Chapter 3 #2
But it wasn't as clean as that sentence, and I want to put the real version down, because the real version is why I ended up trusting him.
Around hour one he said something wrong.
"The rectory in 1907," he said. "Father Broussard's rectory."
"Broussard?"
"That's what my grandmother said. Father Broussard, Lafitte."
I sat back on my heels. "There's no Father Broussard in the Lafitte parish rolls in 1907. There's a Father Boudreaux."
"She said Broussard."
"She said Broussard because she was talking to a child about a family called Broussard and her mouth went where her mouth was going." I pulled the diocesan list up on my laptop. "That's how oral tradition degrades. Not by lying. By rounding."
Bishop leaned over to look at the screen, which put him closer than I'd agreed to, and I did not move, which I also noted and filed.
"Boudreaux," he read.
"Boudreaux."
"Fifteen people have told me Broussard for thirty years."
"And they were all wrong, and every single one of them was sure, and one of them slapped your hand away from a cabinet." I turned the laptop toward him. "That's what a document is for, Bishop. Not to be more true than a person. Just to be less flexible."
He was quiet a second.
"Do that again," he said.
"Do what?"
"That. To the rest of it."
So we did.
And it went like that for two hours, him giving me the family version and me putting it against paper, and the family version being wrong about four things in a way that made it more useful, because you could see the direction the errors ran.
Places got closer to Lafitte over time. Priests got more Catholic.
Sums got rounder. Every generation had sanded a little off, and once you knew which way the sanding went, you could work backward.
At one point he said, "This is the first time anybody's checked."
"In how long?"
"Ever," he said. "That's the arrangement. You hold it and you pass it on and you don't check, because checking means writing it down, and writing it down is the one thing we've never—"
He stopped.
"What," I said.
"Nothing."
"You went somewhere."
"I went to a kitchen in 1998," Bishop said, and didn't explain, and I let it sit there for a while, because I've interviewed a lot of donors and you can either get the fact or the person, and only one of them comes back.
I have worked with maybe two hundred researchers in my career. Most of them are hoarders. They come in with a piece and they hold it against their chest like a plate at a buffet.
He put everything on the floor in the first hour.
"You're not protecting any of it," I said, at one point.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I've watched four generations of my family protect it," Bishop said, "and every single one of them died in this parish owing somebody. So."
Around eight I realized I hadn't looked at my phone since the nine-one-one, and that I hadn't thought about the fire in ninety minutes, and that this was the longest stretch since Tuesday, and that the reason for it was a felon on the floor of my annex with a bakery lease in his hand.
That annoyed me enormously.
"I don't like you," I said.
He didn't look up. "Okay."
"I want that clear. You broke my hinge. You handled unglove-handled paper. You have said the word cher to me one time and we're going to talk about that."
"Alright."
"But you're the first person in four days who has talked to me like I'm a colleague instead of a widow, and I find that I like talking to you, and I want it noted that those are two separate findings and I'm filing them separately."
Bishop was quiet a second.
"Noted," he said.
"Good."
"You want to eat?"
"I want to eat so badly I've been having visions."
He stood up and put out a hand and pulled me off the floor of a former bakery, and my knees popped, and he said, "Whoa," and I said, "Don't," and he said, "I didn't say anything," and I said, "You said whoa," and he said, "That was for me, my knee went too," and I decided to let him have that.
Outside, the heat had gone down from a slap to a hand on the back of your neck.
There were eleven motorcycles parked along the laundromat and a very large man in a sun hat with a neck flap standing next to them, sweating so comprehensively that he had achieved a kind of glaze.
He raised a hand.
"Ma'am," he said. "Is it always—" and then he stopped, and made a gesture with both arms that took in the entire sky, the street, the air, the concept of Louisiana.
"Yes," I said.
He nodded slowly, the way men do when they receive a terminal diagnosis with dignity.
"Alright," he said. "Amos."
"Delphine."
"Ma'am, can I ask you a professional question."
"You may."
"What is on my arm."
I looked. There was a beetle on his arm approximately the size of a car key.
"That's a palmetto bug," I said.
"That's a roach."
"We don't say that."
"Ma'am, that's a roach, and it's looked at me—"
"Amos, I need you to understand something and I need you to hear it from a native.
" I put a hand on his shoulder, which was damp, which we both agreed silently not to discuss.
"You cannot win. There is no course of action.
There is no spray, no screen, no candle.
You can only decide what kind of man you're going to be about it. "
Amos looked at the beetle. The beetle looked at Amos.
"What kind are you?" he said.
"Calm," I said. "Publicly."
He flicked it off. It flew. That was the part he wasn't ready for — that they fly — and I watched a sixty-one-year-old man make a sound I have only otherwise heard from a kettle.
Behind me, Bishop said, "You gonna be alright?"
"No," Amos said, with total sincerity.
There were nine other men in the laundromat, I discovered, buying every cold drink in the machine and standing directly under the vents, and one enormous white dog asleep in front of the dryers like he'd paid for the cycle.
"Is that your dog?"
"That's Ghost. He's not anybody's dog. He works here now."
"Here?"
"Wherever we are," Bishop said. "He decides that's where he works."
I looked at eleven strangers in a laundromat in Mid-City, and at the man who'd broken my hinge, and at a bakery building holding forty years of a museum I could not afford to keep open, and I thought about a fire that had been thorough.
"Okay," I said. "Where do we eat?"
"You pick."
"No, you pick. You're the one who's been gone fifteen years. I want to see if the place you name still exists. That'll tell me more about you than an hour of conversation."
Bishop thought about it.
"Mimi's," he said.
"Mimi's closed in 2011."
"Yeah," he said. "That tracks."