Chapter 6: The Bell

The bell rang at six that Sunday evening, and it rang late.

I heard it across the bayou from my kitchen, where I was frying eggs for a seven-year-old who wanted them with ketchup.

St. Joseph's bell rings the hours over the Henderson levee.

The humans in Pierre Part set their clocks by it and think it's an old church tradition.

The pack set its life by it for two hundred years.

It rang six slow strokes, and the last one lagged behind where it should have.

I stood with the spatula in my hand.

I had heard that bell ring late once before, on a Saturday in October, eight years ago.

"Mama," Bastien said.

"The eggs are burning."

I took them off the heat.

"You eat at the table," I said.

"I'm going to the porch.

"Don't open the door to anybody."

"Even the man with the truck?" Bastien asked.

"Even him," I said.

I stepped out onto the porch.

The sky over the water was orange and low, the cane across the road went dark, and the air smelled of smoke.

An old man was coming up my gravel lane on foot.

He walked bent, with one hand pressed to the small of his back, and he wore a gray cardigan in October heat.

I knew him at forty yards.

My heart did a thing that I did not like.

Anselme Delahoussaye had been the sexton of St. Joseph's for fifty-five years.

He had taught me my catechism and slipped me peppermints.

He had rung the bell on the night they sentenced me, and I had heard it from the cane and thought, even he.

He stopped at the foot of my porch steps.

He did not climb them.