A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

“Yeah, I know. He looks like a ghoul.”

  “But he’s bothered by something, isn’t he?”

  “How would I know?” I lied.

  “You don’t want to believe he’s a tormented spirit,” Penelope said.

  “I’m signing off on this,” I said. “I’ve seen Confederate soldiers in the mist. Maybe they were born out of my imagination, or maybe they have a message for us. But both of you betrayed your daughter. That’s real. Playing around with voodoo in your home theater isn’t going to change that.”

  “You’d better leave,” Adonis said.

  “I want a word with you outside,” I said.

  “Say it right here.”

  “Stay away from Leslie Rosenberg,” I said. “She’s trying to live a decent life. Find another playground.”

  “You son of a bitch,” he said.

  His wife seemed in shock. She looked around as though she didn’t know where she was. “I put Tabby down,” she said. “Where did he go? It’s his feeding time.”

  “I’m going to walk outside with you, Mr. Robicheaux,” Adonis said. “There’s a door behind the screen. Go through the door and into the yard. Do it now.”

  “You were molested for years by a member of the Shondell family,” I said. “Your father had the molester tortured to death and buried in a bog on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. That means you couldn’t square the situation on your own, maybe not even as an adult. Maybe you dug it.”

  Adonis pushed me in the chest. “Do that again and I’ll break your sticks from the bottom of your feet to your neck bones,” I said.

  He hit me in the sternum with his fist, twisting the knuckles to ensure pain. I caught him on the nose, splattering blood across the projector, then I got him high on the cheekbone and on the jaw. He tried to get up and fight back, but in seconds the worst in me had its way, and I was stomping the side of his head, aiming for bone or cartilage whenever I could find it. Penelope was crying and beating my back with her fists.

  When it was over, I tore the movie screen from the ceiling and went through the back door into the daylight, off balance, the sky and the statuary on the lawn and the lake spinning around me. All the way to the cruiser, I could hear Penelope Balangie weeping, not in a hysterical fashion, not with shock at the level of violence she had just witnessed, but instead in a sustained, repressed, and mournful way, like someone at Golgotha watching a condemned man drag the means of his execution to the crest of the hill.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I DROVE TO THE home of Leslie Rosenberg in Metairie and made a fateful decision that had nothing to do with my job as a detective. Or perhaps she had already made the decision for me by quitting her job as a cashier, telling Adonis Balangie she wouldn’t be seeing him again, and notifying the bank that she would no longer be making payments on the home for which he had made the down payment.

  As she told me these things in her living room, I wondered if I had actually influenced her decision or if she was a player in a drama whose complexities I could only guess at. No one contends with the raison d’être of deathbed conversions, but seldom do people change their entire lives and give up all they own and put themselves and their loved ones—in this case a severely handicapped child—at the mercy of the storm.

  “You’re sure you’re doing the right thing?” I asked her.

  “You’re the one who said to fuck all my worries.”

  “That’s why I seldom take my own advice.”

  “I’m moving into a shelter. I need to pack.”

  “Do you have any relatives in the area?”

  “The last people I need to see are my relatives.”

  “Could I use your phone?”

  “Do it before service is cut off. I put the disconnect order in this morning.”

  I went into the hallway and called New Iberia. Elizabeth was watching me from her wheelchair. When I got off the call, she smiled at me. “It’s nice to see you,” I said. I had never seen eyes as clear and blue. It was like staring into infinity. “Would you like to go to New Iberia?” I said. Her cheeks were pink, her hair gold like her mother’s but with a red tint in it. “I bet you’d like it,” I said, and winked at her.

  I went back into the living room. I could see Leslie through a bedroom door, pulling the sheets and covers off the bed and stuffing them in a big cardboard box. She was wearing jeans and a tight beige sweater that looked wash-faded and utilitarian. “The shelter is short on linens,” she said.

  “I just talked with some Catholic nuns in New Iberia,” I said. “They have a cottage waiting for you. They’ll give you a job at their center. They help people get a second start.”

  “What about Elizabeth?”

  “I think she’ll find many kind people there.”

  “I’ve never been to New Iberia.”

  “It’s a grand place.”

  “In what way?”

  “We only let the best people in,” I said.

  * * *

  IT WAS STRANGE driving back to the city of my birth with Leslie and Elizabeth in the cruiser. In minutes I had effected a geographical change in their lives that might have irreversible consequences. Please don’t misunderstand me. The world in which I grew up was a poem. Others might talk of our illiteracy, our lack of education, our racial injustice and insularity and fear of the outside world, and be correct in all their judgments. But those were the shadings in the painting. Bayou Teche was a way of life. Our ancestors brought both Europe and the mysteries of the Caribbean to Louisiana, and among the crypts in our graveyards were the names of families who had fled Robespierre’s guillotine or been exiled by the British from Nova Scotia or gone to the gates of Moscow with Napoléon Bonaparte. They also contained the remains of the boys in butternut whose remains were shipped from Shiloh and Port Hudson.

  Our culture was an incongruous composite of Spanish and continental French aristocrats and Acadian peasants and Atakapa cannibals and Africans sold into the green hell of the cane fields. Our churches were sometimes more pagan than Judeo-Christian. Hedonism was not only the norm but celebrated as a virtue. The gentry screwed down and married up. But nonetheless Acadiana, as we call it, was a haven, a place where a woman was always addressed as “Miss” coupled with her given name and a man was addressed with the same equal parts courtesy and familiarity. To not shake another man’s hand was an insult. To not remove one’s glove before shaking hands was a sign of inbreeding, coarseness, and social stupidity.

  As we crossed the arched bridge over the Atchafalaya at Morgan City, I could see the wide sweep of the wetlands, the flooded gum trees and the miles of channels and bayous that bled into the Gulf of Mexico. We were entering the heart of Acadian country, where tidal surges and hurricanes could overcome the levees and float coffins from their crypts and shadow the land and leave behind amounts of water that swallowed whole forests, creating bays where the treetops protruded from the surface like patches of deep green watercress, the branches filled with raccoons and rabbits and possums and small deer, all of whom were in danger of drowning or starving to death.

  But we always believed that the sun would rise again, and even though another generation might pass away, the earth would abideth forever, even though it was unlikely we would know those biblical terms. Like the Bedouin whose concept of God derives from his experience inside the immensity and great emptiness of the desert, we believed that our marshlands and swamps and rivers and bayous were not only Edenic but somehow created especially for us.

  It was a terrible kind of innocence to be possessed by. We began to see, when it was too late, that the earth is not inexhaustible and that it cannot bind its own wounds as fast as we can inflict them. Also, candor requires me to say that these conclusions are not held by everyone, and the revelers whose mantra is “Let the good times roll” often remind me of Irish celebrants trying to put a good hat on the funeral of a loved one.

  I did not want to dwell on these unhappy perceptions. It was a glorious day, I told myself. I w
anted to bring a degree of happiness to Leslie Rosenberg and her poor afflicted daughter. Outside of Jeanerette, we stopped to eat in a café that smelled of gumbo and po’boy fried oyster sandwiches and dirty rice and crawfish étouffée, and as soon as we sat down, I heard a duet singing on the jukebox like the year was 1955.

  Leslie saw the look on my face. She glanced at the jukebox and back at me. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “That’s Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie.”

  “Adonis’s stepdaughter?”

  “Do me a favor?” I said, smiling.

  “You don’t want to hear Adonis’s name?”

  “I ripped out his spokes this morning.”

  We were waiting on our food. She had put a cracker in her mouth. “I didn’t get that.”

  “I took him down. In his home theater. In front of his wife or whatever she is.”

  “Please tell me you didn’t do that.”

  “I have nonchemical blackouts sometimes. This was one of them.”

  “You should have told me this earlier.”

  “It’s not of consequence,” I said.

  She was quiet a long time, the jukebox still playing.

  “Have you met his employees, the ones from Sicily?” she said. “They never speak. They’re like shadows. There’s no light in their eyes.”

  “I hear they’re gumballs.”

  “The guys with smashed noses and emphysema lungs are for show. The Sicilians look like Hollywood body doubles for Pee-wee Herman but will take your soul as well as your life.”

  I loved Leslie’s language. “Let me explain something about Adonis,” I said. “He hit me in the chest and twisted the blow so it would bite into bone. He likes to shame and hurt people and make them feel bad about themselves. Only one kind of person does that: a coward and a bully. He got what he deserved. I wish I had busted him up more than I did.”

  She smoothed her daughter’s hair and looked for the waiter. “I think we should go,” she said. “Can we take the food with us?”

  Another song by Johnny and Isolde began playing. “You know what Swamp Pop is?” I said.

  “No,” she answered.

  “It’s called the New Orleans Sound. The melody tinkles like crystal. Ernie Suarez and Warren Storm from Lafayette had a lot to do with it. Fats Domino and Guitar Slim, too. It’s like listening to ‘Jolie Blon.’ You know it’s about a lost love of some kind, something you can’t tell other people about.”

  “So why isn’t it still around?”

  “It takes the listener too deep inside himself.”

  “That’s a strange thing to say.”

  “Why do you think people live on cell phones? It’s because they don’t want to live with their own thoughts.”

  “I want to go, Dave.”

  “Don’t ever be afraid of men like Adonis Balangie,” I said.

  “Something is happening inside me I don’t understand. It has nothing to do with Adonis.”

  “You feel sick?” I said.

  “It has to do with fire. It’s been in my dreams every night for a week. Fire on my legs and arms.”

  Have you known people who stare into space and obviously see a dark place inside themselves rather than the external world? I’d like to say it was that simple with Leslie. But it was not. Her brow was not knitted; her eyes were calm rather than alarmed. I saw certainty in her face that I have seen only in people who are about to accept a terrible fate that has been unfairly imposed on their lives. I witnessed two electrocutions in the old Red Hat House at Angola. The men I watched die had that same look in their eyes.

  Her stare broke. “I shouldn’t have said anything. You’ve been very kind. We need to go. Elizabeth needs to take her nap. Did you know that the hum of a car engine through the metal and seats is approximately in B-flat, the same as the hum of blood in the arteries of a pregnant woman? That’s why children sleep so easily in the backseat of an automobile.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, in the way you speak to people with whom you must be very careful.

  “Two days ago Adonis called and said the revelator is here. Adonis said a great change is at hand.”

  I had learned long ago not to engage with either rhetoric or ideas that are dipped in fear, because the result is always the same: You don’t lessen the other person’s burden by one ounce, but you break your own back. “I’ll pay the check and have the waiter wrap our food,” I said. “I’ll meet you in the car.”

  “Did I say something to affront you?”

  “No, never,” I replied. “Look outside. The devil is beating his wife.”

  “It’s raining while the sun is shining?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve never figured out how that expression came about. Do you know?”

  But like most people preoccupied with an obsession, she had lost interest in the small talk of the day. I went to the register and waited while the waiter added up our ticket and put our food in Styrofoam boxes. Johnny and Isolde’s song ended, and the only sounds I could hear were the very fine chips of hail clicking on the roof and windows and a kitchen helper scraping dirty plates into a garbage pail, scowling at us as though we were directly responsible for his status in the world.

  * * *

  I DROVE UP THE two-lane road that followed Bayou Teche into Iberia Parish. For some reason I felt that the environment around me was changing, the same way the sea can transform itself without explanation, pulling the stars from the sky and lighting a groundswell that makes you feel you’re sliding down the shingles of the earth. Outside my windshield, the blend of winter-green trees and the camellia-petal softness of the season and the pink sun hiding behind the smoke from stubble fires had been replaced by a brass-like brilliance as harsh and cold to the eye as wind blowing across fountain water.

  Maybe the distortion of the light had to do with the hailstones melting and sliding across my windshield. But that explanation was too simple. I felt as though I were seeing Eden on the first day of creation, before God’s hand had finished its work. I felt I was looking at a garden of thorns.

  I looked in the rearview mirror. Elizabeth was asleep under a quilt, and Leslie was staring straight ahead as we passed a trailer slum in Jeanerette and rumbled across a drawbridge and passed two antebellum homes that could have been lifted out of Gone with the Wind.

  “My,” she said.

  “My what?” I said.

  “They’re so white and beautiful, with the azaleas and hibiscus and hydrangeas blooming in front.”

  To our left was Bayou Teche, running fast and flat, swollen with mud and storm debris and dented with raindrops in the sunlight, the glaze of the surface as bright as razors.

  “The nuns are just down the road,” I said.

  “I know what the dream was now. That’s how I died in an earlier time.”

  “Dreams are dreams and should be treated as such,” I said.

  “This is a haunted place, isn’t it? You see things here, things that aren’t real, don’t you?”

  I did not want to talk about the supernatural with Leslie or anyone else. For the first time in my life, I had actually become afraid of it.

  “Depends on how much guilt you have,” I said.

  “I was burned at the stake,” she said. “For being a Jew.”

  “Don’t do this,” I said.

  “I won’t say this publicly. I won’t be an embarrassment to you, if that’s the problem.”

  “That is not the problem,” I said.

  “Then what is?”

  I didn’t answer. We passed a small cemetery full of half-sunken crypts set back in a grove of gum and persimmon trees, then drove through the immaculately maintained cane fields owned by LSU. Up ahead I saw the self-help center run by Catholic nuns who had come to South Louisiana to unionize the field workers in the cane fields. Take a guess how that worked out.

  “You and Elizabeth will like these ladies,” I said.

  “He’s out there,” Leslie said.
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br />   “Who’s out there?” I asked.

  “The man named Gideon. He’s come for me.”

  “I don’t want to hear that.”

  “You shouldn’t have attacked Adonis.”

  I parked in front of the self-help center. It was located inside a lovely old gingerbread house with a wide gallery, surrounded by trees and a velvet-green landscape. “This craziness ends here,” I said.

  She closed her eyes and hung her head on her chest. “I feel very tired. I have to sleep.”

  “Take a nap,” I said. “I’ll go inside. We’ll all feel better later. Okay?” I could not hide my irritability.

  This time it was she who didn’t answer. The only person I wanted to talk to now was Clete Purcel. No one else would understand the madness that had come into our lives, and no one else would have the courage to deal with it. I wondered if I had bought in to folly and superstition or the manipulations of Mark Shondell. Worse, I wondered if the medieval world wasn’t indeed much more than a decaying memory—in reality, perhaps it still defined us and had opened its maw and was about to ingest us.

  I knocked on the door of the gingerbread house. But the nuns did not answer. Father Julian Hebert did. “Are you here about Marcel LaForchette?” he said, his voice quavering as though he did not want to hear the answer to his own question.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I STEPPED INSIDE. “WHAT happened?”

  “Marcel went crazy and came through the door and terrified all the personnel,” Julian said. “The sisters called me and thought I could settle him down. Fat chance.”

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Gone. The sisters went after him. But I don’t think there’s an answer for Marcel. At least I don’t have one.”

  “Bad message from a man of the cloth,” I said.

  “He’s either afflicted, or what he told the sisters and me is true.”

  “Told y’all what?” I said.

  “This man Gideon gave him a thousand dollars to leave New Iberia. Marcel tried to give the money to the Center. He’s afraid of it.”