The man in the back booth walked into Broadmoor Baptist just as the last hymn ended. I saw him come through the double doors in a brown suit that hung loose on him, with a cane in one hand and a worn hat in the other, and I knew who he was before Miss Opaline touched my elbow. He was eighty seven years old and still tall, with black hair gone the color of ashes and a face cut into deep lines. He did not look at the casket. He looked at me. And then, very slowly, he walked down the aisle between the pews, and the whole congregation turned their heads to watch him pass.
He stopped at the front, six feet from the casket of my father. He took off his hat. His hands, I saw, were trembling. “Miss Lafleur,” he said, in a voice like gravel in a bucket, “my name is Orrin Gautreaux. I think you know why I am here.” Nobody in the church breathed. Miss Opaline stood behind me with her hand on my back. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my cousin Tim, who is a deputy with the Caddo Parish sheriff, rise from the third pew in his dress uniform. I raised my hand a little, palm out. He stayed where he was.
“Your father sat across from me for thirty six years,” the old man went on, “and he never said a word. He only looked. I would feel his eyes on the back of my neck from the jukebox. I used to pray he would come over and hit me. He never did. He never did anything but wait.” He swallowed. “I have cancer, Miss Lafleur. They give me three months. I came to this church today because I did not want to die without saying it where Clarence could hear. I killed his brother. I killed Lucien. I was twenty five years old and drunk and I turned the truck around and ran him over a second time because I knew his face.”
A quarter dropped faithfully for thirty six years was not a ritual of grief; it was the price of keeping a good man from becoming a bad one.
A sound went through the church like a wind in dry corn. I felt my knees go and sat down hard on the front pew. Miss Opaline sat beside me and took my hand. The old man stood there in the silence with his hat shaking in his fingers and did not run, and did not look away. “Lucien had seen me sell whiskey from the trunk of that same truck,” he said, “and he told the sheriff, and my cousin the sheriff told me. I only wanted to scare the boy. That is what I told myself for sixty three years.”
My cousin Tim walked down the aisle then, slowly, with his hat under his arm. He said, “Mr. Gautreaux, I am going to ask you to come with me.” The old man nodded and held out both wrists, like a child. Tim shook his head gently. “That will not be necessary. Lean on me, sir.” They went out together through the side door, a deputy and an old man, into the autumn light. Behind them, a woman in the congregation began to hum, very softly, the song of Patsy Cline, and then another, and then a third, until the whole church was humming it.
We buried my father that afternoon in the cemetery at Mooringsport. I had not known that he owned a plot there. The funeral director led us through the old section near the fence, to a cedar tree, and beside the open grave stood a small gray stone I would have missed if the grass around it had not been so freshly mowed. LUCIEN PAUL LAFLEUR, it said. 1943 to 1962. Below the name, in smaller letters: Walking After Midnight. Someone had been mowing around that stone every week for sixty three years. I knew who. I stood there and wept like a child.
Orrin Gautreaux gave his statement that same evening at the office of the sheriff in Shreveport, in the presence of a district attorney, a stenographer, and a lawyer from the public defender, whom he refused to listen to. It ran fourteen pages. He named the date, the road, the truck, the cousin who had signed the false report, and the place in Cross Lake where he had sunk the vehicle the week after. In the drought of that autumn, when the water was low, divers from the state police found the rusted frame of a pickup under the silt, exactly where he said.
He pleaded guilty in December to second degree murder, in a courtroom in Shreveport, from a wheelchair, with an oxygen tube in his nose. The judge asked him if he had anything to say. He said, in his gravelly voice, that he had said it all in the church. Then he looked at me, in the third row, and said, “Miss Lafleur, I am sorry. Tell your daddy.” He was sentenced to life. He died in the infirmary of the state prison at Angola in February. I did not go. I had said what I had to say to my father, and I felt no need to say it to him.
My mother, who is seventy eight and lives in a care home in Bossier City, told me the rest on the Sunday after, in her room with the window open. She had known from the first week of her marriage. “Your father made me promise never to speak of Lucien,” she said, “because speaking of him made him want to kill that man, and Clarence was a deacon, and he would rather sit across a room from the killer of his brother for the rest of his life than put himself in prison and leave you without a father.” She took my hand. “That was what the quarter was, Darla Kay. It was his way of not doing the other thing.”
On the first Friday after Orrin Gautreaux died, I drove out to the Lone Pine Tavern at nine, in the same car my father used to drive. The neon pine tree buzzed on the roof. The back booth was empty, the vinyl cracked, with a cigarette burn on the table. Miss Opaline was behind the bar. I walked to the jukebox, put in a quarter, pushed three buttons, and Patsy Cline came on. I ordered a cold cola. I stood there with it while the song played, and this time I did not leave before it ended. I stayed for the last note. And then I put in another quarter.
