James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

Well, sometimes the best way to deal with the lion is to spit in the lion’s mouth, I told myself. At 5:00 P.M. I drove to Merchie and Theo’s home on the edge of town.

Even though I had passed the house a thousand times, I still could not get over the juxtaposition of imitation thirteenth-century battlements with a boiler works across the highway. But perhaps the conjuncture of nouveau riche vulgarity with pecan orchards and horse barns and the softly lit ambiance of Bayou Teche was the perfect stage set for a man like Merchie Flannigan. Strip away the guise of the reformed street hood and self-made egalitarian success story, and there was little difference between Merchie and his father-in-law, Castille LeJeune.

They didn’t go after their enemies head-on; they poisoned the environment where they worked.

I saw Theo look out the living room window as I parked my truck.

“What’s wrong, Dave?” she said, opening the front door.

“Merchie was looking for me at the department. He seems to think I’m causing a problem in his marriage,” I said.

“Come in.”

“Where is he?”

“At my father’s. Wait, don’t leave like this.”

“Straighten him out on this, Theo,” I said.

Her face slipped by the driver’s window as I turned around and headed back out the driveway.

A half hour later, I pulled up to the front of Fox Run, Castille LeJeune’s home outside of Franklin. I rang the front doorbell, but no one answered. The wind was balmy out of the south, smelling of brine and schooled-up speckled trout at Cote Blanche Bay, the setting so tranquil that my anger at Merchie, which I had fed all the way down the road, made me feel like a spiritually unclean visitor inside a church.

The house itself was deep in shadow, the oak trees creaking overhead, but the surrounding fields and horse pasture were still lit by the last rays of the sun, and in the distance I thought I saw Merchie walk from behind a row of abandoned cabins to a promontory that overlooked the bayou.

I went around the fenced pond that Theo feared for reasons she did not share and walked past a row of shotgun cabins that were probably built in the 1890s for the black people who planted and harvested the LeJeune family’s sugarcane and drove it to the grinding mill in mule-drawn wagons without a member of the LeJeune family ever putting a hand on it. The cabin doors were gone, the tin roofs buckled loose from the joists, the plank floors blown with grit and scoured by the hooves of livestock. The privies were still standing, the eaves clotted with the nests of yellow jackets and mud-dobbers; the wood seats, once streaked with urine, now dry and smooth as old bone; the grass around the walls a bright green.

I wondered if Junior Crudup had once slept in these cabins or used these privies, coming in hot and dirty from the fields, perhaps in leg irons, his evening meal a jelly glass of Kool-Aid and a tin plate of greens, fried ham fat, corn bread and molasses. I wondered how many lyrics in his songs had their inception right here, among these desiccated shacks that perhaps told more of a people’s history than anyone wished to remember.

I had left work ready to bend Merchie’s day out of shape and now I had managed to link him in my mind with his father-in-law and the cruelties and racial injustices of Louisiana’s past. What was my motivation?

Easy answer. I didn’t have to think about the fact I had deliberately put Frank Dellacroce in Max Coil’s gun sights Merchie was standing on a grassy knoll, his back turned to me, and did not hear me walk up behind him. A solitary white crypt, closed in front by a black marble slab that was chiseled around the edges with strings of flowers and clusters of angels, rested at a slight angle in the softness of the ground. Merchie squatted down with an orchid he inserted in a green water vase. The name on the slab was Viola Hortense Flannigan, Merchie’s mother, the strange, neurotic, possessive woman who used to wash out his mouth with soap and whip his bare legs with a switch until he danced.

Earlier I had been ready to tear him apart. Now I felt my anger lift like ash from a dead fire.

“I apologize for intruding on you,” I said.

“You’re not,” he said, rising from his crouched position, a bit like a man waking from sleep.

“You were looking for me at the department?”

He scratched the top of his arm idly and looked at the wind blowing in the grass. “I get hot under the collar sometimes. Things aren’t always right with me and Theo. So I take it out on the wrong people,” he said.

“No harm done,” I said.

He combed his hair and put his comb away, then watched a flock of black geese freckle the sun. “My mother always wanted to be a southern lady.

She told people she grew up in the Garden District in New Orleans. The truth was her old man ran a produce stand in the Irish Channel. So I bought this little piece of land from my father-in-law and buried her in it.”

I nodded, my eyes averted. In the distance I could see the railed fish pond that caused Theo such fear she had almost let two children drown rather than climb through a fence and approach the water.

“What happened at that pond, Merchie?” I asked.

He opened and closed his hands, the veins in his forearms filling with blood. “This place is a living curse. I’d like to set fire to it and plow its earth with salt. Outside of that, I don’t have much to say about it,” he said. Then he walked away, accidently kicking over the vase into which he had placed an orchid for his mother.

Some people seem to be born under a bad sign.

At 8:30 A.M. the following day an arson inspector called me at the office. In the early hours of the morning a fire had broken out in Dr. Parks’s game room and had quickly spread through the roof, destroying the back third of his house. “I know the guy just lost his daughter, but he’s hard to take. How about coming out here, Dave?” the inspector said.

“What’s the deal?” I said.

“Parks is convinced somebody tried to burn him out.”

“My relationship with Dr. Parks isn’t a very good one.”

“You could fool me. He seems to think you’re the only guy around here with a brain.”

I drove up to Loreauville and crossed the drawbridge there and followed the state road to the shady knoll where Dr. Parks’s home sat among the trees like a man with an angry frown. A solitary firetruck was still there and two firemen were ripping blackened wood out of a back wall with axes. Dr. Parks approached me as though somehow I were the source of all the problems and missing solutions in his life. “I want an arson investigation initiated right now,” he said.

“That’s a possibility, but so far there doesn’t seem to be enough evidence to warrant one.” I raised my hand as he started to interrupt.

“No one is saying your suspicions don’t have merit. These guys just haven’t found an accelerant or a—”

“It’s connected to my daughter’s death.”

“No, it’s not, sir.” I fixed my eyes on the blackened back of his house and the roof that had caved in on the kitchen and master bedroom.

It was so quiet I could hear my watch ticking on my wrist.

“Look here, Mr. Robicheaux, I asked that you come out because I know about some of the losses in your own life. I thought you would understand what’s going on here,” he said.

I tried to ignore the personal nature of his statement. “These firemen are good guys. You can trust what they tell you. I think you’ve just had a lot of bad luck,” I said.

“There’s no such thing as luck,” he replied.

Just then an unshaved, mustached fireman in rubber pants and suspenders and a big hat walked from behind the house with a clutch of fried electrical wiring in his hand. “We got an ignition point,” he said.