Three days later, both families went to six o’clock Mass and prayed for shrimp. Barely an hour after dismissal, the Saxon floated under the discharge pipe at the ice plant and took on a half ton. When Colette paid the clerk in the ice-plant office, her eyes followed her money as it disappeared into the cash drawer.

On the dock she waved the first trip off bravely, managing to smile at the men. Paul cranked up the engine while his brother-in-law slipped the lines. Etienne turned the wheel for midchannel, already blowing three longs for the railroad bridge to open. Paul looked back at the dock, where his mother waved, holding Mr. Jeansomme’s hand because he was close to the edge. His father, Nan and her kids, Colette and Matthew looked downriver ahead of the Saxon as though they were all trying to see into the future.

Paul stepped into the engine room when the boat was a mile below town. He checked gauges, looked for leaks; he listened like a physician.

Etienne called down the engine room’s stairs, “Hey, Captain Dogmeat, you want me to hook this old tub up?”

“No. Take it easy with this engine.”

Raymond came through a little door in the rear of the engine room. “Man, this thing’s a antique. I’m glad to see you got us a skiff tied on the roof.” He walked through and went up the steps to the wheelhouse.

After two hours Paul walked to the stern to see where they were. The boat rounded Derniere Chute, and the land began to fall away from him on both sides. He looked ahead at the watery belly that was the Gulf. A breeze sprang alive and the old shrimper heeled down into broad valleys of swells. To the southwest, the sky looked like the underside of a skillet with flames of lightning licking along its bottom.

*   *   *

Within an hour the broad, low waves turned to four-foot rollers, and a peppering rain forced the men into the wheelhouse to watch the heaving water through the boat’s misted windows. Etienne kept the bow into the waves. Raymond mounted the wheelhouse bunk, a ledge over the companionway leading to the engine room. A lightning bolt struck fire from the flinty waves.

Paul whistled and slapped Etienne on the back of the head. “Be careful with my boat, it’s the only one I got.”

“Hey. Soon’s I run out the back of this thunderstorm, I’ll let you play with the wheel.”

Etienne’s face was set against the weather as if he were fighting the storm in a barroom brawl. Paul knew that Etienne could pilot a dredge through a hurricane, so he walked down the steps, opened the door to the engine room, and stooped in to listen. He saw the dark wink of water sliding under the deck boards and he threw a knife-blade switch to run the pump. All their money was here, he thought, every cent and then some. Colette’s uncle Lester had helped to buy the ice. There in the shuddering compartment, he tried to imagine what it would be like to lose the Saxon, somehow survive, and then be brought under the eyes of the most beautiful woman in town, who had roughened her fine skin in fish guts and dead rats to buy the boat. If that happened, he thought, everything would be over for them.