Sunset Limited (Dave Robicheaux 10)

"He owes my father a lot of money. Cisco thinks he can avoid his responsibilities by bringing a person like Swede Boxleiter around."

She gripped the handrail and extended one leg at a time behind her. Her wild, brownish-red hair shimmered with perspiration.

"You let that guy down there shoot you up?" I asked.

"I'm all right today. Sometimes I just have a bad day. You're a funny guy for a cop. You ever have a screen test?"

"Why not get rid of the problem altogether?"

But she wasn't listening now. "This area is full of violent people. It's the South. It lives in the woodwork down here. This black man who's coming after the Terrebonnes, why don't you do something about him?" she said.

"Which black man? Are you talking about Cool Breeze Broussard?"

"Which? Yeah, that's a good question. You know the story about the murdered slave woman, the children who were poisoned? If I had stuff like that in my family, I'd jump off a cliff. No wonder Lila Terrebonne's a drunk."

"It was nice seeing you," I said.

"Gee, why don't you just say fuck you and turn your back on people?"

Her skin was the color of milk that has browned in a pan, her blue eyes dancing in her face. She wiped her hair and throat with a towel and threw it at me.

"That kick-boxing stuff Anthony's doing? He learned it from me," she said.

Then she raised her face up into mine, her lips slightly parted, speckled with saliva, her eyes filled with anticipation and need.

ON THE WAY BACK home I stopped in the New Iberia city library and looked up a late-nineteenth-century reminiscence written about our area by a New England lady named Abigail Dowling, a nurse who came here during a yellow fever epidemic and was radicalized not by slavery itself and the misery it visited upon the black race but by what she called its dehumanizing effects on the white.

One of the families about which she wrote in detail was the Terrebonnes of St. Mary Parish.

Before the Civil War, Elijah Terrebonne had been a business partner in the slave trade with Nathan Bedford Forrest and later had ridden at Forrest's side during the battle of Brice's Crossing, where a minié shattered his arm and took him out of the war. But Elijah had also been below the bluffs at Fort Pillow when black troops who begged on their knees were executed at point-blank range in retaliation for a sixty-mile scorched-earth sweep by Federal troops into northern Mississippi.

"He was of diminutive stature, with a hard, compact body. He sat his horse with the rigidity of a clothes pin," Abigail Dowling wrote in her journal. "His countenance was handsome, certainly, of a rosy hue, and it exuded a martial light when he talked of the War. In consideration of his physical stature I tried to overlook his imperious manner. In spite of his propensity for miscegenation, he loved his wife and their twin girls and was unduly possessive about them, perhaps in part because of his own romantic misdeeds.

"Unfortunately for the poor black souls on his plantation, the lamps of charity and pity did not burn brightly in his heart. I have been told General Forrest tried to stop the slaughter of negro soldiers below the bluffs. I believe Elijah Terrebonne had no such redemptive memory for himself. I believe the fits of anger that made him draw human blood with a horse whip had their origins in the faces of dead black men who journeyed nightly to Elijah's bedside, vainly begging mercy from one who had murdered his soul."

The miscegenation mentioned by Abigail Dowling involved a buxom slave woman named Lavonia, whose husband, Big Walter, had been killed by a falling tree. Periodically Elijah Terrebonne rode to the edge of the fields and called her away from her work, in view of the other slaves and the white overseer, and walked her ahead of his horse into the woods, where he copulated with her in an unused sweet potato cellar. Later, he heard that the overseer had been talking freely in the saloon, joking with a drink in his hand at the fireplace, stoking the buried resentment and latent contempt of other landless whites about the lust of his employer. Elijah laid open his face with a quirt and adjusted his situation by moving Lavonia up to the main house as a cook and a wet nurse for his children.

But when he returned from Brice's Crossing, with pieces of bone still working their way out of the surgeon's incision in his arm, the Teche country was occupied, his house and barns looted, the orchards and fields reduced to soot blowing in the wind. The only meat on the plantation consisted of seven smoked hams Lavonia had buried in the woods before the Federal flotilla had come up the Teche.

The Terrebonnes made coffee out of acorns and ate the same meager rations as the blacks. Some of the freed males on the plantation went to work on shares; others followed the Yankee soldiers marching north into the Red River campaign. When the food ran out, Lavonia was among a group of women and elderly folk who were assembled in front of their cabins by Elijah Terrebonne and then told they would have to leave.

She went to Elijah's wife.

Abigail Dowling wrote in the journal, "It was a wretched sight, this stout field woman without a husband, with no concept of historical events or geography, about to be cast out in a ruined land filled with night riders and drunken soldiers. Her simple entreaty could not have described her plight more adequately: 'I'se got fo' children, Missy. What's we gonna go? What's I gonna feed them with?'"

Mrs. Terrebonne granted her a one-month reprieve, either to find a husband or to receive help from the Freedmen's Bureau.

The journal continued: "But Lavonia was a sad and ignorant creature who thought guile could overcome the hardness of heart in her former masters. She put cyanide in the family's food, believing they would become ill and dependent upon her for their daily care.

"Both of the Terrebonne girls died. Elijah would have never known the cause of their deaths, except for the careless words of Lavonia's youngest child, who came to him, the worst choice among men, to seek solace. The child blurted out, 'My mama been crying, Mas'er. She got poison in a bottle under her bed. She say the devil give it to her and made her hurt somebody with it. I think she gonna take it herself.'

"By firelight Elijah dug up the coffins of his children from the wet clay and unwound the wrappings from their bodies. Their skin was covered with pustules the color and shape of pearls. He pressed his hand on their chests and breathed the air trapped in their lungs and swore it smelled of almonds.

"His rage and madness could be heard all the way across the fields to the quarters. Lavonia tried to hide with her children in the swamp, but to no avail. Her own people found her, and in fear of Elijah's wrath, they hanged her with a man's belt from a persimmon tree."

WHAT DID IT ALL mean? Why did Geraldine Holtzner allude to the story at Red's Gym in Lafayette? I didn't know. But in the morning Megan Flynn telephoned me at the dock. Clete Purcel had been booked on a DWI and a black man had started a fire on the movie set in the Terrebonnes' front yard.

She wanted to talk.