“ ‘That’s not true,’ I protested at once. ‘I don’t want that ghost coming back. I don’t want that—what happened. If I need that, I’ll take care of that somewhere else. I need you to sleep with me,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s say our prayers.’

“And we did, and we hugged each other close as we slept, and I slept so deep that there seemed no dreams to it, only deep deep rest until the morning light astonished me coming through the windows and spilling into the room.

“It was early, hours before my usual lazy adolescent time, but I got up quietly, taking great pains not to wake Big Ramona, and I dressed in my jeans and boots and got my heavy garden gloves and my rifle and my hunting knife, and, stopping silently in the kitchen to get a big knife—the very knife that Patsy had waved at Pops—I stole out of the house down towards the landing and the pirogue tied there.

“The little cemetery was bleak in the sunshine and overgrown with weeds, and somewhere in the back of my distracted mind I knew that Pops in the natural course of things would never have let it get that way, and that he was not himself anymore; that grief was bringing real harm to Pops, and I had to do something about those weeds. I had to clean up the tombs. I had to take care of more things. I had to take care of Pops too.

“I also knew that Goblin was near me but not showing himself, and I knew that Goblin was afraid.

“I didn’t care about Goblin, and I thought perhaps that Goblin knew that too.

“As I look back on it now, I know that he knew it. He knew that once he had been the central mystery of my life and that he was that no longer—Rebecca had taken his place—and he was hanging back, weakened by my indifference and full of a panic which perhaps he had learned to feel from me.

“My heart was set on finding Sugar Devil Island, and so, with the pole in hand I pushed away from the bank and set out into the swamp.”

CHAPTER 11

11

“NOW, I HAD BEEN in the swamp plenty as a youngster. I knew how to fire the rifle. I knew how to fish. And Pops and I had ranged quite far from the banks of the farm. But there was a territory to which we adhered, and it had always seemed spacious enough for us because we caught lots of fish in it, and the swamp itself seemed so unvarying in its morass of cypress, tupelo gum and wild oak, its giant palmetto and endless snags of vine.