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“It’s a done deal, kid. Your scholarship came through. I sent them a check for your fees.”
Her eyes were a dark brown, her hair like black water on her cheeks. She was quiet a long time.
“You did that?” she asked.
“Sure. What did you think I’d do, Alf?”
“I love you, Dave.”
The best moments in life are not the kind many historians record.
I went to the office, then signed out at ten o’clock and drove south toward Poinciana Island, crossing the freshwater bay that separated the island from the rest of the parish. At the far end of the bridge the security guard came out of the little wooden booth he used as an office and flagged me down. He wore a gray uniform and a holstered revolver, an American flag sewn to his shirtsleeve. His face was young and sincere under his cap. He held a clipboard in one hand and bent down toward my window. “You’re here to see somebody, sir?” he said.
“My name’s Dave Robicheaux. I’m a police officer. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t be driving a sheriff’s cruiser,” I replied, and took off my sunglasses and grinned at him.
“You’re Mr. Robicheaux?” He glanced down at his clipboard. He cleared his throat and looked away nervously. “Mr. Robicheaux, I ain’t supposed to let you on the island.”
“Why not?”
“Mr. Perry just says there’s some folks ain’t supposed to come on the island.”
“You did your job. But now you need to get on the phone and call Mr. Perry and tell him I just drove across your bridge on official business. Our conversation on this is over, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you,” I said, and drove onto the island, out of the sun’s white glare into the damp coolness of trees and shade-blooming four-o’clocks and the thick stands of water-beaded elephant ears that grew along the water’s edge.
I followed the winding road to the log-and-brick house where Ladice Hulin lived, directly across from the scorched stucco shell of Julian LaSalle’s home. She came to the door on her cane, wearing a print dress, her thick gray hair pinned up on her head with a costume-jewelry comb, her gold chain and religious medal bright on her throat.
“I knowed you was coming,” she said through the screen.
“How?”
“’Cause I cain’t hide the troot no more,” she said, and stepped out on the gallery. “I’d ax you in, but Rosebud’s sleeping. She come in last night, moaning and crying and hiding in the closet. She’s got terrible t’ings locked up in her head. Some of this is on me, Mr. Dave.”
She sat down in her wicker chair and gazed across the road at the peacocks that wandered lumpily through the shade trees arching over the ruins of Julian LaSalle’s home.
“How is it on you, Miss Ladice?” I asked.
“Lies I tole,” she replied.
“People always thought your daughter was fathered by Mr. Julian. But I think the father was actually Legion Guidry. He raped you, didn’t he? I suspect on a repeated basis.”
“People didn’t call it rape back then. The overseer just took any black woman he wanted. Go to the sheriff, go to the city po-lice, they’d listen while you talked, not saying nothing, maybe writing on a piece of paper, then when you was gone they’d call up the man who had raped you and tell him everything you’d said.”
“When did Tee Bobby learn his grandfather is Legion Guidry?” I asked.
I saw her knuckles tighten on the handle of her cane. She studied the scene across the road, the peacocks picking in Julian LaSalle’s yard, a scattering of poppies, like drops of blood, around a rusted metal roadside cross put there by a friend of Mrs. LaSalle’s.
“I always tole Tee Bobby his granddaddy was Mr. Julian,” she replied. “I t’ought it was better he didn’t know the blood of a man like Legion was in his veins. But this spring Tee Bobby wanted money to go out to California and make a record. He went to see Perry LaSalle.”
“To blackmail him?”
“No, he t’ought he deserved the money. He t’ought Perry LaSalle was gonna be proud Tee Bobby was gonna make a record. He t’ought they was in the same family.” She shook her head. “It was me who put that lie in his life, that made him the po’ li’l innocent boy he is.”
“Perry told him Legion is his grandfather?”
“When Tee Bobby come back to the house, he t’rew t’ings against the wall. He put Rosebud in his car and said he was gonna meet Jimmy Dean Styles and fix it so he could take Rosebud out to California, away from Lou’sana and the t’ings white people done to our family.”
