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Louisiana of my youth. I saw the slatted light that glowed at dawn through the shutters on my bedroom windows. I saw the pecan and oak trees in our yard, the fog off the bayou like cotton candy in the branches. I heard my mother gathering eggs for our breakfast in the barn, and I heard my father loading his crab traps and hoop nets in the back of his stake truck. I could smell the humus back in the swamp and the fecund odor of fish spawning and the night-blooming flowers my mother had planted in her garden. Not far from our home, vast expanses of green sugarcane were swirling in the wind, as though beaten by the downdraft of helicopter blades, backdropped by a sky that was piled with blue-black thunderheads.
    It was V-J Day 1945, and my half-brother, Jimmie, and I were safe in our home because our countrymen had driven both the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese from the earth. In the dream, I heard my father drive away in his stake truck, and I saw my mother look up the dirt road toward a parked Ford coupe. Sitting behind the steering wheel was a blade-faced man in a fedora who, like a scale-covered creature of long ago, patiently waited to enter our green-gold Eden on the bayou.
    When I woke from the dream, I went into the kitchen and sat a long time in the darkness by myself. The sky was black, the rain thundering on the cabin’s roof. The dream was one I had carried with me from Louisiana and the Philippines to Vietnam. It dealt with a sense of loss that I knew I would never get over. My parents had done the worst thing human beings are capable of doing to themselves: They had destroyed their own home and all those in it, including themselves. But the dream was about more than my own family. The world in which I had grown up was gone. The country I live in is not the one of my birth. It might seem so to others, but it is not, no matter what they say.
    Molly sat down beside me in the darkness. Before she married a sheriff’s detective with a history of alcoholism and violence, she had been a Catholic nun and nurse at Maryknoll missions in El Salvador and Guatemala, and had come to New Iberia to help organize the cane workers and build homes for the poor. She was wearing a white bathrobe, and when lightning flared above the mountains, she looked like an apparition. “Want to come back to bed?” she said.
    “I think I’m up,” I said.
    “Want me to start breakfast?”
    “How about steak and eggs up at the truck stop?”
    “Give me a minute,” she said, getting up from her chair, squeezing my shoulder.
    I followed her into the bedroom. When she untied her robe and let it slip off her shoulders onto the bed, I could feel something drop inside me, like water draining through a hole in the bottom of a streambed, as if all the clocks in my life had suddenly accelerated and I couldn’t stop them. I put my arms around her and held her against me. Her shoulders and back were powdered with freckles, and her skin felt cool and smooth and warm under my hands, all at the same time. She had red hair, and it was thick and cropped on her neck, and it smelled of the perfume behind her ears. I squeezed her tight and bit her on the shoulder.
    “You okay, Dave?” she said.
    “Always,” I said.
     
    LATER, WHILE MOLLY and Clete and Albert were in Missoula, I mucked out the stalls in Albert’s barn and scrubbed out the horse tank and refilled it with fresh water from the secondary well he had drilled in his pasture. By noon the chill had gone out of the morning, and the sky was a hard blue, the valley bright with sunshine, the trees a deep green from the rain. I saw a waxed black convertible, the top down, coming up the road, the driver steering straight over the mud puddles rather than around them. Three people were inside. When they stopped by the rail fence at the foot of the pasture, I had no doubt who they were.
    I pulled off my gloves and walked to the fence. The driver was a gold-haired woman who wore blue contact lenses and