She is a girl on a bicycle, barefoot, riding against a dusk that is lapidary with heat lightning. In the mangrove trees fireflies blink. Her sundress catches the wind and billows. A flat bottom glides over the swamp, a lantern dangling over the blackwater and capturing the pearly eyes of small alligators. Mosquitoes flock like pilgrims to the light, the light that lariates like a bell. Gravel churns under her tires and the soles of her feet are coal black. Her legs are dusted to mid-shin. Runnels of sweat fall and collect in her neck’s hollow. She is weaving lyrically. The men on the flat bottom wet their handkerchiefs in the water, tie them round their necks. Ice melts in a cooler, clink and sink. A washboard of clouds simmers with the day’s vestigial color. Febrile shadows haunt the water. She waves to the men and they nod in her direction. The swamp grass hums baroquely under wind, wind composed by a storm two days out. They watch her contrail of dust ascend and then, slowly, settle. One of the men whistles an old hymn and the other fetches a beer.

“Who was that?”

“Faulkner’s daughter.”

“The youngest?”

“Mm.”

They pass through a tunnel of old mangroves that are alive with fireflies. They come out the other side and the dock of Faulkner’s bar is strung with lights whose glow seems somehow faded, ancient, as if the light has been preserved from some long time ago, like pale amber opened by the cloak of night. The warm sibilance of laughter and music spills across the water. They tie to the dock and one of them, the elder, hefts a Styrofoam cooler loaded to the brim with shrimp grey and stringy.

The windows of the bar are open but inside the air is stagnant, dense with the reside of bodies. Faulkner’s wife is behind the bar, face pink as boiled shrimp. She tosses a hand their way and motions to the kitchen. The man with the cooler finds Faulkner there. The room is fetid and rank with pig’s blood. Faulkner’s oldest daughter is singing a half key out of tune, like always. She’s easy to pick out on Sunday morning, loud and unabashed. The voice don’t fit her, she’s lithe like her father, delicate of neck and wrist. A cigarette dangles precariously from the old man’s lips, hanging over a vat of something turbid and viscous and sheathed with animal fat. The man deposits his shrimp and takes the cigarette. He ladles out some of the gumbo.

Faulkner’s other daughter is fiddling with the piano and the men at the bar watch her out their eye’s corners. She’s sturdy in a good way, all legs and hips and chest. Old Wiggins is beside her on the bench teaching her a little bit of blues. The girl’s on that threshold between adolescence and full blown beauty, and the men watch diligently, as if by looking away they might miss the metamorphosis. Some think of their daughters grown or dead or living with disagreeable men, others remember their halcyon lovers, others still commit her legs to memory and later they’ll lie in their beds or in the dry grasses behind their homes and masturbate to the girl bouncing her bare legs along to the rhythm of Old Wiggins playing a few simple bars, G F C. He’d learned the keys with his granddad during the Depression, and he’d been at roadside when the old man got hanged. He stops and tries to work the knots out of his fingers. She likes his hands, which remind her of tree roots or lengths of frayed rope. She plays a little melody and he improvises, dancing the years right off his bones. Then he lays down a melody and she plays a halting jam, grows a little confident at his urging, starts working towards an incoherence that verges on grace. The men at the bar admire her legs and laugh, cheer her on. Her mother steps out for a smoke. The girl stops playing, pours the men shots dripping sweat down her forearms and wrists and onto the cratered bar of copper, into their whiskeys. She doesn’t charge a dime. She tries out her powers, banters harmlessly. They shake their heads, and in the kitchen the old man hears all things.

Old Wiggins plays his slow baleful tunes alone for a while. Then Eudora Melancon arrives with her fiddle and Old Wiggins grows lively and fierce. He works in a trance, his hands flying like memories of his young hands, and he stops to cackle and listen to the Mulatto girl screech. She’s taller than anyone else here, shapeless as wheat, hairy all over like the skin of a kiwi. All the boys have gone home with her to hear her play the fiddle and to hear her sing. But they’ve also gone because there is a magic surrounding her, deep and searing, that brings all the boys close to something they yearn for but cannot name. She lives in a trailer in the dunes and when the tide goes way out she likes to search the salt flats for clams. Sometimes campers will see a shadow moving by moonlight and singing and swear they’ve seen a ghost.

The young boys are against the wall, bobbing, unsure of themselves, or they’re in the next room shooting pool and drinking from smuggled flasks, loose and languid as seaweed in a fast flowing stream. Gooch’s boy is home from a spell on the rig, and he stalks the table. Jonnie Grayson’s youngest ices the top of his cue. Two old friends shooting pool. It is something old friends do. They shoot pool and drink and talk about women. They smoke cigarettes. They curse when easy shots go astray. Jonnie Grayson’s boy mutters and Gooch‘s boy slides himself into a groove, feeling a unity with the cue ball and the geometry of the table. He swaggers and circumnavigates and swills his flask. They remember playing basketball and football not all that long ago, remember when they couldn’t miss or when the holes in the defense resembled canyons. All sweet reminiscence. Gooch’s boy laughs, shrugs his shoulders, lines up the next shot. He’s broad in the shoulders, slender in the waist, stout and carnivorous. He feels the sweetness of two balls colliding, of momentum being transferred. They will someday be old, then much older. Ah, but pool, liquor, women in the other room sweaty with music and dancing. How can anything bear to end?

Outside the young black boys are riding their bikes by street light and mostly by moon, and when they streak under the wan, flickering street lights they resemble sleek, torsional fish, and when their backs catch the moonlight they shine like luminous, carved obsidian. Faulker’s wife watches and smokes. The cicadas are a symphony tonight.

At the bar Rosie Arcenault goes from man to man, bumming smokes or lights, letting a stray finger trace the length of a shoulder or linger on the back of a hand. They all remember when she was a great beauty and no one knows when she stopped being one. Sometimes they ask how it can be true if they can’t pinpoint when it happened. Some of them wonder that if maybe they’d gone home with her they could have kept watch, could have watched her face and located that tipping point when her looks withered. They hate themselves for having such thoughts, hate themselves because one of them didn’t marry Rosie. She chases them now. They’d all loved her once, and half still do, even if it was like loving flowing water, or the memory of moving water under high sun, or the ghost of water. They saw the old beauty sometimes, maybe in the way she stretched all languorous when waking at dawn, in the way her hands still cupped her mugs of coffee, or in the way she resisted a while in bed before at last tightening and arching, and letting her spine show like a vein of fossils, how she still liked having her ears bitten. On down the line she goes, finishing drinks, fingers tickling an inner thigh. She still wears the same perfume and some of them can‘t help going hard at the scent of it.

“Naw, Rosie, not tonight…the old lady’s comin’ down tonight.”

“Rosie, please, please baby no. Just leave me be.”

“Look in the mirror, babe.”

“Can’t a man drink in peace?”

“I ain’t got no cigarettes, Rosie, I quit. M‘yea I quit, bout three years ago now, after the second heart attack.”

Faulkner’s wife brings out the gumbo which is poured over white rice on Styrofoam plates. They start to chow at the bar, pulling out handkerchiefs and wiping their brows, surprised by the heat of the gumbo. Faulkner likes his gumbo hot. Nothing but the sounds of pool in the next room and the feral sounds of eating, the stench and curdle and slop. Old Wiggins eats at the bench and while everyone else is preoccupied with food Eudora Melancon takes Charlie McNulty into the bathroom for a line and a hand job. He pounds the stall once, twice, in ecstasy or fury, and leaves her panting and wet on the toilet seat.

Old Wiggins announces the end of the first meal by tickling out a few lazy chords. Sometimes he thinks about the byways and backwaters he’s played: the time he got half his teeth kicked out while hitchhiking on the Mississippi flatlands; the time he played for fifty hours straight in a little swamp bungalow and by the end of it he was so tired he was drifting asleep between songs and he’d wake up already playing, so tired he was hallucinating his father and grandfather playing right there with him; the tall brunette woman with fiery eyes who watched him play once in Blackwater, how after that she‘d visit him in dreams and say that she was out there waiting for him to find her again, dreams so real he‘d wake up with her perfume on his finger tips, and how every bar he walked into after that he‘d look for those eyes, eyes like a hellfire demon. Soon he and Eudora are rolling again. He scans the crowd again looking for those scarlet eyes. The next time he sees them, he’s come to believe, that’ll be the day the Lord takes him down to hell.

Faulkner comes out from the kitchen to accept congratulations on the gumbo and to collect the crimson stained plates into an enormous garbage bag.

Rosie dances alone while everyone else digests, and the men at the bar watch her over their shoulders, and some of their hearts ache with longing.

“Sad sight.”

Not one of them has the courage to go out there and dance with her. Instead they think about the multitude of minor failures that define their lives: the time one of them slapped his daughter when she wouldn’t stop crying, or the time one of them couldn’t get an erection with his wife because just that afternoon he’d been jacking off while thinking about his best friend’s new girlfriend, or the time one of them went out for dinner with an old friend that he knew had money and went right ahead and ordered the most expensive thing on the menu.

“What’s a girl like that to do when her looks go?”

Rosie’s entered a covenant with the music and doesn’t much care about the loneliness. Some fragile equilibrium between liquor and music and sweat has created a space of disappearance. Only Rosie dances to the secret melody of the music. Only she hears the elided notes, can follow their intuitive paths. She’s always been a cartographer of the ineffable and numinous. This is what all those men have felt inside her and been unable to place, what keeps them visiting her even as her looks have hardened and ossified and betrayed her spirit. One of these men takes her by the wrist now and Rosie becomes tangible again, earthbound. This coming back hurts every time, but she accepts it as a necessary countervailing force, the mundane context that she finds new ways to transcend. She dances a while with him, feeling lonelier than hell, seeing her faded beauty every time he averts his eyes or swills his beer.

In the backyard Father O’Herlihy works the smoker, two pints of whiskey in his pocket. The yard is ruptured by heat, swarmed with children and stray chickens. The kids chase one another and the poultry, and some of the kids carry mason jars whose insides flicker radiantly with captured fireflies. Faulkner brings Father O’Herlihy a plate of gumbo and rice, and the two share a nip from Father’s flask and watch the kids scatter and ebb with the rehearsed chaos of atoms. They swerve into one another, arms astretch, mason jars uncapped and spilling their luminous guts. The two men add fresh cedar chips to the smoker. Steam rises, sizzle and hiss.

Across the yard Grace Hillman watches the two men watch the children. She’s under the ghostly thatched shadows of a mangrove, Spanish moss dangling like garlanding on a Christmas tree. She tries to locate her daughter in the flock of little ones.

Father O’Herlihy watches the Hillman girl, too. She waves to him carelessly and he thinks of the letter he should write her, all the letters at home in the attic of the Parish where he keeps a spare room. He cooks on a hot plate, mostly just rice and soup; sometimes there’s a bit of white bread, too, and if he‘s lucky a little bacon that he can fry the bread in. The light up there is dismal and sepulchral, which keeps him focused, and out the two small windows in one direction is the white road made from crushed seashells that meanders into the swamp and out the other window he can see over the cauliflower tops of the mangroves to the expanses of swamp wheat that are quartered and diced by fishing canals. Once he flew to California, he was a young boy then, and he recalls the stark desert carved by lonesome roads, and the effect of the bayou is much the same. At dawn he likes to drink cold coffee and watch the duck boats glide sleepily amongst the weeds and into the febrile east. Ah, little Hannah Hillman. A pinkish scab on her left knee, her elbows dirty. Fearless in the way girls down here have to be fearless. Her little sister died when she bit into a black widow spider, three years old. He thinks of her body rotting in its little house in the city of the dead. He’s got a desk full of letters all for little Hannah Hillman.

They make space on the dance floor for Aloysius Allemande. It’s not a dance floor, really, just an open space where a few tables have been pushed aside. The women have hung their purses and scarves from the low rafters, the solid beams of piquant cedar. Aloysius Allemande careens madly about the floor. Aloysius had left his house to his wife after their son disappeared and now he lives out of a tent. He shows up in backyards sometimes, nesting for a week or two, hanging his clothes between trees, making a fire pit and eating God knows what. Did his pissing and shitting in the trees or the swamp. Everyone had hosted him. Sometimes the wives or girlfriends would bring him toast in the morning, or coffee. He’s widely admired for his brevity. He’ll disappear for months on end, and neighbors will whisper that maybe he’s finally bit it, decomposing somewhere in the woods or digesting in the gut of a gator. Then he’ll reappear, dragging his tent, newly shaved and a fresh pair of shoes on his feet, the peripatetic saint of the bayou.

“His boy walked off just like that and he’s never seen again. Don’t know how it happens.”

“Don’t know how a man gets over that.”

“Someone told me he’s a prophet. Sees angels and ghosts. Talks to ‘em in his sleep.”

“Sounds like drugs to me. Who told you that nonsense?”

“His wife.”

Old Wiggins is playing piano in his sleep. He’s dragging the tempo into the mud and he can’t feel his hands. Jonnie Grayson’s oldest opens his guitar case and quickly tunes the thing. A boy born with perfect pitch, he’s never taken a lesson in his life. He’s short and lean with furtive, chatoyant eyes and outsized hands. He’s in love with Eudora Melancon and she’s in love with him but both are too afraid to whisper a word about it. So they play music. He pushes a quick, bluegrass pace. She’s game to follow. The older folks shuffle off the floor back to their tables in the shadows. Old Wiggins has his head against the body of the piano and he’s asleep or dead, or maybe he’s just listening to the instrument’s last, imperceptible vibrations.

Gooch and his ex-wife are making out next to the kitchen door, both so drunk that they can barely stand. His boy approaches Faulkner’s youngest daughter who’s the only person at the bar watching the dance floor. Her stool is too high for her and her legs dangle like the legs of a child, suspended in air, dirty feet swaying with the music.

“Do you dance?”

“You askin’ if I dance with you?”

The choir of old men murmurs and behind the bar Faulkner’s wife looks up from her dishes.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Ok.”

He steers her by her fingertips out to a little alcove mostly hidden from the bar. Aloysius Allemande helicopters wildly not far from them, his trajectories unpredictable. Faulkner’s wife tries not to watch. For a time they dance apart, connected by finger tips or not at all. The music grows lethargic and pushes them together. Eudora Melancon watches morosely while Jonnie Grayson’s oldest plays a melancholy solo. She wants to suck on his fingers, run each one through her lips and over her tongue. She’s parched and takes a sip of his beer and he looks up and smiles very sadly and has no problem continuing the solo even though all his attention is turned to her, and he thinks that maybe tonight he’ll take her out back and smoke a cigarette and tell her that he’s been in love with her since the first time they played together and that she’s gotta cut it out, all this fooling around with all the other boys who are tone deaf and dumb and can’t appreciate what she’s laying down. Faulkner’s youngest daughter is leading Gooch’s boy by the hip now, but he’s afraid that if he gets any closer she’ll feel how hard he is and get frightened.

“You were in Iraq.”

“Mm.”

“What was it like?”

He shrugs and she yanks him closer, grinding his dick against her hip and she grazes her hand across it and smirks like a girl who possesses all the wisdom of the world.

“I don’t know about Gooch’s boy. That boy’s got a spooked look.”

“He seen things we ain’t.”

“Looks empty inside, malignant.”

“Nah, it ain’t a vacant look. More like whatever he’s got inside of him ran as deep as it could to hide and now it only comes out to look at the world in the dead of night.”

Faulkner’s wife throws her dishrag onto the bar.

“He’s a nice boy, now.”

Out back little Hannah Hillman approaches Father O’Herlihy with her arms out-stretched in offering. He can see the vessels and veins pulsing along the circumference of her skull.

“Father, I got a pet.”

“What have you got there?”

“It’s a firefly and his name is Rupert. He’s my first pet.”

The girl had the insect pinched between her right thumb and forefinger and was slowly pressing its guts out.

“He’s a little shy because this is his first time meeting people. You can touch him, if you want. He won’t mind. It’s not like petting a dog though. You have to be gentle.”

“That’s ok, Hannah. He seems like a good pet.”

“No, he’s not. Fireflies don’t make very good pets. Everyone knows that. But Rupert is ok as far as fireflies go.”

She runs off and Father O’Herlihy notices that the palm of her hand glows iridescent green. He looks to where Grace was standing in the latticed shadow of the mangrove but she’s disappeared.

Many of the men at the bar are wearing their Sunday suits.

Most of the women have kicked off their shoes and left them scattered about the room. Tables are crowded with empty bottles and half used napkins and plates stacked four, five high. The scarves dangling from the rafters are like ethereal snakes and the purses are like bee hives. Some of the youngest children have come inside and they sleep against the front wall slumped against one another and intertwined, their warm bodies lifting gently with the methodical heaving of their lungs. A group of widows have begun a game of euchre. Some of the older kids watch their parents and siblings dance, and they marvel at the mysteries of the adult world, thinking how serene their relatives look, how composed and purposeful, and they yearn desperately to one day be that old, to be at that age when the world makes sense. The parents see their kids dreamy eyed against the wall and yearn to feel that vanished wonder and awe. The siblings are too myopic to see anything.

James Cohen and Miller Hutchinson confer outside the front door with their guitars. Cohen‘s is warped almost beyond comprehension. Cohen, whose face is cratered and sloughed away, lives in his grandfather’s old homestead that once grew sugarcane but is now over grown and wild. The house is falling apart, the power and running water long gone. His family is dead. He’s self taught on the guitar, and he’s weaving his hands, lariating while Hutchinson leans in, absorbing what he can. Hutchinson is home from college, hair grown long and greasy, his guitar case stickered like the back of a well traveled family minivan. The kid might be better, might speak the language with more fluency, but he listens respectfully to Cohen, who plays with his eyes closed and plays with his whole body. Hutchinson finally breaks into a long experimental riff, unable to help himself any longer. He needs to show the old man that he’s beyond him. Cohen listens with his eyes closed, his eviscerated face frowning as if catching something malicious on the wind. The tide is coming in, bringing the oily smell of marine life, of world’s unknown. Cohen reaches out his hand and puts it on Hutchinson’s arm.

“No, not like that,” he says. “That I can’t do that. That’s all mixed up. All I can do are simple things. Keep it simple. That’s what I like.”

“I could teach you, if you wanted. It’s not too difficult.”

Cohen looks down at his ravaged, calloused hands. “No, no. That ain’t me.”

Faulkner’s oldest daughter tends to a cauldron of red beans and rice. She hears fragments of music as the door opens, can discern the silhouettes of dancers. Her sister is out there. She sighs. Her sister dancing, laughing, driving the chorus at the bar wild. She’ll go out into the world, leaving them behind. She tastes the red beans. Everything reaches her as if she were underwater, far below the surface.

Gooch’s ex-wife stops their osculation with a hand to his cheek, pulls away. The force of his large hands are on the back of her neck.

“Why’d we break up, baby?”

Gooch kisses her cheek, her neck.

“Baby, please. What happened?”

He falls back against the wall as if he were a boy who just got asked to cut the lawn on Saturday morning. He shrugs, his sturdy shoulders petulant. She falls beside him and desperately gropes for one of his hands to knead.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Things just changed.”

“But what.”

Gooch shrugs again.

She pulls him into her and kisses him messily again. “It’s so hard to live the life you want, baby. So hard. Please, can we not forget about this tomorrow morning?” But he doesn’t say a thing. She always dreads the weight of his silences. They seem to contract around her from all sides. Some nights, now that Gooch is out of the house and now that their boys are out into the world, if she can’t sleep and the house seems haunted by emptiness she drives out along quickblack roads and watches the miasma of the city rise over the exoskeletons of the mangrove trees. She pulls over at the bridge and watches the barges and the freighters moaning silently across the river’s oily surface bearing their cargoes for the industrial fires, and then she looks back to the monolithic darkness of the swamps and the streams and the homes that sit on stilts, and she imagines televisions blinking like sentinels in the night, like prophets of a separate civilization. Thank God she had no daughters, she prays. She can’t tell Gooch any of this. She can’t tell anyone any of this, and it makes her feel strange. She wonders if anyone else thinks this way. Sometimes she’ll meet men on her computer and she’ll have them over and she’ll make them dinner and ply them with beer. Usually they’re men passing through the city on business. She wants them to tell her stories. Stories about the great feculent river, and the factory stink, and about foreign metropolises she visits in mythic-sized dreams. She tells these strange men about her thoughts, about her trips to the city, and they smile at her with sadness and pity and condescension, but she keeps talking because what does it matter?

“I’m a rhythm and blues man,” Old Wiggins growls to no one in particular, briefly sitting up, eyes adart like a man perched on the precipice of death.

Grace Hillman slinks from the darkness and surprises Faulkner sitting on the dock. He’s smoking a cigarette and letting his toes drag in the sluggish current. He’s got about five minutes all night for himself. She sits down and twist-ties her ankle around his. She’s missing three fingers from a hunting accident.

“Ain’t you afraid of gators and snakes?”

“They want my feet, they can have ‘em.”

“That’s what I thought about my fingers, and now I’d kinda like to have ‘em back.”

“You’re like a cat, you know. Always hiding and coming out of the darkness.”

“Well your wife don’t care for me.”

None of the women care for Grace Hillman. They don’t trust her a bit. She works the deli at the A & P and when the wives and girlfriends come in they’re rude to her and dismissive and don’t make small talk with her the way they do with everyone else. They don’t let their kids invite Hannah to their birthday parties.

“She doesn’t even know who the father is. I’ve heard three different stories. She told Rosie that the daddy is in Afghanistan, but she told me that he died one night while driving for work in Alabama. Said he was a traveling salesman and one night he’d been working too hard and fell asleep and plowed right into a telephone pole, dead just like that.”

Faulkner’s wife brings out coffee steaming in Styrofoam cups, coffee burnt beyond taste and sometimes spiced with whiskey. Coffee for the vagrants and the vagabonds. She carries four cups in each hand, pinching them by the brim, gliding with pugnacious ease between tables of dozing drunks and litters of sleeping children and the dreamy dancers dreaming on their feet.

Gooch’s boy has his fingers meandering up the front of Faulkner’s youngest daughter’s sun dress. Her pretty nose is stippled in sweat, her makeup is slagging off in thick rills that remind him of hot steel being poured from a blast furnace. Her eyes are astute and playful and urge his fingers to climb higher until he finds her wet and hairy, and he’s so hard that he can’t see straight. It was dreams like this that sustained him on those insufferable days in the desert, days so hot and boring, dreams of nameless girls with hairy, wet cunts. Faulkner’s daughter hadn’t touched puberty when he’d left and he remembers her coming up to him one steamy Sunday in church and handing him a lily and telling him that she’d pray for him. He hasn’t thought about that since forever. It’s strange how memories can hide and lie in wait and then pounce and then retreat again into the impenetrable jungle of lost moments, the jungle of a life. She won’t look at him. He wants her to look at him so badly it’s the only thing he wants.

Eudora and Grayson’s oldest boy launch into an old blues song. Back at the bar Faulkner’s wife puts down a bottle of whiskey she’s holding and listens. Eudora sings like a gospel singer, like a big bellied big boned bitch, but she’s slender and Faulkner’s wife can’t believe the voice coming out of her. It’s not the song she’s listening to but the memory of a song, the outline of some boozy night from her adolescence that she can’t quite grasp. It feels like the whole world is going back with her. Where is her husband? It’s like there’s two versions of her life listening to this song, like she’s somehow split and it’s like in that first moment, she already knew about this moment, could feel it somehow. It’s like even then she knew she’d be standing behind this bar with her beauty behind her and with two girls she doesn’t understand and a husband she can’t find, listening to this very song.

Rosie Arcenault and Aloysius Allemande, both of them laughing madly, dance like wild, sclerotic trees caught in a fierce storm.

James Cohen is outside still, playing guitar with his eyes closed and with such soul that his fingers are bleeding, with such soul that Miller Hutchinson watches and feels like a mendacious fraud, like a newly waxed car without an engine. And when Cohen opens his eyes he’s certain that the boy’s learned something important from him, too.

Eudora Melancon briefly locks eyes with Gooch’s boy. It’s just an incidental glance they share, not the desperate look of two forlorn souls seeking solace in a crowd. She half smiles and he puts up a surreptitious hand when Faulkner’s youngest daughter has her back turned. Eudora remembers being fifteen, and Gooch’s boy showing up at her front door driving his dad’s truck. This was when he’d been a quiet, malicious kid prone to beating his own friends senseless. But Eudora had basically known him forever, and treated him no different than she’d treated him when they’d been five. She was maybe the only girl who wasn’t terrified of him or in awe of him.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go. Got something to show you.” She was standing in the door, his truck was idling, the swamp grasses were blown flat by a stiff autumn wind, rickety boats were lugging their hauls of shrimp and oysters up the canals. “You can’t drive,” she said. “Sure I can. Come on.” So they drove west along the Ponchartreme levee. The road was hard and dusty; they were alone on it. High wisps of stratus framed a piercing sky. She sidled up against him on the cab’s bench and he rolled down the windows. His music practically made her ears bleed so she shut it off.

He drove them to the abandoned sugar plantation out along the Noose Neck canal. The old mansion was slowly being devoured by swamp. Vines and moss strangled the colonnaded front porch. The first floor, having succumbed to flood upon flood, was like a creek bed, full of mud and silt and weeds. High water marks stained the walls the way a parent might track the height of a growing child. A chandelier had become a Medusa’s head of bird’s nests and insect hives.

The grand stairway had moldered and sagged, so they climbed the narrow servant’s stairs to the second floor. All of the windows were blown out, but the hardwood floors were mostly clean, save a thin film of dust. There were blemishes of char on the ceilings from bonfires, and pentagrams were spray painted on the walls. The bones of a small dog or a fox were scattered in one of the bathrooms.

He led her to the back bedroom of the house. It overlooked a grove of swamp oaks and a turbid stream and a patch of grass that danced in the wind. She sat on the windowsill and let the wind whisper sensuously up her spine and between her shoulder blades. He rolled a joint and smoked half of it and let her finish it. Sun streamed through the broken windows; the room was like a chrysalis of late season light. On the blanched floor was the outline of a football field that someone had once laid out with masking tape.

“I bet someone got married out there once,” she said looking out to the grove of oaks. “I bet someone’s daughter got married out there on a spring night. Thick mosquitoes. People sweatin’ violently. This house beautiful and new and smellin’ like cut grass. A band playing. Torches lit and candles lit. The cellar full of wine, full of oak kegs of whiskey. Think they could imagine a moment like this? That we’d be here in their ruins imaginin’ them getting married?”

He kissed her and took her viciously to the floor. The wood was hard against her hip bones. He was clumsy and inexperienced but earnest, trying to suck her breasts, trying to kiss her neck, trying to keep his desire at bay and then trying to enter her gently. She was beginning to understand that boys became different when they were inside her. Some became very scared. Some became violent. Some became nothing at all, turning so far inside themselves that it was like a vacuum, and it was like she didn’t exist at all, either, like they were willing her into nothingness. And some became entirely themselves, as if the person that they were in every other moment had been misplaced in this world, was completely wrong for it, and that they only became their true selves when they were fucking her. It was how she felt when she played music. Gooch’s boy was one of these men; it was like suddenly he’d stepped through a door and the world suddenly, so briefly, made perfect sense.

Afterwards they lay on the warm sunny floor. He was on his belly with his feet up in the air and sweat had pooled at the base of his spine and she went and did something funny and licked it, the pool of sweat, and he’d laughed. She liked him on his belly like he was, kicking his feet like a child. She was splayed madly on her back, her hair spread out like a delta, the sweat spilling slowly off her and into the cracks of the floorboards. She was long, and light, and shapeless, like balsa wood.

“How’d you start playing fiddle, Eudora?”

“My granddaddy taught me. Started teaching me before I can even remember.” And then, for no reason at all except that she’d always wanted to tell somebody and never had, she told Gooch’s boy how when she was seven her granddaddy came into her room one morning before school and made her suck his cock. She didn’t even know what it was then. And after that he kept coming and kept coming on a weekly basis, and pretty soon she started to learn what it was, but she was too afraid to stop because she was beginning to get pretty good at the fiddle, beginning to intuit that it might be the one thing that could save her, and she didn’t want him to take that from her. So she kept on sucking his cock, and by the time she was twelve he wasn’t even coming into her room anymore, she was seeking him out, finding him in his study or in the bathroom, and unzipping his pants and pulling out his cock and blowing him, and then they’d go and he’d teach her more fiddle. She was better than him by then, but she kept doing it, she told Gooch’s boy, who was still on his belly and had lain his head down on the hardwood floor and was looking straight ahead. She kept doing it because she already knew that if sex wasn’t going to save her than there was no real way it could hurt her, either, and maybe it was saving her grandfather. Who could know?

“Don’t you hate that sick old fuck?”

“No, not at all. He gave me the fiddle,” she said. “He gave me that, and that’s more than whatever he took, I figure.”

“If he was alive, I’d kill him for you.”

She put a hand on his back then, and he promised he’d never tell anybody. She promised him she’d never tell anybody else, either. And she hadn’t.

Father O’Herlihy and Faulkner bring flanks of smoked hog into the kitchen. Everyone washes their hands under cold brittle water. Faulkner’s oldest daughter ties her hair back in a net, and Father O’Herlihy admires the damp undersides of her arm, the stringy lines of tendon and the stubble of hair. A man can’t help his tastes, he thinks, and he mutters a prayer of gratitude that he wasn’t born with a taste for young boys or a taste for blood because if he had, he’d have been powerless against such urges. You can resist those things but it’s like closing the release valve on a dam, the pressure builds and then it cascades like a torrent upon the oblivious world. Faulkner’s wife puts on a pair of plastic gloves but the rest of them don’t. The charred pig is on a big wooden cutting board depressed in the center from so much use. Faulkner’s wife leads the assault, taking a haunch of hog and driving her fingers into its hot middle, pulling outwards like she’s pulling the intestines from a dying man. Faulkner lights a cigarette and delves in after her, the two of them side to side, hands working quickly, atavistically, fingers tearing through the soft flesh and muscle, and shredding the adipose meat. They set the little pieces of smooth bone aside. Faulkner’s oldest daughter works like a prostitute going through the disinterested motions, glum and grim. Father O’Herlihy hasn’t cut his nails and the grease and grime congeals in a warm mush atop the delicate pink skin of his fingers. Soon they’re all tearing and tugging thoughtlessly, working in silence but for the moist thwack and wet suck of the hog’s meat flaking apart. The stench will be under their fingers and in their hair for days. Sweat is coming off Faulkner in a fine mist. His cigarette sizzles down to a snake of ash. It falls to the floor, he stubs it out with his toe. His oldest, most reliable daughter wipes her forehead with the back of her forearm. The youngest girl turns the heads but the oldest will take care of Faulkner and his wife when the time comes; the other girl will be long gone, driven away by the selfishness of beauty. The kitchen’s heat is sublime, righteous. It scalds and boils them. Father O’Herlihy sweats through his clothes. They cling to him as if it were raining.

Faulkner’s youngest daughter looks up at Gooch’s boy with lapis eyes, and goddamnit. Goddamnit, goddamnit.

The floor’s sticky with spilled liquor.

Grace Hillman drives home through a tunnel of mangroves her headlights casting forth like curious angels explicating the tree roots perched like upturned hands and the moss dangling like pig intestines. A possum is splattered on the side of the road, its body a mess of blood and bone and fur. Hannah is curled up in the back seat, whistling softly in her sleep, the gristle and flesh of her body still, miraculously, composed.

Gooch is silently fucking his ex-wife in the bed of his pickup truck while she thinks that the stars are like a thousand million candles put onto little boats and set adrift in a jet black sea.

Faulkner is elbows deep into a vat of pork meat and barbecue sauce made from a vinegar base. Father O’Herlihy is taking out handfuls and slopping them onto pieces of soggy white bread and dolloping them with coleslaw that’s attracted a small militia of flies. Faulkner’s oldest daughter is ladling the red beans onto heaps of sticky white rice and her mother is rushing them out as quickly as she can, the Styrofoam plates so heavy that they bend and sag and threaten to break. The men sleeping at the bar wake up dreary eyed and slake their morning thirsts with melt ice whiskeys. The children sleep all entwined like a pile of dirty clothes or a pile of discarded entrails.

Johnnie Grayson’s oldest finally stops playing and realizes he’s had to piss for about four hours. Eudora Melancon is covered head to toe in a fine patina of perspiration that Johnnie Grayson’s oldest thinks about licking off, inch by inch. Old Wiggins is playing in his sleep. The chorus at the bar munch and slop the pork and beans into their mouths with fingers and pieces of white bread and plasticene sporks. Faulkner emerges from the kitchen for another round of applause.

“Get up there, old man!”

“It’s getting late!”

“Come on, old man! Get up and play!”

“Come on, dad.” His youngest daughter drags him by the elbow, like a tugboat guiding a barge through the swamp. Her grip is firm and the chorus at the bar pounds the copper and Faulkner’s wife laughs and gets down another bottle of whiskey. They drink even though the dull ache in their pancreas is back. Tomorrow, they’ll quit. They drink and remember the girls they kissed out on the levees. The girls with snaggle teeth and bee hives of hair. They girls they were too ashamed to dance with in public. The girls their friends mocked. They drink because they were cowards and stayed silent and only kissed those girls in the depths of night.

“Say, where’d Rosie get off to?”

“Hey, Rosie?”

“Yeah, where is she? It’s time for me to dance.”

They bumble to their feet like drunk dinosaurs. But Rosie’s soaking in a seething bath. She’s got Robert Johnson on vinyl and turtle stew congealing on the stove top. Aloysius Allemande is dancing by himself in the front yard of her trailer and pretty soon she’ll join him, naked, the water cascading down her spider veins and her orange peel thighs.

With his tarry cloth, Faulkner wipes down his father’s harmonica. He flutters through a few uneasy, raspy scales. His youngest daughter sits down besides Old Wiggins. Faulkner takes a breath like a man about to plunge underwater, and then he plays. The drunks at the bar turn to watch. The dancers on the floor stop dancing. The boys in the backroom pile into the doorway. Faulkner’s wife goes into the kitchen to start the dishes. The old ladies put their euchre on hold. The kettle roll of blues harmonica infiltrates the dreams of the children sleeping in their dog pile. Faulkner plays alone, he plays an Antediluvian song that his father played when the winds came off the gulf and the rains fell and the waters rose and the levees broke. It’s a song of hammers and stray dogs and adzes chucking. It’s a song that smells like pine wood coffins.

Outside Johnnie Grayson’s oldest takes a cigarette from Eudora Melancon with his lips, and he lights her’s with a match. The creek is stilled with nearly high tide. Dawn is not yet showing but the insects have quieted to a murmur and the birds are tuning and squawking like the woodwinds of a middle school orchestra. Grayson’s oldest lets his whole body spool out. He’s suddenly limp, as if the tensely coiled span of a suspension bridge had been suddenly snapped. His long lank legs slip out from under him and he’s on the bare earth smoking and Eudora’s leaning into the back wall with her right shoulder. She smokes with her left hand.

“I’ll tell you, this?” he says. “Nothing can match it. Not drugs, not alcohol, not sex.”

“Just music.”

Grayson’s boy tilts his head and smiles up at her. “You played good tonight.”

“Thank you.”

“You always play good.”

“I like playing with you.”

“How’d you get that scar, Eudora?” he asks, taking his index finger and brushing her eyebrow. “I always wanted to ask you about it, but I never did.”

“An exorcism.”

“An exorcism?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow.”

“We was living out in my grandparents place then. I don’t think you were ever there. It was out in the swamps behind the Noose Neck levee. It ain’t there anymore, though. They bulldozed it when they filled in the swamp and built that highway from here to the city.”

“I don’t think I ever visited you there.”

“Well I was only a girl then, could barely play fiddle at all. It was a small little shack built high up on some stilts. Me, grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, Elysia, Taveras, all of us lived there. The place was haunted. Always was, of course. Everyone knew that the Indians who built the levee was dumped in the swamp when they died. Sometimes at night you’d see them out there, sitting around a fire and laughing. Once my grandpa got lost and two of ‘em helped him find his way home. But the haunting was getting really bad. Things was going missing. None of us could sleep at night for all the conversations going on. Grandma tried talking it out with ‘em, but they wouldn’t have any of it. So finally she had an exorcism. All of us sat around in a circle. Grandma brought out her real big, sharp knife that she still used a grind stone to sharpen, then she brought in a chicken and cut his head clean off. She drained all the blood from his gullet right into a glass jar. Then she went around the circle and cut all of us at the same place on the eye and dripped our blood in with the chicken’s. Then she said something in old Indian and we all drank some of the blood.”

“Did it work?”

“Nah, didn’t.”

He laughs and she smiles sweetly. Her teeth are crooked and too compact and very small.

“That’s why I had to move out,” she says. “Couldn’t take it no more.”

“Hm. I always wondered the story behind that scar.”

“I got scars all over me from her exorcisms. Someday I’ll show you all of ‘em.”

“I’d like that.”

Faulkner’s wife comes out of the kitchen and gets her youngest daughter from the bench beside Wiggins.

“Come on girl, get back here. You got to do at least a little work.”

She sulks back to the kitchen. Her older sister looks her over. “The fuck you smiling at?” she asks.

In the back room Gooch’s boy racks another game. Johnnie Grayson’s youngest looks his friend over. “You look like you just been danced with by a ghost.”

Faulkner’s still playing.

At the piano bench, Old Wiggins wakes up from a sweet lyrical dream. He scans the crowd like he always does. And he sees a pair of scarlet eyes burning like hellfire and blood, looking right back at him.