Last Car to Elysian Fields

by James Lee Burke

  No matter, though. Sookie and his associates linked arms with Ida Durbin and Lou Kale, claiming that Ida and Lou were the parents of the only legal claimant to the estate, Valentine Chalons, now deceased.

  The upshot was a settlement that awarded half of the estate to Mrs. Bergeron and Tee Bleu and the other half to Lou and Ida.

  Guess who’s living today in the big white house on the Teche but no longer singing the blues in B flat?

  Jimmie finished reconstructing our birthplace south of town and spends weekends there, sometimes with friends from New Orleans. He invites Molly and me to his barbecues and lawn parties, but I find excuses not to attend. It has been my experience that age brings few gifts, but one of them is the acceptance that the past is the past, for good or bad, and if you are fortunate enough to have lived in an era that was truly exceptional, characterized by music, chopped-down Fords with chrome-plated engines roaring full out against purple sunsets, and drive-in restaurants where kids jitterbugged and did the dirty bop and knew they would never die, then those moments are forever inviolate, never to be shared or explained, and, like images on a Grecian urn, never subject to time and decay. Why make them less by trying to re-create them?

  I attend meetings at the Insanity Group and still have not learned how to sleep through the night. Every Sunday, Clete picks me up in his Caddie and we fish for speckled trout out on West Cote Blanche Bay. Molly, Snuggs, Tripod, and I live on Bayou Teche and in the early-morning hours often see two pelicans sailing low over the water, their extended wings touched by the sunrise. For me, these are gifts enough.