James Burke: Burning Angel

Bootsie and I took Alafair to the LSU-Ole Miss game that year and later stopped for crawfish at Possum’s on the St. Martinville Road. It had been a wonderful day, the kind that memory will never need to improve upon, and when we got home we lighted Alafair’s jack-o’-lanterns on the gallery and fixed hand-crank ice cream and frozen blackberries in the kitchen.

Maybe it was the nature of the season, or the fact that quail and dove freckled the red sun in my neighbor’s field, but I knew there was something I had to do that evening or I would have no rest.

And like some pagan of old, weighing down spirits in the ground with tablets of stone, I cut a bucket full of chrysanthemums and drove out to the Bertrand plantation, down the dirt road past the tenant houses, to the grove of gum trees that had once been a cemetery for slaves. When I got out of the truck the air was damp and cold and smelled like dust and rain; curlicues of sparks fanned out of the ash in the fields and I could hear leaves swirling dryly across the concrete pad abandoned by the construction company.

I put on my raincoat and hat and walked across the field to the treeline and the collapsed corn crib where Ruthie Jean and Moleen had begun their affair, where they had been spied on by the overseer whom Luke Fontenot would later kill, where they had reenacted that old Southern black-white confession of need and dependence that, in its peculiar way, was a recognition of the simple biological fact of our brotherhood.

And for that reason only, I told myself, I stuck the flowers by their stems in what was left of the crib’s doorway, then began walking back toward my truck just as the first raindrops clicked against the brim of my hat.

But I knew better. All our stories began here — mine, Moleen’s, the Fontenot family’s, even Sonny’s. Born to the griff, pool halls, and small-time prize rings, he somehow stepped across an unseen line and became someone whom even he didn’t recognize. The scars on his body became lesions on our consciences, his jailhouse re bop a paean for Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill.

If I learned anything from my association with Moleen and Ruthie Jean and Sonny Boy, it’s the fact that we seldom know each other and can only guess at the lives that wait to be lived in every human being.

And if you should ever doubt the proximity of the past, I thought to myself, you only had to look over your shoulder at the rain slanting on the fields, like now, the smoke rising in wet plumes out of the stubble, the mist blowing off the lake, and you can see and hear with the clarity of a dream the columns marching four abreast out of the trees, barefoot, emaciated as scarecrows, their perforated, sun-faded colors popping above them in the wind, their officers cantering their horses in the field, everyone dressing it up now, the clatter of muskets shifting in unison to the right shoulder, yes, just a careless wink of the eye, just that quick, and you’re among them, wending your way with liege lord and serf and angel, in step with the great armies of the dead.