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I prayed, and late afternoon, they started to come. Felicia and Helene and Marie Arceneau and Marie Thibodeau and Ovide Latourneau, all of them, from all over the parish. Père Alceé read psalms and Latourneau pounded the porch posts, three times each, and lit a green candle at my door. The women of the parish piled food on my table: lard, sacks of potatoes, smoked sausage, ti’ salée, boudin, fig preserves, a chicken, carrots, onions, rice, and rice, and rice, and rice. LeLe Balais brought cornbread two miles on foot with a baby riding her hip. I said, Chere LeLe, how can you spare it?
    
C’est rien, she said. The baby, starved dumb in the womb, hid its face in LeLe’s hair and moaned while you waved and cooed and made smoke rings with your pipe.

I see you writing in that notebook, laughing while you write. All over the parish, for weeks, I know there’s been nothing but turnips. How could you play that giggling, sputtering tune through the comb-teeth of your moustache, while I dare not eat a bite, after three days, of this food on my table.

Mark Twain, have you been in their kitchens too?

 
II. The River Moved

If a farmer, landlocked at the mouth of a horseshoe curve, wants the river at his back door, he might burn a water moccasin from that same river, and spread its ash where he wishes the river to run. He might make a gris gris of thirteen pennies, nine cotton seeds, and hair from a black hog, then, under a waning moon, with gris gris in hand, summon the river as he would a spirit. He might, at the very least, light a red candle upside-down and hope for the best. But the surest way to move a river is to dig a narrow ditch along the neck of the curve – slit it like a throat – and wait for flood.

Your River came through here once, and you on it.

Our grandfathers remembered you, in our town. You, a famous man, a great man—so our grandfathers were told—passed the day with them on their porches. They did not know your name, but you drew eyes, then crowds, when you came ashore, with your madman’s hair and imperial air, claiming this River, and all lands drained by it. It was a kindness that you sat with them on their porches.

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