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"My great-grandparents are in that crypt," he said. He rubbed his hand along the smooth stone, let it stop at a circular pinkish white inlay that was cracked across the center. "Can you recognize the flower? My great-grandfather and both his brothers rode with the Knights of the White Camellia."
"Your wife told me."
"They weren't ashamed of it. They were fine men, even though some of the things they did were wrong."
"What's the point?"
"I believe it's never too late to atone. I believe we can correct the past, make it right in some way."
"You're going to do this for the Knights of the White Camellia?"
"I'm doing it for my family. Is there something wrong with that?" he said. He continued to look at my face. The water was low and slow moving in the bayou and wood ducks were swimming along the edge of the dead hyacinths. "Dave?"
"I'd better be going," I said.
He touched the front of my windbreaker with his fingers. But I said nothing.
"I was speaking to you about a subject that's very personal with me. You presume a great deal," he said. I looked away from the bead of light in his eyes. "Are you hard of hearing?" He touched my chest again, this time harder.
"Don't do that," I said.
"Then answer me."
"I don't think they were fine men."
"Sir?"
"Shakespeare says it in King Lear. The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. They terrorized and murdered people of color. Cut the bullshit, Buford."
I walked out the gate and back through the trees. I heard his feet in the leaves behind me. He grabbed my arm and spun me around.
"That's the last time you'll turn your back on me, sir," he said.
"Go to hell."
His hands closed and opened at his sides, as though they were kneading invisible rubber balls. His forearms looked swollen, webbed with veins.
"You fucked my wife and dumped her. You accuse me of persecuting an innocent man. You insult my family. I don't know why I ever let a piece of shit like you on my property. But it won't happen again. I guarantee you that, Dave."
He was breathing hard. A thought, like a dark bird with a hooked beak, had come into his eyes, stayed a moment, then left. He slipped his hands stiffly into his back pockets.
The skin of my face felt tight, suddenly cold in the wind off the bayou. I could feel a dryness, a constriction in my throat, like a stick turned sideways. I tried to swallow, to reach for an adequate response. The leaves and desiccated twigs under my feet crunched like tiny pieces of glass.
"You catch me off the clock and repeat what you just said . . . ," I began.
"You're a violent, predictable man, the perfect advocate for Aaron Crown," he said, and walked through the pines toward the house. He flung the hackamore into a tree trunk.
That night I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling, then sat on the side of the bed, my thoughts like spiders crawling out of a paper bag I didn't know how to get rid of. A thick, low fog covered the swamp, and under the moon the dead cypress protruded like rotted pilings out of a white ocean.
"What is it?" Bootsie said.
"Buford LaRose."
"This morning?"
"I want to tear him up. I don't think I've ever felt like that toward anyone."
"You've got to let it go, Dave."
