Talmadge shook his head. “Not by blood, but she was sent to me three year ago by the Lord, like a blood child would be. Her folks—they lived away back up in the marshes—died of the malaria, mama, papa, baby brother. I found her floatin’ down a crick in a canoe when I was out huntin’ ducks. Soon come to me that she didn’t have no tongue in her head, I mean, she got one, it just don’t work proper. Can’t hear neither. She can understand, if you look right at her and talk real slow, like I just done, but she’s deaf as a rock. Well, now, I had this here vision, kind of, after I come across her, floatin’ midst the bulrushes like a girl Moses. The Lord had give her to me to raise as my own, and if I done a proper job with her, in time he’d been done with chastisin’ me. Not that he was gone to stop all at once, no, sir, it would be like a convict, gittin’ a little easier time of it for good behavior. Like that. So Clara—name I give her, ’cuz I never could find out what her real name was, her folks bein’ dead and all—been with me ever since.”

He pulled a pipe from his shirt pocket, and with head lowered as if in deep thought, filled the bowl from a cloth tobacco pouch. During the pause, Nathaniel, as bemused as his shipmates, asked how he knew Clara’s family had died of malaria.

“She took me to ’em. Got in my skiff and rowed with her all the way up the crick, way back in there, and there they was, still livin’, but sweatin’ and shiverin’ and ravin’ like crazy folks. I know the malaria when I see it. Done what I could for ’em, took the girl back with me to here, got in my oyster boat, and sailed over to Beaufort to fetch a doctor. By the time I done that and by the time he got out to where they was, three days had passed and they was dead—mama, papa, and baby brother. We buried ’em there and it was then that it come to me, that I was to be father to this girl and that would start puttin’ me to rights with the Lord.”