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lost everything.
    The patriarch of that era shot himself through the heart, leaving his descendants to scrape out a meager existence alongside the blacks and poor whites they had so recently exploited. But in 1938, fortune reversed herself again.
    A young geologist with Texas backers leased a huge tract of former DeSalle land. Through a quirk in Louisiana law, landowners retained the mineral rights to their property for ten years after it was forfeited. My great-grandfather was ecstatic just to get the lease money. But nineteen days before his mineral rights expired, the young geologist struck one of the largest oil fields in Louisiana. Christened the DeSalle field, it produced over 10 million barrels of crude oil. My great-grandfather eventually bought back every acre of DeSalle land, including the island. He also bought back Malmaison and restored the house to its pre–Civil War splendor. Its present owner, my maternal grandfather, keeps Malmaison in pristine condition, worthy of the Architectural Digest cover it graced ten years ago. But the city that surrounds the mansion, though as well preserved as Charleston or Savannah, seems as doomed to slow decay as any other Southern town bypassed by the interstate and abandoned by industry.
    I pull around the “big house” and park beside one of the two brick dependencies behind it. The eastern slave quarters—a two-story edifice larger than some suburban houses—was my home during most of my childhood. Our family’s maid, Pearlie, lives in the western quarters, thirty yards across the rose garden. She helped rear my mother and aunt from infancy, then did the same with me. Well over seventy now, Pearlie drives a baby blue Cadillac, the pride of her life. It sits gleaming in the darkness behind her house, its chrome polished more regularly than that on the cars of any white matron in the city. Pearlie often stays up late watching television, but it’s past midnight now, and her windows are dark.
    My mother’s car is nowhere in sight. She’s probably in Biloxi, visiting her elder sister, who’s embroiled in a bitter divorce. My grandfather’s Lincoln is gone, too. At seventy-seven, Grandpapa Kirkland still possesses remarkable vitality, but a stroke a year ago ended his driving days. Undeterred, he hired a driver and resumed the pace he’d always kept up, which would exhaust a man of fifty. Grandpapa could be anywhere tonight, but my guess is that he’s on the island. He’s an avid hunter, and DeSalle Island—which teems with deer, wild hogs, and even bear—has been a second home to him since he married into the family a half century ago.
    When I get out of the Audi, the summer heat wraps around me like a thick jacket. The whine of crickets and the bellow of frogs from the nearby bayou fills the night, but this soundtrack from my childhood brings mixed feelings. As I glance toward the rear of Malmaison proper, my eyes lock onto a gnarled dogwood tree at the edge of the rose garden that separates our house from Pearlie’s, and my throat seals shut. My father perished under that tree, shot dead by an intruder he confronted there twenty-three years ago. I can’t look at the dogwood without remembering that night. Blue police lights flashing through rain. Wet, gray flesh. Glassy eyes open to the sky. I’ve asked Grandpapa many times to cut down that tree, but he’s always refused, claiming it would be foolish to mar the beauty of our famed rose garden out of sentimentality.
    Sentimentality.
    I stopped speaking after my father was murdered. Literally. I didn’t utter a word for over a year. But in my eight-year-old brain, I ceaselessly pondered what the intruder had come looking for that was worth my father’s life. Cash? The family silver? Grandpapa’s art or gun collections? All were possible targets, but no money or property was ever discovered missing. As I grew older, I wondered if it could have been my mother that drew the prowler. She was scarcely thirty