He removed the iron from her hand and put his arms around her and rubbed his face in her hair and pressed her tightly against his body.
“I’m dirty. I been on my feet all day,” she said.
“You’re lovely anytime, Ladice,” he said. He led her to her bedroom, which was lit only by a bedside lamp, and pulled her T-shirt over her head and pushed her jeans down over her hips.
“It’s Thursday. You don’t have a sitter for Miz LaSalle on Thursday night,” she said.
“She’s taking a nap. She’ll be fine,” he replied. Then he was on top of her, his body trembling, his lips on her breasts.
She fixed her eyes on the smoke in the slash pines outside, the fireflies that lit like sparks in the limbs, the moon that was orange with dust from the fields. She thought she heard a pickup truck clanking by on the road, but the sound of its engine was absorbed by the distant whistle of a Southern Pacific freight rumbling through the wetlands toward New Orleans. She closed her eyes and thought of New Orleans, where the mornings always smelled of mint and flowers and chicory coffee and beignets frying in someone’s kitchen.
She felt his body constrict and tighten and his loins shudder, then his weight left her and he was lying next to her, his breath short, his hair damp against her cheek. After a moment he widened his eyes, like a man returning to the world that constituted his ordinary life. He sat on the side of the mattress, his pale back sweaty and etched by vertebrae.
Then he did something he had never done in the aftermath of their lovemaking. He patted her on top of the hand and said, “In another time and place we might have made quite a pair, you and I. You’re an extraordinary woman. Don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise.”
The inside of the room seemed filled with mist or smoke, and the fireflies in the tops of the trees seemed brighter than they should have been. She wondered if she was coming down with a cold or if she had lost a part of her soul and no longer knew who she was. She rose from the bed, still naked, and went to the window.
“Turn out the light,” she said.
He clicked off the lamp on the bedside table and the room dropped into darkness. She looked out the window and realized it was too late in the year for fireflies, that the red pinpoints of light in the pines were sparks tumbling out of the sky.
But it was not the threat of fire to her own house that made her heart stop. The narrow, grained face of Legion the overseer suddenly moved into her vision, no more than three feet on the other side of the glass. His eyes raked her nude body even as he was tipping his hat.
CHAPTER 6
The fire at the LaSalle home had started in the kitchen, probably by a dish towel that had been left near an open flame. The fire climbed up the wall and flattened on the ceiling, then spread through a hallway and was sucked by a draft up the staircase onto the second story. Mr. Julian had removed the phone from Mrs. LaSalle’s bedroom long ago, after a judge in Opelousas and a U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge complained she was calling them in the middle of the night, claiming that Huey Long had been murdered by agents of Franklin Roosevelt. The clerk from the plantation store was passing on the road when he saw the windows of the house fill with pink light. He was an excitable man, given to belief in demonic possession and the gift of tongues, and after the heat of the front doorknob seared his hand, he began shouting at the house and throwing dirt clods on the roof to alert those who might be sleeping upstairs.
He picked up a garden rake and broke the glass out of a living room window. The flames mushroomed up through the second and third stories like cold oxygen igniting in a chimney.
The store clerk and the black people from up the road tried to soak the roof with a lawn hose. They scooped dirt with their hands and threw it through the windows into the smoke and hand-carried water buckets from the bay but were finally driven back from the house by the heat radiating from the walls. They heard glass break in Mrs. LaSalle’s bedroom and saw her hands on the iron grillwork, like the yellow talons of a bird extended through a cage. They never saw more of her physical person than her hands; the rest of her body disappeared in an envelope of flame.
An obese black woman grabbed her daughter and held her tightly against her stomach, smothering her daughter’s head with her arms so she would not hear the sounds that came from Mrs. LaSalle’s window.
But at Ladice Hulin’s house, neither she nor Mr. Julian knew of these events. Legion waited outside for her and Mr. Julian to emerge. There was ash on his khaki clothes, a smear of soot on his cheek and one shirtsleeve. “You were watching us through the window? You were spying on me?” Mr. Julian said incredulously.
“No, sir, I wouldn’t say that. I come here to tell you somet’ing else. It’s sad news, yeah. Miz LaSalle got burned up in a fire.”
Legion turned his face away, but he watched Mr. Julian out of the corner of his eye to see the reaction his words would cause.
“What? What did you say?” Mr. Julian said.
“Your home’s gone, too. I hate to be the one to tell you, Mr. Julian.”
Mr. Julian’s face was bloodless, popping with sweat, even though the temperature was still dropping.
“We’ll go back wit’ you, Mr. Julian,” Ladice said.
“I was the first one in her room. The deadbolt was locked from the outside. I took the key out and stuck it in the other side of the lock, so nobody ain’t gonna get the wrong idea, no,” Legion said.
“You did what? Say that again?” Mr. Julian said as though he could not sort through Legion’s words.
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p; “The key was almost melted. But I moved it to the other side of the lock, me. You ain’t got to worry,” Legion replied.
But Mr. Julian wasn’t listening now. He walked to his car and started the engine and backed one tire into Ladice’s garden, then drove down the road under an orange moon toward the smoke that rose from the ruins of his home.
Ladice looked up into Legion’s face. He had removed his hat and was running a comb through his hair. His hair was black, like tar from a barrel, the vertical lines in his narrow face like those in a prune.