III.
Eulalie
Eulalie Arsenault is truly dying now. Alcide has left off his roaming ways and wants to sit by her side and gloomily survey her wracked body as they turn her every hour and dress her cratered chest wall, and lay her arm, swollen like a gaseous bladder, on a pillow. Only her legs remain alive, shapely and muscular; and Alcide rests his head on the bed, clinging to an ankle.
The night she told me about the lump we make love all night on the floor, he tells Rosa. On the floor?
I fall down when she was out. She come home and can’t lift me, so we put pillows and sleep there. Her mother had the lump too. But Lalie don’t let them cut her.
At the end they had to cut her, to remove some of the rot. But that cutting had only made the arm swell up to an unimaginable size, its gases
