The Convict and Other Stories

I drove to the coast and stayed in an expensive hotel on a magnificent stretch of white beach. Charter boats out for kingfish drifted through the emerald and inky-blue patches of the Pacific, and the late sun seemed like a red planet slipping beyond the earth’s watery rim. I ate lobster in a dining room with linen-covered tables and French doors that gave onto palm trees and yellow hibiscus, drank two bottles of Madeira wine, and paid for everything with my Diners Club card. Father Larry haunted me.

In 1942 I was frightened by the stories that I heard adults tell about Nazi submarines that waited in the mouth of the Mississippi for the oil tankers that sailed unescorted from the refineries in Baton Rouge. People said you could see the fires at night burning low on the southern horizon. In my mind the Nazis were dark-uniformed, evil men with slit eyes who lived under the water and could reach out and murder innocent people in a defenseless world whenever they wished. At night I prayed that the Nazis would not come to New Orleans, that I would always be safe in my bed in my aunt’s house.

Then one Sunday night when we were visiting m

y cousins in Pointe a la Hache, the priest called and said the Germans had torpedoed two freighters and the survivors were going to be brought to the Catholic elementary school. We packed blankets and canned goods and drove in a rainstorm to the small school building, where the coast guardsmen were unloading people on stretchers off of a canvas-covered truck. The cafeteria was brightly lit and crowded with cots and tables pushed together, and the oil-streaked, fire-blackened people on them filled me with horror. They vomited seawater and oil, cried out for morphine, stared wild-eyed out of poached faces that had no eyebrows or hair. My aunt wept silently for them and told me to go into the kitchen with the old nun who was fixing soup.

But I couldn’t move. I felt as though I were looking into hell itself. I couldn’t accept that the war, the Nazis, had reached into my world and filled a school building like my own with so much unrelieved suffering. I was drowning in the thought that truly wicked men could do whatever they wished to us.

A coast guardsman in a T-shirt and bell-bottom dungarees with a white sailor’s hat on the back of his head saw the expression in my face and squatted down in front of me. Every muscle in his lean body seemed to ripple when he moved. His eyes were clear blue and there wasn’t a doubt or fear anywhere in them. On one brown arm was a tattoo of an enormous American flag surrounded with a circle of blue stars.

“Don’t you worry, boy. Uncle Sam is going back out there and blow them sons of bitches plumb back to Krautland,” he said.

I never knew my father, but I was sure he could have been no finer a man than this one. I also knew now what people meant when they said that one day the lights would go on again all over the world.

. . .

But that sailor wasn’t with Father Larry in San Luis, Guatemala. Instead, Francisco came with his guerrillas to the village, asking for medicine and bandages. The nuns told me they believed that he simply wanted to show the Indians he could come into the village in daylight without fear of the army. He smiled and bowed courteously when Father Larry explained that they had little medicine to spare, and then he invited the clergy and the children to a dinner of tripe, baked bread, and goat’s milk. Francisco would never become an important figure in the revolution and in all probability would be killed and buried in an anonymous jungle grave, but he had a flair for the romantic among his people and a clumsy Guevara-like disregard for his fate.

But on the late afternoon that he and his men left the village with cases of Pepsi Cola on their shoulders, he presented to Captain Ramos the invitation and sanction that an idle, heavily armed, rut-filled contingent of troops lusts for—reason to occupy or attack a village that has no means to defend itself.

The soldiers killed sixteen Indians in San Luis the following day. The people they killed had no weapons, no politics, no knowledge of the world outside their village. A terrified peasant man tried to hide in the church. The soldiers dragged him outside squealing like a pig, shoved him on the floor of a jeep, and drove him out into a field, where they murdered him. There was no more rationality in concealing his execution than there was in anything else they did that day. They took away the bodies of the dead Indians on a U.S. Army truck, then off-loaded them into a helicopter and threw them out at high altitudes over the countryside.

That night three men in civilian clothes with bandannas on their faces tried to kidnap Father Larry from his house. When he refused to go with them, they stabbed him to death with a bayonet.

I’m back in Wichita, Kansas. Out there under those frozen, snowy wheat fields are eighteen Titan missiles that sleep in gleaming silos manned by crews of technicians who look like my sons. The man who can send them ripping across the skies to destroy the Soviet Union, or all of Europe, is an ex-sportscaster. My aunt, with her genteel and kind Old South innocence, has passed into history. I imagine that time has had its way with that coast guardsman, too (he who could reach below the oil-flaming water with that tattooed arm and pull men back from eternity). But sometimes when I think of spring, then of baseball and Beantown and Fenway Park, I’m sure Father Larry would tell me it’s always the first inning. Like that elderly black man in the Baton Rouge jail, he knew that courage and faith are their own justification and that heaven’s prisoners don’t worry about historical place.

THE CONVICT

for Lyle Williams

My father was a popular man in New Iberia, even though his ideas were different from most people’s and his attitudes were uncompromising. On Friday afternoon he and my mother and I would drive down the long, yellow, dirt road through the sugarcane fields until it became a blacktop and followed the Bayou Teche into town, where my father would drop my mother off at Musemeche’s Produce Market and take me with him to the bar at the Frederic Hotel. The Frederic was a wonderful old place with slot machines and potted palms and marble columns in the lobby and a gleaming, mahogany-and-brass barroom that was cooled by long-bladed wooden fans. I always sat at a table with a Dr. Nut and a glass of ice and watched with fascination the drinking rituals of my father and his friends: the warm handshakes, the pats on the shoulder, the laughter that was genuine but never uncontrolled. In the summer, which seemed like the only season in south Louisiana, the men wore seersucker suits and straw hats, and the amber light in their glasses of whiskey and ice and their Havana cigars and Picayune cigarettes held between their ringed fingers made them seem everything gentlemen and my father’s friends should be.

But sometimes I would suddenly realize that there was not only a fundamental difference between my father and other men but that his presence would eventually expose that difference, and a flaw, a deep one that existed in him or them, would surface like an aching wisdom tooth.

“Do you fellows really believe we should close the schools because of a few little Negro children?” my father said.

“My Lord, Will. We’ve lived one way here all our lives,” one man said. He owned a restaurant in town and a farm with oil on it near St. Martinville.

My father took the cigar out of his mouth, smiled, sipped out of his whiskey, and looked with his bright, green eyes at the restaurant owner. My father was a real farmer, not an absentee landlord, and his skin was brown and his body straight and hard. He could pick up a washtub full of bricks and throw it over a fence.

“That’s the point,” he said. “We’ve lived among Negroes all our lives. They work in our homes, take care of our children, drive our wives on errands. Where are you going to send our own children if you close the school? Did you think of that?”

The bartender looked at the Negro porter who ran the shoeshine stand in the bar. He was bald and wore an apron and was quietly brushing a pair of shoes left him by a hotel guest.

“Alcide, go down to the corner and pick up the newspapers,” the bartender said.

“Yes suh.”

“It’s not ever going to come to that,” another man said. “Our darkies don’t want it.”

“It’s coming, all right,” my father said. His face was composed now, his eyes looking through the opened wood shutters at the oak tree in the courtyard outside. “Harry Truman is integrating the army, and those Negro soldiers aren’t going to come home and walk around to the back door anymore.”

“Charlie, give Mr. Broussard another manhattan,” the restaurant owner said. “In fact, give everybody one. This conversation puts me in mind of the town council.”

Everyone laughed, including my father, who put his cigar in his mouth and smiled good-naturedly with his hands folded on the bar. But I knew that he wasn’t laughing inside, that he would finish his drink quietly and then wink at me and we’d wave good-bye to everyone and leave their Friday-afternoon good humor intact.

On the way home he didn’t talk and instead pretended that he was interested in Mother’s conversation about the New Iberia ladies’ book club. The sun was red on the bayou, and the cypress and oaks along the bank were a dark green in the gathering dusk. Families of Negroes were cane fishing in the shallows for goggle-eye perch and bullheads.