I went to the public library and the morgue at the Daily Iberian and began searching every piece of microfilm I could find on the assassination of Ely Dixon.
Only one story, in Newsweek magazine, mentioned the fact that Ely was killed in a two-bedroom house he rented for fifty dollars a month from his brother, Jimmy Ray, to whom the article referred as a disabled Vietnam war veteran.
I drove back to the department and went into the sheriff's office.
"What if the wrong man was killed?" I said.
"I have a feeling my interest is about to wane quickly," he said.
"It was the sixties. Church bombings in Birmingham and Bogalusa, civil rights workers lynched in Mississippi. Everybody assumed Ely Dixon was the target."
"You're trying to figure out the motivation on a homicide that's twenty-eight years old? Who cares? The victim doesn't. He's dead just the same."
He could barely contain the impatience and annoyance in his voice. He turned his swivel chair sideways so he wouldn't have to look directly at me when he spoke.
"I like you a lot, Dave, but, damn it, you don't listen. Leave the LaRoses alone. Let Aaron Crown fall in his own shit."
"I told Helen we don't execute people in Iberia Parish."
"Don't be deluded. That's because the electric chair doesn't travel anymore."
He began fiddling with a file folder, then he put it in his desk drawer and rose from his chair and looked out the window until he heard me close the door behind me.
Batist went home sick with a cold that evening, and before supper Alafair and I drove down to his house with a pot of soup. His wife had died the previous year, and he lived with his three bird dogs and eight cats on a dirt road in an unpainted wood house with a sagging gallery and a peaked corrugated roof, a truck garden in a side lot and a smokehouse in back. The sparse grass in his yard was raked clean, his compost pile snugged in by chicken wire, his crab traps stacked next to a huge iron pot in the backyard where he cooked cracklings in the fall.
Over the years, in early spring, when he broke the thatched hard-pan on his garden, his single-tree plow had furrowed back bits of square nails, the rusted shell of a wagon spring, .58 caliber minié balls, a corroded tin of percussion caps, a molded boot, a brass buckle embossed with the letters CSA, the remains from a Confederate encampment that had probably been overrun by federals in 1863.
I first met Batist when I was a little boy and he was a teenager, a blacksmith's helper in a rambling, red barnlike structure on a green lot out on West Main. Batist worked for a frail, very elderly man named Mr. Antoine, one of the last surviving Confederate veterans in the state of Louisiana. Every day Mr. Antoine sat in the wide doors of his smithy, to catch the breeze, in red suspenders and straw hat, the skin under his throat distended like an inverted cock's comb.
Anyone who wished could drop by and listen to his stories about what he called "the War."
Few did.
But I'll never forget one he told me and Batist.
It was during Jubal Early's last assault on the federals before the surrender at Appomattox. A fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama was the only unwounded survivor of his outfit. Rather than surrender or run, he tied a Confederate battle flag to an empty musket and mounted a horse and charged the union line. He rode two hundred yards through a bullet-cropped cornfield littered with southern dead, his colors raised above his head all the while, his eyes fixed on the stone wall ahead of him where five thousand federals waited and looked at him in disbelief.
Not one of them fired his weapon.
Instead, when the boy's horse labored up the slope and surged through a gap in the wall, three federal soldiers pulled him from the saddle and took his colors and pinioned him to the ground. The boy flailed and kicked until one soldier in blue said, "Son, you ain't got to study on it no more. You're over on the Lord's side now."
Mr. Antoine slapped his thigh and howled at the implications of his story, whatever they were.
Later, I would read a similar account about Cemetery Ridge. Maybe it was all apocryphal. But if you ever doubted Mr. Antoine's authority as a veteran of the Civil War, he would ask you to feel the cyst-encrusted pistol ball that protruded like a sparrow's egg below his right elbow.
The irony was the fact that the man who probably knew more firsthand accounts of Mr. Antoine's War, and the man who grew food in the detritus of a Confederate encampment, was a descendant of slaves and did not know how to read and write and consequently was never consulted as a source of information by anyone.
He sat down with the soup at the kitchen table in a pair of slippers and surplus navy dungarees and a denim shirt buttoned at the throat. The sun glimmered off the bayou through the trees behind his house.
"Fat Daddy Babineau brought me some poke chops, but they ain't good for you when you got a stomach upsetness. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, though," he said.
"You going to be all right by yourself?" I said.
"I'm gonna be fine." He looked at Alafair, who was examining some minié balls on his kitchen shelf. Then he looked back at me.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Fat Daddy just left. I was fixing to call you." He kept his eyes on my face.