Papa Roy drove us to the home he shared with Mama Ilene, tucked just off a narrow road in a wood of their own, and not very far from the Gulf, where I had read of giant squid diving deep toward the sunken shell bottom. This land, too, so near to the hungry tides, would sink one day. Nothing could be done about that.
Because of this, their house crouched on stilts, fronted with a loosely screened porch. Long steps traipsed down from toothy wood pillars, and its eaves dangled with wind chimes thin as fish bones. From a distance, in the dark, I imagined the house looked like a creature all its own—a patron of the swamp, a misty-eyed troll with steam rising from a crooked pipe, fronds of lichen and the soft fur of mosses rising up from its haunches. Eli and I sat behind the screen of the porch like morsels, fate’s bait to be swallowed soon enough, in rolls of waves rising up from the ocean.
I told this to Papa Roy, that one day the whole town would be underwater.
He looked out into the reedy lawn and the thin torsos of cypress, surveying the already half-sunk landscape. “When?”
“I’m not sure, exactly,” I said.
“Well, then,” he said. “I guess we ain’t worse off than anyone else just yet.”
Of course I knew that Eli would cry eventually. On one of our first nights in the house, his sniffling pawed at my ears from across the room we shared. Four small walls watched over a shag rug and a wardrobe and a wooden bookshelf we had stocked with our things: A Fairy Tale Companion, some pictures of us as babies, coneflowers and prairie flax Mama Ilene had picked for us. No photos of Ma. Eli said that he didn’t miss her. He said that he was afraid of what I had mentioned on the porch. He was afraid that if the water rose anytime soon, he would be the first to drown, because he was smaller than the rest of us.
Mama Ilene and Papa Roy had heard him crying from across the narrow hall, and they came in together to see what the problem was. I told them Eli liked to be read to, but Papa Roy looked nervous about that. “I don’t have any good books,” he said.
Mama Ilene looked from him to me. “Why don’t you read?” she asked me. “You’re so good at it.”
We gathered like turtles on a log atop Eli’s twin bed, and I opened A Fairy Tale Companion. I flipped past the expired return slip and barely glanced at Gretel escaping the witch’s oven, until Papa Roy asked me to stop at a story about halfway through the book.
“Well, look here,” he said, pointing to the page as it fluttered back down with the rest. “This one here looks like Bayou Bonne Chance, you think?”
Eli leaned in closer. In the illustration, spires of castles rose from a watery kingdom, red as the creaking drills, leaning over a landscape bubbling with plant life and birds, and in the midst of it, beside a small pond, stood a young woman who held in her hands a gleaming, golden ball. She clutched it to her chest, sharing a glance with a small green frog perched at the water’s edge, beckoning to her.
Nothing about it looked anything at all like the bayou. The princess’s paper-white skin and long, blond hair opposed our appearances completely, and the castle signaled little of our peeling paint, our rickety floorboards.
“It does, kind of,” said Eli.
Papa Roy closed his eyes as I read. He was the first to fall back asleep. The first to dream.
I stood at the kitchen sink one evening, peeling potatoes with Mama Ilene while Eli watched reruns on the couch, when the silty squelch of Papa Roy’s pick-up spilled from the driveway into the open window behind us. Mama Ilene shook her head—“Lord have mercy, that crazy old man”—as we heard Papa exit, finish belting a blaring execution of some old jukebox song, and dance his way toward the porch.
The door flung wide and we turned to Papa Roy. He stood there grinning, a hand thrust to his hip. “Y’all,” he said, nodding along as if we had already guessed the words about to come from his mouth.
“You have something to say?” asked Mama Ilene, turning back to the potatoes.
“Oh, Mama, I got something to sing,” he said. “We heard, baby. I sure wish you wouldn’t.”
“No, not Otis,” he said. “The song in the wind, woman! The song in the trees! You know what I heard singing in the swamps today?”
I started drying my hands on a dishcloth. Eli had knelt against the cushions of the couch in the living room beside us, watching, his cheeks in his hands.
“I heard,” said Papa Roy, finding a captive audience in Eli’s wide eyes, “sailing right out through them wishy waters, the most rarest, most famous song for miles around.” A mosquito at his ear startled him momentarily, and he shut the door behind him, then saddled up to the kitchen table, elbows like cricket legs as he grasped the back of a chair. He looked into our eyes for a full second each, even Mama Ilene’s, which had wandered back to him. “I heard me the Blue Bull of Bayou Bonne Chance.”