October

Old Tregre read it on the Monday at noon, and he did not read it in the voice he read the lists in.

He read it in a voice Lucien had not heard him use. It was lower, and slower, and he held the paper further from his spectacles than he usually did, as if it were heavier; and the men on the wharf, who had come in off the lake and tied up and come along the planks to the ice house the way they did every noon, stood round him with their hats in their hands before he had read a word of it, because they had seen his face.

It was on the front of L’Abeille. Both halves. The French page and the English page, the same three paragraphs, with a black line round them, telegraphed from London on the Sunday and set in the type they used for the Grand-Duc’s proclamations on Code Day.

Old Tregre read the English first. He always read the English first when it was from the Crown.

“It is announced with deep regret that His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, Lieutenant, Grenadier Guards, was killed in action in Belgium on the morning of the twenty-first of October.”

Nobody moved.

“The King and Queen have received the news.”

Old Tregre stopped. He looked at the paper. Then he read the third paragraph, and he read it slower than the other two.

“His Majesty desires that no distinction be made in the manner of the announcement, and that the Prince be named in the casualty lists of his regiment in the ordinary place and the ordinary form.”

---

The men on the wharf did not say anything for a long time.

The lake slapped at the pilings under the planks. A gull went over. Somewhere along the row of camps a child was crying and a woman was singing to it. Old Bazile, on the bench by the ice house, had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was holding it in his hand, in his lap, and not putting it back.

Then old Tregre turned the paper over to the inside page, where the lists were, and found the column, and ran his finger down it, slowly, and stopped, and read it out. He did not say why. Nobody asked him to.

“Grenadier Guards. Killed in action, twenty-first October. Aldridge, Lieutenant H. R. Albert Edward Adolphus, Lieutenant, H.R.H. Anstey, Private J.”

He read it in the voice he read the lists in. The same voice he had read the Abernathys of Baltimore in, and the Ackermans of Chicago, and Sœur Marie-Thérèse Fortier of the Ursulines. Aldridge, Lieutenant. Adolphus, Lieutenant. Anstey, Private. The way the King had asked for it.

“Mon Dieu,” said somebody, very quietly.

“Dix-huit ans,” said old Tregre. He took his spectacles off. “It says on the front. He was eighteen.”

---

Lucien walked back along the wharf to the pirogue with the empty basket.

He was doing a sum. He did not want to do it and he did it anyway, walking, the way you count steps on a stair when you are not thinking. He was twenty-one. He had been twenty-one since March. The boy in the casualty return between Lieutenant Aldridge and Private Anstey had been eighteen. Born in June, the paper said, in 1898. That was three years. Three years younger. When the boy was born Lucien had been three, and his mother had been alive, and had held him on her knee at the kitchen table over the trap in the floor and taught him his letters in French. When the boy had been commissioned into the Guards at seventeen, the paper said, in the autumn of last year, Lucien had been twenty and working the trawl with his father on the flats off the bayou mouth. When the boy had been killed on Saturday morning in Belgium, in the rain, probably, it always rained in Belgium, Achille said so, Lucien had been on the lake with his father, holding the lantern at the end of the wharf at four in the morning while his father talked to the boat.

He was the heir. He had been going to be King. King of the Realm, and of the British, and of the five other things the paper always listed and nobody on the wharf could remember. He had been going to be all of them. And he had gone, at eighteen, and been killed with his men in the ordinary way, and been put in the list in the ordinary place.

And Lucien Prudhomme, who was going to be nothing but a fisherman of the camps at the mouth of the Bayou Saint-Jean, was walking along a wharf in the sun with an empty basket.

He did not know what to do with it. He put it down in the pirogue with the basket, and paddled home.

---

His grandmother had heard.

She was at the window when he came in under the gallery. She had seen the men on the wharf with their hats in their hands, he supposed; she saw everything. She did not sing. She looked down at him through the boards as he tied up and said, in French:

“C’est le prince?”

“Oui, Mémère.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said two words. Not about the prince. Not about the King.

“Pauvre mère.”

Poor mother.

And then nothing else at all for the rest of the day.

---

There was a requiem at the cathedral on the Thursday.

The whole city went. Not into the cathedral; it held two thousand and the city was three hundred thousand. Into the Place d’Armes, in front of it, and the streets round it, and the levee behind it, all of them full, standing, in black where they had black and in their good clothes where they did not, from ten in the morning, in the sun, with the doors of the cathedral open so that the people in the square could hear the organ, and could not, and stood there anyway.

Lucien went with his father.

That was the thing he would not have believed on the Monday. His father did not go to the cathedral. His father went to the church on Esplanade at Easter and Christmas because his mother made him, and stood at the back, and left before the end. He did not go into the city if he could help it. He did not stand in crowds. He went out on the lake at four and came in at eleven and sold to Sostène Arceneaux and mended the net and went to bed.

On the Thursday morning at eight he came out of the camp in his good coat, the black one he had been married in and had worn to his wife’s funeral and to nothing since, with his hat brushed, and stood on the gallery, and looked at Lucien, and said:

“Allons.”

To him. Not to the boat.

---

They stood at the back. Not in the square; his father had gone round it, through the crowd, along the side of the cathedral, under the arches of the Cabildo where Achille had stood in the queue in the dark in June, and in through a side door that an old verger was holding open for men who looked as if they would stand at the back, and in, and stood at the back, against the wall, under a window.

The cathedral was full. He had been in it before, for confirmations and a funeral, and he had never seen it full like this, every pew, to the front, and the aisles, and the gallery, and the light coming down through the high windows in long slants onto all of it, and the smell of the incense, and the candles, hundreds, round a black catafalque in the middle of the nave with nothing on it but a flag. The Realm’s. The eagle. And over the eagle, laid on it, folded, the other one, the Grand Duchy’s, the pelican.

In the front pew, on the right, alone, a man in a dark coat with a grey beard and a ribbon across his chest, very upright.

“Le Grand-Duc,” said a fisherman beside them, from the lake shore, very low, to nobody.

Lucien had never seen him. He had seen his portrait in the window of the photographer on Royal Street and his head on the coins and his name on the proclamations old Tregre read on Code Day. He looked at the back of the grey head in the front pew and thought that it was a very ordinary head, and that the man it belonged to had been told on Sunday, the same as everybody, by a telegraph from London, that a boy of eighteen was dead.

The organ began.

He did not understand most of the requiem. It was in Latin, and the Latin he knew was the Latin of the church on Esplanade at Easter, which was not much. He understood the music. It went up into the roof and came down again and filled the cathedral, and the people in the pews bowed their heads, and the people in the square outside, he supposed, stood in the sun and heard a little of it through the open doors and bowed theirs.

His father stood beside him against the wall at the back with his hat in his hands and his head up.

He did not bow it. He stood very straight, in his good black coat, and looked at the catafalque in the middle of the nave with the eagle on it and the pelican folded over the eagle, and his face did nothing at all. It did nothing all the way through. Through the music and the Latin and the incense and the long slow words of the archbishop, which were in French, and which said that a King had given his son as the Realm was being asked to give its sons, and that the Realm should know that it had been asked by a man who knew the price, and that the dead were in the hands of God.

His father did not move.

Then, at the end, when the archbishop had come down from the altar and censed the catafalque, walking round it slowly with the smoke going up, and the choir had sung the last thing, and the whole cathedral had stood, two thousand people, together, with a sound like a wave going up a beach; his father put out his hand, without looking, and found Lucien’s shoulder, and put his hand on it, and left it there.

He did not look at Lucien. He looked at the catafalque. His hand stayed on Lucien’s shoulder, heavy, the hand that talked to the boat, all through the last of it, and through the procession going out down the aisle, and the bells starting in the tower overhead, all of them at once, so loud you felt them in your teeth; and then he took it away, and put his hat on, and went out through the side door the verger was holding, into the sun, and did not say anything, and they walked home along the shore because the streetcars were full.

---

A letter came from Achille on the Saturday.

It had been posted a fortnight before and it said nothing about the prince, because Achille had not known. It said very little about anything. It was written in pencil on squared paper and it said that they were somewhere behind a line, which was all he could say, and that it had rained for nineteen days.

Nineteen. I have counted. It does not rain here the way it rains at home, all at once and then the sun. It rains a little all day and all night and never stops and never gets heavier and never gets lighter, and everything is wet, the bread and the blankets and the letters and the inside of your boots and the inside of your head. The ground is flat. Flatter than the lake. You could stand on a chair and see the end of the world. There are dykes, like the levee, but small, and ditches full of water everywhere, and the farmers talk a language that is not French and is not English and is not anything, and they look at us as though we were another kind of rain.

Some of them talk French. Not our French. Their French. When I talk to them they laugh and then they are kind.

We have not been in the line. We can hear it. At night it is like the storms off the north shore, all the time, a long way off, and the whole sky over there goes pink and white and you can feel it in the ground.

Tell Monsieur Octave it is flatter than the lake and wetter and there are no shrimp. Tell him I asked.

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. Lucien folded it and put it in the tin box under the bed with the others, nine of them now, and came back out.

---

On the Sunday his father went out on the lake.

He never went out on a Sunday. Nobody on the lake shore did, except in a hard season, and this was not a hard season. On Sunday the boats stayed tied under the galleries and the men went to Mass, or did not, and sat on the galleries in the afternoon and talked about the price, and the lake belonged to the pelicans.

At two o’clock in the afternoon his father came out of the camp in his old canvas coat, and went down the steps under the gallery, and got into the Marie-Ange, and cast off.

He did not ask Lucien. He did not look up at the gallery. He stood in the boat and took the oars and rowed her out of the bayou mouth, single-handed, standing, facing forward, pulling the long oars in the slow even way he had, past the end of the last camp and out onto the lake, which was flat and blue and empty in the Sunday afternoon, and when he was a quarter of a mile out he shipped the oars, and did not put the sail up, and did not put the trawl down. He sat down in the stern.

Lucien watched him from the gallery.

He sat there. On the lake, in the boat, alone, with nothing on her, no sail, no net, drifting a little on the breeze, a small black hull on the blue with a man sitting in the stern of it with his hands on his knees. He did not move. He sat there for two hours.

His grandmother was at the window behind Lucien. She watched too. She did not sing.

At four o’clock his father took up the oars again, and rowed back, standing, and came in under the gallery, and tied up, with the knot he always used, without looking, and came up the steps, and went past Lucien on the gallery without saying anything, and went in.

At supper he ate what was put in front of him. Afterwards he sat on the cane chair with the net across his knees and mended it. In and out of the mesh. The needle and the twine.

Lucien sat on the step below him and did not ask.