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They told you stories. Our granddaddy Jean-le-Sot, they said in French, he was such a fool – he wanted to hide his gold. “What I’m gonna do with all this gold?” he thought, “Somebody’s gonna steal it.” So he got in his pirogue and rowed far out upon the great bayou—the one they call the Mississippi River—and he dumped that sack of gold overboard. “Now,” he thought, “how I’m gonna find it again?” So, he put him a big X on the side of that pirogue, right over where he dumped the gold . . .

They laughed at themselves. They were the fools of their own tales.

You tried your French, too. La rivière est large . . . you said.

Ain? they said.

La rivière, you said, est l-a-r-g-e . . .  

They shook their heads.

La rivière est large! La rivière est large! La r-i-v-i-è-r-e . . .

Ouais, ouais . . . !

. . . est . . .

Quoi?

Dad-blame-it, gentleman! you said, without a wink or smile, I’ve seen this river so wide it had only one bank . . .

You puffed on your pipe and waited for laughter. You might have been a senator, a judge, the president, mourning the deaths from past floods. They said, Ouais, and nodded, solemn. The River, meanwhile, peeked over the neglected levees at the man who flattered its flow and size and lore.

You so charmed the River that, after you had tamped out your pipe, shaken hands with the Frenchmen, and floated on toward New Orleans, the River leapt its banks and flooded our town, searching for you. Water rose above our grandfathers’ porches. The animals drowned. The River found the ditch dug by the landlocked farmer and rushed into it, chased after you.

In the morning—our town no longer a River town, swamp up to the porches, our grandfathers and grandmothers beset by mosquitoes. Our grandfathers launched their boats into still water.

The River had moved thirty miles further east.

They say old N’onc Télémaque, returning from the Gulf the night of the flood, took his shrimp boat around the old bend, and never found his way home. They say even now you can see him in the swamp, in his boat, tracing the memory of river, and finding no outlet.

Our grandfathers told this story to our mothers and fathers, and then to us. They learned your name, and who you were, from the New Orleans paper that reported the flood. A man named Clemens, or Twain, got his picture on the front page, they said, because he romanced the River away from them, a l’anglais.

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