Then she told me of the events following the death by fire of Julian LaSalle’s wife.
Ladice went back to work in the fields but was not molested by Legion. In fact, he didn’t bother any of the black girls or women and seemed preoccupied with other things. Vendors and servicepeople drove out to see him, rather than Julian LaSalle, with their deliveries or work orders for electrical or plumbing repairs on the plantation. Legion sometimes tethered his horse in the shade and went away with the vendors and servicepeople and did not return for hours, as though his duties in the fields had been reduced to a much lower level of priority and status. Mr. Julian stayed in a guest cottage by the freshwater bay and was rarely seen except when he might emerge at evening in a robe and stand in the gloom of the trees next to the water’s edge, unshaved, staring at the wooden bridge that led to the mainland and the community of small houses where most of his employees lived.
Sometimes his employees, perhaps washing their cars in the yard or barbecuing over a pit fashioned from a washing machine, would wave to him in the waning light, but Mr. Julian would not acknowledge the gesture, which would cause his employees to round up their children and go inside rather than let the happiness of their world contrast so visibly with the sorrow of his.
But to most of the black people on the plantation the die was cast three weeks after Mrs. LaSalle’s death by an event that to outsiders would seem of little importance.
A bull alligator, one that was at least twelve feet long, had come out of the bay in the early dawn and caught a terrapin in its jaws. Down the bank, a black woman had left her diapered child momentarily unattended in the backyard. When the child began crying, the alligator lumbered out of the mist into the yard, rheumy-eyed, pieces of sinew and broken terrapin shell hanging from its teeth, its green-black hide slick with mud and strung incongruously with blooming water hyacinths.
The mother bolted hysterically into the yard and scooped her child into her arms and ran all the way down the road to the plantation store, screaming Mr. Julian’s name.
Mr. Julian knew every alligator nesting hole on or near the island, the sandbars where they fed on raccoons, the corners and cuts in the channels where they hung in the current waiting for nutria and muskrat to swim across their vision.
Mr. Julian hunted rogue alligators in his canoe. He’d paddle quietly along the bank, then stand suddenly, his balance perfect, lift his deer rifle to his shoulder, and drill a solitary .30–06 round between the alligator’s eyes.
Mr. Julian had his faults, but neglecting the safety of a child was not one of them.
The woman who had run to the plantation store was told by the clerk to return home, that someone would take care of the gator that had strayed into her yard.
“Mr. Julian gonna bring his gun down to my house?” she said.
“Legion is handling things right now,” the clerk said.
“Mr. Julian always say tell him when a gator come up in the yard. He say go right on up to the house and bang on the do’,” the woman said.
The clerk removed a pencil from behind his ear and wet the point in his mouth and wrote something on a pad. Then he took a peppermint cane out of a glass case and gave it to the woman’s child.
“I’m putting a note for Legion in his mailbox. You seen me do hit. Now you take your baby on home and don’t be bothering folks about this no more,” he said.
But three days passed and no one hunted the rogue alligator.
The same black woman returned to the store. “You promised Legion gonna get rid of that gator. Where Mr. Julian at?” she said.
“Send your husband down here,” the clerk said.
“Suh?” the woman said.
“Send your man here. I want to know if y’all plan to keep working on Poinciana Island,”
the clerk said.
Two days later Legion and another white man showed up behind the black woman’s house and flung a cable and a barbed steel hook through the fork of a cypress tree on the water’s edge. They spiked one end of the cable into the cypress trunk and baited the hook with a plucked chicken carcass and a dead blackbird and threw the hook out into the lily pads.
That night, under a full moon, the gator slipped through the reeds and the hyacinths and the layer of algae that floated in the shallows and struck the bait. Its tail threw water onto the bank for fifteen feet.
In the morning the gator lay in the shallows, exhausted, hooked solidly through the top of the snout, through sinew and bone, so that its struggle was useless, no matter how often it wrenched against the cable or thrashed the water with its tail.
Legion left the gator on the hook until dusk, when he and two other white men backed a truck up to the cypress tree and looped the free end of the cable through the truck’s bumper. Then they pulled the cable through the fork of the tree, grinding off the bark, hoisting the gator halfway out of the water, its pale yellow stomach spinning in the last red glow of sunlight in the west.
Legion slipped on a pair of rubber boots and waded into the shallows and swung an ax into the gator’s head. But the angle was bad and the gator was only stunned. Legion swung again, whacking the blade into its neck, then he hit it again and again, like a man who knows the strength and courage and ferocity of his adversary is greater than his own and that his own efforts would be worthless on an equal playing field. Finally the gator’s stubby legs quivered stiffly and its tail knotted over and became motionless in the hyacinths below.
Legion and his two workmen skinned out the carcass and left the meat to rot and took the hide to a tanner in Morgan City.
The next afternoon Ladice’s mother received a call from a white woman who ran a laundry in New Iberia. The white woman said one of her regular girls was sick and she needed Ladice’s mother to fill in. That evening. Not the next day. That evening or not at all.
Just after dark Legion came to Ladice’s house. He didn’t knock; he simply opened the front door and walked into the front room. His khakis were starched and pressed, his jaws freshly shaved. The top of a thick silver watch, with a Lima construction fob on it, protruded from the watch pocket in his trousers. He removed a toothpick from his mouth.
“You getting along all right?” he asked.