Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

I picked up the last photo in the series and looked again at the image of Junior staring up at a mounted gun bull across the bayou from Castille Lejeune's home, his hoe at an odd angle on his shoulder, his face puzzled by a world whose rules ensured he would never have a place in it. But the focus of my attention was not Junior. In the wintry background, guiding a single-tree plow through the cane stubble,

was a muscular, coal black convict, with the clear detail of welted scars on his forearms, the kind a convict might earn in a half dozen knife beefs.

I held a magnifying glass to the grainy black-and-white image. I was almost sure the face was that of a youthful Hogman Patin, the long-time recidivist who had been on the Red Hat Gang with Junior but had said he did not know Junior's fate.

I picked up the telephone and called my house.

"Hello?" Father Jimmie said.

"Want to check out some Louisiana history you don't find in school books?"

"Why not?" he said.

Chapter 12.

Wherever Hogman lived, he created a bottle tree, for reasons he never explained. During winter, when the limbs were bare, he would insert the points of the branches into the mouths of colored glass bottles until the whole tree shimmered with light and tinkled with sound.

Father Jimmie and I parked in the front yard of his house on the bayou and walked around to the back, where Hogman was hoeing weeds out of a garden next to his bottle tree. He stopped his work and smiled, then saw my expression.

"Why'd you jump me over the hurdles?" I said.

"You mean about Junior?" he said.

"You got it," I replied.

"Junior punched his own ticket. You might t'ink he was a hero, but back in them days, if a nigger got mixed up wit' a white woman, all of us had to suffer for it."

"How about spelling that out for me?" I said.

The year was 1951. Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell played on every jukebox in the South, and across the ocean GIs packed snow on the barrels of .30 caliber machine guns to keep them from melting while they mowed down wave after wave of Chinese troops pouring into North Korea.

But in central Louisiana, a group of black convicts who knew little or nothing of the larger world suddenly found themselves transferred from Angola Penitentiary to a work camp for nonviolent offenders deep down in bayou country. The camp had been created out of the remnants of what had been called the quarters on Fox Run Plantation. None of the convicts knew what to expect. The first morning they found out.

They were given clean denims, soap, toothpaste, good work shoes, and were told to burn their striped pants and jumpers in a trash barrel behind the camp. The beatings with the black Betty, the sweat-boxes and anthill-treatment, the fecal-smelling lockdown units, the killings by guards on the Red Hat Gang, became only a memory at Fox Run. Sometimes a truculent inmate was forced to wear leg irons or stand all night on an upended bucket, and the food they ate the greens, fatback, beans, corn bread, and molasses was the same fare served at Angola; but the guards were not allowed to abuse them, and at night the inmates slept in cabins with mosquito screens on the windows, boiled coffee in the fireplace, played cards and listened to radios, and on holidays had preserves and cookies to eat.

The humane treatment they received was due solely to one person: Miss Andrea, as they called her, the wife of Castille Lejeune.

The other inmates had been in the camp six months when Junior transferred in from the Red Hat Gang. The first time he saw her he was in the bottom of an irrigation canal with Hogman Patin, raking mounds of yellowed weeds out of the water and flinging them up on the embankment. She was riding English saddle on a black gelding, her long hair tied behind her head, her white riding pants skintight across her rump and thighs. Her small hand was cupped around a braided quirt.

"That's her, huh?" Junior said.

"Who?" Hogman said.

"Miz Lejeune," Junior said.

"What you care who she is?"

"She wrote me a letter."

"Shit."

"That's right. Up at the joint. Tole me how much she liked my music. She's a fine-looking woman."

"You get them t'oughts out of your head, nigger," Hogman said.

"You boys eye-balling down there?" the guard said from horseback.

Among Junior's few possessions was a guitar, a twelve-string Stella he had bought in a New Orleans pawnshop. He tuned the double-strung E, A, and D strings an octave apart so that the chords reverberating out of the sound hole gave the impression of two guitars being played simultaneously. Eac