Library Notes
October 3, 2003
By Pansy Hundley, Librarian.
I took myself up to Oklahoma last week-end, to help Suzie with some projects that were overwhelming her, by the sheer number of them.
In Norman they have quite a bit of ice and snow and are usually ten degrees colder than we are here. There were a few things that needed doing outside to winterize for the coming cold weather.
One of the main things that needed doing was cutting some limbs off some trees that were hanging over the house. The first ice storm would see them coated with ice and falling on the house, probably damaging the roof. We made a list of all that we wanted to accomplish that day and we pretty well finished the list.
I set out with the lawn mower first, and Suzie, reverting back to her young, country days, climbed a tree standing next to the house and perched on the roof to begin the mangling of limbs.
When she finished on that side, she proceeded to make her way to the other side of the house, for further manglement. However, she quickly discovered that was not going to happen. The roof was too steep. The mangling, pulling, cutting, breaking all had to be done from the ground. And we hoped that the breaking would not be any part of us, as the limbs came tumbling down.
Suzie has a tree saw, one of those long fellers that has the saw on the end. And you reach up with the long pole and saw from the ground, hopefully. I could not believe that the thing would work, but it did. We cut with that thing for a while and even tried the chain saw once, after being pleasantly surprised that it started. Standing on a tall ladder with a chain saw is not a good thing, we decided, because the limbs were too far to reach.
The yard mowing got put on the back burner, as I started to help the master limb-mangler. She cut and I dragged limbs. Cheyenne wanted to help, so he became assistant mangled-limb dragger. He wound up with a sticker in his toe, fell down over one of the limbs he was dragging and bruised his knee. I tell ya, life ain’t easy for a limb dragger, but he sure did sleep good that night.
We worked all day and into the night, but got a lot done. Our last project we completed by flashlight, hoping we would not fall over a copperhead, wandering around out there in the dark, us, not him. We wound up with our tongues hanging out, our hands and arms sore, various cuts and bruises here and there. We were very happy to have our Saturday night baths, whether we needed them or not, you know, and make our weary way to our beds. We were also very happy to have all done that we had done that day.
She and I agreed that it is a good thing that we are not wimpy women, considering all of the many things that we get to do in our lives.
I finally got the last of the mowing done before I left on Monday morning. So, things are in pretty good shape for winter now. And it’s fast approaching Oklahoma. The high for some days has been in the 50’s already and the weatherman is speaking of 30’s at night within the next few days up there.
With all that work done, let us relax with a book now. Seems as though I’m not getting to do that lately. Too much work everywhere to do, it seems. But, I can at least tell you about a new one, and perhaps you will have time to read it. Ole’ James Lee Burke and his detective Dave Robicheaux have been hard at work, solving another mystery. But they will surely need your help, the same as usual. "Last Car to Elysian Fields" is the title and here’s the low-down on it.
"For Dave, there is no easy passage home. New Orleans, and the memories of his life in the Big Easy, will always haunt him. So to return there – as he does in this novel – means visiting old ghosts, exposing old wounds, opening himself up to new, yet familiar, dangers.
When Dave, now a police officer based in the somewhat quieter Louisiana town of New Iberia, learns that an old friend, Father Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest always at the center of controversy, has been the victim of a particularly brutal assault, he knows he has to return to New Orleans to investigate, if only unofficially. What he doesn’t realize is that in doing so he is inviting into his life – and into the lives of those around him – an ancestral evil that could destroy them all.
The investigation begins innocently enough. Assisted by good friend and P.I., Clete Purcel, Dave confronts the man they believe to be responsible for Dolan’s beating, a drug dealer and porno star named Gunner Ardoin. The confrontation, however, turns into a standoff as Clete ends up in jail and Dave receives an ominous warning to keep out of New Orleans’ affairs.
Meanwhile, back in New Iberia, more trouble is brewing: Three local teenage girls are killed in a drunk-driving accident, the driver being the seventeen-year-old daughter of a prominent physician. Dave traces the source of the liquor to one of New Iberia’s "daiquiri windows," places that sell mixed drinks from drive-by-windows. When the owner of the drive-through operation is brutally murdered Dave immediately suspects the grief-crazed father of the dead teen driver. But his assumption is challenged when the murder weapon turns up belonging to someone else.
The trouble continues when Father Jimmie asks Dave to help investigate the presence of a toxic landfill near St. James Parish in New Orleans, which in turn leads to a search for the truth behind the disappearance many years before of a legendary blues musician and composer. Tying together all these seemingly disparate threads of crime is a maniacal killer named Max Coll, a brutal, brilliant, and deeply haunted hit man sent to New Orleans to finish the job on Father Dolan. Once Coll shows up, it becomes clear that Dave will be forced to ignore the warning to stay out of New Orleans, and he soon finds himself drawn deeper into a viper’s nests of sordid secrets and escalating violence that sets him up for a confrontation that echoes down the lonely corridors of his own unresolved past."