The Convict and Other Stories

“Why do you drink with them, Daddy? Y’all always have a argument,” I said.

His eyes flicked sideways at my mother.

“That’s not an argument, just a gentleman’s disagreement,” he said.

“I agree with him,” my mother said. “Why provoke them?”

“They’re good fellows. They just don’t see things clearly sometimes.”

My mother looked at me in the backseat, her eyes smiling so he could see them. She was beautiful when she looked like that.

“You should be aware that your father is the foremost authority in Louisiana on the subject of colored people.”

“It isn’t a joke, Margaret. We’ve kept them poor and uneducated and we’re going to have to settle accounts for it one day.”

“Well, you haven’t underpaid them,” she said. “I don’t believe there’s a darkie in town you haven’t lent money to.”

I wished I hadn’t said anything. I knew he was feeling the same pain now that he had felt in the bar. Nobody understood him—not my mother, not me, none of the men he drank with.

The air suddenly became cool, the twilight turned a yellowish green, and it started to rain. Up the blacktop we saw a blockade and men in raincoats with flashlights in their hands. They wore flat campaign hats and water was dancing on the brims. My father stopped at the blockade and rolled down the window. A state policeman leaned his head down and moved his eyes around the inside of the car.

“We got a nigger and a white convict out on the ground. Don’t pick up no hitchhikers,” he said.

“Where were they last seen?” my father said.

“They got loose from a prison truck just east of the four-corners,” he said.

We drove on in the rain. My father turned on the headlights, and I saw the anxiety in my mother’s face in the glow from the dashboard.

“Will, that’s only a mile from us,” she said.

“They’re probably gone by now or hid out under a bridge somewhere,” he said.

“They must be dangerous or they wouldn’t have so many police officers out,” she said.

“If they were really dangerous, they’d be in Angola, not riding around in a truck. Besides, I bet when we get home and turn on the radio we’ll find out they’re back in jail.”

“I don’t like it. It’s like when all those Germans were here.”

During the war there was a POW camp outside New Iberia. We used to see them chopping in the sugarcane with a big white P on their backs. Mother kept the doors locked until they were sent back to Germany. My father always said they were harmless and they wouldn’t escape from their camp if they were pushed out the front door at gunpoint.

The wind was blowing hard when we got home, and leaves from the pecan orchard were scattered across the lawn. My pirogue, which was tied to a small dock on the bayou behind the house, was knocking loudly against a piling. Mother waited for my father to open the front door, even though she had her own key, then she turned on all the lights in the house and closed the curtains. She began to peel crawfish in the sink for our supper, then turned on the radio in the window as though she were bored for something to listen to. Outside, the door on the tractor shed began to bang violently in the wind. My father went to the closet for his hat and raincoat.

“Let it go, Will. It’s raining too hard,” she said.

“Turn on the outside light. You’ll be able to see me from the window,” he said.

He ran through the rain, stopped at the barn for a hammer and a wood stob, then bent over in front of the tractor shed and drove the stob securely against the door.

He walked back into the kitchen, hitting his hat against his pants leg.

“I’ve got to get a new latch for that door. But at least the wind won’t be banging it for a while,” he said.

“There was a news story on the radio about the convicts,” my mother said. “They had been taken from Angola to Franklin for a trial. One of them is a murderer.”

“Angola?” For the first time my father’s face looked concerned.

“The truck wrecked, and they got out the back and then made a man cut their handcuffs.”