White Doves at Morning

Chapter Eleven

IT WAS sunset on the river now, and Abigail Dowling sat next to Flower Jamison on a rough-hewn bench in the pilothouse of Jean-Jacques LaRose's salvage boat as it moved northward against the current, past a wooded promontory dotted with campfires and the biscuit-colored tents of Confederate soldiers. The river was swollen and dark yellow from the summer rains, and back in the shadows under the overhang the water roiled with gars feeding on dead livestock.

Abigail thought about the work that lay ahead for her that night, and the prospect of it made her throat swallow. She had helped transport escaped slaves out of the wetlands, onto boats that waited for them in salt water, but this was not the same. This time she was going into the heart of enemy country, into a primitive and oftentimes cruel area not tempered by either the mercies of French Catholicism or its libertine and pagan form of Renaissance humanism. And she was taking others with her.

The conflicts of her conscience seemed endless, like the thinking processes of a neurotic and self-concerned girl incapable of acquiring her own compass, she thought. In moments like these she longed for the presence of herdead father. What was it he had once said about the obligations and restraints of those who fight the good fight of St. Paul? "We will do many things in the service of justice. But shedding blood isn't one of them. The likes of us have a heavy burden, Abby." In more ways than one, she thought.

The air smelled like sulfur and distant rain and smoke from cypress stumps that had been chain-pulled out of the dirt and set burning while still wet. Abigail looked out the back door of the pilothouse at the riverwater cascading in sheets off the paddle-wheel. For a moment she thought she saw a blue-sleeved arm and shoulder roll out of the froth in the boat's wake, then be lapped over and disappear. She rose to her feet and stared at the water's surface, the waves from the boat now sliding into the shore.

"Something wrong, Miss Abigail?" Flower asked.

"No, the light's bad. I imagine things sometimes," she replied. Jean-Jacques turned from the wheel and looked at her but said nothing. They followed the channel markers through a wide bend in the river and passed lighted plantation homes couched among cedar and oak trees, a half-sunken gunboat whose cannons and boilers had been removed, a slave cemetery whose banks were eroding into the river, cotton acreage that was still under cultivation in spite of the war, and a pine woods that had been sawed into a stump farm. Then the moon broke from behind the clouds and the river loomed up ahead of them, straight as far as the eye could see, immense, rain-dented, tree-lined, wrinkled with wind, blown with leaves and dust out of the fields.

Abigail looked over Jean-Jacques' shoulder at the raindrops striking against the glass.

"You're a problem of conscience for me," she said.

He turned around and squinted his eyes to show his incomprehension.

"I took advantage of your resentment toward Ira Jamison," she said.

"When this is all over, who you t'ink is gonna come out on top?"

"The Union," she replied.

"Remember who hepped you," he said.

But the rum on his breath belied his cavalier attitude. If they were caught, his fate and that of the two white men who fed the boiler belowdecks would not be an easy one. At best they would be sent to a prison where the convicts were literally worked to death. But chances were they would never make trial and would die on a tree.

Nor would the fate of Flower Jamison be much better-. Although Abigail had never witnessed an instance of branding or hamstringing herself, she had heard stories and had known slaves who turned to stone if they were questioned about the scars on their bodies.

But when she tried to imagine her own fate, she realized once again her risks were like those of a rear echelon officer in a war. Slavers might hate her; a bounty hunter could spit on her skirts; and a newspaper editorialist could refer to her as "Miss Lover-of-all-Darkies." But if they didn't respect her, they respected money, and they knew her family had been rich, at least at one time, and her father had been the friend of United States presidents from both the North and South and had served at the side of Jefferson Davis in the War of the Mexican Cession. It was doubtful she would ever die on a tree or experience the touch of a hot iron on her back.

Flower was sleeping with her head on her chest, the hat she had woven from palmetto leaves quivering from the vibration of the engines. Her face looked troubled, as though she had walked through a spiderweb in her dreams.

Abigail squeezed her hand.

"You're the bravest person I've ever known," she said.

Flower's eyes opened like the weighted eyelids on a doll.

"Brave about what?" she asked, unsure of where she was.

"We're almost there," Abigail said.

Flower smiled sleepily.

"My gran'mama never thought she could be free. I cain't believe this is happening, Miss Abigail," she said.

The river was blanketed with rain rings now, the moon buried deep in clouds, like a pool of scorched pewter. Jean-Jacques steered his boat past a lighted plantation home on a bluff, then rounded a bend where the land flattened and the river had risen into groves of willow and gum trees and out in a field a trash fire was burning inside the mist, the sparks fanning over the water.

Jean-Jacques blew out his breath and looked through the glass at the canvas that was stretched across the deck, swelling in the wind and tugging against the ropes that held it, canvas that in reality sheltered nothing except a few crates of tools and plowshares. He reached into his shirt and lifted a religious medal to his lips and kissed it.

"Lord, if you cain't forgive me all my sins, just don't remember them too good, no. Thank you. Amen," he said.

He steered the boat close to shore, until the overhang scratched against the gunnel and the top of the pilothouse, then shut down the paddle-wheel while his boatmates slipped the anchors on the bow and stern. Curds of yellow smoke rose from the trash fire burning in the field. A black man walked through the trees toward the boat, the fire bright behind him. He stood motionless on the bank, squinting at the darkened windows in the pilothouse.

"That's my uncle!" Flower said, and ran out on the deck.

"Why don't she yell it at them people in that plantation house back yonder?" Jean-Jacques said.

"We'll be back in a few minutes. It's going to be fine," Abigail said.

Lightning rippled through the clouds over the river. Jean-Jacques' face looked dilated, his eyes like black marbles. He pulled the cork from a green bottle and drank from the neck.

"Miss Abigail, my heart done aged ten years tonight. Get back quick with them colored people. Don't make me grow no older, no," he said.

"Fifteen minutes. You'll see," she said, and winked at him.

She and Flower went down the plank the boatmates had propped against the bank and followed Flower's uncle up an eroded coulee through a stand of gum trees. The mist was gray and damp, like a cotton glove, the air tannic with the smell of dead leaves that had pooled inside stagnant water. The coulee led like a jagged wound through a sweet potato field, steep-sided, thick with ferns and air vines, the soft clay at the bottom laced with the stenciled tracks of deer and possums and raccoons.

Lightning jumped between the clouds, and Abigail saw perhaps two dozen adults and children sitting down on each side of the stream at the bottom of coulee, their faces frightened, their belongings tied inside blankets.

A tall, thick-necked black woman, with cheekbones as big as a hog's, wearing an ankle-length gray dress, rose to her feet, her eyes fastened on Abigail.

"This the one?" she asked Flower, nodding at Abigail.

"There ain't… there isn't a better white person on earth," Flower said.

"Some white mens from Baton Rouge has talked slaves into running and turned them in for the bounty," the older black woman said.

"You're Flower's grandmother?" Abigail said.

"That's right."

"I don't blame you for your suspicions. But we don't have much time, ma'am. You must trust me or otherwise return to your home. You have to make that decision now," Abigail said.

Flower's grandmother picked up her bundle in one hand and took the hand of a little boy in another.

"The paddy rollers are scared of the Yankees. They was looking along the river with lanterns," she said.

"Then let's be gone," Abigail said.

They walked single file back down the coulee toward the river, the sparks from the fire in the field drifting over their heads. A thunderous clap of lightning struck in the trees, and behind her Abigail heard an infant begin to cry. She stepped out of the line and worked her way back to a teenage girl who was walking with an infant not over three or four months old in each arm.

"Cain't carry them both. I gots to go back," the girl said.

"No, you don't," Abigail said, and took one of the babies from her.

The line of people splashed ankle-deep down the coulee toward the sound of the river coursing through the willow trees in the shallows. Then they heard someone snap a dry branch off a tree and throw it angrily aside with a curse, as though an object of nature had deliberately targeted him for injury. A balloon of light burst out of the tree trunks and flooded the bottom of the coulee.

"Tell me y'all ain't the most bothersome bunch of ungrateful pea brains I ever seen," a voice said from behind the lantern.

His name was Olin Mayfield. He had a jug head and a torso that looked as soft as mush. He wore a slicker and a slouch hat whose brim had gone shapeless in the rain and an army cap-and-ball.44 revolver on his hip. When the light of his lantern swung into his face his eyes were as green and empty of thought as stagnant water in a cattle tank.

"No, I ain't gonna hit you. Just get your worthless asses out of the ditch and follow me back to the quarters. Colonel Jamison is gonna flat shit his britches," he said and he laughed. he carouched down to pull a woman up by her hand.

Then he stiffened, his nostrols swelling with air, as though the odor of a dangerous animal had suddenly wrapped itself around him. He rose from his crouch, turning, hoisting the lantern above his head, and stared straight into the face of Jean-Jacques LaRose.

Abigail watched the next events take place as though she were caught in a dream from which she could not wake. Olin Mayfield's expression shaped and reshaped itself, as though he could not decide whether to grin or to scowl. Then he gripped the heavy Colt revolver on his hip and pulled it halfway from his holster, his lip curling up from his teeth, perhaps, Abigail thought, in imitation of an illustration he had seen on the cover of a dime novel.

The knife Jean-Jacques carried in his right hand was made from a wagon spring, a quarter-inch thick, reheated and beveled down to an edge that was sharp enough to shave with, mounted inside an oak handle with a brass guard. He thrust the blade through Olin Mayfield's throat and extracted it just as fast.

Mayfield's mouth opened in dismay as the blood drained out of his head and face and spilled down his chest. Then he slumped to his knees, his head tilted on his shoulder, as though the trees and sweet potato fields and the empty wagons in the rows had become unfairly torn loose from their fastenings and set adrift in the sky.

His lantern bounced to the bottom of the coulee and hissed in the stream but continued to burn. Then the entire band of escaping slaves bolted for the shoreline and the gangplank that led onto Jean-Jacques' boat.

Abigail was at the end of the line as it moved past Olin Mayfield. He lay on his side, his mouth pursed open, at eye level with her, his hands on his throat. When she looked at the twitch in his cheek and the solitary tear in one eye and the froth on his bottom lip she knew he was still alive, unable to speak or to fully comprehend what had happened to him.

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

She gathered the infant she was carrying closer to her and dashed after the others.

AN hour later the rain stopped and the sky cleared and Abigail stood in the darkness of the pilothouse and looked out on the vast moonlit emptiness of the river and the black-green border of trees on the banks and the stump fires that smelled like burning garbage. She wondered if any sort of moral victory was possible in human affairs or if addressing and confronting evil only empowered it and produced casualties of a different kind.

The slaves had at first been terrified at the slaying of the paddy roller, but once they were in a new and seemingly secure environment, hidden inside the cargo hold or under the canvas on deck, the fear went out of their faces and they began to laugh and joke among themselves. Abigail had found herself laughing with them; then one man in the hold found a splintered piece of wood from a packing crate and hacked at the air with it, pretending he was executing Olin Mayfield. Everyone clapped their hands.

What had her father said? "We will do many things in the service of justice. But shedding blood isn't one of them." She drew a ragged breath and shut her eyes and saw again the scene in the coulee. What a mockery she had made of her father's admonition.

"You still t'inking about that man back there?" Jean-Jacques said. A palpable aura of rum and dried sweat and tobacco smoke rose from his skin and clothes.

"Yes, I am," she replied.

"He made his choice. He got what he deserved. Look out yonder. We got a lot more serious t'ings to deal wit'," he said.

They had just made a bend in the river and should have been churning past the Confederate encampment, unchallenged, on their way to New Orleans, with nothing to fear until they approached the Union ironclads anchored in the river north of the city. Instead, a ship-of-war with twin stacks was anchored close to the shore, and soldiers with rifles moved in silhouette across the lighted windows. A pair of wheeled cannons had been moved into a firing position on a bluff above the river and all the undergrowth and willows chopped down in front of the barrels. Abigail heard an anchor chain on the Confederate boat clanking upward through an iron scupper. Jean-Jacques wiped his mouth with his hand. "Maybe I can run it. But we gonna take some balls t'rew the starboard side," he said.

"Turn in to shore," she said.

"That don't sound like a good idea."

"Get everyone down below," she said.

"There ain't room," she said.

"You have to make some."

She pulled up her dress and lifted the bottom of her petticoat in both hands and began to tear at it. The petticoat was pale yellow in color and sewn with lace on the edges. Jean-Jacques stared at her, his face contorted.

"I ain't having no parts in this," he said.

"Get Flower to help you. Please do what I say."

He frowned and rubbed the stubble on his jaw.

"Leave me your knife," she said.

"My knife?"

This time she didn't speak. She fixed her eyes on his and let her anger well into her face.

He called one of his boat mates to take the wheel and went out on the deck and opened a hatch in front of the pilothouse. One by one the black people who were hidden under the canvas crawled on their hands and knees to the ladder and dropped down into the heat of the boiler room.

Abigail ripped a large piece out of her petticoat, and knelt on the floor with Jean-Jacques' knife and cut the cloth in a square the size of a ship's flag. Then she tied two strips from the trimmings onto the corners and went to the stern. She pulled down the Confederate flag from its staff and replaced it with the piece from her petticoat.

Jean-Jacques came back into the pilothouse and steered his boat out of the channel, into dead water, cutting the engines just as the Confederates came alongside.

"What we doing, Miss Abigail?" he asked. He watched two soldiers latch a boat hook onto his gunnel and throw a boarding plank across it.

She patted her hand on top of his. He waited for her to answer his question.

"Miss Abigail?" he said.

But she only touched her finger to her lips.

Then he glanced at the tops of his shoes and his heart sank.

A major, a sergeant and three enlisted men dropped down onto the deck. Jean-Jacques went outside to meet them, his smile as natural as glazed ceramic.

"Had a bad storm up there. It's cleared up all right, though," he said.

The faces of the soldiers held no expression. Their eyes swept the decks, the pilothouse, the canvas stretched across the front of the boat. But one of them was not acting like the others, Jean-Jacques noted. The sergeant, who was unshaved and wore his kepi low on his brow, was looking directly into Jean-Jacques' face.

"You see any Yanks north of here?" the major asked.

"No, suh," Jean-Jacques said.

The major lit a lantern and held it up at eye level. He was a stout, be-whiskered man, his jowls flecked with tiny red and blue veins. A gray cord, with two acorns on it, was tied around the crown of his hat.

"You'll find them for sure if you keep going south," he said.

"I give a damn, me," Jean-Jacques said.

"They can confiscate your vessel," the major said.

"What they gonna do, they gonna do."

"What's your cargo?" the major asked.

Before Jean-Jacques could answer Abigail stepped out in front of him.

"You didn't see our yellow warning?" she said.

"Pardon?" the officer said.

"We have yellow jack on board," she said.

"Yellow fever?" the major said.

"We're taking a group of infected Negroes to a quarantine and treatment station outside New Orleans. I have a pass from the Sanitary Commission if you'd like to see it."

The enlisted men involuntarily stepped back, craning their necks, looking about.

"Where are these infected Negroes from?" the major asked.

"Up the river. There's been an outbreak on two plantations," Abigail answered, busying herself inside her purse. She handed him a Sanitary Commission identification card. He cupped it in his palm but did not look at it.

"Where are they?" he asked.

"In the cargo hold."

"Something's not right here," the major said.

"Why is that?" she replied.

"Is that blood on your shoes?" the major asked Jean-Jacques.

Jean-Jacques studied his feet. "That's what it look like."

"Happen to know where it came from?" the major asked.

"People tole me I busted a bottle on a fellow's head last night. I ain't sure about that, though. I t'ink I would remember it if I done somet'ing that bad, me."

"Why are you transporting the Negroes in the hold?" the major asked.

"It's an airborne disease. Sir, why don't you inspect them and come to your own conclusions?" Abigail said.

The major's eyes broke. He brushed at one nostril and thought for a moment.

"I'll do it, sir," the sergeant interrupted.

"Very well," the major said.

Willie Burke hooked his hand through the bail of the lantern and walked aft. He hesitated a moment, then grasped the iron ring on the hatch and lifted it. His face darkened as he stared down into the hold.

"What is it?" the major asked.

"There appear to be a couple of families down here, sir," Willie replied.

"And?" the major said.

Willie wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I think their yellow flag is one we should heed, sir."

"Close it up," the major said. He handed Abigail her identification card. "You appear to be a brave woman."

"I'm not," she replied.

"Don't you people do this again," he said.

"Sir?"

"You know what I mean," the major said, and gestured for his men to follow him.

Willie passed within inches of her. He wore a mustache now and his faded gray shirt was tight on his body, his skin browned by the sun, his black hair ragged on his neck. His armpits were looped with sweat stains and he smelled of campfire smoke and leaves and testosterone.

His dark eyes met hers for only a moment, then he was gone.

A half hour later Abigail stood on the stern, the Confederate camp far behind her, and once again she looked at the great emptiness of the river and the coldness of the stars. She had never felt more desolate in her life. In her victory, the joy of danger and adrenaline had been stolen from her, and she was left to contemplate the lighted face of a dying man on the edge of a coulee, a red-veined bubble forming on his lips.