On his right hand Lane has a scar, which, when he grips certain things too long, like the handle of an ax or an oyster knife or a steering wheel, begins to burn as if the skin were being pulled apart all over again, and by the time they reach the boggy land along Bayou Teche, the scar has begun to pain him. He’d gotten it at thirteen, the first time he ever punched through a glass window, before he knew to wrap his hand in cloth, before he knew how to pick a lock. That first time it wasn’t to steal so much as take back what was rightfully his, a Remington 12-gauge that had belonged to his grandfather, and that his father had wagered in a hand of poker he lost to a fellow cane worker named Guy Davis. Lane had punched through the windowpane above the knob of the kitchen door, reached through the jagged opening in the glass, and just like that, he found himself in another man’s home: cold soup on the stove, dirty dishes piled in the sink, mud-caked boots by the door. Left open, the wound had healed poorly, a raised wormy line that reminds him always of how easy it is to break into someone’s home.
He shakes his hand out and presses his scarred knuckle to his mouth, tasting the salt of his own sweat. He can’t see the bayou from the road, but he can smell its fustiness, a mix of mineral, marsh, and earth that reminds him of home. Sugarcane and cotton fields have given way to pecan groves, which soon give way to the stately, columned homes that cluster among the live oaks on the edge of New Iberia. Here is where they are meant to pass the night after the midnight execution in St. Martinville, twelve miles to the northeast. Seward has fallen asleep in the passenger seat; he breathes throatily, and the way his jaw occasionally snaps makes Lane wonder if the man might be eating in his dreams. It’s occurred to Lane that with the captain sleeping he could drive the chair anywhere, or run, but he doesn’t know where he’d go and as he’s already done half his time, he figures he’d be better off seeing it through than risking a punishment even worse. And now here they are, arriving with their terrible cargo.
Lane glances at the captain. Seward stirs, clears his throat, and rearranges himself in his seat, glancing at Lane as if to gauge whether his slumber has been noticed. Then he unscrews the cap of the flask he keeps in his breast pocket and drinks, and after he’s wiped his mouth, he keeps his hand cupped against his face as he peers through the windshield.
Outside, evening sunlight glints in dust motes kicked up by passing traffic: sugarcane wagons and oil trucks, brown tanks on flatbeds. The truck’s engine murmurs steadily. “Ain’t been to New Iberia since ’37,” Seward says, finally. He drops his hand. “Year my grandbaby was born and died.”
“Year I went to jail,” Lane mutters. He thinks he might have passed through New Iberia when his father’s pa took sick, but he was a boy and it was the middle of the night and he can’t say for sure if it was New Iberia or some other sugar and oil town. He remembers his father talking about oil field trash, and he remembers a field of derricks in the moonlight, a city of spindly rods. Much of the past presents itself to Lane this way, in flashes without context. It’s as if his existence before Angola is a series of discrete and dreamlike moments, without a binding narrative: a goose caught up in hog wire, his mother weeping over a soup pot in the side yard, the tiny naked bodies of his siblings in the rain. Of Angola, there is little to remember, with every day the same.
Lane slows the truck when they come to downtown. Until now, the drive has been all swamp, prairie, and cane field, the occasional tiny town. This is the first real city Lane has seen since he was sentenced in Thibodaux six years ago. Men sit in chairs in the shade in front of a barbershop, where a pole spins slowly by the open window. People walk up and down the street, past shopwindows where suited mannequins pose, where books and clocks and pastries are on display. Outside the theater, beneath a blinking marquee, people stand in line for a matinee, fanning themselves with whatever they can find. Lane remembers driving in the prison bus from the courthouse in Thibodaux and looking out at streets like these with longing. Now, looking out the window, he’s filled with puzzlement that verges on panic. It’s the same as any downtown he’s ever seen, but he may as well have landed on the moon. Movies, restaurants, boutiques, fancy shoes: none of it seems to make sense anymore. He wonders if it ever really did.
“Take a left here.” Seward points. “Iberia Street.”
Lane turns, stopping as Seward instructs him in front of a large white building set back from the street, a four-story cement-stucco structure at the top of a tiered set of concrete stairs, with pilasters between five slitlike window casements that rise nearly to the height of the building. The double doors and window frames are dulled aluminum, the doors imprinted with eight shining, circular disks. It’s unlike any building Lane has ever seen.
“Courthouse,” Seward says. “Nigger’s waiting in there. Cell up top. And I reckon he’s not feeling too good tonight, boy.”
Lane pauses. The sudden proximity of the convicted man to the chair that will kill him makes Lane feel peculiar. “I thought he was in St. Martinville.”
“Hah. They’d a left him in the St. Martinville jail the good townspeople would have done our job for us before we even left Angola.”
Lane looks at the building, trying to imagine the man inside, what a man might be doing when he knows he has only a few more hours to live. “What’d he do?” he asks.
Seward spits out the window. “Raped a white girl. In her own bed. Crept right in through the window and had his way with her, with her daddy in the room next door.”
Lane pauses again. “He kill her?”
“Kill her? Pah. Don’t know if he’d be safe anywhere if he’d a killed her too.” Seward pats the side of the truck, his ring clanking against the metal. “Though he may as well have,” he adds. “Killed herself soon after. Blew her brains out with her daddy’s gun the next day.”
Outside, beyond the courthouse, the sky is glowing with the eerie orange hue of burning season, though it isn’t. A nearby church bell tolls six times, and it occurs to Lane, as he listens, that the condemned man is hearing the same sound, too.