White Doves at Morning

Chapter Eight

THE first day Abigail Dowling reported to work as a volunteer nurse at the Catholic hospital on St. Charles Avenue, she realized her experience with the treatment of yellow fever had not adequately prepared her for contrasts.

At first it was heartening to see the Union ironclads anchored on the river, plated and slope-sided, their turreted cannons an affirmation of the North's destructive potential, the American flag popping from the masts. But somehow the victory of her own people over the city of New Orleans rang hollow. She had anticipated seeing anger in the faces of the citizenry, perhaps feelings of loss and sorrow, but instead she saw only fear and she didn't know why.

The hospital was two stories, constructed of brick that was webbed with ivy, set far back under live oak trees, with a scrolled-iron veranda on the second story. Two wings extended out toward the street, creating a garden-like area in the center that was planted with pink and gray caladium, banks of philodendrons and elephant ears, climbing roses, banana trees, bamboo, crepe myrtle and azaleas, whose blooms puffed in the wind and tumbled on the grass.

She walked with a white-clad nun down a long wood hallway that glowed from hours of polishing done by women who prayed inside sweltering habits while they scrubbed floors on their hands and knees. The intermittent statues of the saints, daily dusted from the crowns of their heads to the soles of their feet, could have been the votive patrons of cleanliness and order. Then Abigail passed a Union sentry and entered the ward for Confederate prisoners who had survived surgery in field hospitals and had been shipped south from Shiloh on commandeered riverboats.

Abigail fought to keep her face empty of expression when she looked upon the men in the rows of beds, the covered ceramic slop jars set neatly in front of each bed. Field surgeons had often sawed the limb right at the trunk, offering no chance for a prosthesis. Some men had only sockets for eyes, a scooped-out hole for a nose, a mouth without a jaw, a tube of useless flesh for an arm or leg after the bone had been removed.

The lucky ones had stumps that ended in puckered scar tissue that was still pink with circulation. But some had been condemned to die the death of the damned twice, their limbs cut without benefit of ether or laudanum by a field surgeon using a saw he cleaned on an old shirt soaked in whiskey. Then, when they thought their ordeal was over, they discovered that gangrene had taken hold under their bandages and their swollen flesh had turned the color of an eggplant.

"Some of the nuns put rosewater on a handkerchief and pretend they have a cold," the sentry at the door told her. His accent was a distorted echo of her own, Boston or New York or Rhode Island, a man who had probably operated a dray or worked in a fish market or at the firehouse.

"I'm not bothered by it," she replied.

"Come back at night. When we have to close the windows because of the mosquitoes and they start pitching around in their sleep, knocking over slop jars and yelling out and such," he said.

The sentry was thin and nice-looking, with startling blue eyes, a fresh haircut and a trimmed mustache. A bayonet was fixed on the rifle that was popped butt-down between his feet.

"Yesterday, when I got off the boat, I heard a great commotion by the Mint," she said.

"The Rebs tore down our flag and ripped it up in the street. They're not gracious losers."

"I see," she said.

"One of them is about to get a taste of General Butler today. You know what the general said? 'They don't respect our stars, they'll feel our stripes.' Pretty clever, if you ask me," the sentry said.

"I don't quite follow you," she said.

"Go down to the Mint this evening and get an eyeful."

She started to walk away.

"Don't feel sorry for these Rebs, ma'am. They've lorded it over the darkies all their lives and never had to work like the rest of us. Now, they're going to get their comeuppance. If you want to see an example of His Southern Highness, check behind the screens at the end of the room," the sentry said.

Later, as she was carrying out slop jars to the lime pit in back, she glanced through an opening between two mobile partitions fashioned from mosquito netting. Propped up on pillows by the window was a bare-chested and handsome man wrapped with bandages across his rib cage and lower back and shoulder. The bandages on the rib cage were spotted with two dark red circles the size of quarters.

The shutters on the window were open, and the dappled light that filtered through the philodendron shifted across his face like gold leaves floating on water. His eyelids looked as thin as paper, traced with tiny blue veins. His breath was so shallow he seemed barely alive.

"Colonel Jamison?" she said.

He turned his head on the pillow and opened his eyes, his brow furrowed, like a man waking from an angry dream. His lips were dry and gray, and he seemed to rethink a troubling idea in his head, then correct the expression in his face, as though by choice he could manifest the personae he wanted to present to the world.

"Miss Abigail? You have a way of showing up in the most unexpected fashion," he said.

"You were taken prisoner at Shiloh?" she said.

"Truth be known, I don't remember it very well. For sure, they planted three balls in me. Would you mind putting a teaspoon of lemon water in my mouth?"

When she picked up the bowl from the nightstand his mouth opened and waited like a communicant's. She placed the teaspoon of crushed ice and mint leaves and lemon on his tongue. His throat made a dry, clicking sound when he swallowed and for just a moment color seemed to bloom in his cheeks. On the nightstand were a gilded leather-bound Bible and a saucer with three conically shaped.36 caliber pistol rounds on it.

She tried to remember the name of his regiment. Was it the Orleans Guards?

"Do you have news of a soldier named Willie Burke? He was with the 18th," she said.

A shadow seemed to slide across Jamison's brow.

"On the first day we were supposed to be on their flank. There was a great deal of confusion. They went up the slope on their own."

"Do you know of Willie?" she asked again.

"No, I know no one by that name. I was wounded the following day. If I live through this war, I'll always be associated with the destruction of the 18th Louisiana. I hope the balls they dug out of my flesh somehow atone for my failure."

She studied his face and could not decide if what she saw there was remorse or self-pity. His fingers touched hers.

"I apologize for my behavior in your home, Miss Abigail. I'm an aging widower and sometimes give in to romantic inclinations that are the product of my years," he said.

His eyes tried to hold hers, but she turned from him and picked up a partially covered wooden bucket filled with encrusted bandages. An odor rose into her nostrils that made the skin of her face stretch against the bone.

"The surgeon says my intestines were probably damaged. There's a term for it," he said.

"Peritonitis?"

"Yes."

She pressed down the lid on the wooden bucket and let her face show no expression. When she returned from the lime pit he was looking out the window at a sunshower falling on the live oaks and floral gardens between the hospital and the street.

"Flower is attending me. She'll be here this evening," he said.

"Pardon?" Abigail said.

"I had her brought from New Iberia. She's a good girl, isn't she?"

He turned his head on the pollow and smiled. For the first time she looked upon him with pity and wondered if indeed, as her religion taught, there were those who found genuine erdempion in their last days.

HER thoughts were still on the colonel and his illegitimate daughter, the slave girl Flower, when she took a public carriage downtown that evening and walked to the room provided her by the Sanitary Commission. She stopped at the open-air market and bought a fried catfish sandwich and sat on a bench by the river, watching the paddle-wheelers in the sunset and the children playing in the street. The wind smelled of wet trees and rain falling on warm stone in a different part of the city, and when she closed her eyes she felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life.

She had dedicated herself to the plight of the infirm and the abandoned and the oppressed who had no voice, hadn't she? Why this unrelieved sense of loneliness, of always feeling that the comforting notion of safe harbor would never be hers?

Because there was no one solidly defined world she belonged to, no one family, no one person, she thought. She saw herself in an accurate way only twice during any given twenty-four-hour period, at twilight and at false dawn, when the world was neither night nor day, when shadows gave ambiguity a legitimacy that sunlight did not.

Amid the cries of children wheeling barrel hoops down the street and a band playing in front of a saloon, she heard another sound, a guttural shout, like a visceral cheer from a single individual who spoke for many. Then she heard collective laughter and yelling, a crowd moving up the street toward the U.S. Mint, a mixture of soldiers trying to maintain the appearance of discipline, loafers from the saloons, drunk prostitutes, a dancing barefoot Negro in green felt pants and a red-and-white-striped hat, a man with a peg leg stumping his way along the edge of things, a dwarf carrying a parasol over his head, grinning with a mouthful of tombstone teeth.

In the center of the crowd was a disheveled and terrified white man, his hands shackled behind him with a chain and heavy metal cuffs. He wore a thin mustache that looked grease-penciled on his upper lip, like an actor playing a villain in a cheap melodrama. He twisted his head back and forth, pleading to anyone who would listen. But his words were lost in their jeers.

"What did he do?" Abigail asked an elderly man with a goatee sitting next to her, his hands folded on the crook of a cane.

"He was wearing a piece of the ripped flag in his buttonhole," the man replied.

Then she remembered the account given her by the sentry, something about a man who had torn down the Stars and Stripes from the front of the U.S. Mint.

"The army knows it was he?" she asked.

"I don't think they care. He's a cardsharp by trade," the elderly man replied.

She set down her sandwich on the piece of newspaper it had come wrapped in and stood up from the bench.

"My God, what are they going to do?" she said. When the man on the bench didn't reply, she tried again. "Who's in charge of this?"

His eyes looked at her casually, as though he were considering the implications of her accent before he answered.

"General Butler. 'Spoons' Butler to some. He has a way of ending up with people's silverware. Where you from, anyway?" the man said.

She walked hurriedly toward the balloon of people who surrounded the man in manacles, her shoes splashing in water. She jerked on a soldier's arm.

"What are you going to do to this man?" she asked.

"Whatever it is, it's none of your business. Go back to the edge of the street," the soldier replied.

"You take me to your commanding officer," she said.

"Maybe you should kiss my smelly bum, too," he said.

"What did you say?" she said.

He shifted his rifle to his left hand and spun her in the opposite direction, then pushed her hard between the shoulder blades, snapping her head back. When she turned around again, the other soldiers had already worked their captive inside the building.

Someone on the second story pulled aside the curtains above the empty flag staff that protruded from the bricks. She could see the man in manacles fighting now, butting the soldiers with his head, spitting at their faces.

She tried to push her way inside the door and was shoved back by a sentry. She heard he crowd roar behind her and looked up, just as the manacled man was hoisted onto the windowsill, a narrow-gauge greased length of rope looped around his throat. He fell three feet ingo space before the rope came taut.

But his neck did not snap. Brick mortar shaled from his shoes and fell on her head and shoulders as he twisted on the rope and his feet kicked against the wall.

She fought her way back through the crowd and suddenly found herself inside the collective odor of its members, the dried sweat under the perfume and caked body powder, the dirty hair, the wine breath and decayed meat impacted between their teeth, all of it washing over her in a fetid wave as they shouted out their ridicule of the man whose eyes bulged like walnuts above them, some twisting their own heads and sticking their tongues out the sides of their mouths in mockery.

She pushed her way to the edge of the crowd into the open. She dropped her purse in a mud puddle and almost fell down when she tried to pick it up. The whistle of a steamboat screamed on the river and one of the ironclads fired off a cannon in celebration of the hanging. Then a black woman took her around the waist and walked with her toward the open-air market and the empty bench where a cat was eating the sandwich Abigail had left behind.

"You gonna be all right, Miss Abigail. No, no, don't watch what them people are doing no more. You and me are just gonna keep putting one foot after the other and not worry about them folks back yonder," the black woman said.

"Is that you, Flower?" Abigail said.

"Sure it is, Miss Abigail. I ain't gonna let you down, either," Flower said.

"That poor man."

"No, no, do what I tell you and don't be looking over there," Flower said, touching Abigail's eyes with her fingers. "You a brave lady. I wish I was as brave as you. One day everybody gonna know how brave you been, how much you done for us. I'm gonna see to it."

When they sat down on the bench together they clenched hands like schoolchildren. The palm and banana trees along the levee clattered in the wind off the river, and the deepening color of the sky made her think of the purple cloak Jesus was supposedly made to wear at his crucifixion. The street was empty now. The manacled man hung like a long, narrow exclamation mark against the wall of the Mint.

"My own people did this. Those who claim to be the voice of justice," Abigail said.

"But we didn't. That's what counts, Miss Abigail. You and me didn't do it. Sometimes that's about all the relief the world give you," Mower said.

"It's not enough," Abigail said.