From the Coast

The First Louisiane was in the lists on the last Monday of January.

It had been in the paper before. It had been in the paper when it went, in July, with a photograph of the colours going down Chartres Street; and in September, a paragraph, that it had sailed; and in November, a line, that it had arrived; and every week since, in the column on the inside page where L’Abeille printed what the War Ministry let it know, which was very little, a sentence or two about the regiment of the Grand Duchy being in good spirits and good health somewhere in Flanders. Old Tregre read the sentences out on the wharf every Monday and the men on the wharf nodded and went home.

On the last Monday of January there was a column.

It was headed with the pelican. The paper had a little block of the pelican feeding her young, the regiment’s badge, that it used on Code Day; and it had put the block at the top of the column, and under it, in English and then in French, FIRST LOUISIANE: CASUALTIES REPORTED, and under that the names. A great many names. In alphabetical order, under the companies, with the parish after each.

Old Tregre read them. He did not take his spectacles off. He read them in the voice he read every list in, the voice of the Abernathys and the Ackermans and the prince between the lieutenant and the private, and the men on the wharf stood round him in the grey January noon with their hats in their hands, and the wind came off the lake, cold, and nobody moved.

He was a long time reading. The column went on to the next page.

Lucien listened for one name. He did not hear it. He listened for it all the way through, every company, every parish, Paroisse d’Orléans, Paroisse de Saint-Martin, Paroisse de Lafourche, the Robichaux and the Thibodeaux and the Hébert and the Landry and the Broussard, the names of every street in the camps and every pew in the church on Esplanade; and old Tregre came to the third company, and read it through, all of it, the D’s, Doucet, Dugas, Duhon, and there was no Daigle.

He breathed.

Then old Tregre came to the F’s in the fourth company and read Fontenot, Private Hippolyte, Paroisse d’Orléans, and stopped, and looked along the wharf at the row of camps, and at the widow Fontenot’s camp, the seventh on the right, where the dog was; and went on.

---

There were five from the lake shore.

Old Bazile’s grandson’s cousin from Grand Isle, who had been the only other man in the company who was not sick on the ship. A Tregre, old Tregre’s own great-nephew, whom old Tregre read out in the same voice as all the others without stopping, and then took his spectacles off, after all, and stood with them in his hand for a moment before he put them back on and went on. Two brothers named Landry from the far end of the row, whom Lucien had fished beside on the flats since he was twelve. And Hippolyte Fontenot, who was nineteen, and had lied about it at the Cabildo in June, and whose mother had let him.

Killed. Not wounded; not missing. The column had three headings and old Tregre had read them in order, and the lake shore was under the first.

The men on the wharf did not say anything when he had finished. Old Tregre folded the paper and put it under his arm, and did not say voilà, and they went home along the wharf, one at a time, and nobody looked at the widow Fontenot’s camp as they went past it, and everybody did.

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The dog waited on the gallery.

He saw it every morning after that, going out at four with the lantern, and every noon coming in. The widow Fontenot’s dog, a yellow thing with one ear up and one down, which had barked at the Marie-Ange every morning of Lucien’s life as she went past in the dark. It did not bark now. It lay on the top step of the widow’s gallery with its nose on its paws, facing the shore, the road, the streetcar line on its causeway, where the boy had gone out in July in his armband and not come back; and it watched the road, and did not bark at anything, and the widow did not call it in.

His father looked at it every morning as they went past. He did not say anything. On the fourth morning, going out, in the dark, he took one of the little fish from the bottom of the basket, the ones they kept for the pelican, and leaned out over the gunwale as they went past the widow Fontenot’s camp, and put it on the bottom step, by the water, without stopping the oars.

When they came in at noon it was gone, and the dog was still on the top step, facing the road.

---

The white shrimp had gone in December and the lake was the winter lake.

Grey and hard and choppy, with the wind coming down off the north shore all day, cold enough to see your breath at four in the morning and the spray freezing on the gunwale. They fished for whatever there was, which was not much: a few croakers, a drum, some crabs in the pots off the bayou mouth. They went out at five instead of four because the light came late. They came in at ten with three baskets, or two, or one, and Sostène Arceneaux at the wharf paid what he paid in the winter, which was less, and nobody argued.

He was twenty-one still. He would be twenty-two in March. He had been on the lake every morning since the First Louisiane went down Chartres Street in the rain, and every morning his father had talked to the boat at the end of the wharf, and every morning they had said four words, and every evening his father had mended the net.

He had read the whale twice. Achille was right. It was better the second time.

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Achille’s letter came on the Thursday, the eighth of February.

It came to the camp, the fourth on the left, in the big quick slanting hand. But not on squared paper this time. On a sheet torn out of something, thin, brownish, written on both sides in pencil so small and close that he had to hold it to the window to read it, and stained along one edge with something that had dried, and had a smell that he did not know. Not the river. Not the lake. Something colder.

He read it on the wharf first. He did not know why. He had always read Achille’s letters on the gallery, aloud, to his grandmother at the window and his father on the cane chair. He took this one from the postman at the end of the wharf at noon and stood there with it, by the ice house, with the empty basket at his feet, and opened it, and read it to himself.

Cher Lucien,

We have been in the line. I cannot say where. You know where. You have read the paper, and old Tregre has read it to you, so you know what the paper says, and I will not say it again.

You cannot dig here. I want to tell you that because it is the thing nobody told us. We dug in the sand of the pine woods all summer and the sergeant said that is what they do in France. They do not. Not here. You dig a foot down and it is water. You dig two feet and it is the lake. So you do not dig. You build. You build a wall out of mud, in bags, sandbags they call them though there is no sand, only mud, and you build it as high as a man and as thick as a man, and you live behind it, in the water, and the French live behind theirs, a little way off, across the flat, and the wall is called a breastwork, and it is the only thing between you and the rest of the world.

The French are good. I am sorry to write that but it is true. They have been here three years and we have been here three weeks, and they know it, and we know it, and the English who were here before us know it best of all, and look at us the way the sergeant looked at us in the pine woods.

We went over on the 9th. I am not going to write about it. I have tried four times and torn it up four times. I will tell you when I see you, if I see you, and if I do not see you then it does not matter.

He stopped there, on the wharf. He read that paragraph again.

Then he turned the sheet over.

Hippolyte is dead. And both the Landrys. And old Tregre’s Gustave. I saw Gustave. I will not write about that either. You will have had the list by now. Do not let anybody read it to Madame Fontenot. Let her read it herself, she can read, she taught Hippolyte. Tell her he was not afraid. I do not know if he was afraid. Tell her anyway.

The captain from Baton Rouge is dead too. The one who spoke French like a priest. The lieutenant from Shreveport who spoke no French at all gives the orders now, in English, and nobody repeats them.

And then a paragraph that was not in the same hand. It was Achille’s hand, but it was not his writing; it was smaller, and harder, and it went straight across the page instead of slanting, as though he had pressed down.

They are French over there. You know that. You knew it in June. But you do not know it the way you know it here. At night you can hear them. They talk. They sing. They shout across at us, sometimes, in French, things I will not write, and our boys from the parishes shout back, in our French, and the French laugh at us, at the way we talk, they call it patois, they call us les sauvages, the savages, they ask us across the wire whether we live in trees. And then in the morning they are shooting at us and we are shooting at them, and it is the same language. It is the same language, Lucien. I did not understand that it would be the same language.

And then, at the bottom, in the slanting hand again, as if he had gone back to it after a while:

Tell Monsieur Octave it is wetter than the lake and colder than the lake and flatter than the lake and there are still no shrimp. Tell Mémère to sing. Tell yourself to stay where you are.

Achilles with an s.

---

He stood on the wharf with it for a long time.

Then he folded it, and put it in his coat, and picked up the empty basket, and walked back along the wharf to the pirogue, and paddled home.

---

He read it aloud on the gallery that evening. His grandmother was at the window. His father was on the cane chair with the net.

He read the first page. The breastworks; the mud; the wall as high as a man and as thick as a man; the French being good. He read we went over on the 9th and I will tell you when I see you, and did not read if I see you, and if I do not see you then it does not matter. He read it as if the sentence ended at when I see you. His voice did not change. He had not known it would not.

He read the second page. Hippolyte and the Landrys and Gustave Tregre. He read let her read it herself, she can read, she taught Hippolyte. He read tell her he was not afraid. He did not read I do not know if he was afraid. Tell her anyway.

He came to the paragraph in the other hand. The one that went straight across the page.

He read it. All of it. Les sauvages. Whether we live in trees. It is the same language, Lucien. He read it in the voice he read everything in, and his grandmother at the window did not move, and his father’s hands on the net slowed, the way they slowed for the letters, and went slower, and stopped.

He read the last part. Tell Mémère to sing. He did not read tell yourself to stay where you are. He read the signature.

He folded the letter and sat with it on his knee.

Nobody said anything.

---

His father put the net down.

He put it on his knees, carefully, the needle stuck through the mesh so it would not slip, and looked at the lake, which was dark and grey and choppy under a low winter sky with no moon, and at the lights of the city on the far side of the bayou mouth, and at the widow Fontenot’s camp, the seventh on the right, which had no light in it at all.

Then he said, in his low voice, not to the lake, not to the net, not to the boat. To Lucien.

“Il les entend, la nuit? Les Français?”

He hears them, at night? The French?

Lucien looked at him. His father was looking at him. The pale grey eyes that looked at you as if you were a long way off across the lake were looking at him across the gallery, three feet, and they were not looking at him from a long way off.

“Oui, Papa. Il dit qu’il les entend.”

Yes, Papa. He says he hears them.

His father was quiet for a moment.

“Et ils parlent comme nous-autres?”

And they talk like us?

Lucien thought about it. He thought about the letter, the paragraph in the other hand. They laugh at us, at the way we talk. They call it patois.

“Non, Papa,” he said. “Pas comme nous-autres. Mais il les comprend.”

No, Papa. Not like us. But he understands them.

His father looked at him for a long time. Then he looked back at the lake. Then he picked up the net, and took the needle out of the mesh, and began to mend it again, in the dark, by feel, and did not say anything else.

Behind them, at the window, very quietly, his grandmother began to sing.

Not the first verse. The one about the friend. The one she had sung once, in August, and never again.

J’ai perdu mon ami sans l’avoir mérité.

---

He took the letter to the widow Fontenot’s camp the next morning, before he went out.

Not the letter. Achille had not written to her and Lucien would not have given her his. He took nothing. He went along the planks between the galleries in the dark at half past four, past the Daigles’, where there was a light, past the Robichaux’, to the seventh on the right, where there was not, and the yellow dog on the top step lifted its head and looked at him and did not bark.

He knocked.

The widow Fontenot opened the door. She was dressed. She had not been asleep. She stood in the doorway in the dark with a shawl round her shoulders, a small grey woman of fifty who had taught Hippolyte his letters at the kitchen table and every child on the lake shore their catechism, and she looked at him.

“Achille m’a écrit,” said Lucien. Achille wrote to me. “Il dit qu’Hippolyte avait pas peur.”

He says Hippolyte wasn’t afraid.

She looked at him for a long time in the dark.

She knew. He saw her know. She was a woman who had taught every child on the lake shore to read, and who could read anything, and she read his face at half past four in the morning in the dark the way she would have read a page, and she knew exactly what was in the letter and what was not, and why he had come, and that he did not know any more than she did whether her son had been afraid.

“Merci, Lucien,” she said.

She put her hand out and touched his face. Once. The way you touch a child’s face to see if it has a fever. Then she went in, and closed the door, and the dog on the top step put its nose back on its paws, and watched the road.