Chapter 6: Board Up

Neither of us said anything until the warning finished.

Then Etienne reached past me and turned the radio off.

"Two days," he said.

"The greenhouse."

"The greenhouse sits four feet above the marsh. A big one puts it under."

"Then we move the vault."

"We move the vault."

He picked my ring up off the dash, looked at it and set it back down in the same spot.

"I'll run the boat up the bayou tonight, to the hurricane hole. It'll ride there."

"With that on the dash?"

"Nobody's going to steal it," he said. "Nobody's going to be out there but me and the herons."

By noon the whole island was boarding up.

You could hear it from every direction, the drills and hammers and the slap of plywood on brick.

The bottling crew screwed sheets of it over the bottling house windows.

The pickers pulled the last red peppers off the plants, ripe or not, because the wind would strip them anyway.

Lise stood on a ladder at the café with a mouthful of screws, nailing up a sheet that said "GO AWAY STORM" in red spray paint.

"That's not going to work," I told her.

"It worked for my mamma in '05."

"Your mamma's café washed into the bayou in '05."

"Then it's due to work," she said around the screws.

Mémère refused to leave.

She sat on her porch in her cardigan and told the parish sheriff she'd been through eleven hurricanes and he'd been through two.

Luc called her sister in Opelousas.

Her sister called her and said things in French I won't write down.

On Tuesday morning Mémère got into her sister's car with one suitcase and her pearl earrings, and she pointed at me through the window.

"The seed, chère."

"I know."

"Not the barrels. Not the house. The seed."

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