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Years ago, in state documents, Vachel Carmouche was always referred to as the
electrician, never as the executioner. That was back in the days when the electric chair
was sometimes housed at Angola. At other times it traveled, along with its own generators,
on a flatbed semitruck from parish prison to parish prison. Vachel Carmouche did the
state's work. He was good at it.
In New Iberia we knew his real occupation but pretended we did not. He lived by himself,
up Bayou Teche, in a tin-roofed, paintless cypress house that stayed in the deep shade of
oak trees. He planted no flowers in his yard and seldom raked it, but he always drove a
new car and washed and polished it religiously.
Early each morning we'd see him in a cafe on East Main, sitting by himself at the counter,
in his pressed gray or khaki clothes and cloth cap, his eyes studying other customers in
the mirror, his slight overbite paused above his coffee cup, as though he were waiting to
speak, although he rarely engaged others in conversation.
When he caught you looking at him, he smiled quickly, his sunbrowned face threading with
hundreds of lines, but his smile did not go with the expression in his eyes.
Vachel Carmouche was a bachelor. If he had lady friends, we were not aware of them. He
came infrequently to Provost's Bar and Pool Room and would sit at my table or next to me
at the bar, indicating in a vague way that we were both law officers and hence shared a
common experience.
That was when I was in uniform at NOPD and was still enamored with Jim Beam straight up
and a long-neck Jax on the side.
One night he found me at a table by myself at Provost's and sat down without being asked,
a white bowl of okra gumbo in his hands. A veterinarian and a grocery store owner I had
been drinking with came out of the men's room and glanced at the table, then went to the
bar and ordered beer and drank with their backs to us.
"Being a cop is a trade-off, isn't it?" Vachel said.
"Sir?" I said.
"You don't have to call me 'sir'... You spend a lot of time alone?"
"Not so much."
"I think it goes with the job. I was a state trooper once." His eyes,
which were as gray as his starched shirt, drifted to the shot glass in front of me and the
rings my beer mug had left on the tabletop. "A drinking man goes home to a lot of
echoes. The way a stone sounds in a dry well. No offense meant, Mr. Robicheaux. Can I buy
you a round?"
The acreage next to Vachel Carmouche was owned by the Labiche family, descendants of what
had been known as free people of color before the Civil War. The patriarch of the family
had been a French-educated mulatto named Jubal Labiche who owned a brick factory on the
bayou south of New Iberia. He both owned and rented slaves and worked them unmercifully
and supplied much of the brick for the homes of his fellow slave owners up and down the
Teche.
The columned house he built south of the St. Martin Parish line did not contain the
Italian marble or Spanish ironwork of the sugar growers whose wealth was far greater than
his own and whose way of life he sought to emulate. But he planted live oaks along the
drives and hung his balconies and verandah with flowers; his slaves kept his pecan and
peach orchards and produce fields broom-sweep clean. Although he was not invited into the
homes of whites, they respected him as a businessman and taskmaster and treated him with
courtesy on the street. That was almost enough for Jubal Labiche. Almost. He sent his
children North to be educated, in hopes they would marry up, across the color line, that
the high-yellow stain that limited his ambition would eventually be bleached out of the
Labiche family's skin.
Unfortunately for him, when the federals came up the Teche in April of 1863 they thought
him every bit the equal of his white neighbors. In democratic fashion they freed his
slaves, burned his fields and barns and corncribs, tore the ventilated shutters of his
windows for litters to carry their wounded, and chopped up his imported furniture and
piano for firewood.
Twenty-five years ago the last adult members of the Labiche family to bear the name, a
husband and wife, filled themselves with whiskey and sleeping pills, tied plastic bags
over their heads, and died in a parked car behind a Houston pickup bar. Both were
procurers. Both had been federal witnesses against a New York crime family.
They left behind identical twin daughters, aged five years, named Letty and Passion
Labiche.
The girls' eyes were blue, their hair the color of smoke, streaked with dark gold, as
though it had been painted there with a brush. An aunt, who was addicted to morphine and
claimed to be a traiture, or juju woman, was assigned guardianship by the state. Often
Vachel Carmouche volunteered to baby-sit the girls, or walk them out to the road for the
Head Start bus that took them to the preschool program in New Iberia.
We did not give his attentions to the girls much thought. Perhaps good came out of bad, we
told ourselves, and there was an area in Carmouche's soul that had not been disfigured by
the deeds he had performed with the machines he oiled and cleaned by hand and transported
from jail to jail. Perhaps his kindness towards the children was his attempt at
redemption.
Besides, their welfare was the business of the state, wasn't it?
In fourth grade one of the twins, Passion, told her teacher of a recurrent nightmare and
the pain she awoke with in the morning.
The teacher took Passion to Charity Hospital in Lafayette, but the physician said the
abrasions could have been caused by the child playing on the seesaw in City Park.
When the girls were about twelve I saw them with Vachel Carmouche on a summer night out at
Veazey's ice cream store on West Main. They wore identical checkered sundresses and
different-colored ribbons in their hair. They sat in Carmouche's truck, close to the door,
a lackluster deadness in their eyes, their mouths turned down at the corners, while he
talked out the window to a black man in bib overalls.
"I've been patient with you, boy. You got the money you had coming. You calling me a
liar?"
"No, suh, I ain't doing that."
"Then good night to you," he said. When one of the girls said something, he
popped her lightly on the cheek and started his truck.
I walked across the shell parking area and stood by his window.
"Excuse me, but what gives you the right to hit someone else's child in the
face?" I asked.
"I think you misperceived what happened," he replied.
"Step out of your truck, please."
Excerpted from PURPLE CANE ROAD © Copyright 2001 by James Lee Burke. Reprinted with permission by Dell. All rights reserved.
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