Victims of Winter

Through darkened villages—Champagne, Grand Pointe, Pont Breaux, Carencro—I raced alongside drowsy truckers heading for home and a welcoming bed. For fifteen miles through unmapped Atchafalaya shortcuts, night bugs swarmed in the inverted cones of my spattered headlights, beamed low so that I could follow the gravel roads rushing up at me.

At home I parked under our chinaberry tree to vex my mother, who soon after she rises will find my car and then my empty bed upstairs. Across the Cecelia highway I waded through wet fields of zabasson and biting brier, as ardently maddened now as when with my father's shotgun held at the ready I saw my exasperated hunter's face (vraiment un coullion, oui!)—sweat streaked, seed specked, wild hair drooped into devil's peaks—in Picou's unlit windows.

The amber dome lights of A.J.'s truck (holiday double-time in Mermentau) disappeared into a cloud of ground fog, and Sis and Blackie were underfoot, circling me in his yard, leaping and yelping, nipping my ankles as their tails wagged. I stole through unlocked doors and ferreted my head under warm covers, where I was met with reluctant thighs, non, non, non—my brother's heat still clings to our grand-mère's quilt. Espère, espère, je dois me laver. Celise tugged at my ears and gave me a stale greeting kiss but returned tasting of cloves, with scented hair everywhere, cleansed and renewed this early-spring morning.

At daybreak, coffee brewing and biscuits baking, bare feet clattered across a cold linoleum floor, and up onto the couch (my pretend bed for the last minutes of night) and all over their sleepy ol' Uncle Mike, Jeanie and Susie climbed, smothering me with milky kisses, milky breath. Musty and sweet-smelling little girls, urine and talcum powder, soft in their white cotton nightgowns.