For my sister Mary Colette (Cookie) Benson

for your humor and your heart

I had Ambition, by which sin

The Angels fell;

I climbed and, step by step, O Lord,

Ascended into Hell.

— W.H. Davies, Ambition

The girl was just plain amazing with a knife. She had a natural talent, a gift from God Almighty, or so her father, Big Daddy Jake Renard, told her when, at the tender age of five and a half, she gutted her first speckled trout with the precision and expertise of a professional. Her father was so proud, he picked her up, put her on his shoulders-with her little skinny knees on either side of his face-and carried her down to his favorite watering hole, The Swan. He plopped her down on the bar and gathered his friends around to watch her gut another fish he'd tucked into the back pocket of his worn-out overalls. Milo Mullen was so impressed he offered to buy the child for fifty dollars cash right then and there, and he boasted that he could make three times that amount in one week renting the little girl out to the local fish shacks on the bayou.

Knowing Milo was only trying to be complimentary, Big Daddy Jake didn't take offense. Besides, Milo bought him a drink and made a real nice toast to his talented daughter.

Jake had three children. Remy, the oldest, and John Paul, a year younger, weren't even teenagers yet, but he could already see they were going to be bigger than he was. The boys were pistols, slipping in and out of mischief every single day, and both as smart as whips. He was proud of his boys, but it was a fact that his little Michelle was the apple of his eye. He never once held it against her that she damned near killed her mama getting herself born. His own sweet Ellie had what the doctors called a massive stroke inside her head right smack in the middle of that final push, and after her daughter was washed and wrapped in clean blankets, Ellie was taken from their marriage bed to the local hospital on the other side of St. Claire. A week later, when it was determined that she was never going to wake up, she was transferred by ambulance to a state institution. The doctor in charge of Ellie's care called the foul place a nursing home, but Big Daddy, seeing the stark, gray, stone building surrounded by an eight-foot iron fence, knew the doctor was lying to him. It wasn't a home at all. It was purgatory, plain and simple, a holding area here on earth where all the poor, lost souls did their penance before God welcomed them into heaven.

Jake cried the first time he went to see his wife, but he remained dry-eyed after that. Tears wouldn't make Ellie's condition any better or the terrible place she rested in any less bleak. The long hallway down the center of the building opened to room after room of seafoam green walls, institutional gray linoleum tile floors, and rickety old beds that squeaked every time the side rails were raised or lowered. Ellie was in a big square room with eleven other patients, some lucid, but most not, and there wasn't even enough space to pull up a chair next to her bed and sit a spell and talk to her.

Jake would have felt worse if his wife had known where she was resting, but her brain kept her in a state of perpetual sleep. What she didn't know couldn't upset her, he decided, and that fact gave him considerable peace of mind.

Every Sunday afternoon, once he had gotten out of bed and shaken off his aches and pains, he took Michelle to see her mama. The two of them, hand in hand, would stand at the foot of Ellie's bed and stare at her for a good ten or fifteen minutes, and then they would leave. Sometimes Michelle would pick a bouquet of wildflowers and tie them with twine and make a pretty bow. She'd leave them on her mama's pillow so she could smell their sweet fragrance. A couple of times she made a crown of daisies and put them, on her mother's head. Her daddy told her the tiara made Mama look real pretty, like a princess.

Jake Renard's luck changed a couple of years later when he won sixty thousand dollars in a private numbers game. Since it wasn't legal and the government didn't know about it, Jake didn't have to pay taxes on his windfall. He considered using the money to move his wife to a more pleasant setting, but somewhere deep down inside his head he could hear Ellie's voice scolding him for being impractical, wanting to spend the money on something that would do no one any good. And so, instead, Jake decided to use a little of the cash to buy The Swan. He wanted his boys to have a future tending bar when they finished growing up, stopped chasing skirts, and settled down with wives and babies to support. The rest of the money he tucked away for his retirement.

When Michelle wasn't in school-Jake didn't figure she needed an education, but the state figured she did-he took her everywhere he went. On fishing days, she sat beside him and passed the time talking like a magpie or reading stories to him out of the books she made him take her to the library to get. While he took his afternoon nap, she set the table and her brothers prepared supper. She was quite the little homemaker. She kept an immaculate house, no small feat given the fact that her father and her brothers were admittedly slovenly. In the summer months she always had fresh flowers in mason jars on the tables.

In the evening, Michelle accompanied Big Daddy to The Swan for the late shift. Some nights the litde girl fell asleep curled up like a tabby cat in the corner of the bar, and he'd have to carry her to the storage room in back, where he had a daybed set up for her. He treasured every minute he had with his daughter because he figured that, like many of the girls in the parish, she'd be pregnant and married by the time she turned eighteen.

It wasn't that he had low expectations for Michelle, but he was a realist, and all the pretty girls married young around Bowen, Louisiana. It was just the way things were, and Jake didn't figure his daughter would turn out any different. There wasn't much for the boys and girls to do in town except diddle with one another, and it was plain inevitable that the girls eventually found themselves in the family way.

Jake owned a quarter acre of land. He had built a one-bedroom cabin when he married Ellie, and he added on rooms as his family expanded. When the boys were old enough to help, he raised the roof and created a loft so that Michelle could have some privacy. The family lived deep in the swamp at the end of a winding dirt lane called Mercy Road. There were trees everywhere, some as old as a hundred years. In the backyard were two weeping willows nearly covered in moss that hung like crocheted scarves from the branches to the ground. When the mist rolled in from the bayou and the wind picked up and began to moan, the moss took on the eerie appearance of ghosts in the moonlight. On those nights, Michelle would scramble down from the loft and sneak into bed with Remy or John Paul.

From their house, the neighboring town of St. Claire was a quick twenty-minute walk away. There were treelined paved streets there, but it wasn't as pretty or as poor as Bowen. Jake's neighbors were used to poverty. They did the best they could to scratch a living out of the swampland and the water, and they scraped together an extra dollar every Wednesday night to play the numbers in hopes they would catch a wind-fell the way Jake Renard had.