slide off into the ether, where all missed communications gathered.
“I don’t know.” Moira felt the lie burn its way down her throat like the moonshine Uncle Mookey cooked up in a still he’d rigged from stolen car parts. The taste of dishonesty was twice as oily and half as pleasant.
She did know.
She knew that no matter what left Uncle Sal’s lips, she would be leaving Stump Bayou today. Yet the prospect of having this question answered proved too seductive to resist. There wasn’t another question on earth that could scoop out room beneath her roots, make her vulnerable to this kind of bargain.
“Was twenty-something years ago,” Sal began, pulling his ball cap off to mop the sweat from a liver-spotted brow with a wadded bandana from the pocket of his overalls. “Me, Red, and Mookey was out on the bayou but hadn’t caught more than heat rash and a chapped ass. It was hell for everyone that summer. Like the whole damn parish was cursed.”
Something broke loose inside of Moira and skittered away into the shadows to avoid direct scrutiny. A curse.
“It was almost sundown,” he continued, “and we’d just about give up and decided to come back when Mookey starts haulin’ in the net. Next thing I know, we was ankle-deep in crawfish and Mookey’s hollerin’, ‘We done caught a baby!’”
Wind stirred the red-black tendril that brushed Moira’s cheek. “You pulled me from the bayou in a net?”
“Sure enough did. And a helluva lotta other critters too. Seems they was keeping you company. You shoulda seen Red just about water his britches when he tried to pick you up and a snapping turtle damn near made sure that fool could only count to seven.”
Moira fought a smile as the scene played itself out in her mind. In addition to running the town’s only car repair shop, Uncle Red periodically provided entertainment as a part-time gator wrestler—a hobby which had cost him his left thumb and his right pinky.
She saw Red as he must have been in those days—short and stocky with muscles earned by manual labor, blasted with freckles, clad in worn jeans and white tank top, his orange hair bright as molten glass in the dying sunlight. Uncle Sal always looked like pulled taffy next to Red. Moira could practically see Sal falling backwards, off the rickety three-legged stool he perched on when gutting fish. His hooting laughter would have set the blue light flashing off his raven-black hair.
All of this she could have conjured easily to memory. It was herself she couldn’t see. Couldn’t fathom the baby she might have been wriggling among the muddy creatures pulled from the bayou’s bottom.
“I was alive?” she asked.
“Alive and wailing like you’s being skinned,” Sal said. “I flipped the snapping turtle over the side and scooped you up. You’s so muddy we couldn’t hardly tell if you were a he or she at first. Mookey motored us back toward the dock while Red and me got you cleaned up as best we could. You didn’t think much of your first bath, I’ll tell you that right here and now. I s’pose I wouldn’t have neither, with the ice and all.”
“Ice?” Moira asked, the gears in her brain grinding. “What ice…” The image came to her at once and complete: the battered green beer cooler that stored both beverage and bait on her uncles’ fishing excursions. “You cleaned me off in the beer cooler?”
Sal’s bony shoulders jerked toward his ears. “Was the best option at the time.”
“So, you pulled me out of the bayou in a crawdad net and cleaned me up in the beer cooler. Then what?”
“We figured you might be upset on account of bein’ nekkid and cold, so Red stripped off his shirt and we made you some britches, and I wrapped you up tight in a gunnysack like I seen ladies do sometimes. When that didn’t quiet you down, we figured maybe you was hungry.”
Or maybe I wasn’t thrilled with a sweat-stained diaper and a onesie made of burlap, Moira thought. A pent-up breath hissed out between her teeth. “Please tell me you didn’t feed me night-crawlers.”
Sal managed to look shocked. “Of course not! What kinda fool you take me for, girl?”
Several answers suggested themselves, but Moira kept her mouth closed around them.
“We gave you a beer,” Sal continued.
“You gave beer to a baby?”
Cheeto squeaked in protest at Moira’s raised voice. She laid a hand on his back to quiet him.
“Well we was out of grape Nehi,”