James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"Has the Chalons family ever tried to injure you?"

She gazed at the bayou, her eyes blinking more than they should have. "They let us know they were around," she said.

I removed the handful of mug shots from my shirt pocket and placed them on the table. "Ever see any of these guys?" I asked.

She separated the photos one from the other with her index finger. Then she tapped on the face of a man with grainy skin, recessed eyes, and teeth that were too big for his mouth. "That's one I won't forget," she said.

"His name is Billy Joe Pitts. He's a sheriff's deputy."

"He pulled me over to the side of the highway north of Alexandria. We'd been circulating a union petition among some cannery workers. He made some rather nasty remarks."

"He threatened you?"

"His remarks were sexual in nature. That night our car was vandalized."

"Did you ever hear of a woman named Ida Durbin?"

"No, I don't recall that name. Who is she?"

"Someone I believe the Chalons family would like to forget," I said.

She paused a moment. "You're not really here about our troubles, are you?"

I felt my face tighten. "Billy Joe Pitts is part of an ongoing assault-and-battery investigation. I think he takes his orders from the Chalonses."

"I see," she said.

"You've been very helpful." But I had lost her attention and I believe her trust as well.

She looked at her watch. "I have to make some deliveries now. We run a folk craft workshop and sell the birdhouses they make. A tough way to raise a dollar, huh?"

Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.

Just before I drove off the property onto the state road, I saw a group of black people leave the rehabilitated farmhouse that served as Sister Molly's administrative center. They were laughing, clapping one another on the shoulder about a joke of some kind. A dome-headed black man recognized me through the windshield and raised a hand in greeting. It was Andre Bergeron, the handyman who did chores for the Chalons family. I waved out the window in response and headed back to New Iberia.

After work, I fixed supper for Jimmie and me at the house. I was beginning to regret I had told him of Ida Durbin's fate. He blamed himself and kept trying to recall details of their last day together, as though some clue could be extracted from an idle remark she made over forty years ago. He told me he was meeting a musicologist that night at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.

"I know I've heard Ida's voice on a record. I'm sure of it, Dave," he said.

I did the dishes and didn't try to contend with Jimmie's obsession. After he was gone, I showered and took a walk downtown in the twilight. From the drawbridge looking south I could see the gardens behind the Shadows, a plantation home built in 1831, and the receding corridor of oak and cypress trees along the banks of the Teche, a tidal stream that had been navigated by Spaniards in bladed helmets, French missionaries, displaced Acadians, pirates, Confederate and Yankee gun crews, and plantation revelers who toasted their own prosperity on paddle wheelers that floated through the night like candlelit wedding cakes.

Jean Lafitte had auctioned off West Indian slaves a few hundred yards from where I stood. As a lesson in terror, Union soldiers under the command of General Nathaniel Banks had raped women, burned crops, and looted the homes of the rich up and down the bayou when they marched through New Iberia in April 1863. People still found minie balls in the heartwood of felled oak trees and pieces of broken china in chicken yards, green depressions carpeted with mushrooms in a woods where soldiers with no names were hurriedly buried.

As the heat went out of the day, the summer light seemed to ascend higher into the sky, so that the bayou itself became a long amber ribbon between the green darkness of the trees, the surface creasing in the wind, somehow disconnected from the present, the alluvial soil along the banks filled with the bones of Indians, Europeans, and Reconstruction-empowered Africans, all of whom had thought their dominion over the land was forever.

But in my reverie about the nature of history and collective vanity I had forgotten a more prosaic detail from my day at the office. Either Jimmie or I had accidentally turned off the message machine on my telephone, and when I returned home the phone was ringing without stop.

"Hello?" I said.

"I wasn't going to call, but principle is principle, I think."

"Honoria?" I said.

"Yes. Who did you think it was?" she said.

I squeezed my eyes shut. "I was supposed to call you back after work," I said.

"To put it more accurately, you asked for my phone number. We were going to have a drink."

Not exactly, but it wasn't a time to argue. "I got buried today. I'm terribly sorry," I said.

She didn't speak, and I could feel my hand tightening on the receiver, my discomfort growing. I had meant to call her back, but not to have a drink. Instead, my whole agenda with Honoria had been about Sister Molly Boyle, whom I had been able to contact on my own. The consequence was I had forgotten about Honoria. The truth was I had tried to use her.

"Where are you?" I said.

"Down the street, at Clementine's."

"Can I treat you to a dessert?"

"Whatever you like, Dave. It's a strange evening, isn't it? The sky is purple and full of birds. When I think of the color purple, I always think of the passion of Christ or the robe of Agamemnon."

Don't get mixed up with this one, I thought.

But I was just buying her a dessert, obeying the tenets of basic charity, wasn't I? Why turn a harmless act into self-flagellation? I told myself.

And in that spirit I strolled down to Clementine's and through the door into a bar and supper club where the glad-at-heart gathered and had drinks and etouffee and steaks two inches thick on a candlelit terrace overlooking the Teche, and where, in the cold smell of crushed ice stained with whiskey and bruised cherries, a half century could disappear with the ease of raising a glass to your mouth.

"You can't drink at all?" Honoria said.

"I could but I choose not to," I replied, and felt instantly stupid at my own rhetoric.

"I thought if you went through the Twelve Steps, you were cured. It must be awful to know that about yourself."

"To know what?"

"That you're afraid of your own metabolism."

There was a black shine in both her hair and eyes, and she wore a white cotton dress with eyelets in the bodice that exposed the deep tan in her skin. When she ordered her third vodka collins I made a show of noticing the clock above the bar and told her I should be going. But you didn't get off the hook that easily with Honoria Chalons. She gave the waiter a credit card to pay the check before I could, then asked him to put her drink in a Styrofoam cup. "Do me a favor?" she said to me.

I waited for her to go on.

"My car won't start. I think it'll have to be towed. Can you give me a lift?" she said.

We walked back down East Main to my house and got in my pickup truck. She tripped once on a pitch in the sidewalk and I felt her body come hard against me. "I still haven't eaten dinner. Want to stop somewhere?" she said.

"I have work to do," I said.

"It's a grand evening. I don't want to waste it at home. The House of Chalons is a dark place. Few people know how dark it really is," she said.

I looked at her profile in the shadowy light of a streetlamp, and wondered if she was being deliberately grandiose. But she was not. Her eyes were fixed on the rooftops of the Victorian and antebellum homes along the street and the birds circling over the chimneys, as though they held the answer to a question she had never resolved.

"Why are you staring at me?" she said.