James Burke - Last Car to Elysian Fields

“How does he feel about talking to a white man?”

“He don’t care what color you are. He climbed up on a power pole to get a cat down and got ‘lectrocuted. His eyes cooked in his head. You’ll t’ink he’s looking at you but don’t no light go t’rew his eyes. His eyes scare people. Maybe that’s why ain’t nobody ever been around axing Woodrow questions about what he seen.”

Idrove back to New Iberia and on south of Abbeville, where sugarcane acreage gave way to saw grass and clumps of gum trees and the miles of wetlands that bled into the Gulf of Mexico, forming the watery, ill-defined coastline of southwest Louisiana. I crossed a bridge onto one of the few remaining barrier islands left in Louisiana, a reef composed of hard-packed shell ground up by the tides, the crest topped with alluvial soil that is among the richest in the western hemisphere.

The adjacent islands had been dredged and scooped out of the surf and hauled away on barges decades ago for highway-construction material, but portions of Pecan Island, preserved largely by an oil corporation as a recreational area for its CEOs, contains wooded acreage where the canopy of live oaks rises perhaps two hundred feet into the sky and the sunlight breaking through the moss and branches and air vines is the same color as light filtering through green water in the Florida Keys.

In the midst of duck-hunting camps with wide, screened-in porches and adjacent boat houses was the tiny vegetable farm and blue-point crab business of Woodrow Reed. Stacks upon stacks of collapsible wire crab traps, webbed with dried river trash, stood by the side of his small, paint less house. A middle-aged black woman was chopping up nutria parts on a butcher block a short distance away, the rubber gloves on her hands spotted with brown matter.

Woodrow Reed’s eyes were large, round and flat, unblinking, like painted facsimiles that had been cut out of paper and pasted on the face of a mannikin. They stared at me intently, the pupils dilated and black, although it was obvious Woodrow Reed was sightless.

“I’m Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said. I opened my badge holder and held it aloft so the middle-aged woman in the side yard could see it.

“I knowed you was coming,” he said, rising from where he sat on the front steps.

“Hogman called you?” I said.

“Yeah, but he didn’t have to. I knowed somebody was coming one day. Want to come in, suh?” He opened the rusted screen door to his front porch and waited for me to enter.

He could not have been over five feet. His skin was the color of a razor strop that has yellowed with wear, his body compressed and hard looking, his cheeks and chin scrolled with gray whiskers. But I could not get over his eyes. I had seen eyes like his only once before, in the body of a man who had been exhumed from a grave in northern Montana where he had lain for decades under frozen ground.

“How’d you come by your farm, Mr. Reed?” I asked.

“You already know the answer to that.”

“Can you tell me how Junior Crudup died?” I asked.

Woodrow Reed was sitting on what looked like a motion-picture theater seat mounted on a wood block, his palms propped on his thighs. His denim pants were neatly pressed, the cuffs and pockets buttoned on his long-sleeve work shirt.

“The doctor give me another year. I already put my farm in my daughter’s name. Ain’t a whole lot can touch me no more. I got cancer, just like Jackson Posey, although I never smoked like he did or had no problems with my skin,” he said.

“Tell me about Junior, sir.”

“Junior was gonna be Junior. He didn’t wear no other man’s hat. That was Junior,” he said. For the first time he smiled.

In the waning days of summer, when the amber light at evening turned the countryside into a yellowing antique photograph, Junior Crudup took his twelve-string Stella guitar out on the steps of the cabin in the work camp and began composing a song whose lyrics he penciled on a paper bag flattened down on the board plank beside him.

“What you calling your song?” Woodrow asked, sitting down next to him in the dusk.

“‘The Angel of Work Camp Number Nine,’” Junior replied.

Woodrow rubbed the whiskers that grew like black wire on his chin.

“T’ink that’s a good idea, Junior?” he asked.

“Gonna record it up in Memphis one day. You gonna see,” Junior replied.

“I seen her car out here last night. Parked right there on the road.

She was smoking a cigarette behind the wheel and playing the radio in the dark.”

“You better not be fooling with me, Woodrow.”

“It was her. Cap’n Posey walked up to her window and axed if any ting was wrong. She said she was just taking a drive. Then she drove on down the road toward the li’l sto’ by the bridge. A li’l while later I seen her drive on back to the big house. She was drinking a bottle of beer, tilting her chin up each time she took a sip.”

“Why didn’t you come get me?”

“You spent too much time up Nort’, Junior. You’re having t’oughts ain’t no nigger in Lou’sana ought to be having.”

“Maybe it was that way at first. But not now. You know what she got that make her special?”

“Her tits ain’t bad.”

“Don’t be talking that way, Woodrow. She’s special ‘cause she got respect for other people.”

Junior adjusted the belly of his guitar on his thigh and slipped his three steel finger picks on his right hand, then corded the neck of the guitar and began singing:

“You risking your ass for somebody don’t know you alive,” Woodrow said.

“Rich ladies like that got all kinds of things they got to do, places they got to travel to, Woodrow. She cain’t be coming down here all the time.”

“Don’t let Boss Posey hear that song.”

“When she invites me back up to the house?” Junior said.

“Yeah?”

“That’s the first song I’m gonna play.”

There was drought in the fall and the fields hardened and cracked under a merciless sun and an empty sky that by noon was like white glass. The leaves of the cane baked in the wind and frayed into thread on the ends and rattled dryly on the stalks, and by evening the sky was cinnamon colored with dust and the convicts filling mule-drawn water tanks with buckets they flung into the bayou on ropes had to tie wet handkerchiefs across their nostrils and mouths. To conserve water the convicts bathed in the bayou, then sat listlessly on the porches of their cabins until lock-up. Every third or fourth evening, while the cicadas sang in a grove of cedar trees near the camp, Junior worked on the song he was composing in tribute to Andrea LeJeune, waiting for the invitation to play on her lawn again, telling himself she was contacting the governor and that any day a parole order for his release would be delivered at the camp’s front gate.

At bell count on a September morning Jackson Posey saw the folded brown paper sack covered with penciled lyrics sticking from Junior’s back pocket.

“What you got there, Junior?” he asked.

The early sun was already a dull red inside the dust blowing out of the fields. At the bottom of the slope that led down to the bayou, the water was low and swarming with gnats, algae-webbed snags protruding from the surface, all of it smelling of dead fish that lay bloated and fly-specked on the banks.