man with grainy skin, recessed eyes, and teeth that were too big for his mouth. “That’s one I won’t forget,” she said.
“His name is Billy Joe Pitts. He’s a sheriff’s deputy.”
“He pulled me over to the side of the highway north of Alexandria. We’d been circulating a union petition among some cannery workers. He made some rather nasty remarks.”
“He threatened you?”
“His remarks were sexual in nature. That night our car was vandalized.”
“Did you ever hear of a woman named Ida Durbin?”
“No, I don’t recall that name. Who is she?”
“Someone I believe the Chalons family would like to forget,” I said.
She paused a moment. “You’re not really here about our troubles, are you?”
I felt my face tighten. “Billy Joe Pitts is part of an ongoing assault-and-battery investigation. I think he takes his orders from the Chalonses.”
“I see,” she said.
“You’ve been very helpful.” But I had lost her attention and I believe her trust as well.
She looked at her watch. “I have to make some deliveries now. We run a folk craft workshop and sell the birdhouses they make. A tough way to raise a dollar, huh?”
Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.
Just before I drove off the property onto the state road, I saw a group of black people leave the rehabilitated farmhouse that served as Sister Molly’s administrative center. They were laughing, clapping one another on the shoulder about a joke of some kind. A dome-headed black man recognized me through the windshield and raised a hand in greeting. It was Andre Bergeron, the handyman who did chores for the Chalons family. I waved out the window in response and headed back to New Iberia.
After work, I fixed supper for Jimmie and me at the house. I was beginning to regret I had told him of Ida Durbin’s fate. He blamed himself and kept trying to recall details of their last day together, as though some clue could be extracted from an idle remark she made over forty years ago. He told me he was meeting a musicologist that night at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.
“I know I’ve heard Ida’s voice on a record. I’m sure of it, Dave,” he said.
I did the dishes and didn’t try to contend with Jimmie’s obsession. After he was gone, I showered and took a walk downtown in the twilight. From the drawbridge looking south I could see the gardens behind the Shadows, a plantation home built in 1831, and the receding corridor of oak and cypress trees along the banks of the Teche, a tidal stream that had been navigated by Spaniards in bladed helmets, French missionaries, displaced Acadians, pirates, Confederate and Yankee gun crews, and plantation revelers who toasted their own prosperity on paddle wheelers that floated through the night like candlelit wedding cakes.
Jean Lafitte had auctioned off West Indian slaves a few hundred yards from where I stood. As a lesson in terror, Union soldiers under the command of General Nathaniel Banks had raped women, burned crops, and looted the homes of the rich up and down the bayou when they marched through New Iberia in April 1863. People still found minie balls in the heartwood of felled oak trees and pieces of broken china in chicken yards, green depressions carpeted with mushrooms in a woods where soldiers with no names were hurriedly buried.
As the heat went out of the day, the summer light seemed to ascend higher into the sky, so that the bayou itself became a long amber ribbon between the green darkness of the trees, the surface creasing in the wind, somehow disconnected from the present, the alluvial soil along the banks filled with the bones of Indians, Europeans, and Reconstruction-empowered Africans, all of whom had thought their dominion over the land was forever.
But in my reverie about the nature of history and collective vanity I had forgotten a more prosaic detail from my day at the office. Either Jimmie or I had accidentally turned off the message machine on my
“His name is Billy Joe Pitts. He’s a sheriff’s deputy.”
“He pulled me over to the side of the highway north of Alexandria. We’d been circulating a union petition among some cannery workers. He made some rather nasty remarks.”
“He threatened you?”
“His remarks were sexual in nature. That night our car was vandalized.”
“Did you ever hear of a woman named Ida Durbin?”
“No, I don’t recall that name. Who is she?”
“Someone I believe the Chalons family would like to forget,” I said.
She paused a moment. “You’re not really here about our troubles, are you?”
I felt my face tighten. “Billy Joe Pitts is part of an ongoing assault-and-battery investigation. I think he takes his orders from the Chalonses.”
“I see,” she said.
“You’ve been very helpful.” But I had lost her attention and I believe her trust as well.
She looked at her watch. “I have to make some deliveries now. We run a folk craft workshop and sell the birdhouses they make. A tough way to raise a dollar, huh?”
Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.
Just before I drove off the property onto the state road, I saw a group of black people leave the rehabilitated farmhouse that served as Sister Molly’s administrative center. They were laughing, clapping one another on the shoulder about a joke of some kind. A dome-headed black man recognized me through the windshield and raised a hand in greeting. It was Andre Bergeron, the handyman who did chores for the Chalons family. I waved out the window in response and headed back to New Iberia.
After work, I fixed supper for Jimmie and me at the house. I was beginning to regret I had told him of Ida Durbin’s fate. He blamed himself and kept trying to recall details of their last day together, as though some clue could be extracted from an idle remark she made over forty years ago. He told me he was meeting a musicologist that night at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.
“I know I’ve heard Ida’s voice on a record. I’m sure of it, Dave,” he said.
I did the dishes and didn’t try to contend with Jimmie’s obsession. After he was gone, I showered and took a walk downtown in the twilight. From the drawbridge looking south I could see the gardens behind the Shadows, a plantation home built in 1831, and the receding corridor of oak and cypress trees along the banks of the Teche, a tidal stream that had been navigated by Spaniards in bladed helmets, French missionaries, displaced Acadians, pirates, Confederate and Yankee gun crews, and plantation revelers who toasted their own prosperity on paddle wheelers that floated through the night like candlelit wedding cakes.
Jean Lafitte had auctioned off West Indian slaves a few hundred yards from where I stood. As a lesson in terror, Union soldiers under the command of General Nathaniel Banks had raped women, burned crops, and looted the homes of the rich up and down the bayou when they marched through New Iberia in April 1863. People still found minie balls in the heartwood of felled oak trees and pieces of broken china in chicken yards, green depressions carpeted with mushrooms in a woods where soldiers with no names were hurriedly buried.
As the heat went out of the day, the summer light seemed to ascend higher into the sky, so that the bayou itself became a long amber ribbon between the green darkness of the trees, the surface creasing in the wind, somehow disconnected from the present, the alluvial soil along the banks filled with the bones of Indians, Europeans, and Reconstruction-empowered Africans, all of whom had thought their dominion over the land was forever.
But in my reverie about the nature of history and collective vanity I had forgotten a more prosaic detail from my day at the office. Either Jimmie or I had accidentally turned off the message machine on my
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