IN NOVEMBER IN NORTHERN LOUISIANA, when the rains arrive for good, it is possible to pass a week without seeing the sun or the stars. During these overlong eclipses, both citizenry and weather settle into a long-accustomed, mildly narcotizing routine. On the third day, the rain stops for an hour and everyone goes outside to drive to the laundry, pharmacy, and grocery store. From somewhere the mailmen appear in their orange hipboots, raincoats, and plastic hat-covers. They are preceded by a flock of a million grackles, which rises in a roar then metamorphoses into swirling black cones and decahedrons and parabolas, then just as suddenly contracts and descends and is quiet again.

By the fourth day, the gravel driveways beside each house have long since filled with water, creating twin narrow canals which flow into the sodden back yards and gardens. The canals form a kind of interconnected waterway upon which a fleet of miniature boatmen could circumnavigate the entire neighborhood with only one or two brief portages. Those of us inside the houses peer from our kitchen windows and back porches at this wide, shallow sea. Somewhere beneath the water lie thousands of pecans—a ruined crop and a fiscal disaster for the neighborhood schoolchildren who count on a seasonal economy. In ordinary years they arrive with a burlap bag and a collection of dented kitchen pans, one per child. Each pan’s rate of filling can be registered aurally, from plink to thunk, at which point the pan’s contents are added to the burlap bag, which gradually learns to stand up straight. But no profit this year; the entire crop is lost.

Of all the commercial interests in the neighborhood, the local bookstore would seem to benefit from a week of rain. But it doesn’t. The store’s walk-in business is as dismal this week as any other. How long can such an enterprise survive? The bookstore is located on the first floor of the owner’s house, a nineteenth-century, cross-gabled Queen Anne, the oldest and homeliest edifice in the neighborhood. Notable among the bookstore’s attractions are the pale yellow bookcases, built of heart cypress, that cover every wall and surface of the first floor. They turn corners, slip under staircases, flow over windows and doors, hide in closets and utility rooms. They were built in 1923 by a once-famous local cabinetmaker. In an earlier life, the cabinets existed as sunken cypress logs in the Atchafalaya River, where they were harvested by Cajun . . .

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