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aqui ?” she said, her face a terrible question mark.
     
    She had other questions for us, too, ones not easily resolved by Annie’s and my poor Spanish, or more importantly our adult unwillingness to force the stark realisation of mortality upon a bewildered child. Perhaps in her sleep she still felt her mother’s hands on her thighs, raising her up into the wobbling bubble of air inside the plane’s cabin; maybe she thought I was more than human, that I could resurrect the dead from water, anoint them with my hand, and make them walk from the dark world of sleep into the waking day. Alafair’s eyes searched mine as though she would see in them the reflected image of her mother. But try as we might, neither Annie nor I could use the word muerto .
    ” Adónde ha ido mi mamá ?” she said again the next morning.
    And maybe her question implied the best answer we could give her. She didn’t ask what had happened to her mother; she asked instead where she had gone. So we drove her to St. Peter’s Church in New Iberia. I suppose one might say that my attempt at resolution was facile. But I believe that ritual and metaphor exist for a reason. Words have no governance over either birth or death, and they never make the latter more acceptable, no matter how many times its inevitability is explained to us. We each held her hand and walked her up the aisle of the empty church to the scrolled metal stand of burning candles that stood before statues of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus.
    ” Ta maman est avec Jésus ,” I said to her in French. “ Au ciel.”
    Her face was round, and her eyes blinked at me.
    ” Cielo ?” she asked.
    “Yes, in the sky. Au ciel ,” I said.
    ” En el cielo ,” Annie said. “In heaven.”
    Alafair’s face was perplexed as she at first looked back and forth between us, then I saw her lips purse and her eyes start to water.
    “Hey, hey, little guy,” I said, and picked her up on my hip. “Come on, I want you to light a candle. Pour ta maman .”
    I lit the punk on a burning candle, put it in her hand, and helped her touch it to a dead wick inside a red glass candle container. She watched the teardrop of fire rise off the wax, then I moved her hand and the lighted punk to another wick and then another.
    Her moist eyes were bright with the red and blue glow from inside the rows of glass containers on the stand. Her legs were spread on my hip like a frog’s, her arms, tight around my neck. The top of her head felt hot under my cheek. Annie reached out and stroked her back with the flat of her hand.
     
    The light was pink in the trees along the bayou when I opened the dock for business early the next morning. It was very still, and the water was dark and quiet in the overhang of the cypress trees, and the bream were feeding and making circles like raindrops on the edge of the lily pads. I watched the light climb higher in the blue sky, touching the green of the tree line, burning away the mist that still hung around the cypress roots. It was going to be a balmy, clear day, good for bluegill and bass and sunfish, until the water became warm by mid-morning and the pools of shadow under the trees turned into mirrors of brown-yellow light. But just before three o’clock that afternoon the barometric pressure would drop, the sky would suddenly fill with gray clouds that had the metallic sheen of steam, and just as the first raindrops clicked against the water the bluegill would begin feeding again, all at once, their mouths popping against the surface louder than the rain. I cleaned out the barbecue pit on the side porch next to the bait shop, put the ashes in a paper bag, dropped the bag in a trash barrel, spread new charcoal and green hickory in the bottom of the pit and started my lunch fire, then left Batist, one of the black men who worked for me, in charge of the shop, and went back up to the house and fixed an omelette and cush-cush for our breakfast. We ate on the redwood picnic table