Taltos

Twenty-seven

EVERYBODY ALWAYS TOLD him the Fontevrault Mayfairs were crazy. “That’s why they come to you, Dr. Jack.” Every single one of them was mad, said the town, even the rich kin in New Orleans.

But did he have to find it out for himself on an afternoon like this, when it was as dark as night, and half the streets in town were flooded out?

And bringing out a little newborn baby in such a storm, wrapped up in smelly little blankets and lying in a plastic ice chest, no less! And Mary Jane Mayfair expecting him just to make out the birth certificate right there in his office.

He’d demanded to see the mother!

Of course, if he’d known she was going to drive this limousine like this over these shell roads, right through this storm, and that he’d end up holding this baby in his arms, he would have insisted on following her in his pickup.

When she’d pointed to the limousine, he’d thought the woman had a driver. And this was a brand-new car, too, twenty-five feet long if it was a foot, with a moon roof and tinted glass, a compact disc player, and a goddamned telephone. And this teen Amazon queen at the wheel-in her dirty white lace dress, with mud spattered on her bare legs and her sandals.

“And you mean to tell me,” he shouted over the rain, “that with a big car like this, you couldn’t have brought this baby’s mother to the hospital?”

The baby looked fine enough, thank God for that, about a month premature, he figured, and undernourished, of course! But otherwise okay and sleeping right now, deep in the ice chest with all the stinky little blankets around it, as he held the thing on his knees. Why, these blankets actually reeked of whiskey.

“Good heavens, Mary Jane Mayfair, slow down!” he said finally. The branches were making a racket on the top of the car. He flinched as the clumps of wet leaves slapped right against the windshield. He could hardly stand it, the way she ran right over the ruts! “You’re going to wake the baby.”

“That baby’s just fine, Doctor,” said Mary Jane, letting her skirt fall all the way back down her thighs to her panties. This was a notorious young woman, nobody had to tell him that. He’d been pretty damn sure this was her baby and she was going to make up some cock-and-bull story about its having been left on the doorstep. But no, there was a mother out there in those swamps, praise God. He was going to put this in his memoirs.

“We’re almost there,” Mary Jane called out, half smashing a thicket of bamboo on their left, and rolling right on past it. “Now, you got to carry the baby in the boat, all right, Doctor?”

“What boat!” he shouted. But he knew damn good and well what boat. Everybody had told him about this old house, that he ought to drive out to Fontevrault Landing just to see it. You could hardly believe it was standing, the way the west side had sunk, and to think this clan insisted upon living there! Mary Jane Mayfair had been slowly cleaning out the local Wal-Mart for the last six months, fixing the place up for herself and her grandmother. Everybody knew about it when Mary Jane came to town in her white shorts and T-shirts.

She was a pretty girl, though, he had to give her that much, even with that cowboy hat. She had the most high-slung and pointed pair of breasts he’d ever seen, and a mouth the color of bubble gum.

“Hey, you didn’t give this baby whiskey to keep it quiet, did you?” he demanded. The little tucker was just snoring away, blowing a big bubble with its tiny little pink lips. Poor child, to grow up in this place. And she hadn’t let him even examine this baby, saying Granny had done all that! Granny, indeed!

The limousine had come to a halt. The rain was teeming. He could scarcely see what looked like a house up ahead, and the great fan leaves of a green palmetto. But those were electric lights burning up there, thank God for that. Somebody’d told him they didn’t have any lights out here.

“I’ll come round for you with the umbrella,” she said, slamming the door behind her before he could say they should wait till the rain slacked off, and then his door flew open and he had no choice but to pick up this ice chest like a cradle.

“Here, put the towel over it, little guy will get wet!” Mary Jane said. “Now run for the boat.”

“I will walk, thank you,” he said. “If you’ll just kindly lead the way, Miss Mayfair!”

“Don’t let him fall.”

“I beg your pardon! I delivered babies in Picayune, Mississippi, for thirty-eight years before I ever came down to this godforsaken country.”

And just why did I come? he thought to himself as he had a thousand times, especially when his new little wife, Eileen, born and raised in Napoleonville, wasn’t around to remind him.

Lord in heaven, it was a great big heavy aluminum pirogue, and it didn’t have a motor! But there was the house, all right, the entire thing the color of driftwood, with the purple wisteria completely wrapped around the capitals of those upstairs columns, and making its way for the balusters. At least the tangle of trees was so thick in this part of the jungle that he was almost dry for a moment. A tunnel of green went up to the tilting front porch. Lights on upstairs, well, that was a relief. If he had had to see his way around this place by kerosene lamp, he would have gone crazy. Maybe he was already going crazy, crossing this stretch of duckweed slop with this crazy young woman, and the place about to sink any minute.

“That’s what’s going to happen,” Eileen had said. “One morning we’ll drive by there, and there won’t be any house, whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel, will have sunk into the swamp, you mark my words, it’s a sin, anybody living like that.”

Carrying the ice chest and its quiet little contents with one hand, he managed to get into the shallow boat, thrilled to discover that it was full of about two inches of water. “This is going to sink, you should have emptied it out.” His shoes filled up to the ankles immediately. Why had he agreed to come out here? And Eileen would have to know every last detail.

“It’s not going to sink, this is a sissy rain,” said Mary Jane Mayfair, shoving on her long pole. “Now hang on, please, and don’t let the baby get wet.”

The girl was past all patience. Where he came from, nobody talked to a doctor like that! The baby was just fine under the towels, and pissing up a storm for a newborn.

Lo and behold, they were gliding right over the front porch of this dilapidated wreck and into the open doorway.

“My God, this is like a cave!” he declared. “How in the world did a woman give birth in this place? Will you look at that. There are books in there on the top shelf of that bookcase, right above the water.”

“Well, nobody was here when the water came in,” said Mary Jane, straining as she pushed on the pole.

He could hear the thonk-thonk of it hitting the floorboards beneath them.

“And I guess lots of things are still floating around in the parlor. Besides, Mona Mayfair didn’t have her baby down here, she had it upstairs. Women don’t have their babies in the front room, even if it isn’t underwater.”

The boat collided with the steps, tossing him violently to the left, so that he had to grab the slimy wet banister. He leapt out, immediately stamping both his feet to make sure the steps weren’t going to sink under him.

A warm flood of light came from upstairs, and he could hear, over the hiss and roar of the rain, another sound, very fast, clickety, clickety, clickety. He knew that sound. And with it, a woman’s voice humming. Kind of pretty.

“Why doesn’t this stairway just float loose from the wall?” he asked. He started up, the ice-chest cradle beginning to feel like a sack of rocks to him. “Why doesn’t this whole place just disintegrate?”

“Well, in a way, I guess it is,” said Mary Jane, “only it’s taking a couple hundred years, you know???” She went thumping up the steps in front of him, pushing right in his way as she hit the second-floor hall, and then turning around and saying, “You come with me, we got to go up to the attic.”

But where was that clickety, clickety, clickety coming from? He could hear somebody humming, too. But she didn’t even give him a chance to look around, rushing him to the attic steps.

And then he saw old Granny Mayfair at the very top in her flowered flannel gown, waving her little hand at him.

“Hey, there, Dr. Jack. How’s my handsome boy? Come give me a kiss. Surely am glad to see you.”

“Glad to see you too, Grandma,” he said coming up, though Mary Jane once again shoved right past him, with the firm admonition that he was to hold tight to the baby. Four more steps and he’d be glad to set this bundle down. How come he was the one who’d wound up carrying it, anyway?

At last he reached the warm, dry air of the attic, the little old lady standing on tiptoe to press her lips to his cheeks. He did love Grandma Mayfair, he had to admit that much.

“How you doing, Grandma, you taking all your pills?” he asked.

Mary Jane picked up the ice chest as soon as he set it down, and ran off with it. This wasn’t such a bad place, this attic; it was strung with electric lights, and clean clothes hanging on the lines with wooden clothespins. Lots of comfortable old furniture scattered around, and it didn’t smell too much like mold; on the contrary, it smelled like flowers.

“What is that ‘clickety-clickety’ sound I’m hearing on the second floor down there?” he asked as Grandma Mayfair took his arm.

“You just come in here, Dr. Jack, and do what you got to do, and then you fill out that baby’s birth certificate. We don’t want any problems with the registration of this baby’s birth, did I ever tell you about the problems when I didn’t register Yancy Mayfair for two months after he was born, and you wouldn’t believe the trouble I got into with the city hall and them telling me that …”

“And you delivered this little tyke, did you, Granny?” he asked, patting her hand. His nurses had warned him the first time she came in that it was best not to wait till she finished her stories, because she didn’t. She’d been at his office the second day he opened up, saying none of the other doctors in this town were ever going to touch her again. Now that was a story!

“Sure did, Doctor.”

“The mama’s over there,” said Mary Jane, pointing to the side gable of the attic, all draped in unbleached mosquito netting as if it were a tent with its peaked roof, and the distant glowing rectangle of the rain-flooded window at the end of it.

Almost pretty, the way it looked. There was an oil lamp burning inside, he could smell it, and see the warm glow in the smoky glass shade. The bed was big, piled with quilts and coverlets. It made him sad, suddenly, to think of his own grandmother years and years ago, and beds like that, so heavy with quilts you couldn’t move your toes, and how warm it had been underneath on cold mornings in Carriere, Mississippi.

He lifted the long, thin veils and lowered his head just a little as he stepped under the spine of the gable. The cypress boards were bare here, and dark brownish red and clean. Not a leak anywhere, though the rainy window sent a wash of rippling light over everything.

The red-haired girl lay snug in the bed, half asleep, her eyes sunken and the skin around them frighteningly dark, her lips cracked as she took her breaths with obvious effort.

“This young woman should be in a hospital.”

“She’s worn out, Doctor, you would be too,” said Mary Jane, with her smart tongue. “Why don’t you get this over with, so she can get some rest now?”

At least the bed was clean, cleaner than that makeshift bassinet. The girl lay nestled in fresh sheets, and wearing a fancy white shirt trimmed in old-fashioned lace, with little pearl buttons. Her hair was just about the reddest he’d ever seen, and long and full and brushed out on the pillow. The baby’s might be red like that someday, but right now it was a bit paler.

And speaking of the baby, it was making a sound at last in its little ice-chest bed, thank God. He was beginning to worry about it. Granny Mayfair snatched it up into her arms, and he could tell from the way she lifted it that the baby was in fine hands, though who wanted to think of a woman that age in charge of everything? Look at this girl in the bed. She wasn’t even as old as Mary Jane.

He drew closer, went down with effort on his knees, since there was nothing else to do, and he laid his hand on the mother’s forehead. Slowly her eyes opened, and surprised him with their deep green color. This was a child herself, should never have had a baby!

“You all right, honey?” he asked.

“Yes, Doctor,” she said in a bright, clear voice. “Would you fill out the papers, please, for my baby?”

“You know perfectly well that you should-”

“Doctor, the baby’s born,” she said. She wasn’t from around here. “I’m not bleeding anymore. I’m not going anywhere. As a matter of fact, I am fine, better than I expected.”

The flesh beneath her fingernails was nice and pink. Her pulse was normal. Her breasts were huge. And there was a big jug of milk, only half drunk, by the bed. Well, that was good for her.

Intelligent girl, sure of herself, and well bred, he thought, not country.

“You two leave us alone now,” he said to Mary Jane and the old woman, who hovered right at his shoulders like two giant angels, the little baby whining just a little, like it had just discovered again that it was alive and wasn’t sure it liked it. “Go over there so I can examine this child, and make sure she’s not hemorrhaging.”

“Doctor, I took care of that child,” said Granny gently. “Now do you think I would let her lie there if she was hemorrhaging?” But she went away, bouncing the baby in her arms, pretty vigorously, he thought, for a newborn.

He thought sure the little mother was going to put up a fuss, too, but she didn’t.

There was nothing to do but hold this oil lamp himself, if he wanted to make sure everything was all right. This was hardly going to be a thorough examination.

She sat up against the pillows, her red hair mussed and tangled around her white face, and let him turn back the thick layer of covers. Everything nice and clean, he had to hand it to them. She was immaculate, as though she’d soaked in the tub, if such a thing was possible, and they had laid a layer of white towels beneath her. Hardly any discharge at all now. But she was the mother, all right. Badly bruised from the birth. Her white nightgown was spotless.

Why in the world didn’t they clean up the little one like that, for God’s sake? Three women, and they didn’t want to play dolls enough to change that baby’s blankets?

“Just lie back now, honey,” he said to the mother. “The baby didn’t tear you, I can see that, but it would have been a damned sight easier for you if it had. Next time, how about trying the hospital?”

“Sure, why not?” she said in a drowsy voice, and then gave him just a little bit of a laugh. “I’ll be all right.” Very ladylike. She’d never be a child again now, he thought, pint-sized though she was, and just wait till this story got around town, though he wasn’t about to tell Eileen one word of it.

“I told you she was fine, didn’t I?” asked Granny, pushing aside the netting now, the baby crying a little against her shoulder. The mother didn’t even look at the baby.

Probably had enough of it for the moment, he thought. Probably resting while she could.

“All right, all right,” he said, smoothing the cover back. “But if she starts to bleed, if she starts running a fever, you get her down into that limousine of yours and get her into Napoleonville! You go straight on in to the hospital.”

“Sure thing, Dr. Jack, glad you could come,” said Mary Jane. And she took his hand and led him out of the little tent enclosure, away from the bed.

“Thank you, Doctor,” said the red-haired girl, softly. “Will you write it all out, please? The date of birth and all, and let them sign it as witnesses?”

“Got a wooden table for you to write on right here,” said Mary Jane. She pointed to a small makeshift desk of two pine boards laid over two stacks of old wooden Coke bottle crates. It had been a long time since he’d seen Coke crates like that, the kind they used to use for the little bottles that used to cost a nickel. Figured she could probably sell them at a flea market these days to a collector. Lots of things around here she could sell. He spied the old gas sconce on the wall just above him.

It broke his back to lean over and write like this, but it wasn’t worth complaining about. He took out his pen. Mary Jane reached up and tipped the naked light bulb towards him.

There came that sound from downstairs, clickety-clickety-clickety. And then a whirring sound. He knew those noises.

“What is that sound?” he asked. “Now let’s see here, mother’s name, please?”

“Mona Mayfair.”

“Father’s name?”

“Michael Curry.”

“Lawfully wedded husband and wife.”

“No. Just skip that sort of thing, would you?”

He shook his head. “Born last night, you said?”

“Ten minutes after two this morning. Delivered by Dolly Jean Mayfair and Mary Jane Mayfair. Fontevrault. You know how to spell it?”

He nodded. “Baby’s name?”

“Morrigan Mayfair.”

“Morrigan, never heard of the name Morrigan. That a saint’s name, Morrigan?”

“Spell it for him, Mary Jane,” the mother said, her voice very low, from inside the enclosure. “Two r’s, Doctor.”

“I can spell it, honey,” he said. He sang out the letters for her final approval.

“Now, I didn’t get a weight….”

“Eight pounds nine ounces,” said Granny, who was walking the baby back and forth, patting it as it lay on her shoulder. “I weighed it on the kitchen scale. Height, regular!”

He shook his head again. He quickly filled in the rest, made a hasty copy on the second form. What was the point of saying anything further to them?

A glimmer of lightning flashed in all the gables, north and south and east and west, and then left the big room in a cozy, shadowy darkness. The rain teemed softly on the roof.

“Okay, I’m leaving you this copy,” he said, putting the certificate in Mary Jane’s hand, “and I’m taking this one to mail it into the parish from my office. In a couple of weeks you’ll get the official registration of your baby. Now, you should go ahead and try to nurse that child a little, you don’t have any milk yet, but what you have is colostrum and that …”

“I told her all that, Dr. Jack,” said Granny. “She’ll nurse the baby soon as you leave, she’s a shy little thing.”

“Come on, Doctor,” said Mary Jane, “I’ll drive you back.”

“Damn, I wish there was another way to get home from here,” he said.

“Well, if I had a broom, we’d fly, now, wouldn’t we?” asked Mary Jane, gesturing for him to come on as she started her thin-legged march to the stairway, loose sandals clopping on the boards.

The mother laughed softly to herself, a girl’s giggle. She looked downright normal for a moment, with a bit of rosy color in her cheeks. Those breasts were about to burst. He hoped that baby wasn’t a snooty little taster and lip-smacker. When you got right down to it, it was impossible to tell which of these young women was the prettiest.

He lifted the netting and stepped up again to the bed. The water was oozing out of his shoes, just look at it, but what could he do about it? It was running down the inside of his shirt, too.

“You feel all right, don’t you, honey?” he asked.

“Yes, I do,” she said. She had the jug of milk in her arms. She’d been drinking it in big gulps. Well, why not? But she sure as hell didn’t need it. She threw him a bright schoolgirl smile, just about the brightest he’d ever seen, showing a row of white teeth, and just a sprinkle of freckles on her nose. Yes, pint-sized, but just about the prettiest redhead he’d ever laid eyes on.

“Come on, Doctor,” Mary Jane positively shouted at him. “Mona’s got to get her rest, and that baby’s going to start yowling. ’Bye now, Morrigan, ’Bye, Mona, ’Bye, Granny.”

Then Mary Jane was dragging him right through the attic, only stopping to slap on her cowboy hat, which she had apparently taken off when they’d come in. Water poured off the brim of it.

“Hush, now, hush,” said Granny to the baby. “Mary Jane, you hurry now. This baby’s getting fussy.”

He was about to say they ought to put that baby in its mother’s arms, but Mary Jane would have pushed him down the steps if he hadn’t gone. She was all but chasing him, sticking her little breasts against his back. Breasts, breasts, breasts. Thank God his field was geriatrics, he could never have taken all this, teenage mothers in flimsy shirts, girls talking at you with both nipples, damned outrageous, that’s what it was.

“Doctor, I’m going to pay you five hundred dollars for this visit,” she said in his ear, touching it with her bubble-gum lips, “because I know what it means to come out on an afternoon like this, and you are such a nice, agreeable …”

“Yeah, and when will I see that money, Mary Jane Mayfair?” he asked, just cranky enough to speak his mind after all this. Girls her age. And just what was she likely to do if he turned around and decided to cop a feel of what was in that lace dress that she had just so obligingly mashed up against him? He ought to bill her for a new pair of shoes, he thought, just look at these shoes, and she could get those rich relatives in New Orleans to pay for it.

Oh, now wait a minute now. If that little girl upstairs was one of those rich Mayfairs come down here to-

“Now don’t you worry about a thing,” Mary Jane sang out, “you didn’t deliver the package, you just signed for it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“And now we have to get back in that boat!”

She hurried on to the head of the lower steps, and he sloshed and padded right behind her. Well, the house didn’t tilt that much, he figured, once you were inside of it. Clickety, clickety, clickety, there it was again. Guess you could get used to a tilted house, but the very idea of living in a place that was half flooded was perfectly-

The lightning let go with a flash like midday, and the hall came to life, wallpaper, ceilings, and transoms above the doors, and the old chandelier dripping dead cords from two sockets.

That’s what it was! A computer. He’d seen her in the split second of white light-in the back room-a very tall woman bent over the machine, fingers flying as she typed, hair red as the mother up in the bed, and twice as long, and a song coming from her as she worked, as if she was mumbling aloud whatever she was composing on the keyboard.

The darkness closed down around her and her glowing screen and a gooseneck lamp making a puddle of yellow light on her fluttering fingers.

Clickety, clickety, clickety!

Then the thunder went off with the loudest boom he’d ever heard, rattling every piece of glass left in the house. Mary Jane’s hands flew to her ears. The tall young thing at the computer screamed and jumped up out of her chair, and the lights in the house went out, complete and entire, pitching them all into deep, dull afternoon gloom that might as well have been evening.

The tall beauty was screaming her head off. She was taller than he was!

“Shhhh, shhhh, Morrigan, stop!” shouted Mary Jane, running towards her. “It’s just the lightning knocked out the power! It will go back on again!”

“But it’s dead, it’s gone dead!” the young girl cried, and then, turning, she looked down and saw Dr. Jack, and for one moment he thought he was losing his faculties. It was the mother’s head he saw way up there on this girl’s neck, same freckles, red hair, white teeth, green eyes. Good grief, like somebody had just pulled it right off the mother and plunked it down on this creature’s neck, and look at the size of this beanpole! They couldn’t be twins, these two. He himself was five foot ten, and this long, tall drink of water was at least a foot taller than that. She wasn’t wearing anything but a big white shirt, just like the mother, and her soft white legs just went on forever and ever. Must have been sisters. Had to be.

“Whoa!” she said, staring down at him and then marching towards him, bare feet on the bare wood, though Mary Jane tried to stop her.

“Now you go back and sit down,” said Mary Jane, “the lights will be on in a jiffy.”

“You’re a man,” said the tall young woman, who was really a girl, no older than the pint-sized mother in the bed, or Mary Jane herself. She stood right in front of the doctor, scowling at him with red eyebrows, her green eyes bigger than those of the little one upstairs, with big curling lashes. “You are a man, aren’t you?”

“I told you, this is the doctor,” said Mary Jane, “come to fill out the birth certificate for the baby. Now, Dr. Jack, this is Morrigan, this is the baby’s aunt, now Morrigan, this is Dr. Jack, sit down now, Morrigan! Let this doctor get about his business. Let’s go, Doctor.”

“Don’t get so theatrical, Mary Jane,” declared the beanpole girl, with a great spreading smile. She rubbed her long, silky-looking white hands together. Her voice sounded exactly like that of the little mother upstairs. Same well-bred voice. “You have to forgive me, Dr. Jack, my manners aren’t what they should be yet, I’m still a little rough all over at the edges, trying to ingest a little more information, perhaps, than God ever intended for anyone of my ilk, but then we have so many different problems which we have to solve, for example, now that we have the birth certificate, we do have that, do we not, Mary Jane, that is what you were trying to make plain to me when I so rudely interrupted you, was it not, what about the baptism of this baby, for if memory serves me right, the legacy makes quite a point of the matter that the baby must be baptized Catholic. Indeed, it seems to me that in some of these documents which I’ve just accessed and only skimmed, that baptism is a more important point actually than legal registration.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Dr. Jack. “And where in God’s name did they vaccinate you, RCA Victor?”

She let out a pretty peal of laughter, clapping both of her hands together, very loudly, her red hair rippling and shaking out from her shoulders as she shook her head.

“Doctor, what are you talking about!” she said. “How old are you? You’re a fairly good-sized man, aren’t you, let me see, I estimate you are sixty-seven years old, am I right? May I see your glasses?”

She snatched them off his nose before he could protest, peering through them into his face. He was flabbergasted; he was also sixty-eight. She became a fragrant blur before his naked eyes.

“Oh, now this is major, really, look at this,” she said. And quickly put the glasses back on the bridge of his nose with perfect aim, flaring into detail again, with plump little cheeks and a cupid’s bow of a mouth just about as perfect as he’d ever seen. “Yes, it makes everything just a fraction bigger, doesn’t it, and to think this is but one of the more common everyday inventions I’m likely to encounter within the first few hours of life, eyeglasses, spectacles, am I correct? Eyeglasses, microwave oven, clip-on earrings, telephone, NEC MultiSync 5D computer monitor. It would seem to me that later on, at a time of reflection on all that’s taken place, one ought to be able to discern a certain poetry in the list of those objects which were encountered first, especially if we are right that nothing in life is purely random, that things only have the appearance from different vantage points of being random and that ultimately as we better calibrate all our tools of observation, we’ll come to understand that even the inventions encountered on two stories of an abandoned and distressed house, do cluster together to form a statement about the occupants that is far more profound than anyone would suppose at first thought. What do you think!”

Now it was his turn to let out the peal of laughter. He slapped his leg. “Honey, I don’t know what I think about that, but I sure do like the style with which you say it!” he declared. “What did you say your name was, you’re the one that baby’s named after, Morrigan, don’t tell me you’re a Mayfair, too.”

“Oh yes, sir, absolutely, Morrigan Mayfair!” she said, throwing up her arms like a cheerleader.

There was a glimmer, then a faint purring sound, and on came the lights, and the computer behind them in the room began to make its grinding, winding, start-up noises.

“Ooops, there we go!” she said, red hair flying about her shoulders. “Back on line with Mayfair and Mayfair, until such time as Mother Nature sees fit to humble all of us, regardless of how well we are equipped, configured, programmed, and installed. In other words, until lightning strikes again!”

She dashed to the chair before the desk, took up her place before the screen, and began typing again, just as if she’d completely forgotten he was standing there.

Granny shouted from upstairs, “Mary Jane, go on, this baby’s hungry!”

Mary Jane pulled on his sleeve.

“Now wait just a minute,” he said. But he had lost the amazing young woman, totally and completely, he realized that, just as he realized that she was purely naked under the white shirt, and that the light of her gooseneck lamp was shining right on her breast and her flat belly and her naked thighs. Didn’t look like she had any panties on, either. And those long bare feet, what big bare feet. Was it safe to be typing on a computer in a lightning storm in your bare feet? Her red hair just flooded down to the seat of the chair.

Granny shouted from above.

“Mary Jane, you got to get this baby back by five o’clock!”

“I’m going, I’m going, Dr. Jack, come on!”

“ ’Bye there, Dr. Jack!” shouted the beanpole beauty, suddenly waving at him with her right hand, which was at the end of an amazingly long arm, without even taking her eyes off the computer.

Mary Jane rushed past him and jumped in the boat. “You coming or not?” she said. “I’m pulling out, I got things to do, you want to be stuck here?”

“Get that baby where by five o’clock?” he demanded, coming to his senses, and thinking about what that old woman had just said. “You’re not taking that baby out again to be baptized!”

“Hurry up, Mary Jane!”

“Anchors aweigh!” Mary Jane screamed, pushing the pole at the steps.

“Wait a minute!”

He took the leap, splashing into the pirogue as it rocked against the balusters and then the wall. “All right, all right. Just slow down, will you? Get me to the landing without dumping me into the swamp, would you do that, please?”

Clickety, clickety, clickety.

The rain had slacked up a bit, praise God. And a little bit of sun was even breaking through the heavy gray clouds just enough to shine on the drops!

“Now, here, Doctor, you take this,” said Mary Jane, as he climbed into the car. It was a fat envelope just full of bills, and, he saw by the way she ruffled them with her thumb, all new twenties. He eyeballed that to be a thousand. She slammed the door and ran around to the other side.

“Now that’s just too much money, Mary Jane,” he said, but he was thinking Weed Eater, lawn mower, brand-new electric shrub clippers, and Sony color TV, and there wasn’t a reason in the world to declare this on his taxes.

“Oh, shut up, you keep it!” she said. “Coming out on a day like this, you earned it.” There went her skirt, back down to her thighs. But she couldn’t hold a candle to that flaming darling upstairs, and what would it be like to get his hands on something like that, just for five minutes, something that young and that sleek and fresh and that beautiful, with those long long legs! Hush now, you old fool, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack.

Mary Jane threw the car into reverse, wheels whirring in the wet shells of the road, and then made a dangerous one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and headed off over the familiar potholes.

He looked back at the house one more time, the big hulk of rotting columns and wood towering over the cypresses, with the duckweed muck lapping at its half-sunk windows, and then at the road ahead. Boy, he was glad to get out of here.

And when he got home and his little wife Eileen said, “What all did you see out there at Fontevrault, Jack?” what was he going to tell her? Not about the three prettiest young women he’d ever seen under one roof, that’s for sure. And not about this wad of twenty-dollar bills in his pocket, either.