White Doves at Morning

Chapter Three

BY AFTERNOON of the same day the telegraph had carried the news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter to New Iberia, and Camp Pratt, out on Spanish Lake, was suddenly filled with young men who stood in long lines before the enlistment tables, most of them Acadian boys who spoke no English and had never been farther from Bayou Teche than the next parish. The sky was blue through the canopy of oak trees that covered the camp, the lake beaten with sunlight, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, the plank tables in front of the freshly carpentered barracks groaning with platters of sausage, roast chickens, boudin, smoked ducks, crab gumbo, dirty rice, and fruit pies that had been brought in carriages by ladies who lived in the most elegant plantation homes along the bayou.

Willie's tall friend, Jim Stubbefield, sat barefoot in his militia uniform, his back against a cypress tree by the water's edge, and drank from a cup of buttermilk and looked with puzzlement at the festive atmosphere in the camp. He turned to a young man in civilian clothes sitting next to him and said, "Robert, I think the fates are not working properly here. I enlisted two months ago and no one seemed to notice."

His friend was named Robert Perry. His hair grew over his collar and was the color of mahogany, his face handsome, his blue eyes never troubled by fear or self-doubt or conflict with the world around him.

"I'm sure it was just an oversight on the community's part," he said.

Jim continued to stare in a bemused way at the enlistment lines, then his gaze locked on one individual in particular and he chewed on a piece of skin on his thumb and spit it off his tongue.

"I think I've made a mistake," he said.

"A man with your clarity of vision? Seems unlikely," Robert said.

"Look there. Willie's joining up. Maybe at my urging."

"Good for Willie," Robert said.

"I doubt Willie has it in him to shoot anyone," Jim said.

"Do you?"

"If they come down here, I figure they've asked for it."

"I doubt if it was easy for Willie to come here. Don't rob him of his self-respect," Robert said, rising to his feet, pressing a palm down on Jim's shoulder.

"Your father owns over a hundred and eighty niggers, Robert. You ought not to be lecturing to the rest of us."

"You're entirely right, Jim," Robert said. He winked at Jim and walked toward the recruitment table, where Willie Burke had just used quill and ink to enter his name among a long list of French and Spanish and Anglo-Saxon ones, many of them printed by an enlistment officer and validated by an X.

But Robert soon realized Jim's premonitions about their friend were probably correct, that the juncture of Willie Burke and the Confederate army would be akin to a meeting of a wrecking ball and a crystal shop.

Captain Rufus Atkins stepped out of a tent, in a gray uniform and wide-brimmed ash-colored hat with a gold cord and a pair of tiny gold icons tied around the crown. A blond man, his hair as greasy as tallow, wearing a butternut uniform with corporal's chevrons freshly sewn on the sleeves, stood behind him. The corporal's name was Clay Hatcher.

"Where do you think you're going, young Willie?" Atkins asked.

"Back home," Willie answered.

"I think not," Atkins replied. He looked out at the lake and the moss blowing in the trees, the four-o'clocks riffling in the shade. "One of the privies needs dipping out. After you finish that, spread a little lye around and that will be it until this evening. By the way, are you familiar with the poetry of William Blake?"

"Never heard of him," Willie replied.

"I see. Better get started, young Willie. Did you bring a change of clothes?" Atkins said.

"Excuse me, sir, but I didn't join the army to ladle out your shit-holes. On that subject, can you clear up a question that has bedeviled many in the community? Is it true your mother was stricken with the bloody flux when you were born and perhaps threw the infant away by mistake and raised the afterbirth instead?"

The corporal to the side of Rufus Atkins pressed his wrist to his mouth to stop from snickering, then glanced at Atkins' face and sucked in his cheeks.

"Let me gag and buck him, Cap'n," he said.

Before Atkins could answer, Robert Perry walked up behind Willie.

"Hello, Captain!" Robert Perry said.

"How do you do, Master Robert?" Atkins said, bowing slightly and touching his hat. "I saw you signing up earlier. I know your father is proud."

"My friend Willie isn't getting off to a bad start in the army, is he?" Robert said.

"A little garrison duty, that's all," Atkins said.

"I'm sure if you put him in my charge, there will be no trouble," Robert said.

"Of course, Master Robert. My best to your father," Atkins said.

"And to your family as well, sir," Robert said, slipping his hand under Willie's arm.

The two of them walked back toward the lake to join Jim Stubbefield at the cypress tree. Willie felt Robert's hand tighten on his arm.

"Atkins is an evil and dangerous man. You stay away from him," Robert said.

"Let him stay away from me," Willie replied.

"What was that stuff about William Blake?"

"I have a feeling he found a book I gave to a Negro girl."

"You did what?" Robert said.

"Oh, go on with you, Robert. You don't seem bothered by the abolitionist tendencies of Abigail Dowling," Willie said.

"I love you dearly, Willie, but you're absolutely hopeless, unteachable, beyond the pale, with the thinking processes of a stump, and I suspect an extra thorn in Our Savior's crown," Robert said.

"Thank you," Willie said.

"By the way, Abigail is not an abolitionist. She's simply of a kind disposition," Robert said.

"That's why she circulated a petition begging commutation for John Brown?" Willie said. He heard his friend make a grinding noise in his throat.

THAT evening Willie bathed in the clawfoot tub inside the bathhouse on the bayou, then dried off and combed his hair in a yellowed mirror and dressed in fresh clothes and walked outside into the sunset and the breeze off the Gulf. The oaks overhead were draped with moss, their limbs ridged with lichen, and the gardenias and azaleas were blooming in his mother's yard.

Next door, in a last patch of yellow sunshine, a neighbor was boiling crabs in an iron pot on a woodfire. The coolness of the evening and the fecund heaviness of the bayou and a cheerful wave from his neighbor somehow made Willie conclude that in spite of the historical events taking place around him all was right with the world and that it should not be the lot of a young man to carry its weight upon his shoulders.

He strolled down East Main, past the Shadows and the wide-galleried, gabled overseer's house across the street, past other homes with cupolas and fluted columns that loomed as big as ships out of the floral gardens that surrounded them.

He paused in front of a shotgun cottage with ventilated green shutters set back in live oak and pine trees, its windows lighted in the gloom, a gazebo in the side yard threaded with bougainvillea. He heard a wind chime tinkle in the breeze.

The woman who lived inside the cottage was named Abigail Dowling. She had come to New Iberia from Massachusetts as a nurse during a yellow fever epidemic and had stayed, working both in the clinic and teaching in a private school down the street. Her hair was thick, chestnut-colored, her skin without blemish, her bosom and features such that few men, including ones in the company of their wives, could prevent themselves from casting furtive glances at.

But for many her ways were suspect, her loyalties questionable, her candor intimidating. On one occasion Willie had asked her outright about rumors he'd heard.

"Which rumors might that be?" she said.

"A couple of Negroes who disappeared from plantations out by Spanish Lake," he replied.

"Yes?" she said, waiting.

"They got through the paddy rollers. In fact, it looks like they got clean out of the state. Some say you might be involved with the Underground Railroad, Miss Abigail."

"Would you think less of me?" she replied.

"A lady who hand-feeds those with yellow jack and puts their lives ahead of her own?" he said.

But she was not reassured.

Now, in the gloaming of the day, he stood on her gallery and tapped on her door, his straw hat in hand, a discomfort in his chest he could not quite define.

"Oh, good evening, Miss Abigail, pardon me for dropping by unexpectedly, but I thought you might like to take a walk or allow me to treat you to a dessert down at the cafe," he said.

"That's very nice of you," she said, stepping outside. She wore a plain blue cotton dress, buttoned not quite to the throat, the sleeves pushed up on her arms. "But someone is due to drop by. Can we just sit on the steps for a bit?"

"Sure," he said, hoping his disappointment did not show. He waited for her to take a seat on the top step, then sat on the step below her.

"Is something bothering you, Willie?" she asked.

"I enlisted today. Out at Camp Pratt. I'm just in the Home Guards now, but I suspect we'll be formed into regular infantry directly."

The darkening sky was full of birds now, sweeping above the chimneys, the oaks loud with cicadas and the throbbing of tree frogs.

After a long silence, she said, "I'm sure in your own mind you did the right thing."

"My own mind?" he said, and felt his face color, both for his rudeness in mimicking her statement and because he was angry at himself for seeking absolution from her, as though he were not possessed of either humanity or a conscience himself.

"I don't judge you, Willie. Robert Perry is enlisting, too. I think the world of you both," she said.

"Robert believes in slavery. I don't. He comes from a wealthy family and has a vested interest in seeing the Negro race kept subservient. That's the difference between us," he said, then bit his lip at the self-righteousness in his voice.

"Robert is reading for the law. He doesn't plan to be a plantation or slave owner." She paused when she saw the injury in Willie's eyes. "Why are you enlisting?"

Because I'm afraid to be thought a coward, a voice inside him said.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing. I said nothing," he replied. He looked out at a carriage passing in the street. Don't say anymore, for God's sakes, he told himself. But his old enemy, his impetuosity, held sway with him once again.

"I think all this is going to be destroyed. By cannon shot and fire and disease, all of it wiped out," he said, and waved his hand vaguely at the palm trees in the yards, the massive houses hidden inside the live oaks, a paddle-wheeler churning on the Teche, its lighted windows softly muted inside the mist.

"And you make your own life forfeit for a cause you don't respect? My God, Willie," Abigail said.

He felt the back of his neck burning. Then, when he believed matters could get no worse, he looked up and saw Robert Perry rein his horse in the dusk and dismount and enter the yard, removing his hat.

"Good evening, Miss Abigail. You too, Willie. Did I break in on something?" Robert said.

Robert waited for a reply, his face glowing with goodwill.

TWO hours later Willie Burke was on his fourth glass of whiskey in the brick saloon next to Carrie LaRose's brothel. The plank floor was scattered with sawdust and burned by cigars and stained with tobacco juice around the cuspidors. Hand towels hung from brass rings along the bar, and above the bar mirror was a painting of a reclining nude, her bottom an ax-handle wide, her stomach like a soft pink pillow, her smile and pubic hair and relaxed arms an invitation to enter the picture frame with her.

Willie wanted to concentrate on the lovely lines of the woman in the painting and forget the events of the day, particularly the fact he had been so foolish as to enlist in the Home Guards. But the man standing next to him, one Jean-Jacques LaRose, also known as Scavenger Jack, was giving a drunken lecture to anyone within earshot, pounding his fists on the bar, denouncing Secessionists, Copperheads in the North who encouraged them, and people stupid enough to join the army and serve their cause.

Unlike his sister, Carrie LaRose, who owned the bordello next door, Scavenger Jack operated on the edges of legitimate society, hauling away Chitimacha burial mounds that he mixed with manure and sold for high-grade fertilizer, exporting weevil-infested rice to plantation operators in the West Indies whose food costs for their workers were running too high, and, rumor had it, luring ships onto a reef with a false beacon off Key West in order to salvage the cargo.

He was a huge man, his black hair and beard streaked with red, a scar across his nose like a flattened worm. His bull neck was corded with veins, his teeth like tombstones, his shoulders so broad they split the seams of his coat.

"Let me ax you gentlemen somet'ing. When them Yankees blockade our ports, 'cause that's what they gonna do, how you gonna get your sugar and salt and cotton out of Lou'sana, you? Round up the crawfish and pile it on their backs?" he said to his audience.

"Now, Jean-Jacques, there's more involved here than money," said a member of the town council and part owner of the bank, an older man with an egg-shaped, pleasant face. "The Negroes have already heard about the firing on Fort Sumter. A lady in St. Martinville caught her cook with cyanide this morning. But I worry more about the Negro male population being turned loose on our women. That's the kind of thing these abolitionists have encouraged."

"Them rich people couldn't convince y'all to fight for their cotton, no. So they got all them newspapers to start y'all t'inking about what's gonna happen to your jelly roll. That done it when nothing else did," Jean-Jacques said.

"That's not called for, Jean-Jacques. We're all serious men here and we speak respectfully of one another," the older man said.

"What y'all fixing to do is ruin my bidness. You t'ink a black man who work all day in the field got nothing on his mind except sticking his pole up your wife's dress?" Jean-Jacques said.

"You should give some thought to your words, sir," the older man said, lowering his eyes, his throat coloring. Then he collected himself and said to the bartender, "Give my friend Jean-Jacques another drink."

Jean-Jacques belched so loudly the men at the billiard table turned around, startled.

"Better enjoy your own drink, suh. The liquor in here come off my boats. What y'all gonna drink after them Yankees shut me down?" Jean-Jacques said.

But Willie had long ago given up listening to the self-serving arguments about the moral validity of Secession. Rarely did logic and humanity have any influence over the discussion. Instead, the most naked form of self-interest always seemed to drive the debate, as though venality and avarice had somehow evolved into virtues. He thought about the slave girl Flower and the fact that her literacy had to be concealed as though it were an object of shame.

He wondered if Rufus Atkins had found Flower's notebook as well as the collection of William Blake's poems. What had he done? Why had he not listened to his mother or his friend Jim Stubbefield?

He drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass, then sipped from a pitcher of warm beer that he was using as a chaser. He looked at the mouth and breasts of the woman in the painting and through the open window heard someone playing a piano in the brothel next door. His head reeled and the room seemed to tip sideways, and his ears buzzed with sound that had no meaning. The oil lamps in the saloon were like whorls of yellow color inside the cigar smoke that layered the ceiling. The whiskey had brought him no relief and instead had only created a hunger in his loins that made him bite his lip when he looked at the woman above the bar mirror.

Oh Lord, quiet my desires, he thought. And immediately focused his gaze on the woman's form again. He swallowed the rest of his whiskey in one gulp and thought he was going to fall backward.

"Gag and buck," he said to no one.

"What did you say, Willie?" Jean-Jacques asked.

"What does 'gag and buck' mean?"

"You don't want to find out. You ain't gone and signed up for the army, you?"

"I did."

Po' Willie, why ain't you come to see me first?" Jean-Jacques said, and cupped his hand on the back of Willie's neck.

"You're a criminal," Willie said.

"But I got my good points too, ain't I?"

"Undoubtedly. Oh, Jean-Jacques, I've made a mess of things," Willie said.

Jean-Jacques put his mouth close to Willie's ear. "I can put you on a boat for Mexico when it's the right time. Let's go next door to my sister's and get your ashes hauled," he said.

"That's a grand suggestion, and please don't hold it against me for not acting on it. But I have to puke," Willie said.

He reeled out the back door into an overgrown coulee and bent over behind a tree just as an enormous volume of whiskey and beer and pickled food surged out of his stomach. He gasped for breath, then rinsed his face in a rain barrel and dried it on his shirt. The night air was soft with mist, the moon buried in the clouds above the cane fields. Next door the piano player was playing a minstrel song titled "Dixie's Land." Willie shouldered a mop propped against a cistern and began a parody of close-order drill in the yard behind the brothel, then flung aside the flap on the tent in the side yard and marched through the row of cots inside, counting cadence for himself, "Reep… reep… reep," saluting two naked people caught at the worst possible moment in their coupling.

He continued out the far end of the tent and on down the road, passing a horseman whose face was shadowed by a wide hat. The wind changed, and he saw dust blowing out of the fields and a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. He left the road and crossed the dirt yard of the laundry where Flower worked and walked through the iron pots in the backyard and the wash that was flapping on the clotheslines and stopped by the back window of her cabin.

"Flower?" he said.

He heard her rise from her bed, then push open the wood flap on the window with a stick.

"What you doing, Mr. Willie?" she asked.

"Did Rufus Atkins come upon the poetry book I gave you?"

"Yes, suh, he did."

"Did he report you?"

"No, suh, he ain't done that. I mean, he didn't do that."

"Come close, so I can see your face."

"You don't sound right, Mr. Willie," she said.

"Did Rufus Atkins make you do something you didn't want to?"

"I ain't got no control over them things. It don't do no good to talk about them, either."

"I've done you a great harm, Flower."

"No, you ain't. I mean, no, you hasn't. You better go back home now, Mr. Willie."

He was about to reply when he heard horses out on the road.

"Who's that?" he said.

"The paddy rollers. Oh, suh, please don't let them catch you here," she said.

He walked back through the yard and the darkness of the oaks that grew on each side of the laundry. He was sweating now, the wind suddenly cold on his face. He heard thunder crack in the south and rumble across the sky, like apples tumbling down a wooden chute. He stepped out on the road and walked toward the lights in the saloon and the tinny music in Carrie LaRose's brothel, his pulse beating in his wrists, his palms damp, a tightness in his throat he could not quite explain.

There were six riders spread across the road in front of him, led by a seventh man in a rain slicker and flop hat, like cavalry advancing on an enemy position, their saddles hung with pistols and coils of rope and braided whips, their faces bladed with purpose.

"Hold your hands out by your sides, friend," the leader said.

"I think not. Unless you have governance over a white man talking a walk," Willie said.

The leader rode his horse forward. Lightning rippled through the clouds overhead and the wind flattened the tops of the young cane in the fields. The leader of the horsemen leaned down on his pommel, the saddle creaking with the shift in his weight.

"We've got five niggers unaccounted for tonight. It isn't a time for cleverness, Mr. Willie," he said.

"Oh, it's Captain Atkins, is it? This is a coincidence. I'm on a mission of recovery myself. I took my laundry to the Black girl, whats her name, Flower, the one owned by Mr. Jamison? I think I dropped one or two of my books out of my saddle bags.You didn't find them did you?"

"Maybe you and I will have a talk about that later," Atkins said.

"Mr. Jamison often visits at the Shadows. I'll mention it to him. Is there anything I should report about amorous relationships on your part with his niggers?" Willie said.

Atkins' ringed finger clicked up and down on the stitched top of his pommel.

"A word of caution to you, Mr. Willie. You were at the home of the abolitionist woman this evening. Now I see you in a neighborhood where five slaves didn't report for bell count. Be aware there are others besides I who feel you bear watching," Atkins said.

"Say again?"

"Robert Perry saved his little tit-sucking momma's boy of a friend from being gagged and bucked today. Don't expect that kind of good fortune again," Atkins said.

"Thank you, sir. It's a great honor to be excoriated by a miserable fuck and white trash such as yourself," Willie said.

He brushed past Atkins' horse and walked through the other riders, the cane in the fields whipping in the wind, dust and rain now blowing across the lighted front of the saloon.

He heard Atkins' boot heels thud against his horse's sides and barely had time enough to turn before Atkins rode him down, whipping the lead ball on the butt of his quirt handle across Willie's head.

He felt the earth rush up at him and explode against his face. Then the booted legs of the paddy rollers surrounded him and through a misting rain he thought he heard the song "Dixie's Land" again.

"Since he likes the abolitionist woman so much, dump him in the nigger jail," Atkins said.

Then Willie was being lifted over a saddle, his wrists and feet roped together under the horse's belly. As the horse moved forward blood dripped out of Willie's hair onto his shirtsleeves and the dust from the horse's hooves rose into his nostrils.

But a huge man stepped into the middle of the road and grasped the horse's bridle.

"You're a constable and I cain't stop you from taking him in, Mr. Atkins. But if there's another mark on him in the morning, I'm gonna strip the clothes off your body on Main Street and lay a whip to your back, me," Jean-Jacques LaRose said.

Atkins was dismounted, his stature diminutive in contrast to Jean-Jacques LaRose. He pressed his quirt against Jean-Jacques' chest, bowing the braided leather back on itself.

"Would you care to see your sister's business establishment shut down?… You don't?… I knew you were a man of reason after all, Jack," he said. He tapped his quirt softly on Jean-Jacques' chest.

A half hour later Willie lay on a wood bunk inside a log jail, an iron manacle around his ankle. Two Negroes sat on the dirt floor against the far wall, barefoot, their knees drawn up before them. Their clothes were torn, their hair bloody. They smelled of funk and horse barns and night damp and fish that had soured on their stomachs. He could hear them breathing in the dark.

"You men ran from your owners?" Willie asked.

But they would not answer him. In the glow of the moon through the barred window their faces were running with sweat, their eyes red, their nostrils cavernous. He could see the pulse jumping in one man's throat.

He had never seen fear as great in either man or beast.