The Convict and Other Stories

by James Lee Burke

  We drove on in the rain. My father turned on the headlights, and I saw the anxiety in my mother’s face in the glow from the dashboard.

  “Will, that’s only a mile from us,” she said.

  “They’re probably gone by now or hid out under a bridge somewhere,” he said.

  “They must be dangerous or they wouldn’t have so many police officers out,” she said.

  “If they were really dangerous, they’d be in Angola, not riding around in a truck. Besides, I bet when we get home and turn on the radio we’ll find out they’re back in jail.”

  “I don’t like it. It’s like when all those Germans were here.”

  During the war there was a POW camp outside New Iberia. We used to see them chopping in the sugarcane with a big white P on their backs. Mother kept the doors locked until they were sent back to Germany. My father always said they were harmless and they wouldn’t escape from their camp if they were pushed out the front door at gunpoint.

  The wind was blowing hard when we got home, and leaves from the pecan orchard were scattered across the lawn. My pirogue, which was tied to a small dock on the bayou behind the house, was knocking loudly against a piling. Mother waited for my father to open the front door, even though she had her own key, then she turned on all the lights in the house and closed the curtains. She began to peel crawfish in the sink for our supper, then turned on the radio in the window as though she were bored for something to listen to. Outside, the door on the tractor shed began to bang violently in the wind. My father went to the closet for his hat and raincoat.

  “Let it go, Will. It’s raining too hard,” she said.

  “Turn on the outside light. You’ll be able to see me from the window,” he said.

  He ran through the rain, stopped at the barn for a hammer and a wood stob, then bent over in front of the tractor shed and drove the stob securely against the door.

  He walked back into the kitchen, hitting his hat against his pants leg.

  “I’ve got to get a new latch for that door. But at least the wind won’t be banging it for a while,” he said.

  “There was a news story on the radio about the convicts,” my mother said. “They had been taken from Angola to Franklin for a trial. One of them is a murderer.”

  “Angola?” For the first time my father’s face looked concerned.

  “The truck wrecked, and they got out the back and then made a man cut their handcuffs.”

  He picked up a shelled crawfish, bit it in half, and looked out the window at the rain slanting in the light. His face was empty now.

  “Well, if I was in Angola I’d try to get out, too,” he said. “Do we have some beer? I can’t eat crawfish without beer.”

  “Call the sheriff’s department and ask where they think they are.”

  “I can’t do that, Margaret. Now, let’s put a stop to all this.” He walked out of the kitchen, and I saw my mother’s jawbone flex under the skin.

  It was about three in the morning when I heard the shed door begin slamming in the wind again. A moment later I saw my father walk past my bedroom door buttoning his denim coat over his undershirt. I followed him halfway down the stairs and watched him take a flashlight from the kitchen drawer and lift the twelve-gauge pump out of the rack on the dining-room wall. He saw me, then paused for a moment as though he were caught between two thoughts.

  Then he said, “Come on down a minute, son. I guess I didn’t get that stob hammered in as well as I thought. But bolt the door behind me, will you?”

  “Did you see something, Daddy?”

  “No, no. I’m just taking this to satisfy your mother. Those men are probably all the way to New Orleans by now.”

  He turned on the outside light and went out the back door. Through the kitchen window I watched him cross the lawn. He had the flashlight pointed in front of him, and as he approached the tractor shed, he raised the shotgun and held it with one hand against his waist. He pushed the swinging door all the way back against the wall with his foot, shined the light over the tractor and the rolls of chicken wire, then stepped inside the darkness.

  I could hear my own breathing as I watched the flashlight beam bounce through the cracks in the shed. Then I saw the light steady in the far corner where we hung the tools and tack. I waited for something awful to happen—the shotgun to streak fire through the boards, a pick in murderous hands to rake downward in a tangle of harness. Instead, my father appeared in the doorway a moment later, waved the flashlight at me, then replaced the stob and pressed it into the wet earth with his boot. I unbolted the back door and went up to bed, relieved that the convicts were far away and that my father was my father, a truly brave man who kept my mother’s and my world a secure place.

  But he didn’t go back to bed. I heard him first in the upstairs hall cabinet, then in the icebox, and finally on the back porch. I went to my window and looked down into the moonlit yard and saw him walking with the shotgun under one arm and a lunch pail and folded towels in the other.

  Just at false dawn, when the mist from the marsh hung thick on the lawn and the gray light began to define the black trees along the bayou, I heard my parents arguing in the next room. Then my father snapped: “Damn it, Margaret. The man’s hurt.”

  Mother didn’t come out of her room that morning. My father banged out the back door, was gone a half hour, then returned and cooked a breakfast of couche-couche and sausages for us.

  “You want to go to a picture show today?” he said.

  “I was going fishing with Tee Batiste.” He was a little Negro boy whose father worked for us sometimes.

  “It won’t be any good after all that rain. Your mother doesn’t want you tracking mud in from the bank, either.”

  “Is something going on, Daddy?”

  “Oh, Mother and I have our little discussions sometimes. It’s nothing.” He smiled at me over his coffee cup.

  I almost always obeyed my father, but that morning I found ways to put myself among the trees on the bank of the bayou. First, I went down on the dock to empty the rainwater out of my pirogue, then I threw dirt clods at the heads of water moccasins on the far side, then I made a game of jumping from cypress root to cypress root along the water’s edge without actually touching the bank, and finally I was near what I knew my father wanted me away from that day: the old houseboat that had been washed up and left stranded among the oak trees in the great flood of 1927. Wild morning glories grew over the rotting deck, kids had riddled the cabin walls with .22 holes, and a slender oak had rooted in the collapsed floor and grown up through one window. Two sets of sharply etched footprints, side by side, led down from the levee, on the other side of which was the tractor shed, to a sawed-off cypress stump that someone had used to climb up on the deck.

  The air among the trees was still and humid and dappled with broken shards of sunlight. I wished I had brought my .22, and then I wondered at my own foolishness in involving myself in something my father had been willing to lie about in order to protect me from. But I had to know what he was hiding, what or who it was that would make him choose the welfare of another over my mother’s anxiety and fear.

  I stepped up on the cypress stump and leaned forward until I could see into the doorless cabin. There were an empty dynamite box and a half-dozen beer bottles moted with dust in one corner, and I remembered the seismograph company that had used the houseboat as a storage shack for their explosives two years ago. I stepped up on the deck more bravely now, sure that I would find nothing else in the cabin other than possibly a possum’s nest or a squirrel’s cache of acorns. Then I saw the booted pants leg in the gloom just as I smelled his odor. It was like a slap in the face, a mixture of dried sweat and blood and the sour stench of swamp mud. He was sleeping on his side, his knees drawn up before him, his green-and-white, pin-striped uniform streaked black, his bald, brown head tucked under one arm. On each wrist was a silver manacle and a short length of broken chain. Someone had slipped a narrow piece of cable through one ma
nacle and had nailed both looped ends to an oak floor beam with a twelve-inch iron spike. In that heart-pounding moment the length of cable and the long spike leaped at my eye even more than the convict did, because both of them came from the back of my father’s pickup truck.

  I wanted to run but I was transfixed. There was a bloody tear across the front of his shirt, as though he had run through barbed wire, and even in sleep his round, hard body seemed to radiate a primitive energy and power. He breathed hoarsely through his open mouth, and I could see the stumps of his teeth and the snuff stains on his soft, pink gums. A deerfly hummed in the heat and settled on his forehead, and when his face twitched like a snapping rubber band, I jumped backward involuntarily. Then I felt my father’s strong hands grab me like vise grips on each arm.

  My father was seldom angry with me, but this time his eyes were hot and his mouth was a tight line as we walked back through the trees toward the house. Finally I heard him blow out his breath and slow his step next to me. I looked up at him and his face had gone soft again.

  “You ought to listen to me, son. I had a reason not to want you back there,” he said.

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  “I haven’t decided. I need to talk with your mother a little bit.”

  “What did he do to go to prison?”

  “He says he robbed a Laundromat. For that they gave him fifty-six years.”

  A few minutes later he was talking to Mother again in their room. This time the door was open and neither one of them cared what I heard.

  “You should see his back. There are whip scars on it as thick as my finger,” my father said.

  “You don’t have an obligation to every person in the world. He’s an escaped convict. He could come in here and cut our throats for all you know.”

  “He’s a human being who happens to be a convict. They do things up in that penitentiary that ought to make every civilized man in this state ashamed.”

  “I won’t have this, Will.”

  “He’s going tonight. I promise. And he’s no danger to us.”

  “You’re breaking the law. Don’t you know that?”

  “You have to make choices in this world, and right now I choose not to be responsible for any more suffering in this man’s life.”

  They avoided speaking to each other the rest of the day. My mother fixed lunch for us, then pretended she wasn’t hungry and washed the dishes while my father and I ate at the kitchen table. I saw him looking at her back, his eyelids blinking for a moment, and just when I thought he was going to speak, she dropped a pan loudly in the dish rack and walked out of the room. I hated to see them like that. But I particularly hated to see the loneliness that was in his eyes. He tried to hide it but I knew how miserable he was.

  “They all respect you. Even though they argue with you, all those men look up to you,” I said.

  “What’s that, son?” he said, and turned his gaze away from the window. He was smiling, but his mind was still out there on the bayou and the houseboat.

  “I heard some men from Lafayette talking about you in the bank. One of them said, ‘Will Broussard’s word is better than any damned signature on a contract.’”

  “Oh, well, that’s good of you to say, son. You’re a good boy.”

  “Daddy, it’ll be over soon. He’ll be gone and everything will be just the same as before.”

  “That’s right. So how about you and I take our poles and see if we can’t catch us a few goggle-eye?”

  We fished until almost dinnertime, then cleaned and scraped our stringer of bluegill, goggle-eye perch, and sacalait in the sluice of water from the windmill. Mother had left plates of cold fried chicken and potato salad covered with wax paper for us on the kitchen table. She listened to the radio in the living room while we ate, then picked up our dishes and washed them without ever speaking to my father. The western sky was aflame with the sunset, fireflies spun circles of light in the darkening oaks on the lawn, and at eight o’clock, when I usually listened to Gangbusters, I heard my father get up out of his straw chair on the porch and walk around the side of the house toward the bayou.

  I watched him pick up a gunnysack weighted heavily at the bottom from inside the barn door and walk through the trees and up the levee. I felt guilty when I followed him, but he hadn’t taken the shotgun, and he would be alone and unarmed when he freed the convict, whose odor still reached up and struck at my face. I was probably only fifty feet behind him, my face prepared to smile instantly if he turned around, but the weighted gunnysack rattled dully against his leg and he never heard me. He stepped up on the cypress stump and stooped inside the door of the houseboat cabin, then I heard the convict’s voice: “What game you playing, white man?”

  “I’m going to give you a choice. I’ll drive you to the sheriff’s office in New Iberia or I’ll cut you loose. It’s up to you.”

  “What you doing this for?”

  “Make up your mind.”

  “I done that when I went out the back of that truck. What you doing this for?”

  I was standing behind a tree on a small rise, and I saw my father take a flashlight and a hand ax out of the gunnysack. He squatted on one knee, raised the ax over his head, and whipped it down onto the floor of the cabin.

  “You’re on your own now. There’s some canned goods and an opener in the sack, and you can have the flashlight. If you follow the levee you’ll come out on a dirt road that’ll lead you to a railway track. That’s the Southern Pacific and it’ll take you to Texas.”

  “Gimmie the ax.”

  “Nope. You already have everything you’re going to get.”

  “You got a reason you don’t want the law here, ain’t you? Maybe a still in that barn.”

  “You’re a lucky man today. Don’t undo it.”

  “What you does is your business, white man.”

  The convict wrapped the gunnysack around his wrist and dropped off the deck onto the ground. He looked backward with his cannonball head, then walked away through the darkening oaks that grew beside the levee. I wondered if he would make that freight train or if he would be run to ground by dogs and state police and maybe blown apart with shotguns in a cane field before he ever got out of the parish. But mostly I wondered at the incredible behavior of my father, who had turned Mother against him and broken the law himself for a man who didn’t even care enough to say thank you.

  It was hot and still all day Sunday, then a thunder-shower blew in from the Gulf and cooled everything off just before supper time. The sky was violet and pink, and the cranes flying over the cypress in the marsh were touched with fire from the red sun on the horizon. I could smell the sweetness of the fields in the cooling wind and the wild four-o’clocks that grew in a gold-and-crimson spray by the swamp. My father said it was a perfect evening to drive down to Cypremort Point for boiled crabs. Mother didn’t answer, but a moment later she said she had promised her sister to go to a movie in Lafayette. My father lit a cigar and looked at her directly through the flame.

  “It’s all right, Margaret. I don’t blame you,” he said.

  Her face colored, and she had trouble finding her hat and her car keys before she left.

  The moon was bright over the marsh that night, and I decided to walk down the road to Tee Batiste’s cabin and go frog gigging with him. I was on the back porch sharpening the point of my gig with a file when I saw the flashlight wink out of the trees behind the house. I ran into the living room, my heart racing, the file still in my hand, my face evidently so alarmed that my father’s mouth opened when he saw me.

  “He’s back. He’s flashing your light in the trees,” I said.

  “It’s probably somebody running a trotline.”

  “It’s him, Daddy.”

  He pressed his lips together, then folded his newspaper and set it on the table next to him.

  “Lock up the house while I’m outside,” he said. “If I don’t come back in ten minutes, call the sheriff’s office.”


  He walked through the dining room toward the kitchen, peeling the wrapper off a fresh cigar.

  “I want to go, too. I don’t want to stay here by myself,” I said.

  “It’s better that you do.”

  “He won’t do anything if two of us are there.”

  He smiled and winked at me. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, then took the shotgun out of the wall rack.

  We saw the flashlight again as soon as we stepped off of the back porch. We walked past the tractor shed and the barn and into the trees. The light flashed once more from the top of the levee. Then it went off, and I saw him outlined against the moon’s reflection off the bayou. Then I heard his breathing—heated, constricted, like a cornered animal’s.

  “There’s a roadblock just before that railway track. You didn’t tell me about that,” he said.

  “I didn’t know about it. You shouldn’t have come back here,” my father said.

  “They run me four hours through a woods. I could hear them yelling to each other, like they was driving a deer.”

  His prison uniform was gone. He wore a brown, short-sleeved shirt and a pair of slacks that wouldn’t button at the top. A butcher knife stuck through one of the belt loops.

  “Where did you get that?” my father said.

  “I taken it. What do you care? You got a bird gun there, ain’t you?”

  “Who did you take the clothes from?”

  “I didn’t bother no white people. Listen, I need to stay here two or three days. I’ll work for you. There ain’t no kind of work I can’t do. I can make whiskey, too.”

  “Throw the knife in the bayou.”

  “What ’chu talking about?”

  “I said to throw it away.”

  “The old man I taken it from put an inch of it in my side. I don’t throw it in no bayou. I ain’t no threat to you, nohow. I can’t go nowheres else. Why I’m going to hurt you or the boy?”

  “You’re the murderer, aren’t you? The other convict is the robber. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  The convict’s eyes narrowed. I could see his tongue on his teeth.