ST. MARY PARISH had a long history as a fiefdom run by a small oligarchy that had possessed power and enormous fortunes, actually hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time when the great majority of people in the parish had possessed virtually nothing. The availability of
the ancient cypress trees, the alluvial soil that was among the most fertile in the world, the untapped oil and natural-gas domes that had waited aeons for the penetration of the diamond-crusted Hughes drill bit, and, most important, the low cost of black and poor-white labor seemed like the ultimate fulfillment of a corporate dream that only a divine hand could have fashioned. Even the curds of white smoke rising from the mills into the hard blue Louisiana sky could easily be interpreted as a votive offering to a benevolent capitalist deity.
To my knowledge, no members of the Abelard family had held rank of consequence in the Confederate army, nor had they participated in great battles, nor had their home been burned or vandalized by Yankee marauders. Nor did they choose to participate in the grand illusion that came to be known as the Lost Cause. In fact, rumors had persisted to the present time that the Abelards, originally from Pennsylvania, had gotten along very well with their Union occupiers and their cotton and molasses had been allowed to pass unobstructed up the Mississippi to markets in the North.
The patriarch was Peter Abelard. He had been a successful haberdasher in Philadelphia and New York City during the 1840s and had brought his wife and children to the South with one objective—to buy as much land and as many slaves as possible. By the outbreak of the war, he had owned 185 slaves and was renting fifty more, the latter in a category known as “wage slaves.” After Emancipation, while others watched in quiet desperation as their fortunes went down the sinkhole or joined terrorist groups like the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia, Peter Abelard formed a partnership with the man who had converted Angola Plantation into Angola Prison and turned it into a giant surrogate for the slave-labor system that Lincoln had signed out of existence with one stroke of his pen. The two men created the convict-lease system that became a prototype throughout the South, resulting, in Louisiana alone, in the deaths of thousands of inmates, mostly black, who died of malnutrition, disease, and physical abuse.
The Abelard estate was down at the bottom of St. Mary Parish, where the land bleeds gradually into sawgrass and ill-defined marshy terrain that is being eaten away by saltwater intrusion as far as the eye can see. The Abelard house, with its Greco columns and second-story veranda, had once been a magnificent structure inside an Edenic ambience that John James Audubon had painted because of the beautiful birds that lived among the trees and flowers. But now, as Clete and I drove south on the two-lane asphalt road, the vista was quite different.
A ten-thousand-mile network of canals that had been cut for the installation of pipelines and the use of industrial workboats had poisoned the root systems of living marsh along the entirety of the coast. The consequences were not arguable, as any collage of aerial photography would demonstrate. Over the years, the rectangular grid of the canals had turned into serpentine lines that had taken on the bulbous characteristics of untreated skin tumors. In the case of the Abelard plantation, the effects were even more dramatic, due in part to the fact that the grandfather had allowed drilling in the black lagoons and hummocks of water oaks and gum and cypress trees that had surrounded his house. Now the house sat in solitary fashion on a knoll, accessible only by a plank bridge, the white paint stained by smoke from stubble fires, its backdrop one of yellowed sawgrass, dead trees protruding from the brackish water, and abandoned 1940s oil platforms whose thick wood timbers were as weightless in the hand as desiccated cork.
For whatever reason, for whatever higher cause, the collective industrial agencies of the modern era had transformed a green-gold paradisiacal wonderland into an environmental eyesore that would probably make the most optimistic humanist reconsider his point of view.
I had called ahead and had been told by Kermit Abelard that he would be genuinely happy if I would come to his home. I did not ask about his friend Robert Weingart, the convict-author, nor did I mention the reason for my visit or that I would be bringing Clete Purcel with me, although I doubted if any of these things would have been of concern to him. I did not like Kermit dating my daughter, but I could not say he was a fearful or deceptive man. My objections to him were his difference in age from Alafair’s and that he was an experienced man in the ways of the world, and a great part of that experience came from the exploitive enterprises with which the Abelards had long been associated.
We rumbled over the bridge and knocked on the front door. A storm was kicking up in the Gulf, and the wind was cool on the porch. In the south I could see a bank of black thunderheads low on the horizon and electricity forking inside the clouds the way sparks fork and leap off an emery wheel.
“What a dump,” Clete said.
“Will you be quiet?” I said.
He screwed a filter-tip cigarette into his mouth and got out his Zippo. I started to pull the cigarette out of his mouth, but what was the use? Clete was Clete.
“Who’s Abelard’s cooze?” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Alafair is going out with him.”
His face looked as though it had just undergone a five-second sunburn. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I thought maybe you’d figured it out.”
“Is there another agenda working here, Dave?”
“Not a chance,” I replied.
He lit his cigarette and puffed on it. When Kermit Abelard opened the door, Clete took one more drag and flipped the cigarette in the flower bed.
“How do you do?” Kermit said, extending his hand.
“What’s the haps?” Clete replied.
“You’re Clete Purcel, aren’t you? I’ve heard a lot about you. Come in, come in,” Kermit said, holding the great oaken door wide.
The interior of the house was dark, the furnishings out of the Gilded Age, the light fixtures glowing dimly inside their dust. The carpet was old and too thin for the hardwood floor, and I could feel the rough grain of the timber through my shoes. Clete touched his nose with the back of his wrist and cleared his throat.
“Something wrong, Mr. Purcel?” Kermit asked.
“I have allergies,” Clete replied.
“I’ve fixed some drinks for us and a cold Dr Pepper or two and a snack if you’d like to come out on the sunporch,” Kermit said.
I couldn’t hold it back. “You’re keen on Dr Pepper?” I said.
“No, I thought you might want—” he began.