Jesse’s Law

A Companion to The Boys of the Gallery

Prologue

October 18, 1968

The blue evening was gradually fading deepest navy, and the first star, a bright point of light just above the rooftops, was growing fuller and more distinct with each passing second. Rustling like the worn pages of a book, dead leaves fell from each ailing tree and turned over themselves in spirals to the ground, drifting here and there like red and gold snow banks. The breeze that carried them may have been warm, but it concealed a wintry chill.

Perched on a broken bench, Jesse DePradts drew heavily on a cheap cigarette, letting the hot smoke saturate his lungs before slowly exhaling, watching the patterns cascade through the cooling air and slowly dissolve into nothingness a few yards away. He smoked on every other breath, like clockwork; breathe, smoke, breathe, smoke...

When he was done with the first, he lit another, and another until his chest ached and his throat was raw. Then he checked his watch. Half an hour 'til curfew. He stood up, stretching his sore muscles; it had been a hard day. The year before, when his father passed away, his mother had laid off all the hired help on the plantation. No more workers, not that there was much business anyway, and Jesse did all the harvesting and processing himself, along with a couple of his cousins on the weekends – hick kids, high school dropouts whom he could easily manipulate into doing most of the work. But today was Friday, and they hadn't come, so right after school, he had started in. The whole plantation began to smell like decay the second the plants hit the huge steel steepers. Even the house had started to smell like it, and town was a comforting escape from his headache. He stared at his fingers, stained deep blue from handling the dye, then looked himself over in the window of a vacant storefront. The wind had mussed his sandy hair, too long for his mother's taste; she was terrified that he was becoming one of those “goddamn hippies” like the couple who bought dye from the DePradts' plantation. No qualms about selling to them; money was money, but between his hair, the Rolling Stones 8 tracks in the console of the family truck, and the blue jeans he came home wearing every time he delivered dye to their store, it seemed to her like there was no stopping it.

His eyes, shaded in the reflection of the dusky air through the filthy window, were a million shades of blue and green, like his mother's. He had inherited most of her looks – his fair skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, all the proud indicators of a purely white heritage. The only evidence of his French Creole father's existence was in his accent, a smooth drawl characteristic of Louisiana, tainted once again with the sharp nasality of his mother's North Carolina.

His eyes lingered on their reflection for a moment. He often got lost in his own eyes, wondering exactly what was behind them, what they concealed that made him so thoroughly different from everyone else around him. No other boy in his family had ever even finished high-school, let alone gone off to college, and he had been visiting schools with his tips from deliveries when his cousins worked the plantation. The week before, he had gone all the way up to Indiana.

The other boys thought he was crazy, but didn't mind taking his share of the pay.

That wasn't all; there were too many differences to count between Jesse and his family. Too many to think about. Sometimes when he tried, he wondered if he wasn't part of the family at all, if he wasn't even human.

He shook his head and got behind the wheel of the aging Chevy, dazed and blank until he pulled off the highway, and the truck rumbled down the dirt road, sending up huge clouds of dust, spiraling high enough to obscure the clear sky. The radio was blaring – some fuzzy rock and roll broadcast, a song he didn’t know. All along the road that led to the plantation, the country was low-lying, wet and mucky, but the water was shallow lately, and the road was mercifully dry, which meant that Jesse could make his deliveries and stay in town as long as he liked. In the Spring, he was never so lucky; sometimes the road would flood for weeks at a time, and no matter how much the five families that lived and worked along that twenty-mile stretch complained, the county wouldn’t pave it, and all too often for his taste, Jesse was stuck inside the house with his mother.

He lit the last cigarette of his pack just as he turned onto the narrow drive up to the house. It was long enough that, at a snail’s pace, he could usually finish one before he passed the fields and the steepers and the decrepit little huts that used to house the workers, and, in a time before Jesse was born, but well after Emancipation, the slaves.

With a windy sigh, Jesse flicked the still-smouldering butt into the yard between the house and the workers’ quarters and ran his now-free hand through his hair as he parked by the side door.
The second he walked in, his ears were assaulted by his mother’s off-key backing vocals to one of her annoying, antiquated country records – remnants of the forties and fifties in her native Appalacia.
And if she was reminicing, that meant that she was regretting – her marriage, her occupation, her entire life – and that she would be coming, shortly, to the conclusion that it was somehow all the fault of Jesse’s jeans and haircut.

Eager to avoid the imminent verbal abuse (and possibly an impromptu haircut, if she had her kitchen shears handy), he crept silently up the stairs past her bedroom and into his own. He said a little prayer of thanks (to whom, he didn’t know – certainly his mother’s God did not come to his side in these instances; she prayed to Him nightly to keep Jesse under her control), and crawled under his tattered blankets. They had been very nice when Jesse was younger, warm and thick, but time had worn them down, and even his father, who had kept the plantation well-afloat in an industry that was half a century dead, couldn’t provide enough for his family in the last ten years of his life, not even to replace his only son’s blankets. In fact, all of the family’s income had been poured back into their business, and there had just never been enough to go around.

The clothiers in town – Janis, a pretty girl with long red hair, and her Jamaican-born boyfriend, Eddie – had been a Godsend; they didn’t buy much, but it was steady, about once every month or two, and they tipped well. These days, they were the only things keeping the business going.
Clicking his tongue against his teeth – a sound which almost startled Jesse in the silence – he pulled the fraying quilt tighter around him and closed his eyes.

He was leaning over the side of the steeper, hot, filthy air hitting his face and filling his lungs like wet wool. The water inside was pure black, and the plants themselves floated through the muck, never pausing, nauseating. The reflection of his face was clear, but distorted by the drifting buds. A hand rose up behind him and fell on his right shoulder. He never felt it, but was propelled forward by the phantom blow, down…

Down…

Down…

And it was morning before he reached the bottom.