I walked toward her but her attention had been distracted by the strange red reflection of the sun's afterglow on the bayou. A little boy and girl, not older than four or five, climbed through the fence on the opposite side of the fish pond and ran giggling toward the dock. I had no way of knowing the depth of the pond, but a spring board was attached to the end of the dock, which meant the depth was certainly over a child's head.
Theo looked back from the sunset at the pond and saw the children almost the same time as I. She bit her lip and raised her hand as though to warn them off, but she remained outside the fence, frozen, as though an invisible shield prevented her from entering the pasture. The children thumped onto the dock and danced up and down, then bent over the edge of the dock and peered at the fish feeding on the moths dropping from the flame in the gas lamp.
Theodosha heard me walk up behind her. She turned abruptly, startled, her expression one of both fear and shame.
"That water is fairly deep, isn't it?" I said.
"Yes," she said, turning back toward the pond. "Yes, those children shouldn't be out there. Where are their parents?"
I started to climb through the fence.
"No, I'll do that. I'm sorry. I'm " She didn't finish whatever she was going to say. She ducked under the top rail of the fence and ran awkwardly onto the dock, then returned, clasping each of the children by the hand.
The children's faces were hot, angry, a bit frightened, their cheeks pooled with color.
"We didn't know we did anything wrong, Miss Theo," the little boy said.
"You shouldn't go near a lake or pond or the bayou without your mother or father. Don't you ever do this again," Theo said, and shook him.
Both of the children began to cry.
"Hey, you guys, let's get a soft drink," I said.
I took them by the hand and walked them to the drink table and asked the waiter to give each of them a Coca-Cola. Through the trees I saw Theodosha walking rapidly toward the back of her house, her arms clinched across her chest, as though the temperature had dropped thirty degrees.
I decided I'd had enough of the Lejeune family for one evening. I told Father Jimmie I'd say good night to our hosts for both of us and went to find Theodosha inside the house. I didn't have to look far. She was in the den with her father, sitting on a stuffed leather footstool beneath the mounted airplane propeller, her face in her hands. Castille Lejeune stood above her, stroking her hair, his eyes filled with pity.
Neither one of them saw me. I backed out of the doorway and joined Father Jimmie outside.
"Do you know where Merchie is?" I asked.
"He and another man went to the stables. The other guy seems to have his own Zip code," he said.
"Let's go, Father."
"I was too hard on Flannigan?"
"What do I know?" I said.
We got in my pickup truck and headed down the long driveway toward the state road. I thought the bizarre nature of my visit to the plantation home of Castille Lejeune was over. It wasn't. In the glare of flood lamps by a long white, peaked stable, Merchie Flannigan was perched on top of a fence, drinking from a bottle of Cold Duck, while a tall, gray-headed, crew-cropped, angular man in cowboy boots and western-cut slacks was lighting strings of Chinese fire crackers and throwing them in the air while a group of children screamed in delight. In the background, a half-dozen thoroughbred horses raced back and forth across a fenced pasture.
Merchie flagged me down and walked toward my truck, slightly off balance.
"Not leaving, are you?" he said.
"Looks like it. Thanks for having us out," I said.
Merchie bent down to window level to see across me-. "I'm a bum Catholic, Father. But I try," he said.
"You were in the reformatory?" Father Jimmie asked.
Merchie's face reddened. "Yeah, I guess I was."
"We'll compare stories sometime," Father Jimmie said.
The tall, crew-cropped man lit another string of firecrackers and threw it popping into the air. One of the thoroughbreds struck the fence and knocked a slat onto the grass.
"Why are you letting that guy panic those horses like that?" I said.
"That's Will Guillot. Those are his kids," Merchie replied, then seemed to look into space at the vacuity of his words. "Will does things for my father-in-law. You don't know him?"
"No."
"You should," he said.
"Why?"
"You're a police officer," he said. He leaned on his arms against the side of my truck, his eyes slightly out of focus, his breath like a wine vat.
CHAPTER 5
The telephone call to Father Jimmie came on Sunday afternoon, while he was watching a pro football game on television at the rectory. It was raining, and through the window he could see the rainwater cascading off the roof, pounding the small garden he tended in the green space between the gray, back wall of the church and the alley where the sanitation service picked up the garbage.
"I need to go to confession, Father," the voice said.
"Reconciliation is scheduled every afternoon at four, except Sundays," he said.
"I need to go now."
Father Jimmie looked over his shoulder at a quarterback completing a thirty-yard pass on the television screen.
"Can it wait?" he asked.
"I have to get something of a serious nature off my conscience."
In the silence Father Jimmie could hear die man breathing into the receiver. "I'll be in the confessional at four o'clock," he said.
He finished his sandwich in front of the television, and a half hour later walked down the center aisle of the church toward the three confessionals that were inset in a side wall at the rear of the building. The inside of the church was magnificent. Twin balconies draped with brilliant red tapestries extended all the way from the choir to the altar area. The pulpit was hand-carved from teak wood and had been constructed high above the laity, in a time when there were no microphones to magnify the minister's voice. Whenever the sunlight struck the stained-glass windows, the effect inside the church was stunning. The celestial scenes on the ceiling and the paintings depicting Christ's passion in the Garden of Gethsemane and his ordeal by scourge and mockery and spittle and finally crucifixion made the viewer swallow in both reverence and trepidation.
The front doors of the church were open, and Father Jimmie could see the grayness of the afternoon out on the street and the drabness of the neighborhood and the rainwater welling up from the storm sewers. Perhaps a dozen people were in the pews, all of them old, their clothes shabby, their rosary beads wrapped around their hands. Some nodded at him and smiled as he passed. Their faith was genuine, he thought, their level of devotion long since proven by the lives they had led, but if they did not have this place to visit, where they could say their beads and confess sins that were either imaginary or inconsequential, he knew they would have no lives at all.
A homeless man slept in a back pew, curled up in a fetal position, his odor rising from his clothes like a living presence. A bottle of fortified wine had fallen from his coat pocket and was precariously balanced on the edge of the pew.
Father Jimmie picked it up, tightened the cap, and placed it on the floor, within arm's reach of the sleeping man.
Then, on the far side of the church, he saw a man he had never seen before. The man wore a tight-fitting tan raincoat buttoned to his neck, like a prison on his body. His face was beaded with water, his ears like small cauliflowers, his hair cut short, combed neatly, reddish in color. He was sitting rather than kneeling, his hand resting on a domed, black lunch box. His eyes never made contact with Father Jimmie's.