Vincent and Victor began to jump around and whoop. They dove overboard and swam to the skiff, shoving it against the tug. Paul rolled his eyes up at Colette with the expression of one of the tortured saints in their church’s stained glass. He seemed afraid to look at her. “Colette, I lost the boat,” he said, his voice full of fear and shame.

An explosion of laughter came from all the men, who banged one another about the shoulders and shouted mocking versions of “I lost the boat.” Colette stepped down into the rocking skiff and kissed Paul’s sunburned face, then raised her head high, laughing louder than the men, showing her fine straight teeth, sitting back hard on the narrow rail and tumbling overboard into the delighted arms of the Larousse twins.

Chapter Twenty-six

Twenty-six

He was still the kind of man who could wake up in the morning without opening his eyes, letting the new day come to him through sound instead of light. It was spring, the mild days were dry, and sounds, like people, had more carrying power. Paul heard from his bed in the big wooden house the tin doors at the fish dock up the street bang open against the building, one, two, as Nerby Billiot pushed them wide to the sun. In the cane fields across the river, a locomotive honked at a crossing with the diminished voice of a child’s toy. In the middle of the rolling Chieftan, chain was rattling onto a steel deck, and from south of town, like the greeting of a relative, came the deep steamy drone of the rebuilt dredge Gruenwald.

Colette began to move beside him and he rolled into her back, where they waited like two spoons in a drawer for the Louisiana Sawmill whistle to rasp from north of town and tell them to make breakfast for Matthew and tend to Jennifer, a new girl-child with ebony hair and eyes as dark as a well.

Paul swung his old lunch box as he walked to LeBlanc’s Machine Shop, which had reopened to a good trade since the oil business was seeping alive and the local sugar mills were wearing out their engines. LeBlanc had had a bypass operation, was retired, and Paul had been brought back to run everything. The riverside doors were already open, the five-foot fans humming in the roof peaks, Grand-père Abadie sitting on the church pew under the oak, pale, trying to remember something.

From the pew Paul could see inside the shop, where LeBlanc’s redneck was uncrating a computerized milling machine elaborate with buttons. “Hey,” he yelled to Paul. “Come show me how to start working this thing.”

“Read the book,” Paul shouted. He sat in the pew and the old man handed him the red plastic cup off his thermos of coffee and laughed.