We had a garden on the edge of the bayou and pecans and may pops were still abundant at the edge of the marsh that led back to our old home. It was a hot June day when Minos told me that his leg hurt. I will always remember the feel of the lump just above his bony knee and the purple oily shadow that surrounded it. Over the weeks the lump seemed to grow and throb. When I mentioned doctors and hospitals, Minos fled, limping into the hollow night.
Purple shadows are shadows of death, marks of the devil, killers of the innocent.
On a cool morning before the sun sped down the bayou and onto our gallery, I left the marsh and visited the deserted old white church on Louisiana Highway 3269, where Father PreJean had once declared Minos a soul forever stuck in limbo. When I got back to our camp, Minos had made cornbread and sliced fresh tomatoes. He did not ask where I had gone, for we often went off to our own solitude. That night, the blast rocked and inflamed the eastern sky just as I had finished telling Minos of my last day in Vietnam. Today I buried Minos behind our cabin, on the highest chenier, and planted springs of Mama s wild roses that still wrap around the wide porch of our lost home.