“Maybe we should go inside,” I said.
“He was in an accident? He’s dead in an accident?” she said, turning her head away as though avoiding her own words.
“He was shot to death in Jeanerette.”
She placed one hand on the rope of a swing suspended from an oak limb. The blood had drained from her face. She was wearing a yellow cowboy shirt with the top snap undone. She began pushing on it with her thumb, knotting the fabric, unable to snap the brad into place, her eyes fastened on mine. “He went to a bar?”
“He was in the home of an Iberia Parish deputy sheriff. I think you know who I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t. He was going fishing. He’d been looking forward to it all week.”
“He raped and sodomized Catin Segura. He also beat her severely. A third party came into the house and shot and killed him.”
“My father isn’t a rapist. Why are you saying all this?” Her breath was coming too fast, she was like someone verging on hyperventilation, the color in her face changing.
“Do you have any idea who the shooter was?” I asked.
“I have to sit down. This is a trap of some kind. I know you, Dave. You were out to get my father.”
“You don’t know me at all. I always believed in you. I thought you were stand-up and honorable. I believed you beat the male-chauvinist oil bums around here at their own game. I was always on your side, but you never saw that.”
She was crying now, unashamedly, without anger or heat. There was a red dot on her chest where she had almost cut herself trying to snap her shirt. “Where is he?” she said.
“At Iberia General. Catin is at Iberia General, too. She has two children. I promised to take them to see her. It will probably be years before Catin overcomes the damage that’s been done to her. Would it hurt if you talked to her?”
“Me?”
“Sometimes the Man Upstairs gives us a chance to turn things around in a way we never see coming. Do Catin and yourself a favor, Varina.”
“You want me to go in there and talk to the woman who claims she was sodomized by my father?”
“I saw her at the crime scene under an hour ago. What happened to that woman is not a claim.”
I was not sure she was hearing me anymore. She looked as though she were drowning, her eye shadow running, her cheeks wet. She started walking toward the kitchen entrance of her house, trying to hold her back straight, almost twisting her ankle when she stepped in a depression. I caught up with her and put my arm around her shoulders. I thought she might resist, but she didn’t.
“Listen to me. Cut loose from that fraudulent preacher, the Duprees, Lamont Woolsey, the rackets they’re involved in, the whole nefarious business. There’s still time to turn it around. Say ‘full throttle and fuck it’ and get this stuff out of your life forever.”
Then she did one of the most bizarre things I had ever seen a bereaved person do. She went up the steps into her kitchen and took a half-gallon container of French-vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and sat at the same table where she had gotten Clete Purcel loaded and began eating the ice cream with a spoon, scraping its frozen hardness into curlicues, as though she were the only person in the room.
“Will you be all right if I leave?” I asked.
She looked at me blankly. I repeated my question.
“Look in the garage. You’ll see his spinning rod and ice chest and tackle box are gone. He was going to stop for shiners. He was going after sac-a-lait at Henderson Swamp.”
I put my business card on the table. “I’m sorry for your loss, Varina.”
She rested her forehead on her hand, her face wan. “He was poor and uneducated. Nobody ever helped him. All y’all did was condemn him. You should have helped him, Dave. You grew up poor. Your parents were illiterate, just like his. You could have been his friend and helped him, but you didn’t.”
“Not everyone who grew up poor took out his grief on people of color. Your father wanted to do payback on me and probably took Catin as a second choice. That doesn’t make me feel too good, Varina,” I said. “Jesse victimized black women for decades. This time he got nailed. That’s the sum total of what happened. If you want to hear the truth, visit Iberia General and talk to Catin and cut the bullshit.”
“How can you talk to me like this? I just lost my father.”
“Your father dealt the play. Unless you accept that fact, you’ll carry his anger the rest of your life.”
“I wouldn’t go in that woman’s hospital room at gunpoint.”
“Good-bye, Varina,” I said.