He stood alone. In the night. In the woods.
The same ice cold feeling of lucid indifference churned deep within him, that same frigid indifference that overwhelmed him, just as it had all those years before.
Before his knowledge of Charlotte, the woman who had existed in a world before the massive destruction of the city called New Orleans. A world that looked upon New Orleans with the same frozen indifference he was once again feeling again after all of this time.
Charlotte cried, just as those helpless people had cried, from the melancholy whore on the delta when the wind and the waves burst through the knowingly insufficient levies. Charlotte would cry in a realm of continuity that would overcome her with disbelief when he so suddenly and coldly departed from her life; after becoming so deeply entangled irrevocably within that world in which she had existed.
The rain had just begun to fall in big round droplets, as he stepped off the porch of the old Litchfield house and headed through the woods to his car. The car he parked a fair ways away from the broken down and dilapidated house; a house where nothing could ever come from of any worth, as far as he was concerned. In his eyes, he saw everything as it truly was. He had been aware of the age difference between his twenty seven years and her fifty-six years that lay so heavily upon the frame of the woman he loved. The difference that had never caught his attention until that moment she had looked up at him from the floor of that awful, old, bug-ridden house. It was as if he were a stranger that had not the slightest notion as to whom this was, nor why he felt so strongly toward her. This woman who had caused him, Esau Barker, to look down at her as she puked on the floor where she was sitting and to tear away the tattered shreds of an illusion he had maintained for nearly ten years. Now throwing back into his face the fact that she was nearly thirty years his senior.
As he stood there, feeling the drops of the heavy Southern rain fall on his head, he thought back to that time years before, when he had stood inside this same clearing of trees, away from the Litchfield place, on his Daddy’s land.
--‘Oh my Daddy,’ he thought, ‘oh my ever-loving Daddy,’--
His Daddy was an angry man, who had been shot in the back of the head one night when he was full of drink and mean as a preacher in a whorehouse on a Sunday morning. Momma had said that it was Satan who had killed him, just as his Daddy’s Daddy - the name he always had known his grandfather by - had been shot in his head a good many years before Esau was born into this world, and his Daddy’s Momma – his grandmother who would die with the appellation of ‘the Old Woman’ - said that it was Satan that had done that deed as well. So his Daddy was thus relegated to persons shot in the head with man-made bullets from a gun, shot by a supernatural being. Not having much schooling, and no more religion than the ranting of the Old Woman with her bible raised high in hand, Esau did not believe in Satan. Nor did he see any need to believe in a benevolent god, since he had never seen anything that made him think that there actually was a god. Or that this god was overflowing with kindness for anyone that lived in the same world that he lived in. He also knew for a fact that there was nothing supernatural about his Daddy’s death, leaving any information about his Daddy’s Daddy’s death open to speculation.
But right now, his thoughts were winding their way back to Charlotte. The only woman he had ever loved or he ever would love.
