White Doves at Morning

Chapter Twenty-eight

ABIGAIL Dowling whipped her buggy horse down the road and into the entrance of Rufus Atkins' property. She felt a sickness in her chest and a dryness in her throat that she could compare only to a recurrent dream in which she was peering over the rim of a canyon into the upended points of rocks far below. She waited for the voices to begin, the ones that had called her a traitor and poseur who fed off the sorrow and the inadequacies of others, the voices that had always drained her energies and robbed her of self-worth and denied her a place in the world that she could claim as her own. But this time she would fight to keep them in abeyance; she would rid herself of self-excoriation and for once in her life surrender herself to a defining, irrevocable act that would not only set her free but save an innocent like Flower Jamison from bearing a cross that an unjust world had placed on her shoulders.

What would her father say to her now? God, she missed him. He was the only human being whose word and wisdom she never doubted. Would he puff on his pipe silently, his eyes smiling with admiration and approval? But she already knew the answer to her question. That jolly, loving, Quaker physician who could walk with beggars and princes would have only one form of advice for her in this situation, and it would not be what she wanted to hear.

She cracked the whip on her horse's back and tried to empty her mind of thoughts about her father. She would think about the pistol that rested on the seat beside her, substituting one worry for another, and concentrate on questions about the residue of dried mud she had seen wedged between the cylinder and the frame and inside the trigger guard, about the possibility the caps were damp or that mud was impacted inside the barrel.

The rain was as hard and cold as hail on her skin. The convicts were climbing down from the house frame, raking water out of their hair and beards, grinning at the prospect of getting off work early. She reined up her horse and stepped down into the mud.

"Hold up there, missy," the foreman said.

His stomach was the size of a washtub and he wore an enormous vest buttoned across it and a silver watch on a chain. A black trusty guard in prison stripe pants and a red shirt and a palmetto hat stood behind him, the stock of a shotgun propped casually against his hip, his ebony skin slick with rain, his eyes fastened on the outdoor kitchen under the live oak where the cooks were preparing the midday meal.

"My business is with Mr. Atkins," she said.

"Hit ain't none of mine, then. But, tell me, missy, what's that you got hid behind your leg?" the foreman said.

"Are you a Christian man?"

"I try to be."

"If you'd like to see Jesus today, just get in my way and see what happens," she said.

The foreman snapped open the cover on his watch and looked at the time, then snapped the cover closed again and replaced the watch in his vest pocket. "I reckon I've had enough folks fussing at me in one day. How about we eat us some of them beans?" he said to the trusty guard.

Abigail stepped up on the plank walkway that led to Rufus Atkins' tent. The rain was slackening now, the sun breaking from behind a cloud, and the sky seemed filled with slivers of glass. She paused in front of the tent flap and cocked back the hammer on the revolver with both thumbs.

Then her hands began to shake and she lowered the pistol, her resolve draining from her like water through the bottom of a cloth sack. Why was she so weak? Why could she not do this one violent act in defense of a totally innocent creature whom the world had abused for a lifetime? In this moment, caught between the brilliance of the rain slanting across the sun and the grayness of the cane fields behind her, she finally knew who she was, not only a poseur but an empty vessel for whom stridence had always been a surrogate for courage.

She heard a rumbling sound on the road and turned and saw Willie Burke and Robert Perry crouched forward in a wagon, the boy named Tige clinging to the sides in back. Willie had doubled over the reins in his hands and was laying the leather across his horses' flanks.

So once more she would become the burden of others, to be consoled and protected and mollified, a well-intended, neurotic Yankee who was her own worst enemy.

But if she couldn't kill, at least she could put the fear of God in a rotten piece of human flotsam like Rufus Atkins.

She raised the pistol and threw back the tent flap and stepped inside just as a man emerged from a curtain and a tangle of mosquito netting in back, his posture stooped in order to get through the netting, a metal object in his right hand. His eyes lifted to hers, just before she pointed the revolver with both hands and squeezed the trigger and a dirty cloud of smoke erupted into his face.

Her ears rang from the pistol's report. Then she heard his weight collapse as he sank to one knee, a bright ruby in the center of his forehead, the muscle tone in his face melting, his arm fighting for purchase on top of a worktable, like an unpracticed elderly man whose belated attempt at genuflection had proved inadequate.

Outside the tent, she dropped the revolver from her hand and walked toward the stunned faces of Willie Burke, Robert Perry, and Tige McGuffy.

"I killed Ira Jamison by mistake. But I'm glad he's dead just the same. God forgive me," she said.

"You shot Ira Jamison?" Willie said.

"He had a wind chime in his hand. A silly little wind chime," she said.

She buried her face in Willie's chest. He could feel the muscles in her back heaving under the flats of his hands and could not tell if she was laughing or sobbing.

THE rain stopped and the air filled with a greenish-yellow cast that was like the tarnish on brass. The wind came up hard out of the south, flattening the cane in the fields, whipping the tent in which Ira Jamison died, riffling water in the irrigation ditches, scattering snow egrets that lifted like white rose petals above the canopy in the swamp. Out over the Gulf a tree of lightning pulsed without sound inside a giant stormhead.

As an old man Willie Burke would wonder what the eyes of God saw from above on that cool, windswept, salt-flecked August day of 1865. Did His eyes see the chime pried from Ira Jamison's dead hand and Robert Perry's revolver substituted for it?

Or did His eyes choose not to focus on an individual act but instead on the great panorama taking place below Him, one that involved all His children-leased convicts perched like carrion birds on a house frame in the middle of a wetlands, abolitionists and schoolteachers whose altruism was such they flayed themselves for their inability to change the world's nature, slavers whose ships groaned with sounds that would follow them to the grave, mothers and fathers and children who had no last names and would labor their lives away for the profit of others without ever receiving an explanation?

Did God's eyes see the past, present and future taking place simultaneously, perhaps on a mist-shrouded, alluvial landscape threaded by Indians and Spanish and French explorers and Jesuit missionaries, its hummocks surrounded with either saw grass or endless rows of cotton and cane, its earth pounded with the hooves of mounted jayhawkers and Confederate guerrillas or covered with flocks of birds and roving herds of wild animals, its mists flaring with either the spatter of musket fire and the red glow of burning crosses or lanterns lighting quiet residential streets and children at play in the yards?

Sometimes in the clarity of his sleep Willie Burke saw the same protean landscape he believed God saw, and a long column of soldiers wending their way toward the horizon, their butternut uniforms crusted with salt, their bullet-rent flags aflame in the sunset, a sergeant-major in a skull-tight kepi counting cadence, "Reep, reep, reep," while a brass band thundered out a joyful song like the one that had made Jim Stubbefield wonder if there wasn't something glorious about war after all. For reasons Willie did not understand, he wanted to join their ranks and disappear with them over the rim of the earth.

But in the mornings the dream escaped his grasp and his days were often filled with memories he shared with no one.

Then, five years after that late August afternoon when Abigail Dowling shot down Ira Jamison, Willie woke to an early frost, to the smell of wood smoke and the sound of trees stiff with ice and breakfast wagons creaking across stone. He walked out into the freshness of the dawn and, in a place inside his mind that had nothing to do with reason, he once again remembered his speculation about how the eyes of God viewed creation. He stood on the gallery in his nightshirt, the sunlight breaking on his bare feet, and imagined himself caught between the Alpha and the Omega, in the hush of God's breath upon the world, and for just a second believed he actually heard the words I am the beginning and the end. I am He who makes all things new.

In that moment he let go of his contention with both the quick and the dead and experienced an unbridled gladness of heart. He was a participant in the great adventure, on the right side of things, a celebrant at the big party, a role that until the day of his death no one would ever be able to deny him.