Colette put sugar in her coffee. “We won’t tear it up if you let us use it.”

“Hell yas, you can use it. I want to hear it go downriver again, with that exhaust poppin’ slow out that pipe.” He turned to Paul. “You know who built that boat? My daddy. Last thing he did.”

“I didn’t know him,” Paul said. “He died before I was born, but I thought he was an engineer in a sugar mill.”

Abadie’s face caved in a little when he brought his lips together. He hadn’t put in his teeth yet. “When Belle Terre mill close up, he sat around in his yard back behind you house and made maybe two, three skiff a year. Maybe he made six before he passed, bored to death because he couldn’t run them big Corliss engines in the mill.” He turned his head in the direction of Belle Terre mill, now a weedy hackberry grove studded with brick engine foundations. “He learned to build boats from you great-great grand-père.”

Paul sat up straight. “I never knew anybody who met him.”

“What you talk? Right here, me myself, I knew him. He ran a farm on that elbow by the river above town. But you young people, you don’t care about that. Once somebody’s dead, you turn on that television and forget their name.”

“Tell me his name,” Colette said. “I won’t forget it.”

Abadie opened a hand toward her. “It was August Théodore, and he was a damned good cane farmer. And his daddy was Viléor, the blacksmith.

“Born in 1826,” Father Clemmons added. “He made the lightning rods for the first church. And his father was Zefirin Marcelian, who was, as I remember from the church records, born in 1799 and thrown out of church because he wouldn’t snuff his pipe in Mass. He lived in the swamp behind town, had eleven children, and outlived three wives.”

Paul took a long swallow of coffee, thinking about the old names. He looked at Colette. “In high school you looked up your family tree.”

“We’re drifters,” she told him. “Been here only a hundred and forty years or so.”

Father Clemmons nodded. “Came over from the Lafourche region. The first Jeansomme started a tavern about where LeBlanc’s Machine Shop is today. They were prolific, and many are in the old graveyard that was closed forty or so years ago.”

“A lot of ghosts,” Colette said, looking at an expired calendar hanging on the kitchen wall.

“Was that Zefirin guy the first one in my family around here?”

The priest shook his head. “Abadie made me look them all up.”