James Burke - The Glass Rainbow

For whatever reason, for whatever higher cause, the collective industrial agencies of the modern era had transformed a green-gold paradisiacal wonderland into an environmental eyesore that would probably make the most optimistic humanist reconsider his point of view.

I had called ahead and had been told by Kermit Abelard that he would be genuinely happy if I would come to his home. I did not ask about his friend Robert Weingart, the convict-author, nor did I mention the reason for my visit or that I would be bringing Clete Purcel with me, although I doubted if any of these things would have been of concern to him. I did not like Kermit dating my daughter, but I could not say he was a fearful or deceptive man. My objections to him were his difference in age from Alafair’s and that he was an experienced man in the ways of the world, and a great part of that experience came from the exploitive enterprises with which the Abelards had long been associated.

We rumbled over the bridge and knocked on the front door. A storm was kicking up in the Gulf, and the wind was cool on the porch. In the south I could see a bank of black thunderheads low on the horizon and electricity forking inside the clouds the way sparks fork and leap off an emery wheel.

“What a dump,” Clete said.

“Will you be quiet?” I said.

He screwed a filter-tip cigarette into his mouth and got out his Zippo. I started to pull the cigarette out of his mouth, but what was the use? Clete was Clete.

“Who’s Abelard’s cooze?” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Alafair is going out with him.”

His face looked as though it had just undergone a five-second sunburn. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I thought maybe you’d figured it out.”

“Is there another agenda working here, Dave?”

“Not a chance,” I replied.

He lit his cigarette and puffed on it. When Kermit Abelard opened the door, Clete took one more drag and flipped the cigarette in the flower bed.

“How do you do?” Kermit said, extending his hand.

“What’s the haps?” Clete replied.

“You’re Clete Purcel, aren’t you? I’ve heard a lot about you. Come in, come in,” Kermit said, holding the great oaken door wide.

The interior of the house was dark, the furnishings out of the Gilded Age, the light fixtures glowing dimly inside their dust. The carpet was old and too thin for the hardwood floor, and I could feel the rough grain of the timber through my shoes. Clete touched his nose with the back of his wrist and cleared his throat.

“Something wrong, Mr. Purcel?” Kermit asked.

“I have allergies,” Clete replied.

“I’ve fixed some drinks for us and a cold Dr Pepper or two and a snack if you’d like to come out on the sunporch,” Kermit said.

I couldn’t hold it back. “You’re keen on Dr Pepper?” I said.

“No, I thought you might want-” he began.

“You thought I would like a Dr Pepper instead of something else?” I said.

“No, not necessarily.”

“You have water?” I said.

“Of course.”

“I’ll take a glass of water.”

“Sure, Dave, or Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Call me whatever you like.”

I saw Clete gazing out the side door onto the sunporch, trying to hide a smile.

“What is it I can help y’all with?” Kermit said.

“Is your friend Robert Weingart here?” I said.

“He’s just getting out of the shower. We were splitting wood on the lawn. Robert is marvelous at carving ducks out of wood. Both of us write through the morning, then have a light lunch and do a little physical exercise together. I’m glad you came out, Mr. Robicheaux. I think so highly of Alafair. She’s a great person. I know you’re proud of her.”

He was patronizing and presumptuous, but nevertheless I wondered if I hadn’t been too hard on him; if indeed, as Clete had suggested, I’d had my own agenda when I’d brought Clete to the Abelard home.

When Kermit was only a teenager, his parents had disappeared in a storm off Bimini. Their sail yacht had been found a week later on a sunny day, floating upright in calm water, the canvas furled, the hull and deck clean and gleaming. I suspected that regardless of his family’s wealth, life had not been easy for Kermit Abelard as a young man.

Earlier I mentioned that his ancestors had not invested themselves in the comforting legends of the Lost Cause. But as I glanced at a glassed-in mahogany bookcase, I realized that southern Shintoism does not necessarily have to clothe itself in Confederate gray and butternut brown. A Norman-Celtic coat of arms hung above the bookcase, and behind the glass doors were clusters of large keys attached to silver rings and chains, the kind a plantation mistress would wear on her waist, and a faded journal of daily life on a southern plantation written in faded blue ink by Peter Abelard’s wife. More significantly, the case contained framed photographs of Kermit’s grandfather, Timothy Abelard, standing alongside members of the Somoza family in Nicaragua, supervising a cockfight in Batista-era Cuba, receiving a civilian medal for the productivity of munitions that his defense plant had manufactured during the Vietnam War, and finally, Timothy Abelard overseeing a group of black farmworkers in a field of wind-swirling sugarcane.

In the last photograph, the cane cutters were bent to their work, their shins sheathed in aluminum guards. Only Timothy Abelard was looking at the camera, his pressed clothes powdered with lint from the cane. His expression was that of a gentleman who had made his peace with the world and did not consign his destiny or the care of either his family or his property to others.

Then I realized that I was being stared at, in a fashion that is not only invasive but fills you with a sense of moral culpability, as though somehow, through a lapse of manners, you have invited the disdain of another.

Timothy Abelard was sitting in a wheelchair no more than ten feet away, a black female nurse stationed behind him. Eight or nine years ago he had become a recluse without ever offering a public explanation of his infirmity. Some people said he’d developed an inoperable tumor in the brain; others said he had been dragged by his horse during an electric storm. His skin was luminescent from the absence of sunlight.

“Hi, Pa’pere. Did you want to join us?” Kermit said.

But Timothy Abelard’s eyes did not leave my face. They had the intensity of a hawk’s, and like a hawk’s, they did not occupy themselves with thoughts about good or evil or the distinction between the two. He was well groomed, his hair thin and combed like strands of bronze wire across his pate. His smile could be called kindly and deferential, even likable, in the way we want old people to be wise and likable. But the intrusive nature of his gaze was unrelenting.

“How are you, sir?” I said.

“I know you. Or I think I do. What’s your name?” he said.

“Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Sheriff’s Department,” I said.

“You investigating a crime, suh?” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

“I had some questions about the St. Jude Project.”

“That’s a new one on me. What is it?” he said.

“I guess that makes two of us,” I said. “Do you remember my father? His name was Aldous Robicheaux, but everyone called him Big Aldous.”

“He was in the oil business?”

“He was a derrick man. He died in an offshore blowout.”

“I’m forgetful sometimes. Yes, I do remember him. He was an extraordinary man in a fistfight. He took on the whole bar at Provost’s one night.”

“That was my father,” I replied.

“You say he was killed on a rig?”

“Yes, sir.”