My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Pen
At a boucherie, Dolly's father loses a year of her work on a card game, and she takes the pen from the underboss's hand and signs as his wife.
My father had not answered his phone since dawn, so I drove out to the pasture in my school lanyard.
It was a Saturday in February and thirty-eight degrees.
A hog lay on a long steel table, half-butchered, with steam coming off it.
Two big pots of boudin simmered on propane burners, and the smoke blew sideways across the grass.
Men stood around in canvas coats with paper cups of coffee that smelled of something stronger.
At the far end of the pasture, on a plank laid across two oil barrels, a dozen men sat in a ring playing bourré.
I knew the ring before I knew the men.
I knew my father's rust-colored barn coat and his Saints cap pulled low.
I parked beside a row of trucks and walked up with my keys still in my hand.
Nobody looked up until I was close enough to hear the cards hit the plank.
Then everyone looked up at once.
"Daddy," I said.
"Dolly, cher."
He tried to smile.
He was holding one card, and his hand was shaking.
"I called you nine times," I said.
"I had my phone off."
"Why?"
My father looked at the man dealing.
The man dealing was Blake Broussard, who owned the crawfish plants on the Teche and, according to everybody in Breaux Bridge who knew better than to say it loud, a good deal more than that.
He was heavy and sandy-haired and wore a quilted vest, with a gold St. Christopher at his throat.
He smiled at me.
"Cher, sit down," Blake said.
"There's coffee."
"I'd like to know why my father has his phone off."
"Alcide had a bad hand," Blake said, gently.
"A very bad hand."
My father said, to the plank, "Sixty-one thousand."
The boucherie went quiet.
Somebody turned off a burner.
"That's what I owe the family, Dolly.
"I put up the house."
"What house?" I asked.
"Your mama's house," he said.
I heard it, and for a second I could not do anything with it.
Marie Fontenot had left me that house when she died six years ago.
It had a roof I had patched myself and a back room where I slept.
I had paid the property tax on it every November since I was twenty.
My father's name was not on the deed.
"You can't put up Mama's house," I said.
"You don't own it."
"I know it."
"Then what did you put on the paper?" I asked.
"I put it down that I would make it right," he said.
He would not look at me.
"I told them there's an old way to settle it.
"A year of my daughter's work in the Broussard house.
"Cooking.
"Cleaning.
"Minding that little girl.
"No questions."
He said it to the plank and to the cards, and to a dozen men and a hog.
He said it with my name hanging right behind it.
I looked at Blake.
Blake gave me the same kind smile and slid a typed sheet of paper down the plank, past the cards and the barrels and the coffee cups.
It stopped in front of the man at the end.
The man at the end had not looked up once since I walked over.
He sat with his elbows on his knees and a pen in his right hand.
He was thirty-five or thirty-six and lean, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a scar through his left eyebrow.
I knew his name.
Sebastien Broussard.
Monsieur Seb, the plant crews called him.
His wife had driven her car into Henderson Lake four years ago, with their baby in the back.
People said his daughter had not said a word out loud since.
He read the paper once, slowly, and then he looked at me.
I had expected a man who looked at a woman like inventory.
He looked like he did not want to be there.
He looked like a man who had been told, for the first time in a long while, that he was a party to something and wanted to say no, and could not remember how.
His mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
"That's all right, Seb," Blake said warmly.
"Just sign it and let the girl go home and think."
The pen in Seb's hand was moving.
It was a small tremor in two fingers, and I would not have seen it if I had not been standing so close.
I did not decide to move.
I walked around the barrel and took the pen out of his hand.
My fingers closed over his, and his hand was cold and dry and shaking in mine.
He went completely still.
I took the paper with my other hand and read it.
It said, in Andrei Ivanov's neat typing, that Odalie Fontenot would keep house and mind the child of Sebastien Broussard for one year, in exchange for the cancellation of a debt of sixty-one thousand dollars owed by her father.
My own name was typed on the line.
Nobody had asked me.
"Daddy," I said.
"Look at me."
He looked.
"Did you think I'd say no?"
"I thought," he said, and stopped.
"I thought you'd forgive me."
I turned to the plank and spoke to the ring of men.
"I will keep Monsieur Broussard's house and mind his girl for one year.
"I'm doing it because my mother's house is mine, not because my father gave me away.
"And I will do it as his wife, in front of anyone who asks.
"Because from the way every one of you just looked at him, you need somebody to think so."
Nobody breathed.
Blake's smile did not move, but his eyes did.
"Now put down what it pays," I said.
"Put down what it doesn't.
"I'll write the rest myself."
I borrowed a stub of pencil from a man with a boudin pot.
Under the typing I wrote three lines in my school handwriting.
The house is mine and the tax is mine.
In public I am his wife.
In private nobody touches anybody unless I say.
I signed it.
Odalie Fontenot, the way my mother had written it on my first-grade spelling test.
Seb had not said a word.
He took his hand back from mine, slowly, and it was still shaking.
Blake took the paper and read my three lines.
He laughed, loud and delighted, and the old men laughed with him.
"Fontenot blood," he said.
"Alcide, you've got a lawyer for a daughter."
"I'm a teacher," I said.
"I'll be at the house Sunday at noon."
I walked back to my truck without looking at my father.
The passenger door on the Silverado had been sticking since 2019, and I was sitting behind the wheel trying to find the key when the other door opened and Seb Broussard got in.
He shut it behind him.
He sat there in his canvas coat in thirty-eight degrees with both hands flat on his knees, looking through the windshield at the smoke.
"Why did you say wife?" he asked.
His voice was low and rough from not being used.
"Because Blake smiled when you looked at me," I said.
"And you didn't."
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