Letters

His grandmother’s letters came on Thursdays.

They came at mail call, after supper, when the corporal with the voice like a mule stood on the step of the company office with a sack and called the names off the envelopes, badly, and men went up for them one at a time and came back with their faces doing something. Proud-home, the corporal called, every Thursday, and Lucien went up, and the corporal gave him the envelope without looking at it, and he came back to hut forty-one with it in his hand and did not open it until he was on his bunk.

They were opened already. Along the top, neatly, with a knife. He had known they would be. He did not mind, much; he thought of Captain Pruett in the hut by the water tower with his spectacles on his nose, reading his grandmother’s French with his finger under the line, saying extraordinary, and it was almost funny.

The envelopes were the blue ones. The good paper, from the shop on Royal Street that had closed in 1890. She had given him most of it, and kept enough back to answer. He had not thought of that, on the morning at the kitchen table: that she had counted it out, how much for him and how much for her, the way his father counted the baskets.

Her hand was the hand the Ursulines had taught her in 1844, small and upright and joined up, with long tails on the letters that went below the line and loops on the ones that went above it, very even, the hand of a girl who had been beaten for a blot. And the French in it was not the French the Ursulines had taught her. It was theirs. She wrote it the way it was said, the way she said it, with no book to tell her how, so that the same word was spelled two ways on the same page and asteur was asteur and once astheure, because nobody had ever agreed what it was on paper and she was not going to wait for them to.

He read them on his bunk. Then he read them again. Then he lay on his back with the blue paper on his chest and read them a third time, holding it up to the light of the lamp over the stove, and heard her voice saying it, at the window, in her old black dress, with the lake under the floor.

---

The white shrimp came in on the twelfth, she wrote, at the end of August. The Robichaux had forty baskets in the first week and Sostène Arceneaux had thirty and old Tregre says the price is the best since the Spanish war. Everybody has gone out every morning. I watch them go. I hear them go, at four, the oars and the sails and the men calling across the water to each other the way they do, and then I hear them come in at nine, and I count them, and there is one fewer, and I know it, and I count them again anyway.

We had a blow on the tenth. Not a bad one. It came from the north in the night and it took the canvas off the boat at one corner and lifted it like a sail. I heard it go in the dark. In the morning Ti-Paul Bazile was down there on the shell before it was light with his uncle and they tied it down again, all four corners, with new rope, and Ti-Paul tarred the seam on the starboard side where the sun has opened it. Nobody asked him to. He goes down most evenings now and looks at it. He does not touch it. He looks at it and goes home.

The widow Fontenot’s dog sleeps on her step now and not on the planks. She says it has given up waiting for the streetcar. She does not say anything else and I do not ask her.

Your father is at the river. He goes at five and comes back at eight. His hands are bad. The hook does something to them that the trawl rope did not. He soaks them in the evening in a basin of salt water from the lake and does not say anything about it and I do not say anything about it either.

And then, at the bottom, under her name, the line that was at the bottom of every letter. He had known it would be there before he got to it, the way he had known the knife would have been along the top.

Ton père dit que le bateau est sec.

Your father says the boat is dry.

---

That was the line.

It was at the bottom of every one, under her name, in the same small upright hand, and it was never more than a line. He came to read the letters for it. He came to read the whole letter fast, the first time, his eyes going down the blue paper over the white shrimp and the blow and the widow Fontenot’s dog, to get to the line at the bottom; and then go back, and read the rest properly, the second time, slowly.

Ton père dit que le bateau est sec.

Ton père dit que les blanches sont bonnes cette année. Your father says the white shrimp are good this year.

Ton père dit que tu dois manger. Your father says you must eat.

He did not know how she got them. He thought about it, on his bunk. He could see it: his grandmother at the kitchen table after supper with the blue paper and the pen with the steel nib and the little bottle, writing, and his father on the cane chair at the window with his hands in the basin, and at the end, when she had signed her name, her looking up over her spectacles and saying et toi?, and you? And his father not answering for a long time. And then saying one thing, to the lake, out of the window, the way he said things.

He wondered whether she asked him every time or whether he told her without being asked. He wondered whether there were evenings when his father said nothing at all, and what she wrote then. He thought she would write something. He thought she would make it up, sooner than send a letter with no line at the bottom, and he did not know whether he wanted to know.

---

The letter that answered the General came on the sixth of September.

He had not known whether to leave the last line in. Il a l’air de Papa. He had left it. And he had thought about it all the next week, at the range and on the parade ground and in the bays of the fire trench on the edge of the prairie, about his grandmother reading it out at the window, and about what his father’s face had done, or not done, when she got to it.

I read your letter to your father, she wrote. All of it, the General and the boots and the sergeant and the island. I read him the last line. He did not say anything. He looked at the lake. Then he went to bed.

At eleven o’clock he came out again and asked me to read it to him again. Only the part about the General. The fire and the little girls and the boy out of the window. I read it again. He listened with his eyes shut. Then he said a thing and went back to bed, and I have written it down for you the way he said it, and I do not know what it means either.

And at the bottom, under her name:

Ton père dit: celui-là, il connaît.

Your father says: that one, he knows.

He lay on his bunk with the letter on his chest for a long time, with the stove ticking and the men round him playing cards and Kerrigan losing and saying so, and looked at the slats of the bunk above.

He knew what his father meant. He did not know how he knew. He thought of the kitchen table over the trap in the floor, at midnight, and his father at it in the dark, not moving, the winter after the yellow fever, and his grandmother singing to him; and he thought of the face on the bay horse coming along the front of the Second Kansas at a walk, looking at the boots, lined the way his father’s was lined in the same places; and he did not know what had been in that face, still, and his father had not seen it at all, and knew.

Celui-là, il connaît.

He folded the letter and put it in the tin box under the bunk with the others.

---

Achille’s letter came on the thirteenth.

It came to him direct, to C Company of the Second Kansas, Camp Smoky Hill, in Achille’s hand, which he would have known across a room. It had gone to the lake shore first, and his grandmother had sent it on in one of her own blue envelopes, and it had been opened along the top twice, by two different knives, one neat and one not.

It was short.

That was the first thing. Achille’s letters had always been long. In the pine woods they had been four pages and five, both sides, about everything, the captain from Baton Rouge and the boy from Opelousas and the right rifles and the dances on Saturday in the town; and the one from the coast in February had been long too, the breastworks and the mud and the paragraph in the other hand that went straight across the page. This was one side of one sheet. The writing was smaller. It went along the lines very straight and very close, as if he were saving paper, or as if he were writing in a hurry, or in the dark.

Lucien.

Your grandmother says you are in Kansas with a regiment from everywhere and they call you Lucky. Good. Let them.

We are out of the line. We have been out a fortnight and we go back on Tuesday. I am a corporal. Do not laugh. There was nobody else.

Bring socks. I mean it. Bring ten pairs if they let you and twenty if they do not stop you. Nothing else matters as much as socks here and nobody will tell you that until it is too late. Your feet are in water from the day you come into the line to the day you go out and the only thing between you and losing them is a dry pair. Tell your sergeant. He will know.

The sea is at the end of everything.

Whatever you are doing, it is there. You come up the road to the line and it is there, past the dunes. You stand in the breastwork and look out at the French and it is there, at the end of the line, where the bags stop and the sand begins. At night you can hear it, under the guns, when the guns stop. It goes on and on, like the lake on the shell beach at the end of the camps, but bigger, and slower, and it does not stop for anything.

It is grey. Not like the lake. The lake is every colour and it is ours. This is one colour, and it belongs to nobody. I have stood on the dunes behind the line on a Sunday and looked at it for an hour and it did not look back.

Tell Mémère I still sing. Not often.

A.

He read it twice.

He read the bottom of it a third time. Not Achilles with an s. Not your friend. One letter, at the bottom of one side of one sheet, very small.

He folded it and did not put it in the tin box. He put it in the pocket of his tunic, the left one, over his heart, and buttoned the pocket, and lay on his bunk with his hand over the button.

---

“What’s he say?” said Harlan.

They were at the edge of the grass, after lights out. They went most nights now. Nobody stopped them; Sergeant Cutter must have known and did not say anything, and the corporal with the voice like a mule had stopped looking for them in the second week. They went out past the sergeant’s room and down the numbered street to where the camp stopped, and stood, or sat on the last step of the last hut, and looked at the prairie in the dark with the wind going over it.

“Socks,” said Lucien.

Harlan considered this.

“That’s sensible,” he said.

“He says ten pairs. Twenty.”

“My mother’d send twenty. She’d send forty if I asked her. She’d knit them in the evenings with the lamp.” Harlan looked at the grass. “What else.”

Lucien did not answer for a while. Then he took the letter out of the pocket of his tunic and unfolded it, in the dark, though he could not read it in the dark, and did not need to.

“He writes about the sea,” he said.

Harlan turned his head.

“Read it,” he said. “In English. If you can.”

So he did. He held the blue paper on his knee in the dark and said it into English, slowly, one sentence at a time, finding the words, the way he had found the English for the whale book on the gallery, a little at a time. The sea is at the end of everything. Whatever you are doing, it is there. He did not read the part about the socks again, or the part about being a corporal, or the letter at the bottom. He read the sea. At night you can hear it, under the guns, when the guns stop. It is grey. It belongs to nobody. I stood on the dunes on a Sunday and looked at it for an hour and it did not look back.

Harlan did not say anything for a long time.

“It didn’t look back,” he said, at last.

“That’s what he says.”

“Huh.” Harlan looked at the grass going away from them in the dark. “What’s that mean?”

Lucien thought about it.

“On the lake,” he said, “you look at the water and it tells you things. The colour. Where the shrimp are. If there’s a squall coming off the north shore. If it’s going to be a good morning or a bad one. My father looks at it and it tells him and he says bon or he doesn’t say anything. It looks back.” He stopped. “I think he means the sea doesn’t tell you anything. You look at it and it’s just the sea.”

Harlan was quiet.

“The prairie’s like that,” he said. “Some days. In the winter. You look at it and there’s nothing in it for you at all.” He put his big hands between his knees. “Tell me some more. About what it’s like. You must know some.”

“I’ve never seen it.”

“You’ve seen the Gulf. From a boat. When you were twelve.”

“Once. For an hour. At the mouth of the river. My father took me out to see where the river goes.” He tried to remember it. “It was brown, near the shore, from the river. Then a line. You could see the line on the water, where the brown stopped. Then it was green. Then out past that it was blue, a blue I’d never seen, darker than the sky. And it moved. Not like the lake. The lake moves on top. The Gulf moved underneath. The whole boat went up, slowly, and came down, slowly, and you couldn’t see what was doing it. My father said that was the swell. He said it comes from a long way off, from a storm you’ll never see, and goes on a long way past you, and it doesn’t care about you at all.” He stopped again. “That’s all I know.”

“That’s a lot,” said Harlan.

“It’s one hour.”

“It’s one hour more than me.” Harlan was looking at the grass, and the wind was going over it, and in the dark it moved the way it always moved, in long waves, one after another, going away from them to the edge of the world. “Does it smell?”

“The sea?”

“Anything. The lake. The Gulf.”

Lucien shut his eyes.

“The lake smells of mud,” he said. “And salt, a little, not much, it’s half salt and half not. And the shrimp, in the bottom of the boat, in the baskets. And tar. And the reeds, when the wind’s off the shore, like cut grass but wet. And the morning. It smells of the morning at four o’clock, before anything’s happened. I don’t know how to say that in English.” He opened his eyes. “The Gulf smelled of salt. Only salt. Like the inside of an oyster.”

Harlan was quiet for a long while.

“I’ll know it,” he said. “When I see it. Because you told me. I’ll get off the train and I’ll smell salt like the inside of an oyster, and I’ll see a line where the brown stops, and the whole boat’ll go up and down and I won’t see what’s doing it, and I’ll know it.” He thought about it. “I’ve never eaten an oyster.”

“I’ll show you.”

“You’ll have to. I won’t know which end to start.”

They sat on the step of the last hut. The wind came over the grass from the south, warm, smelling of dust and a long way, and the grass moved in it, and somewhere a long way off over the prairie a coyote was going, high and thin, and stopped.

“Lucky,” said Harlan.

“Yes.”

“Your friend. With the letter. He’s not doing so good, is he.”

Lucien did not answer.

He put the blue paper back in the pocket of his tunic and buttoned it.

“He says bring socks,” he said.

“Then we’ll bring socks,” said Harlan.

---

The orders came on the twenty-first.

They were read out on the parade ground at reveille, to the whole regiment, by the colonel, from a paper, in a voice that carried; and then again in the huts by the sergeants, in voices that carried better. The division would entrain on Wednesday the twenty-sixth. For the east. For a port on the east coast, which was not named, and then for the crossing, which was not named either, and then for the coast, which did not need to be.

Hut forty-one took it in a silence that lasted the length of Sergeant Cutter reading the paper and walking out of the door with it. Then everybody talked at once.

Lucien did not. He sat on his bunk with his hands on his knees and looked at the floor, at his boots on the raw pine, the army boots, broken in now, that had replaced the church shoes in the first week. He thought about the sea at the end of everything. He thought about socks.

Below him, Harlan lay on his back with his hands behind his head and his boots on, looking at the slats of Lucien’s bunk, with an expression of patient interest, as if he were watching weather.

“Well,” said Harlan, to the slats. “I’m going to see it.”

---

His grandmother’s last letter in Kansas came a day early, on the Wednesday, the twenty-sixth, an hour before they marched to the siding. It had come on the morning train and the corporal with the voice like a mule had gone down the street with the sack and given the letters out by hand, which nobody would have thought he would do.

He read it standing up, in full kit, in the street outside hut forty-one, with the pack on his back and the rifle on his shoulder and the regiment forming up round him in the dust.

It was about the shrimp, and the price, and old Tregre’s knee, and the Robichaux girl who was to be married at Christmas to a boy from Mandeville, which nobody approved of. It was about the canvas, which was holding. It was about Ti-Paul. It was in her small upright hand, the Ursuline hand, all the way down the blue paper, very even, to her name.

And under her name, where the line always was, there was no line.

There was a word.

It was in capitals. Big ones, much bigger than her hand, crooked, each one on its own, with spaces between them as if they did not know each other, going uphill across the bottom of the blue paper. The pen had been pressed so hard that the nib had gone through the paper in one place, at the top of the A, and the ink had spread round the hole in a little blot. A hand had made them that had made knots in rope for fifty years and never made a letter.

ALLONS

And under it, very small, in her hand again, squeezed in at the very bottom of the sheet where there was no room:

Il l’a fait tout seul. Je l’ai écrit, et il l’a copié. Ça lui a pris toute la soirée.

He did it himself. I wrote it, and he copied it. It took him the whole evening.

The sergeants were shouting along the street. The regiment was moving. Harlan was beside him, very tall, with his pack on, looking down at him and not saying anything.

Lucien folded the letter along its folds and put it in the left pocket of his tunic, with Achille’s, over his heart, and buttoned the pocket, and went.