James Burke - Purple Cane Road

I had known Belmont through his cousin Dixie Lee Pugh at SLI when we were all students there during the late 1950s. Dixie Lee went on to become the most famous white blues singer of his generation, second only to Elvis as a rock 'n' roll star. Belmont learned to play piano in the same Negro juke joint that Dixie Lee did, but he got hit with a bolt of religion and turned to preaching as a career rather than music. He exorcised demons and handled snakes and drank poisons in front of electrified rural congregations all over Louisiana. He baptized Negroes and poor whites by immersion in bayous so thick with mud they could clog a sewer main, while cottonmouth moccasins and alligators with hooded eyes watched from among the lily pads.

But the donations he received from church people were small ones and he made his living by selling detergent, brooms, and scrub brushes out of his automobile. Occasionally he would stop by New Iberia and ask me to have lunch with him at Provost's Bar. He had attended college only one year, but he was proud of what he called his "self-betterment program." He read a library book thirty minutes before breakfast each morning and thirty minutes before going to bed. He learned one new word from a thesaurus each day, and to improve what he called his "intellectual thinking skills," he did his business math in his head. He performed one good deed a day for somebody else, and, in his words, "as a man on his way up, one good deed for my own self."

To save money he slept in his car, ate fifty-cent lunches in poolrooms, and sometimes bathed and shaved with a garden hose behind a church house fifteen minutes before his sermon.

Then Belmont discovered the carnival world of Louisiana politics, in the way a mental patient might wander into a theme park for the insane and realize that life held more promise than he had ever dreamed.

Newspeople called Belmont the most mesmerizing southern orator since Huey Long.

During his run for his second term as governor, the opposition spread rumors that Belmont was not only a drunk but that his mulatto mistress, whom he had stashed over in Vicksburg, had borne him twins. Time magazine said he was finished. Fundamentalist preachers, once his colleagues, denounced him from every pulpit in the state. Belmont appeared on a nationally telecast religious show and tried to rinse his sins in public. His contrition was a flop.

He held a July Fourth political rally and barbecue in Baton Rouge. The beer, the corn on the cob, the chicken, and the links were free, paid for, some said, by casino interests in Chicago and Las Vegas. Belmont climbed up onto a flatbed truck while his string band belted out "The Orange Blossom Special." He played harmonica into the microphone, his face reddening, sweat leaking out of his Stetson hat. When the song ended, the applause was no more than a ripple, while the audience waited to hear what Belmont Pugh had to say about his misdeeds.

He wore shined oxblood cowboy boots, a white suit, a blue shirt, and a flowered necktie. He was too tall to speak comfortably into the microphone, and he removed it from the stand and held it in his huge hand.

His face was solemn, his voice unctuous.

"I know y'all heered a lot of stories about your governor," he said. "I won't try to fool you. They grieve me deeply. I'm talking heartfelt pain."

He paused, taking a breath. Then his knees bent slightly, as though he were gathering a huge volume of air in his lower parts.

"But I'm here to tell y'all right now… That anytime, anywhere, anybody…" He shook his head from side to side for emphasis, his voice wadding in his throat as though he were about to strangle on his own emotions. "I mean anybody sets a trap for Belmont Pugh with whiskey and women…" His body was squatted now, his face breaking into a grin as wide as an ax blade. "Then by God they'll catch him every time!" he shouted.

The audience went wild.

The price of domestic oil rose the same week and the economy bloomed. Belmont was reelected by a landslide…

Late the next afternoon I looked through the screen window of the bait shop and saw Belmont 's black Chrysler park by the boat ramp and Belmont walk down the dock toward the shop. His aides had started to follow him but he waved them off with his Stetson hat, then began slapping the hat against his thigh, as though pounding dust off his clothes. His brow was furrowed, his eyes deep in his face. He blew out his breath and punched and shaped the crown of his hat with his fist and fitted it back on his head just before entering the shop, his easy smile back in place.

Fifteen minutes later we were a mile down the bayou, the outboard pulled into a cove of cypress and willow trees. Belmont sat on the bow and flipped his lure toward the edge of the lily pads and retrieved it slowly through the dark water. He had a lean face and long teeth and pale eyes and graying hair that hung over his ears. His Stetson, which he wore virtually everywhere, was shapeless and stained with sweat and wrapped with a silver cord around the crown.

"You a student of Scripture, Dave?" he asked.

"Not really."

"The Old Testament says Moses killed maybe two hundred people when he come down off Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments still smoking in his hands. God had just talked to him from the burning bush, but Moses saw fit to put them people to death."

"I'm not following you, Belmont."

"I've signed death warrants on a half dozen men. Every one of them was a vicious killer and to my mind deserved no mercy. But I'm sorely troubled by the case of this Labiche woman."

I lay my rod across the gunnels of the boat. "Why?" I asked.

"Why? She's a woman, for God's sakes."

"That's it?"

He fanned a mosquito out of his face.

"No, that's not it. The minister at my church knows her and says her conversion's the real thing. That maybe she's one of them who's been chosen to carry the light of God. I got enough on my conscience without going up to judgment with that woman's death on me."

"I know a way out."

"How?"

"Refuse to execute anyone. Cut yourself loose from the whole business."

He threw his rod and reel against the trunk of a cypress and watched it sink through a floating curtain of algae.

"Send me a bill for that, will you?" he said.

"You can bet on it," I replied.

"Dave, I'm the governor of the damn state. I cain't stand up in front of an auditorium full of police officers and tell them I won't sign a death warrant 'cause I'm afraid I'll go to hell."

"Is there another reason?"

He turned his face into the shadows for a moment. He rubbed the curls on the back of his neck.

"Some people say I might have a shot at vice president. It ain't a time to be soft on criminals, particularly one who's chopped up an ex-state trooper."

"I don't know what to tell you," I said, trying to conceal the disappointment in my voice.

He beat at the air with both hands. "I'm gonna call the Mosquito Control down here and bomb this whole place," he said. "Lord God Almighty, I thought liquor and women's thighs were an addiction. Son, they don't hold a candle to ambition."

The next morning a young black woman walked through the front door of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and down the hall to my office and tapped on the glass with one ringed finger. She wore a lavender shirt and white blouse and lavender pumps, and carried a baby in diapers on her shoulder.

"Little Face?" I said when I opened the door.

"I'm moving back here. Out at my auntie's place in the quarters at Loreauville. I got to tell you something," she said, and walked past me and sat down before I could reply.

"What's up?" I said.

"Zipper Clum is what's up. He say he gonna do you and Fat Man both."

"Clete Purcel is 'Fat Man'?"