Instead, he looked upon the naked, clay-colored back of a woman whose knees were splayed across his father's loins. Her head reared back and her mouth opened silently, then a sound broke from her lips that he had never heard a woman make before. She blew out her breath, as though the room had grown cold, bending down toward his father now, her knees and thighs clenching him as if she was mounted on a horse. Her back shuddered again and her hands touched his father's face with a tenderness and intimacy that somehow seemed stolen from his mother and misused by another.

Ira's thoughts made no sense and were like shards of glass in his head.

Then the box broke under his feet and he was left hanging from the sill, the woman's eyes fastening on his now, his father's uplifted face popping with sweat like pinpoints of dew on a pumpkin.

Ira fell into the banana sta;ks and ran through the yard, dirty and hot and itching with ants, his head ringing as though someone had clapped him on both ears.

A moment later his father appeared on the gallery, barefoot, his shirt hanging outside his pants.

"Sit down with me, son," his father said.

"No," Ira said.

His father walked down the steps, his silhouette blocking out the sun. He touched Ira under each eye with his thumb. "There's nothing to cry about," he said.

"Who is she?" Ira said.

"A woman I see sometimes." He took his son's hand and led him back up to the gallery. They sat together on a swing that was suspended on chains from an overhead beam. It was spring and the willows and cypresses along the riverbanks were filled with wind and green with new leaf.

"Your mother has the consumption. That means we can't have the normal life of a husband and wife. I just hope God and you both forgive my weakness," his father said.

"She's a nigger. She was sitting on top of you," the boy said. His father had been stroking his head. But now he took his hand away and looked at the river and a hawk that hung motionlessly in the wind above the trees.

"Will you be telling your mother about this?" he asked.

"I hate you," Ira said.

"You tear my heart out, son."

"I hate you. I hate you. I hate you," Ira said.

Then he was running out of the yard and down the street in his short pants, running through mud puddles, past the grinning faces of whores and teamsters and drunk Irishmen, his legs and face splattered with water that was black and oily and smelled like sewage and felt like leeches on his skin.

BACK at Angola Plantation, Ira refused to eat, fought with his British schoolmaster, and attacked a mulatto dressmaker at the dirt crossroads in front of the plantation store.

She was a statuesque, coffee-colored woman who wore petticoats and carried a parasol. She had been waiting for a carriage, fanning herself, her chin pointed upward, when Ira had gathered up a handful of rocks, sharp ones, and began pelting her in the back.

The store clerk had to pick him up like a sack of meal and carry him across the pommel of his saddle to Ira's house.

His mother sat with him in the kitchen, her eyes and cheeks bright with the fever that never left her body. The light was failing outside, the clouds like purple smoke above the bluffs on the river. Ira could hear the pendulum swinging on the clock in the dining room, the soft chimes echoing off the walls.

"What frightens you so?" his mother said, stroking his head.

"I'm not afraid of anything," he replied.

"Something happened in Baton Rouge, didn't it? Something you're trying to hide from your mother."

He clenched his hands in his lap and looked at the floor.

"Is that why you hit the sewing woman with rocks? A well-dressed mulatto woman?" she said.

He scraped a scab on his hand with his thumbnail. His mother lifted his chin with her finger. Her black hair was pulled back like wire against her scalp, her dark eyes burning.

"You have my looks and my skin. If you don't inherit my family's bad lungs, you'll always be young," she said.

"He let her sit on him. He put her-"

"What?" his mother said, her face contorting.

"He had her breast in his mouth. They were naked. On a bed in Nigger Town."

"Get control of yourself. Now, start over. You can trust me, Ira. But you have to tell me the truth."

She made him go through every detail, describing the woman, the positions on the bed, the words his father had spoken to him outside the cottage.

"What is her name?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said, shaking his head.

"You must know. He must have used her name."

But Ira couldn't speak now. His face was hot, his eyes swimming with tears, his voice hiccuping in his throat. His mother rose from her chair and looked for a long time out the window. Ira's father was in the garden, snipping roses, placing them in a bucket of water. He did not see his wife watching him. Then he glanced up at the window and waved.

She turned back toward her son.

"You must never tell anyone about this," she said.

"Is Papa going to know I told?"

"You didn't tell me anything, Ira. This didn't happen," she said.

She walked close to him and pulled his face into the folds of her dress and rubbed the top of his head with both hands. He could smell an odor like camphor and animal musk in her clothes. He put his arms around her thighs and buried his face against her stomach.

"When you were a baby I bathed you every morning and kissed you all over. I kissed your hands and your little feet and your bottom and your little private places. You'll always be my little man. You're my good little man, aren't you?" she said.

"Yes," he replied.

She released him and, with no expression on her face, walked out of the room. For reasons he could not understand he felt a sense of numbness, violation, shame and desertion, all at the same time. It was a feeling that would come aborning in his dreams the rest of his life.

FOR his birthday a week later, his father had the cook bake a strawberry cake and fry a dinner basket of chicken and convinced Ira's mother to join the two of them and an elderly black body servant named Uncle Royal for a picnic on the southern end of their property, three miles down the river.

His father chose this particular spot because it had been the site of a Spanish military garrison, supposedly overrun and massacred by Atakapa Indians in the eighteenth century, and as a boy Ira's father had played there and dug up the rusted shell of a Spanish helmet and a horseman's spur with an enormous spiked rowel on it.

They spread a blanket in a glade and set fishing lines in the river, and for a birthday present his father gave him a windup merry-go-round with hand-carved wooden horses on it that rotated in a circle while a musical cylinder played inside the base.

The river was yellow from the spring rains, thick and choked with mud, swirling with uprooted trees that floated southward toward New Orleans. The wind was drowsy and warm, the glade dotted with buttercups and bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, and for a while Ira forgot his father's infidelity and the brooding angerin his mother eyes and the blood-spotted handkerchief that stayed balled in the palm of her hand.

The body servant, Uncle Royal, wore a tattered black coat, a white shirt, a pair of purple pants and looked like he was made of sticks. He was fascinated by the windup merry-go-round that rested in the center of the blanket, next to the cake.

"Where something like that come from, Master Jamison?" he asked.

"All the way from England, across the big pond," Ira's father said.

"Lord, what my gran'child would give to play with something like that," Uncle Royal said.

"I tell you what, Royal, the storekeeper in Baton Rouge has another one just like it. On my next trip there, I'll buy it for you as an early Christmas present," Ira's father said.