“Paul? I thought he’d be buying his accordion out of hock by now.”

The old man shook his head.

“What?”

“You think you know it all. He thinks he knows it all.” He made a motion, as though he was chasing a fly off an ear, and then went into his bedroom, coming back with a faded bottle of Dr. Tichenor’s antiseptic. “Let me see that hand.” He poured the amber liquid into her palm and her feet drummed his wooden floor. Wiping the wound clean with a paper towel soaked in the antiseptic, he pressed it open. Then he went to the bottom drawer in his refrigerator and rummaged around with a steak knife in one hand, returning with a silver-dollar-sized cut of salt meat. He tied this into her palm with a strand of gauze. “Now, don’t take this off—no matter how much it hurts—for twenty-four hours, no.”

She was doubtful, and by that afternoon the place in her palm burned like fire. It felt as though the salt meat was sucking at the opening, and as she tried to watch television with her father that night, the salt meat seemed to move in her hand like a mouse. At bedtime she took a bath, her hand hanging out of the tub, thrumming like a radio. She slept soundly, then got up and tended to Matthew and her father, doing everything one-handed until the twenty-four hours was up. The hand had not hurt when she woke, and when she took the bandage and the meat away, she saw a whitened wound, clean of infection, though the disk of salt pork had absorbed a dark blue blot of poison or bad blood, something hurtful from her flesh. Another day, she thought, and I can go back out in the channel.

But with a scowling black sky and a fusillade of pecans on the tin roof, the weather turned cold enough to keep even her inside. The fish seemed to abandon the river, and in January she could work only nine days, and in February, four. In March, as usual in Louisiana, warm weather came with a two-footed jump out of the south, and she began working harder than before, coming in with skiffloads of supple catfish bound for the restaurants of New Orleans. She added new lines at Sugarhouse Bend, moved a set of traps down by Terrapin Light and Poor Man’s Chute, worked longer days, getting home at six, in time to relieve whoever was taking care of Matthew and her father, throwing together a quick supper, washing the fish slime off of her in time to put the baby and the old man to sleep, hoping that they would indeed sleep all night.