AARON CRown should
not have come back into our
lives. After all, he had never really been one of us, anyway, had he? His
family, shiftless timber people, had come from north Louisiana, and when they
arrived in Iberia Parish, they brought their ways with them, occasionally
stealing livestock along river bottoms, poaching deer, perhaps, some said,
practicing incest.
I first saw Aaron
Crown thirty-five years ago when, for a brief time, he tried to sell
strawberries and rattlesnake watermelons out on the highway, out of the same
truck he hauled cow manure in.
He seemed to walk
sideways, like a crab, and wore bib overalls even in summertime and paid a
dollar to have his head lathered and shaved in the barber shop every Saturday
morning. His thick, hair-covered body gave off an odor like sour milk, and the
barber would open the front and back doors and turn on the fans when Aaron was
in the chair.
If there was a
violent portent in his behavior, no one ever saw it. The Negroes who worked for
him looked upon him indifferently, as a white man who was neither good nor bad,
whose moods and elliptical peckerwood speech and peculiar green eyes were
governed by thoughts and explanations known only to himself. To entertain the
Negroes who hung around the shoeshine stand in front of the oldFrederick Hotel on Saturday mornings, he’d scratch matches alight
on his clenched teeth, let a pool of paraffin burn to a waxy scorch in the
center of his palm, flip a knife into the toe of his work boot.
