Loretta Jackson didn’t ask for favors. She sang deep, soulful blues from the pit of her big, curvy frame, she cooked jambalaya so sweet and spicy that all other food tasted hollow, and she took care of the ones she loved with such intensity that it even patched over that old familiar hole in my heart. A favor from Loretta wasn’t a favor at all. It was an opportunity to do something for someone who’d given me everything she had.

We walked down Conti to Decatur and then continued upriver north under wooden signs swinging in the fall wind and beneath wrought-iron balconies heavy laden with palms, banana trees, and stunted magnolias. Twisted Christmas lights shaped like chili peppers and little skulls burned from the rusted ironwork. We passed the new, tourist-friendly Tipitina’s, dozens of gift shops selling lewd T-shirts and cheap posters, and tired old restaurants serving reanimated crawfish, dead since spring, and watery gumbo.

We turned down the flagstone walkway running along Jackson Square – closed since dusk – and toward St. Louis Cathedral. The air smelled of the Mississippi’s fetid brown water and cigarette smoke from a loose gathering of skinheads playing with a mangy puppy by the front doors of the church.

Loretta ignored them and took a seat on a nearby green bench. I didn’t figure for wandering about tonight and had only worn a thin suede jacket over my black Johnny Cash T-shirt. It was the pose Cash did for Def Jam records when he wanted to thank the country music industry by saluting them with his middle finger.

I was pretty proud of it.

“If you don’t want to do this, you tell me,” Loretta said. “Right, baby? You don’t owe me nothin’.”