“You saw the ship out on the water, the one with the oars?”
“The one we’ve both had dreams about. Explain that to me.” He grasped his stomach. “I feel sick.”
“I need to make a phone call,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The air smelled cold and tannic, and the sun was red yet gave no heat. I went inside the house and called Father Julian.
We drove in my pickup to Julian’s cottage down Bayou Teche just outside of Jeanerette. The sun was barely a spark in the west, the sky the color of a bruise. The lights were on in the cottage, the church dark. Clete and I got out of the truck and started toward the cottage. Someone was banging on the church roof. Clete stared at a figure silhouetted against the sunset. “What’s he doing here?”
“Good question,” I said. I walked to the base of a ladder propped against the church’s eave, then climbed far enough to see a man with a face like a dehydrated prune hammering nails in a sheet of corrugated tin, his knees spread like a jockey’s on the roof’s spine.
“Hey, Marcel,” I said. “You helping out Father Julian?”
“No, I’m vandalizing the roof of his church,” he replied.
“You’re doing a good deed. You’re a stand-up guy.”
“If that’s Pork Butt Purcel I see down there, tell him I said eat shit.”
“What do you have against Clete?”
“He’s on the planet. That’s enough.”
“You never disappoint, Marcel,” I said, climbing back down the ladder. I rejoined Clete.
“What did LaForchette have to say?” he asked, still staring at Marcel’s silhouette, an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth.
“He’s at war with the world,” I said.
“What a joke,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“That crazy fuck is the world, Dave.”
Father Julian opened the screen door onto his small gallery. He was wearing sandals and elastic-belted khakis and a yellow T-shirt with Mickey Mouse’s face on it. In his hand he had a magnifying glass, the one he used when he worked on his stamp collection, which was extensive and the secular love of his life. “Come in and tell me what all this is about,” he said.
“I don’t know if you’re going to be up to it, Julian,” I said.
“It can’t be that bad, can it?”
“Wait and see,” I replied.
Clete narrated everything that had happened in Key West, starting with Johnny Shondell’s overdose in the motel room and the plainclothes cop who’d clocked him with a blackjack. Up to that point, there was nothing surprising about the narrative, considering the source. In fact, Father Julian seemed to be nodding out. Then Clete told of awakening upside down in his skivvies and discovering that he was about to be burned alive by a figure whose face seemed less than human while, offshore, a multitiered vessel that resembled a medieval prison ship lay at anchor.
“This guy had on a cowl, you say?” Julian asked.
“Yeah,” Clete said.
“So maybe the shadows created an effect you can’t be sure about?” Julian said.
“No, that’s not it,” Clete replied. “He looked exactly like I said. Here’s the rest of it. He could see into my head. He knew about an incident in my childhood I never talk about. I busted up a greenhouse behind a lady’s house in the Garden District. He taunted me with it like he was my father talking to me.”
“I don’t have an explanation, Clete.”
“The guy was going to burn me upside down. Dave says that means something.”
Julian’s eyes looked haunted. “It’s the way Giordano Di Betto died.”
“Penelope Balangie’s ancestor?” Clete said.
“Yes,” Julian said, his voice solemn and dry.
“Then this fog blew in, with hail and thunder and rain,” Clete said. “It saved my life. I felt like a woman was stroking my eyes and brow.”
“I’ve got to stop you here,” Julian said.
“What’d I say?” Clete said.
“You said nothing wrong. But I have no knowledge about these things. They’re frightening in their aspect. They’re frightening in what they suggest.”
“How you mean?” Clete said.
“It’s too easy to get lost in the images you describe. How do people explain Auschwitz? They blame it on the devil. I don’t buy that. There’s enough evil in the human heart to incinerate the earth.” His cheeks were pooled with color, his nostrils white around the edges, as though he had been breathing the air in a subzero locker.
“I’m not getting you,” Clete said.
“There’s a good chance you were drugged,” Julian said. “Don’t give supernatural powers to these men. They have none. They live under logs.”
Clete looked away, obviously disappointed in the way the conversation was going. “I think you’re slipping the punch, Father,” he said.
“You’re probably right,” Julian said. “I hate the cruelty that lives in us. I think about Joan of Arc and the way she suffered, and I want to weep.” He picked up his magnifying glass and looked through it, one eye swelling to bulbous proportions. “I get carried away. I mentioned Auschwitz. I went on a tour there. I thought I heard people crying in one of the rooms. There was a vice president of a midwestern university in our tour group. He said, ‘I know this sounds bad, but what a masterpiece of administration.’ I wanted to beat him with my fists.” Julian set down his magnifying glass and stared at the rug.
“We saw Marcel LaForchette up on the roof,” I said.
“Yeah,” Clete said. “He’s quite a guy. You might keep a high-tech lock on the poor box.”
“He’s a sad man,” Julian said.
“His victims might argue with that,” Clete said.
“You’re a tough sell, Clete,” Julian said. “I wish I could be of more help. The truth is I don’t have answers to much of anything.”
“You’ve been very helpful, Julian,” I said.
“Good try,” he said.
We said good night and went outside into the dark. It wasn’t a good moment. There are situations for which no one has a solution, and it’s unfair to push the burden upon people who are unprepared to deal with it. I looked up at the church roof. Marcel LaForchette was gone. I felt awful about Julian. I suspected he would not sleep that night.
I heard the screen door open again. I turned around and saw Julian silhouetted in the doorway. “Dave, could I speak to you a minute?” he said.
“Go on. I’ll be in the truck,” Clete said.
I walked back to the gallery.
“There are times when I fail,” Julian said. “This is one of them.”
“None of this is your fault. Clete and I got into this on our own.”
“There’s something I need to tell you. It has nothing to do with anything Marcel told me inside a confessional. He says Mark Shondell is part of a group that plans to stir up hatred toward minority people on a national scale.”
“I never thought Shondell was political.”
“For Mark Shondell, politics and money are interchangeable. He’s the lowest form of humanity I’ve ever known.”
I had never heard Julian speak of someone in that way.
“Shondell is going to undo the Civil Rights Act?” I said, trying to smile.
“Do you know how many people secretly wish that were the case?” he said. “I’m going to have a drink now. Probably more than one. Take care of yourself, Dave. And take care of Clete most of all.”
He latched the screen but continued to look through it as we turned around in the yard and headed back to New Iberia. Moths were clustered like wet chicken feathers on the electric light above his gallery.
One week later, the sheriff’s department merged with the Iberia City Department and moved into City Hall, a lovely two-story building on the Teche with a reflecting pool in front and a long semicircular driveway shaded by live oaks. The driveway stayed in deep shadow and led past the library and a grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother. On the other side of the grotto was a canebrake and a Victorian home that once was the residence of Joel Chandler Harris, the former Confederate officer best known for his Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit stories and his passionate concern for people of color.