The next night Batist's sister banged down the dirt road in a dilapidated pickup that sounded like a dying animal when she parked it by the bait shop and turned off the ignition.
She sat down heavily at the counter and fished in her purse for a Kleenex and blew her nose, then stared at me as though it were I rather than she who was expected to explain her mission to my bait shop.
"Ain't nobody ever known the true story of what happened on Julian LaSalle's plantation," she said.
I nodded and remained silent.
"I had bad dreams about Legion since I was a girl. I been afraid that long," she said.
"Lots of us have bad memories from childhood. We shouldn't think less of ourselves for it, Clemmie," I said.
"I always tole myself God would punish Legion. Send him to hell where he belong."
"Maybe that'll happen."
"It ain't enough," she said.
Then she told me of the events following the death by fire of Julian LaSalle's wife.
Ladice went back to work in the fields but was not molested by Legion. In fact, he didn't bother any of the black girls or women and seemed preoccupied with other things. Vendors and servicepeople drove out to see him, rather than Julian LaSalle, with their deliveries or work orders for electrical or plumbing repairs on the plantation. Legion sometimes tethered his horse in the shade and went away with the vendors and servicepeople and did not return for hours, as though his duties in the fields had been reduced to a much lower level of priority and status.
Mr. Julian stayed in a guest cottage by the freshwater bay and was rarely seen except when he might emerge at evening in a robe and stand in the gloom of the trees next to the water's edge, unshaved, staring at the wooden bridge that led to the mainland and the community of small houses where most of his employees lived.
Sometimes his employees, perhaps washing their cars in the yard or barbecuing over a pit fashioned from a washing machine, would wave to him in the waning light, but Mr. Julian would not acknowledge the gesture, which would cause his employees to round up their children and go inside rather than let the happiness of their world contrast so visibly with the sorrow of his.
But to most of the black people on the plantation the die was cast three weeks after Mrs. LaSalle's death by an event that to outsiders would seem of little importance.
A bull alligator, one that was at least twelve feet long, had come out of the bay in the early dawn and caught a terrapin in its jaws. Down the bank, a black woman had left her diapered child momentarily unattended in the backyard. When the child began crying, the alligator lumbered out of the mist into the yard, rheumy-eyed, pieces of sinew and broken terrapin shell hanging from its teeth, its green-black hide slick with mud and strung incongruously with blooming water hyacinths.
The mother bolted hysterically into the yard and scooped her child into her arms and ran all the way down the road to the plantation store, screaming Mr. Julian's name.
Mr. Julian knew every alligator nesting hole on or near the island, the sandbars where they fed on raccoons, the corners and cuts in the channels where they hung in the current waiting for nutria and muskrat to swim across their vision.
Mr. Julian hunted rogue alligators in his canoe. He'd paddle quietly along the bank, then stand suddenly, his balance perfect, lift his deer rifle to his shoulder, and drill a solitary.30-06 round between the alligator's eyes.
Mr. Julian had his faults, but neglecting the safety of a child was not one of them.
The woman who had run to the plantation store was told by the clerk to return home, that someone would take care of the gator that had strayed into her yard.
"Mr. Julian gonna bring his gun down to my house?" she said.
"Legion is handling things right now," the clerk said.
"Mr. Julian always say tell him when a gator come up in the yard. He say go right on up to the house and bang on the do'," the woman said.
The clerk removed a pencil from behind his ear and wet the point in his mouth and wrote something on a pad. Then he took a peppermint cane out of a glass case and gave it to the woman's child.
"I'm putting a note for Legion in his mailbox. You seen me do hit. Now you take your baby on home and don't be bothering folks about this no more," he said.
But three days passed and no one hunted the rogue alligator.
The same black woman returned to the store. "You promised Legion gonna get rid of that gator. Where Mr. Julian at?" she said.
"Send your husband down here," the clerk said.
"Suh?" the woman said.
"Send your man here. I want to know if y’all plan to keep working on Poinciana Island," the clerk said.
Two days later Legion and another white man showed up behind the black woman's house and flung a cable and a barbed steel hook through the fork of a cypress tree on the water's edge. They spiked one end of the cable into the cypress trunk and baited the hook with a plucked chicken carcass and a dead blackbird and threw the hook out into the lily pads.
That night, under a full moon, the gator slipped through the reeds and the hyacinths and the layer of algae that floated in the shallows and struck the bait. Its tail threw water onto the bank for fifteen feet.
In the morning the gator lay in the shallows, exhausted, hooked solidly through the top of the snout, through sinew and bone, so that its struggle was useless, no matter how often it wrenched against the cable or thrashed the water with its tail.
Legion left the gator on the hook until dusk, when he and two other white men backed a truck up to the cypress tree and looped the free end of the cable through the truck's bumper. Then they pulled the cable through the fork of the tree, grinding off the bark, hoisting the gator halfway out of the water, its pale yellow stomach spinning in the last red glow of sunlight in the west.
Legion slipped on a pair of rubber boots and waded into the shallows and swung an ax into the gator's head. But the angle was bad and the gator was only stunned. Legion swung again, whacking the blade into its neck, then he hit it again and again, like a man who knows the strength and courage and ferocity of his adversary is greater than his own and that his own efforts would be worthless on an equal playing field. Finally the gator's stubby legs quivered stiffly and its tail knotted over and became motionless in the hyacinths below.
Legion and his two workmen skinned out the carcass and left the meat to rot and took the hide to a tanner in Morgan City.
The next afternoon Ladice's mother received a call from a white woman who ran a laundry in New Iberia. The white woman said one of her regular girls was sick and she needed Ladice's mother to fill in. That evening. Not the next day. That evening or not at all.
Just after dark Legion came to Ladice's house. He didn't knock; he simply opened the front door and walked into the front room. His khakis were starched and pressed, his jaws freshly shaved. The top of a thick silver watch, with a Lima construction fob on it, protruded from the watch pocket in his trousers. He removed a toothpick from his mouth.
"You getting along all right?" he asked.
She was cutting bread that she had just baked and her face was hot from the oven, her T-shirt damp with perspiration against her breasts.
"My mother gonna be back soon, Legion."
"Your mother's working at the laundry tonight. I give her name to Miz Delcambre. I thought y'all could use the money." He cupped his hand on her shoulder.
"Don't mess wit' me," she said.
His hand left her person, but she could feel his breath on her skin, his loins an inch from one of her buttocks.
"You gonna tell Mr. Julian on me?" he asked.
"If you make me."
"I wonder what it was like for Mr. Julian's wife to be locked in that burning room, grabbing that hot grillwork with her bare hands, trying to pull open the do' he locked from the outside. Don't nobody else know how that po' woman died, no," Legion said.
Ladice drew the butcher knife through the loaf of bread. The knife was thick at the top, the color of an old five-cent piece, wood-handled, the cutting edge ground on an emery wheel. She felt the knife snick into the chopping board. Legion touched her cheek with the ball of his finger.
"Mr. Julian sold me a quarter hoss for ten dollars. I liked that hoss so much, me, I went back and bought four more, same price," he said.
"What I care?" she said.
"Them hoss worth a hunnerd-fifty apiece. Why you t'ink he give me such a good price?" Legion said.
She concentrated on her work and tried to hide the expression on her face, but he could see the recognition grow in the corner of her eye. He stroked her hair and the callused edges of his fingers brushed lightly against her skin. Then he slipped his hand down her back and she felt his sex swelling against her. "You t'ink you worth more than them hoss, Ladice?" he asked.
His words were like an obscene presence on her skin, as though Legion knew her in a way that no one else did, knew the truth about her real worth, as though all her self-deception and vanity and her attempt to manipulate Mr. Julian's carnality for her own ends had made her deserving of anything Legion wished to do to her. He placed his hand loosely on her wrist, then removed the knife from her grasp and set it in a pan of greasy water and picked her up against his chest, locking his arms around her rib cage, squeezing until her head reared back in pain and her knees opened and clenched his hips and her hands fought to find purchase around his neck.
"A colored man ever hold you that tight, Ladice?" he said.
He carried her in that position through the curtained entrance to her bedroom.
After he dropped her on top of the quilt, her eyes brimming with water, he sat on the side of the bed and formed a triangle over her with his arms and sternum and stared into her face. "I ain't a bad man, no. I'm gonna treat you a whole lot better than that old man. You gonna see, you," he said.
Perhaps she tried to report Legion to Mr. Julian. No one ever knew. Mr. Julian received no visitors and was often unwashed and drunk. He forgot to feed his Labrador retriever and the animal had to beg food scraps from the back doors of Negro homes along the bay. To people on East Main, where most of his peers lived, he was an object of pity when they saw him escorted by his elderly black chauffeur into the doctor's office for his medical appointments. On one occasion an old friend, a man who had been a recipient of the Medal of Honor in the Great War, persuaded Mr. Julian to join him at the Frederic Hotel for a meal. At the table Mr. Julian became very still and his face filled with shame. The elderly ex-soldier did not understand and wondered what he could have said to hurt his friend, then realized that Mr. Julian had soiled himself.
But one fine morning Mr. Julian awoke before dawn, seemingly a new man, and worked in his flower garden and bathed in a great iron tub in the washhouse behind the cottage and watched the sun rise and the mullet fly on the bay. He packed a suitcase and whistled a song and dressed in a white linen suit and put on his Panama hat and had his driver take him to the train depot in New Iberia, where he caught the Sunset Limited for New Orleans. From the club car, a drink in his hand, he watched the familiar world he had grown up in, one of columned homes and oak-lined streets and gentle people, slip past the window.
In New Orleans he checked into a luxury hotel on Canal and while unpacking he heard a woman weeping through the wall. When he knocked on her door, she told him her husband had left her and their ten-year-old daughter and she was sorry for her emotional behavior.
He drank whiskey sours in the bar and danced with the cocktail waitress. That evening he dined at the Court of Two Sisters and strolled through the French Quarter and attended a religious service in a storefront church whose congregation was composed mostly of black people. In front of St. Louis Cemetery he talked about baseball with a beat cop and put a twenty-dollar bill in the begging can of a blind woman.
A formal dance was being held at his hotel, and he stood in the entrance of the ballroom and watched the dancers and listened to the orchestra, his hat held loosely on his fingers, his face marked with a wistfulness that caused the hostess to invite him inside. Then he stopped for a cup of coffee in the bar and asked that a dozen roses and a dish of ice cream, with cinnamon sprinkled on it, be sent up to his room. When the tray was delivered on a cart, he instructed the waiter to leave it in the corridor.
A few moments later Mr. Julian moved the cart in front of the door of the woman whose husband had abandoned her and their daughter. He tapped with the brass knocker on her door and went back inside his room and opened the French doors that gave onto the balcony and looked out at the pink glow of the sky over Lake Pontchartrain while the curtains puffed in the breeze around his head. Then Julian LaSalle mounted the rail on the balcony and like a giant white crane sailed out over the streetcars and the flow of traffic and the neon-lit palm trees along the neutral ground twelve stories below.