“And you didn’t know whether the Rangers had come by or not?”
“That wasn’t it. For a long time I couldn’t remember anything. All I knew was that something was terribly wrong.”
“Had the Rangers gone by during the night?” asks my mother, smiling and confident that I had played a creditable role.
“Well no, but that’s not—”
“What happened to them?”
“They got cut off.”
“You mean they were all killed?”
“There wasn’t much left to them in the first place.”
“What a terrible thing. We’ll never know what you boys went through. But at least your conscience was clear.”
“It was not my conscience that bothered me. What I am trying to tell you is that nothing seemed worth doing except something I couldn’t even remember. If somebody had come up to me and said: if you will forget your preoccupation for forty minutes and get to work, I can assure you that you will find the cure of cancer and compose the greatest of all symphonies — I wouldn’t have been interested. Do you know why? Because it wasn’t good enough for me.”
“That’s selfish.”
“I know.”
“I’ll tell you one thing. If they put me up there and said, Anna, you hold your ground and start shooting, you know what I would do?”
“What?”
“I’d be long gone for the rear.”
I summon up the vision of my mother in headlong retreat before the Chinese and I have to laugh.
“We’ll never know what it was like though,” Mother adds, but she is not paying much attention, to tell the truth. I really have to laugh at her. She kneads a pink cube so the fish can smell it. “You know what, Jack?” Her eyes brim with fondness, a fondness carefully guarded against the personal, the heartfelt, a fondness deliberately rendered trite. “It’s funny you should mention that. Believe it or not, Roy and I were talking the other day and Roy, not me, said you would be wonderful in something like that.”
“Like what?”
“Cancer research.”
“Oh.”
Fishing is poor. The egret pumps himself up into the air and rows by so close I can hear the gristle creak in his wings.
AFTER BREAKFAST THERE is a commotion about Mass. The Smiths, except Lonnie, would never dream of speaking of religion — raising the subject provokes in them the acutest embarrassment: eyes are averted, throats are cleared, and there occurs a murmuring for a minute or two until the subject can be changed. But I have heard them argue forty five minutes about the mechanics of going to Mass and with all the ardor of relief, as if in debating the merits of the nine o’clock Mass in Biloxi as against the ten thirty in Bay St Louis they were indeed discussing religion and who can say they weren’t? But perhaps they are right: certainly if they spoke to me of God, I would jump in the bayou.
I suggest to Roy Smith, who has just returned from the Rigolets, that Sharon and I stay home and mind Jean-Paul. “Oh no,” says my mother under drooping lids. “Jean-Paul can go. Well all go. Sharon’s going too, aren’t you, Sharon?” Sharon laughs and says she will. They’ve been talking together.
The church, an old one in the rear of Biloxi, looks like a post office. It is an official-looking place. The steps are trodden into scallops; the brass rail and doorplate are worn bright as gold from hard use. We arrive early so Lonnie can be rolled to a special place next to a column. By the time Mass begins we are packed in like sardines. A woman comes up the aisle, leans over and looks down our pew. She gives me an especially hard look. I do not budge. It is like the subway. Roy Smith, who got home just in time to change to a clean perforated shirt, gives up his seat to a little girl and kneels in the aisle with several other men, kneels on one knee like a tackle, elbow propped on his upright knee, hands clasped sideways. His face is dark with blood, his breath whistles in his nose as he studies the chips in the terrazzo floor.
Sharon is good: she has a sweet catholic wonder peculiar to a certain type of Protestant girl — once she is put at her ease by the heroic unreligiousness of the Smiths (what are they doing here? she thinks); she gazes about yellow-eyed. (She thinks: how odd they all are, and him too — all that commotion about getting here and now that they are here, it is as if it were over before it began — each has lapsed into his own blank-eyed vacancy and the priest has turned his back.)
When the bell rings for communion, Roy gets heavily to his feet and pilots Lonnie to the end of the rail. All I can see of Lonnie is a weaving tuft of red hair. When the priest comes to him, Roy holds a hand against Lonnie’s face to steady him. He does this in a frowning perfunctory way, eyes light as an eagle’s.
THE WOMEN ARE IN the kitchen, my mother cleaning red-fish and Sharon sitting at a window with a lapful of snap-beans. The board sash opens out over the swamp where a flock of redwings rattle like gourds and ride down the cattails, wings sprung out to show their scarlet epaulets. Jean-Paul swings over the floor, swiveling around on his fat hip, his sharklike flesh whispering over the rough boards, and puts his finger into the cracks to get at the lapping water. There comes to me on the porch the voices of the morning, the quarreling late eleven o’clock sound of the redwings and the talk of the women, easy in its silences, come together, not in their likenesses (for how different they are: Sharon’s studied upcountry exclamations—“I surely didn’t know people ate crawfish!”—by which she means that in Eufala only Negroes eat crawfish; and my mother’s steady catarrhal hum—“If Roy wants bisque this year, he’d better buy it — do you know how long it takes to make bisque?”) but come together rather in their womanness and under the easy dispensation of the kitchen.
The children are skiing with Roy. The blue boat rides up and down the bayou, opening the black water like a knife. The gear piled at the end of the dock, yellow nylon rope and crimson lifebelt, makes aching phosphor colors in the sunlight.
Lonnie finds me and comes bumping his chair into my cot. On Sundays he wears his suit and his snapbrim felt hat. He has taken off his coat but his tie is still knotted tightly and fastened by a chain-and-bar clasp. When Lonnie gets dressed up, he looks like a little redneck come to a wedding.
“Do you want to renew your subscriptions?”
“I might. How many points do you have?”
“A hundred and fourteen.”
“Doesn’t that make you first?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t mean I’ll stay first.”
“How much?”
“Twelve dollars, but you don’t have to renew.”
The clouds roll up from Chandeleur Island. They hardly seem to move, but their shadows come racing across the grass like a dark wind. Lonnie has trouble looking at me. He tries to even his eyes with mine and this sets his head weaving. I sit up.
Lonnie takes the money in his pronged fingers and sets about putting it into his wallet, a bulky affair with an album of plastic envelopes filled with holy cards.
“What is first prize this year?”
“A Zenith Trans-World.”
“But you have a radio.”
“Standard band.” Lonnie gazes at me. The blue stare holds converse, has its sentences and periods. “If I get the Zenith, I won’t miss television so much.”