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I worked late at the office that evening. The eight-by-ten death photos of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau were spread on my desk. The body postures and faces of the dead always tell a story. Sometimes the jaw is slack, the mouth robbed of words, as though the dying person has suddenly discovered the fraudulent nature of the world. Perhaps the gaze is focused on a shaft of sunlight through a tree, or a tear is sealed in the corner of the eye, or the palms lie open as though surrendering the spirit. I would like to believe that those who die violently are consoled by presences that care for and protect them in a special way. But the eyes of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau haunted me, and I wanted to find their killers and do something horrible to them. On the way home I drove to the pickup corner where Linda Zeroski had gotten into an automobile under a spreading oak and driven off, without concern, into a sunset that looked like purple and red smoke against the western sky. The teenage crack dealers who had supposedly been her friends were bored with my questions, then irritated that I was interrupting the flow of business on the corner. When I did not leave, they glanced at one another, formulating a different response, as though I were not there. Their voices became unctuous, their faces sincere, and they indicated to a man they would certainly call my office if they heard any information that might be helpful. I started to get back into my truck. Then I stopped and walked back under the oak tree.
“Does Tee Bobby Hulin ever swing by the corner?” I asked.
“Tee Bobby likes them when they sweet, white, and sixteen. I don’t see nothing like that ’round here, suh,” one kid said. The others snickered.
“What are you telling me?” I asked.
“Tee Bobby got his own thing. It just ain’t got nothing to do wit’ us,” the same kid said.
They lowered their heads in the shadows, suppressing their grins, kicking at the dust, their eyes flicking with amusement at one another. I walked back to my truck and got in. The heat lightning in the south pulsed like quicksilver in the clouds.
Joe Zeroski had asked how many individuals in our area were capable of the crimes committed against the persons of his daughter and Amanda Boudreau. Could Tee Bobby have been involved in the abduction of Linda Zeroski? Tee Bobby’s grandmother had said that Tee Bobby’s present trouble had started before he was born. Maybe it was time to find out what she had meant. I drove home and parked in the drive and went into the bait shop. Batist was by himself, eating a sandwich at the counter.
“How well do you know Tee Bobby?” I asked.
“Good enough so’s I don’t want to know him,” he answered.
“You think he could rape and murder a young girl?”
“What I t’ink don’t count.”
“What do you know about Ladice Hulin’s relationship to the LaSalle family?”
He finished his coffee and stared out the screen at the bream night-feeding on the moths that fried themselves on the floodlamps and fell into the water.
“Stories about white men and black field women ain’t never good, Dave. You want to hear it, my sister growed up with Ladice,” he said.
I told my wife, Bootsie, I’d eat supper late, and Batist and I drove to his sister’s small house outside Loreauville, where I listened to a tale that took me back into the Louisiana of my boyhood.
But actually, even before Batist’s sister began her account, I already knew much of the LaSalle family’s history, not because I necessarily admired them or even found them interesting, but because their lives had become the mirror and measure of our own. In one fashion or another the town had been a participant in all their deeds, all their reversals of fortune, for good or bad, from the time the first cabins were hewn and notched out of cypress on the banks of Bayou Teche, to the federal occupation in 1863 and later the restoration of the old oligarchy by the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction, into modern times when Cajuns and people of color were deliberately kept uneducated and poor in order to ensure the availability of a huge and easily manipulated labor pool. The LaSalles had believed colonial Louisiana would allow them to realize all the grandiose dreams that Robespierre’s guillotine had denied some of their family members. But they soon learned that revolutionary France had not quite finished paying back their kind for centuries of royal arrogance. In fact, they were the bunch Napoleon Bonaparte selected as the target for his most successful large-scale swindle. They paid large sums to obtain land grants in Louisiana from his government, only to discover in 1803 that Napoleon had sold the land from under their feet to the Americans in order to finance his wars.
But the LaSalles were a resilient group, not to be undone by a Corsican usurper or their new egalitarian neighbors. They bought slaves whom James Bowie and his business partner, Jean Lafitte, were smuggling into Louisiana from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. They drained swamps and felled forests and later laid log roads and railway tracks for steam engines across acreage that was so black and rich with sediment from the alluvial fan of the Mississippi that any kind of seed would grow on it if the seed were simply thrown on the ground and stepped upon.
Like his predecessors, Julian LaSalle was a practical man who did not argue or contend with the world. Perhaps his family had built its wealth upon the backs of slave labor, but that had been the ethos of the times and he felt no guilt about it. He paid what was considered a fair wage to his field hands, saw to their medical care, always kept his word, and during the Great Depression never turned a man in need from his door.
As a little boy I saw him when my father took me with him to Provost’s Bar and Pool Room. Mr. Julian, as we called him, was a dark-haired, handsome man with a cleft chin, who wore suspenders and linen suits and Panama hats and two-tone shoes, like an American you might see at a Havana racetrack. He never sat at the bar but always stood, a cigar in one hand, a tumbler of bourbon and ice in the other. On Saturday afternoons Provost’s was always filled with both business and blue-collar men, the floor spread with green sawdust, sometimes littered with football betting cards. Mr. Julian treated all the patrons there with equal respect, bought drinks for the old men at the domino and bouree tables, and walked away when other men used racist language or told bawdy jokes. He was wealthy and educated, but his graciousness and good nature inspired in others admiration rather than envy.
There were stories about his involvement with black women, one in particular, but someone was always quick to offer that Mr. Julian’s wife suffered from cancer and other illnesses and had
been in a sanitarium in the North, that her hysterical behavior at Mass was such that even a sympathetic priest had reluctantly asked her not to attend. Who could expect Mr. Julian to abide what even the church could not?
But Batist’s sister did not begin her story with Mr. Julian. Instead she told of an overseer on Poinciana Island, a lean, rough-grained, angular man who wore sunglasses, western boots, a straw cowboy hat, and khaki clothes when he sat atop his horse and rode among the black workers in the fields. The year was 1953, a time when the white overseer on a Louisiana plantation had the same powers over those in his charge as his antebellum antecedents did. No one knew his origins, but his name was Legion, and the first day he appeared in the field one worker, who had been a convict on Angola Farm, looked into Legion’s face and at first opportunity leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles back to New Iberia and never returned to ask for his pay.
“You say his name was Legion?” I asked Batist’s sister.
“That’s the name he give us. Didn’t have no first name, didn’t have no last name. We didn’t even have to call him ‘Mister.’ Just ‘Legion,’” she replied.
He believed clothes kept the heat off the body, and he buttoned his shirt at the throat and wrists, no matter how humid and hot the weather became. The back of his shirt was peppered with sweat by midday, and while the blacks ate their sandwiches of company-store balogna and potted meat in a grove of gum trees, he tethered his horse under a solitary live oak in the middle of a pepper field and sat in a folding chair a black man hand-carried to him for that purpose. He ate the boudin or pork chops and dirty rice the blacks said a prostitute at Hattie Fontenot’s bar prepared and wrapped in wax paper for him each morning.
He took the girls and women he wanted from the field, indicating with a nod of the head for one of them to follow his horse into a canebrake or pine thicket, where he dismounted from the saddle and stripped nude and told the girl or woman to remove her underpants and lie down and open her legs, his language as mechanical and dehumanized as the violence of his copulation and the release of his animus as he plunged inside the girl or woman, his upper torso propped up stiffly on his arms, as though he did not want to touch any more of her body than was necessary.
Afterward the girl or woman had to wash him. His body was as rough as animal hide, they said, welted with knife scars, the insides of his forearms blue with tattoos that looked like the crudely drawn figures in old black-and-white movie cartoons.
Then the day came when his eyes settled on Ladice Hulin.
“Go up yonder in them gum trees and sit in the shade,” he said.
“I got to pick to the end of the row, suh. Then I got the other row. Or I’m gonna come up short,” she said.
