Chapter 4

I felt it in my knees first, the way you feel a crew boat come off the dock.

Something let go under the house with a long groan, one pier and then another, and the iron bed rolled out from under my boots and hit the wall.

I was hanging by my hands from the edge of the hatch, kicking at nothing.

An arm came down through the dark and got me by the wrist.

It was my brother's. I knew the grip.

I looked at it as long as I could afford to, and then I took it.

That attic was black and hot and smelled of wet tar paper, and you could only sit up straight under the ridge. We sat in a row on the joists with the Christmas boxes and the dog panting.

The whole house was riding now. It rose and slid and came down, and every time the wind got under the eaves the roof took a breath.

I turned the flashlight off to save it.

"Anybody bring the coffee?" Remy said.

Odile laughed, a bad laugh, close to the other thing.

He went on talking to her. He told her about the time the bishop's hat blew off at Creole, and he did the bishop's voice.

When her breath got short he started the Hail Mary in French, low, the way our grandmother said it. Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce. She came in on it after him, and they went around and around.

I sat a yard away with sixty feet of line in my lap and listened to my brother keep my wife from going to pieces.

He was good at it. I've never been able to do that for anybody. I can fix what's broke, and that's all I can do.

"I built this house," I said. I don't know why. Nobody had asked.

The praying stopped.

"You did," Remy said, in the same easy voice. "Every stud. Mama told me I could have it."

"What?"

"At Easter. The home place, when I marry. She said you'd understand. You got the rig money, you can build another one."

Something big hit us right then, a tank or a tree, and the whole roof rang.

"Then you'd best hang on to it," I said.

"When you marry who?" Odile said.

It was a fair question, and I'd like to have heard the answer.

I put my hand down through the hatch to feel for the water, and the water was right there. It came up over my wrist, warm as a bath, up through the hatch and up through every crack in the floor.

We got to our feet bent over, under the ridge pole, with the dog swimming between us.

Nobody answered anybody after that.

When it reached our waists I got out the hatchet.

Inch boards, felt and asphalt shingles, and every nail in them driven by a man who meant it. I can tell you exactly who nailed that roof. I cursed him the whole time.

Remy held the light. It shook all over the boards, and I figured that was the house moving.

It took about twenty minutes, my arm over my head, the water coming up my chest and tar running in my eyes. Then the boards let go. I stuck the hatchet back in my belt and got my head out, and the wind took the breath right out of my mouth.

The rain came flat, like thrown gravel. It was about five o'clock, and there was light, if you want to call it that.

I looked for the Hebert place and there wasn't any. There wasn't a ridge road or a fence or a light pole.

There were oak trees standing in the water up to their arms, a long way off, and roofs going by with nobody on them. I could hear cattle bawling somewhere, and after a while I couldn't.

They measured it later at over twelve feet, west of Cameron, and it went twenty-five miles inland. All I knew was that the parish was the Gulf of Mexico now, and we were going north across it at about the speed of a man walking, on top of my house.

I got Odile out by the wrists. Remy shoved the dog up after her and then he came, and we lay along the ridge with our fingers dug under the shingles.

I unlaced my boots and let them go, because a man can't swim in steel toes. I hollered at Remy to do the same. He grinned at me and shook his head.

Odile looked at the coil on my shoulder and put her mouth to my ear.

"Tie me."

I shook my head. I'd seen what line does.

"You tie on to something that rolls," I hollered, "you go where it goes."

So nobody tied on. I kept the coil loose on my shoulder, to throw.

But Odile never learned to swim, like most of the women on that ridge, and somebody had to lie below her on the low side, in case she slid.

Remy's mouth came up to my other ear.

"Give her to me," he said. "She goes in, I got her. Who swam the Pass?"

Everybody in Cameron knew about that. Calcasieu Pass, on a dollar bet, the summer he was sixteen. He told it at my wedding.

I was still in the Navy that summer, and I got it in a letter from Mama. When we were boys he was always the one who stayed in the boat, and I took that for laziness.

I swim all right, the way a Navy man swims. He was the swimmer, and I needed my hands for the line.

It made sense. That's what I've had to live with.

I took my wife's hand in the rain and I put it in my brother's, on the low side. Nobody made me.

She looked at me while I did it.

"I got her," Remy said, smiling, and he closed his fingers.