The Season

The brown shrimp went out of the lake in June and the white shrimp came in in August, and between them there was the heat.

He had known it all his life. The summer on the lake shore was a long white blaze from June to September, with the lake flat and pale and steaming under it and the air so thick you could have cut it with the netting knife and laid it on the gallery in slabs, and the fish went deep, and the shrimp went thin, and the men of the camps went out at three in the morning instead of four to get the cool, and came in at nine, and lay in the shade of the galleries in the afternoons on the planks with their shirts off and did not move until the evening. It was the season. Every summer was the same summer.

This one was not. He could not have said how. The lake was the same and the heat was the same and the camps were the same, two rows on their stilts with the washing on the galleries; but the camps were quieter. There were nine men gone from the two rows into the First Louisiane, and three more into the Navy at the yard across the river, and the boats under the galleries that they had worked were tied up, or worked by old men, or by boys of fourteen who did not know what they were doing and had to be shouted at across the water.

And his father was the same, and was not.

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They said four words a morning, his father and he.

He had counted once, in July, because he had nothing else to do with the dark between three and the light. Four. His father said allons at the end of the wharf to the boat, which did not count, because it was to the boat. Then on the lake, at the first haul, he said bon or pas bon, depending. And at the end of the morning, looking at the baskets, c’est assez. And sometimes, if Lucien did something with the net that his father would have done differently, his father said non, once, without heat, and Lucien did it differently.

That was the summer. It was the way it had always been. He had been out on the lake with his father since he was seven and they had always said four words a morning and he had never once thought of it as anything but the way it was.

He thought of it now. He thought of it every morning, in the dark, holding the lantern at the end of the wharf while his father talked to the boat, and he thought: if I had gone, he would be saying the four words to nobody.

He did not think it as an argument. He thought it the way you think the time.

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In July there was a squall.

It came off the north shore in the night, at about four, out of a clear sky, the way they did in July, without anything to say it was coming except the stars going out one after another in a line across the north, and the air going cold all at once, and the lake, which had been flat, getting up. They were two miles out on the flats with the trawl down. His father saw the stars go. He said, to the boat, not to Lucien, ah, non, which was two words more than the morning’s allowance, and Lucien had the trawl up before he had finished saying it.

Then it was on them.

It was not long. They never were. Twenty minutes, perhaps, of black and wind and rain coming flat across the water so hard it hurt, and the Marie-Ange lying over on her side with her lee rail under and the lake coming in green over the coaming, and his father at the tiller in the dark, standing, with his legs braced and his face to it, holding her into it, and Lucien on the halyard with his hands burning, getting the sail down a reef at a time while the boat kicked under him like something alive, and neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say and no air to say it with.

It went over. It went on south across the lake towards the city, they could see it go, a wall of black with lightning in it walking away from them over the water, and the stars came back behind it one at a time, and the lake went down.

They sat in the boat, both of them, wet through, with the water swilling round their feet and the reefed sail hanging off the yard.

His father looked at him.

He did not say anything. He looked at Lucien in the starlight, a long look, across the length of the boat, the pale grey eyes that looked at you as if you were a long way off across the lake; and then he looked away, at the sail, and said, to the sail:

“Bon.”

And they bailed, and shook out the reef, and went on fishing.

He thought about that look for a week afterwards. He did not know what was in it. He thought, in the end, that it had been the look his father gave the boat when she had brought them through something, and that his father had not known he was giving it to his son.

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He took Achille’s books back in July.

The parish library was a room at the back of the church on Esplanade, with a priest in it on Tuesdays and Thursdays who was not Père Bossuet and who looked at the two overdue books for a long time and then at Lucien and said, in French, Daigle?, and Lucien said he’s gone with the First Louisiane, mon père, he asked me to bring them back and pay the fine, and the priest looked at the books again, and looked at the card in the front of the French one, the history of the Acadians, which had Achille’s name on it eleven times, in a column, going back six years, and said, there is no fine, and stamped them, and put them on the shelf.

Lucien took the whale out again.

He read it on the gallery in the afternoons, in the shade, lying on the planks, through July and into August, slowly, because it was long and it was in English and his English was the English of the wharf and the streetcar and not the English of a man who wrote a book about a whale. He read it the way his father mended a net. A little each day. He did not understand all of it. He understood the parts about the sea, and the boats, and the men who went out in them and were not sure they would come back, and the part about a man who had lost a leg and could not stop going after the thing that had taken it, and he lay on the gallery in the heat with the book on his chest and thought about Achille saying the whale’s better the second time. You know who’s going to win.

He did not know who was going to win. He thought Achille had been making a joke, and then he thought Achille had not.

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The letters came from a camp in the pine woods.

The First Louisiane had gone north to the pine country near Alexandria, to a camp they had built themselves in July out of the forest, and Achille wrote from it every week. He wrote to his mother, who could read, and to Lucien, and his letters to Lucien came addressed in a big quick slanting hand in French to M. Lucien Prudhomme, la quatrième cabane à gauche, l’embouchure du Bayou Saint-Jean, the fourth camp on the left, the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean, which was the only address the camps had ever had and which the postman understood perfectly.

Lucien read them aloud.

He read them on the gallery in the evening, after supper, to his grandmother at the window and his father on the cane chair with the net across his knees. He had not decided to. The first one came on a Wednesday at the end of July and he had opened it on the gallery and begun to read it to himself, and his grandmother had said through the window, lis-le fort, Lucien, read it out loud, and he had, and after that it was what they did. His grandmother listened with her hands in her lap. His father mended the net. He did not look up, ever. But his hands slowed, Lucien noticed, while the letters were being read, and went quicker again when they were finished.

They have given us rifles, and they are the right rifles, and nobody knows how to use them, least of all the sergeant, who learned on a musket in the year dot and holds it like a fishing pole. We dig. That is all we do. We dig all day in the sand of the pine woods, and fill it in, and dig it again, because somebody in New Westminster has heard that in France they live in holes in the ground and has decided that we had better practise, and the sand here falls in faster than you can dig it out, and the sergeant says that is good practice too.

There is a captain from Baton Rouge who speaks French like a priest and a lieutenant from Shreveport who speaks no French at all and pretends he does, and when the captain gives an order in French the lieutenant repeats it in English very loudly a second later, as though he had thought of it.

Tell Mémère they feed us. Tell her not well.

His grandmother wrote back.

She wrote the answers herself, every week, at the kitchen table over the trap in the floor, with the lamp and the pen and the ink and the blue paper she had kept in a drawer for forty years for letters, in a hand that had been taught to her by the Ursulines in 1844 and had not changed since, very small and very upright and very black. She did not show anybody what she wrote. She folded it and gave it to Lucien to post, and he posted it, and he never read it, and Achille never said in any of his letters what was in it, except once, in August, at the end of a page about a mule:

Thank Mémère for the recipe. The cook says it cannot be done with army bacon. I have told him that Mémère says it can, and he is afraid of her already, from three hundred miles off.

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His grandmother sang the second verse in August.

He had never heard her. All his life she had sung the first verse from the window when the boat came in, à la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener, the same four lines, every day, and stopped, and called down through the floor about the chevrette. She did not sing the rest. He had not known, he understood afterwards, that she knew the rest.

It was a Thursday at the end of August, in the evening. Not when the boat came in. After supper, after the letter, with the lamp lit on the gallery and the lake gone dark and the frogs going in the reeds by the shore. His father was on the cane chair with the net. Lucien was on the step. His grandmother was at the window behind them in the dark.

And she began to sing. Very quietly. Not the first verse; the chorus, the part he had heard other people sing at weddings and at the fais do-do on the shore, and never her.

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

I have loved you for a long time. I will never forget you.

And then a verse he had never heard anybody sing at all.

J’ai perdu mon ami sans l’avoir mérité, pour un bouquet de roses que je lui refusai.

I have lost my friend without having deserved it, for a bunch of roses that I refused him.

His father’s hands stopped on the net.

Lucien had never seen them stop. Not on the net. Not in the evening, on the gallery, with the needle and the twine, in the dark, by feel. They stopped, both of them, in the mesh, and stayed there, and his father sat on the cane chair perfectly still with his hands in the net and his face towards the lake, which was black, and did not move until his mother had finished singing, all of it, every verse, to the end, very quietly, in the dark behind them, at the window, in the voice of a girl born on the river in 1836.

Then she stopped. Nobody said anything.

After a long time his father’s hands began to move again in the net.

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The last letter of the summer came on the seventh of September, from a ship.

It did not say which ship, or where it was going, or where it had been. It said nothing about any of that; there were things, Achille wrote, that you did not put in letters now, not because anybody stopped you but because the captain from Baton Rouge had asked them not to, very politely, in his priest’s French, and they had all agreed. It was short. It had been written on the back of a printed menu, with a pencil.

We are on the water. It is bigger than the lake. Nobody in the company has been on water bigger than a bayou except me and Ti-Paul Bazile’s cousin from Grand Isle, and they are all sick, and I am not, and they hate me.

Tell Monsieur Octave the Atlantic is too far. He was right. Tell him I’m sorry I said the Seine.

Tell Mémère I sang her song on the deck last night and a man from Opelousas knew all the verses and cried.

Tell yourself the whale wins. I’ve been thinking about it.

Your friend, Achilles with an s.

Lucien read it on the gallery. His grandmother listened at the window. His father mended the net.

When it was finished, his father did not say anything. He did not look up. But a little later, when Lucien had folded the letter and put it in the tin box under his bed with the others, and come back out, and sat down on the step, his father put the net down on his knees for a moment, and looked out at the lake, which was black, with the lights of the city on the far side of the bayou mouth and the frogs going in the reeds, and said, to the lake, in his low voice:

“Il a raison. C’est trop loin.”

He’s right. It’s too far.

And picked up the net again.