Chapter 5

We rode that roof about two hours, and you couldn't talk on it, so nobody finished anything.

A man went by on a barn door, sixty yards off, sitting straight up like he was riding a mule. He lifted one hand to us and I lifted mine. I never learned who he was.

It got as light as it was going to get.

About seven by my guess the oaks came out of the rain ahead of us, a long black line of them up to their elbows in the water. That was the Creole ridge, three miles from my back steps.

An oak doesn't move for anything, and there's no steering a roof.

We hit the first big one with the low corner.

It didn't make any more noise than a truck door, in that wind. The roof opened along the ridge pole like a book.

My half rode up into the limbs and jammed there, shaking. The other half swung out on the current and came apart, and the last I saw of the yellow dog he was standing on a piece of the eave, going away, looking back.

Then I saw her hair.

They were in the water thirty feet off, going along the line of trees, with his chest across a length of rafter that was going down under the two of them. His white undershirt, and her hair, and he had her by the hand, like I'd told him.

I got up on my knees and took the coil off my shoulder.

I throw line for a living, and I never threw better. It went out flat under the wind and lay down across the water right in front of him.

He looked at it.

He had one hand free. A man can hold a line with one hand and a woman with the other, long enough. All he needed was long enough.

He looked up at me. Thirty feet, with the rain in both our faces, and he looked me right in the eye.

I'd seen a hand open like that once before, over a kitchen floor.

He opened it.

He took the line with both of his.

Odile looked at her own hand. That's what I remember. She looked at it like somebody had just given her something. Then she went under with no splash at all, like a person stepping down off a porch.

And the rafter rolled off and my brother went under too, and came up blowing with his eyes rolled back, hanging on to that line.

He didn't kick. He didn't do one thing a swimmer does. He hung there like a sack of feed on a hook.

He couldn't swim.

It came to me all at once, on my knees on that roof. He never swam any Pass.

And I saw the pirogue. I built it when I was twelve, and I found him on the bayou bank when he was eight, soaked to the hair, with the bottom stove in on a cypress knee behind him. He smiled at me, and for nineteen years I had thought he did it out of meanness.

I'd put her hand in his.

I had the other end of that line in my fist. There was a limb beside me as thick as my thigh. I threw one turn around it and jammed the tail under itself, and I didn't test it.

I looked at my brother on the end of it for no time at all.

I went in off the roof in my bare feet with no line on me.

That water was warm. It surprised me every time. It was brown, and it had everything in it: shingles, wire, somebody's curtains.

Current takes a body along, so I swam where she ought to be and not where she'd been. I went down with my eyes open, for all the good it did, and felt around with my hands like a man looking for a dropped wrench on a dark floor.

Wire. A chair. My chest had started to jump.

Then something soft went around my wrist, like weed, and it was hair.

I got two wraps of it around my right hand and I pulled for the top, the way you'd pull a stuck line, with everything I had.

We came up under the limbs, and the current slammed us in among them.

I got an arm over one and hung there with her head on my chest. She wasn't doing anything at all.

I got her across that limb on her stomach with her head hanging down, and I leaned on her back with both hands the way the Navy taught us. Press and let go. Press and let go.

A moccasin was wound on the same limb, not a yard from her face, thick as my wrist, with its head up out of the rain. It looked at me. I kept pressing.

I don't know how long.

She threw up a quart of the Gulf of Mexico down the side of that oak, and she took a breath that sounded like a saw.

I laid my forehead on the wet dress between her shoulders, and for as long as that lasted I clean forgot I had a brother.

Then I heard the line.

It was humming over my head, the way a line hums when it's carrying more than it should.

I went up that trunk on my hands and bare feet. The jam had slipped. There wasn't anything holding him but that one wet turn, and the tail had about a foot left to run.

I took it in my left hand, the scarred one, and his whole weight came into it.

He was forty feet out in the current. Something had hit him, and his left arm trailed out behind him like it belonged to the water.

He looked up at me through the rain, one hand on the line, smiling.