AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I walked to my cruiser, which was parked on Abbeville's town square. The sun was already deep in the west, the light thin and brittle on the old brick cathedral in the square and the cemetery behind it, where the bodies of Confederate dead from Shiloh and Port Hudson lay in crypts stained with lichen and split with fissures, as though the earth were determined to absorb them and their contents back into itself. I could hear traffic crossing the steel bridge over the Vermilion River and smell the odors of diesel oil and water and shrimp husks piled behind a restaurant, and as I looked at the bare limbs of the willows along the river I was suddenly filled with the sense the sun was not simply completing part of its cycle across the sky, it was about to descend over the rim of the earth for the last time.
In psychoanalysis it's called a world destruction fantasy.
Were my irrational feelings connected to the fact I had just helped dismantle a woman's life? Or were the rats' nests of rags and bones in those crypts reminders that Shiloh was not a grand moment in history, but a three-day meat-cutter that soaked the hills with the blood of farm boys most of whom never owned a slave or knew anything about the economics of northern textile mills? Or was the sum total of my own life finally being made apparent to me?
The streets were almost empty, swirling with dust and pieces of newspaper, the water oaks bare of leaves, many of the old stores permanently closed. The world in which I had grown up was gone. I wanted to pretend otherwise, to find excuses for the decay, the strip malls, the trash strewn along the roadways, the century-old live oaks that developers lopped into stumps with almost patriotic pride. In my vanity I wanted to believe that I and others could turn it around. But it was not going to happen, not in my lifetime nor in my child's.
It was 4:45 when I got back to the department and rain had begun falling in big fat drops on the sidewalk that led into the courthouse. I pulled my mail out of my pigeon hole and went into my office. A few minutes later Helen came in.
"So what happened today?" she asked.
I told her.
"Will Guillot creeped the psychiatrist's office and stole Theo Flan-nigan's file so he could blackmail Castille Lejeune?" she said.
"It's more serious than that. I think he murdered the psychiatrist on orders from Castille Lejeune. He was probably supposed to deliver the file back to Lejeune, but he either didn't do that or he xeroxed it and is using it to take over the old man's business."
Through the window I saw a hearse pass on its way to the funeral home on St. Peter Street. I got up from my desk and let down the Venetian blinds. My office suddenly seemed hermetically sealed, artificially lit, shut off from the rest of the world.
"You unhappy about something?" Helen said.
"No. Everything is fine."
She looked somberly at my face. "Have dinner with me, Pops," she said.
"Why not?" I said.
Chapter 24.
That evening I walked into the kitchen while Father Jimmie was on the phone. Unconsciously he turned his back to me, rounding his shoulders, as though somehow creating a shell around his conversation.
"I believe you, but we'll do this on my terms. No, you have my word. I'll be there. Now, good-bye," he said. After he hung up he turned around and grinned sheepishly. "I get calls from a neurotic parishioner once in a while," he said.
"Was that one of them?" I asked.
"Let's don't clutter up the evening, Dave."
"You're meeting Max Coll?"
"He's ready to change his way. I can't deny him reconciliation or communion."
"Coll is planning to kill somebody. But you're supposed to repair his soul so he can sneak into heaven through a side window?"
"That last sentence describes two thirds of my constituency," he said.
He picked up Snuggs and a box of cat food and went out on the back steps to feed him.
"I already fed him," I said.
"He's a warrior. He needs extra rations," Father Jimmie replied.
There was no moon that night. Screech owls were screaming in the trees and the humidity was so thick I could hear moisture ticking in the leaves on the ground. Father Jimmie had gone out, although I had no idea where. I went into the small office I had created in my rented house and sat at the desk and began writing a letter to Alafair.
DearAlf,
We're going to have a swell time at Christmas. Clete's in town and is anxious to see you, as of course am I. How is your novel going? I bet it's going to be a fine one. Hope you're through exams by now. Don't be too worried about grades. You always did well in school and college is not going to be any different. Would you like to take a ride out on the salt if the weather permits? Batist says he's found a new spot for redfish by Southwest Pass.
The images out of the past, created by my own words, made my eyes film. I saw Bootsie, Alafair, and me in the stern of our boat, with Batist at the wheel, the throttle full out, slapping across West Cote Blanche Bay at sunrise, the salt spray like a wet kiss on a spring morning.
