Sunset Limited

"You were at Cisco's house. You're Mr. Robicheaux," a woman's voice said behind me.

It was Billy Holtzner's daughter. But her soapy blue eyes were focused now, actually pleasant, like a person who has stepped out of one identity into another.

"You remember me?" she asked.

"Sure."

"We didn't introduce ourselves the other day. I'm Geraldine Holtzner. The boxer down there is Anthony. He's an accountant for the studio. I'm sorry for our rudeness."

"You weren't rude."

"I know you don't like my father. Not many people do. We're not problem visitors here. If you have one, it's Cisco Fly

"Cisco?"

"He owes my father a lot of money. Cisco thinks he can avoid his responsibilities by bringing a person like Swede Boxleiter around."

She gripped the handrail and extended one leg at a time behind her. Her wild, brownish-red hair shimmered with perspiration.

"You let that guy down there shoot you up?" I asked.

"I'm all right today. Sometimes I just have a bad day. You're a fu

"Why not get rid of the problem altogether?"

But she wasn't listening now. "This area is full of violent people. It's the South. It lives in the woodwork down here. This black man who's coming after the Terrebo

"Which black man? Are you talking about Cool Breeze Broussard?"

"Which? Yeah, that's a good question. You know the story about the murdered slave woman, the children who were poisoned? If I had stuff like that in my family, I'd jump off a cliff. No wonder Lila Terrebo

"It was nice seeing you," I said.

"Gee, why don't you just say fuck you and turn your back on people?"

Her skin was the color of milk that has browned in a pan, her blue eyes dancing in her face. She wiped her hair and throat with a towel and threw it at me.

"That kick-boxing stuff Anthony's doing? He learned it from me," she said.

Then she raised her face up into mine, her lips slightly parted, speckled with saliva, her eyes filled with anticipation and need.

ON THE WAY BACK home I stopped in the New Iberia city library and looked up a late-nineteenth-century reminiscence written about our area by a New England lady named Abigail Dowling, a nurse who came here during a yellow fever epidemic and was radicalized not by slavery itself and the misery it visited upon the black race but by what she called its dehumanizing effects on the white.

One of the families about which she wrote in detail was the Terrebo

Before the Civil War, Elijah Terrebo

"He was of diminutive stature, with a hard, compact body. He sat his horse with the rigidity of a clothes pin," Abigail Dowling wrote in her journal. "His countenance was handsome, certainly, of a rosy hue, and it exuded a martial light when he talked of the War. In consideration of his physical stature I tried to overlook his imperious ma

"Unfortunately for the poor black souls on his plantation, the lamps of charity and pity did not burn brightly in his heart. I have been told General Forrest tried to stop the slaughter of negro soldiers below the bluffs. I believe Elijah Terrebo

The miscegenation mentioned by Abigail Dowling involved a buxom slave woman named Lavonia, whose husband, Big Walter, had been killed by a falling tree. Periodically Elijah Terrebo

But when he returned from Brice's Crossing, with pieces of bone still working their way out of the surgeon's incision in his arm, the Teche country was occupied, his house and barns looted, the orchards and fields reduced to soot blowing in the wind. The only meat on the plantation consisted of seven smoked hams Lavonia had buried in the woods before the Federal flotilla had come up the Teche.

The Terrebo

She went to Elijah's wife.

Abigail Dowling wrote in the journal, "It was a wretched sight, this stout field woman without a husband, with no concept of historical events or geography, about to be cast out in a ruined land filled with night riders and drunken soldiers. Her simple entreaty could not have described her plight more adequately: 'I'se got fo' children, Missy. What's we go

Mrs. Terrebo

The journal continued: "But Lavonia was a sad and ignorant creature who thought guile could overcome the hardness of heart in her former masters. She put cyanide in the family's food, believing they would become ill and dependent upon her for their daily care.

"Both of the Terrebo

"By firelight Elijah dug up the coffins of his children from the wet clay and unwound the wrappings from their bodies. Their skin was covered with pustules the color and shape of pearls. He pressed his hand on their chests and breathed the air trapped in their lungs and swore it smelled of almonds.

"His rage and madness could be heard all the way across the fields to the quarters. Lavonia tried to hide with her children in the swamp, but to no avail. Her own people found her, and in fear of Elijah's wrath, they hanged her with a man's belt from a persimmon tree."

WHAT DID IT ALL mean? Why did Geraldine Holtzner allude to the story at Red's Gym in Lafayette? I didn't know. But in the morning Megan Fly