Authors: Greg Iles
“I will.”
Jesse puts a foot into the stirrup and expertly mounts the horse. Then he takes his foot out of the stirrup so I can get a foothold. When I do, he takes my left arm and pulls me effortlessly up behind his saddle. “You can talk, but hang on while you do.” He puts the horse into a canter on the grassy shoulder of the gravel road. His broad shoulders are wet with sweat, and pink scar tissue dots the back of his neck.
“You work for my grandfather, right?” I ask.
“That’s right.”
“What do you think about him?”
“He’s a tough old man.”
“Do you like him?”
“Dr. Kirkland pays my wages. ‘Like’ got nothing to do with it.”
I have a feeling the relationship between Jesse Billups and my grandfather isn’t simple at all. “What are you not telling me, Jesse?”
I can almost feel him smile. “Dr. Kirkland beat me once when I was a boy. Beat me bad. But I’d have done the same thing in his place, so we’re square enough on that, I guess.”
I want to ask more about this, but before I can, I see a woman riding toward us on a bicycle. The gravel road makes her work difficult. She looks as if she might skid and fall at any moment.
“Mother
fucker,
” mutters Jesse.
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t pay her no mind. She half-crazy.”
The woman slows as she nears us, but Jesse spurs his horse as though he means to pass her without a word.
“Wait!” cries the woman.
“Stop,” I tell Jesse.
He doesn’t.
“Goddamn you, Jesse Billups!”
shouts the woman.
“Don’t you run from me!”
I reach around Jesse and grab for the reins. “Stop this horse!”
He curses, then stops the horse on a dime. “You gonna wish we hadn’t.”
As agitated as the woman below me looks, I expect her to start shouting accusations of battery or paternity at Jesse Billups. But now that the horse has stopped, she acts as if Jesse doesn’t exist. She has eyes only for me.
“Are you Catherine Ferry?” she asks.
“That’s right.”
“I’m Louise Butler. I want to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Your daddy.”
“Did you know him?”
“I surely did.”
Swinging my left leg over the horse’s flanks, I drop to the gravel beside Louise Butler. She’s about forty and very pretty, with the same milk-chocolate skin Pearlie has. She’s watching me with what looks like suspicion in her large eyes.
“If you stay here and jaw,” says Jesse, “you gonna have to get back to your car on your own. I gots to go.”
“I know where my car is. I can get back to it.”
Jesse kicks his horse and leaves us in a small cloud of dust.
I look at Louise and wait, expecting some explanation of her sudden appearance. But she only stares at the sky.
“Gonna rain soon,” she comments. “I got a place by the lake. We’d better start back that way.”
Without waiting for an answer, she turns her bike around and starts pushing it down the road. I watch her for a few seconds, noting her one-piece shift and Keds sneakers. Then I trot forward and fall in beside her, my feet scrunching the gravel as I walk.
“How did you know I was here?” I ask.
“Henry told me,” she says, not looking over at me.
“So you knew my father.”
Now she turns to me. “You might not like what I’m gonna say, Miss Catherine.”
“Please call me Cat.”
She laughs softly. “Kitty Cat.”
A chill goes through me. My father called me Kitty Cat when I was very small. He was the only one who did. “You did know him. Please tell me anything you can.”
“I don’t want to make you feel bad, honey.”
“You can’t make me feel any worse than I already do today.”
“Don’t be so sure. Did Jesse tell you anything bad about Luke?”
“Not really. He might have, but you came along.”
Louise wrinkles her nose. “You can’t trust Jesse. Not about Luke.”
“I thought they were friends.”
“They was for a while.”
“What happened?”
“Me.”
“You?”
She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “Darling, Luke was my man for seven years. From 1974 right up to the night he died. And a lot of people didn’t like that.”
I stop in my tracks. This woman can’t be more than ten years older than I. And she’s telling me she was my father’s lover?
Louise walks on, then realizes I’m no longer beside her. She stops and turns back. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I just wanted to talk to you about him, see if I could see him in you.”
“Can you?”
She smiles sadly. “He’s looking out of your eyes at me right now. Every line of your face got a shadow of him in it.”
“Louise, what—”
Before I can finish my sentence, the clouds open up. Fat raindrops slap the cream-colored dust on the shoulder of the road, making dark circles of mud. The circles multiply too fast to follow, and then Louise and I are running down the road like little girls, she pushing her bike at first, then jumping onto it and riding beside me.
“You’re in good shape!” she cries as the shacks of the little village come into sight. “My house ain’t far, but it’s past this bunch here.”
We race past the gray shacks, their porches empty now, and turn down a muddy path that parallels the lake.
“There it is!” Louise shouts.
I hold my hand over my eyes to shield them from the rain. In the distance I see a shack that’s not gray like the others, but bright blue, like a shack in the Caribbean. Now that I know where I’m going, I sprint ahead of the bike. My feet have better purchase in the mud than her bicycle, and I beat Louise to her porch.
Watching her ride the last few yards, I realize that I’m about to hear things about my father that he never meant for me to know. Does this beautiful stranger know things that might explain what Grandpapa told me today? Or at least confirm it?
“Go on in,” she says, lifting her bike onto the narrow porch of the little house. “I’m right behind you.”
I walk through the flimsy front door into a room that serves as a combination kitchen, den, and dining area. The moment I enter, two things strike me with startling intensity. First is the sound of the rain hitting the tin roof above me. It’s my recurring dream made real, and the rattling almost takes my breath away. The second is the certainty that my father once lived here. On the mantel over a gas space heater is a sculpture of a woman. Though it’s of African rather than Asian derivation—a blank oval face over a long neck and a trunk with graceful limbs—one glance tells me it’s my father’s work. The woman is lying on her side, with one knee raised and one hand on her hip, the way a woman might lie in bed watching her lover across the room. This sculpture is easily worth more than Louise’s whole house.
The dining table, too, is my father’s work. Brushed steel with inset glass plates, and flecks of mica fused to the steel. There’s no bed in this room, but I’d bet anything that he built that, too.
“Luke wanted me to have my own place,” Louise says from behind me.
Suddenly I’m wavering on my feet. The heat in the house is stifling, as though the place has been shut up for days, and the rattle of the rain seems to grow louder by the second. But that’s only part of it. Today my father’s life has turned from a patchwork of happy memories to a house of mirrors.
“What is it?” cries Louise.
“I don’t know.”
She rushes to an air conditioner mounted in a window and flips a switch. The rumbling roar of the old window unit does much to drown the sound of the rain, but it’s too little too late.
“You’re going to faint!”
As my knees go out from under me, Louise catches me under the arms and steers my falling body toward a sofa.
“Drink this,” says Louise, holding a glass of iced tea under my chin. “The heat got you, that’s all. This place been shut up a couple of days, and it gets like an oven without the AC going.”
“It’s not the heat,” I tell her, taking the glass and drinking a sip of syrupy sweet tea.
“Was it seeing Luke’s things? I should have known that would upset you.”
“That’s not why I passed out.”
She studies me with her deep brown eyes. “You look scared, more than anything.”
I nod slowly. “It’s the rain.”
“The rain?”
“The sound of it. Rain hitting a tin roof.”
Louise looks confused. “You don’t like that?”
“It’s not a matter of liking it or not. I just can’t take it.”
“Really? I love that sound. It makes me lonely, but I still love it. I used to lie in bed with Luke on rainy afternoons and listen for hours. It’s like music.”
I try to smile, but my lips won’t do it.
“I’m sorry. You’re upset, and I’m just thinking back on good times. Did something bad happen to you in the rain?”
“I wish I knew. Lately I’ve been hearing that sound in my dreams, and even while I’m awake.”
“Sometimes that’s the way of it,” Louise says, walking to the sink. “I got a lot of things inside me I don’t understand.” She runs tap water into a carafe. “I got to make some coffee. It can be a hundred degrees outside, but I got to have my coffee. Addicted, I guess.”
“Louise, what can you tell me about the orange pickup truck by the bridge?”
She switches on the Mr. Coffee, then comes and sits in a Naugahyde recliner on my left. “That old rusted wreck by the shed?”
“Yes.”
“That was Dr. Kirkland’s truck back in the old days.”
“I know. But did my father ever drive it?”
She closes her eyes. “Yeah, Luke drove it some, when Dr. Kirkland wasn’t around. Dr. Kirkland used to brag all the time about how long that junker had been running. He said it had never quit on him and never would. Finally did, though. Why?”
“I think I saw something when I was in that truck. I have this dream where I’m riding in it with Grandpapa. We’re on the north end of the island, riding up a hill in the cow pasture, toward the pond.”
Louise nods. “I know where that is.”
“In the dream, we never get over the hill. We get closer and closer, but we never get over it. Lately, the closer we get, the more afraid I get.”
“How long you been having this dream?”
“A couple of weeks, maybe longer. Do you know of anything that happened up there? Something bad I might have seen?”
She leans back in her chair and looks at the porch window. The storm clouds have brought a premature darkness, and the wind rattles the glass in its frame.
“Gonna get worse before it gets better,” she predicts. “Lots of bad things happened on this old island over the years. But the pond…you think you saw somebody get beaten? Killed, maybe? Something like that?”
“I don’t know.” A different thought strikes me. “Did you and Daddy ever do anything at the pond? Sexually, I mean?”
A deep stillness comes over Louise. “We swam there sometimes. But not while you were on the island.”
“Did you ever make love when I was on the island?”
She averts her eyes. “We tried not to. But sometimes we did. I’m sorry if that upsets you, but I don’t want to lie.”
“No, I want the truth. And I know how it is when you love somebody.”
“Well…you could have seen us swimming naked in the pond. But I don’t think you did.”
Sensing discomfort in Louise, I change the subject. “Did Daddy ever talk to you about the war?”
“Not with words. But he let me see the pain in different ways.”
“What do you think happened to him over there?”
Her large eyes fix on me, an earnest passion in them. “He got poisoned. That’s what happened. Not in his body—in his soul.”
“Louise…I’ve been told that his unit committed war crimes. Atrocities. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
She nods solemnly.
“They tortured people. Kidnapped women and raped them. Do you think Daddy could have done anything like that?” This is as close as I can bear to come to asking Louise if she thinks my father could have molested me.
She stands suddenly and goes to a drawer, then takes out a pack of Salem cigarettes and lights one with a kitchen match. Despite the passage of time, Louise still has a slim figure, with taut calves that a lot of women would kill for. I can only imagine what she must have looked like as a young woman.
“Luke had some problems, okay?” She exhales blue smoke. “When he and I first got together, he couldn’t make love.”
“You mean physically?” A strange excitement awakens in my chest. “He was impotent?”
She tilts her head as if unsure how to reply. “He was and he wasn’t.”
“What do you mean, he was and he wasn’t?”
Louise looks at me skeptically. “I don’t see a ring on your finger. You ever lived with a man?”
“A couple. Or they lived with me, rather. You don’t have to pull any punches with me, Louise. I know men.”
She chuckles softly. “You know how when a man wakes up, lots of times he’s hard down there from having to go to the bathroom?”
I nod, my curiosity making me grip the arm of the sofa.
“Well, Luke would be like that in the morning. But if I tried to make love with him, he couldn’t stay that way.”
“I see.”
“I knew something in the war had done that to him. Not his wound. Something in his head. It took more than a year to get him where he could be with me. Where he could trust me. I think that’s what it was, trust. But I’m no doctor. I don’t know. He may have done or seen things over there that made sex something terrible to him.”
Wild thoughts are spinning in my head. If my father was impotent, could he have abused me?
Of course he could have,
answers a bitter voice.
There are lots of sex acts besides intercourse.
I’m not even sure intercourse is the main form of child abuse. I should ask Dr. Goldman, or even Michael Wells.
A blast of wind makes the windows shudder, and the rain drives against the roof like hail. I focus on the drone of the air conditioner to block it out. “What did you say about you coming between Jesse and my father?”
Louise pours herself a cup of still-brewing coffee. “Jesse always wanted me. Watched me from the time I was a little girl. Always talking to me, bringing me presents. Following me around on his horse. But I didn’t want him.”
“Why not?”
“I just didn’t feel right about it. I didn’t know what I wanted, but it wasn’t Jesse. Then I started seeing this white boy wandering around the island. He was a man, really—like Jesse—but he seemed more like a boy. Always off by himself, like me. Him and Jesse talked sometimes, but I think all they had in common was the war. Anyway, I’d figure out ways to get ahead of Luke on his walks, so he’d stumble on me, like it was an accident. I liked talking to him. I hadn’t been nowhere but here and to school in West Feliciana Parish. And that was just an old country school for black people. Didn’t learn nothing there. I’d just sit and listen while Luke talked. Which was funny, ’cause people who met him wondered if he could talk at all. But he could when he wanted to. He talked to me all the time.”
“I did the same thing,” I tell her. “I used to go into his studio every night to watch him work. He didn’t talk much to me—because I was so young, probably—but he let me sit with him. I was the only one he’d let in.”
Louise is smiling at me. We are sisters under the skin.
“How old were you when all this happened?” I ask.
Her cheeks darken in embarrassment. “I was fourteen when I started following Luke around. But we was just talking, like I said. We didn’t do nothing till I turned sixteen.”
Sixteen…
“I can see you were in love with him.”
There’s a faraway look in her eyes. “You want to know if he was in love with me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“He told me he was. I know that probably hurts you. But I’ll tell you this, he wasn’t ever gonna leave you to come to me. He hated that place, that Malmaison. Hated your grandfather, too.”
“And my mother?”
Louise gives me an intense look. “He loved your mama, now. She just didn’t understand him. But when I’d talk to him about leaving—and don’t think I didn’t. Lord, I begged him sometimes—he’d say, ‘I can’t leave my Kitty Cat, Louise. Can’t leave my baby in that house with those people. So I can’t come to you.’ And he never did.”
This confirmation of my father’s love warms my heart, despite what I heard from my grandfather today. Yet as soon as I feel this emotion, something clenches in my chest. “Did he say anything else about my mother?”
She looks hesitant.
“Please tell me.”
“He said your mama had problems with sex. Even before he went to the war.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Well…she just couldn’t do much. She did the one position, man on top, and she had to have the lights off to do that. Couldn’t take her clothes off in front of him. Before they got married, he thought it was just shyness. But she never loosened up. Luke said he was patient, and I believe him. I think she’d just been taught that sex was something to be ashamed of. I know some women like that. And then, after he got back from the war, Luke had his own problems.”
“Thank you for being so honest, Louise.”
“I got no reason to lie, except to spare you pain. And you seem like you can handle it.”
You’d be surprised at how much and how little I can handle sometimes.
“What did you do after Daddy died?”
She sighs deeply. “I left this damn place, for one thing.”
“Where did you go?”
“St. Francisville. I fixed hair over there for a while.”
“Why did you come back?”
“I got in some trouble over there. Got caught with some weed in my car. I didn’t even like smoking that stuff, but it was better than drinking. Didn’t make me fat. And it took away some of the pain of grieving. Luke taught me that.”
“Were you arrested?”
Bitterness comes into her face. “Oh, yeah. They was gonna put me in jail. But Dr. Kirkland told me that if I’d come back to the island and get clean, he’d vouch for me. And that’s what happened.”
Of course,
I think, with a strange feeling of resentment.
With a single phone call, the feudal baron restores order to his universe.
“When did you come back?”
“Nineteen eighty-three.”
“You haven’t left here since then?”
“Not to stay. This island’s kind of like a prison, I think. People get out of Angola sometimes, and you’d think they’d be happy. But they’re just lost. After all them years behind bars, they don’t know what to do without ’em. So they do some crime to get put back inside again. This island’s kind of like that. Lots of folks leave, but sooner or later, most of ’em come back.”
Like me? Do all roads lead back here?
“You’ve got pretty hair,” Louise says. “Even that reminds me of your daddy.”
“Did Daddy talk to anybody else about the war besides Jesse?”
“I think he talked to Dr. Cage some, over in Natchez. That’s who gave him his medication. Dr. Cage is a good man. I saw him a couple times. He likes to listen to people talk.”
I remember Pearlie mentioning Dr. Cage.
“About the only thing I can think of that might help you is his diary.”
My pulse quickens. “Diary?”
“It wasn’t really a diary. It was a drawing pad. Luke used to carry it around, making sketches. Lots of times he would sit by the river and write in that pad. He talked about maybe writing a book one day. I think some of that writing was about the war.”
My palms are tingling. “Do you have this sketch pad?”
“No. I wish I did.”
“What did it look like?
“It was just a sketch pad, like they used to sell in the dime stores. A thick one. He drew all kinds of pictures in it. He drew me once. I do have that picture.”
She goes to a fiberboard cabinet, kneels, and brings out a photo album. Opening the large book, she brings out a piece of paper and holds it up for me to see. It’s a charcoal sketch of a girl of no more than twenty, with stunning bone structure and shy eyes.
“You were beautiful.”
“Were?”
Louise snaps. Then she laughs with loud good humor. “Lord knows I’ve changed. But I was pretty then, and I’m glad. I brought some happiness into his life by being pretty.” She shakes her head sadly. “Lord, I loved that boy. You know, he was only thirty when he died. You ever think about that?”
My father was a year younger than I am now when he died?
“I don’t usually. I guess I think about him the way I saw him as a little girl.”
She nods knowingly. “God made a mistake on that day, taking Luke out of this world. Taking him, and leaving thousands of men who ain’t worth spit.”
My eyes have focused on one of the cabinet shelves. There’s a line of books there.
Dispatches
by Michael Herr. Bernard Fall’s book on Dien Bien Phu. Graham Greene. Tim O’Brien.
Koko
and
The Throat
by Peter Straub.
Siddhartha. The Bell Jar.
Four or five books on the My Lai massacre.
“It looks like Daddy put a lot into this house,” I say, gesturing toward the dining table. I’m really trying to stall while my mind works out just what it wants to know from this woman, but Louise smiles with pride.
“This old house was falling down back then, but it sat apart from the others, and I liked that. So Luke fixed it up for me. He said he was fixing it up for himself, so Dr. Kirkland wouldn’t pay no mind. But then I started using it when Luke was gone. After a while, we’d stay in here together. Everybody knew, but nobody said nothing, since Dr. Kirkland didn’t. Some of these women round here called me a ho, but I didn’t pay no mind. Narrow-minded and mean, most of them.”
“My grandfather knew about the affair?”
“He’d have to have been blind not to. And that’s one thing Dr. Kirkland
ain’t.
”
“What do you think about my grandfather, Louise?”
She takes her time answering. “Dr. Kirkland’s a hard man, in some ways. But soft in others. He’s tough on dogs and horses. He’s good at taking care of people, though. Saved a lot of lives out here over the years. Saved my uncle after a chain saw accident. Lost his arm at the shoulder and damn near bled to death, but Dr. Kirkland pulled him through. The doctor’s got a temper, now. If he gets mad, there’s hell to pay. Luke’s the only man I ever saw defy him and get away with it.”