The Tide Brings Them Back

• Chapter 1 High Water Mark
• Chapter 2 Rust and Silt
• Chapter 3 The Skimmer’s Engine
• Chapter 4 What Lies Beneath the Levee
• Chapter 5 Echoes in the Brackish Deep
• Chapter 6 The First Drift
• Chapter 7 Sunken Streets
• Chapter 8 Voices Above the Dredge
• Chapter 9 The Mud-Bound Bell
• Chapter 10 Slack Tide
• Chapter 11 Phantom Lights on the Reach
• Chapter 12 What the Net Dragged In
• Chapter 13 The Submerged Church
• Chapter 14 Floating Bones
• Chapter 15 The Drowned Harbor
• Chapter 16 Currents of the Unsaid
• Chapter 17 The Salvage Contract
• Chapter 18 Black Water Rising
• Chapter 19 The Dredge Keeper's Ghost
• Chapter 20 Sinking Foundations
• Chapter 21 The Surge
• Chapter 22 Ghosts of the Spillway
• Chapter 23 The Breaking Point
• Chapter 24 Ebb and Flow
• Chapter 25 What the River Keeps
• Chapter 26 The Returned

The salt had eaten the third digit off the flood gauge, but nobody needed a painted brass ruler to know where the water stood. You felt it in the floorboards of the shack. When the Gulf pushed hard enough into the lower distributaries, the pilings groaned like old knees, and the gray river turned backward, slick and oily, pooling against the riprap until the willow trees drowned up to their armpits.

Harlan stood on the low deck of the slip, a thermos of chicory-heavy coffee clamped between his thighs, scraping grease out from under his thumbnails with a notched wire brad. Behind him, the skimmer rested on its pontoons. The hull was flat-bottomed aluminum, welded thick and patched thicker, mottled with patches of marine primer that had dried the color of dried liver. It wasn’t a pretty vessel, but it drew barely ten inches of brown soup when the throttle was open, which mattered when the tops of chain-link fences and drowned cattle guards sat an inch below the surface.

Out across the broad reach of the Pass, the morning light was the shade of a wet zinc nail. There wasn't any horizon to speak of, just a pale, greasy seam where the sky met the silt. The radio in the galley of the watchtower had been spitting static since four in the morning, interspersed with the clipped, bored voice of the parish dispatcher reciting stages from the gauge stations north of the spillway. Eighteen feet at the Cut-Off. Nineteen and two-tenths at the Siphon. Rising three inches an hour on the incoming tide.

"Wind’s out of the south-southeast," Miller said, coming down the ladder from the cribbing. He was carrying a crate of copper shear-pins and a five-gallon can of red-dye diesel. He dropped them on the planking with a wet thud that made the river rats under the dock scurry. "Pumping the salt right up into the cypress knees. If you go out past the Old Crevasse today, you’re going to be skimming over somebody’s kitchen counter."

"I know where the counters are," Harlan said without looking up from his thumbnail. "The Formica rotted out twelve years ago. It’s just the studs now. Studs don't catch the intake unless you’re running stupid."

"You run stupid twice a week," Miller said reasonably. He sat on an upturned grease bucket and took out a tin of leaf tobacco, working a plug loose with his thumb. "The Corps opened the middle gates at dawn. They didn't have a choice. The backwater in the basin was coming over the secondary levee. You get that fresh head coming down from the north and this saltwater surge shoving up from the south, they’re going to meet right over the townsite like two bulls in a chute."

Harlan capped the thermos. "That makes the slack shorter."

"Makes the slack nonexistent," Miller corrected. "Water’s going to bunch up, swell like an infected tooth, and sit there until the moon changes its mind. If you’re hunting that heat exchanger off the pumping station, you’d better find the hoist chain before twelve. After twelve, the bottom’s going to get soft. Real soft."

Harlan looked past the slip toward the dead forest. A mile out, where the land had given up twenty years back, the skeletons of bald cypresses rose out of the gray water like the teeth of a rusted saw. They had been killed by the salt intrusion when the outer barrier islands dissolved into mud banks during the autumn storms of the late thirties. Now they were just roosts for snakebirds and the gray herons that stood so still they looked like drifted timber.

Every town in the lower delta had two names: the one on the old topographic maps that the surveyors had drafted before the subsidence went vertical, and the one the pilots used. The map said this was Pointe-aux-Rats. The pilots called it the Wash.

"The contract didn't say nothing about the heat exchanger," Harlan said.

Miller spat a brown arc into the scummy space between the pontoons. "Then what are you burning my fuel for?"

"The school board records," Harlan said.

Miller stared at him for four slow seconds, his jaw motionless over the tobacco. A pelican dropped from thirty feet above the channel, hitting the water with a sound like a wet sack of flour being thrown from an open truck. It surfaced with nothing in its beak, shook its head once, and sat on the swell, looking irritated.

"The parish house went under when we were boys, Harlan," Miller said, his voice dropping into that low, flat register he used when he thought somebody was losing their grip on practical matters. "There isn’t paper down there. There isn't even ledger bindings. Just crawfish and blue crabs."

"They weren't on paper. The late ones were on iron-plate micro-drums. Sealed in paraffin and put down in the vault beneath the basement boiler room." Harlan stood up, his spine making a dry pop. He took the diesel can and tipped the spout into the skimmer’s funnel. The red fuel gurgled down into the belly tank, smelling of sulfur and hot kerosene. "Parish wants the deed plots for the marsh mitigation credits. Company up north is buying the right to plant mangrove seed by the thousand-acre block. They can’t sell the bottom to the federal bank without the names on the original school tax rolls."

"Who’s paying?"

"Land office out of Houma."

"They pay in scrip?"

"They pay in fresh water vouchers and two drums of standard aviation oil," Harlan said. "The sixty-weight stuff. The kind we can’t get off the barges anymore."

Miller looked at the oil cans sitting in the shade of the tool locker, then down at his own cracked boots. Aviation oil was currency south of the intracoastal. Without it, the skimmer's top-end bearings would seize after forty hours of working through the grit-choked river wash. The water here wasn't clean; it was liquid pumice, fine silt carried down from five states away, sharp enough to scour the bronze off a propeller within three seasons.

"You’re going to need the heavy grappling iron," Miller said, standing up. "And the short cable. The long one will foul on the wire netting around the playground."

"Playground’s gone," Harlan said. "The scour hole took the swings out back during the June blow."

"The frame is still down there," Miller insisted. "The A-frames were three-inch galvanized pipe. They don't scour out. They just lean over and wait for an intake to pass over them."

They worked for twenty minutes in the damp heat that was already rising off the marsh like steam from an unwashed shirt. The sun was an indistinct yellow blister behind the high clouds, not burning the haze off, just making it white and thick. They loaded three lengths of lead-core line, the short gaff with the double-welded barb, and an auxiliary battery in a rubberized box. Harlan checked the air-start on the skimmer’s six-cylinder diesel. It kicked on the third stroke with a blast of blue smoke that chased the midges out of the slip, then settled into that hard, hollow idle peculiar to two-stroke engines running without a muffler.

Harlan stepped down into the well deck. The aluminum boat settled an inch deeper into the silt-thick current. The river had already lost its brown river-color; it was turning that greasy, olive-gray that meant the Gulf was pushing hard against the outflow, damming the Mississippi’s mouth with six hundred miles of heavy salt water.

"Watch the markers on the turn," Miller shouted over the clatter of the exhaust. He was untying the stern painter from the iron ring. "The channel buoys are all dragged south. The state stopped servicing the chains in August."

"I don't use the buoys," Harlan said.

"Watch the roofs anyway," Miller said. He threw the line into the boat. It hit the aluminum floor with a wet smack. "Water’s six feet over the high-tide line from last winter. If the current stops, look out for the drift."

Harlan didn't ask what kind of drift. You didn't ask that question south of the Cut-Off. The river took things down, and when the tide got high enough and the sea pushed back, the river gave them back up again. Usually it was hemlock logs from the north, whole mats of water hyacinth the size of garden plots, dead hogs bloated till their legs stuck straight out like table pegs, and the occasional plastic chemical tote that had broken loose from a chemical wharf in Baton Rouge.

Usually.

Harlan engaged the hydraulic pump. The skimmer’s drive-leg lowered into the wash with a dull whine. He shoved the throttle forward half an inch. The boat backed out of the slip into the broad, blind channel, its flat nose swinging into the teeth of the gray wind.

The settlement of Pointe-aux-Rats didn't disappear behind him so much as it dissolved into the horizontal line of the levee. From the water, the only things that stayed visible were the radar tower—derelict now, its open-mesh basket frozen at a twenty-degree tilt toward the sea—and the three elevated water tanks that had belonged to the sulfur company before the mines went under. They looked like giant, rusted iron mushrooms growing out of the water. Everything else was reed-breaks, salt-grass, and the occasional rib of an oil barge that had been run aground to act as a breakwater and then abandoned to the barnacles.

Harlan steered by the line of the old canal. Even with three fathom of water over the banks, the channel had a different texture on the surface. Where the dredged cut lay beneath, the swells had long, round backs; where the flats began, the chop was short, steep, and broken by yellow foam that gathered in lines like spit.

He ran at six knots, just enough to keep the rudders biting through the cross-current. Two miles out, where the old shell road used to carry the crew trucks to the ferry landing, a white iron cross stuck four feet out of the chop. It was the top of the cemetery gate.

The people who had built the cemetery had known about the water, of course. They had buried their dead in concrete vaults that sat four feet high on the natural ridge, long rows of white boxes that looked like miniature bakeries in the weed fields. But that was when the marsh had thirty miles of salt-meadow between it and the surf. Once the outer marsh became open water, the ground under the vaults had simply turned into mush. Some had cracked and spilled their gravel; others had tipped whole into the bayous, rolling like casks until the silt caught them.

A gull was sitting on the cross arm. It didn't move as the boat slid past thirty yards off. Its yellow eye followed the skimmer, bright and dumb.

Beneath the keel, the depth-sounder was clicking with a dry, irregular tick, like an old clock with gravel in the escapement. The green phosphor tube on the dashboard was clouded with moisture inside the glass, but Harlan could read the green line. Twelve feet. Fourteen feet. Then a sharp rise to six feet—the old highway embankment. Then down into the trough where the borrow pit had been dug seventy years ago to build the very road that was now seven feet under his propeller.

The water was slackening. Harlan felt it in the throttle. The engine’s pitch dropped half a tone as the resistance on the wheels fell off.

This was the dangerous hour. The river had run out of push, and the sea hadn't quite decided to take the land over completely. Everything went flat. The chop died down into an oily, undulating skin that looked heavy enough to bear a man's weight if he stepped lightly. The yellow foam lines ceased their drifting and lay in wide, curdled mats that smelled of rotten bladder-wrack and sour iron.

Harlan pulled the throttle back to idle. The skimmer glided forward by its own weight, the aluminum hull hissing as it plowed through a raft of dead cane.

Ahead, the schoolhouse sat where it always sat, though nothing showed above the surface now except the rusted cupola and the iron lightning rod with its hollow glass ball still miraculously unbroken. The building had been red brick, two stories of it, built during the Works Progress days when the government thought you could anchor an empire in the mud with enough hydraulic cement. It had lasted longer than the store, longer than the post office, longer even than the church.

Harlan let the skimmer drift until the bow bumped the cupola's lead flashing with a hollow clink. He reached out with a gloved hand and took hold of the lightning rod’s guy wire. It was slick with slime, green river-weed clinging to the twisted strands like greasy ribbons.

He shut down the diesel.

The silence that came down was not empty. It was full of small, wet noises. The lap of the river against the tin-shingle roof three feet under the surface; the hiss of marsh gas bubbling up from the mud through the floor drains of the classrooms below; the distant, low-frequency hum of the Gulf, forty miles away, working at the edge of the continental shelf like someone breathing through an iron pipe.

Harlan pulled his boots tighter at the calf and went to the stern. He picked up the grappling iron. It was a three-pronged anchor he had forged himself out of concrete rebar, the tines ground to blunt points so they wouldn't hang up too easily on timber rafters.

"School tax," he muttered to himself. His voice sounded flat and small in the gray open. "Hundred and twelve years of dead fishermen paying for three rooms of geography."

He swung the iron twice to clear the boat's rail and dropped it over the side.

The line hissed through his leather gloves. Ten feet. Fifteen feet. Twenty feet. The building was sitting in a scour hole; the current had dug around the foundation like a pig rooting in straw. At twenty-four feet, the rope slackened.

Harlan waited. He took the line between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the vibration.

Through the hemp, you could tell what the iron was touching. Stone was hard and sharp, a short clack that traveled all the way up the arm. Wood was dull, a heavy thud that held the tines for a second before releasing them. Silt was nothing—just a cold drag that made the rope heavy without stopping it.

The iron struck something that rang.

It wasn't the dull clink of roof tin. It was thick, cast metal. The bell. The school bell was still hanging in the lower belfry, twelve feet beneath his keel, jammed into its timber frame by fifty years of river mud.

Harlan took two turns of the line around the bronze deck cleat and hauled until the rope drew taut as a bowstring. The skimmer listed slightly to starboard as it took the strain. He worked the line back and forth, trying to hop the tines over the rim of the bell housing toward the chimney chase where the vault had been built into the brick foundation.

Then the rope twitched.

It wasn't a drag twitch. It wasn't the boat swinging on the tide. It was three distinct, measured jerks, like something had taken the iron between its palms and shaken it to see what was on the other end.

Harlan let go of the hemp as if it had been heated in a charcoal brazier.

He stood in the middle of the small, open deck, his boots planted wide, his hand dropping by instinct to the heavy lignum-vitae fid he kept in his belt for splicing cable. The river was dead flat. The skimmer didn't roll. The foam mats hung motionless around the hull, caught in that perfect balance between the salt wedge below and the brown runoff above.

"Bottom’s soft," he said aloud. "Just the mud giving."

The rope didn't jerk again. But it didn't go slack, either. It stayed bar-taut, angled straight down into the black hole where the center hallway of the school used to be.

Then, six feet off the port quarter, something broke the skin of the water.

It didn't splash. It came up slow, pushing a dome of greasy water ahead of it before the surface broke with a small, sucking gasp.

It was an arm.

It wasn't a bone, and it wasn't the gray, waterlogged meat you found when an oil-rig diver stayed down too long in the intake vents. It was pale, the color of turnip flesh that had spent the winter in a cellar, covered in a fine, white film of river silt that made it look powdered, like an actor’s face. The fingers were long and blunt-ended, the nails stained with that deep, indelible yellow that comes from handling raw sulfur or drying tobacco leaves.

It hung there in the oily current, about three inches above the water, the wrist bent at an impossible, rubbery angle.

Harlan didn't breathe. He didn't reach for the gaff. He had lived in the delta forty-eight years; he had seen the coffins come out of the ground at Grand Isle after the October gale of '38; he had seen the old cemetery at Cheniere Caminada walk right out into the surf like a herd of white sheep. You didn't touch what the river had unburied until you knew whether it was coming or going.

The water around the arm began to clear.

In the slack tide, the silt settled fast. Six inches down, then a foot down, the gray murk parted like tea leaves in a cup.

Beneath the arm, just under the film of diesel oil that had drifted out from the skimmer’s exhaust, was a face. It was tilted up toward the gray sky, eyes open and wide, the pupils gone the milky blue of river pearls. The mouth was slightly open, packed with dark, fine river silt that looked like black coffee grounds between the teeth.

Harlan knew the nose. He had seen that nose on four different men who worked the lime kiln at the cut when he was a boy. It was the LeBlanc nose—narrow, crooked in the middle where an oyster dredge had caught the bridge back during the strike of '22, with the left nostril notched from an old hook-scar.

"Ambrose," Harlan whispered.

The name tasted like river water in his mouth.

Ambrose LeBlanc had gone into the canal behind the schoolhouse during the hurricane that took the post office. That was the year they had the three-day blow from the south, when the water rose nine feet in three hours and they found eight children sitting in the branches of an oak tree three miles out in the salt-meadow. Ambrose had gone back for the team of mules. Neither the mules nor Ambrose had come back to the landing, and the family had put an empty cypress box into the ground on the ridge with his initials carved on the lid with a Barlow knife.

The mouth moved.

A single bubble of marsh gas, round and silver as a new dime, forced its way through the silt packed between the teeth. It rose through the water, wobbled for a second on the surface tension, and burst with a faint, rotten pop that smelled of iron-scale and old swamp mud.

The fingers on the pale arm closed once, slowly, the yellow nails digging into the soft palm until the skin creaked like wet harness leather. Then the hand sank two inches, drifted sideways with the very first creep of the rising tide, and pointed down into the dark water where the rope disappeared.

The skimmer gave a sudden, sharp lurch.

Down in the dark, thirty feet down among the waterlogged joists and the mud-silted desks, the iron had taken hold. Not of the chimney. Not of the vault.

The line began to sing. A high, thin drone, like a fiddle string being scraped with a greased bow, came up through the hemp, through the bronze cleat, through the aluminum skin of the boat until Harlan could feel it in the soles of his feet, vibrating in the marrow of his shins.

The tide had turned. The salt was coming back.

The hemp rope did not snap, but it groaned as the fibers stretched, weeping cold drops of brackish water that smelled of old pondweed and tallow. Harlan did not wait for the cleat to tear out of the deck. He caught the turns with his calloused palms, bracing his hip against the gunwale, and kicked the dog-latch on the drum reel. The friction brake smoked, a dry, sharp stench that cut right through the stink of the bottom-ooze, before the spool yielded half a fathom of line.

Down below, the thing that had held the iron let go. The release was not violent; it was soft and slow, like drawing a butter knife out of cold lard.

On the surface, the dead man did not sink. He drifted, turning half a circle in the counter-eddy that always set in when the Gulf began to master the river’s drop. The pale arm rested flat upon the scum-line, the crooked fingers pointing north now, toward the great drowned bends where the sugar cane used to run thirty miles back from the natural levees.

Harlan reached for the throttle, his thumb hovering over the starter valve. The sense of an old, dumb patience clung to the air. You did not run from a floater in the lower parish, not if you wanted your neighbors to speak to you when the winter meat was divided, and certainly not when the floater had a name you could trace back to an iron brand on an ox yoke. But there was a difference between a drowned man who had drifted out of a caved-in vault on the morning tide and a man who looked up through eighteen inches of river-gravy and held a three-prong grappling iron like a fellow checking the heft of a garden spade.

"Ambrose," Harlan said again, his throat dry as a kiln brick. "You let that iron alone. That’s state iron. It’s got two seasons left in the tines."

The face beneath the slick did not alter its set, but the eye rolled. It was not the loose, milky roll of meat turning in the current; the cloudy blue pupil fixed itself on the skimmer’s port seam, tracking the weld from the stem down to the water-line. The mouth opened another fraction of an inch, and a thin streamer of silt drifted out from between the lips, looking like black lace as the incoming tide caught it and braided it into the river water.

The tide was not a gentle thing down here. It did not lap against a beach like it did on the postcards the oil company used to hand out at the Houma landing. It crept in from below, heavy with salt and cold as iron ore, sliding under the lighter, brown fresh water that had spent two weeks running down from Minnesota. It lifted the whole world from beneath. The skimmer rose four inches against the schoolhouse cupola with a wet, wooden scrape that peeled a strip of lichen off the cypress boards.

Harlan didn't fire the diesel. The noise would carry three miles over the flats, and there were things living in the high cane that didn't need to know a six-cylinder was running without a guard on the intake. Instead, he took the long ash pole from the rack under the coaming, planted the iron-shod heel against the brickwork of the submerged chimney, and leaned his weight against it.

The pole bowed until the grain hummed, but the boat moved. It slipped away from the brick cupola, sliding over the drowned tin shingles with a faint, sliding hiss. Ambrose did not follow, but he did not sink, either. He remained balanced on the interface between the fresh head and the salt wedge, turning slowly like an oar left adrift in a basin. As the boat cleared the school roof, the arm settled into the wake, the yellow nails trailing through the film of motor oil Harlan had dropped when he backed out of the slip.

Two hundred yards to the east, the remains of the parish road emerged from the gray water like the spine of a dead sturgeon. It was nothing more than an asphalt ribbon now, broken every twenty paces by gaps where the tidal culverts had collapsed and let the marsh through. A rusted mail delivery van, its wheels long since buried in the silt, sat on the highest crown of the grade. The yellow paint had faded to the color of wet straw, and the roof had been hammered flat by forty seasons of pelican roosting.

Harlan brought the skimmer alongside the roadbed, letting the flat aluminum belly settle into the soft mud of the shoulder. He tied off to the van’s rusted steering column through the open driver’s window, using a half-hitch that would come loose with a single jerk if the water began to run too fast.

The engine was cold now, its iron block ticking as it shed the morning’s heat.

He opened his toolbox, a cedar chest bound with copper strap that had belonged to his uncle, and lifted out the secondary tackle: a forty-pound mushroom anchor, two hundred feet of tarred line, and the hand-dredge he had made from an old grease drum and a pair of leaf-springs. If the vault was down in the boiler cellar, the grappling iron was the wrong tool anyway. It was too light; it would only skip along the top of the mud-pack like a needle on a chipped record.

He looked back toward the cupola.

The church bell had ceased its vibration, but the surface around the schoolhouse was no longer flat. A dozen small circles, the size of tin plates, were rising and breaking around the brick chimney. It looked like the water over an oyster bed when the drumfish were feeding, but there were no drumfish this far up the reach since the sulfur plants had let their tailings go during the big storm.

"They aren't fish," Harlan told the empty cab of the mail van.

The van didn't answer, but a fiddler crab, gray and swollen with river salt, crawled out of the horn button and sat on the dashboard, waving its great yellow claw at the river as if directing traffic that had ceased to run forty years ago.

Harlan spat over the rail and reached into the pocket of his duck jacket for his whetstone. He began to draw the gray slate down the edge of his salvage knife, working with the slow, circular stroke his father had taught him on the oyster platforms at Pointe-à-la-Hache. The sound was comforting: scrit-scrit-scrit, like a cricket behind a woodbox.

The parish records had to be in the cellar because that was where the old man who kept the books had stayed until the water reached the transoms. Everyone in the lower basin knew about Mr. Toussaint. He had been seventy when the first levee went in '42, and he had possessed that particular kind of small-town stubbornness that mistook forty miles of encroaching seawater for a temporary administrative inconvenience. He had moved the ledger cases from the front office to the vault, then from the vault to the furnace platform, and when the furnace went under, he had simply climbed onto the top of the boiler with his kerosene lantern and a tin of salt pork.

They hadn't found Toussaint when the rescue skiffs came through from the naval station. They had only found his hat, a gray felt fedora with a lead sinker pinned to the band to keep the wind from taking it, floating in the stairwell between the second-grade primers and the lunchroom trays.

If the records were there, they were under four feet of river sediment that had the consistency of wet flour. It would take the hand-dredge and three hours of hard winching to clear a hole big enough to get the hooks into the vault door. And Harlan had roughly two hours before the salt wedge reached its peak and began to push the top-water back into the willows with the force of an open sluice.

He checked his pocket watch. It was an old Elgin with a nickel case that had pitted until it looked like bread crust. Ten minutes past nine. The tide would stand until eleven, maybe eleven-fifteen if the southeast breeze held the Gulf back against the barrier sands.

He stood up on the skimmer’s thwart and looked down into the water beside the road.

The asphalt was six inches below the surface here. Under the clear film of the fresh water, he could see the yellow dashed line that had once divided the north-bound traffic from the south-bound. It was covered in a slippery pelt of brown periphyton, but the paint held, lead-based and poisonous, refusing to rot even after thirty years of drowning. A school of tiny top-minnows, no bigger than spruce needles, was darting along the line, using the slight ridge of the paint to shelter from the current.

Something was coming up the road.

It was not moving on the surface. It was moving along the asphalt, down where the yellow line vanished into the deeper water near the culvert.

A cloud of silt rose first, a brown puff that blossomed like smoke from an underwater blast, drifting slowly with the tidal creep. Then came the noise: a heavy, dull scrape, the sound of iron dragging over gravel, muffled and deadened by ten feet of river.

Ch-clank. Ch-clank.

It was the sound a man makes when he is walking in iron-toed boots with six fathoms of logging chain wrapped around his waist.

Harlan didn't reach for his gun. A rifle was no good against the river; you shot into the water and the ball came apart like a dried bean before it reached three feet, leaving you with an empty chamber and an arm full of hot powder-stink. He picked up the heavy ash pole instead, holding it by the balance point, the iron spike pointing down toward the yellow line.

The water thirty feet out bulged.

It was not Ambrose this time. Ambrose was too light; Ambrose had died in the ditch and had never worn iron in his life except for the buckle on his belt and the rings in his ears. This thing had weight. It had the weight of the old days, when the state put chain gangs out on the roadbeds with twelve-pound sledges to break the river limestone before the asphalt was poured.

A head cleared the ditch-weed.

The hair was gone, replaced by a dense cap of river-moss that trailed down the nape of the neck like greasy horsehair. The shoulders were broad, flat slabs of muscle that had pickled in the salt water until they were the color of cured ham, crossed by the gray canvas straps of an old pair of convict overalls. The brass buttons on the bib were green with verdigris, each one stamped with the pelican that was supposed to represent the state's care for its own.

The walker stopped five yards from the skimmer’s stern. He stood in the middle of the submerged road, the water reaching just above his collarbones, his chin tilted up so that his nose and mouth were open to the air.

He breathed. It was not a real breath; it was just the river falling out of his throat as he cleared his chest, a long, rattling rattle that sounded like gravel being turned in an iron bucket.

"Road’s closed," Harlan said.

The walker did not look at Harlan. His eyes were small, deep-set, and covered with that same bluish film that Ambrose had worn, like the skin on boiled milk. He lifted one hand—a huge, spatulate thing with the fingernails worn down to the quick from handling rock—and touched the rusted bumper of the mail van. His skin made a wet, sucking sound against the corroded steel.

"You’re forty years late on the contract, Cletus," Harlan said, keeping his voice level, the ash pole balanced on his forearm. "The camp at the siphon went down during the June rise. There isn't any camp. There isn't any sergeant. There’s just eight feet of mud and some blue herons."

The thing named Cletus didn't turn his head, but his jaw worked. The lower lip had been split by an old cut, the scar white and hard against the gray-pink flesh. A trickle of black water ran down his chin, joining the river again at his neck.

"Water," Cletus said.

The word was thick, mangled by a tongue that had been swollen with brine for half a lifetime. It wasn't a question, and it wasn't a complaint. It was just the name of the thing that was all around them, stated the way a man might name a horse he had been following all day through the brush.

"Plenty of it," Harlan agreed. "Too much of it. The parish is buying the bottoms back. If you’re looking for your three acres and the mule, they’re down in five fathom off the light-tower. You ought to go on down there and lie down. The tide’s going to run hard toward the Gulf by noon, and you don't want to be caught on the crown when the scour starts."

Cletus took another step. The chain around his ankles—three links of rusted five-eighths iron that had been cold-shut around his shins—dragged across the asphalt with a scream that set Harlan’s teeth on edge. The sound was too loud for the swamp; it belonged to a foundry or a stone quarry, something dry and hot and full of dust.

The walker’s hand moved from the bumper to the skimmer’s gunwale.

The aluminum grooved under his grip. It didn't bend; it dented, the five-thousand-series plate yielding to those dead, salt-cured fingers as if it were lead flashing on a roof. The boat tipped three inches to port, the muddy water slopping over the rub-rail and wetting the legs of Harlan’s boots.

Harlan didn't strike with the spike. You didn't spike them if you could help it; the spike stayed in the bone, and then you were attached to two hundred pounds of salt-cured meat that didn't have any reason to stop walking until it reached the edge of the continental shelf. Instead, he took the flat of the ash oar and brought it down across the back of the walker’s wrists with a clean, short snap.

The sound was like hitting a side of bacon with a pine board.

The grip didn't break, but the skin split. No blood came out—just a smear of yellow fluid that smelled like the liquid at the bottom of an old bait freezer.

"Get your meat off my boat," Harlan said, his teeth together. "I’ve got forty gallons of diesel in the bilge and an order for sixty-weight oil from the land office. I ain't got the fuel to drag your chain three miles back to the siphon."

Cletus looked at his wrist. The skin was curled back like birch bark, showing the white, fat-free sinew beneath, but there was no pain in the face. There hadn't been any pain in that face since the state doctor signed the yellow slip in the camp infirmary while the water was coming through the baseboards. He looked up, his milky eyes finally finding Harlan’s face through the yellow river glare.

"The gate," Cletus said.

"Gate’s down," Harlan said. "The posts went into the cut twenty years back. You’re free, Cletus. You’ve been free since the levee broke. Go on out to the bar and find yourself some sand."

Cletus didn't move. He stood there in the road, the current parting around his thick neck in two greasy ripples, his hand still resting on the dented aluminum.

A hundred yards away, the bell in the schoolhouse belfry gave a single, muffled stroke.

Toll.

It wasn't the grappling iron. Harlan’s line was slack, floating in a wide bight between the boat and the cupola. The rope was not moving.

The sound had come from inside the mud. It was the bell itself, shifting on its gudgeons as the bottom began to soften under the weight of the rising sea.

Cletus turned his head toward the sound. The skin of his neck was tight, like drum parchment, and as he moved, a small, dried crawfish fell out of the moss behind his ear and hit the water with a light click.

"Class," Cletus whispered.

"No class today," Harlan said. "School was condemned before your daddy was born. The books are full of silt, Cletus. There isn't anybody to teach you your letters."

The dead man let go of the gunwale. His fingers left five gray depressions in the bare aluminum, each one outlined by a greasy smudge of dead skin and river-slime. He didn't look at Harlan again. He turned toward the schoolhouse, his heavy boots finding the submerged edge of the asphalt and stepping off into the deeper water of the borrow pit with a heavy, hollow plunge.

The water closed over his head.

For three seconds, nothing showed except a circle of foam that had turned the color of ditch-water. Then a line of bubbles—large, fat bubbles that smelled of sour coal and wet lime—began to trace a path across the flooded pasture toward the schoolhouse cupola.

Harlan took a deep breath, the air tasting of sulfur and the fried cornmeal he had eaten for breakfast six hours ago. His shirt was plastered to his shoulder blades by the gray river fog, but his hands were cold. He wiped his palms on his trousers, leaving two dark streaks on the brown duck.

"Rust and silt," he muttered, picking up the hand-dredge. "Nothing down here but rust and silt and people who don't know enough to stay where they were put."

He untied the painter from the mail van’s steering column. The van seemed to sink another half-inch as the skimmer let go, settling into the mud with a faint sigh of rusty metal. The fiddler crab remained on the horn button, motionless, watching the gray water rise toward its legs with the dull indifference of things that were made to live in the ditch.

Harlan shoved the skimmer off with the oar.

The current was running faster now. The slack had lasted barely forty minutes; already the yellow lines of foam were straightening out, pointing north toward the high ground that was no longer high. The salt was winning. Under the brown top-water, the Gulf was a great, cold piston, shoving thirty miles of dead sea into every ditch, every canal, and every basement that had ever been dug by men who thought the dirt would stay where they had shovelled it.

He let the boat drift back toward the schoolhouse, keeping twenty feet off the line of the old fence.

The cupola was lower now. The water had reached the bottom of the arched louvers, and a dead snakebird was caught in the copper screening, its black wings spread out like a fan against the green mesh.

Harlan brought the boat to the windward side of the roof, where the current would hold him against the shingles without using the engine. He took the heavy iron dredge—the sixty-pound drum with the serrated lip—and set it on the rail.

If he was going down into the boiler cellar, he had to do it before the salt wedge brought the rest of them up.

Because Ambrose and Cletus were just the outriders. They were the ones who had died in the ditches, the ones whose bones hadn't been weighted down with six feet of river-brick and two coats of lime. Down in the parish churchyard, three miles back toward the cut, there were four hundred vaults that had been built out of red clay brick during the yellow fever summer of '78.

And the churchyard, Harlan knew from the gauge readings, was already under twelve feet of water.

He reached down and caught the dredge line, testing the splice with his thumb. The hemp was stiff and cold, but it was honest rope, four-strand manila that had been soaked in pine tar until the rot couldn't find a tooth-hold.

"All right, Toussaint," he said to the water between his knees. "Let’s see what the state thinks your paper is worth."

He pushed the drum off the gunwale.

The iron hit the surface with a heavy, flat chug that sent a circle of yellow foam out toward the willows. The line whined through his gloves, thirty feet, thirty-five feet, forty feet, until the drum struck the boiler room roof with a dull, iron thump that set the skimmer vibrating from stem to stern.

Then, through the wood of the floorboards, Harlan heard the bell again.

It wasn't tolling this time.

It was ringing. A rapid, frantic clatter, like the sexton was hanging from the rope with both boots off the ground, warning the people who had been dead fifty years that the crevasse was open and the river was in the yard.