Free The Hard Blue Sky by Shirley Ann Grau

to make it hold together.
    And then she’d put both hands to her mouth and run out of the room. Julius took over, without anybody having to ask him; he knew exactly what to do. He wrapped the rags around and around the arm, perspiring with the effort, so careful to make them even and comfortable.
    His father looked at him with a kind of a grin that was just a little lift of the mouth. “Takes after his mother, him. He is going to be a fine nurse.”
    His father fell asleep then, right in his chair, even before the bandaging was finished. It was the whisky—his mother gave them all the whisky they could drink before she started work, so that there would not be so much pain.
    That day when Julius came out of the cane brake, cut and scratched, his mother asked: “You been fighting, no?”
    He pulled up his shoulders and lied: “Oui.”
    A couple of days later, his brother Raoul was talking about cane-cutting over in Napoleonville. Then spotting Julius, he grinned. “For what do you listen, dogaree?”
    “Nothing.”
    “You don’t know what it is about.”
    “But I do.” Julius said something he knew he should not have said: “I know about the cane.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I heard it growing.”
    “Holy mother!” his brother said. “You never even seen sugar cane.”
    Julius did not answer.
    His father asked: “Where you heard the cane?”
    Julius dropped his head and tried to move away.
    His father caught him by the shoulder. “Where you heard the cane?”
    “Down beyond the Robichaux grocery, I heard it.”
    Raoul pounded both hands on his knees as he laughed. “We have an idiot who hears things but does not know the difference between sugar cane and all the others. He would try to eat a fishing-pole.”
    “Let him alone,” his mother said.
    He followed her outside. “I did hear the cane.”
    “I got to go get the clothes in. Come along. What else you heard?”
    He took a quick look into her face, but there wasn’t any laughter there, just a serious question. “What else you heard?”
    “I hear the sun come up in the morning; and I hear the leaves come out the stalk; and I hear the worms crawling in the ground. And when I sit and watch a moonflower open, I can hear that, me.”
    “And what does it sound like, that?”
    “It creaks, like.”
    “Next time,” his mother said, “I will listen.”
    Julius Arcenaux stretched and shifted in his chair. That had been such a long time ago.
    He cocked his head and listened to the hum of the mud daubers building their nests on the underside of the drainpipe just above the window.
    The dogs were still yelping—they were closer. A man’s voice shouted at them.
    Julius Arcenaux got to his feet and stood for a minute, hands scratching his thighs. He kept his nails short, very short, or he bit them, and the soft skin made no impression on the khaki pants. “God damn.” He rolled up one leg at a time, and methodically scratched. The heat made the skin prickle like a nest of ants.
    Outside the man’s voice yelled again: “Hi, hi, hi!”
    Julius grinned. That would be the dogs, all right. Packs of them roamed all over the island.
    When he was a boy a whole pack had gone running over him. He’d lain on the ground, screaming, until one of his brothers jerked him up to his feet and felt him all over, carefully, looking for broken bones, and laughed at him for being afraid.
    To this very day, Julius thought, his brothers thought he was a coward because he had never liked to fight and because he hadn’t taken his place on the boat with them.
    Maybe, Julius thought, or maybe not. “I can’t help what I am, me,” he said aloud.
    And he hadn’t been scared that day when the painter had almost jumped him. That had been ten or fifteen years back, when his daughter was still little. He’d taken her into the swamp. They weren’t going anywhere in particular, just fooling around because he hadn’t wanted to stay home. It was early spring, he remembered,