Feu cast a shadow now.
That was the fact my eye went to first. Light should not have a shadow. A will-o’-wisp should not put weight on old boards or leave the faint dry shape of two bare feet after rain. But October had come in thin and cool, and Feu was at the porch rail with his face turned south, a man’s outline laid across the planks behind him.
Everyone was where they belonged: Sable in the kitchen, the southeast corner warm; Mireille at the table with her satchel; Leste at the bank; Corvin at the wire. The wisteria past the gate had gone gold. The wood ducks came up off the Hollow later now, a little later each week.
The morning put a chill at the back of my neck for the first time since April.
Not frost. Frost was still out there somewhere, unscheduled.
But the cold had reached the porch.
Feu felt the car before I did.
His hand tightened on the porch rail. The light inside him gathered, then thinned. By the time the Lincoln came around the walnut tree, he had gone to thread: one stitch of amber at chest height, the body folded back into the room upstairs. He had done it for every visitor since June. The parish road was still the parish road, and Beau had not been out in three weeks; Feu thinned himself to spare a man a conversation he did not yet have language for. I did not look at him while he did it. He does not care to be watched at the changing. I had learned that too.
The Lincoln turned at the wide place, pulled even with the porch, and stopped.
Beau got out carefully. Suit jacket first, then one hand on the car door, then the rest of him, thinner than the suit had been cut for.
I took my inventory of him from the top step: the collar standing off his neck a little farther than last visit, the belt taken in again, the suit jacket hanging off the shoulders as if the shoulders were hangers and not a man. I had told him in June that he would not die at that courthouse as Étienne had died at it. He had promised me he would not. He was keeping the promise, and the promise was eating him anyway.
I came down two steps to meet him.
“Della.”
“Beau.”
“It’s finished,” he said.
The words landed before he reached the porch.
“The motion was granted at the bench yesterday morning. We filed the appeal before lunch; the higher bench denied it before supper. The Houston firm has its order, signed and sealed, and they’ve been at the staging lot on Highway 70 since dawn: three trucks when the sun came up, six by the time I drove past. They’ll be at your south boundary by noon tomorrow. Sonar first, then a sample drill inside a day or two, then full pumping whenever their lab tells them where to put it. The order runs to first frost. That’s their window. Whatever they mean to do to that ground, they do it before the frost or they start the petitions over in spring.”
First frost.
The words moved through the porch.
The almanac had opinions. The parish had older opinions. None of them was a date. Frost was a thing you watched for in the cypress knees and the cattle breath and the way the Hollow went quiet before dawn. It was not a number you could write down and rule a line beneath.
I wanted the legal pad then. My hands manage bad news better when they are employed. Since June twenty-fifth I had been keeping a small record of finished things: rail rasped even, wisteria cut back, coffee made, another morning held. Hortense’s journals had taught me that a holding does not live in its large acts. It lives in the rail and the pruning and the second pot of coffee. A column of small finished things is one way to know whether the day held.
But this was not a finished thing.
And I would not give it the dignity of a column.
I looked past Beau to the south road instead, where the trucks would come tomorrow, and counted nothing.
Beau had seen the wanting. He reads a face the way he reads upside down. He looked at me, then past me at the porch rail, where the stitch of light had come to a decision.
Feu solidified.
He did it slowly, out of courtesy: light gathering its edges, then weight arriving inside the light, then a man standing at the rail with his hands loose, the whole performance eight seconds long. I counted them. Beau watched all eight with his hand finding the back of Hortense’s wicker chair and holding on.
“How long?” he asked. Lawyer to the floorboards. Even astonished, he asked the operative question.
“Since the night of the fires,” I said. “June twenty-third. The room gave the body. The body is his. The room doesn’t take it back.”
Beau looked at Feu a while longer. Feu looked back with the patience of a thing that has outwaited several kinds of century, and inclined his head, slow, the greeting arriving on the will-o’-wisp’s schedule and not on ours. Beau nodded once in return, the nod he gave a court when a ruling came out right for the wrong reasons, and sat down in the wicker and set the banker’s box at his knee.
The box had come to every visit since the parish vote and had never once been opened on my porch. It held the deposition, and Étienne’s four unfinished lines, and the page Beau had signed into the parish record in June. It had ridden along like a chaperone all summer. Now he lifted the lid and took out a single page and laid it on the porch table, seal up. The seal was blue and embossed and no bigger than a fig, and it outranked everything I owned.
I looked at it. I did not pick it up. There was nothing in it my hands needed that my eyes hadn’t already taken.
The phone rang in the kitchen. Mireille answered on the second ring, listened, and held the receiver out through the window frame without a word, which meant Lou.
“Della, cher.” Lou’s voice had its diner-at-rush pitch, level and carrying. “I’ve had the door propped since daylight, counting trucks. The Daigle boy ran the first count to my counter before I had the coffee up. They’ll be past your gate by noon tomorrow. I’m telling everybody who comes in for eggs the same thing I’m telling you: nobody does anything foolish, everybody keeps their eyes open, and the parish acts like a parish. You still have one, cher. Put that in your book too.”
“Beau’s here. He brought the order.”
“Then I’m glad he’s sitting on your porch and not in that building. Feed him, Della. He’s gone thin as Lent.” She hung up in the middle of her own sentence’s momentum, which was Lou all over.
I put the receiver back in Mireille’s hand and came out. Beau was drinking the coffee she had brought him, both hands around the cup, and Feu was solid at the railing and staying solid, because the seeing was done now, and there was nobody left on the property to spare.
Behind me, through the kitchen wall, I could feel Sable at the southeast corner: chair and bark both at once, the man threaded through the house and the tree since the rite in June and not entirely either one. The warmth held at the wall. He was listening. He had heard the word order through four walls.
“I’ll be here every day until first frost,” Beau said. He set the cup down on its saucer with care, which is how Beau italicizes. “Every morning you’ll get whatever the courthouse produced the day before, and then I will sit on this porch for one hour and produce nothing, because Étienne died at a desk trying to finish a sentence, and I have decided that sentence gets finished on a porch.”
“You’ll wear out either way,” I said.
“Then I’ll wear out where I can see the water.”
Mireille refilled his cup. Feu turned his face south, toward the road that ran to Highway 70 and the staging lot and the six trucks learning to idle. The page with its seal stayed on the table between us, and out past the treeline, unscheduled, the frost kept its own counsel about us all.