We are walking again, the uncle in his outrider position. "I got me a pair of woodies right there," he says, shaking two loose fingers toward the woods. "You ought to see that little sucker fly into the hole."

"I'd like to."

"They've long since left the boxes, Uncle," says Lucy wearily.

"Do you know how he does that? Some people say he lights on the edge and goes in, but no. He flies in. I saw him. I'm talking about, he flies right in that hole. Do you know how he does it?"

Lucy, stooping and walking, is paying no attention.

"No, I don't," I say.

"He's only got about a foot of room inside, right?"

"Right."

"You know what he does-I saw him."

"No."

"That sucker flies right in and brakes in the one foot of room inside, like this," says the uncle, suddenly flaring out his elbows like braking wings. "I've seen him! You want to see him? Let's go."

"All right."

"Not now, Uncle," says Lucy.

2. LUCY AND I SIT on the gallery watching the sun go down across the levee through the oaks of the alley, making winks and gleams and casting long shafts of foggy yellow light. She smokes too much, long Picayunes, often plucks a tobacco grain from the tip of her tongue, looks at it.

Lucy fixes toddies of nearly straight bourbon in crystal goblets the size of a mason jar. My nose is running. Perhaps the toddies will help. I haven't had a toddy for years. An eighteenth-century traveler once wrote of Feliciana and Pantherburn: "There is always at one's elbow a smiling retainer ready with a toddy or a comfit." What's a comfit?

Beyond the oaks, the truncated cone of the Grand Mer facility rises as insubstantial as a cloud in the sunset. A pennant of vapor is fastened to its summit like the cloud on Everest.

We sit in rocking chairs.

"Well now," I say after a long drink of the strong, sweet bourbon. My nose stops running.

"Yes indeed," says Lucy.

A duck is calling overhead.

"Is that the uncle?"

"Yes."

Footsteps go back and forth on the upper gallery. The quacking is followed by a chuckling sound.

"Is he talking to somebody?"

"No, he's practicing his duck calls. He was runner-up in the Arkansas nationals last year. That's the feeding call he's doing now. He does it with his fingers. He's been doing it six hours a day since January.

"I see." I take another long pull. The bourbon is so good it doesn't need sugar. "I was wondering why you wanted me to come."

"I want you to stay here while Ellen's gone. It's all right with Ellen. I asked her."

I look at her quickly. Is she trying to tell me something? She is. She rocks forward in her chair to look back at me, shading her eyes against the sun. "What if I were to tell you that it is absolutely all right for you to be here? Would you take that on faith without further explanation?"

"No."

"Do you want me to explain further?"

"No."

She looks at me along her cheek, eyes hooded.

I take another drink. "I appreciate it, but I'm fine. Hudeen's taking good care of me."

"Not as good as I could."

"I'm sure of that."

"No, I'm also selfish. Just now I think I can help you with your syndrome. I have an idea about it. And just now I also need you. You're my only relative besides him"-her eyes go up-"and he's driving me nuts. He needs you too. It's all right for you to stay. Vergil thought you were my father."

"Vergil?"

"You remember Vergil. He's my only help on the farm, he and Carrie, his mother. You remember him. He remembers you. He drives the tractor, does everything. Unfortunately, I have to pay him a fortune. Nobody gave him to me. Will you stay?"

"You mean tonight or-?"

"Speak of the devil."

Vergil has come onto the gallery behind us.

I had known him as a child, but do not recognize him. His father, laid up in a mobile home by the gate and living on the Medicaid Lucy got him, I remember as a hale, golden-skinned Ezio Pinza, fisherman and trapper, hearty and big-chested, too big-he had emphysema even then. They, the Bons, are known hereabouts as freejacks, meaning free persons of color, freed, the story goes, by Andrew Jackson for services rendered in the Battle of New Orleans. More likely, they're simply descendants of the quadroons and octoroons of New Orleans. A proud and reticent people, often blue-eyed and whiter than white, many could "pass" if they chose but mainly choose not to, choose, rather, to stay put in small contained bayou communities.

Vergil Bon, Jr., is another cup of tea. He's got the off-white skin, black eyes, and straight black Indian hair of his mother, but he wears, somewhat oddly, a Tom Selleck mustache. His body is rounded, drawn in simple lines, as if he still had his baby fat, but he's very strong. It was his large simple arm I saw lifting the silver tractor tank. When we shake hands, he smiles but doesn't look at me. His hand is large and inert. He thinks he's being polite by not squeezing. He speaks softly to Lucy, shows her a greasy machine part. Lucy says, "You can? Okay, fix it and I'll get a new one tomorrow. Write down what it is.

"He can fix anything," Lucy tells me when he's gone. "I pay him a fortune, but he's worth it. Do you know he's going to finish up at L.S.U. next semester with two degrees in geology and chemical engineering? He worked on the rigs for years, made toolpusher at age twenty-three, at four thousand a month. He's thirty-five now and is going to end up owning Texaco. He helps me as a favor. I take care of his father. How about it?"

"How about what?"

"Staying."

"I'll stay tonight. As a matter of fact, I need your help."

"With your syndrome?"

"It's not mine. I think I'm on to something. But you're going to have to tell me whether I'm as crazy as our ancestor. Furthermore, you're an epidemiologist and this is up your alley. You saw what I found in Mickey LaFaye's case."

"Yes," says Lucy solemnly. "I don't think you're crazy. I saw Mrs. LaFaye. You've got something. Perhaps we could help each other. Did you bring a list of patients with their social security numbers?"

"Yes. Why do you need them?"

"You'll see. I've got a little surprise for you. A couple, in fact."

Half the toddy is gone. She is drinking with me, drink for drink, and shows no sign of it, save perhaps a widening of the pupils in her dark gold-flecked eyes. But that could be because the sun is behind the levee and no longer in our eyes. The sweet strong bourbon seems to fork in my throat, branching up the back of my head and sending a warm probe into my heart.

"Ahem," I say.

"Yes indeed," says Lucy, smiling.

"Tell me-ah-about the syndrome," says Lucy, pulling up close.

"Yes, certainly." I do, at length, all I know, and with the pleasure of telling her and of her close listening, head cocked, tapping her lips with two fingers, brown gold-flecked eyes fixed on me above plum-bruised cheeks. It is a pleasure telling her, talking easily, she listening, smoking, and plucking tobacco grains from her tongue, we ducking our heads just enough to set the rockers rocking. I take an hour. She fixes us another toddy. She drinks like a man and shows no sign of it except in her eyes. Her eyes change like the sunlight, now lively A-plus smart-doctor's eyes, now a woman's eyes. Beyond peradventure a woman's eyes. Above us the uncle is calling the ducks home for feeding and now and then gives a high-ball, a loud drake's honk. We don't mind.

It is dusk dark. In the west a red light, probably atop the Grand Mer cooling tower, blinks in the mauve sky.

When I finish, Lucy stops rocking and watches me for a long time, fingers on her lips. She puts her hand lightly on my arm.

"I'll tell you what. Here's what we're going to do. Let's go have supper. I brought some Popeyes fried chicken and Carrie cooked us some of her own greens. Then I want to show you something upstairs. What do you say?"

"Yes, certainly."

"By the way."

"Yes?"

"Do you know what Blue Boy means?"

"Blue Boy? No."

"I heard someone at the Fedville hospital talking to Van Dorn about Blue Boy. I wasn't supposed to hear. He looked annoyed."

We finish our toddies and go inside. The old house is dim and cool. There is a smell in the hall as wrenching as memory, of last winter, a hundred winters, wet dogs, Octagon soap, scoured wood. The weak light in the crystal chandelier is lost in the darkness above. The uncle appears from nowhere, flanking us, slides back the twelve-foot-high doors. Light winks on the silver inset handles polished by two hundred years of use.

"Is it true, Uncle," I ask him, "that all the hardware of the doors, even the hinges, are silver?"

"That's true. The Yankees were too dumb to notice. They stole everything else, but missed the silver. You see those handles?"

"Yes."

"Not a white hand touched those handles until the war."

"Is that so?"

"That's so. All you had to do was walk to a door and it would open; go through and it would close."

"Is that right?"

"The people around here were thick as fleas."

Lucy makes a sound in her throat.

"You can't hardly get one of them to do anything these days," says the uncle.

We eat at one end of the long table in the dark dining room, taking fried chicken from the Popeyes bags. There is a pitcher of buttermilk, cornbread, and a tub of unsalted butter. The greens are thick and tender and strong as meat. The one light bulb winks red and violet in the beveled crystal of the chandelier. Dark paintings the size of a barn door are propped against the walls. They seem to be landscapes and bonneted French ladies swinging in a formal garden. They've been propped there since the war, too heavy to hang from the weakened molding. They must have been too big for the Yankees to steal.

I ask the uncle about different duck calls. Lucy makes a sound in her throat. He begins to tell me, but she interrupts him.

"You can have Dupre's room," says Lucy. "I cleaned all his stuff out."

"Fine."

"He had his own room here his last year here," she adds without looking at me.

"I see."

"Do you know who slept in that room?" asks the uncle.

"No."

"General Earl Van Dorn."

"Is that right?"

"That's right. You knew he was from Mississippi-right up the river. One of our people. You know what he did, don't you?"

"What?"

"After those frogs in New Orleans and those coonasses in Baton Rouge gave up without a fight, the Yankees occupied this place. Beast Butler made his headquarters right here. Buck Van Dorn came in with the Second Cavalry from Texas and ran them off. He stayed here until they ordered him to Arkansas. He slept in that room. He was a fighting fool and the women were crazy about him. Miss Bett's grandma, the one they called Aunt Bett, like to have run off with him."

"That's a lot of foolishness," says Lucy absently. "Come on upstairs, I have something to show you," says Lucy, and leaves abruptly.

But the uncle leans close and won't let me go.

"You know what they're always saying about war being hell?" he asks.

"Yes."

He leans closer. "That's a lot of horseshit."

"Is that right?"

"Let me tell you something. I never had a better time in my life than in World War Two. When I was at Fort Benning I lived for six months in a trailer with the sweetest little woman in south Georgia. She was an armful of heaven. When I was at Fort Sill, I had two women, one a full-blooded Indian, a real wildcat. She like to have clawed me to death. Do you know who were the finest soldiers in the history of warfare?"

"No."

"The Roman legionnaire, the Confederate, and the German. I read up on it. The Germans were like us. They beat the shit out of us at Kasserine. Don't tell me, I was there. We shouldn't have been fighting them. Patton gave me a field commission. I made colonel by the time we got to Trier. When I was at Trier I lived with a German girl for three weeks. They were putting out for anything you'd give them, but she was crazy about me. A fine woman! But Patton was a fighting fool. We whipped the Germans in the end, but it was because they'd rather us than the Russians. Patton took seven hundred thousand prisoners. I was in the 3d Armored Division of the Third Army. He wanted to take Berlin and Prague and drive to the Oder-the Germans would have helped us-but Roosevelt wouldn't turn us loose. That son of a bitch Patton was a fighting fool. We could have gone to the Volga."

"Tom!" Lucy calls angrily from the dim hall.