He saw angels everywhere: Teams of two, armed with swords, protect gateways; one sits playing a harp; another holds an hourglass; three have their arms in the air and their heads thrown back in celebration; sterner angels point the way to eternity. Three flying angels accompany a procession of 11 figures winding their way along a brick-lined path. Hill placed himself in many of the tableaux. He rides a horse, or he carries Christ's cross and stands with long hair and a beard, his heart bleeding, in a circular cement base inscribed with the message "It is emty [sic]."

Siporski was so entranced that he returned soon afterward to take photographs and interview Hill. When Siporski spoke with him last fall, Hill hadn't touched any of the pieces all summer. "This part of my life is done," Hill told Siporski. Siporski tried to get him to expound on the site's meaning.

"Is this your vision?" Siporski asked.

"It's about living and life and everything I've learned," Hill replied.

Siporski gently urged him to be more specific. Instead, Hill got vague. "It was like talking to a guru -- very Zen," Siporski recalls. "It was my job to find out what it meant. If he had to explain, I obviously didn't get it." Hill talked on and on and on about wanting people to come and experience his dioramas, and he was not unintelligent.

"If he'd cleaned himself up and put on a suit," Siporski says, "you'd think he was an old college professor, talking about how it takes the whole being to make art. He was way beyond art as a thing."

A recluse doesn't make a lot of acquaintances, and tracking down information on Hill is an uphill battle. No one in the office at Patterson High School remembers him, nor can anyone find a record of him graduating. In Chauvin, most people never laid eyes on him. He never wandered into Sportsman's Paradise just across the bayou, though a waitress there heard he was "odd in the head and temperamental."

As nobody knows Hill, nobody knows what triggered his abrupt departure. At the fire station next to the library, one of the firefighters speculates that financial problems drove Hill away. As Siporski pieces it together, Hill misunderstood his obligations to the IRS: He seemed to think the government was going to take any money he made, so he stopped working. Soon he could no longer pay the rent. Then his mother died. Siporski believes Hill's sense of loss was intensified by increasing guilt about the limited contact he maintained with his children after he moved to Chauvin.

Over at Danny's Fried Chicken, patrons suggest he went overseas to make money. Customers at the Pizza Express disagree. They say he took off for Arkansas to hide in the woods near his brother. Siporski, Allamel and Hill's former neighbor, Julius Neil, concur. Some of the locals use the Cajun expression "comme une bétaille" -- like a wild beast -- when describing Hill's existence in lands farther north.

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