Chapter 6

Nobody ever handed me anything so simple.

I'd handled wet line for ten years, and I knew just what that turn would do. It would hold as long as I held the tail. If I opened my left hand it would slip, slow and then all at once, and forty feet of manila would go over and out, and I wouldn't even hear it in that wind.

And the hatchet was still in my belt. I'd swum with it and never known it.

I had time to look at him. In twenty-seven years I had never just looked.

I've got good eyes. You need them on a derrick. His lips were stretched back off his teeth, and the brown water slapped that smile and it came up again the same. The little jump at the corner of his left eye was going like a pulse.

Mama's wink.

I'd seen it on the bayou bank. I'd seen it in the kitchen when Papa took down the belt and looked around for who. I'd seen it that same afternoon on my own pillow.

He was scared to death.

He was smiling because he was scared to death and it was the only face he had, and he'd been scared to death every time.

You'd think that would soften a man.

It went through me like lye. Twenty-seven years I'd been whipped by somebody more scared than I was.

Here is what I was holding. My wife, breathing, on the limb under me. Mama's land, with no other son to give it to. A whole parish drowned, with nobody counting one more. And nobody alive to see it but her.

She had her head up. She had one arm around the limb and that snake by her face and her hair stuck across her mouth, and she was looking at my hand.

She looked along the line to where it went, and back at my hand.

It took her two tries, with the coughing.

"I won't tell," she said.

I took the hatchet out of my belt.

That edge had been through a roof since I last put a stone to it, but a tight line goes in one lick, and I'd cut a hundred.

The line ran out from the turn right in front of me, shaking off water, under a dead limb that had come down across it.

I watched my arm go back, the same arm as in the kitchen.

I swung.

The dead limb jumped in two and went away, and the line sprang up clear.

I stuck the hatchet in my belt, took that line in both hands, and pulled.

I've had a long time to come up with a reason. I've tried Papa, and Mama, and God, and those are all things I thought of later. I don't have one.

Wet line with a man on it in that current doesn't come to you. You take a foot and you hold it with the turn, and you take another foot.

On the second pull my left hand opened up along that old white scar, and after that the line came through red and then just wet.

I counted them off as he came. I told you I count.

The pirogue. The shotgun. The watch. My wife.

It took more pulls than that.

When he got under the limb I stood on the line and reached down. I got my left fist in that same undershirt and brought him up across the limb the way you'd land a wet tarp, with his arm hanging wrong.

He hung there and threw up. Then he turned his head and looked for me, and his mouth started to do it.

I looked at the water.

After that there wasn't anything to do, and we did it for about nine hours.

We sat in that oak within reach of each other, her on the limb below me, him on the one across. There were three moccasins I could count, a marsh rabbit and a wet hen, and nothing bothered anything.

We had no water, thanks to my truck, so we sat with our heads back and our mouths open for the rain.

Cattle went by all morning on their sides, legs stuck out, turning slow. Around noon something else went by that I didn't look at. Odile did, and she turned her face to the bark.

She tore the hem off her dress and reached up and wrapped my hand. She didn't ask, and I let her.

Along about one o'clock there was a dark wet band on the bark above the water, as wide as my thumb. By three it was as wide as my hand.

"You let go," Odile said. Her voice was about gone. She didn't say it loud.

It was a while before he answered. He'd been shaking since noon.

"I know it."

"You looked at him and you let go."

"I can't swim, Odile."

"I know you can't," she said, and that was all she said to him that day.

Late in the afternoon he said my name. "Cide." I didn't look. "You know the watch?"

I knew the watch. Papa gave it to me in '44, and I left it in the drawer so the Navy wouldn't lose it.

"I wore it, all that winter," he said. "I figured if I had it on, Papa might take me for somebody he didn't whip. I wound it every time I got scared." He breathed a while. "That's how come the spring went."

He had nine hours to bring up the other thing. He told me about the watch.

By dark the ridge was mud with a skin of water on it, and our arms wouldn't hold anymore. We got down and sat against the trunk, not touching.

A little after daylight Friday a boat came along the ridge with a man on the bow, hollering in French and English. She already had forty people on her deck, in whatever they'd been wearing, none of them talking.

A deckhand put a blanket on Remy and asked who got him out.

"That's my big brother right there," Remy said. It carried. "Pulled me out of the Gulf of Mexico with one hand, cut to the bone. Go on, look at his hand."

They looked. He gave them the smile, the whole deck, one at a time. He didn't give it to me.

Odile held the hand he'd let go inside her other one, looking at me.