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By midnight the power was gone, the water off, and half the top of an oak tree had crashed on the roof and slid down the side of the house, covering the windows with tangles of branches and leaves.
I heard Alafair cry out in her sleep. I lit a candle, placed it in a saucer on top of her bookcase, which was filled with her collection of Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, and got in bed beside her. She wore her Houston Astros baseball cap and had pulled the sheet up to her chin. Her brown eyes moved back and forth as though she were searching out the sounds of the storm that seeped through the heavy cypress planks in the roof. The candlelight flickered on all the memorabilia she had brought back from our vacations or that we had saved as private signposts of the transitions she had made since I had pulled her from the submerged upside-down wreck of a plane off Southwest Pass: conch shells and dried starfish from Key West, her red tennis shoes embossed with the words Left and Right on the toes, a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill from Disney-world, her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale on the front and the words Baby Orca that she had fitted over the torso of a huge stuffed frog.
"Dave, the field behind the house is full of lightning," she said. "I can hear animals in the thunder."
"It's Mr. Broussard's cattle. They'll be all right, though. They'll bunch up in the coulee."
"Are you scared?"
"Not really. But it's all right to be scared a little bit if you want to."
"If you're scared, you can't be standup."
"Sure you can. Standup people don't mind admitting they're scared sometimes."
Then I saw something move under the sheet by her feet.
"Alf?"
"What?" Her eyes flicked about the ceiling as though she were watching a bird fly from wall to wall.
I worked the sheet away from the foot of the bed until I was staring at Tripod's silver-tipped rump and black-ringed tail.
"I wonder how this fellow got in your bed, little guy," I said.
"He probably got out of his cage on the back porch."
"Yeah, that's probably it. He's pretty good at opening latched doors, isn't he?"
"I don't think he should go back out there, do you, Dave? He gets scared in the thunder."
"We'll give him a dispensation tonight."
"A dis—What?"
"Never mind. Let's go to sleep, little guy."
"Goodnight, big guy. Goodnight, Tripod. Goodnight, Frogger. Goodnight, Baby Squanto. Goodnight, Curious George. Goodnight, Baby Orca. Goodnight, sea shells. Goodnight—"
"Cork it, Alf, and go to sleep."
"All right. Goodnight, big guy."
"Goodnight, little guy."
In my sleep I heard the storm pass overhead like freight trains grinding down a grade, then suddenly we were in the storm's eye, the air as still as if it had been trapped inside a jar; leaves drifted to the ground from the trees, and I could hear the cries of seabirds wheeling overhead.
The bedroom windows shine with an amber light that might have been aged inside oak. I slip on my khakis and loafers and walk out into the cool air that smells of salt and wet woods, and I see the general's troops forming into long columns that wind their way into other columns that seem to stretch over an infinitely receding landscape of hardwood forests fired with red leaves, peach orchards, tobacco acreage, rivers covered with steam, purple mountain ridges and valleys filled with dust from ambulance and ammunition wagons and wheeled artillery pieces, a cornfield churned into stubble by horses' hooves and men's boots, a meandering limestone wall and a sunken road where wild hogs graze on the bodies of the dead.
The general sits on a cypress stump by my coulee, surrounded by enlisted men and his aides. A blackened coffeepot boils amidst a heap of burning sticks by his foot. The officers as well as enlisted men are eating honeycombs peeled from inside a dead oak tree. The general's tunic is buttoned over his bad arm. A civilian in checkered trousers, high-top shoes, braces, and a straw hat is setting up a big box camera on a tripod in front of the group.
The general tips his hat up on his forehead and waves me toward him.
"A pip of a storm, wasn't it?" he says.
"Why are you leaving?"
"Oh, we're not gone just yet. Say, I want to have your photograph taken with us. That gentleman you see yonder is the correspondent for the Savannah Republican. He writes an outstanding story, certainly as good as this Melville fellow, if you ask me."
