snoring away, blowing a big bubble with its tiny little pink lips. Poor child, to grow up in this place. And she hadn’t let him even examine this baby, saying Granny had done all that! Granny, indeed!
The limousine had come to a halt. The rain was teeming. He could scarcely see what looked like a house up ahead, and the great fan leaves of a green palmetto. But those were electric lights burning up there, thank God for that. Somebody’d told him they didn’t have any lights out here.
“I’ll come round for you with the umbrella,” she said, slamming the door behind her before he could say they should wait till the rain slacked off, and then his door flew open and he had no choice but to pick up this ice chest like a cradle.
“Here, put the towel over it, little guy will get wet!” Mary Jane said. “Now run for the boat.”
“I will walk, thank you,” he said. “If you’ll just kindly lead the way, Miss Mayfair!”
“Don’t let him fall.”
“I beg your pardon! I delivered babies in Picayune, Mississippi, for thirty-eight years before I ever came down to this godforsaken country.”
And just why did I come? he thought to himself as he had a thousand times, especially when his new little wife, Eileen, born and raised in Napoleonville, wasn’t around to remind him.
Lord in heaven, it was a great big heavy aluminum pirogue, and it didn’t have a motor! But there was the house, all right, the entire thing the color of driftwood, with the purple wisteria completely wrapped around the capitals of those upstairs columns, and making its way for the balusters. At least the tangle of trees was so thick in this part of the jungle that he was almost dry for a moment. A tunnel of green went up to the tilting front porch. Lights on upstairs, well, that was a relief. If he had had to see his way around this place by kerosene lamp, he would have gone crazy. Maybe he was already going crazy, crossing this stretch of duckweed slop with this crazy young woman, and the place about to sink any minute.
“That’s what’s going to happen,” Eileen had said. “One morning we’ll drive by there, and there won’t be any house, whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel, will have sunk into the swamp, you mark my words, it’s a sin, anybody living like that.”
Carrying the ice chest and its quiet little contents with one hand, he managed to get into the shallow boat, thrilled to discover that it was full of about two inches of water. “This is going to sink, you should have emptied it out.” His shoes filled up to the ankles immediately. Why had he agreed to come out here? And Eileen would have to know every last detail.
“It’s not going to sink, this is a sissy rain,” said Mary Jane Mayfair, shoving on her long pole. “Now hang on, please, and don’t let the baby get wet.”
The girl was past all patience. Where he came from, nobody talked to a doctor like that! The baby was just fine under the towels, and pissing up a storm for a newborn.
Lo and behold, they were gliding right over the front porch of this dilapidated wreck and into the open doorway.
“My God, this is like a cave!” he declared. “How in the world did a woman give birth in this place? Will you look at that. There are books in there on the top shelf of that bookcase, right above the water.”
“Well, nobody was here when the water came in,” said Mary Jane, straining as she pushed on the pole.
He could hear the thonk-thonk of it hitting the floorboards beneath them.
“And I guess lots of things are still floating around in the parlor. Besides, Mona Mayfair didn’t have her baby down here, she had it upstairs. Women don’t have their babies in the front room, even if it isn’t underwater.”
The boat collided with the steps, tossing him violently to the left, so that he had to grab the slimy wet banister. He leapt out, immediately stamping both his feet to make sure the steps weren’t going to sink under him.
A warm flood of light came from upstairs, and he could hear, over the hiss and roar of the rain, another sound, very fast, clickety, clickety, clickety. He knew that sound. And with it, a woman’s voice humming. Kind of pretty.
“Why doesn’t this stairway just float loose from the wall?” he