"You'll do that, suh?" Uncle Royal said.

"You bet I will, old-timer," Ira's father said.

Ira never admired his father more.

He and his parents ate the chicken and strawberry cake on the blanket while Uncle Royal fished, then Ira's father decided he would entertain his wife and son by climbing on a pyramid of pine logs that were stacked and penned with stobs on a grassy shelf six feet above the shallows.

He walked up and down on the crest of the logs, perhaps twenty feet above the glade, his arms outstretched for balance, grinning idiotically.

"Watch this!" he called. Then he flipped up on his hands and held his feet straight up in the air, his muscular body quivering with tension.

The ground was soft and moist from a week's rain. A stob on the far side of the logs bent backward against the additional weight on the pile, then one log bounced down from the top, followed by another. Ira's father flipped back on his feet and balanced himself, smiling, looking about, waiting for the rush of blood to leave his head. Suddenly the entire pile collapsed and rumbled downward into the river, taking Ira's father with it.

Ira and his mother and Uncle Royal rushed to the edge of the bluff and stared down at the mudflat. Ira's father lay pinioned under a halfdozen crisscrossed logs, his legs in the water, his face white, his powerful arms trying to push away the weight that was crushing the air from his lungs.

Ira and Uncle Royal climbed down from the embankment and pushed and lifted and tugged on the logs that held his father, but to no avail.

"Go to the house. Come back with a team and chains," Ira's father said.

"I got to get your head up out of the water, Master," Uncle Royal said.

"I think my back's broken. You have to get help," Ira's father said.

"You gonna be all right, suh?" Uncle Royal asked.

"Don't be long," Ira's father replied.

Ira watched Uncle Royal climb back up the embankment, the clay shaling over his bare ankles.

"Come on, son," his mother said, reaching her hand down to Ira. Her eyes seemed to avoid both him and his father.

"I'm staying," he replied.

"No, you can't be out here by yourself," she said.

"Then you or Uncle Royal stay," he said.

"We have to get axes and saws and chains. We have to bring a whole crew of men back. Now you do what I say."

He crawled up the embankment, then looked back down at his father.

"We'll hurry," he said.

His father winked at him and tried to hold his smile in place. "I can stay in if you want, Miz Jamison," Uncle Royal said.

"Get in the carriage," she replied.

Uncle Royal turned the carriage around, then got down from the driver's seat to help Ira's mother up the step. "Drive to the crossroads," she said.

"To the sto'?" Uncle Royal asked.

"Yes, to the store."

"That's eight miles, Miz Jamison," Uncle Royal said.

"All the workers are in the fields. Drive to the crossroads. We'll find help there," she said.

"Miz Jamison, the river's going up a couple of inches every hour. It's all that rainwater."

"Do I have in hit you with the whip?" she said.

Ira and his mother and Uncle Royal and the wagonload of men they put together did not get back to the river until after dark. When the manager of the plantation store held a lantern over the water, Ira saw the softly muted features of his father's face just below the surface, the eyes and mouth open, one hand frozen in a death grasp on a broken reed he had tried to breathe through.

AS he matured Ira did not grow in understanding of his father and mother's jealousies and the lack of love that consumed their lives. Instead, he thought of his parents with resentment and anger, not only because they had destroyed his home but also because they had made him the double instrument of his father's death, first as an informer of his father's adultery, then as an accomplice in his mother's deception and treachery.

He spent one year at West Point and told others upon his resignation that he had to return home to run his family's business affairs. But the reality was he did not like the confines of military life. In fact, he thought anyone who willingly ate dry bread and unsweetened black coffee and shaved and bathed in cold water was probably possessed of a secret desire to be used as cannon wadding.

At age twenty he was the master of his estate, a dead shot with a dueling pistol, and a man who did not give quarter in business dealings or spare the rod with his workers. His parents rested in a plot on a grassy knoll above the river, but he never visited their graves nor shared his feelings about the unbearable sense of loss that defined his childhood memories.

He learned not to brood upon the past nor to think analytically about the events that had caused him to become the hard-edged man he had grown into. The whirrings in his blood, the heat that would balloon in his chest at a perceived insult, gave an elan to his manner that made his adversaries walk cautiously around him. A man he had cuckolded called him out on the street in New Iberia. The cuckold's hand shook and his ball went wide, striking Ira in the arm. But Ira's aim didn't waver and he drove a ball through the man's mouth and out the back of his head, then sipped coffee at a saloon bar while a physician dressed his wound.

His young wife was at first bemused and intrigued by his insatiable sexual desires, then finally alienated and frightened by them. In a fit of remorse and guilt about her participation in what she called her husband's lust, she confided the intimate details of her marriage to her pastor, a nervous sycophant with smallpox scars on his cheeks and dandruff on his shoulders. After Ira learned of his wife's visit to the minister, he rode his horse to the parsonage and talked to the minister in his garden. The minister boarded a steamboat in Baton Rouge the next day and was never seen in Louisiana again. "What did you say to him?" Ira's wife asked.

"I told him he was to denounce both of us every Sunday from his pulpit. If he didn't, I was going to shoot him."

But there were moments in Ira Jamison's life that made him wonder if, like his father, more than one person lived inside his skin.

He was cleaning out his attic on a late fall afternoon when he came across the windup merry-go-round his father had given him on his eleventh birthday. He inserted the key in the base and twisted the spring tight, then pushed a small lever and listened to the tune played by the spiked brass cylinder inside.

For no reason he could quite explain he walked into the quarters, in a tea-colored sunset, among tumbling leaves and the smell of gas in the trees, and knocked on Uncle Royal's door.

"Yes, suh?" Uncle Royal said, his frosted eyes blinking uncertainly.

"You still have any young grandchildren?" Ira asked.

"No, suh, they grown and in the fields now. But I got a young great-gran'child."

"Then give him this," Ira said.

The old man took the merry-go-ground from Ira's hand and felt the carved smoothness of the horses with the ends of his fingers. "Thank you, suh," he said. Ira turned to go.

"How come you to think of this now, Master Ira?" Uncle Royal asked.

"My father made you a promise he couldn't keep. So I kept it for him. That's all it means. Nothing else," he replied.

"Yes, suh," Uncle Royal said.

On the way back to the house Ira wondered if his words to Uncle Royal had become his way of saying good-bye forever to the innocent and vulnerable child who had once lived inside him and caused him so much pain.

NOW the spring of 1863 was upon him, and he knew enough of history to realize that the events taking place around him did not bode well for his future. Some of his slaves had been shipped to unoccupied areas of Arkansas, but it was only a matter of time until the South fell and emancipation became a fact of life.