James Burke: Black Cherry Blues

"I think maybe you're right," I said.

"You better believe it, boy," he said, then took a deep breath down in his chest and looked out at the ring of blue mountains around the valley as though he held title to them.

"Ain't this world a pure pleasure?" he said.

Harry Mapes was sentenced to two life terms in the Montana state penitentiary at Deer Lodge, and the charges against me in Louisiana were dropped. I'm up to my eyes in debt, but it's late fall now, the heat has gone out of the days, and the sky has turned a hard, perfect blue, the way it does in South Louisiana after the summer exhausts itself in one final series of red dawns and burning afternoons. The water is now cool and still in the bays and coves, and the fishermen who go out of my dock bring back their ice chests loaded with sac-a-lait that are as thick as my hand across the back.

I invited Tess Regan to visit us, made arrangements for her to stay with my cousin in town, but when the time drew near for her to catch the plane, I knew she wouldn't be here. She said it was a sick grandparent in Bozeman. But we both knew better, and that's all right. I believe every middle-aged man remembers the girl he thinks he should have married. She reappears to him in his lonely moments, or he sees her in the face of a young girl in the park, buying a snowball under an oak tree by the baseball diamond. But she belongs back there, to somebody else, and that thought sometimes rends your heart in a way that you never share with anyone else.

Clete moved back to New Orleans and opened a bar right down from Joe Burda's Golden Star on Decatur. I don't know where he got the capital. Maybe he came away from Sally Dee's house with more than two gold ashtrays. Dixie Lee worked with me in the bait shop for a month, played weekends at a Negro nightclub in St. Martin-ville, then moved to New Orleans and organized a trio. They play regularly at Clete's place and one of my brother's clubs. One night I was down on Decatur, and I passed Clete's place when the door was open. I saw Dixie at the piano, way in back by the dance floor, his white rhinestone sport coat and pink shirt lighted by the floor lamps. I heard him singing:

"When they lay me down to rest, Put a rose upon my breast.

I don't want no evergreens, All I want is a bowl of butter beans."

Three weeks ago I was deep in the marsh at first light. At that time of day you hear and see many strange things in the marsh: a bull gator calling for his mate, a frog dropping off a cypress knee into the water, the cry of a nutria that sounds like the scream of a hysterical woman. The fog hangs so thick on the dead water and between the tree trunks that you can lose your hand in it. But I know what I saw that morning, and I know what happened, too, and I feel no need to tell a psychologist about it. I was picking up the trotline that I had strung through the trees the night before, and just as it started to rain through the canopy overhead Annie and my father walked through the mist and stood on a sand spit right by the bow of my pirogue.

She was barefoot and wore a white evening gown, and she had strung together a necklace of purple four-o'clocks around her throat.

"It's good-bye for real this time, Dave. It's been special," she said, then waded into the water, her dress billowing around her. She kissed me on the eyes and mouth, as perhaps my mother would have.

My father's tin hat was at an angle on his head, and he grinned with a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and held up one of his thumbs and winked. Then they walked deeper into the marsh, and the fog became so white and thick and cold that I had to reach out with the paddle and knock against the hard wood of a cypress to know where I was.

Neither sleep nor late-night thunderstorms bring them back now, and I rise each day into the sunlight that breaks through the pecan trees in my front yard. But sometimes at dusk, when the farmers burn the sugarcane stubble off their fields and the cinders and smoke lift in the wind and settle on the bayou, when red leaves float in piles past my dock and the air is cold and bittersweet with the smell of burnt sugar, I think of Indians and water people, of voices that can speak through the rain and tease us into yesterday, and in that moment I scoop Alafair up on my shoulders and we gallop down the road through the oaks like horse and rider toward my house, where Batist is barbecuing gaspagoo on the gallery and paper jack-o-lanterns are taped to the lighted windows, and the dragons become as stuffed toys, abandoned and ignored, like the shadows of the heart that one fine morning have gone with the season.