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Alafair and Bootsie and I ate dinner at the kitchen table. Outside the window, the evening sky was piled high with rain clouds, and columns of sunlight shone through the clouds on my neighbor’s sugarcane. Alafair ate with her book bag by her foot. In it she kept her short stories and notebooks and felt pens and a handbook on script writing. By her elbow was a thick trade paperback with a black-and-white photo of a log cabin on the cover.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
“Night Comes to the Cumberland. It’s by a lawyer named Harry Caudill. It’s a history of the southern mountains,” she said.
“For your creative writing group?” I asked.
“No, a boy at the library said I should read it. It’s the best book ever written about the people of Appalachia,” she replied.
“You’re going to read your new story tonight?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling. “By the way, I might get a ride home tonight.”
“With whom?” Bootsie said.
“This boy.”
“Which boy?” I asked.
“The one who told me about Night Comes to the Cumberland.”
“That nails it down,” I said.
“Dave, I am sixteen now … Why are you making that face?”
“No reason. Sorry,” I said.
“I mean, lighten up,” she said.
“You bet,” I said, looking straight ahead.
A few minutes later Alafair got into the car with Bootsie to ride into town. Under the trees the sunlight was red on the ground, and I could smell humus and the wet, dense warm odor of the swamp and schooled-up fish on the wind.
“No riding home with boys we don’t know, Alafair. We got a deal?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“Alf?” I said.
“You have to stop talking to me like I’m a child. Until you do, I’m just not going to say anything.”
Behind Alafair’s angle of vision Bootsie shook her head at me, then she said, “I’ll be back in a little while, Dave,” and I watched them drive down the road toward New Iberia.
I don’t know how good a father I was, but I had learned that when your daughter is between the ages of thirteen and seventeen, you will never win an argument with her, and if you fall back on anger and recrimination and coercion to prevail over her, you will come to loathe your triumph and the weakness it disguises and you will not easily find forgiveness for it in either her or yourself.
I read the newspaper on the gallery, then the dusk gathered inside the trees and the leaves on the ground darkened and became indistinct and a car passed on the road with its headlights on. I saw Batist walk out of the bait shop and scoop the hot ashes out of the barbecue into a bucket and fling them in a spray of burning embers onto the bayou’s surface.
I went inside and lay down on the couch with the newspaper over my face and fell asleep. In my dream I saw the sculpted, leafless branches of a tree on an alkali plain, and in the distance purple hills and piñon and cedar trees and cactus and rain bleeding like smoke out of the clouds. Then a flock of colored birds descended on the hardened and gnarled surfaces of the barren tree, and green tendrils began to grow from the tree’s skin and wind about its branches, and young leaves and flowers unfolded with the sudden crispness of tissue paper from the ends of the twigs, so that the tree looked like a man raising a floral tribute toward the sky.
But a carrion bird descended into the tree, its talons and beak flecked with its work, its feathers shining, its eyes like perfectly round drops of black ink that had dried on brass. It extended its wings and cawed loudly, white insects crawling across its feathers, its breath filling the air with a scrofulous presence that enveloped the tree and the tropical birds in it like a moist net.
I sat up on the couch and the newspaper across my face cascaded to the floor. I closed and opened my eyes and tried to shake the dream out of my mind, although I had no idea what it meant. I heard Bootsie’s car outside and a moment later she opened the front screen and came inside.
“I fell asleep,” I said, the room still not in focus.
“You okay?” she said.
“Yeah, sure.” I went into the bathroom and washed my face and combed my hair. When I came back out Bootsie was in the kitchen.
