Chapter 3

That dog had lived under my house two winters and had never once come up the steps, not for rain and not for scraps.

I looked at him, and I looked at my arm back there behind me like it belonged to somebody else.

I let go of the shirt.

I never did hit him that night, and I can't tell you I wouldn't have.

I took the flashlight off the nail and opened the door. Personne came in past my legs and stood on the linoleum and shook, and it smelled like the marsh.

I built seven steps. The flashlight showed me four.

The water wasn't standing the way rain stands. It was coming out from under my house and going north, in no hurry, with sticks riding on it.

I went down and put my fingers in it and tasted them.

Salt.

The Gulf of Mexico was a half mile south, on the other side of the ridge, and here it was coming around my back steps.

There was a nail head in the riser of the fourth step. I held the light on it, and it went under in about two minutes.

An inch every two minutes, call it, and the kitchen floor was thirty inches up. I didn't need a pencil.

"Get your shoes," I said. "We're going."

"The man said morning," Remy said from the door. He was smoothing his undershirt where I'd had it.

"The man's not standing in it."

The truck was my idea, and I'll own that.

It sat higher than his Mercury, so the three of us waded out to it, thigh deep, and got on the bench seat with Odile in the middle and her wet shoulder against mine. It was the closest the three of us had ever sat. Nobody mentioned it.

It started on the second try. I'll say that for Chevrolet.

I got it down the drive toward the road, and the headlights showed me water running on ahead of us with the rain going through it sideways.

There wasn't any road. There was a line of fence posts going away into the dark, and a red cow swimming across the lights with her head up, and then there wasn't a cow.

Forty yards from my steps the engine coughed twice and quit.

The lights stayed on a while, getting yellow.

That idea cost us most of an hour, and everything we could have carried up in that hour: drinking water, the lantern, a loaf of bread.

I got out and went around to the toolbox in the bed, because a rig hand doesn't leave his line. I had sixty feet of three-quarter-inch manila in there and a hatchet. I stuck the hatchet in my belt.

I coiled the line over my left hand in the rain, by feel.

That hand has a white scar straight across the palm. I told Papa it was a crab trap, I told Mama an oyster shell, and I told Odile a cable on the rig.

None of those was so. I'd gotten good at that.

My hitch pay was in the glove box in a company envelope. I thought of it when we were halfway back, and I kept going.

We took Odile between us. The current came at us head on and rolled the shells under my boots, and in the low place by the cistern it came up to my chest. She lost her shoes and never said so.

We passed the Mercury, the one Mama had signed the note on, with water over its door handles.

"There goes Mama's signature," Remy hollered. He was laughing, or his mouth was open.

He had his free hand twisted in the back of my shirt, hard enough to choke me. I figured that was the current.

When we got back there was one step left. Water was sliding in under the kitchen door, and the oilcloth was dripping coffee into it.

The Big Ben said a quarter to four.

Personne had gotten up on the table.

The only way into the attic was a hatch I'd cut in the bedroom ceiling in 1951, right over the bed, because that's where the joists let me. That's all the thought I ever gave it.

So we went down the hall in the dark, in water to the ankles, and into that room.

Nobody had touched that iron bed. The sheet hung off it, with one end floating.

The wind coming through the walls had the fan turning, slow, all by itself.

Remy didn't wait to be asked. He got up on the mattress, boots and all, and I boosted him, and he went through that hatch quick and neat, the way he did everything that didn't cost him. Then his arms came back down.

I climbed up on my bed in my wet boots.

Odile climbed up after me. Her hair had come down in the water.

I took one blade of that fan in my hand and held it still so it wouldn't catch her hair, and I cupped the other hand for her foot.

She put her bare foot in it and looked down at me.

I don't know what she wanted me to say.

"Go on," I said.

And I handed my wife up to my brother.

He had her by the wrists. He was saying something to her, low and easy, and I could hear he'd had practice.

"Leave the dog," he said down the hole.

"You hand him up, Alcide," she said, out of the dark. "You hand him up or I'm coming back down."

I went and got him. The water was at my shins by then, and fifty pounds of wet dog doesn't want to go through a hole in a ceiling. It took two minutes we didn't have.

I don't know why I did it, except that she asked, and I'd been fixing what she asked for six years.

I threw the coil up after him and reached for the edge of the hatch.

The water had come over the bed rails.

The floor came up under me, easy as a boat, and the house began to turn.