The crowd stirs. All eyes are fixed on Edmond and his wife, who suddenly smile, uncertain and happy at the same time. The white man hurries over to Edmond, pumps his hand up and down, congratulates him, gives him a bunch of keys, steps back, looks at him admiringly and applauds. We clap, too.

The draw continues. Each time it’s the same routine. Now we know what’s expected of us. House number two goes to the Tenasco family. House number three goes to the McConninis…

The faces of the winners light up like new pennies.

“House number five goes to Madame… Widow…Manie…Manie Twenish!”

It’s us! But we are only here out of curiosity. Manie doesn’t want a house. She didn’t even know her name was in the hat.

She goes pale and shakes her head. But the man just leaps forward and shakes her hand. He kisses her on both cheeks before handing her a ring of keys.

There is warm applause, but Manie is flabbergasted. She has no intention of abandoning her tent and holing up inside the four walls of a white person’s house.

But they’ve moved on to the next name, and Manie has already been forgotten.

She marches back to her tent, the keys clutched in her hand. We follow a few paces behind — her two sisters and their husbands, the children and babies. There are about a dozen of us. We don’t dare speak.

Manie stops abruptly in front of her tent. The group freezes.

“All right,” she says. “Let’s go and see this house!”

We wheel around and practically run back out of the woods to the big clearing where the houses are lined up facing each other — ten on one side and ten on the other. They are identical, like twenty drops of water. They are all painted white and sitting on gray cement blocks. They all have the same front porches, same doors, same windows. There are no trees, no winding paths. Just the houses. Bits of wood and tarpaper are littered here and there. The wind stirs up clouds of sand. Sheets of plastic packing blow flat against the walls and fly around all over the place.

Our old life already seems far away, a time when we would move around on our narrow, well-worn paths that snaked through the trees, spanned the brooks, zigzagged around the boulders and up the hills. We would stop to greet each other on the paths and exchange a few words as we went from one tent to another.

Today we walk in single file down the main street, staying well to the side so that the officials can pass by in their pickups.

Manie turns to me. “Nipishish, which one is it? They all look the same!”

We’re standing in front of number one. I count down with my finger like a priest sprinkling holy water.

“One, two, three, four… that’s the one, in the middle.”