About an hour after sunrise, the Reverend Hale's head reached back into the world screaming in a muted thunder of pain. He lifted it gently from the crude floorboards under the rickety table and turned it slightly to one side, wincing, but interested in the smell of chicory seeping down through the warm morning air. Creaking, he unrolled his long frame and tried standing up, carefully stepping free of the tattered sections of his host's spare blanket and stooping to fold it up.

"Morning, Marchand! Got somep'n for yore breakfast, better'n nuffin!" Gentry put a scarred tin plate down on the table with a mess of white rice on it and some unidentifiable gravy that smelled vaguely like bayou water, stiffened with chunks of pale catfish meat. Hale winced as his stomach debated the whole idea heatedly, but he won the argument and decided not to be rude. He accepted the plate and the slightly twisted spoon offered with it, and commenced fueling his face rapidly. The galvanized coffee cup was pressed back into service full of a thin chicory tea disguised as coffee, and the conversation was as slow and full of hurt thought as the crumbling bayou morning, slipping into a steaming wasted afternoon. They talked about a cousin in Shreveport, and someone's sister who had run away from her husband in Tuscaloosa and married a drummer in Memphis without benefit of divorce; and kin of friends in Greenville and a crazy girl they had both courted from Natchez, and an uncle in Barataria who claimed to be descent of Jean Lafitte's. And somewhere in there, it was a little confused, an ancient memory stirred, and Gentry raised his head and said "Greenville! That's where that fellow lived they said Sara ran off to!! I never could remember that! Was a brakeman or something, worked the railroad, I think, and he lived outside of there!"

"Couldn't be!! How would she get all way up there?"

"Oh, g'wan – that gal could charm the chrome off a bumper, let a lone a ride out of a trucking man!"

"Well, dat's ancient history, man. Old news. Best forgotten."

"Well, I worked on that forgotten part pretty hard, Marchand. Didn't serve me much good."

"It was eleven years ago, you crazy nigger! What you think, you gonna go up to Greenville and as the first person you see if they know some yaller gal Sara?"

He looked at the moss dripping from the tree limbs and the rutted clay shoreline down from the doorway where they sat; and he looked over his shoulder at the crude pine boards and misshapen furniture, and the hard planks he used as a bed.

"I might just, Marchand. I guess I might just."