell Monsieur Octave.”

“Tell him what?”

“Tell him to bring the boat,” said Achille. “To France. When I’ve won. Tell him I’ll want shrimp. Tell him I’ll want them done the way Mémère does them, with the bay leaf. Tell him to sail the Marie-Ange over the whole Atlantic and up the Seine to Paris and tie her up under the Eiffel Tower and I’ll be there on the bank with a basket.”

The train jerked. All along the platform the cars banged together, one after another, and the train began to move, very slowly, and the people at the railings shouted, all at once, and the men at the windows shouted back.

“Tell him!” shouted Achille.

“He’ll say it’s too far!”

“Tell him anyway!”

The train was moving faster. Lucien walked beside it along the railing, and then he was running, and Achille was leaning out of the window with the man behind him holding his belt, and he was laughing, and he was shouting something else that Lucien could not hear over the train and the crowd and the rain, and then the railing ended, at the end of the platform, and Lucien stopped, and the car went on, and the window went on, and the small dark head with its hair standing up went on, out of the station, into the rain, getting smaller.

He stood at the end of the railing until the last car had gone.

---

He told his father that evening, on the gallery, while his father mended the net. He told him the whole thing. The Seine and the Eiffel Tower and the bay leaf and the basket.

His father did not look up from the net.

When Lucien had finished, his father went on mending for a long time, in and out of the mesh, the needle and the twine, in the last of the light. Then he said, to the net, without looking up:

“C’est trop loin.”

It’s too far.

And then, after another long time, still not looking up, in a voice so low that Lucien would not have heard it if he had not been sitting on the step at his father’s feet:

“Mais je ferais les chevrettes avec la feuille de laurier.”

But I would do the shrimp with the bay leaf.