James Burke - Half of Paradise

Ben Leander told the trusties to take the food cart out. The men were usually given a second serving, but this morning they were being punished. Leander looked around the room once more and went out, clanging the iron door shut behind him.

“You fixed us good,” one man said to LeBlanc.

“He’ll cut us short on lunch, too,” another said.

“We was all right before you and your buddy come in.”

“Was you ever locked in the tank, Shortboy?” a third inmate said.

“He can’t keep nobody in there a week.”

“Shit he can’t.”

“Tell them about it, Shortboy.”

“It’s just like he says,” Shortboy said. He was a short, thick-bodied man, with a square build and a big nose and close-set eyes. “The stink seeps into your guts and they don’t send the trusties in to clean the crappers and them goddamn flies is all over the place and you think you’ll puke when they hand you the food through the slot in the door. About six months ago there was an old man in here. He used to walk around in his drawers all the time, and there was something wrong with one of his legs. It was red and swole up like rubber. One time the door was open and the old guy forgot and stepped across the deadline. Leander pushed him down on the concrete, and he got all skinned up. We wrote what happened on a piece of paper and everybody signed it. One of the guys took it to a newspaper when he got out. Soon as the paper come out Leander threw us in the tank for nine days. Nine fucking days, crowded up together like a bunch of pigs. We even set fire to them Bibles to get rid of the stink. There wasn’t none of us fit to piss on when we come out of there.”

“It ain’t right to lock everybody up for what one guy does,” a man said. “He ought to put LeBlanc in the hole and let us be.”

“You got no rights in here,” another said.

Avery and LeBlanc were over by the window. Avery had his plate and cup on the sill. He was standing. LeBlanc sat on the floor against the wall with his knees pulled up before him. His black hair hung in his face.

“We don’t have a lot of friends here,” Avery said.

“I don’t give a damn for that. Bunch of white trash.”

“Listen. If Leander locks us all in the tank, you and me aren’t going to be worth twenty-five cents.”

“I got some people to pay back. It’s them that’s got to be on the lookout.”

“There’re thirty of them. They’ll get started, and there won’t be any way to stop them.”

“I ain’t afraid of no white trash.”

“That isn’t it,” Avery said. “You’ve got to learn how to live in here if you’re going to make it.”

“I ain’t got to learn nothing.”

“Eat some breakfast.”

“I don’t want none.”

“Suit yourself.”

“You’re good people, kid, but you ain’t got to watch out for me. I seen more stuff than you could think about.”

“I was trying to keep you from getting your throat cut.”

“I didn’t know about you back in the marsh, but you’re good people. There ain’t many people worth anything.”

“Don’t start any more fights in here, and we’ll be all right.”

“I got to even everything up.”

“You’ll go back to the hole.”

“Screw it.”

“Don’t get us into more trouble.”

LeBlanc stood up and jerked his shirt out of his trousers.

“You see this scar on my belly?” he said. “A Jap bayonet done that. Look at my back. That’s what a army M.P. done. I got a lot of paying back to do

Avery poured some of his coffee into LeBlanc’s cup.

“Drink the coffee,” he said.

LeBlanc tucked his shirt in and drank from the cup.

“You ain’t been in a war. Don’t ever go to one, even if they stand you up against a wall,” he said. “I went over in ’43. They sent us in at the Marianas. The Japs pasted us on the beach, but we done our share of killing too. That’s where I shot my first man. I forgot what the rest of them looked like, but Christ I remember that first one. He was buck naked except for a strip of rag around his loins, up in the top of a palm tree. I cut him down with my B.A.R. and he fell out and there was a rope tied around his middle and he was swinging in the air and I kept on shooting and the bullets turned him around like a stick spinning in the water.”

“I’m going to sleep for a while,” Avery said.

“You ain’t finished eating.”

“I was awake most of last night.”

He went through the open door of the tank and lay down on his mattress. He put his arm behind his head and looked up at the top of the tank. He thought of his brother Henri who had been killed at Normandy. Avery could remember the day he enlisted. Henri was seventeen at the time and would not have had to go into the service for another year, but he volunteered with the local National Guard outfit that had just been activated for training. It was his way of leaving, Avery thought. He was getting away from the house and Papa and all the rest of it.

Henri finished training and was shipped to England in February of 1944. They received one letter from him in the next three months. In late June a telegram arrived at the Broussard home. Mr. Broussard didn’t open it. He held the envelope in his hand a moment and dropped it on the table and went to the back part of the house. Henri had been attached to a rifle company as a medic. He was among the first American troops to invade the French coast. Many of the men in his company didn’t make the beach. He dragged a wounded man out of the surf and was giving him a shot of morphine when a mortar shell made a direct hit on his position. The burial detail put him in a pillowcase.

And that’s it, Avery thought. Somebody in Washington sends you a yellow square of paper with pasted words and your brother is dead. Just like that, dead. No more Martinique parish, no more Papa, no more fallen down house that somebody built a hundred years ago for a way of life that is as dead as Papa and Henri. And the last of the noble line of French and Spanish aristocracy is now lying on his back in the parish drunk tank on a mattress that smells of vomit, waiting to go to work camp where he will have prison letters stenciled on his back and they’ll give him a pick and shovel to work with at hard labor from one to three years, and he may be one of the few aristocrat convicts in the camp.

Avery remembered the things his father used to say to him when they sat on the veranda together during the long summer afternoons. Mr. Broussard spoke of the early American democracy and the agrarian dream of Thomas Jefferson, and how they had died and there was nothing left of them save a shell. The agrarian dream had been destroyed by an industrial revolution that pierced America to its heart. The republic was gone and had been replaced by another society which bore little semblance to its predecessor. Mr. Broussard had been raised to live in a society and age that no longer existed. By blood and by heritage he was bound to the past, which was as irreclaimable as those vanished summer days of heavy cane in the fields and the Negroes going to work with the hoes over their shoulders and the full cotton wagons on the way to the gin. Only an inborn memory remained, a nostalgia for something that had flowered and faded and died before he lived. Possibly in the mellow twilight of evening he could look out from the veranda and see the column of men in their worn butternut-brown uniforms, retreating from the Union army, and hear the jingle of the saber and the labor of the horses, the creak of the artillery carriages, as the column moved up the river road to make one last fight against General Banks’ advancing troops.

He should have lived back then, Avery thought. He should have died when it died, and never had sons that end up torn to bits in France or serving time on a work gang.