"I won't be looked down on anymore," he emphasized. "You and your daughter ain't nothin' special. Just remember that and remember to stop cursing the Landrys, hear?"

Mama had no strength to reply. I heard her go into the kitchen and start dinner while Daddy continued to rant and rave to himself in the living room. When he came out, I pretended to be asleep and kept my eyes closed. I felt him standing there, staring at me, and then I heard him charge down the steps and go off in his truck, mumbling to himself.

I never felt so sick inside, so depressed and disgusted with myself. Poor Mama, I thought. She had to take the brunt of Daddy's rage. I went inside to apologize and found her sitting at the table, her palms pressed against her forehead.

"It's all my fault, Mama. I'm sorry," I said. For a moment she didn't move. Then she raised her head slowly, as if it weighed as much as a barrel of rainwater. She looked so tired and worn and she looked like she had been crying, too. It made my heart ache and tears burn the insides of my lids.

"What's done is done," she said. "Don't let your father's ranting bother you. He just looks for excuses to be the no-account man he is. He'll use this to justify getting drunk and wasting time and money, is all." She rose. "Let's eat."

"I'm not very hungry, Mama."

"Me neither, but we better put something good inside to help fight the bad outside," she declared, and gave me a tiny smile.

I went to her and we embraced. She stroked my hair and kissed my forehead.

"Pierre will be back to help, Mama. I know he will," I said to reassure myself as well as her.

"Oui,” she said with a tired voice. "But until then, we better learn to help ourselves, no?"

Mama and I ate and then had some coffee on the galerie.

It was one of those nights when the air is so still, you think the world had stopped spinning. Nothing moved either, not a bird, not a rabbit, nothing. The stillness had a way of creeping inside you, too, making you feel hollow and full of echoes. Mama was just as quiet for most of the time, and then she suddenly put down her cup and turned to me.

"I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you the truth, Gabrielle," she declared. "Goodness knows, I kept it locked up too long."

"The truth? The truth about what, Mama?"

"About me and your daddy. About you," she added.

Her bleak eyes told me it was a dark surprise. I held my breath and waited for her to continue. She had to swallow a few times before she did so.

"I often told you how handsome he was. He still can be when he cleans himself up and cares enough. Well," she said, "he courted me on and off for some time. He was unreliable then, too, but I didn't pay enough attention to that. My mother didn't want me to marry him, of course. She knew the Landrys, and warned me time after time, but . . . as I told you before, I let the woman in me have first say.

"The fact is," Mama said, turning to me again, "I got pregnant before I got married."

"You did?"

"Oui. We lied about our marriage date, pretended we got married by a judge months before we actually did. We had a church wedding just to satisfy the family. I didn't think your father was going to marry me when he found out I was pregnant, and I wasn't sure I was going to marry him, even then; but he surprised me by being happy about it and told me if I didn't marry him, he'd tell everyone in the world you were his child anyway.

"My mother was brokenhearted about it. She barely said a word after the actual wedding, but being married seemed to settle Jack Landry down for a while. He was productive and responsible, and then he just fell back into his old ways.

"But whenever I stop and have regrets, I think how lucky I am to have you, honey," she added, her face beaming.

"Oh, Mama," I wailed, "I just keep adding to your burden."

"Now, now . . . what I'm trying to tell you is I don't want you to apologize and feel bad about me. It says in the Bible that he without sin cast the first stone. I'm no one to cast stones, and your daddy, he couldn't cast a pebble at an ax murderer. Understand, honey?"

"Oui, Mama," I said.

"I mean it," she said firmly.

I smiled. Mama's confession gave me the strength to offer my own.

"Mama, I wanted Pierre's baby and I still do. Very much. I know it's wrong, especially because Pierre is married, but you know how terrible I feel about losing Paul."

"Yes," she said with a deep sigh. It amazed me how she could bear so much weight on those small shoulders. "We'll make do, somehow. We always manage. Great strength comes from great burdens, I suppose.

"But," she added, turning back to me with a very serious expression on her face, "we have to live here, and some of these people can be pretty mean and vicious when they want to, you know. I think it might be best to come up with some explanation down the road. I don't like lying to anyone, even to your father; but it may be necessary to stretch the truth a bit. We have so many other sins to be forgiven for, a little white lie don't seem like much to add, no?" she said with a smile.

"No, Mama. But I'm sure Pierre will help us," I added confidently.

Mama smiled. "We'll see," she said. She sat back, sighed deeply again, and then stood up. "I think I'll turn in. It seems like it's been a very long day."

"I'll be right behind you in a moment, Mama," I told her.

"Don't stay up late," she advised, and went inside.

I sat on the galerie and stared into the darkness of the road that ran by our shack and off to the main highway that would take anyone to New Orleans.

"He'll be back," I told the shadows that hovered around me. "And soon, too.

"And everything . . . will be all right."

Days passed into weeks and I heard nothing from Pierre. Every morning I would wake expecting something, a package, a letter, a messenger, and at night I would sit on the galerie after dinner and stare at the road in anticipation of something; but there was nothing but silence and darkness.

I knew Mama felt bad for me. If I looked her way and caught her gazing with pity, she would shift her eyes quickly and pretend to be interested in something else.

Daddy came and went, sometimes staying away for days. When he did come home, the first thing he would do was come to me to ask if Pierre had been back.

"He come around here, Gabrielle? You tell, hear?"

"No, Daddy," I replied. He nodded, satisfied I wouldn't lie to him. I often caught him staring at me, though. He always looked like he was in deep thought. It made me nervous, but I didn't say anything about it to Mama or to him.

Weeks after the fire, I finally gathered the strength to return to the ruins of Pierre's and my love nest. It had been reduced to rubble, a pile of charred wood and metal. Wandering through the ashes, I saw the small remnants of one of my dresses and sifted through the soot to find some pearls. I gathered them quickly and cleaned them off. Then I put them in my pocket and brought them home to keep them close to me.

Even my nights alone, shut up in the Tates' attic room, weren't as lonely and as melancholy for me as the nights after the fire were. When I finally did go up to sleep, I would sit by the window and look out toward the canal, toward the places where I had seen Pierre waiting for me in the moonlight. I would hope and pray so much that my eyes would play tricks on me and I could swear he was there. Once, I even went out to see, and of course, found no one.

When I did fall asleep, I tossed and turned a great deal, fretting in and out of nightmares. In one I saw myself drowning and calling for Pierre to help. He was just standing in the pirogue, watching, and when he finally decided to pole in my direction to help me, someone called him back. I couldn't see who it was. I woke as my head sunk into the dark, tea-colored water of the canal. My heart was pounding, my face and neck were damp with sweat. After nightmares, I didn't fall back asleep until it was almost morning light, and when I heard Mama moving about, getting ready for the day, I groaned and got myself up to help.

"I want you to rest more, Gabrielle," she told me, and studied me a moment. "You look like you're swellin' up faster this time." She pinched my arm gently and watched the color in my skin, nodding to herself. "Every time a woman gives birth, it's different. Makes sense it should be, the baby's different. You mind and take care, hear?"

I promised I would. These days I wasn't filled with too much energy and enthusiasm anyway. Even my walks were shorter, and I stopped my canoe trips through the canals. Occasionally I went along with Mama to town, but even that held no interest for me and I stopped. I spent hours at the loom or sitting on the galerie weaving palmetto baskets and hats. The mechanical work seemed to fit my empty thoughts. My- fingers moved as if they had minds of their own, and I was always surprised to discover I had finished something.

Had Daddy really driven Pierre away forever? I wondered when my mind did work. What would become of our special love? Would it wilt and crumble like leaves?

The rumble of thunder and rugs of dark clouds that were laid over the sky fit my mood. When the rains came, they seemed to wash away my memories as well as plants and flowers. Hurricane winds tore off branches and blew over tables and chairs. The shack strained and groaned. I hovered under my blankets waiting for it to end, pressing my face to the pillow, wondering how so much gloom could have come so quickly to my world of light and hope.

And then one night after a particularly bad storm, after Mama and I had to clean up our galerie and the front of the shack, Daddy came barreling in with his truck, slamming the door and whistling as if he had won the biggest bourre pot of his life. Exhausted, Mama and I were sitting at the plank table in the kitchen, neither of us with much of an appetite. She looked up at him with disgust.

"Now you come home, Jack," Mama began. "After the storm, after we done all the work, man's work?"

"This house can blow itself down to hell, for all I care," he said. "It don't matter no more."

"Is that right?" Mama began, her eyes blazing despite the film of fatigue that had settled over them. "My house don't matter no more, you say?"

"Now, just hold on, Catherine," he said, raising his hands. "Sit yourself back in that chair, hear, and behave yourself. Otherwise," he said with a wide, silly grin, "I might just not tell you what I done and what's going to be."

"I'm probably better off not hearing it if it's something you've done," Mama mumbled.

"That so? See?" he said to me. "See how she's always smart-talking me all the time, putting me down, making me look bad to my friends and neighbors?"

Mama started to laugh. "Me? No one has to work at making you look bad, Jack. You do that the best."

Daddy's smile faded. He stared at her for a moment and then he took on the most self-satisfied leer I had seen on his face. He dug into his pants pocket and came up with a fistful of money, and planted it on the center of the table. As the bills unfolded, we saw they were fifties and hundreds. It was the first time I had ever seen a hundred-dollar bill.

"What's that?" Mama asked suspiciously.

"What's it look like, woman? That there's good old U.S. currency, and that pile there is for you to do with what you please, hear?"

Mama glanced at me before looking up at Daddy again. "And where's it come from, a bourre pot filled with money folks can't afford to lose?"

"Nope. It comes from here," Daddy said, poking his right temple with his right forefinger. "It comes from being smart."

"Is that so? Well, this I gotta hear," Mama said, and sat back, her arms folded under her bosom.

Daddy went over to the cupboard, found himself some cider, and poured himself a glass first. We watched him gulp it down, his Adam's apple bobbing. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and glared at me.

"She may know the swamp and the animals better than most around these parts," he said, nodding at me, "but she don't know nothin' when it comes to men."

"Never mind Gabrielle, Jack. We're talking about you now and what you done to get this money."

"Right. I think to myself, Jack Landry, why is it you've been the one left holding the hot potato here, huh? Why is it you got to be the one to figure out what else to do to feed another mouth, make a home, bear the brunt of insults, huh? Why is it those rich people can come in here and use us the way they want, use us like a. . a towel and then throw us away, huh? Well, they can't, is what I say!" he exclaimed, pounding the sink top with his fist.