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“She gone to Morgan City with a colored man. She ain’t coming back,” Mae answered.
“Would you step out here, please? Don’t be afraid,” the officer said.
“People call me Mae Guillory. But my married name is Robicheaux,” she said.
“We know that, ma’am. You saw something we think you don’t understand. We want to explain what happened there on the bayou,” he said.
She ran her tongue over her lips to speak, then said nothing, her desire to respect herself as great as her desire to live, her pulse so thunderous she thought a vein would burst in her throat.
“Ladrine Theriot tried to kill a constable. So the constable had to shoot him. It was the constable. You saw it, didn’t you?” the officer said. Then he began to speak very slowly, his eyes lingering on hers with each word, waiting for the moment of assent that had not come. “The constable shot Ladrine Theriot. That’s what you saw. There was no mistake about what happened … Okay?”
She stepped off the tiny gallery into the yard, as though she were in a dream, not making conscious choices now, stepping into the green light that seemed to radiate out of the fields into the sky.
“Ladrine was a good man. He wasn’t like his brother, no. He done right by people. Y’all killed him,” she said.
“Yeah. Because we had to … Isn’t that right?” he said.
“My name’s Mae Robicheaux. My boy fought in Vietnam. My husband was Big Aldous Robicheaux. Nobody in the oil field mess with Big Aldous.”
“We’ll take you to where Ladrine died and explain how it happened. Get in the car, ma’am.”
“I know what y’all gonna do. I ain’t afraid of y’all no more. My boy gonna find you. You gonna see, you. You gonna run and hide when you see my boy.”
“You are one ignorant bitch, aren’t you?” the officer said, and knocked her to the ground.
He unbuttoned his raincoat and exposed his holstered gun. He placed his fists on his hips, his jaw flexing, his raincoat flapping in the wind. Then a decision worked its way into his eyes, and he exhaled air through his nose, like a man resigning himself to a world that he both disdained and served.
“Help me with this,” he said to the other officer.
Mae’s face was white and round when the two officers leaned out of the greenness of the evening, out of the creaking and wheeling of land-blown gulls, and fitted their hands on her with the mercy of giant crabs.
22
The next day the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Department faxed me all their file material on the shooting death of Ladrine Theriot in 1967. The crime scene report was filled with misspellings and elliptical sentences but gave the shooter’s name as one Bobby Cale, a part-time constable, barroom bouncer, and collector for a finance agency.
I called the sheriff in Lafourche.
“The shooter wasn’t the constable,” I said.
“Says who?” he replied.
“A woman by the name of Mae Guillory saw it happen.”
“You wired up about something?”
When I didn’t reply, he said, “Look, I read that file. The constable tried to serve a bench warrant on Ladrine Theriot and Theriot pulled a gun. Why would the constable take responsibility for a shooting he didn’t do?”
“Because he was told to. Two other cops were there. They put a throw-down on the body.”
“I couldn’t tell you. I was ten years old when all this happened. You guys running short of open cases in New Iberia?”
“Where’s Bobby Cale now?”
“If you’re up to it, I’ll give you directions to his place. Or you can get them from the Department of Health and Hospitals.”
“What do you mean ‘if I’m up to it’?”
“Maybe his sins are what got a fence post kicked up his ass. Check it out. Ask yourself if you’d like to trade places with him,” the Lafourche Parish sheriff said.
