"You must know. He must have used her name."
But Ira couldn't speak now. His face was hot, his eyes swimming with tears, his voice hiccuping in his throat. His mother rose from her chair and looked for a long time out the window. Ira's father was in the garden, snipping roses, placing them in a bucket of water. He did not see his wife watching him. Then he glanced up at the window and waved.
She turned back toward her son.
"You must never tell anyone about this," she said.
"Is Papa going to know I told?"
"You didn't tell me anything, Ira. This didn't happen," she said.
She walked close to him and pulled his face into the folds of her dress and rubbed the top of his head with both hands. He could smell an odor like camphor and animal musk in her clothes. He put his arms around her thighs and buried his face against her stomach.
"When you were a baby I bathed you every morning and kissed you all over. I kissed your hands and your little feet and your bottom and your little private places. You'll always be my little man. You're my good little man, aren't you?" she said.
"Yes," he replied.
She released him and, with no expression on her face, walked out of the room. For reasons he could not understand he felt a sense of numbness, violation, shame and desertion, all at the same time. It was a feeling that would come aborning in his dreams the rest of his life.
FOR his birthday a week later, his father had the cook bake a strawberry cake and fry a dinner basket of chicken and convinced Ira's mother to join the two of them and an elderly black body servant named Uncle Royal for a picnic on the southern end of their property, three miles down the river.
His father chose this particular spot because it had been the site of a Spanish military garrison, supposedly overrun and massacred by Atakapa Indians in the eighteenth century, and as a boy Ira's father had played there and dug up the rusted shell of a Spanish helmet and a horseman's spur with an enormous spiked rowel on it.
They spread a blanket in a glade and set fishing lines in the river, and for a birthday present his father gave him a windup merry-go-round with hand-carved wooden horses on it that rotated in a circle while a musical cylinder played inside the base.
The river was yellow from the spring rains, thick and choked with mud, swirling with uprooted trees that floated southward toward New Orleans. The wind was drowsy and warm, the glade dotted with buttercups and bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, and for a while Ira forgot his father's infidelity and the brooding anger in his mother eyes and the blood-spotted handkerchief that stayed balled in the palm of her hand.
The body servant, Uncle Royal, wore a tattered black coat, a white shirt, a pair of purple pants and looked like he was made of sticks. He was fascinated by the windup merry-go-round that rested in the center of the blanket, next to the cake.
"Where something like that come from, Master Jamison?" he asked.
"All the way from England, across the big pond," Ira's father said.
"Lord, what my gran'child would give to play with something like that," Uncle Royal said.
"I tell you what, Royal, the storekeeper in Baton Rouge has another one just like it. On my next trip there, I'll buy it for you as an early Christmas present," Ira's father said.
"You'll do that, suh?" Uncle Royal said.
"You bet I will, old-timer," Ira's father said.
Ira never admired his father more.
He and his parents ate the chicken and strawberry cake on the blanket while Uncle Royal fished, then Ira's father decided he would entertain his wife and son by climbing on a pyramid of pine logs that were stacked and penned with stobs on a grassy shelf six feet above the shallows.
He walked up and down on the crest of the logs, perhaps twenty feet above the glade, his arms outstretched for balance, grinning idiotically.
"Watch this!" he called. Then he flipped up on his hands and held his feet straight up in the air, his muscular body quivering with tension.
The ground was soft and moist from a week's rain. A stob on the far side of the logs bent backward against the additional weight on the pile, then one log bounced down from the top, followed by another. Ira's father flipped back on his feet and balanced himself, smiling, looking about, waiting for
the rush of blood to leave his head. Suddenly the entire pile collapsed and rumbled downward into the river, taking Ira's father with it.
Ira and his mother and Uncle Royal rushed to the edge of the bluff and stared down at the mudflat. Ira's father lay pinioned under a halfdozen crisscrossed logs, his legs in the water, his face white, his powerful arms trying to push away the weight that was crushing the air from his lungs.
Ira and Uncle Royal climbed down from the embankment and pushed and lifted and tugged on the logs that held his father, but to no avail.
"Go to the house. Come back with a team and chains," Ira's father said.