James Burke - Crusader's Cross

"This is Dave Robicheaux," I said when he picked up the receiver. "I'd like to buy one of your birdhouses."

"You called at the right time. I got a sale on. One for twenty-five dol'ars or two for forty-nine ninety-five."

"I think I'll stick with one."

"Installation is free."

"Don't worry about it. Just drop it off at Molly's office and I'll send you a check."

"No, suh, I give door-to-door complete service. That's what you got to do to make a bidness a success today. Me and Tee Bleu got to go to the Wal-Mart. You gonna be home?"

Twenty minutes later he was at the house, balancing on a stepladder while he wired the birdhouse to an oak limb. His son. Tee Bleu, was throwing pecans into the bayou. I wrote a check for Andre on the back steps.

"Miss Molly at home?" he said.

"No, she's at the grocery store. What's up?"

"Nothing. I just heard some people talking at the agency. Stuff they didn't have no right to say."

His eyes fixed on me, then he began to look innocuously around the yard, his whole head turning from spot to spot, as though it were attached to a metal rod.

"Spit it out," I said.

"A couple of ladies was saying they ain't bringing their children to the agency no mo' 'cause of what happened."

"You talking about the child molestation charge filed against me?"

"Mr. Val behind that, suh. It ain't right. No, suh. Ain't right."

"You know much about Mr. Val?"

"Know as much as I need to."

"You're a mysterious man, Andre." I tore the check out of my checkbook and handed it to him.

His half-moon eyebrows could have been snipped out of black felt and pasted on his forehead. He studied his little boy playing down by the bayou, and shook his shirt on his chest to cool his skin. Through the trees we could see a dredge barge passing on the bayou, its hull low in the water, its decks loaded with piles of mud.

"When I was a li'l boy about that size, I seen a gator come out of the bayou after a baby. Baby was in diapers, toddling along on the edge of the water. His mama was hanging wash up by the trees, probably t'inking about the worthless man who put that baby in her belly. Gator got the baby by his li'l leg and started dragging him toward the water. Wasn't nothing nobody could do about it. That gator was long as your truck and two feet 'cross the head. The mother and the old folks was running 'round screaming, hitting at it wit' buckets and crab nets and cane poles, but that gator just kept on moving down to the water, wit' the baby hanging out its mouth, just like they was hitting on it with pieces of string."

"Then Mr. Raphael run down from the big house wit' a butcher knife and cut the gator's t'roat. He drove the baby to Charity Hospital in Lafayette and saved his life. People couldn't talk about nothing else for a year except how Mr. Raphael save that po' child's life."

Andre stopped his story and looked down the slope at his son. The late sun was a burnt orange through the trees, and blue jays were clattering in the canopy.

"I'm not sure I get the point, Andre," I said.

"People loved Mr. Raphael. But they ain't knowed him. Not like I knowed him. Not like I know Mr. Val. My li'l boy growing up in different times from the ones I growed up in. I'm real happy for that. That's the only point I was making, Mr. Dave. I got birdseed out in my car. You want me to fill up your birdhouse?"

"I have some in the shed. Thanks, anyway," I said.

On his way out, he helped Molly carry in her groceries from her car, his face jolly and full of cheer as he set the bags down heavily, one after another, on the kitchen table.

After he was gone, I went inside and helped her put away the groceries. "Andre told me some ladies at your agency won't bring their children there anymore," I said.

"He shouldn't have done that," she said.

"Man's just reporting what he heard."

"I know who I married. That's all I care about."

"You're a pretty good gal to hang out with," I said.

I poured a glass of iced tea for both of us and sat down at the kitchen table to drink it. She leaned over me and hugged me under the neck and kissed me behind the ear.

"What was that for?" I said.

"I felt like it," she replied.

That night I dreamed of two brown pelicans sailing low and flat over an inland bay in late autumn, the pouches under their beaks plump with fish. In the dream they continued north in their flight, across miles of sawgrass stiff with frost and bays that looked like hammered copper. They passed over a cluster of shrimp boats tied up at the docks in a coastal town, then followed a winding bayou into the heart of the Teche country. The pelicans turned in a wide circle over a swamp thick with gum trees and cypress snags, and sailed right across the home where Jimmie and I grew up. Through the eyes of the birds I saw the purple rust on the tin roof of the house and the cypress boards that had turned the color of scorched iron from the dust and smoke of stubble fires in the cane fields. I saw my mother and father in the backyard, hoeing out their Victory garden during World War II. I saw Jimmie and me in tattered overalls, building a wood fire under the big iron pot in which we cooked hog cracklings after first frost.

Then all the people in the yard looked up at the sky, like flowers turning into the sun, and waved at the pelicans.

I woke up from the dream and went into the kitchen to make coffee. What did the dream mean? Bootsie had said that one day the brown pelicans would come back to the Teche. But I didn't need dreams to tell me there were no pelicans on Bayou Teche, and that my parents were as dead as the world in which I grew up.

"Up early?" I heard Molly say.

"It's a beautiful morning," I said.

She went outside and came back with both Tripod and Snuggs and filled their pet bowls. "There's a robin standing on top of the new birdhouse," she said.

"Andre Bergeron told me a story yesterday about Mr. Raphael saving a baby from a gator. Except his story seemed to be about something else."

"A baby?"

"Yeah, a black baby. A gator came after it. Bergeron said when he was a little boy he saw Mr. Raphael save the baby from the gator."

"The baby was Andre. At least that's what I always heard. The old man saved his life. Andre has ugly scars all over one calf."

"Funny guy," I said.

"Andre is sweet," she replied. She looked at the clock on the counter. "It's only five-thirty. You sure you don't want to take a nap before you go to work?" She pursed her lips and waited, her chest rising and falling in the soft blueness of the morning.

"You talked me into it," I said.

I attended the Friday noon meeting of an AA bunch known as the Insanity Group. The meeting was held in a dilapidated house in a poor section of town, and was supposedly a nonsmoking one. But people lit up in both the front and back doorways and flooded the house's interior with amounts of smoke that few bars contain. The people in the Insanity Group had paid hard dues – in jails, detox units, car wrecks, and the kind of beer-glass brawls that quickly turn homicidal. Few of the men shaved more than once every five or six days. Many of the women, most of whom were tattooed, considered themselves fortunate to have a job in a carwash. Anybody there whose life didn't trail clouds of chaos possessed the spiritual eminence of St. Francis of Assisi.

But their honesty and courage in dealing with the lot life had dealt them had always been an example to me. Unfortunately for me, the subject of the meeting was the Fourth Step of Alcoholics Anonymous., namely, making a thorough and fearless inventory of one's own conscience. It was not a subject I cared to broach, at least not since my encounter with Jericho Johnny Wineburger at Henderson Swamp.

I made no contribution during the meeting, although the previous week I had admitted my slip to everyone there.