Iron Lace by Emilie Richards

had seen people move to one side, as if they were determined not to get in his way.
    There’d been little reason to worry. Juan had avoided them with even more determination, preferring to stumble into the shade, rather than take a chance on the crowded path. But Juan had misjudged, and his foot had become entangled in the roots of a chinaball tree. He would have fallen if Raphael hadn’t sprung forward and braced him until he recovered his balance.
    The old man’s swarthy skin had flushed with embarrassment, but he’d mumbled a merci. Then he’d reached inside his pantsand retrieved a small silver coin, pressing it into an astonished Raphael’s hand before he started back toward the store.
    On the way home, Raphael’s mother had listened to his story, then taken the coin to keep with her own. In return, she’d told him that Juan Rodriguez was the son of a man who had sailed with Jean Laffite, and that some on the chénière believed Juan himself had sailed with pirates, too. Juan’s mother had been a bayou girl, and at Juan’s birth she had moved to the chénière to wait, always wait, for her husband to return from his journeys.
    Raphael knew how hard his mother worked. There was little time for storytelling in her busy life, but on that rare day, with Juan’s silver coin jingling happily in her pocket, she had told him about others who lived on the chénière.
    The Barataria region, she’d said, had once been the haunt of pirates. Some of the people who lived here now were their descendants. He’d listened eagerly as she told more stories of the mélange of people who dwelled there, stories of people from Italy, Spain and Portugal, stories of people from Manilla and China who dried shrimp on tall platforms in Barataria Bay and danced over them until the shells fell off to be swept away by the currents. But it was Juan’s story he’d begged to hear again. He had gone to sleep that night promising himself that the next stories he heard would be from Juan himself.
    At first Raphael had been afraid to go to Juan’s house alone. It was far from his own house, and Étienne had frightened him with stories about ghosts who haunted the marsh. But after a while he had found his way there.
    Juan hadn’t spoken to him that first day, or the next. But after Raphael had visited for a week, carrying fresh water in a bucket from the well and helping Juan weave more palmetto into the thatch of his house, Juan had finally begun to talk.
    Now Raphael visited Juan every day he could. Sometimes the old man was out in his boat and Raphael returned home without seeing him. But on lucky days, Juan was sitting outside, ready to tell stories. Raphael lived on these tales of conquest as surely as he lived on the bread his mother baked in her mud oven.
    Today, when Raphael arrived, Juan was nowhere in sight. His boats were there, however, both the pirogue that he used in the marsh behind his home and the skiff he sailed into the Gulf.
    Raphael knocked on the door of Juan’s hut, and when no one answered, he pushed it open a few inches to peer inside. The hut’s interior was more primitive than Raphael’s own. The floor was mud and the furniture nothing more than stumps of trees. There was a shrine in the corner, like the one Raphael’s mother kept, but no statue of the Blessed Mother presided over the simple wooden cross and the stubs of two candles.
    Raphael closed the door and backed away. From the distance, he heard a clap of thunder. He didn’t want to be caught outside if the rain started again, but he knew better than to enter the hut without Juan’s permission. Just as he was turning to run back toward the village, he saw the tall sedge beside Juan’s house part in a rippling wave. As Raphael watched, terrified, the old man materialized in the mists rising from the marsh.
    “Hey! ’Zat you, Raphael?”
    Raphael swallowed hard. For a moment, his voice was locked in his throat, as if the ghosts he’d envisioned had