White Doves at Morning

Chapter Fourteen

THE morning did not feel like spring, Abigail thought. The air was hot and smelled of dust and trash fires, the sky gray, the clouds crackling with electricity. Then her neighbor's dogs began barking and she heard a banging noise down the Teche, like a houseful of carpenters smacking nails down in green wood. She walked out on the gallery and saw birds lifting out of the trees all the way down the street as a long column of soldiers and wagons rounded a bend in the distance and advanced toward the center of town.

The soldiers were unshaved, gaunt as scarecrows, some of them without shoes, the armpits of their butternut and gray uniforms white with salt, their knees patched like the pants on beggars. Three wagons carrying wounded passed in front of her. The teamsters in the wagon boxes were leaning forward, away from their charges, with handkerchiefs tied across their faces. The wind shifted, and she smelled the unmistakable odor of gangrene and of men who had become incontinent and left to sit in their own excretions. She saw no one with a surgeon's insignia in the column.

She walked out into the yard just as a mounted officer rode his horse to the head of column. He wore a slouch hat, a sweat-peppered gray shirt, no coat, and a pistol in a shoulder holster on his chest. His face was narrow, his skin as coarse and dark as if it had been rubbed with the dust from a foundry.

He picked his hat off his head by the crown and combed back his hair with his fingers.

"Still in our midst, are you?" he said.

"This is where I live," Abigail replied.

"Bring as many ladies as you can find up to the Episcopalian church," he said.

"You don't need to tell me my obligations, Captain Atkins," she replied.

"There's nothing like hearing a Yankee accent behind our own lines. But I'm sure you've been loyal to the cause, haven't you?"

"Where is Willie Burke?"

"Can't rightly say. Saw him puking his guts out last week. Don't think he was quite up to blowing railroad spikes into freed niggers."

"What?"

"You haven't heard? The Yanks give them uniforms and guns and permission to kill their previous owners. We waylaid a whole train-load of them. Made good niggers out of a goodly number."

Dry lightning rippled through the clouds. Atkins replaced his hat on his head and looked up at the sky.

"By the way, that was some of General Banks' skirmishers shooting behind us," he said. "They say he was a bobbin boy in one of your Massachusetts textile mills. Does not like rich people. No, sir. So he's turned his men loose on the civilian population. I hear they're a horny bunch. You might fasten on a chastity belt."

She wouldn't let the level of his insult register in her face, but the fact that he had insulted her sexually, in public, indicated only one conclusion about her status in the community: She was utterly powerless. She wanted to turn and walk away, but instead she fixed her eyes on the exhaustion in the faces of the enlisted men marching past her, the sores on the horses and mules, a mobile field kitchen whose cabinet doors swung back and forth on empty shelves.

"Captain Atkins, I suspect you may be a gift from God," she said.

His head tilted sideways, an amused question mark in the middle of his face.

"Sometimes we're all tempted to think of our own race as being superior to others," she said. "Then we meet someone such as yourself and immediately we're beset with the terrible knowledge that there's something truly cretinous at work in the Caucasian gene pool. Thank you for stopping by."

He studied her for a moment and scratched his cheek, his gaze slightly out of focus. He touched his horse with one spur and rode slowly toward the front of the column, his head bent down as though he were lost in thought. Then he reined his horse in a circle and rode back to Abigail's gate. He leaned with both arms on the pommel, the leather creaking under his weight. His flat, hazel eyes looked like they had been cut out of another face and pasted on his own.

He pointed at her with a dirt-rimmed fingernail. "A pox on you, you snooty cunt. Be assured your comeuppance is in the making," he said.

When Abigail arrived at the brick church at the far end of Main Street, the pews had been upended against the walls and the injured placed in rows on the floor. She peeled bandages from wounds that were rife with infection, scissored the trousers and underwear off men who had fouled themselves, and bathed their bodies with sponges and soap and warm water. A local physician, untrained as a surgeon, created an operating table by propping a door across two pews, then sawed limbs off men as though he were pruning trees. After each patient was carried away, he threw a bucket of water on the table and began on the next. There was no laudanum, and Abigail had to hold the heel of her hand in one man's mouth to keep him from biting through his tongue.

Outside, she heard men and horses running in the street, their gear clanking, a wheeled cannon bouncing off a parked wagon, then the spatter of small-arms fire in the distance.

"Are you with the 18th?" she asked a private who lay on a litter, a mound of bloody rags on the floor beside him.

He nodded. His eyes were receded in his face, his cheeks hollow. The bones in his chest looked like sticks under his skin. One pants leg had been cut away, and a swollen red line ran from a bandage on his thigh into his groin.

"What happened out there?" she asked.

"We divided our numbers and tried to fight on both sides of the bayou. They chewed us up. They been running us for six days."

"Do you know where Willie Burke is?"

"Lieutenant Burke?"

"Yes."

"Captain Atkins put him on rear guard."

"You mean now?"

"Yes, ma'am," the soldier said.

"Captain Atkins recently saw Lieutenant Burke?" she said.

But the soldier's eyes had lost interest in her questions.

"Fix my arms and my feet," he said.

"Pardon?"

"You know what I mean. Fix me," he said.

She started to speak, then gave up the pretense, the lie, that was in reality an insult to the dying. She folded his arms across his chest and lifted his good leg and pressed it close to the other, then tied his ankles with a strip of rag. His tin identification disk, with a leather thong looped through a hole at the top, was clenched tightly in his palm.

"Do you want me to write a letter to someone?" she asked.

"No, no letter," he said. His eyes filled with a terrible intensity and roved the vaulted ceiling above him, where a bird was battering itself against the glass windows, trying to escape into the treetops outside. "I stole money from a poor man once. I had a wife and wasn't good to her. I did mean things to others when I was a boy."

"I bet you were forgiven of your sins a long time ago," she said.

"Lean close," he said.

She bent down over his face, turning her ear to his mouth. His breath touched her skin like a moist feather.

"When I'm dead, set my tag so it's up and down between my teeth and knock my jaws shut," he whispered.

She nodded.

"If you got your tag in your mouth, they got to put your name on a marker," he said.

"I'll make sure. I promise," she said.

"I'm scared, ma'am. Ain't nobody ever been as scared as I am right now."

She raised her head and gazed down at him, but whatever conclulion he had reached about the unchartcred course of his life or the fear that had beset him in his last moments had already drifted out of his face like ash off a dead fire.

The bird he had been watching dipped under the arch of the front doorway and lifted into the sky, its wings throbbing.

THE next day Flower Jamison rose before sunup and lit her wood-stove and fixed coffee that was made from chicory and ground acorns. Then she lit the lamp on her table and in the misty coolness between false dawn and the moment when the sun would break above the horizon she removed from under her bed the box of books and writing materials given her by both Willie Burke and later by Abigail Dowling and opened the writing tablet in which she kept her daily journal.

She no longer hid her books or her ability to read them from white people. But her fear of her literacy being discovered did not leave her as a result of any decision or conscious act of her own. It had simply gone away as she looked about her and saw both privation and the cost of war on distant battlefields indelibly mark the faces of those who had always exercised complete power and control over her life. She could not say that she felt compassion or pity for them. Instead, she had simply come to realize that the worst in her life was probably behind her, and adversity and struggle and powerlessness were about to become the lot of the plantation owners who had seemed anointed at birth and placed beyond the reach of the laws of mortality and chance and accident.

At least that is what she thought.

Outside her window the new cane was green and wet inside the mist and she could hear it rustling when the wind blew from the south. She placed her dictionary next to her writing tablet and began writing, pausing on every fourth or fifth word to look up a spelling:

Last night there was either shooting or thunder down the bayou. The dead were took out of the back of the church and laid on the grass under a oak tree. There were flashes of light in the sky and a loud explosion in the bayou. A free man of color say a yankee gunboat was blowed up and fish rained down in the trees and some hungry people picked them up with their hands for food to eat.

Miss Abigail ask me why I come back from New Orleans when I could stay there and he free. I told her this is my home and inside myself I'm free wherever I go. I told her I want to stay and help other slaves escape up the Mississippi to the north. I have been telling myself this too.

I cannot be sure this is exactly truthful. This is my thoughts for this morning.

Respectfully, Flower Jamison

She looked back down at her words in the lamplight, then gazed out the window at the blueness of the dawn and a calf wandering out of the cane field. The calf caught a scent on the breeze and ran toward a cow that stood on the lip of the coulee in a grove of swamp maples.

Flower picked up her pencil and wrote at the bottom of the folded-back page in her tablet:

Post Script-I know I should hate him. But it is not what I feel. Why would a man not love his own daughter? Or at least look at her the way a father is suppose to look at his child? All people are the same under their skin. Why is my father different? Why is he cruel when he does not have to be?

LATE that afternoon Flower filled the caulked cypress tub behind the slave quarters with water she drew from the windmill, then bathed and put on a clean dress and began her pickup route, stopping first at the back door of Carrie LaRose's brothel.

Carrie LaRose could have been the twin of her brother, Scavenger Jack. She was beetle-browed, big-boned, with breasts the size of pumpkins and red-streaked black hair that grew on her head like snakes. She wore a holy medal and a gold cross around her neck, a juju bag tied above her knee and paid a traiteur to put a gris-gris on her enemies and business rivals. Some said she had escaped a death sentence in either Paris or the West Indies by seducing the executioner, who bound and gagged another woman in Carrie's prison cell and took her to the guillotine in Carrie's stead.

Flower paid little attention to white people's rumors, but she did know ont thing absolutely about Carrie La Rose, she either possessed the powers of prophecy and knew the future or she was so knowledgeable about human weakness and the perfidious and venal nature of the world that she could predict the behavior of people in any given situation with unerring precision.

Cotton speculators, arms dealers, munitions manufacturers, and slave traders came to her bordello and had their palms read and their lust slaked in her bedrooms and gladly paid her a commission on their profits.

Early in the war a Shreveport cotton trader asked her advice about risking his cotton on a blockade runner.

"How much them British gonna pay you?" she asked.

"Three times the old price," the cotton trader replied.

"What you t'ink them textile mills in Mass'chusetts gonna pay?" she asked.

"I don't understand. We're not trading with the North," he said.

"That's what you t'ink. The cotton don't care where it grow. Them Yankees don't, either. They rather have it come up to the Mis'sippi than go t'rew the blockade to the British. The blockade runners gonna bring guns back to the Confederates."

The cotton traders who listened to Carrie increased their profits six – and sevenfold.

But those who sought her advice and the service of her girls and sometimes the opium she bought from a Chinaman in Galveston little realized she often listened to their confessions and manifestations of desire and infantile need by putting her ear to a water glass she pressed against the walls of their rooms. On Saturday nights her brothel roared with piano music and good cheer. On Monday mornings a New Orleans export-importer might discover a profitable business deal had been stolen from under his feet.

Flower stripped the sheets from the mattresses in the bedrooms and piled them in the hallway. Outside, the western sky was streaked with gold and purple clouds and under an oak tree in the dirt yard three paddy rollers were drinking whiskey at a plank table. The wind puffed the curtains and blew through the hallway, and Flower could smell watermelons and rain in a distant field. She thought she was by herself, then she heard a board creak behind her and turned around and saw Carrie LaRose sitting in a chair, just inside the kitchen door, watching her, a contemplative expression on her face.

"Why you want to do this shit, you?" Carrie asked.

"Ma'am?"

"I could set you up in your own house, make you rich."

Flower wadded up the dirty linen she had thrown in the hallway and the dresses of Carrie LaRose's higher-priced girls and tied them inside a sheet.

"Don't know what you mean, Miss Carrie," she said.

"Don't tell me that, no. In a week or two this town's gonna be full of Yankees and all you niggers are gonna be free. A pretty li'l t'ing like you can make a lot of money. Maybe you t'inking about selling out of your drawers on your own."

"You don't have the right to talk to me like that, Miss Carrie."

Carrie LaRose looked at her nails. She wore a frilled beige dress, her hair piled on top of her head, a silver comb stuck in back.

"You could have stayed in New Orleans and been free. But you come back here, to a li'l town on the bayou, where you're a slave," she said.

"I don't mess in your bidness, Miss Carrie. Maybe you ought to keep out of mine."

It was silent except for the muffled conversation of the paddy rollers in the yard and the wind popping the curtains on the windows. Flower could feel Carrie LaRose's eyes on her back.

"You come back 'cause of Ira Jamison. You keep t'inking one day he's gonna come to your li'l house and tell you he's your daddy and then all that pain he give you for a lifetime is gonna go away," Carrie LaRose said.

Flower felt the skin draw tight on her face.

"I'll be getting on my way," she said.

"He ain't wort' it, girl. Learn it now, learn it later. Ain't none of them wort' it. They want your jellyroll wit' the least amount of trouble possible. The day you make them pay for it, the day you got their respect."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't play the dumb nigger wit' me."

"I'm fixing to be free, Miss Carrie. It doesn't matter what anybody say to me now. I can read and write. Words I don't know I can look up in my dictionary. I can do sums and subtractions. Miss Abigail and Mr. Willie Burke say I'm as smart as any educated person. I'm fixing to be anything I want, go anywhere I want, do anything I want, and I mean in the whole wide world. How many people can say that about themselves?"

Carrie LaRose propped her chin on her fingers and studied Flower's face as though seeing it for the first time. Then she looked away with an age-old knowledge in her eyes that made something sink in Flower's chest.

The wind was picking up now as she loaded her laundry bags into the carriage behind the brothel. The three paddy rollers were still at the plank table under the oak tree, their heads bent toward one another in a private joke. After the war had begun they had postured as soldiers, carrying the mail from the post office out to Camp Pratt or guarding deserters and drunks, but in reality everyone knew they were mentally and physically unfit for service in the regular army. One man was consumptive, another harelipped, and the third was feebleminded and had worked as a janitor in the state home for the insane.

Flower was about to climb up into the carriage when Rufus Atkins rode into the yard and stopped under the oak tree. He did not acknowledge her or even look in her direction. The three paddy rollers grinned at him and one of them lifted their whiskey bottle in invitation. Atkins dismounted and pulled his shoulder holster and pistol down over his arm and hung them from the pommel of his saddle. His eyes lit on Flower momentarily, seeming to consider her or something about her for reasons she didn't understand. Then the object of his concern, whatever it was, went out of his face and he took a tin cup from his saddlebags and held it out for the harelipped man to pour into. But he remained standing while he drank and did not sit down with the three men at the table.

Flower continued to stare at him, surprised at her own boldness. He stopped his conversation with the paddy rollers in mid-sentence and looked back at her, then set his cup down on the table and walked toward her, the leaves from the oak tree puffing into the great vault of yellow-purple sky behind him.

He wore boots and tight, gray cavalry pants with gold stripes down the legs, a wash-faded checkered shirt, and a slouch hat sweat-stained around the crown. A canvas cartridge belt with loops designed for the new brass-cased ammunition was buckled at an angle on his narrow hips.

"You have something you want to say, Flower?" he asked.

"Not really."

"You bear me a grudge?" he said.

"Miss Carrie in there knows prophecy. Some people say Mr. Willie Burke got the same gift. But folks such as me don't have that gift," she said.

"You're not making a whole lot of sense."

"I cain't read the lines in somebody's palm. But I know you're gonna come to a bad end. It's because you're evil. And you're evil because you're cruel. And you're cruel because inside you're afraid."

He stared into the distance, his fists on his hips, his weight resting casually on one leg. Rain was blowing off the Gulf, like spun glass across the sun. He shook his head.

"I tell you the truth, Flower, you're the damnedest nigger I've ever known and the best piece of rough stock I ever took to bed. That said, would you please get the hell out of here?" he said.

As she rode away in the buggy, she looked back over her shoulder and saw Rufus Atkins counting out a short stack of coins into the palm of each of the paddy rollers. A shaft of sunlight fell on the broad grin of the feebleminded man. His teeth were as yellow as corn, his eyes filled with a liquid glee.