Alone again, she told Paul to get up and walk with her to the levee. He waved her off, but she persisted. “You sitting here feeling sorry for yourself.”

“I’m sitting here feeling ready to die,” he told her.

“Come on.” She grabbed his bad arm and pulled it, and he came out of the chair yowling in pain. She led him through the house, over the crackling linoleum of the kitchen, off the back porch, and up the levee. She let him get his breath at the top, then started off toward LeBlanc’s Machine Shop. “You got to keep moving to get back your strength. It’s going to hurt. Come on.” They skirted the roiling Chieftan River, brown as coffee and moving under a lace of vapor as it played along the trunks of the numberless willows. Between the cut-over levee slope and the tree line was a skirt of brambles and pigweed that the water had risen into, and they saw a five-foot water moccasin exploring a stem of blackberries. She pulled Paul down the slope and up again, feeling his neck for pulse when they were back at the top.

He shook when she touched him, but he acted as though the vibration meant nothing. “What’s the diagnosis, doc?” he rasped.

She made a face. “Feels like a motorboat. You got to build yourself up.”

They walked until they were at the rear of Grand-père Abadie’s house, stopping to stare at the paintless honesty of its cypress planks. “You know,” Paul began, “Abadie never had any more than he has right now. He’s poor and doesn’t know it. We used to have some money. That’s what hurts.”

Colette looked in the other direction and saw the old man’s tarp-covered skiff as it swung in the shallows, twenty feet from the bank, tethered to a trimmed sapling. Unlike the house, it was painted. “What’s that, his old skiff?”

Paul looked where she pointed. “He hasn’t been out in it in fifteen years, but he turns it over once a season, scrapes the bottom, hammers cotton into all the seams, and paints it gray. It’s got to stay in the water so the seams stay swelled shut.”

Colette walked down toward the boat, which was flat-nosed and twenty feet long, made of narrow, tapering planks. It did not have much of a belly, but a five-inch-wide rail board ran along the hull opening. A bump under the tarpaulin was the inboard engine.

She took off her shoes and waded out next to it. “What kind of motor’s this thing have?”

“An antique. A Ferro, I think. Made in the twenties. He’s had it in four other boats. One cylinder with a front flywheel you turn by hand to start.”

She pushed down on the rail and saw that it was fairly stable. “Why’s he keep it?”