Louisiana Lament

me a week off when somebody crawls in the window and try to kill my baby! Their oldest child scalped by an intruder, and they give me a week off! Clayton in the hospital, people comin’ and goin’, every kind of thing, and they give me the week off! Now what you think about that?”
    “I think they didn’t want you knowing their business.”
    Majors nodded with satisfaction. “Tha’s what I think. And you know what else I think?”
    Talba thought she did, but she asked politely, “What?”
    “I think one of ’em done it.” She nodded again, several times for emphasis. “Yep. Sho’ as ya born. One of ’em done it. Scalped they own child.”
    “You think it was one of the parents?”
    “Oh, could of been Little King. Yep. Sho’ could of been him.”
    “Why do you think he would have done it?”
    Majors shrugged almost absently, her tears dried now. She was clearly excited by the subject matter. “He might of done it out of pure jealousy,” she said.
    “Of Clayton?” Talba couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I thought the rest of them hated her.”
    “No, ma’am. Uh-uh. Till that moment, till that night of reckonin’, she was the apple of her daddy eye. All her young life, they love her just like all folks love they chirren. Then they give me the week off and when I come back they hate her.” She snapped her fingers. “They never was nice to her another day in her life.” She brought up another tissue from somewhere and wiped a few more tears. “Nobody oughta be treated the way they treat that child.”
    “What did they do, exactly?”
    She turned her palms up. “Wasn’t what they did so much as the way they talk to her. Mean. Just kinda mean. Like she know they secret and they hate her for it.”
    Talba squirmed. That was certainly the impression she was getting and it was ugly. She said, “I met the young one a day or two ago. Hunter.”
    For the first time in the interview, Majors smiled. “Sho’ is a funny name, ain’t it? Clayton. Hunter. King. Trey. Who those people think they is? Well, now, her I like. Young Miss Hunter, she my baby. She didn’t have nothin’ to do with that scalpin’ and she never had no need to punish her sister for it. ’Course any time she nice to Clayton, the whole family mean to
her.”
    Talba shivered, and not from the iced tea.

Chapter Seventeen
    Talba (“the Baroness”) Wallis could get so damn proud of herself. She’d just sashayed into Eddie’s office, put her hands on her hips, and pronounced, “You are not going to believe what I got today.”
    Eddie rubbed his left temple, feeling a headache coming on. If her voice weren’t so goddamn beautiful, she’d drive him crazy.
    “That’s what Audrey always says when she’s been shopping.”
    “What?” Ms. Wallis looked taken aback.
    He could see she didn’t get the joke; he didn’t know why he bothered. “Never mind, Ms. Wallis. Full speed ahead.” That pretty much described her, he thought. If he were the poet instead of she, and if he were going to write a poem about her, that might be the title of it: “Full Speed Ahead.”
    “Somebody in Clayton’s family attacked her. The maid says so—woman named Betty Majors. And if anybody’d know, she would.”
    “She heard ’em talking about it?”
    “No. That’s the interesting part. They gave her the week off.”
    “I don’t see how you get a family scalpin’ out of that one.”
    “They hated her after that—Clayton, I mean.”
    He wasn’t getting it. “Uh-huh. What does that prove?”
    Talba just looked disgusted on him—like she was some big college-educated character and she just kind of knew things by osmosis. He decided to try a new tactic. “You didn’t tell me you were going back to Clayton—I thought I told you to stay out of that town.”
    “Uh-huh. That’s why I didn’t mention it.”
    “Don’t you think you’re getting a little too big for ya britches?”
    Now she looked guilty.
    “It’s what ya mama says, idn’t it? Sometimes I pity Miz Clara. I truly do.”
    She tapped his desk with her pencil, making some point or other. “Eddie, I’m a grown woman. You want to know what I did? I think it was pretty clever, actually—I didn’t even go in the white neighborhoods. I just interviewed black people.”
    He shook his head. “Umph, umph. Ms. Wallis, Ms. Wallis.”
    “What’s wrong with that?”
    “Nothing’s wrong with that. I was just thinking ya don’t disappoint—I can always depend