My Father Bet My Year at the Boucherie, So I Signed It Myself and Named the Terms novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Camp House

Dolly moves into Seb's camp house on Henderson Lake, hears his rules, and meets his silent daughter, who holds up a drawing of a car, water and a truck with its lights off.

I drove the Silverado down the Henderson levee road on Sunday at noon with everything I owned in the bed and my mother's good cast-iron pot on the seat beside me.

The camp house sat at the end of a gravel track where the oaks gave way to cypress knees and flat gray water.

It was cypress and tin, with a wide screened porch, and a dock running out into the lake.

On the porch stood a clawfoot tub with a plastic bucket of dead leaves in it.

Seb was waiting on the steps in his work jacket, with his hands in his pockets.

He had shaved.

It did not make him look warmer.

"You came," he said.

"I signed a paper."

"It isn't a real paper."

"I know," I said.

"I came anyway."

He looked at the pot in my arms.

Then he took the box of groceries from the truck bed and carried it up the steps without another word.

Inside, the kitchen was long and clean and cold, and nobody had cooked in it for a long time.

The refrigerator held milk, eggs and a jar of pickles.

There were two bedrooms off a short hall, and a bathroom with a window that looked at the lake.

Seb stood in the middle of the kitchen as though he were a guest.

"Margot's at my aunt's until three," he said.

"I wanted to say some things before she's here."

"Say them."

He sat down at the kitchen table.

I sat across from him.

It was an old cypress table with a ring burned into one corner by a hot pan, and I put my hand over the ring without meaning to.

"You'll have the back bedroom," he said.

"It has a lock, and the key is on the nail.

"I sleep on the porch."

"It's February," I said.

"There's a daybed with quilts."

"Why the porch?" I asked.

"It's where I sleep," he said.

I let it go.

"What do I do?" I asked.

"You get Margot up and dressed and to school.

"You make supper.

"She eats very little.

"She won't talk, and you don't make her."

"I teach second grade," I said.

"I know what a quiet child looks like."

"You'll be paid."

"I'm paid in my mother's house," I said.

"The tax bill comes in November.

"I'll pay that, and nothing else from you."

His jaw tightened.

"There's a debt, Mademoiselle Fontenot."

"There's a bet," I said.

"A card-table bet made into a typed page by a man who doesn't own what he bet.

"I know exactly how much of it is law."

He stared at me.

I thought for a moment I had misjudged him.

Then one corner of his mouth moved, a tiny bit, as though a muscle he had not used since the funeral was testing itself.

"Nothing," he said.

"It's not law at all.

"It's only what the family keeps."

"Then I'll keep it," I said.

"For a year.

"And in public I'm your wife, because I said so.

"What do I call you?"

"Seb."

"Seb, then.

"Tell me what the wife does."

"Sits by me at Mass.

"Comes to the family supper.

"Doesn't contradict me in front of the old men."

"Does she love you?"

He looked down.

"The old men need to think she does," he said.

"They need to think I'm better."

"Are you not better?"

He did not answer.

At three o'clock a pickup pulled in beside my truck.

An old woman in a quilted coat got out of the passenger side, and a small girl climbed down after her and stood in the gravel with a tin of crayons held to her chest.

She wore a red wool coat that was too big in the sleeves.

Her braids were uneven, as though a man had done them.

She was six, and she had her father's gray eyes.

Margot Broussard did not look at the camp house or at me.

She looked at the lake.

"Margot," Seb said, and crouched.

"This is Mademoiselle Dolly.

"She's going to live here and look after us."

Margot looked at me then.

It was a long, flat, careful look, the kind I had learned to wait out in my own classroom.

I did not smile too much and I did not come closer.

I crouched on the gravel a few feet away.

"Bonjour, Margot," I said.

"I have a pot of chicken and sausage on the stove, and I haven't tasted it yet.

"I'd like your opinion later."

She did not speak.

She walked past her father and up the steps and into the kitchen, and sat down at the end of the cypress table.

She opened the crayon tin, took out a sheet of paper from the stack by the telephone, and began to draw.

I put the pot on to heat and drew up a chair.

I did not look over her shoulder.

I have taught six-year-olds to draw what they saw for four years.

The first rule is that you never look until they turn it around.

When the sheet was full she slid it across the table to me.

It was done in black and blue crayon, pressed hard enough to dent the paper.

It showed a small car tilted nose-down in a wavy band of blue.

Behind the car, up on a straight gray line, stood a long dark truck.

The truck had no headlights.

She had drawn the place where the lights should be, and she had blacked it out so completely the paper shone.

"That's a good truck," I said carefully.

She looked at me and did not nod.

Seb was standing in the kitchen doorway.

His face had gone gray.

"She draws that," he said.

"She's drawn it every week since the funeral."

"Where do the drawings go?" I asked.

"Andrei keeps them," he said.

"My friend.

"He collects them to keep them safe, in case she wants them when she's older."

"Does she show them to anyone?" I asked.

"She shows them to everyone," Seb said.

"And what does everyone say?"

Seb closed his eyes for a moment.

"That it's the water," he said.

"That she's drawing the water."

I took the paper and folded it carefully in thirds, and put it in the pocket of my fleece.

Margot watched my hands.

I heard tires on the gravel again, a big engine, and the porch boards creaked under heavy weight.

A man's voice called through the screen, warm and glad.

"Cher! There's my new sister!"

Blake Broussard came through the door with a pot of his own in both hands, kissed me on the cheek before I could move, and said, "I brought gumbo.

"Don't tell Seb, but you won't have to cook tonight."

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