Page 101 of Havoc

They put Cricket's cut on the wall beside the charter.

Storm does it himself with two nails and a hammer out of the shop, in front of everybody, and he don't say anything while he's doing it and it takes him about a minute and a half and nobody in that room breathes right through any of it.

The club's newest dead man, hanging next to the paper that names its first.

Then Storm goes back to the table and picks up the second one.

Twenty-two years of humidity and a hole in the ground behind a bait shop and it still hangs right when you hold it up.

GALLOW KINGS. LOUISIANA. No crown on that serpent. And on the right chest, white thread gone yellow, sewn by hand by somebody who cared more about doin' it than doin' it well:

TITHE

"Emile Doucet," Storm says.

Ovide Guidry looks up. Ransom's got his rings off. Warden's standin' at the door where Warden stands.

"Sixth name on that charter. Signed for a club he never got to ride under, three weeks before he was supposed to patch over with the rest of us, and this coat has been on a wall in a room in New Orleans for twenty-two years and it come home in the back of a car eight days ago.

"I've read that name out loud in this room every New Year's since two thousand five and I ain't never once told a single one of you who he was. That's mine. I'll answer for it another day."

He turns around and hangs it on the third nail.

Charter in the middle. A dead prospect on one side and a dead treasurer on the other, and about eight inches between all three of them.

And then he does the thing nobody voted on.

He takes the frame down off the wall.

Two hands, careful, and he sets it face up on the table and gets a pen out of his own shirt pocket and works the back of it off — and half this room comes up out of their chairs, because that is a twenty-two-year-old piece of paper and the man is opening the frame with his thumbnail.

He gets the glass off.

He looks at that sheet for a while.

Then he writes on it.

Under the sixth signature, in a hand about half the size, and it takes him maybe four seconds:

LENNOX DOUCET

"There ain't a bylaw for it," Storm says, to the room, without lookin' up. "There ain't a vote and I ain't takin' one. Article four says a daughter's got no claim on this club and article four's stayin' in that book till a table changes it, and I ain't the man to bring it, 'cause I'm the one read it out loud on Monday and hid behind it.

"So this ain't a claim. This is a name under her daddy's name on a piece of paper in my buildin' that I built the frame for, badly, in oh-four.

"Anybody wants to say somethin' about it, I'm right here."

He puts the glass back on.

Nobody says one word.

Tyrant reaches over, without bein' asked, and holds the frame square while Storm gets the backing on.

Lennox is against that back wall with both hands flat on it.

She don't come forward and she don't make a sound and she is lookin' at that frame like a woman lookin' at a thing through a window, and Junie has got an arm around her waist and is holding on to her with a fist in the side of her shirt.

Twenty-two years.