Victims of Winter

By David Stetler

Through darkened villages—Champagne, Grand Pointe, Pont Breaux, Carencro—I raced alongside drowsy truckers heading for home and a welcoming bed. For fifteen miles through unmapped Atchafalaya shortcuts, night bugs swarmed in the inverted cones of my spattered headlights, beamed low so that I could follow the gravel roads rushing up at me.

At home I parked under our chinaberry tree to vex my mother, who soon after she rises will find my car and then my empty bed upstairs. Across the Cecelia highway I waded through wet fields of zabasson and biting brier, as ardently maddened now as when with my father's shotgun held at the ready I saw my exasperated hunter's face (vraiment un coullion, oui!)—sweat streaked, seed specked, wild hair drooped into devil's peaks—in Picou's unlit windows.

The amber dome lights of A.J.'s truck (holiday double-time in Mermentau) disappeared into a cloud of ground fog, and Sis and Blackie were underfoot, circling me in his yard, leaping and yelping, nipping my ankles as their tails wagged. I stole through unlocked doors and ferreted my head under warm covers, where I was met with reluctant thighs, non, non, non—my brother's heat still clings to our grand-mère's quilt. Espère, espère, je dois me laver. Celise tugged at my ears and gave me a stale greeting kiss but returned tasting of cloves, with scented hair everywhere, cleansed and renewed this early-spring morning.

At daybreak, coffee brewing and biscuits baking, bare feet clattered across a cold linoleum floor, and up onto the couch (my pretend bed for the last minutes of night) and all over their sleepy ol' Uncle Mike, Jeanie and Susie climbed, smothering me with milky kisses, milky breath. Musty and sweet-smelling little girls, urine and talcum powder, soft in their white cotton nightgowns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Stetler
• Release date: Aug 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476162478

David Stetler

David Stetler’s parents were living fifty yards from the Texas-Louisiana border, at the foot of the Sabine Pass Coast Guard Station when Dave was born. Sabine Pass, Texas, had survived many hurricanes over the years, but the village was blown out to sea in 2005 and again in 2008. Dave's father served in ports from Boston to Key West to Corpus Christi, and so Dave had the good fortune to live much of his childhood as an undisciplined pugilator in Port Aransas, Texas. Also, he endured the strict Catholic discipline of his mother's hometown, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where he acquired an acquaintanceship with the Cajun language and a lifelong interest in Cajun cooking—his family and relatives being the best cooks along the Bayou Teche. He declined a scholarship offer from the College of William and Mary and spent two years in the U.S. Army to attend, on The G.I. Bill, The University of Texas, where he truly was intended to go, from which he graduated, and where he was reluctantly tolerated by the great teacher and scholar, T.G. Steffan. Dave taught at U.T. as a graduate student, at Texas A&I University, and in Augusta, Georgia, where he has lived since 1967. He has touched hands with Ella Fitzgerald, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Jessye Norman, Luciano Pavarotti, Odetta, Irma Thomas, Hans Richter-Haaser, Aaron Copland, John Carradine, David Madden, Erskine Caldwell, Norman Mailer, Upton Sinclair, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, John Barth, Reynolds Price, and James Dickey. He received a gift from Walker Percy after forwarding to him a first edition of The Moviegoer that had been autographed by Rory Calhoun, who didn't know that he was, in a way, the star of the novel. Dave hopes to complete four more novels, which he’s been working on for twenty years. Most importantly, he enjoys the affection of three sons and five grandsons. Also, he regrets shaking hands with Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk.

Book preview

Victimes d'hiver

Victims of Winter

a novel by

David Stetler

scribamo.com

Victims of Winter

by David Stetler

Copyright 2011 by David Huff Stetler

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any fashion, by any means, without prior written permission of the copyright holder. This is a work of fiction. All events and characters (except for public figures) are imaginary. You are not in this book.

Cover: Isaac Fuller, 1606-1672, after M. Buonarroti,

courtesy the British Museum.

Digital edition produced by Maureen Cutajar

www.gopubished.com

scribamo.com

[e-mail]

Si une histoire est bien écrite, nous la vivons dans notre sang et nous voyons clairement. Cependant, victimes d'hiver et circonstance, nous trébuchons par nos propres vies.

—anonyme

Also by

David Stetler

Seventh Crisis

Watergate:

behind the scenes in President Nixon's fall from power

Under the Sun

a novel of Southwest Texas

for

Truman Guy Steffan

le meilleur professeur

Table of Contents

Temps Arrêté

I

Dimanche

II

Pageant

III

Carrion Crow

IV

Romeo et Juliette

V

La Boucherie

VI

Confirmation

VII

Anneliese

VIII

Le Marais

IX

Au Nom du Père...

X

Indian Summer

XI

Apotheosis

XII

About the Author

Other Works by David Stetler

Temps Arrêté

There is a photograph of the three of us—Celise, A.J., and me, Michel—that has caught us in three graceless poses, three uneasy responses to my mother's photographic commands, for her notions of snapshooting came straight from the information sheet wrapped around each roll of Verichrome Pan film. I remember that those instructions depicted a démodé lady who wore a cloche hat, a middy blouse, and a pleated skirt that nearly touched her high-topped shoes, who peered into the glass window of the box camera she held at her waist. The sun, a circle with lines radiating forward, was fixed at a forty-five degree angle over her shoulder. All of which meant that my mother, who is a literalist at reading and from whom, therefore, official instructions demand a moral commitment, insisted on photographing us always at those optimal hours, mid-morning or mid-afternoon. And always, as the drawings required, we were ordered to stand front lit, staring straight into the sun.

From somewhere near New Guinea in the waning days of World War II, my father had requested a photograph of his two sons and his très chère jeune fille, our neighbor Celise. And so Mama gathered us out onto the front lawn and arranged us in stair-step fashion—Celise first, me, and then A.J.—with some now long-gone poincianas and our old pieux fence for background. A.J. and I were outfitted in coat and tie for the benefit of our dear father, whom we had not seen in more than two long years. A.J.'s suit was of white linen and I was wearing a checked sport coat, bow tie, and detestable short trousers. At eight, I was the youngest of the three by one year. In place of her usual polo shirt and shorts and sneakers, Celise wore an organdy dress and glistening black pumps. But brazenly, despite Mama's warnings, she dared to shade her eyes—with both hands.

Less bold than Celise, I did as I had done and would continue to do on most important occasions for more than a decade—dozens of other photos testify to this—I shut my left eye against the searing sun and squinted out of my right. Of the three of us, only A.J. was clearly obedient. He stood dumbly at attention, heels touching and hands pressed flat against his trouser legs. Somehow he managed to keep both eyes open, but his head was cocked to one side in pain.

In my mother's album we are surrounded by page after page of family reunions, birthdays, class pictures, studio portraits, pictures taken on holidays and Holy Days, and miscellaneous others taken by A.J. and me but appropriated by Mama for her album—all selected, arranged, and corner-mounted according to her firm but faulty memory, with sometimes the correct month or season and the year inscribed in white ink with a crow quill nib, in her most elegant Spenserian hand.

Thus one moment in Spring ‘44 has been recorded in two dimensions and the shadowy illusion of a third. Bordered by a fancy black scroll and deckled edges, we have been suspended among decaying particles of silver, where we shall remain for maybe a hundred years if the Pelican Photo Co. of Lafayette has properly done its job.

I

A hurricane danced in the Gulf of Mexico for days, filling our ditches and soaking our crops with far more rain than anyone around here would have prayed for, even in a dry year. After flooding the deltas near New Orleans and raising our streams and bayous more than three feet, the storm went on to sink hundreds of boats in Biloxi and along the Alabama coast, where its winds fed on coastal heat and rose to 125 miles an hour before ripping across Florida and threatening the entire East Coast, killing half a dozen people in New England. But as before, the rains ceased, our ditches and fields dried up, gray skies gave way to scudding clouds, and our welcome cool spell ended. Oppressive summer heat—which no one really gets used to, not even in a lifetime—returned en pleine force. And as we'd done so many times, my family shelved its evacuation plans. Mama put away her hoard of canned goods and candles and bottled water, canceled motel reservations way up in Shreveport, where my mother and grandparents would have gone, minus my father, and we resumed our daily lives.

I'd ridden out this particular hurricane at school in Baton Rouge, an hour and a half from home and maybe seventy miles inland, but I definitely had been on call, needed or not, receiving twice-a-day emergency weather updates from Mama. When I attempted to drive my usual shortcut back to Acadia across the great Atchafalaya spillway, I encountered detours where wooden bridges had simply floated away, and I saw where ancient live oaks with washed-out roots had toppled into the broadened Bayou Teche after ten days of ground-softening rain.

Lucky for us, our cypress bateau had snagged itself on what we ordinarily consider to be pestilential hyacinths. It took me twenty minutes to haul ashore one capsized and untethered and nearly lost boat. I walked fence lines for about an hour, finding only one sagging strand of barbed wire that needed to be bucked tight and stapled. After two sweaty trips to the storage room and a maddening search for the wire stretcher, I was able to mend the fence, but this self-imposed chore required only half an hour to complete. I then grappled with three twisted strands of barbed wire strung between two cedar posts that opened to the bayou. Our makeshift gate was so snarled that it could no longer be closed, and so—flirting with maybe a rusty gash, perhaps even lockjaw—I tugged at its coiled strands, without nicking myself, until finally I was able to poke the end post back into its baling-wire loops. Another fifteen minutes.

In the barnyard I saw that someone, probably Uncle Olivier or Ti'Verne, had begun to unload a wagon laden with corn, and so I pitched the remaining ears—one at a time, for sport—through the loft door all the way to the back wall of the barn. Anything to be of use. With a few six-penny nails I tamed several warped planks that had worked loose from a feeder in the cow lot, but eventually—despairing, lacking genuine zeal for real work—gave up. I climbed aboard the second of three tractors that paralleled my uncle's working life, an exhausted relic, a classic Model Eight that yields up a spare part every now and then, and simply waited for my father's Mercury to appear in the gravel driveway beside Uncle Olivier's house.

But when Celise arrived—at last!—she quickly let me know, without showing even the simple courtesy of greeting me, that she was intent on nothing but work. The ill-begotten Reuben waved hello before driving back to my father's office in town. Celise, not glancing in my direction, hurried into the house, which was never locked, and changed from her nurse's whites into boots and jeans and a faded western shirt—a man's shirt far too large for her, probably one of A.J.'s—whose frayed tails she was looping around her waist as she came onto the porch.

And though obviously we were alone at the moment—my uncle's sedan was parked near the carport but his workaday truck was nowhere to be seen, and surely Celise had noticed that the windows of the house had been lowered against the possibility of yet more rain—she gave me only a crummy little nod of recognition.

No kiss, not even a smile.

A few minutes later, when I offered to carry some of Noé's saddle gear for her, she said no thanks, she could manage all by herself. For one quick moment, however, when I played the fool—head bowed, extending my arms, pleading silently—she embraced me, oh so briefly, before shoving me away.

From the storage room inside the barn she brought out, in two trips, all she would need for Noé's afternoon workout: bridle and saddle and pad, and then a pail containing a currycomb, a brush, and a bottle of Uncle Olivier's homemade liniment, a sticky emerald unction that resembles crème de menthe but smells like Dr. Tichenor's Antiseptic. From the stable where Noé was allowed to rest in shade during the hottest hours of the day, Celise led him into the barnyard. The early-summer sunlight offended his eyes, apparently (what the fuck, for nearly two years I'd been a city boy, no horse lover!), and so she calmed Noé as she guided him along—cooing him, talking softly to him all the while.

She held the bridle aloft for Noé to see. No sudden moves, no surprises. With thumb and forefinger slipped inside the bit, she pressed the corners of his mouth until he accepted it willingly. Then she drew the crown piece over his head gently, so that his big ears flipped into place without snagging. She led him into the yard and walked him ‘round in circles, stopping every now and then to run a reassuring hand over the beast's back. She patted his rump and she sang to him, too.

I could have held Noé's reins for her, but no—shit no!—she preferred tying him to a rail before brushing his back and belly. She brushed carefully where the cinch goes around while I loitered close to her side, handy and anxious, obviously desiring to help in any way I could. Yes, a bit obtuse too. When Celise finally decided to talk to me, her topics were carefully chosen, all of them innocuous, all about horse racing, horse breeding, horsey paraphernalia. None of which interested me in the least, and she knew it.

And even then she would halt in mid-sentence, speaking to me in spurts, between fits of work. Work came before anything else, she was telling me in gesture and tone.

Oh, they had raced on a muddy track the previous weekend (while I'd remained at school, in Baton Rouge, at Celise's insistence). And they'd nearly lost, winning by only un vrai pied, a true foot. When she lifted one of Noé's forefeet to show me why, and glanced around for a mud scraper, I gave her the willow wand that earlier, in my disconsolate wandering, I'd selected and whittled down to a neatly-chiseled edge for her. She scraped a hoof and pointed to the thin rim of the shoe, saying that Uncle Olivier had ordered a set of racing shoes from one Sidney Arceneaux in Duson—and if they didn't arrive before the weekend...! She paused to steady Noé—"Tais-toi, canaille!"—and then dealt out more of the same. These custom shoes, it seems—should they ever arrive—have a raised rim and special mud slots that make for a better grip, especially on a wet track. And so forth.

I stood at the ready, in postures appropriate to rapt attention, repeating things like: Yes, I see. Yes. Mmmm. Sure!

When Celise reached down for another hoof, Noé balked, pulling away from her and jarring the fence when his reins jerked tight.

You need to back away, she said. You're giving off some kind of rutting odor that's annoying to Noé. I don't think he likes the competition.

And so I retreated, though her complaint was all too transparent, and might even have been funny had I been in the right mood. I walked all the way over to the pecan tree under which the junked Ford tractor was sunk axle-deep in dirt, climbed aboard once again, propped my feet against the stripped and eyeless instrument panel, and watched as Celise calmed my uncle's prize poulain noir.

And waited patiently.

In the first year of her marriage to my brother A.J., Celise had avoided me zealously—almost passionately, you might say. And on those sentimental occasions when my presence at home was more or less required—Mother's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter—when Celise and I would therefore be thrust together socially, she spoke to me only as good manners required, and usually she and a disappointed A.J. ("Shit—another five minutes and Mike would've been broke!") would leave early, with Mama trailing them to the door, puzzled, wondering aloud why they weren't staying longer.

And of course I rejoiced at all of Celise's curtness—at every one of our truncated conversations, at every one of Celise's deliberately chosen and clipped words—for such dedicated tenacity revealed a depth of emotion that could only be flattering to me. At least that was my theory.

During that difficult and lonely year I stayed away from home most of the time, except for when A.J. would invite his brother (and best friend, just as he'd always been my best friend—God's TRUTH!) down for some special event. Eventually I managed to acquire several Baton Rouge girlfriends, all of them lackluster, decidedly no match for Celise, and in the end keeping only one, my happy, slightly-chubby Nella, who proved to be the least demanding and at the same time the most loving one of my dates. (Which was to the detriment of my character, probably, since throughout most of my life I'd shamelessly profited from unmerited affection.) Also, part of buxom Nella's appeal might have been that her wealthy and generous parents thoughtfully provided her with an MG-TD (with a convertible top and wire-spoke wheels!), which I drove almost daily, an apartment all her own, with swimming pool, out on Lake Pontchartrain Boulevard, and lots of cash.

But when A.J.'s National Guard unit (which the big dummy had joined in an attempt to beat the draft after he'd flunked out of McNeese State) was called up by President Eisenhower in January of 1953, I became the prodigal son who returned—and kept on returning.

At my father's insistence, Celise moved from her white-shuttered honeymoon cottage in St. Martinville into our home, into A.J.'s old room—just across the hall from mine. By then A.J. had been transferred all the way to the West Coast, and soon after that I was driving home every weekend my examination schedule would allow, and some that it did not.

Even after A.J.'s outfit was shipped to the Far East, however, it took about three months for Celise's resolve to give way, three long months of letters in care of my father's office; many collect phone calls, also to his office (whenever Celise deigned to accept them); many desultory horseback rides around the farm; a few near misses, some tears....

When Noé was groomed and ready to go, and with no word for me in parting, Celise led him along a cow trail to the track, where Ti'Verne, just off the school bus, stood waiting for her. In true jockey fashion, Ti'Verne was slapping a stick resembling a riding crop into his open palm. His protective helmet, which he wore only at my uncle's insistence, he carried under his arm, like a football.

It appeared that Ti'Verne was as anxious to greet Celise as I had been. After coaxing her away from Noé with words that I could not distinguish, he dropped his helmet, offered a handshake, and then twisted her arm into a hammerlock that she broke with a quick elbow to his ribs.

Ti'Verne was Celise's long-time buddy, her pal, and as such he took full advantage of the King's X (yes, le X du Roi) he could claim for all but the most serious of transgressions. If his arm should accidentally graze her breasts or if an innocent hand should somehow find its way into a tight rear pocket of her jeans, then nothing much was to be made of it. As my Aunt Alcée said in observing all this, you don't kill a puppy for sucking eggs.

Celise tripped Ti'Verne, wrestled him into a hammerlock, and made him beg. But of course he'd already had the pleasure of brushing up against her several times. He stood on tippy-toes, pleading for mercy, crying for help to Aunt Alcée, who with my uncle had just driven up to the house. Aunt Alcée ordinarily presided over these initiation rites from her back porch. She did not answer Ti'Verne but stood on the running board of the truck and watched until she was satisfied that no real harm was being done, before calling for me to help with the groceries.

A short while later, I removed the rope halter from the fence post where Celise had hung it, and hid it behind my back as I walked out toward Grenouille, who was not at all pleased to see me. He did not attempt to run away, always his first inclination, and since I was at least five pounds overweight and thoroughly out of shape (such was the strenuous life of a college student), I was grateful that the dappled gray bastard allowed me to take him without a chase.

I slipped the halter over his big hammer-head and hauled him back to the barn, advising him all the while: You're fat and old and lazy, and you'll die a lot sooner if no one takes the trouble to ride you.

If my uncle were to allow this lazy wretch to have his own way, which Uncle Olivier would not do, Grenouille would happily live out his life in the shade of the horse barn, eating lespedeza, sipping cool water, and farting.

Of the several saddles in the storage room, I selected the most comfortable one there, measuring nineteen inches from horn to cantle, one that had been expressly tailored for my outsized uncle.

When Grenouille was saddled and his cinch drawn tight enough to make him complain, I rode out to the pasture and rounded up the milk cows for Uncle Olivier, which he no doubt assumed I would do, having seen my fire-engine red Oldsmobile coupe, the only car of its kind of any color in St. Martin Parish. I'd seen him as he stood working at the washroom window of the dairy barn.

From the peculiar twisting and dipping of his shoulders, I knew that he was slipping rubber teats into their chrome-plated holders. Assembling those milking machines had been acceptable work to both A.J. and me, but more than once we'd fought to avoid washing them when the milking was done. It was far more preferable to shovel cow shit into a wheelbarrow and to scrub down the pissy concrete floor of the cavernous room where we milked the cows, even on the coldest winter mornings when shallow water at the open end of the dairy would ice over, for washing up after milking was without a doubt the single most onerous chore A.J. and I were ever required to perform—so great was its resemblance to dish washing, I suppose. And the BK disinfectant, one scoop per sinkful of hot water, always pinched my nose like a broken ampule of ammonia, drawing huge, sobbing tears from my eyes and leaving me with a kind of sniffly hay fever for hours afterward, which counted for little in A.J.'s reckoning whenever I would try to dodge my turn in the washroom.

Celise was now busy at the starting gate, where I knew she wouldn't appreciate any further distractions from me. And so I rode aimlessly for the better part of an hour, eventually allowing Grenouille to graze in a patch of clover—and it wasn't coincidence that this was within sight of Celise's sweet butt.

Only ten or fifteen minutes later, happily, I saw that Ti'Verne was leading Noé away from the starting gate, toward the track, where he would ride however many laps at whatever speed my uncle had ordered—leaving Celise all alone.

And any desire that I might have had to ride for the fun of it, while waiting for exactly this moment, had already been sated. I'd gone down to the Bayou Teche and back, with Grenouille resisting all but one gait, a stiff-legged trot intended: 1) to cause his rider great discomfort, 2) to cause his rider to fall. Also I'd had to steer him away from fence posts, where a rider's leg could be bruised, and several low-lying tree limbs, which were capable of effecting an almost instantaneous dismount.

Grenouille, however, was reluctant to abandon the clover patch. I pulled up hard on his reins several times until he lifted his stubborn head, and then I gigged him forward, aiming him in the direction of the rusty metal gate, where Celise was now sitting with little to do. And with little excuse to fend me off.

Grenouille was in no hurry. He was comfortably stuffed with clover. Nor was I in a hurry, I decided, lest I appear overly eager to gain Celise's company.

And so we ambled over, with Grenouille picking his own path around clumps of Johnson grass and islands of zabasson in this last unimproved field of the farm, in the general direction of the starting gate, where Celise now sat on a fence railing, combing her pale brown hair—bleached almost blond by the sun—that I longed to tease with my fingers. She looked not so much like one of Millet's overripe figures in an overripe rural landscape, but more like a solitary figure in one of the Gustave Courbets that were on tour in New Orleans. In this real-life scene before me, Une fille qui se peigne, there was just a hint of dissatisfaction that seemed at odds with the expected serenity of country life. (The thoughts that go through an amateur art critic's head when he's horny!)

To cut through any more of her busy prattle about horse racing, I repeated a line over and over again to get it just right, so that it would come out naturally, unrehearsed, with only a slight stress to suggest really.

"How are you?"

But she received my muted plea literally, impersonally, as if it had been nothing more than a polite inquiry into her health. And her reply was as deliberately false as my question had been deliberately propounded.

Oh, I'm fine, really fine. With a big, cheesy smile. "And how are you?"

Long ago Celise had learned—from necessity, or perhaps from wisdom—to question my every motive. Unfortunately for me, both she and my mother have always been able to see straight through me, to discern with ease my most deeply-hidden, I thought, feelings.

Once more Celise sought to evade me, and I, weary of all her defensive bagasse, tried a more straightforward approach.

Hey! I said, interrupting a busy explanation of why she and Uncle Olivier worked so hard on Noé's first few strides out of the starting gate. "Let's talk, please."

She shrugged. Sure, it was all the same to her. Anger brought color to her un-rouged cheeks. And her lips were as waxy-new as a little girl's.

She said, May I go first?

Please, I said happily. Please do.

Okay, what the hell are you doing here?

The direct approach.

I'm here because I wanted to see you, I admitted. I missed you and I needed to see you.

You said a month—you promised.

Why didn't you answer my letters?

You sent only two letters, sport. Don't make it sound like you bared your bleeding heart twice a day.

You wanted more? You could have answered them.

There was a time when you couldn't be bothered to answer any of my letters.

For this complaint she'd reached back through at least two years and many even older grievances. I knew it was a mistake to go on, yet I persisted, foolishly. I tried to call you—why wouldn't you answer the goddamn phone?

Several times I had attempted to call her on rainy days at noon, with no one answering, when almost certainly she would be there in my father's office, alone. In good weather she might walk over to the playground at Sacred Heart's grade school, where she would sit and read at a picnic table near the Teche. From Baton Rouge, only seventy-five miles away if you measure straight over the Atchafalaya Swamp, I could usually guess where she might be. If the weather didn't allow, or if Elmire for some reason had not made her a sandwich, or if Dad had no plans for the two of them, she would order a sandwich from across the street, from Hebert's, and then spend most of her lunch hour reading, comfortably, amid emesis pans, syringes, needles, astringent smells....

I said, Suppose it had been an emergency call—for Dad!

"Everyone in St. Martin Parish knows that we're closed for an hour at noon, and Sheriff Fourgeaud can always find your father if he needs to. You agreed to give me a month. You promised."

I didn't agree to a month of complete silence.

But that's exactly what I asked for. That's exactly what I meant.

Celise turned away from me and directed all of her attention to the last few braids of a pigtail that she could have plaited with her eyes shut tight.

Standing there, even though I was being well ignored, and simply observing her, watching as her fingers wound and wove her flowing hair so symmetrically, was pure pleasure for me.

And even I—with my complete lack of insight into what to me are the lace and crinoline insides of a woman's mind—even I knew that this was no time to push her further.

You want me to go away? I was now repentant. I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and drew designs in the dirt with my completely out of place, city-slicker, smart-ass loafers. My indignant attitude had gotten me nowhere. You want me to leave, don't you? You want I should shove the fuck off, right?

My new attitude puzzled her a little, almost amused her. But then she looked straight into my eyes and agreed with me. Yes, I suppose I do.

You want me to go far, far away?

Not that far.

Almost. She almost smiled!

To China?

"Try Texas. That might be far enough. She touched my arm. It is possible, you know, that I may find some use for you yet."

Now this was better. Oh, so much better.

Look, I said evenly, without the slightest betrayal of passion, "I'm going to ride Grenouille down to the bayou, and who knows? Maybe—just maybe—when you're all through with Noé, you might want to join us there."

"Us?"

"Us—you know, me and my pet, Grenouille."

Celise found no humor in this. I thought I had worded my invitation carefully, but once again I found that I had gauged Celise's feelings incorrectly. In the silence that followed I sensed a welling up. I sensed the rising of a response harsher than I cared for. It occurred to me that she might be building up nerve to banish me forever in favor of marital fidelity and demure, housewifely masturbation, and so I hastened to add, To talk.

"Don't kid yourself—it isn't talk you're interested in."

Celise wasn't at all this unfriendly the last time I came home for a visit. Then, with little regard for propriety—with Aunt Alcée and Uncle Olivier both at home and with Ti'Verne only temporarily occupied, circling the track aboard Noé—she'd returned my lascivious greeting kiss several times, in kind, before taking my hand and leading me to the barn, whose gleaming tin roof was visibly radiating heat, and up a ladder to the steamy, almost simmering loft, where we tossed our clothes aside and on a mildewy saddle blanket fell into a long-delayed and decidedly un-romantic, sweaty square knot of passion.

But now, however, it was pointless to go on. Nor was there any real point in my going down to the Teche—not alone. With Grenouille trailing me as I shuffled my feet, I acted the role of the avid fermier artisan, the true nature lover deeply grateful for the mottled blue sky above and the warm sod below.

I picked dandelions and bluebells on my way back to the house, sniffing them, and here and there I paused to test the soil. I crumbled muddy clods between my fingers, sniffing again, and ah, clearly God is good and his good earth fertile. Messy, too. I glanced back to see if Celise was taking in my performance. As before, she didn't seem, not really, to be amused by anything I said or did.

I rode the remaining hundred yards to the barn and tied Grenouille there. It was getting late enough so that I didn't need to seek out any shade for this slack old fucker. I then walked back to join my aunt, who was having a beer on the cinder block and concrete slab that she called her patio, a several-years-old carport project: tarps and folding chairs, a folding picnic table, various machinery parts, and a split oil drum barbecue grill. Her carport had yet to sport a roof or shelter a car.

I selected one of her new lawn chairs, aluminum pipe with plastic webbing, and shook it until it fell into its proper configuration. I placed the chair alongside my aunt's, but she extended a hand to keep me from sitting. She presented me with an empty bottle. Get both of us a beer, will you?

I would never grow accustomed to the recently-acquired fullness of Aunt Alcée's face. For years, all through my childhood, she had complained to my father that no matter what she ate, she remained maigre, too skinny, and her prescribed diet, to be augmented with brewer's yeast and plenty of beer, had done her no good at all. But in the last several years, with my aunt well into her forties, she'd accumulated an ample amount of fat that, now, she simply could not lose.

When I returned with two bottles of icy Jax that Aunt Alcée had placed in the freezer to cool, I saw that Celise was over at the barn, climbing aboard Grenouille.

"Pauvre Grenouille, said my aunt. He's going to die with Celise on his back."

I did not fully share my aunt's concern.

Celise allowed Grenouille to choose his own way over the cattle guard. At first he'd decided that he wasn't going to cross it at all, but when she gigged him with her heels, he responded. When they reached the end of the gravel road that fronts my uncle's property, she leaned left in the just-fading light of dusk, not exactly the ideal time for a leisurely ride, turning Grenouille onto the road to Carencro, settling him into a smooth, easy gallop for a ride that would no doubt end after nightfall.

Aunt Alcée was going through a