"You're a religious man, Hogman. Each one of those bottles represents a different prayer. Every time the wind makes the glass sing in the branches, a prayer goes up from each of those bottles, doesn't it?"
He lowered his eyes and pared one of his fingernails with a toothpick. "What a man do in his home is what he do in his home," he said.
"You helping cover up a murder, Hogman."
"Ain't right you talk to me like that, Dave. No, suh."
"Maybe not. But why do you want to protect the Lejeune family?"
"I ain't seen what happened after I left the camp. Cain't tell you about what I ain't seen. Don't want to tell you about what I ain't seen, either."
"Somebody saw. Somebody knows."
He breathed hard through his nose, his nostrils flaring in his frustration with me and his own conscience. The wind was cool and wrinkled the bayou's surface, and Hogman's bottle tree rang like spoons clinking on crystal. "There's a man down at Pecan Island stacked time in the same camps as me and Junior. He was a check writer and used to carry the water can when we road-ganged. Him and his gran'daughter sell crabs and vegetables off a truck out on the state road. His name is Woodrow Reed."
"How does he feel about talking to a white man?"
"He don't care what color you are. He climbed up on a power pole to get a cat down and got 'lectrocuted. His eyes cooked in his head.
You'll t'ink he's looking at you but don't no light go t'rew his eyes.
His eyes scare people. Maybe that's why ain't nobody ever been around axing Woodrow questions about what he seen."
I drove back to New Iberia and on south of Abbeville, where sugarcane acreage gave way to saw grass and clumps of gum trees and the miles of wetlands that bled into the Gulf of Mexico, forming the watery, ill-defined coastline of southwest Louisiana. I crossed a bridge onto one of the few remaining barrier islands left in Louisiana, a reef composed of hard-packed shell ground up by the tides, the crest topped with alluvial soil that is among the richest in the western hemisphere. The adjacent islands had been dredged and scooped out of the surf and hauled away on barges decades ago for highway-construction material, but portions of Pecan Island, preserved largely by an oil corporation as a recreational area for its CEOs, contains wooded acreage where the canopy of live oaks rises perhaps two hundred feet into the sky and the sunlight breaking through the moss and branches and air vines is the same color as light filtering through green water in the Florida Keys.
In the midst of duck-hunting camps with wide, screened-in porches and adjacent boat houses was the tiny vegetable farm and blue-point crab business of Woodrow Reed. Stacks upon stacks of collapsible wire crab traps, webbed with dried river trash, stood by the side of his small, paint less house. A middle-aged black woman was chopping up nutria parts on a butcher block a short distance away, the rubber gloves on her hands spotted with brown matter.
Woodrow Reed's eyes were large, round and flat, unblinking, like painted facsimiles that had been cut out of paper and pasted on the face of a mannikin. They stared at me intently, the pupils dilated and black, although it was obvious Woodrow Reed was sightless.
"I'm Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department," I said. I opened my badge holder and held it aloft so the middle-aged woman in the side yard could see it.
"I knowed you was coming," he said, rising from where he sat on the front steps.
"Hogman called you?" I said.
"Yeah, but he didn't have to. I knowed somebody was coming one day. Want to come in, suh?" He opened the rusted screen door to his front porch and waited for me to enter.
He could not have been over five feet. His skin was the color of a razor strop that has yellowed with wear, his body compressed and hard looking, his cheeks and chin scrolled with gray whiskers. But I could
not get over his eyes. I had seen eyes like his only once before, in the body of a man who had been exhumed from a grave in northern Montana where he had lain for decades under frozen ground.
"How'd you come by your farm, Mr. Reed?" I asked.
"You already know the answer to that."
"Can you tell me how Junior Crudup died?" I asked.
Woodrow Reed was sitting on what looked like a motion-picture theater seat mounted on a wood block, his palms propped on his thighs. His denim pants were neatly pressed, the cuffs and pockets buttoned on his long-sleeve work shirt.
"The doctor give me another year. I already put my farm in my daughter's name. Ain't a whole lot can touch me no more. I got cancer, just like Jackson Posey, although I never smoked like he did or had no problems with my skin," he said.
"Tell me about Junior, sir."
"Junior was gonna be Junior. He didn't wear no other man's hat. That was Junior," he said. For the first time he smiled.
In the waning days of summer, when the amber light at evening turned the countryside into a yellowing antique photograph, Junior
Crudup took his twelve-string Stella guitar out on the steps of the cabin in the work camp and began composing a song whose lyrics he penciled on a paper bag flattened down on the board plank beside him.