Chapter 1

The hurricane warning sent me home from the rig two days early.

My brother was in my bed, with the ceiling fan turning over him.

My wife pulled the sheet up with both hands.

He smiled at me the way he'd smiled since we were kids, every time he broke something of mine.

"Go on and hit me, Alcide. You never have."

Before daylight the Gulf of Mexico was in that room.

By breakfast time he was on the end of my rope, and I could not have told you what I was going to do.

"Audrey's not due till tomorrow," the tool pusher told us on the Cameron dock. "Go see to your people."

That was Wednesday, June 26, 1957.

I was thirty-one, a derrickman, one week out of every two on a steel rig out in the Gulf, and my wife wasn't looking for me until Friday.

I stopped at the drugstore and bought her a little blue bottle of Evening in Paris, and it rode home in my lunch pail.

I took my Chevrolet pickup down the ridge road to Oak Grove with long slow swells coming in on my right.

That ridge stands maybe five feet above the Gulf on a good day.

We'd all grown up on it, so nobody thought about that.

My brother's Mercury sat in the shell drive by the cistern, which meant nothing.

Remy came by to borrow things.

The yellow dog came out from under the back steps to meet me.

Nobody claimed that dog.

Odile fed him all winter while I was offshore, and she called him Personne, which is French for nobody.

I went up the seven steps with my pail and my duffel.

I built that house myself in 1951, up on brick piers, every stud, so I knew which board in the hall creaked.

I stepped over it, because I wanted to surprise her.

The bedroom door stood open for the air.

My brother was in my bed, with the ceiling fan turning over him.

His gray pants hung on my chair, and her blue housedress lay on the floor, where in six years of marriage I had never seen her leave a dress.

Odile was twenty-eight, and men on the crew boat who'd met her once still asked after her.

Her long hair was down, and she saw me first.

She pulled the sheet up with both hands.

She had that fair skin that never could hide anything, and the color climbed her face while she stared at my lunch pail, I don't know why.

Remy was twenty-seven, and women turned around at Mass to look at him.

He lay there in his undershirt with one arm behind his head, on my pillow, and he took his time.

He smiled at me the way he'd smiled since we were kids, every time he broke something of mine.

The pirogue I built when I was twelve.

Papa's shotgun.

The watch Papa gave me when I shipped out with the Navy.

It was always the same smile, with a little jump at the corner of his left eye that Mama called his wink.

"Go on and hit me, Alcide. You never have."

I had never once hit him back, not in twenty-seven years, and he knew it.

He knew the rest too.

Every stud in that house was mine, but the land under it was still my mother's, and whatever Remy broke, Mama forgave by supper.

The fan went around.

Behind the bed the shutter banged open, and the first gust took the curtains.

I set the pail down, walked out without a word, and something that had held for thirty-one years started to give…