It was rainy season, the sky sagging above Mobile like a mouldy mattress, and behind the bluff, where the ground was low, all the houses were flooded. The damp jammed its fat fingers between the timbers of the cabins and paddled the mortar of clay and oyster shells that filled them. Nothing dried. In Elisabeth’s garden the pumpkins swelled, their leaves greasy with mud. The cabin smelled of rot. Jean-Claude had been gone from Mobile for nearly two months. She had only just begun to show. The sickness that had tormented her lingered for days afterwards, the bleeding much longer. There was a fever, some manner of poison in the blood brought on by the ceaseless rain, the unwholesome thickness of the air. She dreamed vivid, fevered dreams. In her dreams, over and over, she unwrapped the meat and opened the sacks of corn beneath the bed and stirred the stew in its pot over the fire and, pressing the food into her mouth with both hands, she ate and ate and ate, until her belly swelled, splitting the skin in two.
