James Burke: Purple Cane Road

It started to rain again after I got home. I listened to no radio or television that night, and at ten minutes after midnight I put on my raincoat and hat and walked down to the bait shop and turned on the string of lights over the dock and the flood lamps that shone on the bayou and every light in every corner of the shop. I fixed coffee and mopped down the floors and cut and trimmed bread for sandwiches and said my rosary on my fingers and listened to the rain beating on the roof until it became the only sound in my head. Then I realized I was not listening to rain anymore but to hail that bounced and smoked on the dock and melted into white string on the flood lamps, and I wanted to stay forever inside the lighted, cool brilliance of the dock and bait shop, and to keep Bootsie and Alafair there with me and let the rest of the world continue in its fashion, its cities and commerce and inhumanity trapped between morning and the blackness of the trees.

But it was I who would not let the world alone. The next day I drove out to the Labiche home and was told by a tall, high-yellow mulatto I had never seen before that Passion was at the nightclub, preparing to open up. He wore a mustache and tasseled, two-tone shoes and dark blue zoot pants with a white stitch in them and a black cowboy snap-button shirt with red flowers on it and a planter's straw hat cocked at an angle on his head. "How's she feeling?" I said.

"Ax her," he said.

"Excuse me, but who are you?"

"What do you care, Jack?" he said, and closed the door in my face.

Passion's pickup truck was the only vehicle in the nightclub's parking lot. I went in the side door and saw a woman at the antique piano by the back wall. She was totally absorbed in her music and was not aware that anyone else was in the building. Her powerful arms lifted and expanded in silhouette as she rolled her fingers up and down the yellowed keys. I couldn't identify the piece she was playing, but the style was unmistakable. It was Albert Ammons, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Moon Mulligan; it was out of the barrelhouse South of fifty years ago; it was Memphis and Texas R amp;B that could break your heart.

The woman at the piano stool wore jeans and an LSU T-shirt. A streak of gold sunlight fell across her neck like a sword, and on her neck was a tattooed red rose inside a cluster of green leaves.

She finished her song, then seemed to realize someone was standing behind her. She stayed very still, her hair lifting on her neck in the breeze from the fan, then closed the top on the piano keys.

"You want something?" she said, without turning around.

"No. Not really," I replied.

"You figured it out?"

"Like Clete Purcel says, 'What do I know?'"

"You think bad of me?"

"No."

"My sister was brave. A lot braver than me," she said.

"The dude at your house looks like he's in the life."

"It's a life, ain't it?"

"I never heard anybody do 'Pine Top's Boogie' as well as you. Don't sell yourself short, kiddo," I said, and squeezed her on the shoulder and walked outside into the sunlight.

This story has only a brief postscript, and it's not a very dramatic one. Yesterday a package wrapped in white butcher paper arrived in the mail. In it were an old scrapbook with a water-faded purple binder and an envelope taped across the binder's surface. The letter read as follows:

Dear Mr. Robicheaux,

Enclosed please find an item that evidently belonged to your mother. When the quarters were torn down, a number of such personal belongings were placed in a storage shed by my father, who was kind and thoughtfultoward his workers, white and Negro alike, regardless of what his detractors have written about him.

It is not my responsibility to hold on to the discarded memorabilia of people to whom it obviously did not have great import. Frankly, you have proved a great disappointment. You besmirched my husband's name, and it would not surprise me that you are responsible for the rumor that I deliberately admitted a murderer to my home in order to rid myself of my husband. I understand you invested much of your life in drunkenness. Perhaps you should seek help.

Sincerely, Cora Gable

I flipped through the pages of the scrapbook, stiff with photos and postcards and ticket stubs and sealed locks of hair and pressed flowers that had been glued in place with brush and jar. There was a wedding photo of her and Big Aldous taken in front of the brick cathedral in Abbeville; a menu from the restaurant in the old Jung Hotel in New Orleans, where she and Big Al had their honeymoon; a newspaper article from the Daily Iberian about my return from Vietnam; another article about my graduating from the New Orleans Police Academy.

The next ten pages, the only ones remaining in the book, were filled with articles from both the Times-Picayune and the Daily Iberian about my career. Inside the back of the binder she had pasted a newspaper photograph of me in uniform, leaning on a cane, and below it a photo of me taken in third grade at the Catholic elementary school. She had created a frame around the two pictures by gluing strips of pink ribbon along the borders of the binder.

My mother had been virtually illiterate and was probably not sure of the content of many of the articles she had saved. Nor was she able to make annotations in her scrapbook to indicate what the articles meant to her. But I knew who my mother was. She had said it to her killers before she died. Her name was Mae Robicheaux.

And I was her son.

Winner of two Edgar Awards, JAMES LEE BURKE is the author of nineteen novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Sunset Limited, Cimarron Rose, Cadillac Jukebox, Burning Angel, and Dixie CityJam. He lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.