Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  Afterward the girl or woman had to wash him. His body was as rough as animal hide, they said, welted with knife scars, the insides of his forearms blue with tattoos that looked like the crudely drawn figures in old black-and-white movie cartoons.

  Then the day came when his eyes settled on Ladice Hulin.

  “Go up yonder in them gum trees and sit in the shade,” he said.

  “I got to pick to the end of the row, suh. Then I got the other row. Or I’m gonna come up short,” she said.

  He reached down and lifted the cloth sack out of her hand and tied its loose end to his saddle pommel.

  “The pepper juice giving you blisters. You need to soak your hands in milk at night. It gonna take the sting right out,” he said.

  “They don’t be hurting, Legion. I promise. I got to get my row,” Ladice said.

  This time he didn’t reply. He turned his horse in a circle and came up behind her and let the horse’s forequarters knock against her.

  “Legion, my daddy expecting to see me this afternoon. He coming down from the quarters. I got to be out here in the row where he can see me,” she said.

  “You ain’t got a daddy, girl. Don’t make me ax you again, no,” Legion said.

  The other workers, bent over in the pepper bushes, never looked up from their own fear and grief with the sun and heat and blistered fingers and the ball of pain that grew steadily in the small of the back through the long afternoon. Ladice wiped the dust and sweat off her face with her dress and began the walk to the gum trees in whose midst was a thorn bush, one with deep green leaves and red flowers that looked like drops of blood in the hot shade.

  She heard a car honk on the road. She turned and saw Mr. Julian in his Lincoln Continental, its whitewall tires and wirewheels gleaming in the sunlight, like a shining invention that had appeared out of a cloud. He got out in the road, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt with purple garters on the sleeves and seersucker pants and a Panama hat on the back of his head. His smile was wonderful, and he was looking at her, his face filled with goodness, the influence of his presence so immediate that Legion dropped her sack to the ground and dismounted from the saddle and led his horse toward the road, so his employer would not be forced to look up at him and address him on horseback.

  The easy smile never left Mr. Julian’s face, but she could hear his words drifting across the rows on the wind.

  “I’m surprised to see you bump a young woman with your horse like that, Legion. I suspect that was an accident, wasn’t it?” he said.

  “Yes, sir. I tole her I was sorry about that,” Legion said.

  “That’s good. ’Cause you’re a good man. Let’s don’t have a conversation like this again.”

  Ladice picked up her sack and got back in the row and stooped over and began picking the peppers whose juice sometimes caused her hands to swell as though they had been stung by bumblebees. She glanced sideways at Mr. Julian, at the way he held himself, the cleft in his chin, the sheen on his hair when he removed his hat, his red tie blowing over his shoulder in the wind. Physically, Legion towered over Mr. Julian, but Legion stood in silence, like a chastised child, motionless, while Mr. Julian unsnapped the cover on his gold vest watch and looked at the time and snapped the cover shut again, then began discussing a deep-sea fishing trip he wanted to take.

  While he talked his eyes remained fastened on Ladice.

  “Don’t be t’inking you special, girl. Don’t be that kind of fool,” an old woman in the next row said.

  A week later Mr. Julian gave Ladice a job in the big house and new dresses to wear to work and the apartment over the garage to live in. She knew the price he would extract but did not think less of him for it. In fact, his obvious need, his male dependency, the fact that he wanted her, that he had chosen her out of all the women in the quarters, that any night he would come for her, all his weaknesses exposed, these thoughts made her cheeks burn and her breath rise like a shard of glass in her chest.

  She entertained herself with fantasies as she worked in the ornate silence of his house, dusting the antique chairs that were never sat in, placing cut flowers in a large silver bowl on a dining room table that was never used, listening for the little bell by Mrs. LaSalle’s bedside, the only lifeline the old woman had to the world beyond her bedroom. The Negro boys who had courted Ladice only a week earlier seemed part of a distant memory now, one of parked cars behind juke joints and insects humming in the hot darkness or a hurried coupling on a stale-smelling mattress in a corncrib.

  She sensed a new power in herself among all those who lived by the rules and strange parameters that governed life on Poinciana Island. On her first visit to the plantation store after moving up to the big house, the clerk called her “Miss Ladice,” and Legion and another white man stepped aside when she crossed the gallery to the parking lot.

  It was during her second week at the big house, just after sunset, when she was fresh from her bath and dressed in clean clothes, that she heard the weight of Mr. Julian’s footsteps on the garage apartment stairs. Her hand moved to the switch for the outside light.

  “There’s no need to turn that on. It’s only I,” he said through the screen door.

  She stood still, her hands folded demurely in front of her, unsure whether she should act first by pushing open the door for him, wondering if even that small a courtesy would indicate a foreknowledge about his behavior that he would find insulting and presumptuous.

  When she didn’t speak, he said, “Am I disturbing you, Ladice?”

  “No, suh, you ain’t. I mean, you aren’t.” She held the door open. “Would you like to come in, suh?”

  “Yes, I couldn’t sleep. I left Miz LaSalle’s window open so I could listen for her bell. I understand you’ve graduated from high school.”

  “Yes, suh. I went t’ree years at plantation school and one at St. Edward’s.”

  “Have you thought about college?”

  “The closest for colored is Southern in Baton Rouge. I ain’t got the money for that.”

  “There’re scholarships. I could help with one,” he said.

  But he was not hearing his own words now. His eyes lingered on her mouth, the thickness of her hair, her skin that was as smooth as melted chocolate, the lovely heart shape of her face. She saw him swallow and an expression like both shame and lust suffuse his face. His hands cupped her shoulders, then he bent toward her and kissed her cheek and let his hands slip down her arms and over her waist and onto the small of her back.

  “I’m a foolish old man who has little in the way of a married life, Ladice. If you wish, I’ll leave,” he said.

  “No, suh. You ain’t got to go. I mean, you don’t got to go,” she replied.

  He kissed her neck and touched the points of her breasts with his fingers and unbuttoned her shirt and blue jeans. He helped her slip her shirt off her arms and held one of her hands while she stepped out of her jeans, then walked her to the narrow bed in the room off the kitchen and unhooked her bra and laid her down on the bed and removed her panties.

  “Mr. Julian, ain’t you gonna use somet’ing?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice hoarse, the folds of flesh in his throat red and bewhiskered in the moonglow through the window.

  There was a sadness in his eyes she had never seen in a white person’s before.

  “You feel bad about somet’ing, Mr. Julian?”

  “What I do is a sin. I’ve made you part of it, too.”

  She took his hand and flattened it on her breast. “Feel my heart beating? It ain’t a sin when a woman’s heart beats like that,” she said, and held him with her eyes.

  He sat on the edge of the mattress and kissed her stomach and the insides of her thighs and put her nipples in his mouth, then he entered her and came within seconds, his back shaking while she stroked the curly locks of hair on the back of his neck.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t give you satisfaction,” he said.

  “It’s all right, s
uh. Lie on your back. Let me show you somet’ing,” she said.

  Then she mounted him and lifted his sex and placed it inside her and closed her knees and thighs tightly against him. She looked into his eyes in a way she had never dared look at a white man, probing his thoughts, controlling his sensations with the movements of her loins, leaning down to kiss him as she might a child. She came at the same time as he and she felt a surge of power and electricity in her thighs and genitalia and breasts that made her cry out involuntarily, not as much in pleasure as with a sense of triumph she never thought she could experience.

  Through the window she heard the tiny bell ring in Mrs. LaSalle’s bedroom.

  “I always fix Mrs. LaSalle a sandwich and a glass of milk at this time of night,” he said.

  “I can do it, suh.”

  “No, your duties are in the downstairs of the house. That’s where you work and remain, Ladice, unless I’m away and Mrs. LaSalle calls you.”

  There was a sharpness in his voice that made her blink. She covered herself with the sheet and pulled her knees up in front of her. She had only to look into his eyes for a second to realize that a transformation had taken place in him since his moment of need had passed. He began dressing, his face composed now, his chin pointed upward while he buttoned his shirt. Ladice stared into the shadows and removed a strand of hair from her forehead, her lips slightly pursed, her eyes veiled.

  Then she lay back on the pillow with one arm behind her head and watched him prepare to leave.

  “Good night, Ladice,” he said.

  She looked at him indifferently and did not answer.

  You gonna be back. Won’t be long, either. See who talks down to who next time, she said to herself.

  The following week the tiny bell on Mrs. LaSalle’s nightstand rang when Mr. Julian was in town. Ladice climbed the stairs and stood in Mrs. LaSalle’s doorway in her maid’s black dress and frilled apron. “Yes, ma’am?” she said.

  Mrs. LaSalle had forced her husband to put iron grillwork over the windows, although there had never been a burglary on the island, and she never allowed the windows to be unlocked or opened. The air in the room was oppressive and smelled of camphor and urine. Mrs. LaSalle’s skin looked like candle wax, her hair like a tangled red flame on the pillow of her tester bed. Her eyes were dark, larger than they should have been, luminous with either the cancer in her body or the fits of insanity that took possession of her mind.

  “What happened to the other nigra girl?” she asked.

  “Mr. Julian said you wanted her sent away, ma’am,” Ladice replied.

  “That sounds like someone’s fabrication. Why would I want to do that? Never mind. Come here. Let me look at you.”

  Ladice walked closer to the tester bed. Mrs. LaSalle’s pink nightgown was sunken into her chest, where her breasts had been removed.

  “Why, you’re a juicy little thing, aren’t you?” she said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I’m incontinent. I want you to rinse my panties.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you deaf? Remove my panties and rinse them. I’ve soiled them.”

  “I cain’t be doing that, ma’am.”

  “You impudent thing.”

  “Yessum,” Ladice said. She turned and left the room.

  That night Mr. Julian was at her door.

  “My wife says you sassed her,” he said.

  “I don’t see it that way,” Ladice replied.

  He opened the screen door and stepped inside without being invited. He was much taller than she, his shadow blocking out the evening light that shone through the trees outside. But she didn’t move. She wore jeans and sandals and a blue V-necked T-shirt and a gold-plated chain with a small purple stone around her throat. Her body felt cool and fresh from the cold bath she had just taken, and she had put perfume behind her ears, and one lock of her hair hung down over her eye.

  “I need to know what happened today, Ladice,” he said.

  “If Miz LaSalle want her clothes laundered, I’ll be glad to carry them on down to the washing machine. I’ll iron them, too,” Ladice said.

  “I see. I think maybe this was just a miscommunication in language,” he said.

  She didn’t reply. His eyes softened and moved over her face and studied her mouth. His hand touched her arm.

  “My momma and uncle are picking me up to go to town,” she said.

  “Will you be back later?”

  She moved the lock of hair from her eyebrow. “I t’ink my momma want me to stay over wit’ her tonight,” she said.

  “Yes, I’m sure she’s lonely sometimes. I’m very fond of you, Ladice.”

  “Good night, Mr. Julian.”

  “Yes, well, I guess good night it is, then,” he said.

  But his words did not coincide with his immobility and the longing in his face. She held her eyes steadily on his until he actually blinked and color came into his throat. Then his jawbone flexed and he let himself out the door.

  She watched him through the window as he crossed his yard to the back of his house, tearing angrily at the knot in his necktie.

  Maybe your wife will let you rinse her panties, she said to herself, and felt surprise at the vitriolic nature of her thoughts.

  In her naïveté she thought their arrangement, love affair, whatever people wished to call it, would aim itself at a dramatic denouement, like a sulfurous match suddenly igniting the dryness of her life, bringing it to an end in some fashion, perhaps even a destructive one, that would set her free from the world she had grown up in. But the long, humid days of summer blended one into another, as did Mr. Julian’s nocturnal visits and the depression and sleeplessness they engendered in her. She no longer thought about control or power or her status among the other blacks on Poinciana Island. Her familiarity with Mr. Julian made her think of him with pity, when she thought of him at all, and his visits for her were simply a biological matter, in the same way her other bodily functions were, and she wondered if this wasn’t indeed the attitude that all women developed when they coupled out of necessity. It wasn’t a sin; it was just boring.

  Then it was fall and she could smell gas from the swamp at night and the faint, salty odor of dead fish that had been trapped in tidal pools by the bay. Sometimes she would lie awake in her bed and listen to the moths hitting on her screens, destroying their wings as they tried to reach the nightlight in the bathroom. She wondered why they were created in such a way, why they would destroy themselves in order to fly onto an electrically heated white orb that eventually killed them. When she had these thoughts, she covered her head with a pillow so she could not hear the soft thudding of the moths’ bodies against the screens.

  But the venal and pernicious nature of her relationship with Julian LaSalle and his family and Poinciana Island, and its cost to her, would reveal itself in a way she had never guessed.

  In November she boarded a Greyhound bus and rode across the Atchafalaya Swamp to Baton Rouge. She stayed in the old Negro district called Catfish Town, where juke joints and shotgun shacks left over from the days of slavery still lined both sides of the streets. Her first morning in the city she took a cab to the campus of Southern University and entered the administration building and told a white-haired black woman in a business suit she wanted to pre-enroll in the nursing program for the spring semester.

  “Did you graduate from high school?” the woman asked.

  “Yessum.”

  “Where?”

  “In New Iberia.”

  “No, I mean what was the name of the school?”

  “I got a certificate from plantation school. I went to St. Edward’s, too.”

  “I see,” the woman said. Her eyes seemed to cloud. “Fill out this application and return it with your transcripts. You could have done this through the mail, you know.”

  “Ma’am, is there somet’ing you ain’t telling me?”

  “I didn’t mean to give that impression,” the woman replied.
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  When Ladice walked outside, the air was sunlit and cool and smelled of burning leaves. A marching band was practicing beyond a grove of trees, the notes of a martial song rising off the brass and silver instruments into a hard blue sky. For some reason she could not explain, the expectation of football games and Saturday-night dances and corsages made of chrysanthemums and gin fizzes in the back of a coupe had become the province of others, one she would not share in.

  One month later the mail carrier told Ladice he had left a letter from Southern University for her at the plantation post office. She walked down the dirt road in the dusk, between woods that smelled of pine sap and dust on the leaves and fish heads that raccoons had strewn among the trunks. The sun burned like a flare on a marshy horizon that was gray with winterkill.

  She took the envelope from the hand of the postal clerk and walked back to the garage apartment and put it on her breakfast table under a salt shaker and lay down on her bed and went to sleep without opening the letter.

  It was dark when she awoke. She turned on the kitchen light and washed her face in the bathroom, then sat down at the table and read the two brief paragraphs that had been written to her by the registrar. When she had finished, she refolded the letter and placed it back in the envelope and walked down to Julian LaSalle’s front door, not the back, and knocked.

  He was in slippers and a red silk bathrobe when he opened the door, his reading glasses tilted down on his nose.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “My credits from plantation school ain’t no good.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Southern will take my credits from St. Edward’s. The ones from plantation school don’t count. You must have knowed that when you said you would get me a scholarship to Southern. Did you know that, Mr. Julian?”