Afternoon rain clouds had started to build in the south when we crossed the drawbridge over the bayou and drove out East Main toward the edge of town. Huge oak trees grew on each side of the street; their thick roots cracked through the sidewalks, their spreading branches arched in a sun-spangled canopy overhead. The homes along East Main were antebellum and Victorian in design, with widow's walks, second-story verandas, marble porches, Greek columns, scrolled iron fences, and sometimes gleaming white gazebos covered with Confederate jasmine and purple bugle vine. The little girl, whom I had offhandedly named Alafair, my mother's name, sat between us in the pickup. The nuns had kept her damp clothes and had dressed her in a pair of faded child's jeans and an oversized Softball shirt that read New Iberia Pelicans. Her face was exhausted, her eyes dull and unseeing. We rumbled over another drawbridge and stopped at a fruit stand run by a black man under a cypress tree on the edge of the bayou. I bought us three big links of hot boudin wrapped in wax paper, snowcones, and a lug of strawberries to fix later with ice cream. Annie put the ice in Alafair's mouth with the small wooden spoon.

"Little bites for little people," she said.

Alafair opened her mouth like a bird, her eyelashes blinking sleepily.

"Why did you lie back there?" Annie said.

"I'm not sure."

"Dave…"

"She's probably an illegal. Why make problems for the nuns?"

"So what if she's an illegal?"

"Because I don't trust government pencil pushers and paper shufflers, that's why."

"I think I hear the voice of the New Orleans police department."

"Annie, Immigration sends them back."

"They wouldn't do that to a child, would they?"

I didn't have an answer for her. But my father, who had been a fisherman, trapper, and derrickman all his life, and who couldn't read or write and spoke Cajun French and a form of English that was hardly a language, had an axiom for almost every situation. One of these would translate as "When in doubt, do nothing." In actuality he would say something like (in this case to a wealthy sugar planter who owned property next to us), "You didn't told me about your hog in my cane, no, so I didn't mean to hurt it when I pass the tractor on its head and had to eat it, me."