Clete picked up Waylon Grimes by the front of his shirt and shoved him through a cluster of banana plants into the side of the building, pinning him by his throat against the wall, driving his fist again and again into the man’s face, saliva and blood stringing across the plaster.

He dropped Grimes to the ground and kicked at him once and missed, then steadied himself with one hand against the wall and brought his foot down with all his weight on Grimes’s rib cage. It was then that Clete knew, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he was not only capable of killing a man with his bare hands but he could literally tear him into pieces with no reservation or feeling whatsoever. That was what he commenced doing.

Out of nowhere, Alice Werenhaus pushed past him, her feet sinking to the ankles in the mixture of black dirt and coffee grinds and guano that Clete used in his gardens, dropping onto all fours and forming a protective arch over Grimes’s body, her homely face terrified. “Please don’t hit him anymore. Oh, Mr. Purcel, you frighten me so,” she said. “The world has hurt you so much.”

Our home was located on a one-acre lot shaded by live oak and pecan trees and slash pines on East Main in New Iberia, right up the street from the Shadows, a famous antebellum home built in the year 1831. Even though our house was also constructed in the nineteenth century, it was of much more modest design, one that was called “shotgun” because of its oblong structure, like a boxcar’s, and the folk legend that one could fire a bird gun through the front door and the pellets would exit the back entrance without ever striking a wall.

Humble abode or not, it was a fine place to live. The windows reached all the way to the ceiling and had ventilated storm shutters, and in hurricane season, oak limbs bounced off our roof without ever shattering glass. I had extended and screened the gallery across the front, and hung it with a glider, and sometimes on hot afternoons I would set up the ice-cream freezer on the gallery and we would mash up blackberries in the cream and sit on the glider and eat blackberry ice cream.