A Stained White Radiance (Dave Robicheaux 5)

“Sorry,” the man with the hammer and staples said. “The guy just said to stick ’em up on all the trees.”

“Which guy?”

“The guy who give me the signs.”

“Well, just don’t nail any more up till you get around that next corner, okay?”

“Sure.”

I tried to free the staples from the bark, then I simply tore the poster down the middle, handed it to him, and walked up to the house.

Bootsie was in town and Alafair had not gotten home from her picnic yet. I undressed in the bedroom, turned on the window fan, lay down on top of the sheets with the pillow over my head, and tried to sleep. I could hear the rain hitt

ing the trees in large, flat drops now and tinking on the blades of the fan.

But I couldn’t sleep, and I kept trying to sort through my thoughts in the same way that you pick at a scab you know you should leave alone.

No matter how educated a southerner is, or how liberal or intellectual he might consider himself to be, I don’t believe you will meet many of my generation who do not still revere, although perhaps in a secret way, all the old southern myths that we’ve supposedly put aside as members of the New South. You cannot grow up in a place where the tractor’s plow can crack minié balls and grapeshot loose from the soil, even rake across a cannon wheel, and remain impervious to the past.

As a child I had access to few books, but I knew all the stories about General Banks’s invasion of southwestern Louisiana, the burning of the parish courthouse, the stabling of horses in the Episcopalian church on Main Street, the union gunboats that came up the Teche and shelled the plantation on Nelson’s Canal west of town, and Louisiana’s boys in butternut brown who lived on dried peas and gave up ground a bloody foot at a time.

Who cared if their cause was just or not? The stories made your blood sing; the grooved minié ball that you picked out of the freshly plowed row and rolled in your palm made you part of a moment that happened over a century ago. You looked away at the stand of trees by the bayou, and rather than the tractor engine idling beside you, you heard the ragged popping of small-arms fire and saw black plumes of smoke exploding out of the brush into the sunlight. And you realized that they died right here in this field, that they bled into this same dirt where the cane would grow eight feet tall by autumn and turn as scarlet as dried blood.

But why did large numbers of people buy into a man like Bobby Earl? Were they that easily deceived? Would any group of reasonable people entrust the conduct of their government to an ex-American Nazi or Ku Klux Klansman? I had no answer.

I wondered if any of them ever asked themselves what Robert Lee or Thomas Jackson might have to say about a man like this.

I finally fell asleep. Then I heard the brakes on the church bus and a moment later the screen door slam. Other sounds followed: a lunch kit clattering on the drainboard, the icebox door opening, the back screen slamming. Tripod racing up and down on the chain that was attached to the clothesline, the screen slamming again, tennis shoes in the hallway outside the bedroom door, then a pause full of portent.

Alafair hit the bed running and bounced up and down on her knees, lost her balance, and fell across my back. I raised my head up from under the pillow.

“Hi, big guy. What you doing home early?” she said.

“Taking a nap.”

“Oh.” She started bouncing again, then looked at my face. “Maybe you should go back to sleep?”

“Why would I want to do that, Alf?”

“Are you mad about something?”

I put on my trousers, then sat back down on the side of the bed and tried to rub the sleep out of my face.

“Hop up on my back,” I said. “Let’s check out what Batist is doing. It’s not a day for lying around in bed.”

She put her arms around my neck and clamped her legs around my ribcage, and we walked down through the wet leaves to the dock. It was raining lightly out of a gray sky now, the lily pads were bright green and beaded with water, and the bayou was covered with rain rings.

Batist had slid the canvas awning out on wires over the dock, and several fishermen sat under it, drinking beer and eating boudin out of wax paper. He had also allowed someone to put Bobby Earl posters in the bait-shop windows and on the service counter.

I let Alafair climb down off my back. Batist was taking some boudin out of the microwave. He wore canvas boat shoes without socks, a pair of ragged, white cutoffs whose top button had popped off, and a wash-faded denim shirt tied under his chest, which reminded me of black boilerplate. His shirt pocket was bursting with cigars.

“Batist, who put these posters here?”

“Some white man who come ax if he could leave them.”

“Next time send the man up to the house.”

“You was sleepin’, you.” He put a dry cigar in his mouth and began slicing the boudin on a paper plate and inserting matchsticks into each slice. “Why you worried about them signs, Dave? People leave them here all the time.”