“That’s right,” the old man said. “Before Zefirin was Arsène, and before that was François, who was thrown out of Nova Scotia by those damned English. The what—the Spanish gave him some land that one time covered half of downtown. It’s in the records,” Abadie said, pointing in the direction of the church.

“Arsène made fiddles in the winter and fished in the summer,” the priest said. “The aristocratic priest kept notes on his congregation in Spanish, which I happen to read.”

Colette sat against the wall and let the town spread out in her imagination two hundred years back, the mud-and-moss farmhouses, the hand-ditched fields, a log chapel, a bal de maison with couples dancing in the yard, fiddlers on the porch scraping a tune from Arsène Abadie’s instruments, their music like wasps in a drainpipe. She shuddered, feeling the spirits of fishermen and farmers gathering in this little room made of narrow boards patterned like mattress ticking.

Abadie had gone into his bedroom and they heard him bumping around in an armoire. He returned with a yellowed navigation map, which he unrolled on the kitchen table, placing their coffee cups on the corners. Running a thick finger down the blue vein of the Chieftan, he showed them where to go with the boat.

“Là,” he said, tapping his finger on the paper, “the old diversion canal. They’s gonna be plenty nutria going over to eat in the cane field that runs all along the levee on the north side.” Without looking up, he told them what time of day the animals would be in the water, and how they would swim. He studied the map as though it were the breathing marshland itself, his face filling with so much memory that he forgot anyone was in the room with him, and he began to speak to himself. “Nutria can’t be shot in the water, no. He might sink right where you shoot him. When he hits the edge of the bank, pee-yow, you let him have it in the back of the head, and that’s where he’ll stay.”

“You could come with us,” Paul said.

The old man laughed. “I’m gon’ be eighty-four or -six next month. I got no business out there.” He rolled up the map. “I don’t know if you gonna do any good. You got to have the sense in you bones when you go out there,” he told them.

Colette stood and put the cups in the sink. “You have to be hungry for something better than what you have,” she said.

Paul shook his head. “She feels better than I do.”

“She’s a Jeansomme all right,” the priest said. “They want to get paid for their misery.” Father Clemmons turned to Abadie. “Now put in your teeth and tell me your confession.”