“Then we’d chat about how it was a blessing Little Ida never knew real old age, or suffered illness, and that she was surely up there with God. Same with Lynelle.

“Finally, after all that, Big Ramona would ask if Goblin was with us, and then she said:

“ ‘Well, you tell Goblin it’s time to sleep now,’ and Goblin settled down beside me and kind of merged with me, and off I went to sleep.

“Gradually, over a period of several months, a semi-calm came over me entirely due to Big Ramona, and I was astonished to discover that Pops and the Shed Men, and even Jasmine and Lolly, credited me with kindness to Big Ramona in her time of grief. It was all our grief. And Big Ramona was saving me from a kind of dark panic which had begun in me with Lynelle and was now creeping closer with the loss of Little Ida.

“I took to going out fishing in the swamp with Pops, something I’d never been all that crazy about before. I got to like it out there as we poked our way through in the pirogue, and sometimes we went deep into the swamps, beyond our usual territory, and I got a kind of fearless curiosity about the swamps, and whether we might find Manfred Blackwood’s island, but that we did not do.

“One afternoon, late, we came upon a huge old cypress tree that had a rusted chain around it, grown into it in parts, and a mark carved on it that looked to me to be an arrow. It was an ancient tree, and the chain was made of large links. I was for pressing on in the direction of the arrow, but Pops said no, it was late, and there was nothing out there anyway, and we might get lost if we went any further.

“It was all the same with me because I didn’t entirely believe all the stories about Manfred and the Hermitage, and I was sticky all over from the humid air, and so we went home.

“Then Mardi Gras came, which meant that Sweetheart had to go to her sister Ruthie’s house, and this year she really didn’t want to go. She claimed she was feeling poorly, she had no appetite, not even for King cake, which was already arriving daily from New Orleans, and she thought she might be coming down with the flu.

“But at last she decided to go into the city for all the parades, because Ruthie was depending on her and she didn’t want the crowd of her elderly aunts and uncles and all her cousins to be disappointed that she wasn’t there.

“I didn’t go with her, though she wanted me to, and though her cough worsened (she called Pops every day and I usually spoke to her too), she did stay for the entire time.