The Jester's Paper Boats

Nine Ways to Peel a Crawfish

There are eleven correct ways to eat a boiled crawfish in south Louisiana, and by the end of his first afternoon in Prairie Gauche, Arthur Pendelton had been taught nine of them by nine different people, each of whom told him privately that the other eight were wrong.

The first was a rice farmer in rubber boots who held the little red creature up like a jeweler with a stone. "Twist," he said. "Pinch the tail. Pull. Don't think about it. Thinking is how you get juice in your eye."

The second was the farmer's wife, who said her husband had been getting juice in his eye since 1987 and Arthur should ignore him entirely.

The third was a boy of about nine with orange spice to the elbows, who did it in one motion too fast to follow and then looked up at the tall clown with the pity of a professional watching an amateur.

By the ninth teacher, a tiny woman of ninety in a lavender tracksuit who peeled with her thumbnail and did not look at her hands at all, Arthur had a pile of shells in front of him the size of a small hat, two burnt fingertips, and the beginnings of an understanding that this town did nothing quickly except eat.

"You suck the head," the woman told him.

"I had heard rumors," said Arthur.

"Rumors are true. That's where the good is." She demonstrated, with a small, precise, unembarrassed sound. "You're the clown?"

"I'm the clown."

"You don't look like a clown."

He was not, at that moment, dressed as one. He was in shirtsleeves and a canvas apron the fair committee had given him, with a red nose in his shirt pocket for emergencies. "I'm off duty," he said. "A clown at a crawfish boil is a public hazard. I would fall in the pot."

"Somebody fell in the pot in 1974," said the woman. "Nonc Ferdie. He was fine. The crawfish weren't."

* * *

The boil was the fair committee's welcome, and it had been laid on behind the Prairie Gauche fairgrounds on three sheets of plywood set across sawhorses and covered with newspaper. The pot, aluminum and as tall as a child, roared on a propane burner, and every twenty minutes two men lifted the basket out on a broom handle and poured it down the plywood in a red avalanche: crawfish by the hundred, ears of corn, small new potatoes, whole heads of garlic gone soft as butter, links of smoked sausage, and, for reasons nobody could explain to Arthur, three lemons and a whole artichoke.

"The artichoke is for Miss Lynette," said the rice farmer. "She's the only one who eats it. It's tradition."

"Since when?"

"Since last year."

Around the tables the whole town seemed to have come out. Beyond the fairgrounds the rice fields stretched to the horizon in shallow sheets of water that held the whole sky upside down, and out of the water, in long patient rows, stood thousands of small mesh traps, their necks poking up like white fingers raised to ask a question. Egrets walked between them on stilt legs, very slowly, as if they had been hired to inspect.

It was the second week of April. The air was already warm enough to wear like a coat.

* * *

The Hrynchuk Family One-Ring Circus had driven two thousand one hundred miles to get there, from a converted curling rink on the outskirts of Brandon, Manitoba, and it had done so for one reason, which Taras Hrynchuk explained to Arthur roughly every two hundred miles.

"Nineteen seventy-nine," he would say, turning around in the passenger seat of the lead truck. He was seventy-eight, built like a fire hydrant, with a bald head, eyebrows like two gray caterpillars and hands that smelled permanently of bicycle grease. "I am a young man. I come with my father's show to a fair in Texas. A man is there selling crawfish from a truck. Comeaux, his name. We become friends in one night, the way you can only when you are young and stupid. He says, Taras, come to my town in Louisiana when the crawfish are fat. I say yes. We shake hands." He would hold up his right hand, as evidence. "A handshake does not thaw."

"It's been forty-seven years, Dido," his granddaughter Lesia would say from the driver's seat. Lesia was twenty-nine and ran the show's books, its bookings and, Arthur suspected, the weather. "Mr. Comeaux died in 2011."

"So his son wrote me. The son says, my father talked about you until the end. The son says, the fair has never had a circus. The son says, Mr. Hrynchuk, the crawfish are fat. So." Taras would turn around again and face the road. "We go."

Lesia had wanted to go north. She had said so all winter, in the curling rink, while the snow piled up against the doors and the unicycles hung from the rafters like a flock of strange metal birds. She wanted to take the show up to Thompson and The Pas and the towns along the rail line to Churchill, places that had not seen a circus in thirty years. She had a map on the office wall with pins in it. Her grandfather had put a single pin in Louisiana, in the bottom of the map, with a little paper flag on it that said, in his square handwriting, HANDSHAKE.

So south they had come, in April, nine vehicles in a line, with Arthur in the props truck and his dented silver trailer, the Sardine Can, bumping along at the end of the convoy like a duckling that had been adopted by mistake.

He had spent the winter with them. He had learned to ride a unicycle in the curling rink well enough to fall off it on purpose, which was the only skill a clown really needed. He had been very cold. He had been, for four months, quite happy.

* * *

"Mr. Hrynchuk's clown!" A woman in a fair committee T-shirt came down the plywood toward him with a tablet held out before her like a tray of drinks. She was about sixty, with a gray braid and reading glasses pushed up into her hair and forgotten there. "Lynette Broussard. Fair secretary. I need you to look at this before Dud says it's wrong."

She turned the screen toward him. It was the town's calendar for the month, every square crowded. *Rice growers' meeting, Tuesday, 7, at the Legion.* *Boucherie at the Guidry place, Saturday, bring your own knife.* *Fais do-do, Bourque's, Saturday, 9 AM.* *Crawfish Fair, two weekends, Thursday through Sunday.* And under it, in a box she had clearly made herself, with a little drawing of a tent: *CIRCUS! Hrynchuk Family, from CANADA. Two shows a day. Seniors free Thursday.*

"I put the exclamation point," she said. "Dud thinks it's too much."

"It's the correct amount," said Arthur.

"That's what I said." She looked at him over the top of the glasses she was not wearing. "The whole parish looks at this. The schools post on it, the Legion posts on it, and Mrs. Guidry posts every time her hens are laying, which is constantly. If it's not on here, it didn't happen."

"Then I'm glad we happened," said Arthur.

Dud Comeaux came up behind her then, a big soft-voiced man in a cap that said COMEAUX RICE & CRAWFISH, and studied the screen for some time.

"The exclamation point is fine," he said at last.

Lynette looked at Arthur in triumph and went away to eat her artichoke.

* * *

It was the music that he would remember afterward, more than the crawfish.

At the far end of the plywood, on two folding chairs under a live oak whose branches swept almost to the ground, sat an old man with a fiddle and a girl with an accordion. Nobody had announced them. They had simply been playing since the first basket came out of the pot, and the town talked and ate and argued over them the way people talk over the sound of a river.

The old man was small and bony, in a pressed white shirt buttoned to the neck and a straw hat with a band of faded red. He held the fiddle low against his chest instead of under his chin, the old way, and his bow arm moved in short, rocking strokes, so that the tune seemed to walk rather than run. His face did not change at all. Only his right foot moved, tapping on the packed dirt, as if he were keeping a promise with it.

The girl was about seventeen, in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt from a seafood restaurant, with a sheet of dark hair held back by a pencil stuck through a knot. Her accordion was small, a single row of buttons, its bellows patched with black tape, and she played it hard, pumping it against her knee so that the whole thing breathed in and out like an animal. When the old man nodded to her, she sang.

She sang in French, in a strong, flat, carrying voice with a crack down the middle of it, and every word was perfect. The way she let a line fall off at the end, as if she had dropped something and decided not to pick it up, was so exactly right that the tiny woman in the lavender tracksuit stopped peeling and closed her eyes.

Arthur spoke French. He had learned it at a desk in Geneva and polished it at a long series of lunches in Paris where nobody had said anything they meant. It was good French, correct French, French with a pressed collar. He did not understand half of what the girl was singing. The words were older than his. They had come by a different road.

"Who are they?" he asked the rice farmer.

"That's Alcide Doucet and his granddaughter. Vange." The farmer cracked a crawfish and considered. "Mr. Alcide's played every boil in this parish since Eisenhower. He don't play for money. He'll tell you he don't play at all. He'll tell you he's just keeping the fiddle from getting lonesome."

* * *

Cyril Mapp found Arthur at sunset, when the pot had been turned upside down to drain and the plywood had become a long red ruin.

Cyril was the circus bandleader, a long, sorrowful, extremely calm man of sixty-three from Winnipeg who played trombone, drums with his feet, and anything else set in front of him. His band was three people. Since Tuesday it had been two, because the keyboard player, Teodor, had gone home for his sister's wedding and telephoned to say he had fallen in love with the caterer.

"I heard the girl," Cyril said. He said it the way some men say, I have seen the ocean.

"So did I."

"She has the circus in her hands. She doesn't know it. She plays like she's trying to start a truck." He looked down the field to the live oak, where the girl was packing the accordion into a box that had once held a microwave oven. "I need someone who can follow a ringmaster into a tumble without being told. Who can play a waltz while a man falls off a unicycle. That's not a skill. That's a temperament."

"Ask her," said Arthur.

"I did. She said she'd have to ask her grandfather. I asked her grandfather." Cyril's face did not change. "He answered me in French. For some time. Then he went to get more sausage."

"What did he say?"

"I have no idea. But it had a lot of verbs."

* * *

Arthur put his nose on then. He had not intended to work that evening, but there are moments that call for a clown, and one of them is when an old man has said a great many verbs to a trombone player.

He went down the field in his apron and the red foam nose, and made a small business of tripping over a root that had been there for two hundred years, and then of apologizing to the root. The old man watched this with no expression whatever.

"Monsieur Doucet," said Bippo, with a bow. And then, because it seemed only polite, he went on in French: he had heard the music, he had been moved, he would be honored to know the name of the tune.

Alcide Doucet looked at him for some time. Then he spoke, in English, for the first time that day, in a high, dry, careful voice.

"Where," he said, "does a clown get French like a bank?"

The girl laughed out loud. Arthur felt, for one instant, the cold small thrill of a man whose coat has been caught on something.

"From a waiter in Montreal," said Bippo. "He was very strict. He made me say *croissant* nine hundred times."

"Hm." The old man began to loosen the bow. "Well. Me, I don't talk to clowns. *J'parle pas aux clowns, moi.* My mama told me. Clowns and insurance men."

"Your mama was a wise woman."

"She was a terror," said Alcide Doucet, and for the first time something moved at the corner of his mouth, and was put away again. "That tune is called nothing. It's a waltz. I learned it from my mama. She learned it from somebody. That's all the name it's got."

"Pépère," said the girl.

"What."

"Tell him yes."

"Tell who yes?"

"The trombone man. For the band. For the circus." She had the accordion box on her hip and her chin up. "It's two weekends. It's two shows a day. I can do it after school."

The old man fitted the fiddle into a case that was older than Arthur, with a rubber band around it where the latch had failed.

"Ask your mama," he said.

"Mama said ask you."

"Then ask the clown." He stood, with a little effort, and settled his straw hat. "He talks French like a bank. He can loan you the answer."

* * *

That night, in the Sardine Can, Arthur sat on his bunk with the window open for the frogs, who seemed to be holding a meeting about him. He had a stack of Lynette's yellow flyers, CIRCUS! with its unapologetic exclamation point.

He took one and folded it, without quite deciding to.

His grandmother Nell had taught him this, on rainy afternoons in Pittsburgh: a square, a triangle, a hat, a smaller hat, and then the little pull at the center that made the whole thing open out, suddenly, into a boat. He had not made one in sixty years. His fingers remembered it all the same.

He set the yellow boat on the shelf beside the dented enamel mug and the old pastille tin, which had only a few buttons left in it now. The small red glass button from Edinburgh he had sewn onto his new costume coat, a short tartan jacket with no buttonholes anywhere, so that Bippo would spend all of every show trying to fasten it.

Then he clipped the microphone behind his ear.

"Reginald."

"Arthur. It is two in the morning here, and I was asleep, and I was dreaming about Manitoba. Are your fingers still attached?"

"Burnt, not frozen. I've been taught to eat a crawfish nine ways." He looked at the paper boat. "And I met a fiddler who caught my French in the first sentence."

There was a short silence from Edinburgh.

"Caught it how?"

"He said it sounded like a bank."

"Ah," said Sterling. "Then I would advise you to speak to him in English, or better still, in clown."

"I intend to listen to him," said Arthur, "in whatever he's willing to say."

The Waltz About a Hen

At a quarter past four the frogs were still in session.

Arthur put the kettle over the flame and waited in the dark with the door open. The fairgrounds smelled of wet grass and cold propane and, faintly, of yesterday's boil. Somewhere toward the rice fields a bird he did not know was making a sound like someone winding a watch.

Tea, strong, in the dented mug. Then one page.

*Crawfish. Nine teachers. An old man who will not talk to clowns, and a girl who sings like she found the words in a drawer.*

He looked at that last line, and then he underlined *found*, because it bothered him, and he did not yet know why.

* * *

Vange Doucet came to the circus lot at ten minutes to seven, before school, in a car with one blue door and one gray one, with the accordion box on the passenger seat wearing a seatbelt.

Cyril Mapp was waiting for her in the empty tent with his trombone across his knees. The third member of the band, a silent woman named Halyna who played tuba and snare, sat on an overturned bucket and studied the girl as if she were a weather report.

"I don't read music," Vange said at once.

"Neither does the unicycle," said Cyril. "Play me something."

She played him a two-step, hard and fast. Cyril listened with his eyes shut. Then he came in under her, and Halyna under him, and for half a minute the three of them were tangled together like dogs meeting in a park, and then, quite suddenly, they were not.

"Now watch," Cyril said, without stopping. "Arthur."

Arthur had been sitting in the third row with his tea. He put it down, stood, took four steps into the ring and fell over nothing.

The girl's accordion fell with him. Not a note late. She dropped the tune down a whole step, the way a staircase drops when you miss the last stair, and then, while he lay flat in the sawdust looking surprised, she let one long squeezed note hang over him like a question, and when he sat up and looked around for whatever had tripped him, she played three small notes, tiptoeing, that were so plainly the sound of a man looking for a culprit that Halyna laughed around her cigar.

Cyril lowered his trombone.

"Like I said," he told Arthur. "Temperament."

* * *

She had the music for the whole show in her head by Wednesday afternoon. She did not learn it, exactly. She absorbed it, the way a sponge learns a puddle. Under Taras's unicycle march she slid a Cajun two-step until Taras, pedaling backward on a seven-foot giraffe unicycle with a teacup on his head, began to bob to the beat without noticing. The dog act, which belonged to Lesia's cousin Bohdan and consisted of three rescued terriers who were not convinced about anything, got a waltz.

And for Bippo, she found a song about a man who loses his hat.

"That's what it's about?" Arthur asked her. They were sitting on the tailgate of the props truck between rehearsals, eating the cold boudin Lynette Broussard had sent over in a foil tray with a note: *for the Canadians, who are too thin.*

"I think so," said Vange. "There's a word in it that means hat. Or a word that sounds like the word for hat. Or maybe it's the word for wind. My pépère sings it when he can't find his hat, anyway, so." She shrugged. "That counts."

"Do you know what most of the songs are about?"

She chewed for a while. The boudin was rice and pork and green onion in a casing, warm with pepper, and she ate it the local way, squeezing it out of the skin, while Arthur tried with very little success to use a fork.

"Some," she said. "Not most. I know the sounds. I've known the sounds since I was three. He'd sing and I'd sing back. I could sing you forty songs right now and every one of them would sound right, because I'm good at sounds. Ask anybody." She wiped her fingers on her jeans. "But it's like singing in a house where you've only ever been in the hall. You know what the hall looks like. You've never seen the rooms."

"Which is your favorite?"

"The waltz. The one from yesterday. The one with no name." She smiled for the first time that morning. "It's about a hen."

"A hen."

"A hen that won't come home. The man keeps calling her. He goes out every night and calls and calls. That's the sad part." She shrugged again, but her face had gone soft. "I cried about that hen when I was six. I still kind of do."

Arthur sat with this. He had heard the waltz. He had understood perhaps one word in three, and the words he had understood had not been about a hen. There was a word in the chorus that the girl sang with special care, *ma belle*, and another that he was fairly sure was *partie*, gone. He had sat in enough lawyers' offices to recognize the shape of a sentence about someone who would not be coming back.

A wiser man would have said nothing. Arthur, who had been wise for most of his life and was trying to recover from it, put his fork down.

"May I tell you something I'm not sure of?"

"You're a clown. That's all you do."

"I think," he said gently, "the hen might be a wife."

The girl looked at him. Then she looked away, out across the fairgrounds to the rice fields, where a crop duster was crossing the sky with a sound like a sewing machine.

"Huh," she said.

That was all. She finished her boudin. She went back into the tent. But when she played the waltz that afternoon for the trapeze, she played it slower than she had ever played it, and at the place in the chorus where the man calls out, she didn't sing at all. She just let the accordion do it.

* * *

On Thursday after the evening show she took him home.

"Pépère said to bring you," she announced, which was so plainly untrue that Arthur did not even bother to ask. "He said, if the clown with the bank French is going to put ideas in your head, bring him here so I can look at him without a nose on."

The Doucet place stood at the end of a shell road a mile out of town, among old pecan trees: a house raised on brick piers, of cypress gone silver with age, with a tin roof and a deep porch, which Vange called a gallery, running all the way across the front. Two rocking chairs sat on the gallery, and a swing. Behind the house was a flooded field full of crawfish traps, and behind that, a small leaning barn that had once held rice and now held, Vange said, "everything Pépère will not let anybody throw out, including my daddy's tricycle and a goat cart."

"You have a goat?"

"No. We have a goat cart."

Alcide Doucet was on the gallery, in one of the rockers, with the fiddle case across his knees. Arthur had taken off the nose. In his gray cardigan he felt, under the old man's eye, rather more undressed than he would have liked.

"Hm," said Alcide. "You're older than I thought."

"It's the nose," said Arthur. "It takes years off."

"Sit."

He sat, in the other rocker. The chair had been rocked so long in one spot that two shallow grooves had worn into the porch boards under its runners, and when Arthur leaned back it settled into them like a train finding its rails.

* * *

Vange took out her phone. She was, Arthur saw, a girl with a project.

"I've been doing this since Christmas," she told him. "I record him. Every tune. And then he tells me who he learned it from, and I write it down under the recording. So when he's — so later, I'll know."

"So when I'm dead," said Alcide.

"So *later*," said Vange.

"She thinks if she says later I'll live forever." He unsnapped the rubber band from the fiddle case. "Go on. Play her the list."

She scrolled. There were forty-one recordings so far, each with a title, a date, and beneath it a few lines in Vange's quick typing. She read some aloud, and Arthur realized within a minute that the notes were the best thing he had heard in Louisiana.

*Two-step, no name. Learned from Nonc Ti-Paul at a boucherie, winter 1951, because Ti-Paul would not stop playing it and Pépère wanted him to stop, and the only way was to learn it himself.*

*Reel, called "the one for Ophé." Learned from Ophé Guidry, who could play with a fever of a hundred and three and once did, at a wedding in Eunice. Ophé's left hand had only three fingers. Pépère says this is why the tune skips.*

*Waltz, called "Sunday Waltz," but not for Sundays. Learned from his cousin Hippolyte in 1956, behind the rice mill, while they were supposed to be loading sacks. They got fired. Hippolyte said it was worth it.*

"You don't have the waltz," said Arthur. "The one from the boil."

"That's next," said Vange.

Alcide put the fiddle to his chest. He did not tune it; he plucked each string once, listened, nodded at it as if it had answered a question, and began.

It was the waltz with no name. On the gallery, without the noise of the boil, Arthur heard it properly for the first time: the long lilting line of it, rising and turning back on itself, the way a road turns back to look at a house it has left. His foot tapped on the boards. Out in the dark field the frogs fell silent one by one, which Arthur would afterward insist was coincidence and which Vange would insist was not.

When it ended, nobody said anything for a while.

"Who taught you?" Vange asked, her thumbs ready.

"My mama. Mélia. I told you that."

"Who taught her?"

The old man was quiet so long that the frogs started up again.

"She said it came from up there," he said finally. "From before. She'd say, *ça vient d'en haut*. That's all. It comes from up there." He lifted the bow and pointed it north, vaguely, over the pecan trees, at the whole dark continent. "She never said who. I never asked. You don't ask your mama questions like that when you're a boy. And then you're an old man, and she's not there to ask."

Vange typed it. Arthur, without meaning to, read it over her shoulder.

*Waltz, no name. Learned from his mama, Mélia Doucet. She said it came from up there. Nobody knows who taught her. Find out.*

She looked up at Arthur, and then at her grandfather, and then she deleted the last two words and typed them again, in capitals.

"Pépère," she said. "In the waltz. Is it about a hen?"

Alcide looked at her. Then he looked at the clown with no nose on, for rather a long time, with his small sharp eyes narrowed in the porch light.

"No, *chère*," he said at last. "It's not about a hen."

"Then what's it about?"

"Ask the clown," said the old man, and stood up and went into the house to get more iced tea, and did not come back out for twenty minutes.

Two-Step at Nine in the Morning

"Fais do-do," said Shelley Doucet, "means go to sleep."

"Then why," said Arthur, "is everyone dancing?"

"Because that's what you said to the babies. In the old days." She handed him a plastic cup of beer he had not asked for at a quarter past nine in the morning. "You'd put the babies down in a back room on a pile of coats, and the mamas would say *fais do-do*, go to sleep, so they could get back out there before the next waltz. So the dance got named after the babies. Which is fair. They were doing all the work."

Shelley was Vange's mother: a compact, quick, tired woman of forty-four in hospital scrubs, just off a night shift in the emergency room in Opelousas and was, she said, going to dance three songs and then sleep until Tuesday. She spoke no French beyond the songs and the swear words. She danced like a woman with a schedule.

Bourque's stood on the state highway two miles out of town, a long low building of white-painted cinder block with a hand-lettered sign that said MUSIC SAT. 9 AM — NO DANCING ON THE BAR, and a single window unit fighting the Louisiana spring with everything it had. Inside, it was one room. A bar ran down one wall, with a mirror behind it that had lost most of its silver, so that the dancers moving in it looked like a memory of dancers. A small stage stood at the far end with a hand-painted backdrop of a bayou at sunset, complete with an alligator that the painter had, perhaps out of local pride, made considerably too large.

And the floor. The floor was the thing. It was pine, scoured pale, worn into a broad shallow trough down its middle by sixty years of boots going round and round counterclockwise, so that it had the gentle dip of an old stone stair. The dancers moved in it the way water moves in a riverbed.

* * *

The band was Alcide Doucet, an accordion player of about seventy named Lucien, a young man on guitar who looked bored in the professional way of very good guitar players, and Vange, on the triangle.

"It's called a *'tit fer*," she told Arthur during the first break. She held it up: a bent steel rod on a string, struck with a long nail. "Little iron. My great-great-uncle made this one out of the tooth of a hay rake. You think it's easy. Everybody thinks it's easy."

"I don't think it's easy."

"You're going to." She handed it to him, and the nail. "Go on."

He went on, for the length of one two-step, and discovered that the triangle was not an instrument so much as a test of character. If you got it wrong, every single person in the room knew, including the man asleep at the end of the bar. By the end of the song Bippo, in full costume because he had a matinee at two, had developed a way of looking at the triangle with deep betrayal every time it rang at the wrong moment. The dancers began to cheer each wrong note. A woman in a lavender tracksuit shouted, "*Mais*, he's terrible!" with tremendous approval, and Arthur recognized his ninth crawfish teacher.

Her name was Mrs. Philomène Landry, she was ninety, and she asked him to dance.

"I don't two-step," said Bippo.

"You don't eat crawfish, either," she said. "Come on."

She led. She was a full two feet shorter than him, and she steered him around that worn pine floor as if she were driving a large and stupid boat through a narrow channel. *Quick, quick, slow. Quick, quick, slow.* His enormous violet shoes slapped the floor. The tartan jacket flapped open, the one red glass button searching hopelessly for a hole. Over Mrs. Landry's head he could see Alcide on the stage, fiddle low on his chest, watching them with no expression whatsoever, except that his foot was tapping faster than it had any reason to.

"You're getting it," Mrs. Landry said.

"I am not getting it."

"No," she agreed. "But you're getting closer to not getting it."

* * *

At the second break Alcide came down off the stage and sat at the end of the bar, beside the clown, and ordered a cola in a glass bottle, and drank half of it in silence. Then, without turning his head, he spoke. In English.

"My granddaughter says you know French."

"A little," said Bippo.

"She says you told her about the hen."

"I may have been wrong."

"You weren't wrong." Alcide set the bottle down with a small click. "Who told you about the wife?"

"Nobody. I heard the word *partie*."

"Hm." The old man studied the bayou on the backdrop, and the oversized alligator. "You want to know why she don't know what the song is about? I'll tell you why. Because her daddy don't know. And her daddy don't know because I never told him. And I never told him because of Miss Arceneaux."

"Who was Miss Arceneaux?"

"First grade." Alcide turned on his stool and looked at him for the first time, and Arthur saw that the small sharp eyes were amused, which he had not expected. "Nineteen forty-seven. I'm six years old. I walk into that schoolhouse knowing maybe ten words of English, and four of them were from the radio and you couldn't say them in front of a teacher. Miss Arceneaux is tall, thin, has a voice like a screen door. First day, I ask the boy next to me where the toilet is. In French. *Où c'est la toilette?* And she hears me."

"What happened?"

"Lines." Alcide held up his hand and wrote in the air with an invisible pencil. "*I will not speak French on the school grounds.* A hundred times. Then two hundred, next time. Then five hundred. I'm a slow learner, see. I keep forgetting I'm not supposed to be what I am."

The bar had gone quiet near them. Mrs. Landry was listening from her stool. So was Lucien, the accordion player, who nodded slowly as if he too had a number.

"Now, you want to know the funny part," said Alcide, and the corner of his mouth moved, and this time he let it. "By the third grade, I'm writing so many lines I get *good* at it. I'm the best writer in the school. I tape two pencils together, see, like this, so I can write two lines at a time. Then three pencils. By the fifth grade I can do five hundred in one recess. And the other boys, they're getting lines too, everybody's getting lines, we're all Cajuns, what are we going to speak? So they start paying me. A nickel for a hundred. I write their lines in their handwriting. I had a business." He finished the cola. "I was the first man in this parish to make a living writing English. And I was nine."

Mrs. Landry laughed until she had to grab the bar with both hands.

"Lynette's daddy paid me in pecans," said Alcide. "Philomène's brother paid me in comic books. And Miss Arceneaux, she put my handwriting up on the wall for the parents to see, because it was so beautiful." He shook his head. "To this day I sign my name like a bank. Like you talk." He pointed the bottle at Bippo. "That's two of us."

* * *

He did not tell the next part as a joke. It came out in the gaps of the third set, in pieces, while Shelley danced her three songs with a cousin and went to sleep in a chair by the door.

He had married Odette Bertrand in 1962. She was from Mamou, and she spoke French in her sleep. They waited twelve years for one boy, Russell. And when Russell was born, in 1974, Alcide had looked down at him in the hospital in Opelousas and thought of the lines, and the three pencils, and the screen-door voice, and he had decided, without telling anyone, not even Odette, that his son was going to have it easier.

"So I talked English to him," Alcide said. "Only English. Odette fought me. She'd sing to him in French and I'd come in and change the song. I thought I was being a good daddy. I thought, the world wants English, I'll give him English. I'll give him a head start." He was looking at the dance floor, at the worn trough in the pine. "And then he's grown, and he's working offshore, two weeks on the rig, two weeks home, and he comes to my house with the baby, Vange, this one, and he wants her to learn the songs. And I teach her the songs. All the songs. And she sings them perfect, she always did. And one day she's maybe eight, and she asks me what they mean. And I go to tell her, and I realize." He stopped.

"What?"

"I can't remember half the words in English. And she can't understand them in French. So there we are, the two of us, on the gallery. She's got the sounds. I've got the meanings. And there's no bridge." He shrugged, an old man's small shrug. "Miss Arceneaux won. She's been dead forty years and she won."

* * *

At the end of the morning, when the dancers were going out blinking into the noon heat, Vange sat on the edge of the stage with her thumbs moving very fast on her phone.

Arthur sat down beside her, in costume, with his enormous shoes dangling.

"What are you doing?"

"Making a list." She turned the phone so he could see.

It was a list of words, and only a dozen of them so far. Beside each word was what it meant, and beside that, a little speaker button, and when she touched it, there was Alcide's high dry voice, from somewhere earlier that morning, saying the word once, clearly, the way you say a word to a child.

*Asteur. Now. "Like 'ass-tuh,' but don't let your mama hear you say it like that."*

*Espérer. To wait. Not to hope. "Up there they hope. Down here we wait. Same thing, if you think about it."*

*Il mouille. It's raining. "Literally it's getting wet. Which is true."*

*Boucane. Smoke. "Like at the boucherie. Like from the pit."*

*Chère. Dear. Darling. "What I call you, when you're good. Which is twice a year."*

"I started it last night," Vange said. "After the hen. I thought, if I get one word every day, by the time I'm his age I'll have —" She did the arithmetic with her lips. "A lot."

"Twenty-five thousand, roughly."

"How'd you do that so fast?"

"Clowns are very good at arithmetic," said Bippo. "It's how we count the pies."

On the stage behind them, Alcide was latching the fiddle case with its rubber band. He did not look at his granddaughter or at the list on her phone. But when he walked past them to the door, he stopped, and leaned down, and said one word into the side of her head, quietly, in French, and went on out into the sun.

She touched the screen and typed it in.

*Fier. Proud.*

She did not add a note under that one. She didn't need to.

The Brother Who Ran into the Woods

The inflatable alligator was eleven feet long, and it had been Lesia's idea, and Taras had been against it from the first moment he saw the box.

"It is undignified," he said. "For the alligator."

"It's plastic, Dido."

"It has a face. Anything with a face has dignity."

But on Friday night Bippo rode a unicycle over it anyway, in the center ring, in front of four hundred people from Prairie Gauche and the surrounding parishes, to a slow, menacing accordion vamp that Vange had invented on the spot and which sounded exactly like something large waking up in a swamp. He did not, of course, ride over it. He rode toward it, and stopped, and wobbled, and consulted the audience, who told him at the top of their lungs to go on, and just as his front wheel touched the alligator's snout, a stagehand underneath the ring curb opened a valve and the alligator's jaws rose slowly with a long, wet sigh of air.

Bippo fell off the back of the unicycle and ran around the ring three times with the alligator's tail chasing him on a fishing line that Bohdan was working from the bleachers. Children screamed with joy. And Taras Hrynchuk, watching from the ring door with his arms folded over his chest, was seen to nod once, very slightly, as if the alligator had conducted itself with dignity after all.

* * *

On Sunday morning Vange came out to the lot at eight with a box of beignets from the gas station, a thermos of coffee so strong it seemed to have muscles, and a question.

"Pépère wants to find them," she said.

"Find whom?"

"The ones up there. In the waltz. *Ça vient d'en haut.*" She sat down on the steps of the Sardine Can with the beignets on her knees, and a small cloud of powdered sugar went up around her and settled on her jeans. "He's never said it before. Not once. Last night after you left, he was on the gallery, and he didn't play anything, he just sat there, and I was going to bed, and he said, *Vange. Find out who they were.*" She looked up. "He's eighty-four. He's never asked me for anything except to take out the trash."

Arthur sat down beside her on the narrow step.

"What do you know?"

"Not much. That's the problem." She pulled up something on her phone. "This is what my daddy started a couple years ago, on the rig, when he was bored. It's mostly my mama's side, because my mama's family kept everything, they've got a family book with names in it back to the Civil War. The Doucet side is just" — she showed him — "this."

It was a family tree. Shelley's side spread out to the left like an oak, crowded with names and dates and small photographs. The Doucet side went up a few branches, to Alcide and Odette, and to Alcide's father and mother, *Désiré Doucet* and *Mélia Doucet*, and then simply stopped, the branches ending in little blank boxes with question marks in them.

"Mélia Doucet," said Arthur. "Was she a Doucet before she married?"

"Yeah. She was a Doucet who married a Doucet." Vange shrugged. "That happens a lot around here. Nobody talks about it. Pépère says it's because there were only nine families in the whole parish for two hundred years and they had to marry somebody."

* * *

They worked on it all morning, at the picnic table behind the cook trailer, where Vira was making varenyky for the crew's supper, pinching each dumpling shut with a quick little twist, and listening.

Vange typed. Arthur asked questions. When they got stuck, Vange called her grandfather, and the old man's voice came out of the little speaker high and dry and grudging, saying a name, a parish, a year, and then *why do you want to know that*, and then, when she told him, a long silence and another name.

His grandfather was Onésime Doucet, who had owned a mule named Senator and nothing else.

His great-grandfather was Valéry, a fiddler along Bayou Nezpiqué who was supposed to have once played for twenty-two hours without stopping, which Alcide said was "a matter of opinion."

And then the old man ran out.

"That's all I got, *chère*. That's all anybody told me."

But the tree, once it had those names, began on its own to stretch. Vange touched a box for Valéry, and the screen offered a small suggestion: someone in Lafayette had built a family of their own that included a Valéry Doucet, born about 1840, fiddler, with the same wife's name. Did she want to look? She looked. And in that stranger's tree, a cousin she had never heard of had traced the line back a further four generations, through old records copied by hand from crumbling registers and civil documents, to a man named Pierre.

*Pierre Doucet. Born about 1735, Acadie. Deported 1755. Arrived in Louisiana, 1766, from Maryland.*

And beside his name, in the little notes field, the stranger had written: *Had a brother, Joseph. Separated in the expulsion. Family story says Joseph ran into the woods. Fate unknown.*

Vange put the phone down on the picnic table.

"There," she said. "That's the waltz. Right there."

* * *

Arthur knew, in the general way that a well-read man knows things, about the Grand Dérangement. He knew that in 1755 the British authorities in Nova Scotia had rounded up the French-speaking Acadians who had farmed those shores for a century and a half, burned their villages so they could not come back, and put them onto ships. He knew that thousands had died, of disease and cold and shipwreck, and that the survivors had been scattered along the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Georgia, and to England, and to France, and that over the next thirty years many of them had found their way, by one road or another, to the swamps and prairies of Spanish Louisiana, where nobody wanted the land and so nobody could take it from them again. Acadian became Cadien. Cadien became Cajun.

He knew all that. What he had not expected was the way it landed in him, sitting at a picnic table in the April heat with powdered sugar on his sleeve.

Because Arthur Pendelton had spent forty years moving things. That was what Pendelton Global Logistics did. Containers, ships, rail cars, the long cold arithmetic of getting a great deal of something from one shore to another as cheaply as possible. He had sat in rooms where men spoke of tonnage and capacity and acceptable losses. He had once been very good at it. And he found that he could imagine, far too clearly, the orders that must have been written in 1755: the ships hired by the ton, the heads counted against the hold space, the families divided because a vessel was full and the next one was going somewhere else. Not cruelty, in the papers. Just logistics.

*Separated in the expulsion.* One brother on one ship. One brother not on it.

He sat and looked at the rice fields for some time.

"You okay?" said Vange.

"Yes," said Arthur. "I was thinking about ships."

* * *

That afternoon, before the matinee, he went looking for Lesia.

She was in the office trailer, a narrow converted camper with a map of Canada on one wall, the pins still crowding the north: Thompson, Gillam, The Pas, Churchill.

"Where do we go after the summer stands?" Arthur asked.

"Atlantic Canada, in August. That's booked. Fairs in Nova Scotia, then New Brunswick." She did not look up from her laptop. "Then home, then, if I win the argument, which I won't, north."

"Where in New Brunswick?"

Now she looked up.

"Moncton. Then I'm trying to fill the week of the fifteenth. Why?"

"No reason," said Bippo, who had the nose on and was therefore allowed to say things like that. "I'm fond of the fifteenth. It's a very good number. Fifteen. Half of thirty. You can't argue with it."

Lesia looked at him the way her grandfather looked at the inflatable alligator: as something that had a face, and therefore dignity, and was probably up to something.

"Go do your show," she said.

He went. But on the way across the lot he stopped at the picnic table where Vange had left the family tree open on her phone while she tuned the accordion, and he looked once more at the little note. *Had a brother, Joseph. Ran into the woods.*

And he thought: the woods where? Because people who run into woods come out of them eventually, somewhere. And people who came out of the woods after 1755, he knew, had not mostly gone back to Nova Scotia, where the farms had been burned and given to strangers. A good many of them had gone north, up the coast, to the empty shores at the top of New Brunswick, where the fishing was good and nobody was looking for them.

He went into the tent humming, and Cyril, who missed nothing, glanced over from the bandstand and recognized the tune.

It was the waltz with no name.

Forty-Five Minutes of Stirring

"You don't leave a roux," said Alcide Doucet. "Not to answer the phone. Not to go to the bathroom. If the house is on fire, you take the pot with you."

It was Monday, the circus's dark day, and Arthur was standing at the old man's stove in a borrowed apron that said KISS THE COOK, which Alcide claimed had come with the house, holding a flat-ended wooden spoon worn into the shape of a crescent moon. In front of him, in a black iron pot so heavy it seemed to have its own gravity, a cup of oil and a cup of flour were slowly becoming something else.

"How long?"

"Till it's right."

"How long is that, generally?"

"Forty-five minutes." Alcide settled at the table with his coffee. "For a man who knows what he's doing. For you, I'd say a week."

The kitchen was small and yellow, with a linoleum floor worn through in front of the sink and a window over the stove that looked out across the flooded field. On the windowsill were jars of things Arthur could not identify, a radio, and a photograph in a cardboard frame of a young woman laughing with her head thrown back.

"Odette," said Alcide, following his eye. "Keep stirring."

* * *

He stirred. The flour and oil went from white to pale gold, and Alcide told him about the first roux he had made by himself, at eleven, and burnt black, and hidden in the rice barn, where his mother found it three days later by the smell.

"How did she know it was you?"

"Because it was always me." He sipped his coffee. "Keep stirring. You see that color? That's a light roux. That's for people from New Orleans. Keep going."

He stirred. The roux went the color of peanut butter, and Alcide told him about the dance hall in Mamou where he had met Odette in 1961, and how she had refused to dance with him three Saturdays running, and how on the fourth Saturday he had asked the band to play the waltz with no name and she had walked across the whole floor to ask him why he knew it.

"Why did you?"

"Because my mama taught me. Why'd *she* know it, that's the question. Her mama taught her. That's how I knew we were going to get married. Two people in Louisiana who know the same nothing-waltz. Keep stirring, you're slowing down."

The roux went the color of an old copper penny. The kitchen began to smell, Arthur thought, like toast that had been to college. Through the window he saw a heron lift off from the field, unfolding itself in slow sections like a lawn chair.

And it went darker still, a deep glossy brown, and Alcide got up from the table and came and stood at his elbow and looked into the pot without saying anything, and then reached past him and dumped in a cutting board's worth of chopped onion, celery and green pepper all at once. The roux hissed up in a great fragrant cloud, and the old man said, "*Là.* Now you can go to the bathroom."

* * *

Vira Hrynchuk arrived at noon in the circus's pickup, with Vange beside her and a covered enamel basin in her lap.

She had not been invited. Arthur had mentioned at breakfast that he was going to the Doucet place to learn a roux, and that in his experience old men cooking alone always made far too much. Vira, who was seventy-three and Taras's sister-in-law and had fed the circus for forty years, had put down her ladle and gone to find the truck keys.

"I brought varenyky," she announced in the doorway, holding out the basin. "Potato and cheese. And some with sauerkraut, for anybody with character."

Alcide stood up. He looked at the small square woman with flour on her sleeves, and at the basin, and at his granddaughter behind her, grinning.

"What is varenyky?" he said.

"Dumplings. Ukrainian. My grandmother's."

"Hm." He lifted the cloth, looked, sniffed. "We got a gumbo."

"So you will have a gumbo, and then you will have varenyky," said Vira. "It's not a contest."

It was, of course, a contest. They ate the gumbo first, over rice, dark and smoky with chicken and andouille, a pinch of filé stirred in at the end, and Vira ate two bowls in silence and then said, "This is very good," in the tone of a general acknowledging a worthy enemy. Then they ate the varenyky, fried in Alcide's skillet with butter and onions, and Alcide ate nine of them and said nothing at all, which Vange said later was the highest compliment her grandfather had ever paid to food that was not his own.

* * *

It was over the coffee that the thing happened which Arthur would think about all summer.

Vange was showing Vira the list: the words and the voice saying them. Vira listened to Alcide say *asteur* and *espérer* and *fier*, and she nodded slowly, and then she said, not to anyone in particular, "My mother got the strap for Ukrainian."

Alcide looked up.

"In Manitoba," Vira said. "Nineteen twenty-something. A little school near Dauphin. All the children were Ukrainian. But the law said English, so English. My mother said *dyakuyu* to the teacher, thank you, on her first day, because she was polite, and she got the strap on her hand." Vira held out her own palm, small and floury, and looked at it. "She never spoke Ukrainian to me unless she was angry. So I learned all the angry words. I can say *you are a goat* in Ukrainian beautifully. I cannot say *I love you* without thinking first."

The kitchen was very quiet. Out in the field a frog said something and was ignored.

"Lines," said Alcide finally. "For me it was lines."

"Lines is better than the strap."

"Lines is longer than the strap."

They looked at each other across the yellow table, the little bald-headed Cajun and the square Ukrainian grandmother from Manitoba, and something went across between them that Arthur did not have a word for in any language he spoke.

"*You are a goat*," said Vira, in Ukrainian, conversationally.

"What's that mean?"

She told him. Alcide laughed so suddenly that he had to put his coffee down, a high wheezing laugh like a pump handle, and then he said something in French that made Vange's eyebrows go up, and wouldn't translate it, and Vira said that was all right, she could tell from the tone it was just as good.

Vange typed both into the list. Arthur saw her do it. Under the French one, in the notes, she wrote: *Pépère won't say what this means. Find out when he's not looking.*

* * *

The trouble came at four o'clock, in the form of Shelley Doucet in her scrubs, home early and not happy.

She came in the kitchen door with her keys still in her hand and found her daughter, her father-in-law, a Ukrainian cook and a very tall man in a KISS THE COOK apron washing dishes, and she stood looking at all of them as if they were a chart she had not ordered.

"Cyril Mapp called me," she said. "The trombone man."

Vange went red.

"He says you're good. He says you're the best accordion he's heard in twenty years. He says he wants you for the summer." Shelley set the keys on the counter. "The whole summer. On the road. In a trailer. With a circus. Going to — where, Vange?"

"Arkansas," said Vange, very small. "And Kentucky. And Pennsylvania, and some places in New England, and then Canada. Nova Scotia. New Brunswick." She lifted her chin. "It's paid. It's real money. Lesia says I can bunk with her. And I'm seventeen in June, I'd be back before school, and —"

"And no." Shelley was not loud. She was an emergency-room nurse; she did not have to be loud. "You're sixteen. You've never been further than Houston. And I'm not going to be on the other end of a phone every night wondering which ditch in Kentucky my child is in."

"Mama —"

"I said no, baby."

Vange turned to her grandfather. Everyone turned to her grandfather. He was sitting at the head of the yellow table with his coffee in both hands, and his small sharp face showed nothing.

"Pépère. Tell her."

"Tell her what?"

"That I can go."

Alcide looked into his coffee for some time.

"Your mama's your mama," he said at last. "I'm just your pépère. A pépère don't get a vote. He gets a chair on the gallery." He set down the cup. "But I'll say one thing, and then I'll go sit in it. New Brunswick, that's up there. *En haut.* That's where they went." He got up, slowly, one hand on the table. "Somebody in this family ought to go look. And it's not going to be me. I'm too old, and I don't like airplanes, and anyway they didn't want us the first time."

He went out onto the gallery. The screen door banged behind him.

Shelley looked at the door. Then she looked at her daughter, and then, for some reason, at the tall man at the sink.

"Don't look at me," said Arthur. "I'm only the dishwasher."

* * *

Before he and Vira left, while Shelley was out on the gallery with her father-in-law, the two of them speaking low, Arthur had stepped out to the gravel drive where her car was parked. It was the car with one blue door and one gray. He had a yellow flyer in his pocket, folded small. He took it out, and opened it into a boat, and on the inside of the hull, in his small neat hand, he wrote a single word that he had heard Alcide say that afternoon to the roux, encouraging it, the way you speak to a horse.

He set the boat on her windshield, under the wiper, where the wind wouldn't take it.

Shelley found it at nine that night, going out for her shift. Vange heard about it the next morning, at the circus, and looked it up on her own list, and found her grandfather's voice already there, saying it to her once, clearly.

*Doucement. Gently. Softly. Slowly. "Like the name, almost. Doucet. Don't rush it."*

What Was in the Coffee Can

The crawfish boat had one wheel, and it was at the back, and it was the most improbable vehicle Arthur had ever ridden in.

It was a flat aluminum skiff, square at both ends, with a single steel wheel at the stern, cleated like a paddle steamer's, which bit into the mud and shoved the whole contraption through water barely a foot deep. Dud Comeaux stood at the controls in his rubber boots and his COMEAUX RICE & CRAWFISH cap, steering with his knee. Alcide sat on an upturned bucket in the bow in his straw hat. And Arthur, who had been invited at dawn by a man who did not speak to clowns, sat on a second bucket in the middle with his knees around his ears, holding a plastic sack and trying to look like he had done this before.

The traps came up one after another, and Alcide lifted each without looking, upended it into the sorting tray, and set it back in one movement, as smooth as a man turning the page of a book he knew by heart. The crawfish came pouring out, clicking and scrabbling, a red-brown mass of claws and indignation.

"Three hundred traps on this pond," Dud said. "Four ponds. My daddy started with twenty, in a ditch."

"With the man from Manitoba watching?"

"Taras?" Dud laughed. "No. My daddy met him in Texas and came home talking about this Canadian with the one-wheel bicycle like he'd met the president. Every spring for thirty years he'd say, Taras is coming. We'd say, Daddy, he's not coming. He'd say, he shook my hand." Dud looked out over the field. "I wrote Taras the letter after Daddy passed. I didn't think he'd answer. I thought, a man that old, a handshake that old. And three weeks later, Lynette's putting a circus on the calendar with an exclamation point."

Alcide, in the bow, lifted a trap and shook it out and said, without turning around, "Handshake don't thaw."

"That's what Taras says."

"I know. I heard him. It's a good line. I'm going to steal it."

* * *

They came back to the house at ten with four sacks of crawfish in the truck bed, and Vange was on the gallery, which she should not have been, because it was a school day. She was sitting on the swing with a dented red coffee can in her lap, and her face was strange.

"You're supposed to be in school," said Alcide.

"I had a free period."

"For three hours?"

"I was looking for pictures. For the tree." She did not get up. "Mama said there were pictures of your mama in the armoire. In the back room. In the bottom drawer, under the quilts." She held up the can. "This was in there, too."

Alcide stopped on the bottom step.

Arthur had seen a great many men stop on a great many steps, in the course of a long life of watching other people receive news. He had seen bankers stop like that, and generals, and once a prime minister. He had never seen anybody stop so completely as that small old man in a straw hat, with crawfish mud drying on his boots.

"I forgot about that," said Alcide.

"Pépère. Did you know she kept them?"

"I forgot," he said again.

* * *

They spread them on the kitchen table, on the yellow oilcloth, under the photograph of Odette laughing.

There were perhaps sixty sheets of cheap ruled school paper, gone soft and brown at the edges, some folded so long that the folds had become small cliffs. Every one was covered from top to bottom, both sides, in pencil, in the same sentence.

*I will not speak French on the school grounds.*

*I will not speak French on the school grounds.*

*I will not speak French on the school grounds.*

On the oldest pages, the letters were large and frightened and leaned in every direction like a fence after a storm. The pencil had pushed so hard in places that it had gone through. On later pages, the hand grew steadier, and smaller, and then, quite suddenly, it was doubled: two lines written at once, a quarter-inch apart, every letter a perfect twin of the one beside it.

"Two pencils," said Arthur.

"Third grade," said Alcide. He was standing over the table with his hat in his hands. He touched one page with a fingertip. "See, there, I didn't have the tape tight. The top one wobbles. Look at that *g*. Shameful." He moved along. "And there, that's three pencils. Fifth grade. That's when I'm doing it for the other boys too." He moved again. "That one's not mine. That's Lynette's daddy's line. I did it in his hand. See how he makes the *F* like a chair? I always did his *F* like a chair. Two pecans a page."

Vange laughed, a little damp. Alcide did not.

There was something else in the can. At the bottom, under the pages, wrapped in a square of white cotton that had once been part of a flour sack, was a single folded sheet of better paper, and on it, in faded ink, in a round, sure, old-fashioned hand, three lines in French.

Alcide unfolded it. He read it without his glasses, holding it at arm's length, his lips moving. Then he gave it to his granddaughter.

"Read it," he said.

"I can't, Pépère. It's French."

"Read it with your mouth. You're good with sounds. Read me the sounds."

She read it aloud. Slowly, and stumbling once, but with the vowels right and the little catches in the right places, because she had been singing in this language since she was three. And as she read, Arthur, standing by the stove, understood every word. It was simple French, a farm woman's French, and it said:

*Pour Alcide, quand il sera grand. Pour qu'on se rappelle ce que ça a coûté. Et pour qu'on recommence.*

When she finished, she looked up at her grandfather.

"What's it mean?"

Alcide started to speak, stopped, and looked at the window. The heron was back, standing on one leg out in the field, perfectly still, waiting for the world to make a mistake.

"Clown," said Alcide.

"Yes," said Arthur.

"You tell her. My English is all used up."

So Arthur told her, gently, with no bank in it at all. *For Alcide, when he is grown. So that we remember what it cost. And so that we start again.*

Vange sat with the paper in her hands. After a while she said, "She wanted you to start again."

"I know what she wanted," said the old man, and sat down at the table, heavily, and put his hat on it. "I didn't. I didn't start again. I stopped. I stopped with your daddy." He looked at the pages, all those hundreds of careful lines, and his face did something complicated and brief. "She kept every page. She must have dug them out of the trash. I threw them in the trash every night at school so she wouldn't see. She must've gone to the teacher, or the janitor, or —" He stopped. "Seventy-eight years. She knew I'd forget, so she kept them for me."

* * *

Nobody said anything for a while. Arthur made coffee, because it was something to do with his hands, and because there is a certain kind of silence in a kitchen that coffee was invented for.

When he set the cups down, Alcide had picked up the fiddle case from where it leaned by the door. He did not take the fiddle out. He sat holding the closed case across his knees, and he spoke to Vange without looking at her.

"Get your phone."

She got it.

"The waltz. The one from my mama. Change the notes."

She found it in the list and opened the notes under the recording, where she had written, a week ago, *She said it came from up there. Nobody knows who taught her. FIND OUT.*

"Put this," said Alcide. "Put: She kept the lines. Seventy-eight years. Put: She said start again. Put: Alcide didn't. Put: Vange is going to." He was quiet. "Put: Vange is going up there this summer with the circus to find out who taught Mama the waltz, and her mama is going to say yes, because her pépère is going to go talk to her mama tonight, on the gallery, for as long as it takes, and her pépère can talk for twenty-two hours without stopping, just like Valéry."

Vange's thumbs had stopped moving. She was crying, a little, without any fuss, the way a roof drips after rain.

"Pépère, I can't put all that."

"Then put the short one."

"What's the short one?"

He thought about it. Outside, the heron struck at the water, fast as a dropped knife, and came up with nothing, and went back to standing on one leg as if it had not done anything at all.

"*Espère*," said Alcide. "Put that. Wait. And then go."

* * *

That night Arthur lay awake in the Sardine Can until past one, listening to the frogs, and to the long freight trains that crossed the prairie two miles south, blowing for every crossing, mournful as cattle.

He was thinking about a woman on a rice farm in 1947 who could not stop her son's teacher, or the law, or the world from wanting English, and who had done the only thing left to her: dug her little boy's shame out of a schoolhouse trash bin, smoothed it out, and kept it against the day he might need to be reminded what it had cost.

Arthur had kept things too. His grandmother's notebooks. Her button tin. He understood very well the stubbornness of women who keep things.

He got up, in the dark, and took a yellow flyer from the stack and began to fold.

A Fiddler in the Center Ring

Shelley Doucet said yes at six-fifteen on Wednesday morning, in the hospital parking lot in Opelousas, at the end of a night shift, to her father-in-law, who had driven there in his 1994 pickup at five a.m. because, he said, he had run out of gallery.

He had talked to her until one o'clock in the morning on Tuesday night, about Mélia and the coffee can, about Odette, about Russell when he was small, and about a cousin who had wrestled an alligator for a bet and lost the bet but won the alligator, which Shelley was fairly sure he had made up on the spot. At one o'clock she had gone to bed. At five, he had gotten into the truck.

"He was sitting on the hood when I came out," she told Arthur that afternoon. She had come to the lot to look at Lesia's trailer, and at Lesia, and at the bunk her daughter would sleep in, the way a nurse inspects a ward. "In his good shirt. With two coffees. He handed me one and said, *Well?* And I said, *Well, what?* And he said, *I'm eighty-four, Shelley. I don't have time for another night like that. Neither do you.*" She shook her head. "So I said yes. To stop him. That's the only reason."

"Of course," said Arthur.

"With conditions." She counted them on her fingers. "She calls every night. She sleeps in Lesia's trailer. She doesn't get a tattoo." She looked at him. "And somebody on this circus keeps an eye on her. Somebody old enough to have sense."

"Taras has a great deal of sense."

"Taras rides a seven-foot bicycle with a teacup on his head."

"That," said Arthur, "is how you can tell."

* * *

The last show in Prairie Gauche was Sunday night, the second weekend of the fair, and the town came as if it had been told the tent might not stand up again.

Lynette Broussard had put it on the calendar with two exclamation points, and Dud had not objected. By seven people were sitting on coolers in the aisles and standing three deep at the back. The Comeaux family filled a whole row. Mrs. Philomène Landry sat in the front, in a different lavender tracksuit, which Arthur assumed was her evening wear. Half the dancers from Bourque's were there, and the man who had been asleep at the end of the bar, now awake and wearing a tie.

And Alcide Doucet sat in a folding chair in the center ring.

It had been Taras's idea, and he had made it in the way he made all his ideas, which was to announce it as if it had already been agreed upon.

"Your grandfather," he told Vange on Saturday, "plays in the ring on Sunday."

"He won't," said Vange. "He doesn't play for audiences. He says he only plays to keep the fiddle company."

"Then the fiddle will be very good company for four hundred people." Taras held up his hand, the right one. "You tell him: Taras Hrynchuk drove two thousand miles because of a handshake with a crawfish man. You tell him: a man who drives two thousand miles for a handshake is owed one tune."

She told him. Alcide said nothing for an entire supper. Then, at the end of it, he said, "What tune?"

* * *

The show opened as it always opened, with the parade: Taras on the giraffe unicycle with the teacup on his head, Lesia on stilts, the three terriers running in the wrong direction, Cyril and Halyna, and Vange, in the circus band's red jacket, which was too big for her, with the accordion strapped to her chest. Behind them all came Bippo in his short tartan jacket and his violet shoes, trying at every step to fasten the one red glass button, and failing, and trying again.

The audience knew him by now. When he stopped at the ring curb to look for the buttonhole, someone in the bleachers shouted "*Il est pas là!*" — it's not there — and the whole tent laughed, and Bippo turned to the voice with such a look of betrayal that they laughed again.

He did the alligator, which had become, over two weekends, the most famous alligator in three parishes; children had begun to bring it gifts. He did the hoop routine in which Bohdan's three terriers sat down and watched him jump through it himself, again and again, with growing despair.

And then the lights went down, and Taras came into the ring, without his teacup, in a plain black jacket, and stood beside the empty folding chair, and spoke.

He spoke about the fair in Texas in 1979, the young man selling crawfish from a truck, and the handshake. He held up his right hand to show them, and the whole tent went very quiet, because half of them had known old Comeaux, and the other half had been told about him. Dud, in the front row, took off his cap.

"So," said Taras. "A handshake does not thaw. I learned this from a Cajun. Now I give you one."

And Alcide Doucet walked into the ring.

He walked slowly, in his pressed white shirt and his straw hat, carrying the fiddle and the bow. He did not look at the audience. He sat down in the folding chair. He plucked each string once, listened, nodded. Then he looked over at the bandstand, at his granddaughter in her too-big red jacket, and lifted his chin a fraction of an inch.

She came down out of the bandstand and walked across the sawdust with the accordion and sat on the ring curb beside his chair. And they played the waltz with no name.

* * *

Arthur watched from the ring door, in the dark, with his nose in his hand.

He had sat in opera houses in Vienna and Milan in the days when he took the best box, and been bored in nearly all of them, because he had been thinking about tonnage. He had never seen anything like an old man in a straw hat playing his mother's waltz in a circus ring in a rice field in Louisiana, holding the fiddle low on his chest, his foot tapping in the sawdust, with a sixteen-year-old girl beside him squeezing the same tune out of a patched accordion.

Vange sang the chorus. And for the first time, Arthur heard her sing it as if she knew what it was about. Not a hen. A wife. Someone gone, who would not be coming home, and a man who kept calling anyway, every night, because that was the shape of love when it was left alone in a field.

Mrs. Landry stood up from her seat in the front row. Nobody asked her to. She simply stood, ninety years old in a lavender tracksuit, and stepped out into the aisle, and began to waltz by herself, slowly, her arms held up around a partner who was not there. And then Lucien, the accordion player from Bourque's, got up from three rows back and went down and took her hands, and they waltzed together in the aisle. And then the Comeaux row, and then the man in the tie, and then, one couple at a time, the aisles of that tent filled with people from Prairie Gauche waltzing in the dark, and Arthur Pendelton, who had once crossed oceans in an aircraft of his own, stood in the ring door of a Canadian circus and had to step outside for a minute into the warm night, where the frogs were, so that nobody would see him.

* * *

When he came back, the waltz was over and the whole tent was on its feet, and Alcide Doucet was sitting in his folding chair looking at four hundred people as if they had all come to his house without calling first.

He stood. He lifted the bow, once, the smallest salute. And then he walked out of the ring by the side door, past the clown in the dark, and as he passed he said, without turning his head, "Don't you say nothing."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good," said Alcide, and went on out to his truck, and sat in it with the door open for a while before he drove home.

* * *

It was after midnight, during teardown, with the crew rolling up the sidewalls by the light of the work lamps and the generators grumbling, that Vange came running across the lot with her phone held out in front of her like a lantern.

"Bippo. Bippo, look."

He was coiling a rope by the props truck. He took the phone.

It was the family tree. She had been working on it every night in Lesia's trailer, and tonight, after the show, there had been a new small notice on Pierre's brother, Joseph, the one who had run into the woods.

Someone else, far away, had a Joseph Doucet in their family. Born about 1737, in Acadie. Hid in the woods during the expulsion. Survived a winter in a refugee camp on the Miramichi River, where many died. Settled by 1770 on the north shore of what would become New Brunswick, at a cove on the Acadian Peninsula called Anse-aux-Huards. Married there. Nine children. Fished. Built boats.

And the note, in that stranger's tree, beside Joseph's name, in French:

*Avait un frère, Pierre. Perdu au Grand Dérangement. On dit qu'il est parti vers le sud.*

Had a brother, Pierre. Lost in the Great Upheaval. They say he went south.

The tree belonged to someone named Yvonne Doucet, of Anse-aux-Huards, New Brunswick.

"Two hundred and seventy years," said Vange. She was shaking a little. "They've been looking too. Bippo. They wrote it down. *They say he went south.*"

"What will you do?"

"Write to her. Tonight. Right now." She took the phone back. Then she stopped. "In what? I can't write French. I can only sing it."

"Then write in English," said Arthur, "and sign it in French. And put the recording of the waltz at the bottom. If she's who I think she is, she'll know what to do with the rest."

Vange sat down on the tailgate of the props truck under the work lights, with the crew tramping past and the sidewalls coming down around her, and wrote. It took her half an hour. Arthur did not read it. He went on coiling rope.

When she had sent it, she walked across the lot to Lesia's office trailer and knocked, and when Lesia opened the door, bleary, in a sweatshirt, Vange said, "Where do we go the week of the fifteenth of August?"

Lesia looked at her. Then over her shoulder at the tall clown coiling rope in the work lights, who was very carefully not looking back.

"Funny you should ask," said Lesia.

* * *

The circus pulled out of Prairie Gauche at six on Monday morning, nine vehicles in a line, north on the state highway, through the flooded rice fields with the sun coming up red over them and the egrets lifting off one after another as the trucks passed, like applause.

Alcide was not there to see them go. He had said goodbye on Sunday night, he said, and a man doesn't say goodbye twice, it wears it out.

But when Vange opened her accordion box at the first rehearsal stop, in a fairground in Arkansas two days later, she found in it, wedged between the bellows and the lid, a small boat folded from a yellow circus flyer, and inside the hull, in a tiny neat hand that she did not recognize and which her grandfather's handwriting most certainly was not, one word.

*Recommence.*

Two Towns on One Page

Yvonne Doucet's answer came on the ninth of May, in a fairground in western Kentucky, during a thunderstorm, and it was four pages long and entirely in French.

Vange read it in Lesia's trailer with the rain drumming on the roof. She could pick out perhaps one word in five. *Famille.* *Frère.* *Valse.* Her own name, twice. A great many exclamation marks, which she took to be a good sign. And at the end, in the same strong slanted hand, in English, a single line: *I am 81, my English is like a cat on a piano, so I write in French and you will find someone. Your Joseph is my Joseph. Come.*

She did not ask the clown. She noticed afterward that she hadn't, and wondered why, and decided it was because the letter was not for a clown, or for anybody who talked like a bank. It was for her grandfather.

She called him at nine o'clock, as she called him every night. Shelley had asked for the calls and Shelley got them, but somewhere around Arkansas they had stopped being for Shelley. Alcide would answer on the gallery on the first ring, which meant he had been sitting with the phone in his lap, and would say, "*Eh bien.* Where are you?" and Vange would tell him, and he would say, "Never heard of it," about every town, including Nashville.

That night she said, "Pépère, I'm going to read you something. Don't interrupt."

"When did I ever interrupt."

She read him Yvonne's letter, all four pages, sounding out every word with the vowels right and the catches in the right places. It took twenty minutes. He did not interrupt once. When she came to the end there was a silence on the line so long that she thought the call had dropped, and she could hear, through the phone, the frogs on the gallery in Prairie Gauche, eleven hundred miles south.

"Pépère?"

"I'm here."

"Did you understand it?"

"Every word, *chère*." His voice was odd. "She talks like my mama. She talks exactly like my mama. Where'd she get my mama's words?"

"What does it say?"

He told her. It took him another twenty minutes, because he kept stopping. Yvonne Doucet was eighty-one, a widow, a carver of wooden birds. Her late husband, Léonce, had been the one who traced the family back to Joseph, during a long winter in the nineteen-nineties, writing letters to archives with a fountain pen. Léonce had been a fisherman and a fiddler. He had always said there were Doucets in Louisiana, *nos cousins du sud*, our cousins of the south, and that one day one of them would come knocking. Yvonne had put his tree online after he died, in case.

And she had listened to the recording at the bottom of Vange's letter. The waltz with no name.

"She says," said Alcide, and stopped again. "She says, *Léonce played that.* She says, he played it at every kitchen party for fifty years. Only fast. A reel. She says they call it *le reel du Barachois*." His voice went up, high and dry and indignant, and Vange laughed out loud with relief to hear it. "A reel! They play my mama's waltz as a *reel*! What kind of people play a waltz fast?"

"Cold people," said Vange. "It's cold up there. They have to keep moving."

There was a long, astonished pause from Louisiana.

"Huh," said her grandfather. "That's a good point."

* * *

The summer went by the way circus summers go, in a long bright smear of fairgrounds.

Arkansas, where the tent poles were too hot to touch at noon. Kentucky, where Bippo was chased across a county fair by a goat that had taken against his trousers. And then, in the second week of June, a three-day stand at a township picnic grove outside Pittsburgh, where on the dark day Arthur took a bus into the city by himself, in his gray cardigan, and walked up a steep street in a neighborhood above the Monongahela River, to a narrow brick row house with a green door that was now painted blue.

He did not knock. A child's bicycle leaned against the steps. He stood across the street and looked at the front window, where, sixty-five years before, his grandmother Nell had sat at her machine in the afternoon light letting out steelworkers' trousers, while a small boy played with spools under the table.

Then he walked back down the hill and had a sandwich with french fries inside it, which was the local custom and which Nell would have considered an outrage, and caught the bus back to the circus. He wrote one line about it in his page the next morning. *Stood outside her window. Somebody else's bicycle. Good.*

Vange turned seventeen in New Hampshire. The circus gave her a cake with an accordion drawn on it in frosting, very badly, by Taras. Alcide called at seven in the morning and played her the birthday tune all the old people at Bourque's played for birthdays, and then hung up without saying anything, because he had said it.

And all summer, without anybody quite noticing when it began, a small thing kept happening on Lynette Broussard's calendar.

* * *

It started because of Arthur, though nobody knew that.

In Kentucky he had happened to say to Vange, over Vira's breakfast, mostly to his eggs, that the easiest way for two families to stay in touch was for each of them to know when the other was having a party.

Vange had looked at him. Then she had called Lynette.

Lynette had called the Anse-aux-Huards fair committee, which turned out to be a Madame Paulette Haché, and the two of them had spoken for an hour and fifty minutes, Paulette in an English that was, by her own account, better than a cat on a piano but not by much. They had found out that they were both sixty-one, both fair secretaries, both married to men who thought exclamation points were too much, and both in possession of a mother-in-law who called every morning at seven to report on the weather.

By the end of June, the two calendars were joined.

It had been simple, in the end. Each town's community page could show the other's events, side by side, in a different color, and anyone in either town could look. Lynette did it on a Tuesday, with her reading glasses on top of her head.

And so the people of Prairie Gauche began to see, in pale blue, strange events from a place most of them had never heard of. *Souper au homard, salle communautaire, samedi.* Lobster supper, community hall, Saturday. *Veillée de cuisine chez les Haché.* Kitchen party at the Hachés'. *Régates des doris, au quai, dimanche.* Lynette had to look that one up and found it meant dory races at the wharf; she decided it was a boat rodeo and wrote that underneath, for clarity.

And the people of Anse-aux-Huards began to see, in pale yellow, *Boucherie at the Guidry place, bring your own knife,* and *Fais do-do, Bourque's, Saturday 9 AM,* and *Mrs. Guidry's hens are laying!!!*

"What is a boucherie?" Paulette asked Lynette, on one of their calls.

"A pig," said Lynette. "And the whole family. And all day."

"Ah," said Paulette. "We have that. We call it November."

* * *

Arthur's own part of it was smaller, and later, and at night.

He clipped the microphone behind his ear on a hot July night in a fairground in Vermont, with the windows of the Sardine Can open to the crickets.

"Reginald."

"Arthur. You sound sunburnt."

"I am sunburnt. I have been sunburnt since Arkansas. Reginald, I need a small trust. Canadian. Based in the Maritimes. Halifax, perhaps."

"You always need a small trust."

"This one has to be dull. A name that nobody would ever want to look up. Something about a hill."

"The Kettle Hill Trust," said Sterling, after a moment. "There is a Kettle Hill outside a village in Nova Scotia, I am told, where nothing of any interest has ever happened."

"Perfect. The Kettle Hill Trust will make small grants to community fairs in Acadian towns for musical exchange. Visiting musicians from other Acadian communities. Travel, lodging, a fee. Open applications. Very easy forms. Very small print."

"How many communities?"

"As many as apply. But I happen to know of one in particular that will apply first, because it is about to receive a very helpful letter about the program, along with every other fair committee on that coast, so that nobody can say why it was chosen." Arthur looked out of the leaking east window at the dark Vermont hills. "It's important, Reginald. He must be invited. Not rescued. Not paid for by somebody's pity. Invited. By them. By his own people. They have to be the ones who ask."

Sterling was quiet a moment.

"My archivist," he said, "the one who used to be a junior associate, will enjoy this enormously. She has always wanted to administer something with a hill in it."

"Tell her to make the application form one page."

"She will make it half a page," said Sterling. "She has opinions about forms."

* * *

On the first of August, Paulette Haché called Lynette Broussard at seven in the morning, before either of their mothers-in-law had a chance to, and said, in English that was considerably worse than a cat on a piano because she was so excited, that the Anse-aux-Huards fair had just received a grant from a foundation in Halifax that nobody had ever heard of, to bring a guest musician from another Acadian community to the fair for the fifteenth of August. And she wanted, if Lynette thought it was all right, and if he would come, and if he would forgive them for 1755, which was not their fault but still, to invite Monsieur Alcide Doucet.

Lynette said she'd ask.

Then she hung up, and went to her calendar, and on the fifteenth of August, in pale blue, under *Tintamarre, Caraquet, 18h*, she added, in yellow, with three exclamation points, which was the most she had ever used:

*Mr. Alcide Doucet goes home!!!*

Dud said nothing about it at all. He read it twice, and then he went out to the truck to call Alcide himself.

The Camp Called Hope

The first Acadian flag Arthur saw was painted on a mailbox.

It was just north of Moncton, on the coast road: a plain metal mailbox done in three broad stripes, blue, white and red, with a small gold star in the blue. Ten minutes later there was another, on a lobster buoy hanging from a fence. Then a whole house, its clapboards painted in the three colors from top to bottom and the gold star on the chimney, like a flag that had decided to stop flying and settle down.

"It's like this the whole way," said Lesia, who was driving the props truck. "They put the flag on everything up here. Telephone poles. Rocks. Lawn chairs."

"Why?"

"Because somebody once tried to make them disappear," said Vange from the back seat, without looking up from her phone. "So now they make sure you can see them from space."

* * *

The road went north up the long eastern shore of New Brunswick, through spruce and hayfields and salt marsh, with the sea showing every few miles as a flat silver line behind the trees. Every village had a French name and a wharf, and every yard seemed to have a stack of lobster traps waiting out the off-season.

At the Miramichi River, broad and dark and slow, Vange asked Lesia to stop.

There was a small wooded island in the river, with a park sign on the shore facing it. Vange got out and stood at the sign. The rest of the convoy pulled onto the shoulder behind them one by one, because nobody on the Hrynchuk circus had ever been able to drive past someone else stopping.

The sign said that in the winter of 1756 to 1757, after the expulsion, hundreds of Acadian refugees who had escaped the soldiers had gathered here, on the river, at a camp they called *l'Espérance*. Hope. Some had walked for months through the woods to reach it. They had little food and no proper shelter, and that winter and the winters after, many hundreds of them died, of hunger and cold and sickness. The ones who survived scattered along the shore to the north.

Vange read it twice. Then she took out her phone and opened the list of words, and found her grandfather's voice, and touched it.

*Espérer. To wait. Not to hope. "Up there they hope. Down here we wait. Same thing, if you think about it."*

"He didn't know," she said. "When he said that. He didn't know about this place."

"No," said Arthur.

"Joseph was here. In the tree. *Survived a winter in a refugee camp on the Miramichi River, where many died.* This is where." She looked out at the low wooded island in the brown river, with the late afternoon light lying across it. "He waited. That's what he did. He waited here, in the snow, and he hoped, and his brother was on a ship going the other way."

Behind them, the whole circus had come and stood on the shoulder of the road, Taras with his cap in his hands, and Bohdan's three terriers, who for once in their lives sat down without being asked.

After a while Cyril took out his trombone and played the waltz with no name, once, slowly, on the riverbank. Nobody had asked him to do that either.

* * *

The Acadian Peninsula is the northeast corner of New Brunswick, a broad, low, wind-scoured thumb of land pushing out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with the Baie des Chaleurs on its north side and, across the bay, on a clear day, the blue hills of the Gaspé. It is a country of spruce and peat bogs and long straight roads with the sea at the end of them.

Anse-aux-Huards was a half-moon of a cove a few miles beyond Caraquet, with perhaps four hundred houses strung along a single road above the shore. A long wharf ran out into the bay, crowded with boats, with a blue tin fish plant at the root of it. There was a small white community hall, a general store with a gas pump, a building with a wide door marked ATELIER DOUCET — BATEAUX, and on the headland a little red-and-white lighthouse that no longer had a light in it and had been turned into an ice cream stand.

When the circus pulled into the field behind the community hall, at six in the evening on the eighth of August, a woman of sixty-one was standing in the middle of it in rubber boots and a fleece jacket, holding a clipboard, under a homemade banner strung between two fence posts: BIENVENUE CIRQUE HRYNCHUK! It had two exclamation points.

"Lynette made me," said Paulette Haché, before anybody could ask.

* * *

Yvonne Doucet was waiting on her front step, two houses up from the boat shop, and she did not wave, and she did not stand up, because, as she explained later, at eighty-one a woman stands up for weddings and funerals and the Queen, and the Queen was dead.

She was a tall bony woman with short white hair and enormous hands, in a man's flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled, and she was smoking a pipe. Her house was a clear hard blue, with red shutters and the gold star over the door. On every windowsill, on the porch rail, and, Vange would discover, on every flat surface inside the house, stood small wooden birds: sandpipers, terns, plovers, gulls, a heron on one leg, a pair of loons with their heads turned toward each other, each one carved so precisely and painted so lightly that they seemed to have just landed and to be considering whether to stay.

Vange came up the path with her accordion box on her hip, and stopped at the bottom of the steps.

The old woman took the pipe out of her mouth and looked at her for some time. Then she said something in French, low and rough, and Vange understood it, all of it, the first full sentence of French she had ever understood from a stranger. It was a simple sentence, and Arthur, standing back by the gate in his gray cardigan, understood it too.

*Tu as les yeux de Léonce.*

You have Léonce's eyes.

"I don't know who that is," said Vange. Her voice cracked down the middle. "But thank you."

"Come in," said Yvonne Doucet, in her cat-on-a-piano English, and stood up after all, which she would later deny.

* * *

The kitchen was a long low room with a wood stove at one end and a table at the other that could seat fourteen if they were friendly, and a big window over the sink that looked across the cove to the dark line of the Gaspé. Birds stood on the windowsill in a row, watching the real ones outside.

On the table was a laptop, open, and beside it, in a stack held together with a rubber band, a heap of letters in blue fountain pen.

"Léonce," said Yvonne, touching the stack. "Twenty years of letters. To archives. To town halls, to old registry offices, to libraries in France, to anybody who had a piece of paper with a Doucet on it. Every winter. He would sit here when the boats were up, with his pen, and write, and write." She opened the laptop. "When he died I put it all in here. So it would not be only in the drawer."

And there it was, on the screen: Yvonne's tree, spreading out over the Acadian Peninsula like a net drying on a wharf, hundreds of Doucets, Hachés, Chiassons, Landrys, Robichauds, fishermen and boatbuilders and their wives, generation after generation, all the way back to one man.

*Joseph Doucet. Born about 1737, Acadie.*

Vange took out her phone and opened her own tree, the thin one, the one that went up from Alcide through Désiré and Onésime and Valéry to Pierre. She laid it beside the laptop. And Yvonne, with one enormous finger, touched a small button on her screen, the one that offered to connect the two families, and the two halves drew together on the screen like the halves of a zipper, Pierre and Joseph side by side at the top, brothers, with two and a half centuries of children spreading out beneath them, one half going south into the bayous, one half staying north on the bay.

Yvonne sat looking at it until the pipe went cold in her hand.

"Léonce," she said, to the screen, quite conversationally, in French. "*Ils sont venus.* They came."

Then she looked up at the girl, and at the tall quiet man by the door in the gray cardigan, whom nobody had introduced, and who had taken off his shoes at the step without being asked, which she noticed.

"And you?" she said to him. "Which one are you?"

"Neither," said Arthur. "I'm with the circus."

"Ah," said Yvonne Doucet, and nodded, as though that explained a great deal, and went to put the kettle on the wood stove.

The Clown Inside the Dory

The inside of an upturned wooden boat smells of cedar, linseed oil and the patience of the man who built it, and for twenty minutes on a Monday afternoon it was the only thing Arthur Pendelton could smell, because he was stuck in one.

It had not been his intention. He had come down to the Atelier Doucet with Vange after lunch because the girl wanted to meet her cousin. He had been in shipyards, of course, in his good coat, in Busan and Rotterdam, watching cranes lower steel plates the size of tennis courts. But that was building ships the way you build an argument, from far away, with other people's hands.

The shop was a long, high barn with its big doors open to the cove, so that the light came in off the water and moved on the ceiling in trembling bands. Wood shavings lay ankle-deep on the floor. Clamps hung from the walls in hundreds. A long plywood steam box stood against one side, breathing a little cloud into the air. And in the middle of the floor, on sawhorses, were three boats: the bare ribs of a lobster boat, rising from the keel like the bones of a whale; a rowing dory, nearly finished, glossy with new paint; and a second dory upside down, half planked, waiting.

Mathieu Doucet was thirty-four, broad and quiet, with sawdust in his beard and a pencil behind each ear. He was Yvonne's grandson. He shook hands with Arthur and with Vange, and then he looked at Vange for a while the way his grandmother had, and said, in careful English, "You have the Doucet chin. We all have it. It is very stubborn."

"Pépère says it's for holding the fiddle."

"Yes," said Mathieu, very seriously. "That too."

* * *

He showed them how the planks were bent: an hour in the steam box until the cedar was as supple as leather, then out at a run and around the frames before it cooled, clamped as it went, groaning and settling into its new shape as if it had always meant to be curved.

"My great-great-grandfather built boats here," said Mathieu. "And his father. And Joseph, probably, the first one, in the cove, when he came out of the woods. You have to have a boat here. There is no other job." He ran his hand along the hull of the finished dory. "Now everyone buys fiberglass. From a factory. I would buy fiberglass too, if I was a fisherman with a mortgage." He shrugged. "So I build these for summer people, and I fix the old wooden ones that are left, and I teach nobody, because nobody wants to learn a thing that is dying."

"Rémi wants to learn," said a voice from the back of the shop.

A boy of sixteen came out from behind the lobster boat's ribs, with a fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other and, sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans, two soup spoons. He was thin and dark-haired, with the Doucet chin and his father's beard trying to happen.

"Rémi wants to learn to play the fiddle," said Mathieu. "That is a different dying thing."

* * *

It was while the three Doucets were discussing this, in a mix of French and English that changed direction every sentence like a school of fish, that Bippo, who had been walking around the shop looking at everything with his hands behind his back, crouched down to look underneath the upturned dory.

He had a professional interest. A clown spends a great deal of time considering where he might hide, and the dory was exactly the right size to crawl under and stand up inside, so that his head and shoulders were in the dim cedar-smelling space under the hull and his legs stuck out the bottom. It was very peaceful in there. He stood up a little further, to look at how the ribs were fixed to the keel.

And his shoulders wedged between two frames, quite firmly, and would not come out.

"Arthur?" said Vange, after a while.

"I'm in the boat," said Arthur's voice, from the boat.

There was a pause in the shop.

"Why," said Mathieu, slowly, "are you in the boat?"

"I was admiring the joinery."

It took them twenty minutes. They could not unclamp the dory without the half-planked hull springing, and they could not pull him out because, as Rémi pointed out with tremendous enthusiasm, he was a very large man and the boat was a very small boat. In the end Mathieu brought a bucket of warm water and a bar of soap, and soaped the frames, and Rémi and Vange each took one of Arthur's legs, and on the count of three, *un, deux, trois*, he came out backward onto the shavings in a great slithering rush, with a long curl of cedar stuck in his hair like a ribbon.

He lay on his back on the floor of the shop. Above him, the light from the cove moved on the ceiling.

"I would like it entered in the record," he said, "that the boat started it."

Rémi laughed so hard he had to sit down on a sawhorse, and when he could breathe again, he took the two soup spoons out of his back pocket, back to back, and played on his knee a small, fast, rattling rhythm, like a drumroll for the clown who had come out of the boat. And then he put the fiddle to his chin, the modern way, high, and played.

It was a reel. It was fast and bright and cold, like wind off the bay, and it went round and round and turned back on itself, and Vange, sitting in the shavings beside Arthur, went absolutely still.

"That's the waltz," she said.

"That's the reel," said Rémi, stopping. "*Le reel du Barachois.* My great-grandfather's. I learned it off his recording. He made a tape before he died. Grand-mère made me learn every tune on it." He looked embarrassed. "I only know eleven. He knew two hundred."

"Play it again," said Vange. "Slower."

He played it slower. And slower. And slower still, until the cold fast reel wasn't running anymore but walking, and then, at Vange's nod, swaying, three beats to the bar, and it was the waltz. It was her great-great-grandmother Mélia's waltz with no name, coming out of a boy's fiddle in a boat shop on the Baie des Chaleurs, note for note.

Mathieu put down his plane.

Nobody said anything. From the open doors came the sound of the cove: gulls, a diesel engine thumping somewhere at the wharf, and the small slap of water under the pilings.

* * *

That evening, at Yvonne's long table, the two cousins worked on the list.

Vange had brought it up on her phone and turned it so Rémi could see. Every word her grandfather had put in it since April: *asteur, espérer, il mouille, boucane, chère, fier, doucement*, and sixty more, each with Alcide's voice saying it, and his notes underneath.

Rémi went through them one by one, with his great-grandmother leaning over his shoulder, and something kept happening. He would touch a word and listen to Alcide's high, dry voice say it, and his eyebrows would go up, and he would say, "*Mais* — we say that." And he would say it himself, in his own voice, slightly different, rounder, the vowels further back.

*Asteur.* "We say *asteure*. Same."

*Espérer.* "Yes. My grand-mère says it. *Espère-moi.* Wait for me. My teacher at school says it's old-fashioned. My grand-mère says the teacher is old-fashioned."

*Il mouille.* "Of course *il mouille*. What else would it do?"

*Boucane.* "Yes! Smoke. From the stove. My father says it."

*Garrocher.* "To throw. Yes. We say that. Grand-mère says it to the gulls."

By the end of the evening they had found more than forty words that Alcide had thought were only his mother's, only the old people's, only Prairie Gauche, which were alive and well in a kitchen on the Acadian Peninsula, two thousand miles to the north, in the mouth of a sixteen-year-old boy who played the fiddle and the spoons.

So Vange added a second voice to the list.

Under each word where it was the same, after her grandfather's recording, she had Rémi say it too. Two voices, one word. The south and the north. And under some of them, when Yvonne could not stop herself, there was a third voice, low and rough, adding a correction to both of them.

Under *espérer*, Vange typed a new note, and showed it to Arthur, who was at the end of the table drying dishes, because that seemed to be his job in every family's kitchen this year.

*Pépère says: up there they hope, down here we wait. Rémi says: up here we wait too. Grand-mère Yvonne says: we did both, at the camp. That's why the word means both.*

"Is that right?" Vange asked Arthur. "Is that what she said?"

"That's what she said," said Arthur, who had heard every word, and had very nearly dropped a plate.

Eighty-Five in Two Accents

Alcide Doucet turned eighty-five on the eleventh of August on his own gallery, in his own rocking chair, in the grooves he had worn into the boards, and announced at breakfast that he did not intend to notice.

"It's a day," he told Shelley. "Like Tuesday. I don't make a fuss over Tuesday."

"It *is* Tuesday, Papa."

"So there you go."

Shelley had taken the day off. Dud Comeaux came by at ten with a sack of late crawfish, "for old times," and stayed. Lynette came at eleven with a pound cake. Mrs. Philomène Landry came at noon in a lavender tracksuit with sequins on it, which Shelley suspected had been bought for the occasion, and sat in the second rocker without being asked, and told Alcide he looked terrible for eighty-five and she had looked much better.

"You were eighty-five five years ago," said Alcide.

"And I looked wonderful."

At two o'clock, when they had eaten the crawfish and most of the pound cake, Shelley went into the house and came out with her tablet and sat down on the top step at the old man's feet.

"Vange made you something," she said.

"I said no fuss."

"It's not a fuss. It's a page." She held the screen up so he could see it. "She made it Saturday, up there, and sent the link to everybody. People have been putting things on it all weekend. She said to wait for today."

* * *

It was a simple page. At the top, a photograph Vange had taken in April at the crawfish boil, without his knowing: Alcide under the live oak with the fiddle low on his chest, his foot lifted in the middle of a tap. Under it, in Vange's words: *Pépère is 85. Say something to him. Any language.*

And under that, one after another, little windows with faces in them.

Shelley touched the first one.

It was Taras Hrynchuk, in a circus tent, bald and enormous-eyebrowed, holding up his right hand to the camera.

"Alcide Doucet," he said. "Happy birthday from Manitoba, from the circus, from everybody. You stole my line, I am told. Is good. Keep it. A gift." And then he said something in Ukrainian, which a caption underneath, in Vira's careful spelling, translated as: *May you live a hundred years and dance at all of them.*

The second was Vira, who held up a plate of varenyky to the camera and said only, "*Nine,*" severely, and then smiled.

The third was Cyril and Halyna, playing the Bourque's birthday tune on trombone and tuba with great solemnity and very slightly wrong.

The fourth was Bippo.

He did not speak. He was in full costume, sitting in front of a cupcake with a single candle in it. He took a great breath, swelling up like a balloon, and blew. The candle leaned, considered, and stood up again. He blew harder, and his wig went backward off his head, and the candle stayed lit. He looked at the camera in despair. And then, slowly, very gently, he leaned down and said something to the candle that nobody could hear, and the candle went out.

On the gallery, Alcide grunted.

"What'd he say to it?" asked Dud.

"Something in French," said Alcide. "Like a bank. The candle was impressed."

* * *

There were more. Lucien from Bourque's, with his accordion. Lynette's grandchildren in Lafayette, who had learned *bonne fête* off Vange's list and said it with tremendous care. Paulette Haché, in her fleece jacket, on the field behind the community hall in Anse-aux-Huards, saying in her own English that she had sent a letter on the first of August, and she knew he had not answered, and she understood, and she was not going to ask again in front of everyone, because that was not polite, but the letter was still good.

And then a window with a face in it that made Alcide sit forward in his chair.

It was Yvonne Doucet, sitting at the end of her long table with the cove in the big window behind her and the wooden birds on the sill, and her pipe in her hand.

She did not say happy birthday. She spoke in French, rough and low and unhurried, the way people talk on that coast in the kitchen at night. And Alcide, on his gallery, two thousand miles south, understood every word, because she talked exactly like his mother.

She told him her name. She told him that her husband, Léonce, had spent twenty winters looking for the cousins of the south, and had died believing they would come. She told him that his granddaughter had come instead, with a little accordion and the Doucet chin, and had sat at Léonce's table, and that this was a great happiness to her, the greatest in a long time. She told him that she was eighty-one and had never once been on an airplane either and did not intend to start. And then she said that on the peninsula, they did not say *joyeux anniversaire*, like in France. They said *bonne fête*. Good feast. Good party.

"*Alors bonne fête, mon cousin*," said Yvonne Doucet, to the camera. "*Et viens-t'en.*"

So, happy birthday, my cousin. And come on.

Shelley glanced up at her father-in-law. He had his hand over his mouth.

* * *

The next window was a boy with a fiddle under his chin, standing in a boat shop with sawdust in the air and the cove bright behind him.

"*Bonne fête, mon oncle*," said Rémi. "I am Rémi. I am sixteen. I play the fiddle a little bit. This is the tune of my great-grandfather Léonce." And he played *le reel du Barachois*, fast and bright and cold as wind off the bay, the way they had always played it in Anse-aux-Huards.

Alcide sat absolutely still in his rocker.

And then the boy, on the screen, without stopping, began to slow down. The reel stopped running and began to walk. Then to sway. Three beats to the bar. And the tune became a waltz, and the waltz became Mélia's waltz, the waltz with no name, played in a boat shop on the Baie des Chaleurs by a boy whose great-grandfather had played it fast for fifty years, for a man whose mother had played it slow.

When it ended, the boy lowered the fiddle and said, a little shy, in English, "Vange says this is how you play it. She says I'm too fast. She says you will tell me. So you will have to come and tell me."

Nobody on the gallery said anything. A heron went over, low.

"One more," said Shelley quietly. "Papa. There's one more."

* * *

The last window had been recorded, by the look of it, on a narrow steel deck under a wide gray sky, with a railing behind and, beyond the railing, nothing but the Gulf of Mexico in every direction. A big man of fifty-two in a hard hat and orange coveralls, his face burnt red, with Alcide's small sharp eyes in it.

Russell Doucet looked at the camera like a man looking at a snake.

"Hey, Papa," he said, in English. "Happy birthday. I'm on the rig. You know that." He stopped. Looked down. Looked up. "Vange sent me the list. The words. With your voice on it. I been listening to it on my breaks. I got a lot of breaks." He cleared his throat. "So I'm going to try something, and you're not allowed to laugh."

And then, haltingly, with an accent that was a little like his father's and a little like a man reading a menu in a restaurant he could not afford, Russell Doucet, who had been raised in English so that he would have it easier, said four words in his father's language, one at a time, as if he were laying planks across a creek.

"*Bonne fête, Papa. Je suis fier.*"

He looked at the camera for a second more, unhappily. Then a voice off-screen shouted something about a crane, and he said "Gotta go," and the window went dark.

* * *

Alcide Doucet sat in his rocker in the grooves in the boards and did not move.

Dud Comeaux got up and went to look at something in the rice barn that did not need looking at. Lynette followed him. Mrs. Landry stayed exactly where she was, because she was ninety and had stopped leaving rooms when things got difficult in about 1970.

Shelley put the tablet face down on the boards.

"Papa?"

"Give me the phone," said Alcide.

"Which phone?"

"The phone, Shelley. The one with numbers in it. The lady with the clipboard. The one from the letter."

"Paulette."

"Her." He held out his hand. It was shaking, a little, and he looked at it with irritation, as if it belonged to somebody else. "I'm going to tell her yes. And then I'm going to get on an airplane, which I hate. And then I'm going to go up there and tell that boy he plays my mama's waltz too fast."

"Papa, you're eighty-five."

"I know how old I am, *chère*. It's my birthday." He took the phone. "Everybody keeps telling me."

Mrs. Philomène Landry, in the other rocker, in her sequined tracksuit, began very quietly to laugh, and then not so quietly, until Alcide, dialing with one stiff finger, said, "Philomène, I'm on the phone with Canada," and she said, "*Mais*, I know, Alcide, I know, that's why I'm laughing," and could not stop.

Il Mouille

The airport at Bathurst had one runway, one baggage belt, one coffee counter and, on the afternoon of the thirteenth of August, one very small, very old man in a pressed white shirt and a straw hat coming down the steps of a commuter plane in a sideways rain, holding a fiddle case against his chest with both arms as if it were a child he had rescued from a fire.

Shelley came down behind him with two suitcases and the expression of a nurse who has spent nine hours watching an elderly patient refuse every single thing offered to him on three separate aircraft, including the window seat, the pretzels, a blanket, the bathroom and, over Montreal, the concept of descent.

The circus had come to meet him, enough of it to fill the little arrivals hall: Vange, in her too-big red band jacket, jumping on the spot; Lesia; Taras, in his best cap; and the tall man in the gray cardigan, at the back, with no nose on.

And at the front, a little apart from them, in a man's yellow oilskin coat that came to her knees and dripped steadily on the floor, stood Yvonne Doucet.

She had driven forty minutes in the rain in a pickup older than Rémi, after telling everyone at breakfast that she was eighty-one and did not stand around in airports for anybody.

Alcide came through the glass doors with the fiddle case and stopped.

They faced each other across the arrivals hall, the small bald man in the straw hat and the tall bony woman in the yellow coat. Two hundred and seventy years. Two brothers. One ship going south, and one man in the woods.

Nobody knew what either of them would say. Vange had stopped jumping. Even Taras was quiet.

Yvonne looked past him, out through the glass at the gray sheets of rain blowing across the runway, and back at him. And she said, in the flat, matter-of-fact voice of a woman remarking on the weather to a neighbor across a fence:

"*Il mouille.*"

Alcide Doucet stared at her. Then something happened to his face that Vange had never seen in her whole life, not at the crawfish boil, not in the circus ring, not on the gallery with the coffee can. It came apart, all at once, and he laughed, and he was crying, both at the same time, standing there in the airport with the fiddle against his chest.

"*Il mouille*," he said back to her. "*Mais oui. Il mouille.*"

It's raining. It's getting wet. His mother's words. Her words. The same.

Yvonne nodded, as if that settled something, and took the fiddle case from him, firmly, the way you take something from someone who has carried it far enough, and put her free arm through his.

"*Viens-t'en*," she said. "*Le souper est sur le poêle.*"

And they walked out together into the rain, the two of them, toward the old pickup, arm in arm, and left everybody else to sort out the suitcases.

* * *

The kitchen party began at seven and was, by Acadian standards, Paulette told Arthur, quite small. Only about forty people.

They came in out of the rain all evening, carrying dishes covered in tea towels and instrument cases and, in one case, a crate of beer on a hand truck. Cousins, and cousins of cousins, crowded into the long low room with the wood stove going against the damp, until the windows over the cove steamed up. People sat on the stairs, on the woodbox, on the counters, on each other.

And the food came out, and with it, almost at once, the first argument.

Tante Germaine Comeau had driven up from Baie Sainte-Marie, in Nova Scotia, eight hours, with a pan the size of a car door wrapped in three towels. She was Yvonne's late husband's sister, seventy-eight, round and pink and fierce, and her pan held a rappie pie: a great golden slab, crisp and brown on top, made, she explained to Arthur at length, from potatoes grated and squeezed dry in a cloth until every drop of their water was gone, and then the dry potato fed back with hot chicken broth until it came alive again, and layered with chicken and onion, and baked for hours.

"*Pâté à la râpure*," she said. "Rappie pie. The real one. From the real place."

"The real place," said a voice behind her, "is Kent County."

This was Gérard LeBlanc, a cousin of Mathieu's mother, from down near Bouctouche, who had brought a pot of pale, round, glistening dumplings the size of softballs, grated raw potato and mashed potato pressed around a nugget of salt pork and boiled for three hours.

"*Poutines râpées*," said Gérard. "You eat them with molasses. Or sugar. Or both."

"With *sugar*," said Tante Germaine to Arthur, in a tone of the deepest pity, as if Gérard had confessed to a crime.

"It's the same potatoes," said Gérard.

"It is not at all the same potatoes."

"It's the same grating."

"It is the same grating," Germaine conceded, "used for evil."

Arthur, who had learned in April that there were eleven correct ways to eat a crawfish, took a plate and ate both, and told each of them privately that theirs was better, and both of them knew he was lying, and both of them gave him seconds.

* * *

Alcide had brought something too.

He had brought it in his suitcase, over Shelley's objections, wrapped in two plastic bags and a sweater: a quart jar of dark roux, the color of an old saddle, made in his own iron pot the morning he left, a small jar of filé, and a bag of rice from Dud's fields.

"They wouldn't let me bring the boudin," he said darkly. "At the border. The man said no meat. I said it's not meat, it's boudin. He said what's in it. I said pork and rice. He said that's meat. I said that's *boudin*." He shook his head. "Canadians."

But Yvonne had a pot of lobster bodies on the back of the stove, left over from the community supper the week before, and a bag of onions, and celery, and peppers from somebody's garden. And so at nine o'clock, in a kitchen on the Acadian Peninsula, with forty people watching and the rain coming down outside, an eighty-five-year-old Cajun from Prairie Gauche stood at an Acadian wood stove with a flat-ended wooden spoon he had also smuggled in his suitcase, and made a gumbo out of lobster.

It was, everyone agreed afterward, a very strange gumbo. It was also gone in twenty minutes. Tante Germaine had two bowls and said nothing about it whatsoever.

* * *

Then the music.

It started, as it always does in those kitchens, without anybody starting it. Somebody's uncle had a fiddle out. Rémi had his spoons. A woman in her seventies sat down on a kitchen chair, folded her hands in her lap, and began to tap her feet on the floorboards, heel and toe, heel and toe, in a rhythm so fast and so complicated that it sounded like a small drum kit had been hidden under her chair. That was *la podorythmie*, Paulette told Arthur: feet as percussion. The woman did not move anything above the knee the entire evening.

They played reels and jigs, one after another, the music of a people who had spent two and a half centuries keeping warm in kitchens by the sea. Vange found that the Acadian tunes sat in her hands like old friends who had changed their hair. The floor shook. The wooden birds on the windowsill trembled. Somebody's grandfather danced with a broom.

And Alcide sat by the wood stove with his fiddle across his knees, and did not play, and watched.

Arthur sat down on the woodbox beside him, in his gray cardigan. The old man kept his eyes on the fiddlers.

"You're the clown," said Alcide, after a while, in English, under the music.

"I'm with the circus."

"You're the clown. Don't argue with me, I'm eighty-five." He watched Rémi's bow flying. "You don't look like nobody without the nose. That's a good trick. But you talk like a bank. With the nose, without the nose. Same bank."

Arthur said nothing.

"I'm not going to ask you nothing," said Alcide. "My mama said, never ask a man in a cardigan where he got his money. Clowns and insurance men." He was quiet. "But that letter. The lady with the clipboard. The fund with a hill in it. Kettle Hill." He turned his head and looked at Arthur for the first time, his small sharp eyes bright in the stovelight. "I looked it up. On Shelley's phone. On the plane. There's no Kettle Hill in Nova Scotia that's got a fund in it. There's just a hill."

"There are a great many hills in Nova Scotia," said Arthur.

"Hm," said Alcide Doucet.

Across the room the reel ended in a stamp and a shout. And in the little silence that followed, before the next one could begin, Yvonne Doucet, at the end of the long table, took her pipe out of her mouth and said, loudly, in French, to the whole kitchen:

"*Et asteure, le cousin du sud va nous jouer quelque chose.*"

And now the cousin from the south will play us something.

Forty faces turned toward the wood stove.

Alcide looked down at the fiddle on his knees. Then he looked at the boy across the room with the bow in his hand.

"Okay," he said, standing up slowly. "But we're going to play it *right*."

The Speed of Walking Home

They did not, in fact, play it right. Not the first time.

Alcide began it slow, the way his mother had, the way he had played it under the live oak and in the circus ring, a long lilting waltz with his foot tapping on Yvonne's floorboards. And Rémi, across the kitchen, came in on the second line fast, the way his great-grandfather had, a bright cold reel, so that for eight bars there were two tunes in the room at once, one walking and one running, like an old man and a boy trying to share an umbrella.

The kitchen laughed. Alcide stopped dead and pointed the bow at the boy.

"*Trop vite*," he said. Too fast.

"*Trop lent*," said Rémi, and then, remembering his manners, "*mon oncle*." Too slow, uncle.

"Too slow? I'm eighty-five. Everything I do is too slow. That's not the point. That's how the tune goes."

"That's how *your* tune goes."

"It's my mama's tune!"

"It's my great-grandfather's tune!"

And the whole kitchen settled in happily to watch.

They started again. And stopped. And started again. Alcide came up a little. Rémi came down a little. Vange, on the stairs between them, kept a steady beat underneath both, patient as a tide, refusing to take sides. Tante Germaine shouted advice from the counter.

And on the fifth try, somewhere in the middle of the second time through, without either of them deciding to, they met.

It was not a waltz and it was not a reel. It was something in between, a tempo neither man had ever played it at, rolling and steady, three beats with a lift on the third, so that the tune seemed to lean forward slightly as it went, like someone walking into a wind. The two fiddles locked together. The old man's bow and the boy's bow went up and down in the same moment. And the room, which had been laughing, went quiet, and then began, softly, to clap on the third beat.

When it ended, nobody said anything for a second. Then Yvonne, at the end of the long table, took her pipe out of her mouth.

"*Ça*," she said, "*c'est la vitesse de quelqu'un qui marche pour rentrer chez lui.*"

That is the speed of someone walking home.

* * *

Vange had recorded it. She had not meant to. Her phone had been on the stair beside her for the whole evening, and at some point during the fourth try she had touched the red circle without thinking, the way you put your hand out to catch something falling.

At one in the morning, when the kitchen had emptied and the rain had stopped, she sat at the end of the table with Rémi and her grandfather and Yvonne and added it to the list of tunes. There were sixty-eight recordings now: all of Alcide's, each with its note about who had taught him, and below them the eleven tunes Rémi had learned off Léonce's old tape.

And now this.

"What do I call it?" she said.

"It doesn't have a name," said Alcide.

"It's called *le reel du Barachois*," said Rémi.

"Then it has two names," said Yvonne, "and that's one too many and one too few. Put both. And put who taught it."

"We don't know who taught it," said Vange. "That's the whole point. That's why I came."

Yvonne looked at her. Then she got up, slowly, and went to the drawer at the end of the counter, and came back with the heap of Léonce's letters in their rubber band, and went through them with her big blunt fingers until she found one, old and soft, written not in blue fountain pen but in a neat typed French on the letterhead of an archive in France.

"Léonce found this in 1998," she said. "A copy of a list from the expulsion. Copies of the old lists ended up in France, and France kept papers. Léonce said they kept papers about everything, the French, they would write down the color of your socks." She unfolded it. "It is a list of the people from one farm on the Gaspereau River, near Grand-Pré. A family. Doucet. The father, Charles. The mother, Anne. And the children. Pierre, twenty. Joseph, eighteen, *absent*. That word. *Absent.* That is our Joseph, in the woods. And the little ones."

"What happened to Anne?" asked Vange.

"She went on the ship with Pierre. To Maryland. Léonce found that too. She died there, the second winter." Yvonne laid the letter on the table. "But Léonce's grandmother always said, when she played the reel, that it was Anne's tune. That Anne used to sing it at the spinning wheel. She said Joseph used to hum it in the woods, so he would not forget his mother's face." She looked at Alcide. "And your mama said it came from up there."

"*Ça vient d'en haut*," said Alcide.

"*Oui.* From up there. From Anne. From the Gaspereau." Yvonne tapped the letter. "So both of them took it. Pierre took it south on the ship, with his mother, and she sang it to him in Maryland before she died, and it went slow in the heat. And Joseph took it into the woods, alone, and it went fast in the cold."

Vange sat with her thumbs over the screen.

Then she typed.

*Waltz / reel. "No name" (Louisiana). "Le reel du Barachois" (Anse-aux-Huards). Taught by: Anne Doucet, a farm on the Gaspereau River, before 1755. Kept slow in the south by Mélia Doucet. Kept fast in the north by Léonce Doucet. Played together again by Alcide Doucet (85) and Rémi Doucet (16), in Grand-mère Yvonne's kitchen, 13 August, at the speed of someone walking home.*

She showed it to her grandfather. He read it without his glasses, holding the phone at arm's length, his lips moving. When he finished he gave it back to her and said nothing at all, but he put his hand on the top of her head, briefly, the way you put a lid on a pot that does not need any more stirring.

* * *

Arthur had gone back to the Sardine Can at eleven, before the archive letter came out. He had judged, correctly, that the kitchen had reached the point in the evening that belonged only to family. He heard about it the next morning from Vange, at the cook trailer, over Vira's eggs, and he wrote it in his page with his tea at a quarter past four the morning after that.

*Anne, at a spinning wheel on the Gaspereau. Her tune went south on a ship and north into the woods. It met itself again in a kitchen, at the speed of walking home.*

He sat with the page for a while, in the dawn, with the gulls starting up over the wharf.

He was thinking about the ship's list. About a clerk in 1755, or some years later in France, writing down a family, father, mother, children, ages, and coming to a boy of eighteen who was not there, and writing *absent*, and moving on to the next name, because there was a great deal of paper to get through and the ship was leaving on the tide. Arthur had employed clerks like that. Good ones. He had been, in his time, the man for whom such lists were made.

He thought: *absent* is not the end of anybody's story. It is just the word for the part the clerk could not see.

* * *

On Friday afternoon, the fourteenth, Yvonne took Alcide down to the boat shop.

Arthur went too, in costume, because there was a matinee at four and he saw no reason to change twice, and because Mathieu had asked, rather hesitantly, if the clown would come and look at the dory again "but from the outside this time."

The two old people walked slowly along the shore road arm in arm, the tall one and the small one, and people in the yards stopped what they were doing to watch them pass, and some of them called out, *Bonjour, Monsieur Doucet!* though he had been in the village for exactly one day.

In the shop, Alcide stood a while in front of the upturned dory, then the lobster boat's ribs, then the steam box. He ran his hand along a plank. He asked Mathieu questions, in French, slowly at first, then less slowly, as the words came back to him one after another like birds landing on a wire. Mathieu answered. Yvonne added things. Vange stood by with her phone, catching words as they went past: *bordage*, planking. *Varangue*, frame. *Étambot*, sternpost.

"My brother built pirogues," Alcide said. "Hippolyte. My cousin, I mean, the one from the rice mill. He built them out of cypress, in his yard, for the duck hunters. Flat. Narrow. You could stand up in them, if you were stupid." He shook his head. "Nobody builds them now. They buy aluminum. Plastic."

"Fiberglass," said Mathieu.

"Same thing. Same story." Alcide patted the dory. "Both ends of the family. Two hundred and seventy years. The boats are going the same way the words went."

Mathieu said nothing. He looked at the half-planked dory, and at the lobster boat that might never be finished, and at the empty bench at the back of the shop where, in his grandfather's day, four apprentices had worked.

Bippo, standing in the doorway against the light with the cove behind him, said nothing either. But he took a small paper boat out of the pocket of his tartan jacket, one he had folded that morning from a page of the fair program, and set it on the bench at the back of the shop, the empty one, where Mathieu would find it at the end of the day.

Inside the hull, in his small neat hand, he had written: *Apprenti.*

The Noise at Six O'Clock

The rule of the Tintamarre, as Paulette Haché explained it to the Hrynchuk Family One-Ring Circus at noon on the fifteenth of August, standing on a picnic table with her clipboard, was very simple.

"At six o'clock," she said, "you make noise."

"What kind of noise?" asked Taras.

"Any kind. Pots, pans, horns, drums, your voice, your car." She looked down at the circus with great seriousness. "For one hour, the whole of Acadie makes as much noise as it can. In Caraquet, the biggest. Thousands of people."

"Why?" asked Bohdan, who had three terriers to think about.

Paulette considered the question. Behind her, the cove was bright and blue, and every boat at the wharf had its flag up, blue, white and red with the gold star, snapping in the wind off the bay.

"Because two hundred and seventy years ago," she said, "they tried to make us quiet. They tried to make us disappear. So once a year, we let everybody know." She climbed down off the table. "We are still here. *On est encore là.* Loud."

* * *

By five o'clock the main street of Caraquet was a river of color running between the houses, and the river was getting wider by the minute.

It ran for kilometers along the shore of the Baie des Chaleurs, and every person in it seemed to be wearing the flag, as capes, as hats, as dresses. Babies wore it in strollers. Old men had it painted on their bald heads and old women on their cheeks, with a little gold star by the eye. A man went by on stilts in a suit made entirely of flags. Another went by with a lobster trap on his head, painted in the colors.

And everybody carried something to make a noise with. Arthur began to keep a list and gave up after ten minutes. Saucepans. A washboard. Cowbells. Air horns. Hubcaps. A fisherman's foghorn. Children with plastic buckets and sticks. A woman of perhaps ninety in a wheelchair with a hand-cranked siren on her lap and an expression of terrible anticipation.

The circus came as itself. Taras rode the giraffe unicycle with a teacup on his head painted in the colors. Lesia walked on stilts with the flag pinned to her back like wings. The terriers had bandanas and tiny bells. And Vira, who had refused to be part of anything so undignified, had brought, for no reason she would explain, the biggest stockpot in the cook trailer and a ladle.

And Bippo had a colander on his head, painted with a gold star, and a small saucepan on a string around his neck, and a spoon.

* * *

Alcide and Yvonne rode in the back of Mathieu's pickup truck, on two kitchen chairs, with a quilt over their knees, though it was August.

The truck was painted, hood to tailgate, in the colors, and moved at the speed of the crowd, which was the speed of walking. Rémi sat on the tailgate with his fiddle, and Vange beside him with her accordion, and Shelley walked alongside with a water bottle for each of the old people, because old people in the backs of pickup trucks were, she said, exactly what emergency rooms were for.

Alcide had his fiddle across his knees. And in his lap, beside it, he had something else, which he had brought from Louisiana in the suitcase with the roux and the spoon and had not shown anyone until that afternoon.

It was the dented red coffee can.

The pages were not in it. He had left the pages at home, in the armoire, under the quilts, where his mother had kept them. He had brought only the can. Empty. With the plastic lid off.

"What's that for?" Vange had asked him that afternoon, when he took it out of the suitcase.

"For the noise," Alcide had said. "She said start again. I'm going to start loud."

* * *

At a minute to six, the street went quiet.

Not entirely. Thousands of people cannot be entirely quiet. But the river of flags stopped moving, and the talk dropped away, and for perhaps half a minute the only sounds along the whole length of the shore were the gulls and the wind off the bay and the small expectant clinks of a great many pots being lifted.

Arthur, beside the painted pickup with his colander on his head, looked up at Alcide. The old man was holding the red coffee can in his left hand and the flat-ended roux spoon in his right, and looking out over the heads of the crowd at the Baie des Chaleurs.

Yvonne, beside him, took her pipe out of her mouth.

The siren on the fire hall roof started it, and then every horn on every boat at the wharf, and then the air horns, and then, from one end of Caraquet to the other, along kilometers of shoreline, all at once, everything.

* * *

There is no describing the noise of the Tintamarre to someone who has not stood in it. Arthur tried, afterward, in his page, and wrote only: *the sky was being hit with spoons.*

It came from every direction, thousands of voices and everything they had brought, rolling up and down the shore and out over the bay and coming back off the water, so that it seemed the bay itself was shouting. The woman in the wheelchair was cranking her siren with a face of perfect joy. Vira was hitting the stockpot so hard that the ladle bent. Taras, on his unicycle, was ringing a bicycle bell and shouting in Ukrainian. Cyril was playing a single long note on the trombone that went on far longer than any human breath ought to allow.

And in the back of the painted pickup, Alcide Doucet, eighty-five, of Prairie Gauche, Louisiana, was beating his mother's coffee can with a roux spoon.

He beat it hard, with his whole small body, his straw hat jumping on his head. The can, which had held seventy-eight years of silence, rang out with a high, flat, tinny, ridiculous clang, again and again and again, utterly lost in the roar of the whole Acadian coast and somehow perfectly audible to everyone standing near the truck. And he was shouting. Arthur could not hear what. He could see the old man's mouth moving, the same words, over and over, as he beat the can.

Beside him, Yvonne had a soup pot and a hammer.

On the tailgate, Rémi was playing his fiddle and Vange her accordion, and nobody could hear a single note of either, and they played anyway, the whole hour, the tune that was a waltz and a reel at the speed of someone walking home.

And Bippo, in the middle of it all, with a colander on his head, did something he had very rarely done in all his years in the ring, where his work was falling down and looking surprised in silence.

He made noise. He beat the saucepan with the spoon and shouted, a long wordless shout, with his head back. He shouted for Anne at her spinning wheel, and for Joseph in the snow at the camp called Hope, and for Pierre on the ship, and for a six-year-old boy in 1947 writing a sentence five hundred times. He shouted for Vira's mother, with her strapped palm, and for his own grandmother, who had sat at her machine in Pittsburgh for forty years and never once raised her voice. He shouted until he was hoarse, and then he kept on banging the saucepan, and nobody in Caraquet looked at him twice, because everybody in Caraquet was doing exactly the same.

* * *

At seven o'clock it stopped, more or less, in a long ragged diminuendo that went on for another twenty minutes as the people at the edges ran out of breath one by one.

Alcide sat in his kitchen chair in the back of the truck with the coffee can in his lap. It was badly dented now, dented all over, one side pushed in nearly flat. He was breathing hard. Shelley, alarmed, was already climbing up into the truck bed with the water bottle.

"Papa. Papa, drink this. Are you all right?"

He drank. He handed the bottle back. He looked at the can.

"She'd have liked that," he said.

Vange put her accordion down on the tailgate and climbed up beside him, and leaned her head against his arm.

"Pépère. What were you shouting?"

He did not answer right away. Down the street the crowd was beginning to break up, to drift toward the food stalls and the music stages and the beer tents, a slow happy river of flags. A child went past still hitting a bucket, unwilling to admit it was over.

"Same thing I wrote," said Alcide. "Five hundred times. Only the other way."

Vange looked up at him.

"*Je vais parler français*," he said. "*Dans la cour de l'école. Je vais parler français dans la cour de l'école.*"

I will speak French. On the school grounds. I will speak French on the school grounds.

He set the dented can down at his feet, very gently, and put his straw hat straight.

"I'm going to need a new can," he said.

Two Boats and a Recess Bell

The first of it arrived in Anse-aux-Huards on the eighteenth of August in a cardboard tube, by courier, addressed to the Atelier Doucet, and Mathieu opened it on his workbench with a chisel because he could not find a knife.

Inside were two sets of plans, rolled together, and a letter on heavy paper from a law office in Halifax that Mathieu had never heard of.

The plans were for boats. One was a dory, a traditional flat-bottomed Acadian rowing dory of the kind Mathieu had built a hundred times. The other was something he had never built in his life: a long, low, narrow, flat-bottomed boat with gently raised ends, drawn in an old-fashioned hand, labeled *pirogue, cypress, south Louisiana type*.

The letter said that a client of the law office, who wished to remain unnamed, had been told that the Atelier Doucet was among the last shops on the Acadian coast still building in wood, and wished to commission two boats, to be built over the coming winter. The client would pay for the materials, the shop's time, and the wages of four apprentices for two years: two from the Acadian Peninsula, and two from the parish around Prairie Gauche, Louisiana, whose travel and lodging would also be paid. The apprentices were to learn both boats. When the boats were finished, the dory would go south, to Prairie Gauche, and the pirogue would stay north, in Anse-aux-Huards. *One to stay, one to go*, the letter said, *as in other times.*

At the bottom, a postscript. *The client understands that the cypress may be difficult to obtain in New Brunswick. The client has been told there is a man in Prairie Gauche named Dud Comeaux who knows where to find some.*

Mathieu read it three times. Then he walked up the shore road in his apron and put the letter on the long table in front of Yvonne and Alcide, who were arguing about whether a heron was a better bird than a loon.

Alcide read it. He read it slowly, without his glasses, holding it at arm's length.

"Hippolyte's pirogue," he said. "That's Hippolyte's drawing. I'd know his *p*'s anywhere. He made them like a man falling off a chair." He looked up at Mathieu. "How did a lawyer in Halifax get Hippolyte's drawing? It was in my barn. In the goat cart."

"I don't know, *mon oncle*."

"Vange," said Alcide, darkly. "She went through the barn in April. For the tree. Pictures. She took pictures of everything in that barn." He set the letter down. "She took a picture of the goat cart."

* * *

Vange denied it, with total sincerity, because it was true. She had taken a picture of Hippolyte's drawings, along with everything else in the barn, and had put them in the family's pages under Hippolyte's name, in case anybody ever wanted to see them. A great many people could have seen them. Several of them had.

Arthur was not asked. He was in the ring at the time, being chased by three terriers in Acadian bandanas.

* * *

The second piece arrived in Prairie Gauche, though nobody in Anse-aux-Huards heard about it for a week, and it arrived, as everything in Prairie Gauche did eventually, on Lynette Broussard's calendar.

It had begun with a letter to the parish school board, from a foundation in New Orleans that nobody had heard of either, offering a grant for a program the letter called, plainly, *the Recess Fund*. It would pay the parish's French-speaking elders a fair hourly wage to come to the elementary schools at recess and lunch, every school day, and sit on the benches and speak French with the children. Not teach. Not hold classes. The parish already had French teachers, and good ones. Just talk. On the playground. On the school grounds.

The superintendent called Lynette, because Lynette knew who the old French speakers were in every family in the parish, and Lynette went straight to her calendar.

*RECESS ELDERS!!! Prairie Gauche Elementary, every school day, 10 AM and 12 noon, starting October. Bring your French. Paid.*

"Three exclamation points," Dud said, looking at it over her shoulder.

"It needs four," said Lynette, and added one.

Mrs. Philomène Landry signed up within the hour. So did Lucien from Bourque's, and the man who had been asleep at the end of the bar, and Ophé Guidry's daughter, who was seventy-one, and fourteen others. The first name on the list, though, had been put there by Lynette before she had even asked him, and when she called Anse-aux-Huards that night to tell him, Alcide Doucet listened without a word and then said, "Which school?"

"Prairie Gauche Elementary, Alcide. On Mill Street."

"That's the same building."

"They put on a new wing in 1978. But yes. Same schoolyard."

There was a silence on the line. Lynette heard, in the background, the wind off the Baie des Chaleurs and somebody's spoons.

"Put me down for both recesses," said Alcide. "Every day. And Lynette."

"Yes?"

"Don't let them pay me. Tell them to give my money to the next one."

* * *

The third piece was smaller and came to Lesia, in the office trailer, on the last night in Anse-aux-Huards, by email: a letter from an association of northern Manitoba community arenas, saying that a sponsor had come forward to cover the costs, next spring, of a touring circus visiting their member communities. Thompson. Gillam. The Pas. Churchill, if the train could carry the trucks. The association understood there was a family circus in Brandon that had wanted to make that tour for years. Was that true?

Lesia went to find her grandfather. He was sitting on the steps of the cook trailer with Vira, eating her copy of Alcide's lobster gumbo, which she had renamed something in Ukrainian so that he would eat it.

Taras read the email twice, moving his lips. Then he handed it back to her, and looked out at the cove, where the lighthouse that sold ice cream had just turned off its lights for the night.

"So," he said. "We go north."

"Who did this, Dido?"

"The Prime Minister," said Taras at once. "Obviously. He has heard about the alligator."

* * *

The fourth piece cost nothing at all, and nobody had to suspect anybody of it.

On the evening of the twentieth of August, at a long folding table set up in the field behind the community hall, under the BIENVENUE CIRQUE HRYNCHUK banner with its two exclamation points, Paulette Haché, for the fair committee of Anse-aux-Huards, signed a sheet of paper. On the other end of a phone line held up to a microphone, two thousand miles south, Dud Comeaux, for the fair committee of Prairie Gauche, read the same words aloud and signed the same sheet, which Lynette would frame.

It said that the two towns were now twinned. Sister towns. *Villes jumelles.* It said they would share their calendars, which they already did, and their fairs, which they intended to, and their musicians, and their boats, and their young people, whenever any of these could be spared.

The whole circus was there, and most of Anse-aux-Huards, and, through a speaker that crackled, most of the Legion hall in Prairie Gauche. Alcide and Rémi played the waltz that was a reel, at the speed of walking home, and four hundred people in a field above a cove, and a hundred more in a hall beside a rice field, clapped on the third beat.

And afterward, while the crowd went to the food tent for Tante Germaine's last rappie pie and Gérard's last poutines, Alcide Doucet came and found the clown.

Bippo was sitting on the steps of the Sardine Can in the tartan jacket with the one red glass button, folding a boat from the fair program. Alcide sat down beside him on the narrow step, which was not built for two people, and watched him make it. A square. A triangle. A hat. A smaller hat. The little pull at the center, and the boat opening out.

"Who taught you that?"

"My grandmother."

"Hm. She talk like a bank?"

"She was a seamstress in Pittsburgh. She hardly talked at all."

Alcide nodded slowly. He did not say anything about Halifax, or New Orleans, or hills in Nova Scotia, or Hippolyte's drawing. He did not ask a single question, because his mother had told him never to ask a man in a cardigan where he got his money, and because, Arthur thought, the old man had decided some time ago that he did not need to know.

"Write something in it," said Alcide.

"What?"

"You always write something. My granddaughter's got a shoebox full. Shelley's got one in her sun visor. Mathieu's got one nailed over the bench. Go on."

Arthur took out his pen. He thought about it. Then, inside the hull, he wrote one word, and handed the boat to the old man.

Alcide held it at arm's length and read it without his glasses, his lips moving.

"*Cousin*," he said.

"That's all."

"That's enough," said Alcide Doucet, and put the paper boat carefully in the breast pocket of his pressed white shirt, behind the pencil, and went back across the field to his family.

Both Recesses, Every Day

Cyril Mapp made his offer on the last morning in Anse-aux-Huards, at the trucks, like a man who had rehearsed it for three weeks and forgotten all of it.

"A chair," he said. "In the band. Paid properly. The north tour in the spring, and the season after that, and after that if you want it." He looked at his trombone case.

Vange stood with the accordion box on her hip and the cove behind her, gray and calm, the boats going out.

"Can I tell you after I say goodbye to her?"

"You can tell me in Manitoba," said Cyril. "I'm a patient man. I'm from Winnipeg."

Yvonne was on her front step with her pipe, not standing up. She had a paper bag in her lap, and when Alcide came up the path, slowly, in his straw hat, she held it out to him without a word. Inside, wrapped in a dish towel, was a heron, carved from a piece of cedar out of Mathieu's shop, standing on one leg, its head drawn down into its shoulders, painted so lightly it was nearly gray, waiting for the world to make a mistake.

"For your field," said Yvonne. "So you have one of ours watching one of yours."

Alcide turned it over in his hands. Under the base, burned in small letters with a hot nail, was a date, *13 août*, and two words: *Il mouille.*

"I got nothing for you," he said.

"You came," said Yvonne, and put the pipe back in her mouth, and that was the end of it, because on that coast a goodbye said twice wears out, the same as in Louisiana.

Vange went to find Cyril before the convoy pulled out. Arthur did not hear what she told him. He saw only that Cyril nodded several times, slowly, the way he nodded at a tune that had gone somewhere he had not expected and turned out better for it, and then took off his cap and shook her hand.

* * *

The letter came to the curling rink outside Brandon in the third week of October, when the first snow had already come and gone once, as a warning.

Arthur read it at a quarter past four in the morning, in the Sardine Can, parked inside the rink for the winter. Tea, strong, in the dented mug. The yellow paper boats on the shelf, a whole fleet of them now.

The first page was in French. It had been written slowly, by hand, in a round careful script, with corrections in green ink taken down over the telephone from Anse-aux-Huards.

*Cher Bippo. Il mouille à Prairie Gauche. Pépère dit que tu parles comme une banque. Moi, je parle comme une fille qui apprend. C'est mieux.*

Dear Bippo. It's raining in Prairie Gauche. Pépère says you talk like a bank. I talk like a girl who is learning. That's better.

At the bottom, in the green ink: *Grand-mère Y. dit: pas mal.*

The rest was in English, typed, because the French had taken her two evenings, and she had homework.

*I said no to Cyril. I said it nice. I told him I'm not saying no to the music, I'm saying no to playing it in the hall. I've been in the hall since I was three. I want to go in the rooms. So I'm finishing school here, and I'm in French III. The teacher is from Lyon and says asteure is wrong. I told her four hundred people on the Baie des Chaleurs say it, so it's not wrong, it's just not hers.*

*I play Saturdays at Bourque's with Pépère and Lucien. I sing the waltz now and I know every word. I sing it slower than I used to, because now I can hear the man calling. Mrs. Landry still cries. She says it's allergies.*

*And I wrote a verse. In French. My own. It's about a girl who walks north to find out who taught her grandmother a song, and finds a boy who plays it too fast. Grand-mère Yvonne fixed the grammar and said the rest was fine. Pépère says it's the first new verse anybody in this family made up since Mélia, and then he went in the house for twenty minutes. I put it in the list under the waltz, with my voice. I didn't put who taught it. Nobody taught it. That's the point.*

*Cyril says I can join the north tour in June, after graduation, for whatever is left of it, if I want. I want. Mama says we'll see, which means yes in Mama.*

Arthur turned the page.

*Now the recess part. You have to know the recess part.*

*Pépère goes to Mill Street every school day, both recesses, 10 and 12, in his good shirt. He sits on the bench by the fence. The kids thought he came with the bench. On the fourth day a boy in first grade came and stood in front of him hopping on one foot, and Pépère said, "Qu'est-ce que t'as?" and the boy didn't understand, so Pépère pointed at the building, and the boy said yes, and Pépère said, really loud, so the whole playground heard, "Mais, va à la toilette, asteure!" And the boy ran. And the next day four kids came to the bench to find out what else he could say.*

*Now there's a can. He went to the store in Eunice and bought a new coffee can, red, the same brand. It sits on the bench beside him. Every recess, every kid who learns a word writes it on a piece of paper and puts it in the can. He reads them at night on the gallery. He says Mélia kept the bad lines and he's keeping the good ones. Lynette put the can on the calendar, Paulette saw it, and now the school in Anse-aux-Huards has one too.*

*Mathieu's apprentices start in January. Two from up there and two from here. Dud found the cypress. He says it was in a barn in Ville Platte, sunk in a bayou for a hundred years and pulled out by a man who wanted it gone. He says old wood that came up out of the water is the right kind for a pirogue going north.*

*My daddy came home from the rig on Tuesday and said "il mouille" at supper, because it was. Pépère didn't say anything. He just passed him the rice.*

*Pépère says to tell the man in the cardigan that there is still no Kettle Hill in Nova Scotia with a fund in it. He says he isn't asking. He says Mélia told him never to ask, and he's eighty-five, so he listens to his mama now.*

*Your friend, Vange Doucet*

*P.S. He keeps the paper boat in his shirt pocket. The one that says Cousin. Behind the pencil. He moves it to the clean shirt every morning.*

* * *

Arthur folded the letter along its creases and put it on the shelf, under the boats, so they would sit on it like geese on a nest.

Then he clipped the microphone behind his ear.

"Reginald."

"Arthur. It is ten in the morning here. Are you still in a curling rink?"

"Inside a trailer inside a curling rink. Like a nesting doll, with frost."

Paper moved in Edinburgh. "The Atelier Doucet has received its cypress, which came up through Saint John on a flatbed truck with a note from a Mr. Comeaux reading, I quote, *Don't let them cut it wrong.* The Prairie Gauche school board reports nineteen elders on the Recess Fund roster and one of them, a Mr. Doucet, declining his wages, which are going to a twentieth. The Manitoba arena association has confirmed Thompson, Gillam and The Pas, and is still arguing with the railway about Churchill. And the Kettle Hill Trust has received eleven applications from fair committees in four provinces for its musical exchange next summer."

Arthur drank his tea.

"There is one more thing," said Sterling, "which I mention only because she insists. She says that since you will never tell her what any of this is for, she has had to invent her own filing system. She files your Acadian affairs under the words you write in those paper boats. Mrs. Doucet's car. The accordion box. The bench in the boat shop. She hears about the boats, Arthur. People talk about them. A clown leaves a boat with a word in it, and three weeks later somebody in Halifax pays for exactly that word."

Arthur looked at the shelf.

"Read me the drawer."

"*Doucement*," said Sterling. "The mother's permission, which was not bought, and therefore cost nothing. She filed it anyway, for the principle. *Recommence*: the Kettle Hill Trust. *Apprenti*: four apprentices, two boats, two years. *Cousin*: the twinning of two towns, which also cost nothing, and which she says is the best line in the ledger. And she has opened a new one this week, for the Recess Fund, and she would like to know if it is correct."

"What did she call it?"

"*Fier*," said Sterling. "She says she heard it from the granddaughter, and that it seemed to be the word."

Arthur said nothing for a while.

"Tell her it's correct," he said.

* * *

He opened the leather-bound book of memories at the next blank page and, in his fine calligraphy, set down:

*Book Four Complete: Prairie Gauche and Anse-aux-Huards. A fiddler who wrote a sentence five hundred times and then shouted it back the other way. A girl who had the sounds and went to find the rooms. A widow who stood up after all. A boy who played it too fast, and an old man who played it too slow, and the speed of walking home. A mother at Grand-Pré who sang at her wheel, and two sons who carried it in opposite directions for two hundred and seventy years until it met itself in a kitchen. I folded the boats. They did the rest.*

Under the entry went a doodle: a red coffee can on a schoolyard bench, with a straw hat sitting on top of it and, peering into it from one side, a carved heron with an expression of deep professional interest.

After that came the usual morning page. Frost on the rink doors. Tea. A letter that began in French. A can full of bad spelling.

Sterling cleared his throat. "Arthur. I hesitate to mention it."

"Reginald, you have not hesitated once in forty years. You pause for effect."

"Quite. There is a town at the end of a railway line on Hudson Bay, where the polar bears walk down the main street in October and the grandmothers say the children no longer know the old names for the ice. And a circus, I'm told, will be arriving there in the spring, if the railway can be persuaded about a unicycle. I merely note it."

Without a word, Arthur reached into his cardigan pocket. Old rule of the trade: two noses, always.

He pressed the spare nose on and squeezed it once, a long small squeak, quietly, so as not to wake the terriers.

"Reginald," he said, "I'm already going."

Then he took a yellow flyer from the stack, and began, without quite deciding to, to fold.