The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,159

from the kitchen changed her mind. “What smells so good in there?”

Annabel smiled. She was a tall, strong woman, a bit overweight, her shoulder-length hair loose in the front and done up in a ponytail behind. “Ham and shrimp. My man, Clive, and the boys cooking up a jambalaya.”

“I’ve never had that,” Amaia admitted. “It smells wonderful.” She went to the kitchen, where a big pot on a portable camp stove held a simmering red-tinted mixture. Clive was stirring it with a long wooden spoon and explaining the recipe to Johnson.

“My mama always make it for holidays when I was little,” Annabel said, pointing to the pot. “Right now maybe don’t look like the time to celebrate, but we got plenty to be happy for. Most of us lost the houses, true, but we save the boats, and they how we earn our living, right? The family is fine, the babies safe, so you know, my dear, we ready to laissez les bons temps rouler!”

“You’re right. The important thing is that everyone’s okay. Were you able to get in contact with the other families?”

“Oh, yes, most of the boats got radios to talk a long way. We get news like that, ’cause out here in the swamp, your telephone don’t work much. We get along fine with the radio. Why, today I talk with a cousin of mine in Maine, told him we all right. He worried a lot about us.”

That caught Amaia’s attention. “How’s that possible? A maritime radio usually reaches only a few miles.”

“Oh, for sure! But it wasn’t on the radio—or, anyhow, not only on the radio. We use the boat radio to contact a shrimper somewhere with his cell phone connection, somebody like Cousin Paula in Cocodrie. We give her the number we want, and she call with the cell phone. Then she put the phone on speaker next to the mic, and we talk like that. Just one problem, though: all the boats on that channel hear you talk.”

Johnson and Amaia looked at one another. “Did you hear that?” she exclaimed, delighted by the discovery. Charbou and Johnson were impressed.

Johnson spoke to Clive. “Can you show me how to do that? We need to get in contact with someone. It’s important, more important than I can say.”

“I got it set up with Paula to talk, round eleven tonight. We can try. But right now the jambalaya ready. You got to eat a jambalaya as soon as you finish cooking it.” He waved behind them. “And it look like this crew full of hungry people.”

Johnson turned to find a line of Cajun families already lined up along the tables.

Amaia relieved Bull at Dupree’s pallet as soon as she’d finished her meal. Johnson and Charbou followed Clive and Annabel to their shrimp boat.

“He hasn’t woken up,” Bull told her, “but his fever’s gone, and he’s looking a lot better.”

Amaia sat on the floor by the pallet. She stared mindlessly through the windows that gave out onto the dark swamp, that realm of darkness the bayou dwellers claimed was inhabited by the fifolets, spirits floating above the dark surface of the water. Tiny lutins, spirits of naughty children, danced around them and sneaked up on sleeping people to braid their hair.

She took in the sounds around her. The festive noise of people sharing a meal in the next houseboat reminded her how resilient human beings could be. She heard the regular creaking of the cables securing the houseboats, a slow rhythm set by the waves. And something else, too—a low murmuring, rhythmic, like prayer. She noticed that Médora wasn’t in the room.

Peering out the window, Amaia saw the traiteur on the back porch, sitting opposite the human wreck that had once been a woman. He was holding her hands and murmuring incantations.

Dupree’s voice in the darkness startled her. “What is Gaueko?”

She jumped. “You scared me! Are you feeling better?”

“Yes,” he said. “A lot better.” He wasn’t a hundred percent yet, but at least his voice had regained its tone and vigor. “What is Gaueko? I heard you say that last night in the dark while we were staring out at the drowned city.”

She returned and settled beside him in the dim light. “Gaueko is the lord of darkness, the spirit of the night. Gauekoak are ‘things of the night.’ In the little town I come from they have legends about all kinds of magical creatures, but you can sort them into two categories: creatures of the light and