Daddy and his brother built the camp in 1968 out of cypress they got off an old barn. It sits on pilings about six feet over the water, which has been high enough every year but one. One room with four bunks, a kitchen with a gas stove, a cistern for water, a generator we run for the lights and the TV when there's a game on, and a screened porch all the way around, which is where the living gets done. The card table is an old cypress door laid across two sawhorses. It has cigarette burns from the sixties and coffee rings from every year since.

The regulars: me; my brothers Thomas, who's the oldest and remembers every card, Ronnie, who has his chair, and Rick, the baby, who's forty-four and still gets called T-Rick; our cousin Larry from Mama's side; and our brother-in-law Harlan Pappas, a Greek boy from New Orleans who married our sister in 1965, learned bourré from us, and has been taking our money ever since. Mama doesn't come to the camp. Mama says she's seen it.

Labor Day weekend, 1996. The pot had been riding all night. Two splits in a row and a couple of bourrés had it up past twenty-six dollars, which on our porch is a fortune.

Thomas dealt and turned up a little four of hearts. I picked up my hand and there it was: the king of hearts. One trump. The king. And the rest was junk, a seven of clubs, a nine of diamonds, a six and a three of spades. Any man with sense drops that hand. I didn't have sense. I had a feeling. I said I was in.

I drew four new cards, and I got four more pieces of junk, not one heart among them. Larry stayed, because Larry always stays. Thomas stayed. Larry was sitting on Thomas's left, so Larry led, and what did Larry lead? The ace of hearts. He'd been sitting on it the whole time.

Now you know the law. Hearts led, I got a heart, I got to follow suit. My king went down under his ace like a stone in the bayou. And every other trick, somebody beat what I had. Five tricks, zero for Roosevelt.

Bourréd. On a twenty-six-dollar pot. And thank the Lord for Mama's ten-dollar rule, because it was the only thing between me and explaining to Teresa where the light bill went. Harlan still tells this one at every wedding and every funeral. He tells it better than me. He wasn't even holding cards that hand.

My cousin Larry Veazey is Mama's baby sister's boy, and in thirty-five years at the card table I have seen him drop a hand exactly twice. Once was because the camp was on fire. (A grease fire on the stove, 1983. We put it out. We finished the hand.) The other time he says he had to go to the bathroom, and he says it doesn't count.

Larry stays in on everything. Two little trumps, he's in. No trumps, he's in, because "you never know what you'll draw." Everybody who sits down with us for the first time thinks Larry is the biggest couillon on the bayou, and by midnight about half of them have figured out that Larry is the reason the pot is so big, and that every so often Larry takes it all. Nobody can read him, because there's nothing to read. He's in. He's always in.

Larry has been bourréd more times than everybody else at the table put together, and he'll tell you he's come out ahead. Thomas keeps a notebook and says he hasn't. They've been arguing about it since Nixon.

When you live down here, you watch the Gulf from June to November like you're watching a pot that might boil over.

Andrew, 1992. Andrew went across Florida first and then came across the Gulf at us. It came ashore west of us, over by Morgan City, at the end of August. They took us off the platform two days before, and I rode it out in Thomas's house in town with the whole family, nineteen people and two dogs, and we played bourré by flashlight on the kitchen floor when the power went, because what else are you going to do. When we got down to the camp afterward, the porch roof was in the marsh and the cypress-door table was gone. Ronnie found it two weeks later in the cane grass a quarter mile off, not a scratch on it. We put it right back on the sawhorses and dealt a hand.

Georges, 1998. Last September everybody was watching Georges head straight for New Orleans, and we boarded up the camp and the houses and filled the bathtubs. Then it turned and went in over Mississippi. We got wind and rain and a lot of plywood we didn't need. We used it to put a new floor in the camp kitchen. Lagniappe.

This year. So far, so good, knock on cypress. We watched Floyd go up the East Coast on the TV at the camp, and we said a prayer for those people in Carolina with all that water. We know what that's like. Season's not over until the end of November.

Every year, the first Saturday it gets good and cold, usually after Thanksgiving, the whole family has a boucherie out at Thomas's place in the country. We buy a hog from a man up the road, and the whole family turns out and works it up into everything you can make from a pig. I won't tell you about the early morning part. The pig doesn't enjoy it, and you won't enjoy reading about it.

But by noon there's a black iron pot of cracklins popping over the fire, and the women are stuffing boudin at the kitchen table, and the kids are stirring the backbone stew and sneaking gratons out of the pot when nobody's looking. Mama makes the hogshead cheese because nobody else does it right, and she'll be the first to tell you. Teresa's job is the rice. Nobody else is allowed to touch the rice.

And when it's all wrapped up and divided out and the fire's down to coals, the men go out to the shed, and the cypress door comes up from the camp in the back of Ronnie's truck, and we play bourré until we can't see. That's the best game of the year. Everybody's tired and full and happy, and nobody cares who gets bourréd. Well. Almost nobody.

From Daddy's side, we keep one Sicilian thing too: the St. Joseph's altar on March 19th. Mama is as Cajun as they come, but she learned Daddy's mother's fig cookies the first year they were married, and she still makes them, every year, by the hundreds. She says that's her penance for marrying an Italian. There's no bourré on St. Joseph's day. That's Mama's other rule.

Some of the French we use at the table and around it. How to say it is in the parentheses, near as I can spell it.