His air was gone. Lost in a swirl of sediment and water, sightless in the murk, he clawed at the slick bottom. Eyes bulged with non-breathing. Empty lungs tried to suck through his throat, collapsing the walls like a squeezed cardboard milk carton. He tried to scream and tasted the putrid mud, knowing then that he was breathing bayou water and that he was doomed.
Sometime later, he lifted eyelids. Yvonne was there but she didn't see that Aurelie was awake. She was talking to the doctor.
"The new complication is pleurisy," the doctor said.
"Mais, please, doctor, what that is, ainh?"
"The lungs are filling with fluid, but the lining between the lungs and the dia.. .the muscle that makes the breathing is drying up."
She showed resignation and despair in the lines of her face. She seemed so much older, now, with her husband on his death bed. Too little sleep.
"We're making him as comfortable as we can," the doctor said. He patted her shoulder. He left the room. She began to weep. Aurelie tried to reach her for comfort, but he could not. His eyes closed slowly like night descending.
***
His brother had the bait. Grub worms in a can. Each of them had two poles already strung and set with bobs and weights.
Gray dew upon the grass. Soaking trousers. Bare feet upon the hard-packed, bramble-bordered cow trail, hopping plate-sized deposits of cattle droppings , the smell of the bayou like a covey of quail to a pointer. The sleepless night not even remembered. All day for fishing.
Still in tandem, they crossed the meadow and filed through the trees with morning rays cutting yellow-orange against gray-black tree trunks and shadow. Pepe, first and anyway the biggest, took the two best spots. He didn't have to search, they both already knew the best spots. Pepe went to them and jammed the blunt ends of the bamboo poles into the mud and set about skewering worms on the hooks.
Aurelie dug up enough worms and started across the log to that little cove by the cattails where he caught the bream that time in the spring. He was very careful of the water because he could not swim. The broad log had been worn smooth by many barefoot crossings.
He stepped on the snake. Felt the writhing, hard-muscled, deadly snake beneath his bare sole. He tried to continue on, not feeling a strike, everything too fast for fear, but fell.
Hitting the water, he even hoped the bamboo fishing poles would hold him up. But the lines and hooks and weights entangled him. His overalls, trapping no air, soaked through and bore him down. Toes hit slick bottom. He settled face down in the mud. Hellish blackness. Silky mud clinging. Water-silent, pulse-roaring. Bowels of the abyss. Air burst from his lungs, streaming vomit-bubbles from nose and mouth. He tasted the breath of bayou water, lost consciousness.
***
His mouth was dry. Yvonne was there. She slept. He tried to speak, but he could not. A grating pain in his lower back. Not enough oxygen to feed his own breathing muscles.
He managed to rattle the plastic oxygen tent. He heard it, heard the rattle so knew he was still alive. He resented her sleeping. She should be awake to keep him awake. He must stay awake so he would not lose his grasp. So that he wouldn't sink beyond the edge.
***
The house floated off the concrete support pillars. Yvonne and Aurelie clung to the roof. They floated down the Teche. A Teche expanded, engorged, flowing with deceptive, quiet, brown terror.
All through the rainy night, they clung there shivering. The morning sun first dried then baked them. Blisters burst and drained and dried and peeled back on their hands, faces, necks.
She sat easily, but Aurelie was stiff as a board, as a madrier. He could not stop scrambling with bloody toes and fingertips. There was no room to get farther from the water.
He could not even help her chase away the snakes. She did not try to keep away the foxes and raccoons and rabbits and the rest. Only the snakes did she shy away with a narrow branch plucked from an uprooted tree floating past.
He would not let go to wave to the boat. She got their attention. Because of her, the boat turned and they were saved. And still they had to pry his hands from the ridge of the roof where he had wedged his fingers hard beneath the shingles.
***
The doctor was shaking her by a shoulder.
"Madame Broussard? Madame Broussard?"
"Cassez ses mains!" she yelled in nightmare memory, Break his hands.
"Madame Broussard!"
She blinked groggily awake.
"Pardon, monsieur, j'etait …. Me, I dream, me."
"Madame Broussard, I'm sorry," the doctor went on quickly in French. "Your husband, he has passed."
And then he grabbed her as she collapsed. She wailed barely coherent about dreaming bad dreams while her husband lay dying. The doctor clutched her, ordered a sedative, muttered consolations like, 'went peacefully' and 'no longer in pain, no longer afraid.' But neither the consolations nor the medicine nor the comfort of her friends and family eased Yvonne's grief and guilt. She suffered through the whole gray business of the wake and the funeral and the interment. As they turned from the crypt in the family cemetery on the Teche, and the scattered drops of rain began to fall like errant tears, she wailed again as in the hospital and again collapsed.
The sedative again kept her quiet during another long, rain-drenched night. Her sister Emilie sat with her, listening at low volume on the battery-operated radio to the crackling whispers of rising flood water. She had no fear for herself or her sister because her dead brother-in-law, le pauvre défunt Aurelie, had built his house upon the highest ridge. It was what the sight of the flood would do to Yvonne that she feared.
Those concerns were well-founded. By the time the sedative had worn off, the flood had made of their ridge a narrow island. Yvonne stood unsteadily at the window. Then she turned to her sister.
"We must go and get Aurelie."
It was impossible. The cemetery was already under four feet of water. She managed to dissuade her sister until the water began to recede. Then Batiste Achete brought them out in the boat.
The boat turned past an overhang of willow into the little cemetery cove. They did not see it until they were afloat among the tombs, the white-washed, cross-topped crypts.
Aurelie's grave, his above-ground brick and cement sepulcher, was not where they had built it. It did not sit upon the ground awash in the flood. Yvonne clutched her rosary and the plat-bord, the gunwale of the boat with both hands, fingers straining white at the edges.
Eyes puffy-red with weeping blinked into the bright morning sunlight glinting off the pure white of the new, dry tomb. Aurelie's final resting place. Safe from the flood waters. Nestled in the thick-limbed fork of a sturdy live oak tree.