Chapter 7

They put us in a church hall in Lake Charles, with Red Cross cots in rows and a smell of wet clothes and coffee.

A lady handed me a cup with milk in it, and I held it till it got cold, because I'd forgotten what you do with one.

Mama came down the row that first afternoon in her black dress, sixty-one years old, with her rosary wound on her fist. She went to Remy first. She took his face in both hands and said mon bébé, mon bébé, and it was some time before she got to me.

Remy told her. He told it sitting up with his arm strapped, and he told it well. He told it to the priest after that, and the Red Cross lady, and a man from the American Press. He was alive because of his big brother.

He told all of it but one hand, and he told it looking at everybody in that hall but me.

Mama took my bandaged hand in both of hers and kissed it.

"Look at this poor hand," she said. "Right on top of that old oyster shell."

Odile was two cots down, in a green dress some lady had given her. She lifted her head.

On the back wall they tacked up the lists, typed, the living on one side and the dead on the other, and they added to them twice a day. People stood there reading with one finger.

I read them Saturday.

Placide Hebert. Zelie Hebert. Two children named Hebert, with their ages.

They finally said four hundred and sixteen at least, and anybody from the parish will tell you more. The ones nobody could put a name to, they buried together there in Lake Charles.

I'd looked at those swells with a pint on my knee and said kiss Zelie for me. I never told anybody that until now.

That night I was sitting on the back steps of the hall, and she came out with two paper cups of coffee and gave me one. She sat down a step above me.

"I know who let go," she said. "And I know who held on."

"So do I."

"I'd go with you, Alcide. Wherever. I'd mean it, too."

I drank some of the coffee.

"Your mother says an oyster shell."

"I heard her."

"You told me a cable."

"I told Papa a crab trap."

She waited. She could always wait.

So I told her. I was fifteen and Remy was eleven. He took Papa's shotgun out after coots where he had no business, got both barrels packed with mud, hung it back on the pegs and said nothing.

I took it out on the marsh that Saturday with him tagging along, and it let go in my hand. I sank what was left of it in the bayou, told Papa I'd lost it off the boat, and took the belt for that.

I tied up the hand myself out there with Remy watching, and he smiled at me.

"Why would you lie for that?"

"Papa would have killed him."

She looked at the bandage. "Sixteen years," she said.

"I pick up what he breaks, cher. I've done it since he could walk. You told me so yourself. I get the glue."

She saw where it was going. I watched her see it. She set her cup down on the step.

"I'm not a plate, Alcide."

"No," I said. "A plate doesn't get a say. You had one."

She took that with her chin up. I'll give her that, too.

"And in that tree you told me you wouldn't tell."

"I wouldn't have."

"I know it. You'd have kept it for me the rest of our lives, and laid down next to it every night, and been good at it." I turned the cup in my good hand. "I can't lie down next to that."

Somebody's baby was crying inside. She listened to it for a while.

"You minded, then," she said. "You finally minded something."

"All night," I said.

She nodded, and she picked up her cup and finished it. That Monday she went to her sister Noelie's in Sulphur, in a dress that wasn't hers.

In the middle of July the company had a job for me out of Morgan City, starting Monday. I borrowed a truck and drove down to the Creole ridge first, for no reason I could have told you.

The road was back, mostly. The smell hadn't left.

What was left of my house lay under that oak in a pile, gray with dried mud. Out in front of it stood the iron bed. It had dropped through when the floor went, and it stood on its four legs with nothing on it, like somebody had set it out to air.

The yellow dog came out from under it.

He was all ribs. I don't know how he got there or what he'd been eating, and I don't want to. He looked at me a good while. I opened the truck door, and he thought it over and got in.

Nobody had claimed him, so I did.

I heard a car on the shells. It was my aunt's Plymouth. I'd told Mama I would stop by the ridge on my way, which was the same as telling Remy.

He got out and came across the mud in somebody else's shoes, with his arm in a sling, and he stopped on the far side of the bed.

We stood there with it between us. Neither one of us looked at it. That took some doing.

He talked about the weather. He talked about who'd been found and who was rebuilding. I'd never known him to run out.

"Mama wants you to have the land," he said. "All of it, the home place. She tells everybody. I told her it's right."

"Keep it."

"It'll come back, Cide. Two, three years, they say, for the salt."

"I'm going to Morgan City."

"Well," he said. He looked at my hand, where it was healing. He looked at me.

And he started to smile. I don't think he knew. It was just what his face did when he ran out of road. The corners began to go up, and the little jump started at his eye.

"You can quit that," I said. "I saw."

I didn't say it hard. I said it the way you'd tell a man his truck door was open.

It stopped about halfway.

He tried to bring it on. I stood there and watched him try. It hung there a second and then it let go, and there was just my brother's face, twenty-seven years old, with nothing on it. He looked down at the mud.

I've seen him since, at Mama's funeral and one or two Christmases. He smiles at everybody. He looks at my shoes.

I got in the truck with the dog.

In twenty-seven years it was the first thing of his I ever broke, and I did not go get the glue.