“You should see his back. There are whip scars on it as thick as my finger,” my father said.
“You don’t have an obligation to every person in the world. He’s an escaped convict. He could come in here and cut our throats for all you know.”
“He’s a human being who happens to be a convict. They do things up in that penitentiary that ought to make every civilized man in this state ashamed.”
“I won’t have this, Will.”
“He’s going tonight. I promise. And he’s no danger to us.”
“You’re breaking the law. Don’t you know that?”
“You have to make choices in this world, and right now I choose not to be responsible for any more suffering in this man’s life.”
They avoided speaking to each other the rest of the day. My mother fixed lunch for us, then pretended she wasn’t hungry and washed the dishes while my father and I ate at the kitchen table. I saw him looking at her back, his eyelids blinking for a moment, and just when I thought he was going to speak, she dropped a pan loudly in the dish rack and walked out of the room. I hated to see them like that. But I particularly hated to see the loneliness that was in his eyes. He tried to hide it but I knew how miserable he was.
“They all respect you. Even though they argue with you, all those men look up to you,” I said.
“What’s that, son?” he said, and turned his gaze away from the window. He was smiling, but his mind was still out there on the bayou and the houseboat.
“I heard some men from Lafayette talking about you in the bank. One of them said, ‘Will Broussard’s word is better than any damned signature on a contract.’”
“Oh, well, that’s good of you to say, son. You’re a good boy.”
“Daddy, it’ll be over soon. He’ll be gone and everything will be just the same as before.”
“That’s right. So how about you and I take our poles and see if we can’t catch us a few goggle-eye?”
We fished until almost dinnertime, then cleaned and scraped our stringer of bluegill, goggle-eye perch, and sacalait in the sluice of water from the windmill. Mother had left plates of cold fried chicken and potato salad covered with wax paper for us on the kitchen table. She listened to the radio in the living room while we ate, then picked up our dishes and washed them without ever speaking to my father. The western sky was aflame with the sunset, fireflies spun circles of light in the darkening oaks on the lawn, and at eight o’clock, when I usually listened to Gangbusters, I heard my father get up out of his straw chair on the porch and walk around the side of the house toward the bayou.
I watched him pick up a gunnysack weighted heavily at the bottom from inside the barn door and walk through the trees and up the levee. I felt guilty when I followed him, but he hadn’t taken the shotgun, and he would be alone and unarmed when he freed the convict, whose odor still reached up and struck at my face. I was probably only fifty feet behind him, my face prepared to smile instantly if he turned around, but the weighted gunnysack rattled dully against his leg and he never heard me. He stepped up on the cypress stump and stooped inside the door of the houseboat cabin, then I heard the convict’s voice: “What game you playing, white man?”
“I’m going to give you a choice. I’ll drive you to the sheriff’s office in New Iberia or I’ll cut you loose. It’s up to you.”
“What you doing this for?”
“Make up your mind.”
“I done that when I went out the back of that truck. What you doing this for?”
I was standing behind a tree on a small rise, and I saw my father take a flashlight and a hand ax out of the gunnysack. He squatted on one knee, raised the ax over his head, and whipped it down onto the floor of the cabin.
“You’re on your own now. There’s some canned goods and an opener in the sack, and you can have the flashlight. If you follow the levee you’ll come out on a dirt road that’ll lead you to a railway track. That’s the Southern Pacific and it’ll take you to Texas.”
“Gimmie the ax.”
“Nope. You already have everything you’re going to get.”
“You got a reason you don’t want the law here, ain’t you? Maybe a still in that barn.”
“You’re a lucky man today. Don’t undo it.”
“What you does is your business, white man.”
The convict wrapped the gunnysack around his wrist and dropped off the deck onto the ground. He looked backward with his cannonball head, then walked away through the darkening oaks that grew beside the levee. I wondered if he would make that freight train or if he would be run to ground by dogs and state police and maybe blown apart with shotguns in a cane field before he ever got out of the parish. But mostly I wondered at the incredible behavior of my father, who had turned Mother against him and broken the law himself for a man who didn’t even care enough to say thank you.
It was hot and still all day Sunday, then a thunder-shower blew in from the Gulf and cooled everything off just before supper time. The sky was violet and pink, and the cranes flying over the cypress in the marsh were touched with fire from the red sun on the horizon. I could smell the sweetness of the fields in the cooling wind and the wild four-o’clocks that grew in a gold-and-crimson spray by the swamp. My father said it was a perfect evening to drive down to Cypremort Point for boiled crabs. Mother didn’t answer, but a moment later she said she had promised her sister to go to a movie in Lafayette. My father lit a cigar and looked at her directly through the flame.
“It’s all right, Margaret. I don’t blame you,” he said.