Chapter 5: The Crossing
The bowline went out over the water in a flat arc, rope hissing through the night, and dropped short of the chimney cap by three feet. The coil slapped the surface and lay there, and the quiet stretch accepted it without a ripple, as if the water had swallowed it whole.
"Again," Kirk said. He was already hauling it back, hand over hand, rope skimming the flood.
"Don't look at the water."
"I'm not looking at the water. I'm looking at the chimney. Talk to me."
"About what?"
"Anything. The bar. The customers you lost when the tide came. The name of that cat that used to sit on your taps."
"His name was Vermeer and he hated everybody." She watched the rope rise, swing, fly. "He'd have hated this city more."
The loop dropped over the chimney cap and settled, and Kirk hauled it twice to set it, and the cap took the weight without shedding a brick. He tested it a third time, harder, his whole body leaning into the line.
"Rope's good. Chimney's good." He fed the running bowline open, offered her the loop. "Hand over hand. Knees up. Feet never touch."
"And if I fall?"
"Then I'll be having a very bad night." His face was the cargo face, flat and gray, but his hand was steady on the loop. "Which of us has ever fallen?"
"You fell off the Natchez in '09."
"That was a dock I fell on, and I was paid to leave it."
She took the loop. The rope was wet with river dew and heavier than it looked, and the gap was twenty feet of glass-black nothing with forty heads ringing its far edge. She wrapped the line twice around her forearm, the way he'd shown her with the mooring lines, and stood up on the ridge with the wind taking the hem of her apron.
"Vermeer," Kirk said. "What kind of name is that for a cat?"
"A bartender's cat. Go."
He paid the line out as she went, and the roof fell away beneath her feet, and then there was only the rope and the water under it, thirty feet of still black water that reflected no moon she could name. She went hand over hand, palms burning on the wet hemp, knees drawn up so high her boots nearly hit her wrists. The rope sagged in the middle. Her weight dipped her toward the surface, closer with each handhold, until the flood lay four feet under her dangling feet, and she could see herself in it, a small dark smudge hanging in the mirror.
She could see other things in it too.
Shapes. Long ones, lying along the bottom of the quiet stretch like felled timber, like cypress roots, pale and unmoving. They were arranged in rows, and the rows were arranged around the one clear lane beneath the rope, the way a congregation arranges itself around an aisle.
"Don't stop," Kirk said, somewhere behind her and above her, very even. "You've stopped. Don't."
"The water. There's a lane in the water. They left a lane."
"That's the door they built for you. Keep your knees up."
She moved. Hand, hand, hand, and the shapes at the bottom did not stir, and the lane stayed open under her like a held breath, and her feet swung two feet, then a foot, then eighteen inches above a face she could half see, tilted at the attentive angle, eyes open under a skin of silt.
Then, behind her, across the gap, through the stone of the tomb, the vault hatch bar finished its work.
She heard it before she felt it, wood sliding free of its brackets, a long groaning note that traveled up the rope into her wrists. The boards below her, forty feet back and twenty feet down, let go their hold, and the humming underneath rose like water finding a hole. It came up through the flood itself, through the black mirror, through the soles of her boots and the bones of her hands, and it locked onto the humming from the courtyard, and for a moment the whole night had one pitch.
The faces at the bottom turned. All of them. A slow roll of heads along the rows, and every drowned eye came up to the same point, to her feet, to the lane.
"Kirk." Her voice came out thin. "Kirk, the hatch."
"I hear it. Move."
"They're all looking at me."
"Then give them nothing to look at. Up."
Hand, hand, hand. The rope burned through the sleeve of her thermal. Eighteen inches became three feet, became five, the lane rolling away beneath her, and she did not look down again. The chimney cap rose to meet her, moss-slick, and she got her forearm over it and then her elbow and then she was hauling herself onto the cottage roof, flat on her chest, rope still wrapped twice around her arm, breathing like a woman who had run the length of a bar shift without stopping.
"Line's secure," she called across, and her voice cracked on secure. "Line's secure, Kirk."
"Good." Already he was unlooping the rope from the tomb's chimney, feeding it out, and she understood before he said it. One rope. One of us on it at a time. She hauled the slack in, wrapped it around the cottage chimney the way he'd wrapped it around his, checked every loop twice, and put her whole weight on it, and it held.
"Bowline's coming back to you," she called. "Same rule. Feet never touch."
"It's your water now, Béatrice. You read it from that side."
She looked. Twenty feet back the tomb sat low on the flood, its iron door standing open the length of the broken hinge, lamplight leaking out into the courtyard like something spilled. From this angle she could see the whole still sheet of water, the rows of heads, the forty-some drowned standing patient as fence posts, all of them facing the tomb now, all of them facing the open door, as if the thing they had spent three weeks wanting had finally been given them and they were waiting to be invited to use it.
Except the woman in the nightgown. She had not turned toward the door. She was looking at the rope.
"Kirk," Béatrice said. "Kirk, go now."
"Throw's got to be right. If it fouls on the cap we're both swimming."
"Kirk."
He threw. The coil went up and out, flat and beautiful, and the bowline dropped over the tomb's chimney cap on the first try, and he gave it two hard pulls, three, setting it, and came up onto the ridge with the rope wrapped around his forearm.
That was when the humming from the courtyard stopped. All of it, the whole choir, cut off like a lamp turned down. The silence came across the water so complete she could hear the rope fibers creaking under Kirk's weight.
And the woman in the nightgown began to walk.
Not wade. Walk. Each bare foot came down on the black water and the water held it, dimpling but not breaking, and she crossed the courtyard at a stroll, unhurried, head tilted, smiling toward the tomb's open door, toward the lamplight, toward whatever had come up the stairs from the vault and was waiting for her inside. She moved the way a hostess moves to greet a guest.
"She's not coming for us," Béatrice called. "She's going in."
"Then she's welcome to the place." Kirk was a quarter of the way across, hand over hand, knees up, the humming from below rising under his dangling boots. "Keep your eye off her. Tell me about the water at your end. Where does it talk?"
Béatrice looked along the flood toward the Boudreaux house, the next roof in his line, and saw it: a stretch of chop, wind-ruffled, muttering against a garden wall. The water there moved. The water everywhere else lay down flat and listened.
"Past the garden wall it ruffles," she called back. "Between you and the wall it's glass."
"Glass till the wall, then. Fine." He moved, hand, hand, hand, and below his feet the lane lay open down the length of the quiet stretch, and every pale shape in it had begun, very slowly, to turn onto its side. Ready. Patient. Polite.
"Kirk," she said. "Don't stop again."
He didn't answer. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the nightgown's hem vanish through the tomb's open door, and the humming from beneath the floor rose to meet the footsteps coming down the hall, and the two of them sounded, for one long moment, exactly like an embrace.
Kirk came on, hand over hand, and the rope trembled under Béatrice's wrapped forearm with every pull he made. She had the line around the cottage chimney and her boots braced against the cap, taking his weight the way he had taken hers, and it was more. He was heavier, and the hemp was wetter now, and the middle of the line dipped him low enough that she could see the sag in his shoulders, the careful economy of a man who knew exactly how much strength each handhold cost.
The humming followed him. It rose out of the quiet stretch in a column, and she could see it working on the water, a fine tremble on the surface directly beneath his boots, rings spreading in rings, the only movement on the whole black sheet.
"Talk to me," Kirk said, halfway.
"The ruffle's past the garden wall. It hasn't moved."
"Then I haven't moved either. Tell me something else."
She thought of the loft behind him. The lamplight in the doorway, the nightgown's hem swallowed by it. "You sealed the vault," she said. "First week. What did you use?"
"Hatch timbers. Tabletop. The leg off the workbench." A pull, a pull. "Why?"
"Because whatever came up the stairs tonight walked over all of it without a sound."
His hands stopped. One beat. Two. Below him the rings widened, and something at the bottom of the lane rolled from its side onto its back, slow as a sleeper settling, and lay looking up.
"Keep moving," she said. "That's an order from the bartender."
"You're not the boss of this rope."
"I'm the only one on your end of it. Move."
He moved. Hand, hand, hand. She counted the pulls without meaning to, the way she used to count the register at close, and at twelve pulls left his boots swung six feet over the water, at eight they swung four, and at six the nearest pale shape in the lane lifted one arm out of the depth. Not fast. It came up the way smoke comes up, unhurried, white sleeve of it unrolling, fingers spread, reaching for the underside of the rope four feet below his heels.
"It's got an arm up. Left of your boot, four feet down."
Kirk didn't look. She saw him decide not to look, saw his jaw set against the pull of his own eyes. "How far up?"
"Waist height. Rising."
"Then I stop being patient." He planted his boot against the rope's sway and swung, one hard pendulum arc toward the cottage, and the fingers closed on empty water a foot beneath him and withdrew the same way they had come, without hurry, without splash. He took three handholds in the swing's momentum and was over the chop line, over the muttering shallows past the garden wall, where the water talked and nothing lay in it.
Then the cap was under his boots, and his hand closed on her wrist, and he came over the chimney ridge onto the tiles beside her, breathing hard, the rope still around his forearm.
They lay flat together, cheek to wet tile, and neither of them spoke for a moment. Behind them the tomb sat in the middle of its courtyard with the lamp burning in the doorway, and the hum had changed. It was inside now, all of it, the courtyard's choir and the vault's below, joined under the roof they had slept in for three weeks, and it had stopped being patient. It had the sound of a tune being learned by heart.
"It's in the hammock," Béatrice said.
"Don't."
"She walked in like she owned it. Kirk, she was coming home. That's what the whole thing was. Three weeks of asking at the door."
"Three weeks of asking at a door that was never hers." He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked along the line, cottage to Boudreaux place to the dark stump of the church ridge. The rope to the next gap was still coiled on the chimney beside them. He began unwinding it from his forearm, working with small, fast motions, not looking at the tomb. "You want to stand here and grieve for it, grieve while you tie."
She took the free end. Her hands were shaking now that there was nothing to hold with them, and she let the shaking happen while she tied, because fighting it cost more. The knot came out clean. She checked it twice the way he'd taught her, and only then did she look back at the courtyard one more time.
The heads had gone.
Not withdrawn. Not sunk. Gone, every row, the whole standing congregation, and the courtyard water lay flat and empty from the tomb steps to the far wall, holding the lamplight in one long smeared ribbon. The quiet stretch was quiet in a new way, a swept way, a room put right after company leaves.
"They're inside," she said. "All of them."
"Good. Let them jam that doorway to the rafters."
"Kirk. They learned a lock. They watched us for three weeks through a seam, and they never once tried the window until we opened it ourselves." She got to her knees. "They're not outside anything anymore. That place was our shelter because they didn't know how to come in. Now they do."
He sat back on his heels. In the dark his face was all planes and wet highlights, and the compass on his belt caught a light that wasn't moonlight, wasn't lamplight, something from under the water in the courtyard, fading. He looked at the Boudreaux roof, forty feet of glass between here and there, and she watched him read it and watched him arrive, in the same slow minute she had, at the arithmetic.
"The whole line's quiet," he said.
"Every gap?"
"Every gap I can see." He picked up the coiled rope and weighed it in his hand, and she heard what he didn't say, that a throw across quiet water was a throw to whatever waited under it, that the rules had changed somewhere in the last hour and nobody had told them. "The church ridge is three throws. If any roof between here and there still has people on it, we'll know by the barricades."
"And if it's quiet all the way to the church?"
"Then we keep going."
She got her feet under her on the slick tile, and that was when the lamp inside the tomb went out. Not blown. Not guttered. Put out, deliberate, the way a host pinches a candle when the evening is over, and in the dark that followed, from somewhere under the flooded courtyard, unhurried and sweet, the humming began again.
It had changed key. It was learning a new tune, note by patient note, and the first three notes of it were the ones Béatrice had hummed to Sylvia over the peaches, on the first night, to get her to eat.
"Béatrice," Kirk said quietly. "Don't sing."