truck, clattering like tack hammers on the roof, filling the cab with such a din that I could not hear Clete talking all the way back to New Iberia. I wished somehow the sulfurous smell of the storm and the swirling clouds of rain and the bolts of lightning spiking into the horizon would cleanse me of the angst I felt about my daughter and her exposure to a tangle of vipers thriving on the watery southern rim of St. Mary Parish.
CHAPTER 4
THE STORM KNOCKED out the power on Main Street, so Alafair and Molly and I ate supper in the light of candles at our kitchen table while the rain beat down on the tin roof of our home and flooded the yard and danced on the surface of Bayou Teche. We had brought Snuggs and Tripod inside, and the two of them were eating out of their bowls on the floor. Tripod was old and sick and losing his eyesight, and I did not like to contemplate the choices we might have to make in the near future. As though she had read my mind, Molly got up from the table and wrapped him in a towel and placed him inside the cutaway cardboard box, lined with a soft blanket, where he slept whenever the weather turned bad.
She patted him on top of the head. “You still cold, little Pod?” she said. He lifted up his pointy face and stared at her, his nose twitching. She squatted down and continued to stroke his head. “You poor little guy.”
When I first met Molly, she had been a nun, although she had not taken vows. She had been working with a relief organization that constructed homes for the poor and helped empower fisherpeople and victims of natural calamities. But she and her fellow nuns were of a different stripe than their antecedents, and they didn’t confine themselves to the type of charitable activities that are usually considered laudatory but of no threat or consequence to corporate-scale enterprises. Molly and her friends began to organize the sugarcane workers. The workers who joined the union discovered they had twenty-four hours to get out of their company-owned houses. And that was just for openers.
Where did this happen?
You got it. In the medieval fiefdom of the Abelard family, St. Mary Parish.
Molly sat back down at the table and resumed eating, her thoughts hidden, the candlelight carving her features, flickering on her red hair and the strange brown luminosity of her eyes.
“I’m going to take him to the vet tomorrow,” I said. “I think he might have distemper.”
“I’ll take him,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let him get wet this afternoon. I was late getting home, and his chain was wrapped around the tree. Where were you?”
We had gotten to the subject I didn’t want to broach. “Clete and I took a ride to the Abelard home, down in St. Mary.”
I heard Alafair stop eating. “Why would you want to go to the Abelard house, Dave?” she asked.
“A pimp by the name of Herman Stanga claims to be working for the St. Jude Project. Kermit Abelard says that’s not so. His friend Robert Weingart claims he never heard of Herman Stanga. I think Weingart is a liar and a full-time mainline wiseass. Clete is hanging by a thread over the fire. He may go to prison because of Stanga, Alafair.”
“Go to prison for what?”
“Stanga spat on him, and Clete did something he shouldn’t have.”
“So it’s Kermit’s fault?”
“I think Kermit is deliberately naive. He chooses not to see evil in men who are genuinely wicked. He told me he had talked to you about his contacts with Stanga.”
“Kermit has a good heart. Maybe you’d find that out if you gave him a chance,” she said.
The rain had slackened, and the light on the bayou was a dense green, the wake from a passing tugboat swelling over the banks into the roots of the cypress and oak trees. Our windows were open, and the air was cool and fresh, and I could smell the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou and the wet trees and the soaked ground, and I didn’t want to talk about Herman Stanga and the Abelard family. No, that’s not true. I did not want to hear my daughter speak as an advocate for the Abelards.
“I warned Kermit not to drag you into his association with Herman Stanga,” I said.
“You did what?”
“Don’t start, you two,” Molly said.
“I’m not supposed to say anything when Dave insults my friends and patronizes me?” Alafair said. “You actually threatened Kermit? I can’t believe you.”
“I didn’t threaten him.”
“Then what did you say to him?”
“Weingart came to the table in a robe and a thong. He called Clete a gelatinous handful. This man is a walking regurgitant. Clete and I are not the problem.”
“I am? That’s the inference?”
I got up from the table and set my plate on the drainboard, half of my food uneaten. I took a carton of ice cream from the freezer and removed three bowls from the cupboard, unsure what I was doing. I opened the solid door to the back porch, letting in the wind. I could hear frogs croaking and rain leaking out of the oaks and pecan trees into the yard. “Do y’all want strawberries with your ice cream?” I said.
“Why do you try to control other people, Dave? Why do you ruin everything?” Alafair said.
Molly reached across the table and grasped Alafair’s hand. “Don’t,” she said.
“I’m not supposed to defend my friends or myself?”
“Don’t,” Molly repeated, shaking Alafair’s palm in hers.
I put on my rain hat and walked downtown in the twilight. Customers were having drinks under the colonnade in front of Clementine’s restaurant, and across the street, at the Gouguenheim bed-and-breakfast, guests were enjoying the evening on the balcony, and farther down the block a crowd was waiting under the colonnade to go inside Bojangles. I walked to the drawbridge over the Teche at Burke Street and leaned on the rail and looked down the long corridor of trees that was barely visible in the gloaming of the day. What is the proper way for a father to talk to his daughter when she has reached adulthood but is determined to trust men who will only bring her injury? Do you lecture her? Do you indicate that she has no judgment and is not capable of conducting her own life? It’s not unlike telling a drunkard that he is weak and morally deficient because he drinks, then expecting him to stop. How do you tell your daughter that all your years of protecting and caring for her can be stolen in a blink by a man like Robert Weingart? The answer is you cannot.
I could not tell Alafair that I remembered moments out of her childhood that she considered of little consequence today or didn’t remember at all: the burning day I pulled her from the submerged wreck of an airplane piloted by a priest who was flying war refugees out of El Salvador and Guatemala; her pride in the Donald Duck cap with the quacking bill we bought at Disney World; her first pair of tennis shoes, which she wore to bed at night, embossed on the appropriate tips in big rubber letters with the words “left” and “right”; her ongoing war with Batist, the black man who ran our bait shop and boat rental, because Tripod would not stay out of Batist’s fried pies and candy bars; her horse, Tex, who threw her end over end into our tomato plants; Alafair, at age six, mallet-smashing boiled crabs at a screened-in restaurant by Vermilion Bay, splattering everyone at the table; Alafair, at age nine, fishing with me in the Gulf, casting two-handed with a heavy rod and saltwater reel like it was a samurai sword, almost knocking me unconscious with the lead weights and smelt-baited treble hook.
Do you approach your daughter and tell her that no man has the right to track his feet through a father’s memories of his daughter’s young life?
I walked home in the dark. The streetlamps were back on and the wind was up, and the frenetic shadows of the live oaks and the moss in their limbs made me think of soldiers running from tree trunk to tree trunk in a nocturnal woods, but I had no explanation why.
THE PHONE RANG at shortly after two in the morning. The caller sounded drunk and black and belligerent. I told him he must have misdialed, and started to hang up on him.
“No, I got the right number. Elmore said to call you. He’s got to talk to you again,” the caller said.
