The Draw

He was twenty-two on the fifteenth of March, on the lake, in the dark, with the lantern.

Nobody said anything about it. Nobody ever had. His mother had made a cake on his birthday every year until he was ten, a gâteau de sirop with the cane syrup from the river parishes, and after she died his grandmother had made it, and then his grandmother’s hands had got too bad for the beating and nobody had made it, and nobody had said anything, and on the fifteenth of March every year since he had gone out on the lake with his father at four in the morning the same as any other day.

This year his father talked to the boat at the end of the wharf for longer than usual.

He did not say anything different. Allons, ma belle. Allons, asteur. The same words. But he said them for longer, bent over the gunwale with his hands on the painter, very low; and when he stepped down into the boat and put his hand up for the lantern, he did not put it up at once. He stood in the boat for a moment and looked up at Lucien on the wharf with the lantern, and the light was on his long brown face from below, and his face did nothing.

Then he put his hand up, and Lucien gave him the lantern, and stepped down after.

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The Selective Service legislation was carried in the Commons in the third week of March.

Old Tregre read it on the wharf on the Monday, the English half and then the French half, all of it, because there was a great deal of it and the men on the wharf wanted every word. Men of twenty-one to thirty, in every polity of the Realm, were to register. There would be a draw, in New Westminster, by lot, in public, with the numbers drawn from a drum and published in the order drawn. Every registered man would have a number and every number would be drawn, in time, and the order of the draw would be the order of the call. There were exemptions: for the sole support of a family; for certain trades necessary to the war; for conscience, under the Rights Act, which the legislation could not have left out and had not, which old Tregre read twice. There would be tribunals in every district to hear the claims.

And the drafts would be mixed. Old Tregre read that part slowly. The men called from any one parish would not be sent together to any one regiment, but distributed among many, so that no town in the Realm should lose its young men in a single morning.

The men on the wharf were quiet for a long time after that.

“Comme les Landry,” said somebody, at last, very low. Like the Landrys.

Both the Landry brothers had been in the third company of the First Louisiane, side by side, and were in the column side by side, under the L’s, killed on the ninth of January.

Nobody answered.

The legislation had been carried, old Tregre read, against opposition that the paper called principled, and regional, and loud. The member for the city had voted for it. Two members from the north of the Grand Duchy had voted against it, and one of them had said that the Realm had fought every war of its history with volunteers and should fight this one the same way or not at all. A member from Wisconsin had voted for it and said, in German, in the Commons, that his constituents would go gladly to stand beside their cousins. A member from Massachusetts Bay, of an Irish family, had voted against it and said that he would not send the sons of Boston to fight Britain’s war while Britain governed Ireland, and had been shouted down, and had said it again.

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He registered on the Saturday at the parish office on Esplanade.

It was a room on the ground floor of the old school, with a table and two clerks and a queue down the stairs and out into the street, men of twenty-one to thirty from every street in the parish, fishermen and clerks and cotton men and stevedores and the boys from the sugar refineries on the river with the smell of the cane still on them. They stood in the queue and did not talk much. It was not the queue at the Cabildo. Nobody had been there since two in the morning to be first.

The clerk at the table was a young man with spectacles who spoke French to him without being asked and wrote in English on the card.

Prudhomme, Lucien Octave. Born 15 March 1895, La Nouvelle-Orléans. Residence: fourth camp, left side, mouth of Bayou St John. The clerk paused at that, and looked up, and Lucien said it again, and the clerk wrote it. Occupation: fisherman. Employer: father. Dependants: none.

“Aucun?” said the clerk, looking at the card. None?

Lucien thought about his father on the cane chair. His grandmother at the window.

“Mon père a son bateau,” he said. My father has his boat. “Ma grand-mère a mon père.”

My grandmother has my father.

The clerk looked at him for a moment over his spectacles. Then he wrote none again, more firmly, and blotted it, and gave Lucien the small card with the number on it, which was not the number of the draw but the number of his registration, and said, in French, the draw is in April, it will be in the paper, and looked at the next man.

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The widow Fontenot read the paper herself.

He saw her do it. She came along the wharf every noon now, which she had never done, and stood at the edge of the men round old Tregre, not in among them, a little apart, in her black, with her own copy of L’Abeille folded in her hands; and while old Tregre read it aloud she read it to herself, her eyes going along the lines a little ahead of his voice. The men made room for her. She did not take it. She stood a little apart and read, and when old Tregre had finished she folded her paper and walked back along the wharf to the seventh camp on the right, where the yellow dog lay on the top step facing the road.

Nobody had read her the column with Hippolyte in it. Lucien had heard that from Achille’s mother. She had read it herself, at her kitchen table, the way Achille had said she should.

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The draw was made in New Westminster on the eleventh of April.

They did it in public, in a hall, old Tregre said, with a great glass drum on a stand and the numbers in it on slips of paper in little capsules, and a man in a blindfold, an old soldier from the rebellion, drawing them out one at a time and handing them to a clerk who read them out, and other clerks writing them down, and the press in the gallery, and the whole thing taking two days. And the order in which they were drawn was telegraphed to every district in the Realm, and printed.

L’Abeille printed it on the thirteenth, a Friday, the whole of the Orleans district, in a supplement, eight pages of numbers, in columns, in order.

Old Tregre did not read it aloud. He could not have; it was eight pages of numbers. He stood on the wharf at noon with the supplement open on top of the bollard by the ice house, held down with stones at the corners against the wind off the lake, and the men came along the wharf with their registration cards in their hands and stood round the bollard and looked for their numbers, one at a time, with their fingers going down the columns, in silence.

Lucien waited until the others had looked.

He did not know why. He stood back on the wharf by the pirogue with his card in his hand and watched them look, one at a time, the fishermen of the camps, the young ones, the ones who had not gone in June. Ti-Paul Bazile’s older brother, who found his on the seventh page and laughed out loud with relief and was ashamed of laughing and went red. A Tregre cousin, who found his on the first page, in the first column, and stood looking at it with his finger on it for a long time, and then took his finger away and walked back along the wharf without saying anything to anybody. The motorman Robichaux’s other nephew, who had two legs, who found his on the second page.

Then there was nobody else at the bollard, and Lucien went and looked.

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He had a number on his card. He held the card in one hand and ran the finger of the other down the columns of the supplement, the first page, the first column, slowly, the way old Tregre ran his finger under the words.

It was on the first page. In the third column. About two-thirds of the way down.

He stood with his finger on it.

Behind him on the wharf the lake slapped at the pilings. A gull went over. Somewhere along the row of camps somebody’s gramophone was playing a waltz, scratchy, the same waltz the Robichaux played every Friday. He stood with his finger on the number on the first page and did not move it.

He had thought about this. He had thought about it since June. He had thought about it on the gallery at night with Achille’s letters and in the dark at four in the morning holding the lantern and on the lake in the squall with his hands burning on the halyard. He had thought: if I am called, I am called, and it is not my choice, and nobody can say I left him. He had thought it would be a relief. He had been ashamed of thinking it would be a relief.

It was not a relief. It was not anything. It was a number on the first page of a supplement held down with stones on a bollard on a wharf in the wind, and his finger on it, and the lake.

He took his finger away.

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He told his father that evening, the Friday, on the gallery, with the supplement folded in his hand.

He did not know how to say it. He had thought about how all afternoon, on the lake, and in the pirogue, and on the gallery waiting for his father to come out, and there was no way to say it that was better than saying it.

“Papa. Mon numéro. Il est sorti.”

Papa. My number. It came out.

His father was on the cane chair with the net across his knees. His hands were in the mesh. They did not stop.

“La première page,” said Lucien. “La troisième colonne. Ça veut dire le premier appel. En mai, ils disent. Le vingt et un.”

The first page. The third column. That means the first call. In May, they say. The twenty-first.

His father did not say anything. His hands went on in the mesh, in and out, the needle and the twine, in the last of the light. He did not look up. He did not look at the lake. He looked at the net.

Behind them, at the window, his grandmother did not say anything either.

Lucien sat down on the step below his father. He sat with the folded supplement on his knee and looked at the lake, which was going gold, with the light coming low across it from the west and the camps’ shadows long on the water, and the Marie-Ange tied under the gallery below him, black and low, with her sail furled on the yard.

His father mended the net until it was too dark to see. Then he went on mending it in the dark, by feel. He did not say anything. He did not say anything at all, the whole evening, not to Lucien and not to the boat and not to his mother at the window; and at ten he put the net down on the cane chair, and got up, and went in.

He did not go to bed. Lucien heard him, through the wall, in the kitchen at the back, over the trap in the floor. Sitting at the table. Not moving. For a long time.

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He did not sleep. He lay in the dark in the front room with the window open and listened to the lake under the floor and his father not moving in the kitchen, and at some time after midnight he heard his grandmother get up, slowly, with her stick, and go through to the kitchen, and the chair scrape as she sat down at the table across from her son.

Neither of them said anything that he could hear.

Then, very quietly, at the kitchen table, in the dark, his grandmother began to sing. Not to the boat coming in. Not the first verse, or the one about the friend. A song he had never heard her sing, slow and low, in an older French than hers, older than the Ursulines, older than the sale; a song for rocking a child, the kind you sang over a cradle at night when it would not sleep; and she sang it through, to her son at the kitchen table, very quietly, all of it.

His father did not say anything.

When it was finished, Lucien heard the chair scrape again, and his grandmother’s stick, going back to her room, slowly. And then nothing.

His father stayed in the kitchen until it was time to go out on the lake.

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The Enemy Language Bill was withdrawn on the Tuesday, the seventeenth.

Old Tregre read it on the wharf on the Wednesday. He read it in English, first, because it had been in the English half first: the Attorney-General had risen in the Commons before the bill’s second reading and advised the House, as the Crown’s first law officer, that the bill as drafted reached a domain secured to the Grand Duchy of Louisiane by its Acts of Admission, that those Acts were not ordinary statutes but the conditions of the Grand Duchy’s place in the Realm, and that Parliament had no power to legislate in that domain without the consent the Acts required; and that, in his advice, a bill that reached it was not a bad law but no law; and that the member from Ohio, on hearing that advice, had withdrawn the bill, and had said that he had not known, and had asked the House to accept his assurance that no insult to the people of Louisiane had been intended, and the House had accepted it.

The men on the wharf did not cheer.

They stood round old Tregre with their hats in their hands, the fishermen of the camps, in the noon sun, with the lake behind them, and did not say anything at all. They had known. That was what Lucien saw on their faces. They had known all along, the way the lawyer at the Opera House had said it, that the thing could not be done; and it had not been done; and it did not feel like winning anything. It felt like being told, in the Commons, by the Crown’s first law officer, that you were allowed to keep a thing that had been yours for two hundred years.

Then old Tregre turned the paper over, and opened it at the French page, and held it up in front of his spectacles, and read it.

All of it. The French half. The whole front page and then the inside, the war news and the price of cotton and the arrivals at the port and the notices of the Ursulines and the advertisement for the chandler’s on Decatur Street and the column on the inside page where the War Ministry said what it let the paper say about the First Louisiane, which was that it was in good spirits; out loud, on the wharf, in French, in his reading voice, for forty minutes, slowly, with his finger under the words, while the men stood round him in the sun with their hats in their hands, and nobody went home.