Creole Belle
Page 57
I wasn’t sure whether Clete knew the danger he and the children were in. I should have known better. Clete was cavalier about his own safety but never about the safety and well-being of anyone else. He picked up all three children, holding them high up on his chest, clear of the water, and waded through the jellyfish like Proteus rising from the surf with his wreathed horn, “Help Me, Rhonda” still blaring from the headphones. After he set them down on the sand, he told them all to hold hands as he led them out on the street where the ice-cream wagon had just stopped.
And that’s the way we dealt with the great issues of our time. Clete protected the innocent and tried to do good deeds for people who had no voice, and I tried to care for my family and not brood upon the evil that men do. We didn’t change the world, but neither were we changed by it. As the writer in Ecclesiastes says, one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever. For me, the acceptance of those words and the fact that I can spend my days among the people I love are victory enough.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Houston, Texas, in 1936, James Lee Burke grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast. He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute and later received a BA and an MA in English from the University of Missouri in 1958 and 1960, respectively. Over the years, he worked as a landman for the Sinclair Oil Company, pipeliner, land surveyor, newspaper reporter, college English professor, social worker on skid row in Los Angeles, clerk for the Louisiana Employment Service, and instructor in the U.S. Job Corps. He and his wife, Pearl, met in graduate school and have been married fifty-two years; they have four children.
Burke is the author of thirty-one novels, including nineteen in the Dave Robicheaux series, and two collections of short stories. His work has twice been awarded an Edgar for Best Crime Novel of the Year; in 2009 the Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master. He has also been a recipient of Bread Loaf and Guggenheim fellowships and an NEA grant. Three of his novels (Heaven’s Prisoners, Two for Texas, and In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead) have been made into motion pictures. His short stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, New Stories from the South, Best American Short Stories, The Antioch Review, The Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review. His novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times over a period of nine years and, upon its publication by Louisiana State University Press in 1986, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
He and Pearl live in Missoula, Montana.
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.
Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Simon & Schuster.
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com