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wreathed in cloying smoke. Stray cotton bolls, lifted across the quay on light wind, drifted against walls and collected in doorways like old, peppery snow that no one bothered to remove. The Italians lived like dogs in their secret courtyards redolent of the old vegetables and shrimp shells that brewed in their stews. In came the innocent and hopeful, and out went the dead. It was an indecent town.
    Nothing mattered but the money. Oh Lord! How could there be so much money? It floated down the river, funneled from the mountaintops to the valleys to the fields to the docks, and on to the hive of cotton offices, insurers, bankers, and saloonkeepers. The money bought sculpture and flesh, tombs and exquisite gardens laden with lemons and bananas. It bought leisure, the most important thing.
    Any man with even a little wit could open an office, buy a desk, hang a sign, and accept the money as if by right. It was possible to look out the window of the office and see each person as a chit to be banked, every crowd a living body of future accrued interest, every new friend a mark to be plundered for treasure. It was not so much different from imagining men as lines on a map, every small line merging into a larger one aimed at the enemy’s lines, each man merely a walking rifle.
    I found partners in the city eager to open a cotton factor’s office with a famous, or infamous, Confederate general who had no experience of commerce. They told me I was a respected man with a well-known name, and that this would draw customers. They flattered, but what they meant was that I was a curiosity. I had friends upriver with cotton, brothers in arms who would surely prefer to sell to me rather than to the dissolute and lazy-tongued traders of the Creole classes. It took two years, nearly all of my own investment, and the disappearance of my partners to relieve me of those fantasies.

    This is how I begin my memoir. I am older, I am wiser, I’ve got nearly no money. We have embarked on a new life that looks mightily like the old one, only with no servants, fewer changes of clothes, and no more days settled into the soft red chairs of the St. Louis’s lobby. Recently I have spent hours instead sitting in the parlor on a three-legged stool (“Two more than you have, Papa!” the boy John Junior says), carved from old river-strewn cypress. Right now I am in my library sitting on my unforgiving four-slat chair missing several inches of its cane bottom, bent over this piece of paper, this is what I do now.
    These last ten years. Ten children, and in the spring our eleventh. I am married to a flower of the Creole world who had the bad sense to be dragged down with me. Yet she still looks at me and flirts during supper. She sits with me on the front porch overlooking Third Street, drinking the very last of our cognac. I have $173, which we keep in a can in the pantry next to the dried field peas. The children know of that money, but they do not steal it. Their friends parade the street in shiny calfskin boots aboard sweet, well-broken ponies. My children dig after bugs and capture butterflies in what Anna Marie diplomatically calls our wildflower garden. They are barefoot most of the time. The older children once had ponies. Lydia’s pony, Joan, was perfect black except for the white blaze and her four white stockings, and Lydia rode her through every yard and into every swampy and secluded stand of cottonwood and cypress she could find. The two of them often returned covered in sharp thorns and burrs. I am told by old friends that she resembled her mother most at those moments. Joan was the last of the ponies we sold. Lydia has never once asked me about her, nor does she look covetously at the neighborhood children who still have ponies. She is the leader of the butterfly snatchers now. She calls every butterfly Joan, but I think this is out of fondness and not out of resentment. She likes the name, she likes the things in her life that have been