In the early evening just after the sun has slipped below the tops of the cypress trees in the western bayou, I sit in Grandmère Catherine's old oak rocker with Pearl in my arms and hum an old Cajun melody, one that Grandmère Catherine used to hum to me when she put me to sleep, even when I was already a little girl with pigtails bouncing over my shoulders as I ran across the fields from the banks of the swamp to our toothpick-legged shack. I can close my eyes and still hear her calling.

"Ruby, it's time for supper, child. Ruby. . ."

But her voice fades from my memory, like smoke from someone's potbelly stove drifting into the wind.

I am nearly nineteen now and it has been almost three months since Pearl was born during one of the most vicious hurricanes to hit the bayou. Trees that were blown over the roads have been pulled aside, but still lay along the macadam like wounded soldiers waiting to be healed and restored.

I suppose I am waiting to be healed and restored as well. In a real sense, this was the true reason for my return to the bayou from New Orleans. After my father, who had suffered great guilt for what he had done to his brother, my uncle Jean, died of a tragic heart attack, my stepmother, Daphne, took over our lives with a vengeance. Daphne resented me from the day I had arrived on their doorstep, the hitherto unknown twin daughter, the one Grandmère Catherine had kept secret so I wouldn't be sold away from her by Grandpère Jack like he had sold Gisselle.

Until I arrived, Daphne and my father, Pierre Dumas, had managed to keep the truth buried under a pile of lies, but after I had appeared, they had to create a new deception: claiming I had been stolen from my crib the day Gisselle and I had been born.

The truth was, my father had fallen in love with my mother, Gabrielle, during one of the hunting trips he and his father frequently made to the swamps. Grandpère Jack was their guide, and once my father set eyes on my beautiful mother, a woman Grandmère Catherine described as a free and innocent spirit, he fell head over heels in love. She fell in love with him, too. Daphne was unable to have children, so when my mother became pregnant with Gisselle and me, Grandpère Jack agreed to a deal proposed by my Grandfather Dumas. He sold Gisselle, and Daphne pretended Gisselle was her daughter.

Grandmère Catherine never forgave him and chased him from our house. He lived in the swamp like a swamp rat and made his living trapping muskrats and harvesting oysters, as well as guiding tourists when he was sober enough to do so. Before Grandmère Catherine, who was a traiteur, a spiritual healer, died, she made me promise I would go to New Orleans and seek out my father and sister.

But life proved even more unbearable for me there. Gisselle resented me from the beginning and made my life miserable in New Orleans as well as at Greenwood, the private school we were made to attend in Baton Rouge. She was particularly peeved at how quickly her former boyfriend, Beau Andreas, fell in love with me, and I with him. Later, when I became pregnant with Beau's child, Daphne sent me to have an abortion in the back room of some horrible clinic, but instead, I ran off and returned to the only other home I had ever known: the bayou.

Grandpère Jack drowned in the swamp during one of his drunken rampages, and I would have been left alone from the start if it weren't for my secret half brother, Paul. Before we knew our real relationship, Paul and I had been young lovers. It broke his heart to learn that his father had seduced my mother when she was very young, and to this day, he has refused to accept the reality.

Since I have returned to the bayou, he has been at my side daily, and daily has proposed that we marry. His father owns one of the biggest shrimp canneries in the bayou, but from an inheritance of land, Paul has become one of the richest men in our parish, for oil has been discovered on that land.

Now Paul is building a grand home in which he hopes Pearl, he, and I will someday live. He knows our relationship would have to be limited, that we couldn't be lovers, but he is willing to sacrifice so he can spend his life with me. I am tempted by his offer, for I have lost Beau, my one great passionate love, and I am left alone with our child, scrounging out the same sort of living Grandmère Catherine and I scrounged out when she was alive: weaving blankets and baskets, cooking gumbos, and selling it all to the tourists at our roadside stand. It's not much of a life and holds no promise for my beautiful baby.

Every night I sit in the rocker as I am now doing and rock Pearl to sleep while I ponder what I should do. I stare hopefully at the picture of Grandmère Catherine I had painted before she died. In it she is sitting in this very rocker on our front gallery. Behind her in the window, I painted my mother's angelic face. The two of them stare back at me as if they expect me to come up with the right decision.

Oh, how I wish they were alive and here and could tell me what to do. In less than a year and a half, I will have money because my inheritance as a Dumas will come due; but I have such a distaste for that world back in New Orleans now, despite the beautiful house in the Garden District and all the riches it promises. Just the thought of facing Daphne again, a woman who once tried to have me incarcerated in a mental institution, a woman whose beauty belied her true cold nature, makes me shudder. Besides, if there was anything I learned while I lived in the Dumas house surrounded by servants and valuable possessions, it was that money and riches won't buy you happiness if you don't have love.

There was no love in that house once my father died, and while he was alive he suffered so under the dark shadows of his own past sins. I tried to bring sunshine and happiness into his world, but Daphne and Gisselle were too determined and too selfish to let me succeed. Now they are both satisfied that I have gone, that I got caught up in my passion and became pregnant and proved to be what they always claimed I was . . . a worthless Cajun. Beau's family sent him to Europe, and Gisselle can't wait to write me about his girlfriends and rich, happy life there.

Perhaps I should marry Paul. Only his parents know the truth about us, and they have kept it a deep, dark secret. All of my Grandmère Catherine's old friends believe Pearl is Paul's child anyway. She has his chatlin hair, a mixture of blond and brown, and she has both our eyes: cerulean blue. She has such delicate fair skin, pale yet rich and glowing that brought pearls to mind the moment I set eyes on her.

Paul pleads with me to marry him every chance he can get, and I haven't the heart to make him stop, for he has always stood by me. He was there when Pearl was born, protecting us during the hurricane. He brings us food and gifts every day and spends his every free hour fixing things around my shack.

Would it be a sinful alliance if we don't consummate our relationship? Marriage is more than simply something that moralizes and legalizes sex. People marry to love and to cherish in greater ways. They marry to have someone who will stand by them through sickness and hard times, to have companionship and to protect each other until death. And Paul would be a wonderful father for Pearl. He loves her as if she were really his own. Sometimes I think he believes she is, really believes it.

On the other hand, would it be fair to Paul to deny him what every man expects and needs from a woman? He claims he is willing to make that sacrifice because he loves me so, and he points out that our Catholic clergy-men make such a sacrifice for a higher love. Why can't he? He has even threatened to become a monk if I reject him.

Oh, Grandmère, can't you give me a sign? You had such wonderful spiritual powers when you were alive. You drove away evil spirits, you healed people who were so sick, you gave people hope and lifted their souls. Where should I look for the answers?

As if she understands my turmoil, Pearl stirs and begins to cry. I kiss her soft cheeks, and as I often do when I gaze into her precious little face, I think about Beau and his handsome smile, his warm eyes, his tempting lips. He has yet to set his eyes on his own daughter. I wonder if he ever will.

Pearl is all my responsibility now. I have chosen to have her and to keep her and to love and cherish her. The decisions I have made from her birth on are decisions that will affect us both. I can no longer think about only what is good for me, only what is right for me. I have to think about her welfare, too. The choices I am about to make might be painful ones for me, but they might be better ones for Pearl.

She quiets down again. Her eyes close and she falls back into her restful sleep, trusting, comfortable, oblivious to the storm of troubles that rage around us. What does fate have in store for us?

If only all this had happened years later, I think. Beau and I would have married and had a wonderful home in the Garden District. Pearl would have grown up in a house of love in a world as precious as the make-believe -worlds of our dreams. If only we had been more careful and . . .

If's, I realize, have no meaning in a world of reality, a world in which dreams often turn into shadows anyway. No more if's, Ruby, I tell myself.

I rock on and hum. Outside, the sun disappears completely and darkness falls thick and deep with only the eyes of the owl reflecting the starlight. I get up and put Pearl in her crib, a crib Paul bought her, and then I return to the window and gaze out at the night. Alligators slither along the banks of the canal. I can hear their tails slap the water. Bats weave through the Spanish moss and dive to scoop up insects for supper, and the raccoons begin to cry.