And then he touched his forehead and began a little story. “Forty, fifty years ago, me, I was setting a trotline in high-water time up north of town. The current pulled the boat and I caught a hook in my wrist right there.” He held up a wrist to show a white scar shaped like a teardrop, between two dark veins. “I went overboard quick, yas, hooked like a big catfish, and that old iron—what you call a bow brace—caught me on top the head and knocked me out.” He popped his white hair with the heel of his hand to demonstrate. “When I came back to, I thought I’d be dead and somewhere else, but I was in you mamma’s daddy’s big new cypress skiff. He saw me go over and crossed the channel, pulled up the trotline and me on it, cut me loose, and pulled me in his boat. You mamma, she was just a girl, maybe twelve, but she held my busted head in her lap and put a rag over where it was cut.” Abadie turned his face and looked over his shoulder a moment, as if preparing to tell a secret. “I tried to sit up, and she told me, ‘Be still, else you gonna get blood all over my daddy’s new skiff.’” He straightened up and began laughing a wet and raspy laugh: “Ha-haaaa.” Colette looked over the rail at her mother’s lilies. “It was a long time ago, that’s for sure. She took care of me. I got dizzy, and they had to carry me up the levee on a board. She stayed with me until my brother came and cut the hook out, and when he did that, she poured the whiskey on the hole.” He looked at his hand, flexed it. “Some fella, they lost they hand when they got a hook in that deep.”

Colette took the hand, studying the scar. “Now I know why you came.”

He shrugged. “Some people’s born good and some got to learn it the way they learn to ride a bicycle. Even from the start, you mamma was a good lady, yeah.” He stood up, put his scaly hands in his pockets, and looked around his feet as if he had misplaced a cane. “I can’t see too good. Sometimes I think I’m walking up the street and I’m walking down the street. Hahaaaaa.” He took the porch steps suspiciously, as if each were a waterborne plank. She walked behind, her hands under his elbows, but not touching his khaki shirt.