Last Car to Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 12

Wherever Hogman lived, he created a bottle tree, for reasons he never explained. During winter, when the limbs were bare, he would insert the points of the branches into the mouths of colored glass bottles until the whole tree shimmered with light and tinkled with sound.

Father Jimmie and I parked in the front yard of his house on the bayou and walked around to the back, where Hogman was hoeing weeds out of a garden next to his bottle tree. He stopped his work and smiled, then saw my expression.

"Why'd you jump me over the hurdles?" I said.

"You mean about Junior?" he said.

"You got it," I replied.

"Junior punched his own ticket. You might t'ink he was a hero, but back in them days, if a nigger got mixed up wit' a white woman, all of us had to suffer for it."

"How about spelling that out for me?" I said.

The year was 1951. Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell played on every jukebox in the South, and across the ocean GIs packed snow on the barrels of.30 caliber machine guns to keep them from melting while they mowed down wave after wave of Chinese troops pouring into North Korea.

But in central Louisiana, a group of black convicts who knew little or nothing of the larger world suddenly found themselves transferred from Angola Penitentiary to a work camp for nonviolent offenders deep down in bayou country. The camp had been created out of the remnants of what had been called the quarters on Fox Run Plantation. None of the convicts knew what to expect. The first morning they found out.

They were given clean denims, soap, toothpaste, good work shoes, and were told to burn their striped pants and jumpers in a trash barrel behind the camp. The beatings with the black Betty, the sweat-boxes and anthill-treatment, the fecal-smelling lockdown units, the killings by guards on the Red Hat Gang, became only a memory at Fox Run. Sometimes a truculent inmate was forced to wear leg irons or stand all night on an upended bucket, and the food they ate the greens, fatback, beans, corn bread, and molasses was the same fare served at Angola; but the guards were not allowed to abuse them, and at night the inmates slept in cabins with mosquito screens on the windows, boiled coffee in the fireplace, played cards and listened to radios, and on holidays had preserves and cookies to eat.

The humane treatment they received was due solely to one person: Miss Andrea, as they called her, the wife of Castille Lejeune.

The other inmates had been in the camp six months when Junior transferred in from the Red Hat Gang. The first time he saw her he was in the bottom of an irrigation canal with Hogman Patin, raking mounds of yellowed weeds out of the water and flinging them up on the embankment. She was riding English saddle on a black gelding, her long hair tied behind her head, her white riding pants skintight across her rump and thighs. Her small hand was cupped around a braided quirt.

"That's her, huh?" Junior said.

"Who?" Hogman said.

"Miz Lejeune," Junior said.

"What you care who she is?"

"She wrote me a letter."

"Shit."

"That's right. Up at the joint. Tole me how much she liked my music. She's a fine-looking woman."

"You get them t'oughts out of your head, nigger," Hogman said.

"You boys eye-balling down there?" the guard said from horseback.

Among Junior's few possessions was a guitar, a twelve-string Stella he had bought in a New Orleans pawnshop. He tuned the double-strung E, A, and D strings an octave apart so that the chords reverberating out of the sound hole gave the impression of two guitars being played simultaneously. Each evening, after supper, he played on the front steps of his cabin, his steel finger picks glinting in the setting of the sun, his voice rising into a sky filled with clouds that looked like colored smoke.

Then, one spring night, while he played on the steps, he saw her car stop on the road. It was a purple 1948 Ford convertible, with an immaculate white, buttoned-down top. She was smoking a cigarette behind the wheel, her skin softly lit by the green illumination of the dashboard. She listened to him play until she had finished her cigarette, then she dropped it outside the window, restarted her engine, and drove away.

In July, on a languid Saturday morning, a guard by the name of Jackson Posey told Junior to put on a fresh change of state blues, to brush his shoes, comb his hair, bring his guitar, and get in the guard's pickup truck. As the two of them drove toward the big house, Junior could feel the guard's irritation like a palpable presence inside the cab.

"What's going on, boss?" Junior asked.

Jackson Posey did not reply. Although he was often called boss, he held the rank of captain, one he had earned by shepherding convicts under the gun for two decades, pulling almost the same kind of time as his charges. But the fact he was a captain was a matter of great pride to him, because it meant he was literate and had administrative duties within the penal system. His forearms were pocked with early indications of skin cancer, the top of his forehead half-mooned like a sliver of melon rind where he normally wore a hat. He put three fingers into a pouch of Red Man and inserted the string tobacco into his jaw, then drove around to the back of the big house and parked under a mulberry tree.

Junior could see Andrea Castille seated on the patio, a pitcher of lemonade on a glass table beside her. A recording machine, the kind that made use of wire spools, rested on the brickwork by her foot, an extension cord running back through the French doors into the house. Inside the living room a little girl, a miniature of her mother, played on the rug with wood blocks.

"I always treated you fair, ain't I?" the guard said.

"Yes, suh," Junior said.

"Then it don't hurt to tell Miss Andrea that, does it?"

"No, suh."

"You stay where I can see you," he said.

"Wouldn't have it no other way, boss."

Jackson Posey narrowed one watery blue eye, as though squinting down a rifle barrel. "You sassing me?" he said.

Junior shut the truck door behind him and approached Andrea Castille with his guitar cradled under his right arm. She wore a pink sundress and dark glasses and a gold cross on a chain around her throat. "Can you play "Goodnight Irene'?" she said.

"Yes, ma'am, I learned it from the man who wrote it," he replied.

"I'd like to record you while you do it. That is, if you don't mind."

"No, ma'am, I'm glad to."

"Would you like to sit down?"

"Standing is just fine, ma'am."

He slipped the cloth strap of the guitar around his neck and sang for her, feeling foolish at the contrived nature of the situation, wondering if the guard's eyes were burrowing into his back or if Andrea Castille's husband was watching him from an upstairs window.

"You have a wonderful voice," she said. "Sit down. Please, it's all right."

"Ma'am, I'm a convict." Involuntarily his eyes swept across the back windows of the house.

She seemed to resign herself to his recalcitrance. "Would you sing another song?" she said.

He sang one of his own compositions. The breeze had dropped and his shirt was damp against his skin. He could not see her eyes behind her dark glasses, but he believed they were invading his person. His fingers were moist and clumsy on the frets, his voice uncertain. A muscle spasm sliced across his back from the odd angle in which he was holding the Stella.

He stopped and blotted his face on his sleeve, his heart beating. Why was he behaving like this?

But he already knew the answer. He wanted her approval just like an organ grinder's monkey.

"I hurt my back in the field yesterday. Just ain't myself," he said.

"Maybe you can come another time, when you're feeling better," she said.

He shook his head negatively, his eyes lowered, his frustration and anger at himself rising. But she didn't give him time to speak. "I have something for you. I'll be just a minute," she said.

He waited patiently in the dappled sunlight, the heat rising from the bricks around him. What was she up to? He had known white women like her in the North, he told himself. They liked to stick their hand in the tiger cage. Sometimes they even brought the tiger into their bed. Well, if that was what she wanted, maybe she might just find out who sticks what in who, he said to himself.

She emerged from the French doors with a narrow, blue-felt, brass-hinged box in one hand. She removed her dark glasses and handed him the box. For the first time he saw her eyes. They were the color of violets, like none he had ever seen, and there was a kindness and honesty in them that caused a thickening sensation in his throat.

"I've heard you play these on your records. I didn't know if you had one now or not," she said.

He pried the lid back stiffly and looked down at a chrome-plated harmonica cushioned inside the white satin interior of the box.

"It's an E-major Marine Band," she said.

"Yes, ma'am. I know. This is a fine instrument, Miss Andrea."

"Well, thank you for coming to my house," she said. Then she shook his hand, something no southern white woman had ever done.

On the way back to the camp, the guard, Jackson Posey, kept turning and staring at the side of Junior's face. Junior looked straight ahead, the harmonica case gripped in his palm. Just before they drove past the wire into the cluster of cabins that made up the improvised work camp, Posey braked the truck and shifted the floor stick into neutral. A cloud of dust floated by his open window.

"You got no control over what that woman does, so I ain't holding it against you," he said.

" Suh? " Junior replied.

"You know what I'm talking about. Her husband's coming home from the arm service next week," the guard said.

"Yes, suh," Junior said, still uncertain about the direction of the conversation.

"I ain't gonna lose my job 'cause I let his wife shake hands with a nigger convict. You hearing me, Junior?"

Junior could feel the softness of the felt box in his fingers. "You don't like what she done, lock me down, boss man," Junior replied.

"You just earned yourself a night on the bucket. Sass me again, and Miss Andrea or no Miss Andrea, you're gonna be the sorest nigger in the state of Lou'sana."

Two weeks later, while Junior and Hogman were pulling stumps on the far side of the bayou, he saw Andrea Lejeune and her husband cantering their horses through a field of buttercups. They clopped across a wood bridge that spanned a coulee, disappearing into a grove of live oaks. A few minutes later she emerged by herself, her face pinched with anger, and slashed her quirt across her horse's flank. She galloped past Junior toward the drawbridge, her thighs crimped tightly into the horse's sides, dirt clods flying off her horse's hooves. She was so close Junior could have reached out and touched her leg.

But if she saw him, she showed no recognition in her face.

That night another convict in Junior's cabin was looking at the pages of a newspaper that had blown from the road into the camp's wire fence. A photograph on the front page showed Castille Lejeune in a dress Marine Corps uniform with a medal hanging on a ribbon from his neck. "That's the man own Fox Run, ain't it?" the convict said. His name was Woodrow Reed. He wore a goatee that looked like a cluster of black wire on his chin, and the other inmates believed he could tell fortunes with a greasy pack of cards he carried in his shirt pocket.

"That's the man," Junior replied.

"What it say about him?" Woodrow asked.

"He saved a bunch of lives, then he shot down a Nort' Korean name of Bed Check Charley."

"Bed Check who?"

"That's a guy used to fly over the Americans in a Piper Cub and drop hand grenades on them. The F-80s couldn't nail him 'cause they was too fast. But Mr. Lejeune went after him in a World War II plane that was a lot slower and blew his ass out of the sky."

"How come you know all this?" Woodrow asked.

"Read about it in a magazine."

"You so meting else, Junior," Woodrow said.

But secretly Junior did not feel he was something else. One out of three of his adult years had been spent in prison. He had made race records in Memphis, been interviewed in Downbeat magazine, and performed with Cab Calloway's orchestra in New York City, all before he was thirty years old. But what had he done with his success? Rather than build upon it, he had gotten into trouble every place he went. Now he was the man with one eye in the country of the blind, sassing redneck prison guards, a hero to hapless, illiterate, and superstitious men because he could read a magazine.

One month later, on a Saturday afternoon, Andrea Lejeune had him brought to the big house again. This time her husband was with her on the patio, seated under an umbrella, a tropical drink in his hand. Their daughter, who must have been around three or four years of age, was throwing a ball back and forth on the lawn with a black maid.

"This is my husband, Junior. He'd love to hear you sing "Goodnight, Irene,"" she said.

Lejeune's legs were crossed. He wore socks with his sandals and seemed to be studying the points of his toes.

"Huddie Ledbetter done it a lot better than I can," Junior replied. He shifted his weight and felt the belly of the guitar scrape hollowly against his belt buckle.

"Then play something of your own choosing," Castille Lejeune said, his gaze still fixed on the end of his foot.

"Suh, I ain't all that good," Junior said. His eyes met Lejeune's briefly, then slipped away.

"You uncomfortable for some reason?" Lejeune asked,

"No, suh."

"Then play. Please," Lejeune said.

He sang "Dig My Grave with a Silver Spade," running quickly through the verses, leaving out the treble string improvisations he usually ran high up on the guitar's neck. When he finished he looked at nothing, the guitar strap biting into the back of his neck. He could smell the exhaled smoke from Lejeune's cigarette drifting into his face.

"You seem to be a man of considerable accomplishment. How is it you spent so many years in jail?" Lejeune said.

"Don't rightly know, suh. Guess some niggers just ain't that smart," Junior replied.

He heard the guard's shoes crunch on the gravel drive, as though the guard were experiencing a tension he had to run through the bottoms of his feet into the ground. But Lejeune seemed to take no notice of any sardonic content in Junior's remark.

"Maybe you should have joined the military and found a career for yourself that didn't get you into trouble," Lejeune said.

"I served in the United States Navy, suh. Under another name, but in the navy just the same."

"You were a Stewart?"

"No, suh. I was a munitions loader. I loaded munitions right next to Harry Belafonte."

"Who?"

"He's a singer, suh."

"Obviously my knowledge of poplar music isn't very extensive," Lejeune said, and smiled self-indulgently at his wife.

Why had Junior just told Lejeune of his military record or the fact he had known Harry Belafonte? It was like nipping a piece of gold through a sewer grate. At that moment he hated Lejeune more than any human being he'd ever met.

"Would you like something to eat before you go?" Lejeune said. He held up a crystal plate on which a thick ring of crushed ice was embedded with peeled shrimp.

"No, thank you, suh."

"I insist," Lejeune said. He used a fork to scrape a pile of shrimp and ice on a paper plate, then inserted a toothpick in a shrimp and handed the plate to Junior. "Go back yonder and sit in the shade and eat these."

Junior looked at the yard, the absence of chairs or scrolled-iron benches on the grass or even a glider hanging from an oak limb. "Where, suh?" he said.

"Behind the carriage house. There's a box you can sit on. Enjoy your snack and then Mr. Posey will take you back to the camp," Lejeune said.

"You sit right here at the table I'm going to get you some gumbo and a Coca-Cola from the house," Miss Andrea said. "Did you hear me? Put your guitar in the chair and sit down."

"I think Mr. Crudup knows where he should eat," her husband said.

"Castille, if you weren't so miserably stupid and insensitive, I think I'd shoot you," she replied. Then she added "God!" and went inside the house.

Lejeune got up from his chair and walked to the driveway, where he talked quietly with the guard, Jackson Posey. Junior Crudup felt as though he were sliding to the bottom of a dark well from which he would never emerge.

Jackson Posey did not drive the pickup truck directly back to the work camp. Instead, he crossed the bayou on the drawbridge and parked between a sugarcane field and a persimmon grove, out of sight of either the Lejeune home or the camp. He breathed hard through his nose, his mouth a tightly crimped line.

"Get out of the truck," he said.

"I ain't did nothing, boss."

"You got that sonofabitch on my ass. You call that nothing?"

"Not my fault, boss."

They were both standing outside the truck now. The sky was hot and bright and wind was blowing dust out of the cane field and birds were clattering in the persimmon trees. Jackson Posey reached behind the driver's seat. Junior heard something hard clank against metal.

"Drink it," Posey said.

But Junior shook his head.

"Good 'cause now I can send your skinny black ass right back up to "Gola."

"Ain't nobody in the camp supposed to get the Mussolini treatment. Miss Andrea don't allow it."

"Miz Lejeune don't write the rules now. What's it gonna be? Don't matter to me one way or another." Posey shook a cigarette loose from a package of Camels and inserted it in his mouth.

Junior took the bottle of castor oil from the guard's hand and unscrewed the cap. The bottle was brown and heavy, the oil as viscous as syrup. He began to drink, then gagged and started again. The guard looked at his watch.

"All of it," Posey said.

"Ain't right, boss."

"You messed up the man's pussy. What do you expect him to do? Like my daddy used to say, life's a bitch, then you die. Chug it down, boy."

Posey watched while Junior finished the bottle, then fingered a reddish purple scab on his arm, one that had not been there only two days ago. He drew in heavily on his cigarette, his eyes draining, as though he were purging himself of any intimations of his own mortality.

"It ain't nothing personal, Junior," he said.

"It's real personal, boss."

The guard stared emptily at the heat waves bouncing off the bayou and flicked his cigarette into the wind.

By the time Junior got back to the camp his bowels were collapsing inside him.

Hogman stopped his account and picked up a bottle that had fallen from his bottle tree. He wedged it in the fork of the tree and seemed to lose interest in both Father Jimmie and me and the story he had been telling.

"Go on, Hogman," I said.

"Junior started believing he was gonna have a life besides jailing and road-ganging. Gonna get a pardon from the governor and be a big star up Nort'. Just like Leadbelly."

"Andrea Lejeune was going to work a pardon for him?"

"That's what he t'ought. She made Jackson Posey keep taking Junior up to the house when Mr. Lejeune was gone. Junior talked about her all the time, how pretty she was, what she smelled like, how she had all these fine manners, how she knew every ting about his music. A whole bunch of people come up from New Orleans to hear him sing and play his twelve-string in the backyard."

"What happened to him, Hogman?"

"Don't know. I got paroled. Last time I seed Junior he was playing "Goodnight Irene' on the steps of his cabin, waiting to see if Miss Andrea was gonna drive by in her li'l convertible."

"I think you're holding out on me, partner."

"Miss Andrea got killed in a car wreck two or tree years after I left the camp. Mr. Lejeune lived up in that big house wit' just himself and his li'l girl. Junior disappeared. Ain't nothing left of him but a voice on scratchy old records. Nobody cared what happened back then. Nobody care now. You axed for the troot'. I just give it to you."

Hogman walked inside the back of his house and let the screen door slam behind him.