Laying Up

His father went into the city on the second of May in his good coat, on a Wednesday.

He did not say why. He came in off the lake at ten, earlier than usual, with three baskets, and sold them to Sostène Arceneaux without arguing, which Sostène noticed and remarked on and was not answered; and he went up into the camp and came out again at eleven in the black coat he had been married in and worn to his wife’s funeral and to the requiem for the prince, with his hat brushed, and went along the planks between the galleries to the shore and the streetcar, and was gone all afternoon.

His grandmother watched him go from the window. She did not ask. Lucien did not ask. He mended the net on the gallery in his father’s place, badly, and waited.

His father came back at six. He came along the planks from the shore in the black coat with his hat in his hand, and came up the steps to the gallery, and stood there, and took something out of his coat pocket and held it out.

A brass tag on a string. Round, with a hole in it and a number stamped in it and some letters round the edge. Lucien took it and turned it to the light. DOCK BOARD. PORT OF LA NOUVELLE-ORLÉANS. WHARF LABOUR. And the number.

“Les quais,” said his father. The wharves.

He did not say anything else. He went past Lucien into the camp and came out again in his old canvas coat, and sat down on the cane chair, and took the net off Lucien’s knees, and looked at what Lucien had done to it, and began, without a word, to undo it.

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The river wharves were six miles from the lake.

Lucien knew them, the way everybody in the city knew them: the long sheds along the levee on the river side of the city, a mile of them, two miles, where the ships tied up three deep, cotton and sugar and coffee and bananas, and where the stevedores worked in gangs of twenty with hooks and trucks, loading and unloading, at a pace the men on the lake shore talked about the way they talked about the Gulf in a hurricane. Since the declaration the wharves had worked day and night. The ships were the Realm’s now, grey, with numbers instead of names, and they took on everything the river brought down from the whole of the middle of the continent, wheat and meat and cotton and mules and things in crates that you did not ask about, and they went out down the river to the Gulf and the Atlantic and did not come back for months.

The Dock Board was paying wages nobody on the lake shore had ever heard of. Old Tregre read the figure out on the wharf in March and men laughed.

His father was fifty-five in June. He had worked on the water all his life, on his own boat, for nobody, at his own pace, from four in the morning until he said c’est assez. He had never worked for wages. He had never worked in a gang. He had never taken orders from a man with a whistle.

He went to the river wharves on the Monday at five in the morning, on the first streetcar, in his old canvas coat, with the brass tag on its string round his neck and his lunch in a tin, and he came back at eight at night, and he did not say anything about it, and he ate what was put in front of him, and he sat on the cane chair, and he did not mend the net. He sat with it across his knees and did not mend it, with his hands on it, and looked at the lake, until it was dark. And then he went to bed.

Lucien went out on the lake alone that week.

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He had never worked the Marie-Ange alone. He found out why.

You could not. Not the trawl. You could row her out of the bayou mouth on your own, standing, the way his father had on the Sundays, and you could put the sail up on your own if the wind was light, and you could sail her on your own if you knew her; but you could not work the trawl and the boat at the same time, nobody could, Achille had said it on the step in July. The trawl needed hands and the tiller needed hands and the sheet needed hands and there were two, and when the net came up heavy and swinging and the boat came up into the wind because nobody was at the tiller, there was nothing to do but let her, and lose the haul, and start again.

He did three mornings. He brought in two baskets the first morning and one the second and on the third he lost the trawl over the side when the boat came up into the wind with the net half in, and got it back, by luck, with the boathook, after twenty minutes, and came in at noon with nothing.

Sostène Arceneaux looked at the empty floorboards and did not say anything, which was the first time in Lucien’s life Sostène had not said anything.

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On the Thursday a boy came along the planks.

Ti-Paul Bazile, old Bazile’s grandson, who was fifteen. He came along the planks between the galleries at seven in the evening, while Lucien was on the step and the cane chair was empty, because his father was still at the river, and he stood at the top of the step with his cap in his hands.

“Je peux crewer le bateau,” said Ti-Paul. “Avec Monsieur Octave. Quand tu seras parti.”

I can crew the boat. With Monsieur Octave. When you’ve gone.

Lucien looked at him. Ti-Paul was small and thin and fifteen, and had been in boats since he could walk, and worked his grandfather’s skiff with his uncle, and was too young for the draw by six years, and his face was very red.

“Il te faut demander à lui,” said Lucien. You have to ask him.

Ti-Paul asked him. He waited on the gallery until eight, when Lucien’s father came along the planks from the shore with the brass tag round his neck and his tin in his hand and his face grey with the river, and Ti-Paul stood up and took his cap off again and asked him, in French, all of it, very fast, the way he had rehearsed it, I can crew, Monsieur Octave, I can work the trawl, I’ve worked my grandfather’s since I was ten, I’ll come at four, I’ll come every morning, I’ll take what you give me.

His father stood at the top of the steps and listened to all of it.

Then he put his hand on Ti-Paul’s head. On the top of it, on the boy’s black hair, the way you would put your hand on a child’s head in church.

“Non, Ti-Paul,” he said. “Merci. Non.”

That was all. He took his hand away, and went in.

Ti-Paul stood on the gallery with his cap in his hands and his face red, and looked at Lucien.

“Pourquoi?” Why?

Lucien did not know. He thought he knew. He looked at the empty cane chair, and the net on it that had not been mended all week, and the Marie-Ange under the gallery below them on the dark water, and he thought he knew, and he did not have the words for it, in French or in English or in the French of the kitchen.

“C’est son bateau,” said Lucien, which was not an answer, and Ti-Paul seemed to understand that it was not, and that it was the only one there was, and went home.

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Achille’s letter came on the fifteenth. It had been written on the twenty-second of April.

I saw it. Your number. We get the papers here, weeks old, the Grand Duchy sends them in bundles, and somebody in the fourth company had the supplement and we all looked for our brothers and our cousins and there you were, first page, third column, two-thirds down. I recognised it. Don’t ask me how. I recognised a number.

So you are coming.

I will not tell you not to. It is not up to you now and it was not up to you before. I know what I said on the step. I meant it. I mean this too.

They say the drafts are mixed. They say you will not come to the Louisiane. You will go somewhere they have never heard French, to a regiment from Iowa or Montana, and they will call you something, and you will let them. Let them. It does not matter what they call you. It matters who is next to you.

If you come to this sector I will find you. It is not a big sector. It is the worst one, but it is not big.

Tell Monsieur Octave I am sorry. Tell him I know what it means. Tell him I know about the trawl.

His father did not hear that one. He was at the river. Lucien read it to his grandmother at the window, in the afternoon, and when he got to tell him I know about the trawl his grandmother put her hand up, and he stopped, and she said, ça suffit, that’s enough, and he folded it and put it in the tin box with the others.

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The brown shrimp came in again in May.

They came in from the Gulf the way they came in every year, across the flats off the bayou mouth, thick, in the warm water, and every boat on the lake shore that had a crew went out after them and came in heavy. Lucien watched them go from the gallery, in the dark at four, the lanterns going out of the bayou mouth one after another past the end of the last camp and out onto the black lake, and the sails going up.

On the Saturday his father did not go to the river.

He came out of the camp at four in the morning in his old canvas coat, not with the brass tag round his neck, and went down the steps under the gallery to the end of the wharf, where the lantern was on its post, and bent over the gunwale of the Marie-Ange with his hands on the painter, and began to talk to her. Very low. In French.

Lucien came down after him and held the lantern.

He did not ask. His father did not say. His father talked to the boat for a long time, longer than on Lucien’s birthday, longer than Lucien had ever heard him, low, so that Lucien could not hear the words, only the sound; and then he stepped down into her, onto the thwart and the floorboards, without looking, and put his hand up for the lantern, and Lucien gave it to him, and stepped down after.

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They fished.

It was the best morning of the year. It was better than the morning in June when old Tregre read about the Chesapeake. The shrimp came up in the trawl at the first haul so thick that the net would hardly come over the gunwale, and Lucien had to stand on the thwart and lift with his whole back, and they came out onto the floorboards in a grey and brown heap that jumped and snapped and rained, and his father at the tiller looked at it and said bon, and at the second haul it was the same, and at the third.

The light came. The lake went from black to grey to the colour of milk. The pelican came down out of the milk-coloured sky and landed off the stern with a splash like a man falling off a wharf, and sat there, upright, and looked at them with one eye, and Lucien threw it a fish, and his father watched him do it and did not say anything.

They hauled six times. They had fourteen baskets, which was more than they had ever had.

At eleven his father looked at the baskets, and at the lake, and at the sky, and did not say c’est assez.

He sat at the tiller for a long time and did not say anything at all. The Marie-Ange lay on the water with her sail slack and the trawl in and the baskets full on the floorboards, and the lake round her blue and flat and full of light, and the city a long way off to the south, small, the colour of the water, with the dome of the cathedral.

Then his father put the tiller over, and they ran home.

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They laid her up on the Sunday.

They took the sail off the yard, the old sail the colour of strong coffee, and folded it, the way you fold a flag, along its seams, and carried it up into the camp and put it under his father’s bed. They unstepped the mast, the two of them, lifting it out of its step and lowering it along the length of the boat onto the thwarts, and lashed it. They took out the trawl boards and the net and the oars and the baskets and the lantern and the boathook and the little tin of tar his father kept for the seams, everything, and carried it up onto the gallery.

Then they got her out of the water.

There was a place on the shore at the end of the camps, where the reeds stopped and there was a little beach of shell and mud, where the families hauled their boats up when they had to, for caulking or in a storm. Old Tregre came, and Sostène Arceneaux, and the Robichaux, and Ti-Paul Bazile and his uncle, and two of the old men from the bench by the ice house who could not lift anything and came anyway; and they brought rollers, cypress logs, and laid them on the shell, and the men of the lake shore took the Marie-Ange by her gunwales, all of them, and hauled her up out of the water, onto the rollers, and up the beach, a foot at a time, with old Tregre calling the time, et un, et deux, until she was on the shell above the line of the weed, out of the reach of the water, on her keel, leaning a little on her blocks.

She looked small. Lucien had never seen her out of the water. She looked very small, and very black, and very old.

His father had a canvas. An old one, tarred, from under the camp. He spread it over her himself. He did not let anybody help. He spread it over her from the bow, over the cuddy and the thwarts and the lashed mast, back along her to the stern, and pulled it down over her sides and tied it to the blocks with line, every corner, with the knot he always used.

He came to the stern last. To the name. MARIE-ANGE, in white letters on the black, repainted every Lent.

He stood and looked at it for a moment.

Then he pulled the canvas down over it, and tied it, and the name was gone.

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His grandmother did not sing that day.

She had sung every day of Lucien’s life when the boat came in. The first verse, from the window, so quietly you could only hear it under the gallery. Every day, for twenty-two years, and before that, his father said once, for thirty years before he was born, for his father and his grandfather; and on the days the boat did not go out, in a storm, or on a Sunday, she did not sing, because the boat had not come in.

The boat did not come in on the Sunday.

She sat at the window all day in her black dress and her white cap with her hands in her lap and looked at the lake, where the boats were going out and coming in, other people’s, the Robichaux’ and the Tregres’ and the Bazile skiff with Ti-Paul at the tiller, their sails going up and coming down, and she did not sing.

In the evening his father sat on the cane chair on the gallery with the net across his knees. He mended it. In and out of the mesh, the needle and the twine, in the last of the light, the way he always had. There was nothing to mend it for. He mended it anyway.

Lucien sat on the step below him.

Tomorrow was the twenty-first.