What the River Owes

About

Grand Cane Parish, Louisiana, 1873. Cora Marchand teaches sixty-one children in a former gin house and forty grown men and women on Thursday nights, because a man who can read a ballot is harder to explain away. The parish has two sets of election returns, two claimants to the sheriff's office, a levee nobody has repaired since the war, and a summer coming. Solomon Pitre is a constable and a militia sergeant who was born on the place that now leases Cora her schoolhouse. He wants the courthouse held and the registration lists locked in an iron box and Cora on a boat before September, and he has never once managed to say the third thing without it becoming an argument. Adèle Rousseau is the widow who holds the freehold of Cora's school, eleven hundred acres she cannot work, and a feeling about Cora that has no name available in this parish and no future available anywhere. All three of them are trying to save the same thing by different arithmetic. A Reconstruction drama with the paperwork intact: registration rolls, crop liens, factor's advances, a rifle inventory that has been quietly sold. The betrayals are specific — a northern registrar with a debt, a brother with a reason, a woman who warns exactly one person nine hours early — and each has an argument. Desire is frank and cuts away at the door. The violence, when it comes to the courthouse, is close, fast and graphic, and it is not redeemed by anything afterwards. Five endings; the school stands in two of them.

Cast

• C Cora Marchand protagonist; teacher of the Grand Cane freedmen's school no portrait yet
• Solomon Pitre parish constable and militia sergeant
• A Adèle Rousseau widow; holds the mortgage, the acres, and the schoolhouse freehold no portrait yet
• Elias Pitre Solomon's younger brother; teamster
• Registrar Bertram Hollis Vermont man; the honest one
• Delphine Aucoin Cora's landlady in town; laundress and the parish's real news service