"It's flat burning up, ain't it?" he said.
"In traveling through some of the other southern parishes, have you run across a man by the name of Legion? No first name, no last name, just Legion," I said.
He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. "An old man? He worked in Angola at one time? Black folks walk around him. He lives behind the old sugar mill down by Baldwin. Know why I remember his name?" he said. His face lit as he spoke the last sentence.
"No, why's that?" I said.
" 'Cause when Jesus was fixing to heal this possessed man, he asked the demon his name first. The demon said his name was Legion. Jesus cast the demon into a herd of hogs and the hogs run into the sea and drowned."
"Thanks for your help, Marvin. Did you sell a Bible to the woman in that last house you were in?"
"Not really."
"I imagine it'd be a hard sell. She hooks in a joint on Hopkins."
He looked guardedly up and down the road, his expression cautionary now, one white man to another. "The Mormons believe black people is descended from the lost tribe of Ham. You think that's true?"
"Got me. You want a ride?"
"If you work in the fields of the Lord, you're suppose to walk it, not just talk it."
His face was full of self-irony and boyish good cheer. Even the streaks of sweat on his shirt, like the stripes a flagellum would make on the chest of its victim, excited sympathy for his plight and the humble role he had chosen for himself. If his smile could be translated into words, it was perhaps the old adage that goodness is its own reward.
I gave him the thumbs-up sign and made a mental note to run his name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., at the first opportunity.
CHAPTER 7
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.