A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

Why was I carrying a drop? Because ever since Clete and I had gotten involved with the Shondell and Balangie families, we had been confronted with situations and people and aberrant behavior that made no sense, and I believed that before it was over, we would experience much worse and that no one would ever accept the story we told about it. The oath we took, the laws we upheld, the justice system passed down to us by men such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson no longer had application in our lives.

I could feel the temperature dropping. I pulled the anchor and set it on the bow, dripping and muddy and tangled with hyacinth roots, and drove my boat deeper into the swamp. When I cut the engine and slung the anchor off the bow, I saw a shack nestled behind a flooded canebrake, the tin roof streaked

with moss and eaten with purple rust. The small gallery was supported by wood posts that were half submerged in the water.

Two children of color were standing on the gallery. Both were barefoot and had blue eyes and light skin. The boy wore overalls that had only one strap, the girl a wash-faded dress that was as thin as Kleenex. A fog bank was puffing out of the willows onto the water.

“Want to buy some worms?” the boy said.

“I’m fishing for sacalait,” I said. I held up my bait bucket. “That’s why I have these shiners.”

The faces of both children seemed hollowed out and lifeless, like apparitions in the mist. The interior of the shack was dark. There was no glass in the windows, no outbuilding on the bank, no boat tied to a post or a tree trunk, no parked vehicle nearby.

“Where’re your folks?” I asked.

“Out yonder,” the girl said.

“Out yonder where?”

She pointed. “Where the fog is at. They gone after a gator.”

“The season is long over,” I replied. “Where do you keep your worms?”

“Behind the shack,” the boy said. “Come see. We got big fat night crawlers.”

The fog was wet on my neck, the breeze pushing the water under the shack’s gallery. “Aren’t y’all cold?”

“No, suh,” the boy said.

“Where do you live?”

“Right here,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ll take a look at those worms.”

I used the paddle to push my way through the canebrake until the bow of my boat slid onto the bank. The fog was gray and thicker now and contained a smell like carrion or offal thrown on a fire. Behind me, I heard a splash I normally would associate with a gator slapping its tail on the water or a huge gar rolling in the hyacinths. When I looked back at the shack, the children were gone.

I unzipped the .45 and took it from its case and put it in the right-hand pocket of my canvas coat. I put the drop in the left pocket and stepped onto the bank. The footprints of the children were clearly stenciled in the aggregate of mold and dirt and rainwater on the gallery. As soon as I stepped on it, my foot plunged through the boards as though they were rotted cork.

I went around to the rear of the shack. The back door hung by one hinge. The prints of small bare feet led from the front door out the back, then faded like cat whiskers on the ground. However, other prints were dramatically visible and freshly etched by someone wearing at least size-eleven shoes or boots with lug soles. They led up a broken levee into a clutch of willows and disappeared into a canal lined with cattails and blanketed with lichen as thick as paint. But I could see no muddy clouds in the water, no broken reeds, no imprints of a shoe or boot on top of the stenciled tracks of raccoons and possums and nutrias and deer that crisscrossed the mudbank.

I returned to the shack. The ground under my feet was badly eroded by the runoff from the levee. In a glistening pool I saw three small rough-surfaced tan balls that any kid raised on Bayou Teche would recognize. They were called slave marbles. In antebellum times, black children made them from the clay they dug from the bayou and baked in a tin oven. I picked the balls from the dirt and rolled them in my palm. I wondered how much time had passed since a child had touched them. I wondered what his life had been like, the travail and suffering that had probably been his only legacy.

Out in the fog I heard a clunking sound, like wood on wood. I dropped the slave marbles in my left coat pocket, took out my .45 and eased a copper-jacketed hollow-point into the chamber, then walked to the edge of the swamp. I heard the knocking of wood on wood again.

“Who’s out there?” I called. “Tell me who you are!”

My words were lost inside the thickness of the fog, the dripping of trees I could not see.

“I have no doubt that’s you, Gideon!” I called. “I wanted to believe you were a misguided guy trying to do a good deed or two! But only a coward would use children to front for him!”

I heard the labored sound of oars. This time I saw no galleon traveling through time. The bow of a wood boat appeared at the edge of the fog bank, a shadowy figure couched in the middle, the oars resting in the locks. The figure was wearing a hooded raincoat. The boat bumped against a cypress stump and drifted sideways. I held my .45 behind my back. “You’re Gideon?”

“Correct.” He turned his head and I saw his face. It made me swallow.

“What’d you do with those kids?” I said.

“They’re safe.”