who could never be accused of familial sentiment, other than a violent one, had decided to exhume his adoptive mother's remains from the Bertrand plantation and transport them in a garbage truck back to Breaux Bridge. Both men operated in a neon and concrete world where people bought and sold each other daily and lived by the rules that govern piranha fish. What was their interest or involvement in a rural community of poor black people? I parked my truck and jogged along a dirt road between sugarcane acreage, over the railroad tracks, past a dilapidated clapboard store and a row of shacks. Behind me, a compact white automobile turned off the highway, slowed so as not to blow dust in my face, and drove toward the lighted houses on the lake. I could see the silhouettes of two people talking to each other. The breeze was warm and smelled of horses and night-blooming flowers, freshly turned soil, and smoke blowing off a stump fire hard by a pecan orchard. The tree trunks seemed alive with shadows and protean shapes in the firelight, as though, if you let imagination have its way, the residents from an earlier time had not yet accepted the inevitability of their departure. I've often subscribed to the notion that perhaps history is not sequential; that all people, from all of history, live out their lives simultaneously, in different dimensions perhaps, occupying the same pieces of geography, unseen by one another, as if we are all part of one spiritual conception. Attakapas Indians, Spanish colonists, slaves who dredged mud from the lake to make bricks for the homes of their masters, Louisiana's boys in butternut brown who refused to surrender after Appomattox, federal soldiers who blackened the sky with smoke from horizon to horizon—maybe they were all still out there, living just a breath away, like indistinct figures hiding inside an iridescent glare on the edge of our vision. But the lights I saw in a distant grove of gum trees were not part of a metaphysical speculation. I could see them bouncing off tree trunks and hear the roar and grind of a large machine at the end of the dirt lane that ran past Bertie Fontenot's house.
I slowed to a walk, breathing deep in my chest, and wiped the sweat out of my eyes at the cattle guard and wisteria-grown arched gate that marked the entrance to the Bertrand property. The dirt lane was faintly haloed with humidity in the moonlight, the rain ditches boiling with insects. I began jogging toward the lights in the trees, the steady thud of my shoes like an intrusion on a nocturnal plantation landscape that had eluded the influences of the twentieth century.
Then I had the peculiar realization that I felt naked. I had neither badge nor gun, and hence no identity other than that of jogger. It was a strange feeling to have, as well as to be forced into acknowledging simultaneously the ease with which my everyday official capacity allowed me to enter and exit any number of worlds where other people lived with an abiding trepidation.
The grinding sounds of the machine ceased and the headlights dimmed and then went off. I strained my eyes to see into the gum trees, then realized that the machine, a large oblong one with a cab and giant steel tracks, was parked beyond the trees in a field, its dozer blade glinting in the moonlight.
Bertie's house and the nephew's were dark. When I walked toward the grove I could see where the dozer blade had graded whole roadways through the trees, ripping up root systems, snapping off limbs, slashing pulpy divo
ts out of the trunks, scooping out trenches and spreading the fill out into the cane field, churning and flattening and re grinding the soil and everything in it, until the entire ground area in and around the grove looked like it had been poured into an enormous bag and shaken out at a great height.
There was no one in sight.
I walked out onto the edge of the field by the earth mover. The moon was bright above the treetops and the new cane ruffled in the breeze. I picked up handfuls of dirt and sifted them through my fingers, touched the pieces of fractured bone, as tiny and brown as awcient teeth; strips of wood porous with rot and as weightless as balsa; the remains of a high button shoe, mashed flat by the machine's track.
The wind dropped and the air suddenly smelled of sour mud and humus and dead water beetles. The sky was a dirty black, the clouds like curds of smoke from an oil fire; sweat ran down my face and sides like angry insects. Who had done this, ripped a burial area apart, as though it had no more worth than a subterranean rat's nest?
I walked back down the dirt lane toward my truck. I saw the white compact car returning down the access road, slowing gradually.
Suddenly, from a distance of perhaps forty yards, the person in the passenger's seat shined a handheld spotlight at me. The glare was blinding; I could see nothing except a circle of white red-rimmed heat aimed into my eyes. ;
No gun, no badge, I thought, a sweating late-middle-aged man
trapped on a rural road like a deer caught in an automobile's head- i lights.
“I don't know who you are, but you take that light out of my eyes!” I shouted.
The car was completely stopped now, the engine idling. I could hear two people, men, talking to each other. Then I realized their concern had shifted from me to someone else. The spotlight went out, leaving my eyes filled with whorls of color, and the car shot forward toward my parked truck, where a man on foot was leaning through the driver's window.
He bolted down the far side of the railway, his body disappearing like a shadow into weeds and cattails. The white compact bounced over the train embankment, stopped momentarily, and the man in the passenger seat shined the spotlight out into the darkness. I used my T-shirt to wipe my eyes clear and tried to read the license plate, but someone had rubbed mud over the numbers.
Then the driver scorched a plume of oily dust out of the road and floored the compact back onto the highway.
I opened the driver's door to my truck. When the interior light flicked on, I saw curled on the seat, like a serpent whose back has been crushed with a car tire, a twisted length of rust-sheathed chain the color of dried blood. I picked it up, felt the delicate shell flake with its own weight against my palms. Attached to one end was a cylindrical iron cuff, hinged open like a mouth gaping in death. I had seen one like it only in a museum. It was a leg iron, the kind used in the transportation and sale of African slaves.
Chapter 6
NEXT MORNING was Saturday. The dawn was gray and there were strips of mist in the oak and pecan trees when I walked down the slope to help Batist open up the dock and bait shop. The sun was still below the treeline in the swamp, and the trunks on the far side of the bayou were wet and black in the gloom. You could smell the fecund odor of bluegill and sun perch spawning back in the bays.
Batist was outside the bait shop, poking a broom handle into the pockets of rainwater that had collected in the canvas awning that extended on guy wires over the dock. I had never known his age, but he was an adult when I was a child, as black and solid as a woodstove, and today his stomach and chest were still as flat as boilerplate. He had farmed and trapped and fished commercially and worked on oyster boats all his life, and could carry an outboard motor down to the ramp in each hand as though they were stamped from plastic. He was illiterate and knew almost nothing of the world outside of Iberia Parish, but he was one of the bravest and most loyal men I ever knew.
He began wiping the dew off the spool tables, which we had inset with Cinzano umbrellas for the fishermen who came in at midday for the barbecue lunches that we sold for $5.95.
“You know why a nigger'd be setting in one of our boats this morning?”
he asked.
“Batist, you need to forget that word.”
“This is a nigger carry a razor and a gun. He ain't here to rent boats.”
“Could you start over?”
“There's a high-yellow nigger wit' slacks on and shiny, pointy shoes,”
he said, tapping his finger in the air with each word as though I were obtuse. “He's setting out yonder in our boat, eating boudin out of a paper towel wit' his fingers. This is a nigger been in jail, carry a razor on a string round his neck. I ax what he t'inks he's doing. He look up at me and say, ”You clean up round here?“
”I say, “Yeah, I clean trash out of the boat, and that mean you better get yo' worthless black ass down that road.”