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"I couldn't say," I replied.
"Four or five songs were in the bottom of the guitar case, each with Junior's signature," Father Jimmie said.
"Yeah, what they wort'?" Doris Crudup asked.
"You'd have to ask somebody else," I said.
She gave Father Jimmie a look, then got up from her chair and took my coffee cup into the kitchen, although I had not finished drinking the coffee in it.
"Her husband died three years ago. Last month the social worker cut off her welfare," Father Jimmie said.
"Why?"
"The social worker felt like it. That's the way it works. Take a walk with me," he said.
"I need to get back home."
"You have time for this," he said.
We went outside, into the sunlit, rain-washed loveliness of the fall afternoon. The pecan tree in the side yard puffed with wind and a yellow dog rolled on its back in the dirt while the children swung back and forth above it on their rope swing. But as I followed Father Jimmie down an incline toward the woods in back I could feel the topography changing under my feet, as though I were walking on a sponge.
"What's that smell?" I said.
"You tell me." He tore a handful of grass from the soil and held the roots up to my nose. "They truck it in from all over the South. Doris's lungs are as much good to her as rotted cork. People around here carry buckets in their cars because of their children's constant diarrhea."
I held onto the trunk of a withered persimmon tree and looked at the soles of my shoes. They were slick with a black-green substance, as though I had walked across a factory floor. We crossed a board plank spanning a rain ditch. The water was covered with an iridescent sheen that seemed to be rising in chains of bubbles from the bottom of the ditch. Perhaps twenty settling ponds, layered over with loose dirt, were strung along the edge of the woods, each of them crusted with a dried viscous material that looked like an orange scab.
"Is this Doris's property?" I said.
"It belonged to her grandfather. But twenty years ago Doris's cousin made his "X' on a bill of sale that had Junior's name typed on it. The cousin and the waste management company that bought the land both claim he's the Junior Crudup of record and Doris is out of luck."
"I'm not following you."
"No one knows what happened to the real Junior Crudup. He went into Angola and never came out. There's no documentation on his death or of his release. Figure that one out."
"I don't want to."
Father Jimmie studied my face. "These people here don't have many friends," he said.
I slipped the flats of my hands in my back pockets and scuffed at the ground with one shoe, like a third-base coach who had run out of signals.
"Think I'll pass," I said.
"Suit yourself."
Father Jimmie picked up a small stone and side-armed it into the woods. I heard it clatter among the tree trunks. Birds should have risen from the canopy into the sky, but there was no movement inside the tree limbs.
"Who owns this waste management company?" I asked.
"A guy named Merchie Flannigan."
"Jumpin' Merchie Flannigan? From New Iberia?" I said.
"One and the same. How'd he get that name, anyway?" Father Jimmie said.
"Think of rooftops," I said.
As I drove back to New Iberia, through Morgan City, and down East Main to my rented house on Bayou Teche, I tried not to think anymore of Father Jimmie and the black people in St. James Parish whose community had become a petro-chemical dumping ground. As sad as their story was, in the state of Louisiana it wasn't exceptional. In fact, on television, the current governor had threatened to investigate the tax status of some young Tulane lawyers who had filed suit against several waste management companies on the basis of environmental racism. The old plantation oligarchy was gone. But its successors did business in the same fashion with baseball bats.
