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IT WAS DUSK when we returned home, and the air was heavy and cool, motionless, loud with the croaking of frogs out in the cypress. I parked under the pecan trees in the front yard, and Bootsie and Alafair walked up to the house while I rolled up the truck’s windows. The sky had turned blue-black, the color of scorched iron, and I could feel the barometer dropping again, and smell sulfur and distant rain. As I started up the incline toward the gallery, a beat-up flatbed truck bounced through the chuckholes in the dirt road and turned in to my drive. On the back was a huge chrome-plated cross, with the top end propped on the cab’s roof and the shaft fastened to the bed with a boomer chain.
Lyle Sonnier cut the ignition and stepped down, grinning, from the running board. He wore a pair of striped overalls without a shirt, and his thin chest and shoulders were red with sunburn.
“I thought I’d take your time just for a minute,” he said. “What do you think of it?”
“It looks like it’s made of car bumpers.”
“It is. Me and this ole boy in Lafayette welded a shell all around the wood beams. What do you think?”
Batist had left on the string of electric bulbs over the dock, and the cross rippled and glowed with a silver and blue light.
“It looks like an artwork. It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Thanks, Loot. It’s the only thing the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock left me before they sent him off to Parchman Farm. One time we were outside New Albany, Mississippi, where some Klan uglies had burned a cross in a field, and Jimmy Bob was eating a hamburger in the truck across the road, looking out at that black cross, when he says, ‘No sense letting good building material go to waste.’ Then he walks across the road and gives this colored farmer who was out there plowing a dollar for it.
“?‘What in the world are we gonna do with that?’ I say.
“He says, ‘Son, the most exciting place in a shithole like this is the Dairy Queen on Saturday night. When you run a hallelujah tent show, you gotta give them lights in the sky.’
“He went into a supermarket, bought eight rolls of aluminum foil, and wrapped the cross in it, then we drove out to a junkyard and he got a guy to string it with electric bulbs. That night we put it up on a hill, way up the slope from the tent, and hooked it up to the generator, and you could see that cross glowing in the mist for five miles.”
I nodded absently and looked up toward my lighted gallery.
“Well . . . I didn’t mean to take up a lot of your evening,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you I didn’t feel good about the other night in Baton Rouge. You came to me for help and I couldn’t offer you very much.”
“Maybe you did, Lyle.”
He looked at me curiously, then lifted one of his overall straps off his sunburn with his thumb.
“I’m going to put the cross up on my new Bible college,” he said. “I was going to call it the Lyle Sonnier Bible Institute. Now I’m just going to call it the South Louisiana Bible College. How’s that sound?”
“It sounds pretty good.”
“I told you I ain’t as bad as you think.”
“I think maybe you’re not bad at all, Lyle.”
His eyes looked into the corners of mine, then he brushed at the dirt and leaves in the drive with his shoe.
“I appreciate it, Loot,” he said.
“You want to come in?” I asked.
“No, thanks anyway. I just came into town to see Drew at the hospital and pick up my cross in Lafayette. Weldon told me about him taking a swing on you. I’m sorry that happened. I know you’ve been as good and fair as you can to both him and Drew. But you really stuck a garden rake in his head.”
“Weldon has to stop jerking everybody around. Maybe it’s time he takes his own fall.”
Lyle etched lines in the leaves and dust with the point of his shoe. He rested his mutilated hand, which in the deepening shadows looked almost like part of an amphibian, on the truck’s door handle.
“Weldon told me last night what he’s been involved in. It’s a mess, it surely is,” he said. “I think he wants to tell you about it. He’s pretty well worn-out with it.”
“Do you want to tell me what it is?”
“It’s his grief. You’ll have to get it from him. No offense meant.” He got up in the cab of his truck and clicked the door shut with his underarm. He smiled. “I better get out of here before I get in some kind of legal trouble. You know why I keep that burnt cross, why I’m gonna put it up on top of my Bible college? It don’t let me forget where I’ve been and what I’m fixing to be. It’s like that ole boy says in the song, ‘I might be an old chunk of coal but I’m gonna be a diamond someday.’ Give Weldon a chance. Maybe inside that cinder-block head of his he wants you to like him.”
“What I think is unimportant, Lyle. Your brother’s problem is going to be with the court. Anyway, there’s something I should tell you before you go. We brought in an old-timer from the Sally in Lafayette, a fellow who’d been in a fire. He might be the same man you saw in your audience.”
“He told you his name was Vic Benson?”
