Louisiana Lament

it.”
    “Why?” she asked. “Why do you care?”
    “Because you haven’t written a poem about it. That’s a really bad sign.”
    It was. It meant she was turtling out on it. Well, she had the next day off. It was Wednesday, but since she’d worked the surveillance the weekend before, (and also finished the report on the redhead), Eddie’d given her a mental health day. She could start in about eight hours, if she had the nerve.
    She woke up thinking about it, about what she could do to pursue it, and it came to her that it might be easy, that she knew someone who might even know the answer—who could certainly point her in the right direction.
    He was the retired minister of First Bethlehem Baptist, the church Miz Clara still went to, that Talba had been taken to every Sunday of her life as a child. She’d become reacquainted with him recently (on another case), and something he’d said to her then, something she hadn’t understood at the time, made her think of him.
    He’d told her that he’d seen her father in church after he left the family. Had he come back with his woman? If so, the old man might know her name; Talba could track him through her.
    The minister’s name was the Reverend Clarence Scruggs, and he’d been a terror in his day, petrifying her and the other kids Sunday after Sunday with shouted threats of “eternal damnation in the blazing flames of hell.” Sometimes she had to sleep with the light on after one of his sermons. He was probably the reason she didn’t go to church today. But, thanks to him, nobody could say she wasn’t God-fearing. If she ran into God in a dark alley, she’d probably pull out the pepper spray.
    The Reverend Mr. Scruggs was now living in public housing and he’d changed. When she went to see him last year she found instead of the raving demagogue of her youth a gentle old man with a rather stilted way of speaking, utterly devoted to his sick wife.
    “Had it not been for my wife I might have lost my way entirely,” he had told Talba. “She is my dearest love and it is a privilege to care for her.”
    He spoke of his anger when their child was stricken with “a rare and painful disease,” though he was, as he said, “the fiercest soldier in the army of the Lord,” and of his wife’s loving gentleness with the child, and of the way it had transformed him.
    Listening to him was a bit on the surreal side—even in conversation, he spoke in the cadences of sermons—but Talba had been utterly moved by the sincerity of what he had to say and by his amazing metamorphosis into a sweet old gent. She really should have been back to see him.
    Darryl drove her home early enough that the two of them had time to grab coffee before Darryl went to work. As soon as her eyes were fully open, she said, “I’m going to do what you said.”
    “What?” But he hadn’t forgotten; she knew he just wanted her to say it.
    “I’m going to work on my big case. Today, in fact. Get ready to find me a fabulous car for pennies.”
    “I feel a… a what…”—he squinched up his eyes—“…a Subaru coming on.”
    “A what? Why a Subaru?”
    “You really want to know?”
    “Sure—are you psychic now?”
    “I’ve got a buddy who knows somebody whose uncle wants to sell one. Or something like that. I’ll bet we could see it Saturday.”
    “What? All that rigmarole just to get me to work on the case?”
    “Naaah. Coincidence. Maybe it won’t work out—I’ll take you to see every car in the classifieds. We’ll have a lot of fun.”
    “That I don’t doubt.” She’d heard Subarus were pretty good cars.
    She needed to take the reverend a present. But what? She couldn’t get Miz Clara to bake him a cake even if her mama were home—any mention of her father and Miz Clara sulked. She ran him off after he took up with another woman and that wasn’t even his worst trait; drugs and abuse were two others Miz Clara had mentioned.
    In the end Talba cooked for the reverend herself. She had to go shopping anyway—her brother Corey was coming to dinner that night. She bought chicken and greens for Miz Clara to fix later on, and the makings for mashed potatoes and peach pie, her own contributions to the meal. For Reverend Scruggs, something sturdy, she thought, and ended up with pot roast. She spent the morning making it, then packed it up and drove to his building, a high rise for seniors. She hadn’t wanted to phone first—she’d dropped in unexpectedly the