Then there was the front gate, with three strands of barbed wire leaned inward on top and the wooden gun tower to one side. The oiled road on the other side bounced and shimmered with heat waves and stretched off through the green border of trees and second growth on the edge of the ditches. I got out of the car with my cardboard box under my arm.
“Paret coming out,” the hack said.
I knew he was going to try to shake hands while the gate was being swung back over the cattle guard, and I kept my attention fixed on the road and used my free hand to look for a cigarette in my shirt pocket. The hack shook a Camel loose from his pack and held it up to me.
“Well, thanks, Mr. Benson,” I said.
“Keep the rest of them. I got some more in the cage.” So I had to shake hands with him after all. He got back in the truck with a pinch of light in his iron face, his role a little more secure.
I walked across the cattle guard and heard the gate rattle and lock behind me. Four other men with cardboard boxes and suits similar to mine (we had a choice of three styles upon discharge) sat on the wooden waiting bench by the fence. The shade of the gun tower broke in an oblong square across their bodies.
“The state car ought to be up in a minute, Paret,” the gateman said. He was one of the old ones, left over from the thirties, and he had probably killed and buried more men in the levee than any other hack on the farm. Now he was almost seventy, covered with the kind of obscene white fat that comes from years of drinking corn whiskey, and there wasn’t a town in Louisiana or Mississippi where he could retire in safety from the convicts whom he had put on anthills or run double-time with wheelbarrows up and down the levee until they collapsed on their hands and knees.
“I think I need to hoof this one,” I said.
“It’s twenty miles out to that highway, boy.” And he didn’t say it unkindly. The word came to him as automatically as anything else that he raised up out of thirty-five years of doing almost the same type of time that the rest of us pulled.
“I know that, boss. But I got to stretch it out.” I didn’t turn to look at him, but I knew that his slate-green eyes were staring into my back with a mixture of resentment and impotence at seeing a piece of personal property moved across a line into a world in which he himself could not function.
The dead water in the ditches along the road was covered with lily pads, and dragonflies flicked with their purple wings above the newly opened flowers. The leaves on the trees were coated with dust, and the red-black soil at the roots was lined with the tracings of night crawlers. I was perspiring under my coat, and I pulled it off with one hand and stuck it through the twine wrapped around the cardboard box. A mile up the road I heard the tires of the state car whining hotly down the oiled surface. They slowed in second gear alongside me, the hack bent forward into the steering wheel so he could speak past his passenger.
“That’s a hot son of a bitch to walk, and you probably ain’t going to hitch no ride on the highway.”
I smiled and shook the palm of my hand at them, and after the car had accelerated away in a bright-yellow cloud of gravel and dust and oil, someone shot the finger out the back window.
I threw the cardboard box into the ditch and walked three more miles to a beer tavern and cafe set off by the side of the road in a circle of gravel. The faded wooden sides of the building were covered with rotted election posters (DON’T GET CAUGHT SHORT—VOTE LONG—SPEEDY O. LONG, A SLAVE TO NO MAN AND A SERVANT TO ALL), flaking and rusted tin signs advertising Hadacol and Carry-On, and stickers for Brown Mule, Calumet baking powder, and Doctor Tichner’s Painless Laxative. A huge live-oak tree, covered with Spanish moss, grew by one side of the building, and its roots had swelled under the wall with enough strength to bend the window jamb.
It was dark and cool inside, with a wooden ceiling fan turning overhead, and the bar shined with the dull light of the neon beer signs and the emptiness of the room. It felt strange to pull out the chair from the bar and scrape it into position and sit down. The bartender was in the kitchen talking with a Negro girl. His arms were covered with tattoos and a heavy growth of white hair. He wore a folded butcher’s apron tied around his great girth of stomach.
“Hey, podna, how about a Jax down here?” I said.
He leaned into the service window, his heavy arms folded in front of him and his head extended under the enclosure.
“Just get it out of the cooler, mister, and I’ll be with you in a minute.”
I went behind the bar and stuck my hand into the deep, ice-filled cooler and pulled out a bottle of Jax and snapped off the cap in the opener box. My wrist and arm ached with the cold and shale of ice against my skin. The foam boiled over the lip and ran down on my hand in a way that was as strange, at that moment, as the bar chair, the dull, neon beer signs, and the Negro girl scraping a spatula vacantly across the flat surface of the stove. I drank another Jax before the man came out of the kitchen, then ate a poor-boy sandwich with shrimp, oysters, lettuce, and sauce hanging out the sides of the French bread.
“You just getting out?” the man said. He said it in the flat, casual tone that most free people use toward convicts, that same quality of voice behind the Xeroxed letters from Boston asking for the donation of our eyes.
I put three dollar bills on the bar and walked toward the square of sunlight against the front door.
“Say, buddy, it don’t matter to me what you’re getting out of. I was just saying my cousin will give you a ride up to the highway in a few minutes.”
I walked down the oiled road a quarter of a mile, and his cousin picked me up in a stake truck and drove me all the way to the train depot in Baton Rouge.
TWO
I could have taken a bus home or hitchhiked, because it was only a three-hour trip to the coast, but I always loved trains, their rows of quiet, angular seats and the suck and rattle of the vestibule opening, and also, there is no dignity in hitchhiking when you are thirty years old. The clapboard general stores and taverns and oaks clicked by the window, and beyond the highway the gray trees of the marsh began. Negroes in flop straw hats cane-fished along the canal, and white cranes rose with their wings gilded in the sunlight above the dead cypress. The butcher boy swayed down the aisle with the roll of the train, his basket loaded wth magazines, newspapers, cans of grape drink, and paper cones of plums. I bought a Times-Picayune from him and walked to the club car.
The porter brought me a Jax, and after I tired of the front page and its serious treatment of something the state legislature was doing, I sipped the beer and watched the fields of new sugar cane and black Angus roll past. But as we neared New Orleans, the country began to change. Somebody had been busy in the last two years; it was no longer a rural section of the delta. Land-development signs stood along the highway, replacing the old ads for patent medicine and Purina feed, and great areas of marsh had been bulldozed out and covered with landfill for subdivision tracts. Mobile-home offices strung with colored flags sat on cinder blocks in the mud, with acres of waste in the background that were already marked into housing plots with surveyors’ stakes. The shopping-center boys had been hard at work, too. Pecan orchards and dairy barns had become Food City, Winn-Dixie, and Cash Discount.
I had to change trains in New Orleans for the rest of the trip home. The train was an old one, with dusty seats and yellowed windows cracked on the outside of the double glass with bb holes. We crossed the Mississippi, and my head reeled when I looked down from the window at the wide expanse of water far below. The tugboats and Standard Oil barges and the brown scratches of wake off their hulls looked as miniature and flat as painted pieces on a map. The train clicked slowly across the bridge and the long stretch of elevated track above the levee and mud flats and willow trees, then began to gain speed and bend through the bayou country and the achingly beautiful dark green of the cypress and oak trees, covered with moss and bursting at the roots with mushrooms and cowslips.
Most of the passengers in my car were French people, w
ith cardboard suitcases and boxes tied with string in the luggage rack. An old man in overalls and a suit jacket was speaking French to his wife in the seat behind me, and I listened to them with a violation of privacy that normally I would have walked away from. But in Angola the hacks, who came primarily from north Louisiana and Mississippi, never allowed anyone to speak French in their presence, and even back in the Block it wasn’t used unless there was no non-French-speaking person within earshot, because it was considered to have the same clandestine quality as a private whisper between two snitches.
The train crossed Bayou Lafourche, and I leaned into the window and looked at the men in pirogues floating motionlessly against the cypress roots, their cane poles arched and beaten with light against the pull of a bull bream below the lily pads. Before the train moved back into that long corridor of trees through the swamp, I saw one man rip a large goggle-eye perch through a torn leaf and dip one hand quickly into the water with the cane bending in his other hand, the boat almost tilted into the shallows, and catch the line in his fingers and pull the fish slowly away from the lily pads.
Then we were back into the long span of track through the trees and the dead water in the irrigation canals and the occasional farmhouses that you could see beyond the railroad right-of-way. I walked up to the club car and had a bourbon and water while the train slowed into my hometown. The X signs and LOUISIANA LAW STOP warnings on the crossings moved by gradually with the decreased speed of the train, and then the uplifted faces of the people on the platform stared suddenly at mine, then turned with a quick brightness of recognition at someone stepping off the vestibule.
There was an ice wagon on the loading ramp with a tarpaulin stretched across the ice blocks, and the evaporated coldness steamed on top of the canvas in the sun. Two taxicabs were parked in the shade of an oak that grew through the sidewalk in front of the depot.
“Do you know how to get to Robert Paret’s place?” I said.
“Who?” The taxi driver’s breath was full of beer through the window, and he smoked a filter-tipped cigarette in a gap between his teeth.
“It’s up Joe’s Shipyard road. You reckon you can take me there?”
“That’s fifteen miles, podna. I’ll turn the meter off for you, but it’ll still cost you ten dollars and maybe some for the tires I bust on that board road up there.”
The town was changed. Or maybe it had been changing for a long time and I hadn’t noticed it. Many of the old brick and wood-front stores had gone out of business, the hotel had a FOR LEASE sign in its dusty main window, and only a few cars were parked in front of the beer tavern and pool hall on the corner. The dime store, which used to be crowded with Negroes on Saturday afternoon, was almost empty. We passed the courthouse square and the lines of oak trees shading the wide sidewalks and wood benches where the old men used to sit, but it looked like a discarded movie set. The Confederate monument, inscribed at the base with the words THEY DIED IN DEFENSE OF A HOLY CAUSE, was spotted with pigeon droppings, and someone had stuffed trash paper in the barrel of the Civil War cannon next to it. Only one or two offices besides the bail bondsman’s were open, and the corner bar that used to have a card game upstairs was now boarded over.
“Where did the town go?” I said.
“It just dried up after they put in that new highway,” the driver said. “People ain’t going to drive into town when you can get everything you need out there. You just getting out of the service or something?”
“I’ve been away awhile.”
“Well, there’s lots of money to be made here. Like, I could be making twice what I’m getting today if that dispatcher didn’t put me on call at the depot.” He belched down in his throat and loosened a can of beer from a six-pack on the seat. He pulled the ring, and the foam slid over his thumb. “You can pick up fares at the airport and run them a half mile down to the motel, and what you get on tips is more money than I make all afternoon at the depot. Take one of them beers if you like.”
“Thank you,” I said. The can was hot, but I drank it anyway.
We drove out into the parish, crossed the wooden bridge over the bayou at the end of the blacktop, and bounced along the yellow, rutted road by the edge of Joe’s Shipyard. Shrimp boats, rusted oil barges, and quarter boats used by seismograph companies were moored along the docks in the dead water, and Negro children were fishing with cane poles for bullheads and gars among the cattails. The driver was out of beer, and we stopped at a tavern filled with deckhands, fishermen, and doodlebuggers (seismograph workers), and I bought him a round at the bar and a carton of Jax to go.
The road followed along the edge of the bayou and the cypress trees that hung out over the water. The expanded swell of the trunks at the waterline was dark from the wake of passing boats, and white egrets were nesting in the sand, their delicate wings quivering as they enlarged the depression around them. I had fished for bream, sacalait, and mud cat under every cypress on that bank, because they always came into the shade to feed in the hottest part of a summer afternoon, and there was one tree that had rusted mooring chains nailed into the trunk with iron stakes that the bark had overgrown in stages until the chain looped in and out of the tree like a deformity. My grandfather said that Jean Laffite used to tie his boat there when he was blackbirding and that he had buried a treasure between two oaks on the back of our property. The ground around the two oaks was pitted with depressions and ragged holes that cut through the roots, and as boys my older brother and I had dug six feet down and scraped away the clay from around the lid of a huge iron caldron, hollowing out the hole like sculptors, to prize up the lid with our shovels and finally discover the bones of a hog that had been boiled into tallow.
We hit the section of board road that Shell Oil had put in three years before when the road had washed out again and the parish refused to maintain it any longer, since the only people who used it were my father and the two or three doodlebug companies that were shooting in that part of the parish. The boards twisted under the tires and slammed upward into the oil pan, and then I saw the mailbox by the short wooden bridge over the coulee.
I paid the driver and walked up the gravel lane through the oak trees. The house had been built by my great-grandfather in 1857, in the Creole architectural style of that period, with brick chimneys on each side and brick columns supporting the latticework veranda on the second story. The peaked roof was now covered with tin, and the foundation had sunk on one side so that the brick columns had cracked and started to shale. The decayed outlines of the slaves’ quarters were still visible in the grass down by the bayou, and the original stone well, now filled with dirt and overgrown with vines, protruded from the ground at an angle by the smokehouse. My father had held on to forty-three acres since the depression, when we lost most of the farm, and he had refused to lease the mineral rights to the oil companies (he called them Texas sharpers who destroyed your land, cut your fences, and gave you a duster in return), but in the last few years the only sugar cane had been grown by Negroes who worked on shares. His Ford pickup truck with last year’s tag was parked in the shed, and there was an old Buick pulled onto the grass at the end of the lane.
The swing on the porch twisted slightly against the chains in the breeze. I tapped on the screen door and tried to see inside into the gloom.
“Hello!”
I heard someone at the back of the upstairs hallway, and I went inside with a strange feeling of impropriety. The house smelled of dust and a lack of sunlight. For some reason the only detail that caught in my eye was his guns in the deer-antler rack above the mantelpiece. The .30-.40 Kraig with the box magazine on the side, the lever-action Winchester, and the double-barrel twelve were flecked with rust and coated with cobwebs in the trigger guards and barrels.
“What you want here?”
I looked up the stairs at a big Negro woman in a starched nurse’s uniform. Her rolled white hose seemed to be bursting around her black thighs.
“I’m Mr.Paret’s son.??
?
She walked down the stairs, her hand on the banister to support her weight. There were tangles of gray hair above her forehead, and I knew that she was much older than she looked.
“You Mr. Iry?”
“Yes.”
“He figured you’d be home this week. I just give him his sedative, so he won’t be able to talk with you too long. After he takes his nap and has his supper, he can talk a lot better to you.”
“How bad is he?”
“He ain’t good. But maybe you better wait on the doctor. He’s coming out tonight with your sister. She stays with him on my night off.”
“Thank you.”
“Mr. Iry, he talks funny because of that medicine. He’s all right after his supper.”
I walked up the stairs into his room. It was dark, and the only light came from the yellow glow of sun against the window shade. Small bottles of urine were lined on the dresser, and there was a shiny bedpan on a stool at the head of the tester bed. His curved pipe and tobacco pouch rested against the armadillo-shell lamp on the nightstand. I didn’t know that his face could look so white and wasted. The sheet was pulled up to his chin, and the knobs of his hands looked like bone against the skin. He ticked a finger on his stomach and squinted into the glare of light from the open door with one watery blue eye, and I saw that he couldn’t recognize me in the silhouette. I eased the door closed behind me. He smiled, and his lips were purple like an old woman’s. He moved his hand off his stomach and tapped it softly on the side of the bed.
“How’d they treat you, Son?”
“It wasn’t bad.”
“I thought you might be in yesterday from your letter. I had that nigra nurse make up your room for you. Your guitars are on the bed.” His voice clicked when he spoke, as though he had a fishhook in his throat.