The next photo shows several black children playing in a dusty road, but they’re all wearing clothes. As I flip through the little binder, the images blend into a montage of life on the island. Not the privileged life I knew as the granddaughter of Dr. and Mrs. Kirkland, but the daily life of the blacks who lived there year-round. One photo shows Daddy with a young black man-Jesse Billups with a “˜fro?-sitting on a porch playing box guitars. Bottles of cheap wine stand on the porch rail, and a heavy black woman with pendulous breasts dances barefoot on the ground. Luke has a glass bottleneck on the third finger of his left hand. I can almost hear the cutting wail of the notes as he draws the slide quivering along the strings.

The last photograph is of me.

I’m sitting on the floor of the barn with my legs crossed, much like Louise in her lotus photo. My elbows are on my knees, my chin in my hands, and I’m staring into the lens with big round eyes that look exactly like my father’s. I look more at peace in that picture than I’ve ever felt in my life.

I look about two years old.

What happened to me after that? What took away the peace in those eyes? Who took it away? The person who shot this picture?

With a long exhalation of relief, I drop the album. It falls beside the rotten prunes on the wire. There’s something revolting about keeping food stuffed in a bag beneath a floor. The prunes have an especially nasty look, as though they were being saved for some reason beyond the ken of normal human beings. A necklace, maybe, like something a peasant would use to ward off vampires.

“Miss Catherine? That you over there?”

A black man in grease-stained khaki work clothes has appeared among the trees. It’s Mose, the yardman. After so many years at Malmaison, he moves among these trees like a ghost. He and Daddy must have run into each other many times on their solitary forays under the canopy of oaks.

“It’s me, Mose.”

“You all right? You fall down or something?”

“I’m just resting.”

He moves closer, but his advance is solicitous, the way Pearlie moves around houseguests who don’t know her. Mose can’t be much younger than my grandfather, and time has worn him down to a bent nub, like a tree that finally gives way to decades of wind and bugs and rain. The scleras of his eyes are yellow, and gray stubble grows high up his cheeks. It’s hard to imagine that I once saw this man carry railroad ties across his shoulders.

“What you got there?” Mose asks. “You drawing pictures?”

He’s noticed the sketchbook, the one artifact of the bag that I haven’t yet examined. “I’m just looking at some old pictures my father took.”

He nods agreeably, but then his eyes focus on something else. “What’s that there?”

He’s pointing at the prunes. “Some kind of rotten food. I think it’s prunes.”

Mose bends and picks up the string of blackened fruit. He studies one, pinches it between his fingers, then brings it to his nose and sniffs it.

“Mose, you’re a braver man than I.”

He laughs. “You ain’t no man. You a girl.”

I always wondered if Mose was simpleminded, but I’ve never known for sure.

“These ain’t prunes.” He places one of the blackened things between his front teeth and bites down, testing its texture. “This here be hide.”

“Hide?”

“Skin. Some kind of animal skin. Chunks of something.”

“Some kind of hunting trophy, maybe?”

Mose shrugs. “Something like that, I reckon.”

As he hands me the necklace, the words of the grizzled vet from the Vietnam Veterans Building come back to me: A lot of Hollywood movies don’t show nothing but grunts cutting off ears and killing women and kids. And some of that happened, I won’t lie.

I stuff the necklace quickly into the bag, nausea rolling through my stomach.

“Miss Catherine? You sure you all right?”

I nod and begin gathering the rest of my father’s things. Far behind Mose, I see Michael’s Expedition carefully negotiating its way through the trees.

“Do you know anything about DeSalle Island, Mose?”

His face wrinkles in thought. “Not no more, I don’t.”

“But you did?”

“Well, I was born down there, wasn’t I?”

A current of excitement goes through me. “You were born on the island?”

“Sho was. I think everybody who ever worked up here for your family was born on the island. Dr. Kirkland always saying nobody knows how to work no more. He about right, too. He say people from the island still do a day’s work for a day’s pay.”

Poverty wages, probably. “Do you like my grandfather, Mose?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. Dr. Kirkland been real good to me.”

“I think you know what I mean.”

Mose looks around as though someone might be eavesdropping. “You know your granddaddy, Miss Catherine. He a tough man, and he know how to squeeze a nickel till the buffalo shits-pardon my language.”

I say nothing, leaving a vacuum that Mose feels compelled to fill.

“Dr. Kirkland be kind of like that story I heard a long time ago. The plantation owner gives a slave a pint of whiskey. Another slave asks how he liked it, and the first slave says, Well, if it’d been any better, he wouldn’t have give it to me, and if it’d been any worse, I couldn’t have drunk it.”

Mose isn’t simpleminded at all.

“Dr. Kirkland takes care of the people on the island, though,” he adds quickly. “They better off than a lot of black folks here in town.”

“What about my father, Mose?”

He looks confused for a minute. “Mr. Luke, you mean?”

“Yes.”

He smiles broadly, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “Mr. Luke always had a good word for me when he passed. Sometimes he gave me a smoke off whatever he was smoking, too. If you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“I liked old Luke, but I had to be careful around him. Dr. Kirkland didn’t like him none at all.”

Michael’s Expedition is close now, threading its way through the trees like a tank wary of land mines. “Did you like the island, Mose?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t know nothing else back then. I wouldn’t go back now, though. I like my TV in the evenings. And I don’t like that river. Too many people done died in that water.”

“Did you know somebody who drowned?”

“I had a cousin drown in it. Sho did.”

“Girl or boy?”

“Boy. Name of Enos. But I believe a little girl drowned some years before that, too.”

“Do you think the island is a bad place?”

Mose squints at me as though trying to make out something far away. “What you mean, Miss Catherine?”

“Is there something bad there? Something you might not be able to explain, but that you just feel? I used to feel something like that there.”

The yardman closes his eyes. After a moment, a little shudder goes through him. Then he opens his eyes and looks at me like a little boy. “When I was young, the old folks used to say killers from the prison roamed the roads at night. From Angola, you know? Like they’d slip out of the prison at night, float over to the island, and walk the roads looking for children. All that seems like a fairy story now, something they used to scare us. But still, a lot of kids wouldn’t get near them roads anytime round dark, and not even in the daytime by themselves.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs again. “That’s just how it was. You’d have to ask somebody else the why of it. But I’ll tell you thisI got me a lot of kin down there, and I hardly been back there in forty years. And now that you ask me, I don’t care if I never go back again.”

As Michael’s Expedition rumbles up beside Mose, the yardman gives me a wave and ambles off through the trees. By the time Michael rolls down his window, Mose has vanished. Like my father, he is another ghost of Malmaison.

I take up Luke Ferry’s bag of secrets and climb into the SUV.