By now, the days had habits.
The phone ringing was not part of the habit. So when it rang before noon, and it was Lou, that was how I knew something was seriously wrong.
Lou didn’t call before the rush. The diner ran her until two and she made her calls after, when the counter had emptied and she could stand at the register, an unlit cigarette sitting nowhere in the ashtray she kept for a habit she'd quit but not thrown out. A call at eleven-forty in the morning meant she had left the grill. It meant she had walked away from money, and she’d only do that if she had a damn good reason.
"They have him at the four-corners, cher." Her voice had gone flat. "They have iron. Come now."
I was already standing. The legal pad was open on the table to the column I'd started in October and never finished. I closed it on a pen so I wouldn’t lose the page.
"How many of them?” I asked. Not a question I needed answered to leave. I asked it to have a number.
"Eight stakes. More than eight people." A pause that was Lou deciding how much to give me at once. "Walter brought the kit out of Fontenot's storage. The old one."
"The 1893 one?”
"Yes."
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say into the phone that wasn't better said with my feet on the dirt at the crossing, and Lou knew that. She hung up without telling me to drive safe, which was its own kind of message.
The car took the parish road at a speed Hortense would have noted in the journal as ill-advised. I noted it too. Forty-eight, fifty-five, the speedometer needle swinging up against the dial, the cypress going by in green smears on both sides and the ditches running high from a week of rain. Three miles to Gravier. At fifty it was a little under four minutes. I counted them. The counting was not calm. It was not panic either. It was what my body did when it could not find either one, the same thing it had been doing since February, since the weight had started taking the steadiness out of my hands.
Seven months I had held this land—the forty acres and the binding under it, the house, the channel, the fence, the light. Seven months of knowing where each of them was supposed to be. Sable in the walls. Leste in the water. Corvin at the wire. Feu Follet at the porch rail when the sun let him be seen.
The light was the one they had taken, and they had him in iron at the four-corners, so I drove faster than Hortense would have liked.
I smelled the crossing before I saw it.
Methane. Not the live, wet smell of the basin venting on its own, which I knew now as I knew the smell of my own kitchen—that one came up soft and rotten and went where the wind sent it. This was scorched. Burned-off and gone metallic, the after-smell of gas that had been lit on purpose and let die. They had drawn him with fire. Someone had run a misfire off the culvert pipe at the four-corner at midnight, blue and small and harmless, the same chemistry he'd spent a hundred and seventy-eight years keeping the parish from ever seeing, and he had come to it as he came to every misfire on this land. To put it out. To do the work no one had ever once thanked him for.
And they had closed the iron behind him.
I left the truck at an angle in the Hebert lot with the door open and the keys in it.
The crossing at Vauclain Parish is four roads meeting at a flat the parish has never paved, packed dirt gone pale as ash in the dry weeks and red as a wound in the wet ones, and today it was somewhere between, the rain a week back and the sun a week on it. There were eleven people standing at the edges of it. I counted them while I walked. I counted the stakes too, because the stakes were the thing that mattered, and there were eight of them, wrought iron, each as long as my forearm and driven deep, set at the points of a circle maybe thirty feet across with the culvert pipe at the south edge of it. Old iron. Black with age and not with paint. Iron that had been in a box in the back of the library since the last time this parish decided the lights were the thing that needed killing.
Inside the circle there was a smear of light at about shoulder height, and it was the worst I had ever seen him.
I knew what Feu looked like dim. I had spent the spring learning the gradations of it—the bench at dusk when the rain came in and diffused him to a voice; the noon walks when the sun thinned him to a warmth I had to take on faith. I had a scale for him. He was below the bottom of it now. Inside the iron he was not a body and not even a steady glow but a guttering, the light going down to almost nothing and coming back smaller, down and back, down and back, like a thing breathing that had been told it could not have the air. The iron did that. Iron broke the line he ran on. They had not lit a fire to burn him. They had built a cage around a cage to see how long the light would last.
I walked to the iron and I stopped.
The edge of it was a thing I could feel before my boots reached it, a wrongness in the dirt, a pressure against the front of me like walking into the side of a cold room. I have been told since that nothing was there. There was nothing there. There was a ring of stakes and the air between them, and the air between them did not want the holder of the binding inside it any more than it wanted the light, and I understood that the second I felt it—that to step over the iron was to step into their ritual, to become a thing the circle was holding, to make the crossing's argument for it.
I did not go in.
"Della." Mrs. Fontenot said it as you say a name you have decided to be reasonable about. She came to the iron from the other side, the library cardigan on her in the May heat, her reading glasses pushed up into hair that had gone the color of the dirt at the crossing. She did not cross either. We stood at the iron with the stakes between us and the dying light between us and she folded her hands at her waist as she folded them at the desk when she was about to tell you the book you wanted was lost.
"You burned a misfire to bring him," I said.
"Walter did."
"You opened the box."
"The box is parish property. It has been parish property since 1893." Her chin did not lift. She did not need it to. "We are not going to do anything to it today. I want you to hear that first, before you decide what kind of morning this is. We will pull the stakes today. The light goes back to your land today. And we will vote on St. John's Eve."
The light guttered. Down, and back, smaller.
St. John’s Even. I had read about the ritual. I knew that this was about. “Eight stakes," I said. "Three children. You brought out the old tale with the old iron."
Something moved in her face and was put away. She had learned that number as a girl. Everyone over sixty in this parish had learned it young: three children, three little bodies, the lights did it, stay away from the lights. They had been taught it wrong. I could have said that then. I could have said it was the fires. I had the sentence, and I had the proof of it, or enough of the proof to know what Mrs. Fontenot had not yet admitted she was going to bring me tomorrow. I did not say it at the iron. You do not win the vote at the crossing. You win it at the diner, with the deposition read out loud, and you do not spend the ammunition in a parking lot.
"Walter," Mrs. Fontenot said, without turning.
Walter Guidry was at the south stake, by the culvert that met our property, where the misfire had been. He was a big man going to softness at sixty-some, in a feed cap and a shirt washed to no color, and he had his hand on the iron already. He’d had it there the whole time I'd been talking, waiting for the word as a man waits who has been promised something he has wanted longer than he has wanted anything. He did not look at the light when he pulled the stake. He looked at me.
"Sixty years," he said. It wasn't to me and it wasn't to Mrs. Fontenot. "I have been waiting sixty years."
The stake came out of the dirt with a sound like a tooth leaving a jaw.
The circle broke. I felt it break—the cold side of the room fell away from my front all at once and the pressure went out of the air, and the light, the guttering smear at shoulder height that had been going down and back, down and back, did not gutter anymore. It dropped. It went low and fast and along the ground, under the iron where the south stake had been, out across the flat and into the ditch and gone toward the bayou like water finding the low ground, like anything that has learned the land cannot be trusted to be anything but a route down. He did not stop at the edge of the crossing or pass me close. He went the short way to water and he was under the cypress and out of the light before I had finished turning to follow him with my eyes, and I knew, watching the place where he'd gone, that I would not see him as a body again for at least two days. The iron costs that. Iron is the one thing the binding could not teach him to survive.
The parish began to disperse. Trucks. The slap of doors. Mrs. Fontenot picked up the south stake from where Walter had dropped it and laid it across her two open hands and carried it back toward the library like a thing that needed to be returned to the right shelf.
I stood at the broken circle until the dirt was just dirt.
Then I went back to the car, where the door was open and the keys were in it. I sat with my hands on the wheel until they were steady enough to use, which took a while, and I did not turn the engine over until they were.
Feu had nowhere to go but the water.
I was going to give him a door.