Jimmy Ray Dixon was one of those in-your-face people who insult and demean others with such confidence that you always assume they have nothing to hide themselves.

It's a good ruse. Just like offering a lie when no one has challenged your integrity. For example, lying about how you lost a hand in Vietnam.

After Jimmy Ray and his entourage had left the dock, I'd called a friend at the Veterans Administration in New Orleans.

The following day, when I got back to the department from the LaRose plantation, my friend called and read me everything he had pulled out of the computer on Jimmy Ray Dixon.

He didn't lose a hand clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy outside Pinkville. A gang of Chinese thieves, his business partners in selling stolen PX liquor on the Saigon black market, cut it off.

A cross-referenced CID report also indicated Jimmy Ray may have been involved in smuggling heroin home in GI coffins.

So he lied about his war record, I thought. But who wouldn't, with a file like that?

That was not what had bothered me.

At the dock Jimmy Ray had said somebody had shot into his home and had killed his brother.

His home.

I went to the public library and the morgue at the Daily Iberian and began searching every piece of microfilm I could find on the assassination of Ely Dixon.

Only one story, in Newsweek magazine, mentioned the fact that Ely was killed in a two-bedroom house he rented for fifty dollars a month from his brother, Jimmy Ray, to whom the article referred as a disabled Vietnam war veteran.

I drove back to the department and went into the sheriff's office.

"What if the wrong man was killed?" I said.

"I have a feeling my interest is about to wane quickly," he said.

"It was the sixties. Church bombings in Birmingham and Bogalusa, civil rights workers lynched in Mississippi. Everybody assumed Ely Dixon was the target."

"You're trying to figure out the motivation on a homicide that's twenty-eight years old? Who cares? The victim doesn't. He's dead just the same."

He could barely contain the impatience and annoyance in his voice. He turned his swivel chair sideways so he wouldn't have to look directly at me when he spoke.

"I like you a lot, Dave, but, damn it, you don't listen. Leave the LaRoses alone. Let Aaron Crown fall in his own shit."

"I told Helen we don't execute people in Iberia Parish."

"Don't be deluded. That's because the electric chair doesn't travel anymore."

He began fiddling with a file folder, then he put it in his desk drawer and rose from his chair and looked out the window until he heard me close the door behind me.

Batist went home sick with a cold that evening, and before supper Alafair and I drove down to his house with a pot of soup. His wife had died the previous year, and he lived with his three bird dogs and eight cats on a dirt road in an unpainted wood house with a sagging gallery and a peaked corrugated roof, a truck garden in a side lot and a smokehouse in back. The sparse grass in his yard was raked clean, his compost pile snugged in by chicken wire, his crab traps stacked next to a huge iron pot in the backyard where he cooked cracklings in the fall.

Over the years, in early spring, when he broke the thatched hard-pan on his garden, his single-tree plow had furrowed back bits of square nails, the rusted shell of a wagon spring,.58 caliber minié balls, a corroded tin of percussion caps, a molded boot, a brass buckle embossed with the letters CSA, the remains from a Confederate encampment that had probably been overrun by federals in 1863.

I first met Batist when I was a little boy and he was a teenager, a blacksmith's helper in a rambling, red barnlike structure on a green lot out on West Main. Batist worked for a frail, very elderly man named Mr. Antoine, one of the last surviving Confederate veterans in the state of Louisiana. Every day Mr. Antoine sat in the wide doors of his smithy, to catch the breeze, in red suspenders and straw hat, the skin under his throat distended like an inverted cock's comb.

Anyone who wished could drop by and listen to his stories about what he called "the War."

Few did.

But I'll never forget one he told me and Batist.

It was during Jubal Early's last assault on the federals before the surrender at Appomattox. A fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama was the only unwounded survivor of his outfit. Rather than surrender or run, he tied a Confederate battle flag to an empty musket and mounted a horse and charged the union line. He rode two hundred yards through a bullet-cropped cornfield littered with southern dead, his colors raised above his head all the while, his eyes fixed on the stone wall ahead of him where five thousand federals waited and looked at him in disbelief.

Not one of them fired his weapon.

Instead, when the boy's horse labored up the slope and surged through a gap in the wall, three federal soldiers pulled him from the saddle and took his colors and pinioned him to the ground. The boy flailed and kicked until one soldier in blue said, "Son, you ain't got to study on it no more. You're over on the Lord's side now."

Mr. Antoine slapped his thigh and howled at the implications of his story, whatever they were.

Later, I would read a similar account about Cemetery Ridge. Maybe it was all apocryphal. But if you ever doubted Mr. Antoine's authority as a veteran of the Civil War, he would ask you to feel the cyst-encrusted pistol ball that protruded like a sparrow's egg below his right elbow.

The irony was the fact that the man who probably knew more firsthand accounts of Mr. Antoine's War, and the man who grew food in the detritus of a Confederate encampment, was a descendant of slaves and did not know how to read and write and consequently was never consulted as a source of information by anyone.

He sat down with the soup at the kitchen table in a pair of slippers and surplus navy dungarees and a denim shirt buttoned at the throat. The sun glimmered off the bayou through the trees behind his house.

"Fat Daddy Babineau brought me some poke chops, but they ain't good for you when you got a stomach upsetness. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, though," he said.

"You going to be all right by yourself?" I said.

"I'm gonna be fine." He looked at Alafair, who was examining some minié balls on his kitchen shelf. Then he looked back at me.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Fat Daddy just left. I was fixing to call you." He kept his eyes on my face.

"Alf, you want to take the truck to the four corners and get a half gallon of milk?" I said.

"Pretty slick way of getting rid of me. But… okay," she said, one palm extended for the keys, the other on her hip.

"Fat Daddy seen this man bring his pirogue out of the swamp," Batist said after Alafair had gone out the door. "Him and his wife was fishing on the bank, and this big nigger wit' one side of his head shaved paddled out of the trees. It was the same morning you seen that man wit' a light out past our dock, Dave.

"Fat Daddy said this big nigger had gold teet' and arms thick as telephone poles. There was a gun up in the bow, and when Fat Daddy seen it, the nigger give him such a mean look Fat Daddy's wife wanted to get in the car. It's the same man come to our shop, ain't it?"

"It sounds like him."

"That ain't all of it, no. Fat Daddy and his wife was walking down the levee when they seen the same nigger again, this time busting out the bottom of the pirogue with his foot. He smashed big holes all over it and sunk it right in the canal. Why he want to do somet'ing like that?"

"Who knows? Maybe he didn't want to leave his fingerprints around."