White Doves at Morning

Chapter Five

AFTER Willie reported to Camp Pratt and began his first real day of the tedium that constituted life in the army, he knew it was only a matter of time before he would empower Rufus Atkins to do him serious harm. One week later, after an afternoon of scrubbing a barracks floor and draining mosquito-breeding ponds back in the woods, he and Jim Stubbefield were seated in the shade on a bench behind the mess hall, cleaning fish over a tub of water, when Corporal Clay Hatcher approached them. It was cool in the shade, the sunlight dancing on the lake, the Spanish moss waving overhead, and Willie tried to pretend the corporal's mission had nothing to do with him.

"You threw fish guts under Captain Atkins' window?" Hatcher said.

"Not us," Willie said.

"Then how'd they get there?" Hatcher asked. "Be fucked if I know," Jim said.

"I was talking to Burke. How'd they get there?" Hatcher said. "I haven't the faintest idea, Corporal. Have you inquired of the fish?" Willie said.

"Come with me," Hatcher said.

Willie placed his knife on the bench, washed his hands in a bucket of clean water, and began putting on his shirt, smiling at the corporal as he buttoned it.

"You think this is funny?" Hatcher said.

"Not in the least. Misplaced fish guts are what this army's about. Lead the way and let's straighten this out," Willie said. He heard Jim laugh behind him. "I can have those stripes, Stubbefield," Hatcher said. "You can have a session with me behind the saloon, too. You're not a bleeder, are you?" Jim said.

Hatcher pointed a finger at Jim without replying, then fitted one hand under Willie's arm and marched him to the one-room building that Rufus Atkins was now using as his office.

"I got Private Burke here, sir," Hatcher said through the door. Atkins stepped out into the softness of the late spring afternoon, without a coat or hat, wearing gray pants and a blue shirt with braces notched into his shoulders. He had shaved that morning, using a tin basin and mirror nailed to the back side of the building, flicking the soap off his razor into the shallows, but his jaws already looked grained, dark, an audible rasping sound rising from the back of his hand when he rubbed it against his throat.

"He says he didn't do it, sir. I think he's lying," Hatcher said. Atkins cut a piece off a plug of tobacco and fed it off the back of his pocketknife into his mouth.

"Tell me, Private, do you see anyone else around here cleaning fish besides yourself and Corporal Stubbefield?" he said.

"Absolutely not, sir," Willie replied.

"Did Corporal Stubbefield throw fish guts under my window?"

"Not while I was around," Willie said.

"Then that leaves only you, doesn't it?" Atkins said.

"There could be another explanation, sir," Willie said.

"What might that be?" Atkins asked.

"Perhaps there are no fish guts under your window," Willie said.

"Excuse me?" Atkins said.

"Could it be you still have a bit of Carrie LaRose's hot pillow house in your mustache, sir?" Willie said. Atkins' eyes blazed.

"Buck and gag him. The rag and stick. Five hours' worth of it," he said to the corporal.

"We're s'pposed to keep it at three, Cap," Hatcher said.

"Do you have wax in your ears?" Atkins said.

"Five sounds right as rain," Hatcher replied.

WILLIE remained in an upright ball by the lake's edge for three hours, his wrists tied to his ankles, a stick inserted between his forearms and the backs of his knees, a rag stuffed in his mouth. A stick protruded from each side of his mouth, the ends looped with leather thongs that were tied tightly behind his head.

Water ran from his tear ducts and he choked on his own saliva. The small of his back felt like a hot iron had been pressed against his spine. He watched the sun descend on the lake and tried to think of the fish swimming under the water, the wind blowing through the trees, the way the four-o'clocks rippled like a spray of purple and gold confetti in the grass.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rufus Atkins mount his horse and ride out of the camp. The pain spread through Willie's shoulders and wrapped around his thighs, like the tentacles of a jellyfish.

Jim Stubbefield could not watch it any longer. He pulled aside the flap on the corporal's tent and went inside, closing the flap behind him. Hanging from Jim's belt was a bowie knife with a ten-inch blade that could divide a sheet of paper in half as cleanly as a barber's razor.

Hatcher was combing his hair in a mirror attached to the tent pole when Jim locked his arm under Hatcher's neck and simultaneously stuck the knife between his buttocks and wedged the blade upward into his genitals.

"You cut Willie loose and keep your mouth shut about it. If that's not acceptable, I'll be happy to slice off your package and hang it on your tent," Jim said.

Two minutes later Corporal Hatcher cut the ropes on Willie's wrists and ankles and the thong that held the stick in his mouth. Willie stumbled back to the tent he and Jim shared and fell on his cot. Jim sat down next to him and gazed into his face.

"What's on your mind, you ole beanpole?" Willie said.

"You have to stop sassing them, Willie," Jim said.

"They cut bait, didn't they?" Willie said.

"What do you mean?" Jim asked.

"I outlasted them. They're blowhards and yellow-backs, Jim."

"I put a bowie to Hatcher and told him I'd make a regimental flag out of his manhood," Jim said.

"Go on with you?" Willie said, rising up on his elbows. "Hey, come back here. Tell me you didn't do that, Jim."

But Jim had already gone out the tent flap to relieve himself in the privy.

Willie got up from his cot and walked unsteadily behind the mess hall and picked up the severed pieces of rope that had bound his wrists and ankles and the salvia-soaked gun rag that had been stuffed in his mouth and the sticks that had been threaded under his knees and pushed back in his teeth. He crossed the parade ground to Corporal Clay Hatcher's tent and went inside.

A small oil lamp burned on the floor, a coil of black smoke twisting from the glass up through an opening in the canvas. Hatcher slept on his side, in a pair of long underwear, his head on a dirty pillow, his mouth open. The inside of the tent smelled like re-breathed whiskey fumes, unwashed hair, and shoes someone had worn for long hours in a dirt field.

Willie kicked the cot. Hatcher lifted his head uncertainly from the pillow, his pale blue eyes bleary with sleep.

Willie threw the sticks and pieces of rope and thong into his chest. "God love Jim for his loyalty to a friend. But you finish your work, you malignant cretin, or one morning find glass in your mush," Willie said.

Hatcher sat up, his lips caked with mucus. "Finish my work?" he said stupidly.

"Did your mother not clean your ears when she dug you out of her shite? You and Atkins do your worst. I'll live to piss in your coffin, you pitiful fuck."

Hatcher continued to stare at Willie, unable to comprehend the words being spoken to him, the bad whiskey he had drunk throbbing in his head.

Willie started for him.

"I'm coming. I got to relieve myself first," Hatcher said, jerking backward, clutching his groin under the coarse cotton sheet. His throat swallowed in shame at the fear his voice couldn't hide.

EXCEPT for the house servants, Ira Jamison's slaves were free to do as they wished on Sunday. Until sunset they could visit on other plantations, sit upstairs at a white church, play a card game called pitty-pat, roll dice, or dance to fiddle music. Even though Jamison's slaves were forbidden to possess "julep," a fermented mixture of water, yeast, and fruit or cane pulp, Jamison's overseers looked the other way on Sunday, as long as no slave became outrageously drunk or was sick when he or she reported for bell count on Monday.

On Sunday mornings Flower usually put on her gingham dress and bonnet and walked one and a half miles to a slat church house, where a white Baptist minister conducted a service for slaves and free people of color after he had completed services at the white church in town. He was considered a liberal minister and tolerant man because he often allowed one of the congregation to give the homily.

This morning the homilist was a free man of color by the name of Jubal Labiche, who actually never attended services in the church unless he was asked to give the sermon. He owned slaves and, upstream from town, a brick kiln on Bayou Teche. Behind a long tunnel of oak trees on the St. Martinville Road he had built a house that sought to imitate the classical design of his neighbors' houses, except the columns and porch were wood, not marble, the workmanship utilitarian, the paint an off-white that seemed to darken each year from the smoke of stubble fires.

He was a plump, short man, his eyes turquoise, his skin golden, his hair flattened with grease against his scalp. Even though it was warm inside the building, he wore a checkered silk vest with his suit, a gold watch as fat as a biscuit tucked in the pocket.

"No one loved God more than St. Paul. He was bound and jailed and whipped, but no matter how great his suffering, he never listened to false prophets. When the Ephesians were of a rebellious mind, this is what he told them…"

Jubal Labiche fitted on his spectacles and looked down at the Bible that rested on the podium in front of him.

" 'Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ,'" he read.

The people seated on the plank benches knotted their hands in their laps uncomfortably or looked at their shoes, or glanced furtively at the white minister, a sheep-shorn rail of a man with a long nose and pointed chin. Some of the people in the congregation nodded assent, before anyone perceived a glimmer of dissent in their eyes.

Flower looked directly into Jubal Labiche's face. He stared back at her, then raised his eyes, as though he were caught in a sudden spiritual moment. He began a long prayer of thanks to God during which the congregation would say in unison "Amen" or "Yes, Lord" whenever he paused.

After the service Jubal Labiche was climbing into his carriage when Flower walked past him. He stepped back down in the road and automatically started to touch his hat, then lowered his hand.

"You seemed to have great interest in the homily," he said.

"St. Paul wrote down that slaves is s'pposed to do what the master say?" she asked. /

"He's telling us to put our faith in the Lord. Sometime the Lord's voice comes to us – through those who know more about the world than a simple servant such as myself," he replied, bowing slightly.

"How come we cain't learn from the Bible ourself? How come it got to be read to us?"

"I guess I'm not really qualified to talk about that," he said.

"I guess you ain't," she said.

She turned and walked down the dirt road through the cane fields, her bonnet in her hand, her hair blowing. She could almost feel his eyes burrowing into her back.

BUT all the way home she found no release from the words Jubal Labiche had read to the congregation. Was it the will of God that people should own one another? If that was true, then God was not just. Or was the Scripture itself a white man's fraud?

She warmed a tin cup of coffee and fixed a plate of corn bread and molasses, peas, and a piece of fried ham and sat down to eat by her back window. But her food was like dry paper in her mouth. She felt a sense of abandonment and loneliness she could not describe. Outside, the wind was hot blowing across the cane fields, and the blue sky had filled with plumes of dust.

God wanted her to be a slave and Jesus, His son, was a teacher of submission?

She looked through her front door at the empty yard and laundry house. The widow who ran the laundry for Ira Jamison was away for the day, gone with a suitor who owned a hunting cabin on stilts back in the swamp.

Flower walked across the backyard, through the wash pots and clotheslines, and entered the back door of the laundry. The widow's bedroom door was open, and on the dresser was a leather-bound edition of the King James Bible.

It took her less than five minutes to find the lines Jubal Labiche had read aloud from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Labiche had carefully avoided reading the passages that followed his selective excerpt, namely, that Christians should live and perform "not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with goodwill doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men."

And a bit farther on: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

She closed the cover on the book and went back to her cabin and finished her lunch, a strange sense of both confidence and tranquility in her heart, which she did not as yet quite understand.

Before sunset she walked downtown and bought a peppermint stick from the drugstore for a penny. She ate it on the bank of the bayou, not far from the boardinghouse operated by Willie Burke's mother. She watched the dusk gather in the trees along the bayou and the water darken and the sunfish and gars rolling in the shallows. The western sky was red and black now and she could smell the rain falling on the fields somewhere out on the rim of the earth.

She stood up from the bank and brushed off her dress and started to walk back to the quarters behind the laundry, before the paddy rollers came out on the roads. But now, for some unexplained reason, the thought of encountering them did not fill her with apprehension.

Then she realized the origin of the feelings that had flooded through her after she had gone into the widow's bedroom and hunted through the New Testament for the excerpt from St. Paul. She could read. No one could ever take that gift from her, and no one could hide knowledge or the truth about the world from her again.

AT sunrise the next morning she heard Rufus Atkins' horse in the yard, then heard him swing down from the saddle and approach her door. She was undressed, and she gathered up her clothes and sat on her bed and held them in her lap and over her breasts. He stepped inside the door, smelling of tobacco and cooked bacon, steam rising from his uniform in the morning coolness.

He removed the bent twenty-dollar gold piece from the watch pocket of his trousers and began working it over the tops of his knuckles.

"I got to go to bell count," she said.

"No, you don't."

"All the niggers got to be there, suh. The widow don't abide lateness."

"Not you, Flower. You can do almost any goddamn thing you want. You're a juicy bitch and you know it."

"Ain't right you talk to me like that, suh."

"I'm not here for what you think," he said. He walked to the back window and looked out on the cane field. The sun had just broken the edge of the horizon, like a soft red lump of molten metal.

"Marse Jamison is establishing a slaves council on all his plantations," Atkins said. "That means the slaves will lay out the punishment for anybody who breaks the rules. Marse Jamison reserves only the right-to overturn a punishment if he thinks it's too severe… are you listening?"

"I'm not dressed, suh."

Atkins took a deep breath and went outside the door. She heard him light a cigar and lean against the railing on her small gallery. She put on her work dress and lit the kindling in her stove and washed her face in the water bucket, then pushed the coffee pot over the flames that leaked around one of the iron pothole lids. She heard Atkins clear his throat and spit and then felt his weight bend the floorboards in the cabin.

"You're going to be on the slaves council for the laundry and two of the plantations up the road," he said.

"This don't sound like Marse Jamison," she said.

"What do you care? It gives you a little power you didn't have before."

"What if I say I don't want it?"

"I'd say you were a mighty stupid black girl."

"Tell him the stupid black girl don't want it."

He removed the cigar from his mouth and tossed it through the back window.

"You're a handful, Flower. In lots of ways," he said, biting down on his lip.

"You been in my bed, Marse Rufus. But it ain't gonna happen again."

"Say that again?"

"You heard me. I ain't afraid of you no more."

It was silent inside the cabin. Outside, the wind off the Gulf rustled the cane and flapped the clothes drying in the yard.

"I wouldn't be talking out of school, Flower. There are houses in Congo Square for girls who do that," he said.

"I ain't afraid."

He took a step toward her, his eyes roving over her face and the tops of her breasts. Her hand touched the oyster knife she kept on the table next to the stove.

Atkins rubbed his mouth and laughed.

"Damned if being white makes any man less of a fool. If I ever get rich I'll buy you and carry you off on my saddle and keep you as my personal strumpet. You believe that? It's a fact. Wouldn't lie to you, girl," he said.

His eyes seemed to be laughing at her now, as though he were reliving each moment he had probed inside her, put her nipples in his mouth, lifted her up spread-eagled across his loins. She turned away and picked up the coffeepot and burned her hand. Behind her, she heard him walk out the door, his boots knocking with a hollow sound on her gallery.

I hope the Yankees kill you, she said under her breath. But the vehemence in her thoughts brought her little solace.

WHEN she was a child, Abigail Dowling's father, who was a physician and a Quaker, taught her that a lie was an act of theft as well as one of deceit. A lie stole people's faith in their fellow man, he said, and the loss was often irreparable, whereas a monetary one was not.

In early August of 1861 the first casualty lists from Manassas Junction made their way back to New Iberia. The postmaster sat down behind the counter where he daily sorted the mail into pigeonholes, an eyeshade fastened on his forehead, and went down the alphabetized row of names from the 8th Louisiana Volunteers with his finger. Then he removed his glasses and placed them on his desk and with some very tiny nails he tacked all the lists to the post office wall.

He put on his coat and went out the front door and walked toward the end of Main, where he lived in a tree-shaded house behind the Episcopalian church. Without apparent cause he began to sway from side to side, as though he were drunk or possessed of epilepsy. When he collapsed against a hitching rail, a black deliveryman picked him up and sat him down in a chair against the front wall of the grocery. Then two white men took him inside and peeled off his coat and fanned his face and tried to get him to drink a glass of water.

Abigail stared through the grocery window at the scene taking place inside.

"What happened?" she asked the black man.

"Mr. LeBlanc's son got kilt in Virginia," the black man said.

"How did he learn?" she asked.

"I reckon it come t'rew the wire or the mail, Miss Abigail. That po' man."

Abigail hurried inside the post office. The wind through the open door and windows was lightly rattling the casualty lists against the wall. Her heart beating, she read the names of the soldiers under the captions "Wounded" and "Killed" and saw none there she could put a face with. She let out her breath and pressed her hand against her heart and then felt shame that her joy was at the expense of families that would never see their soldier boys again.

When she turned to leave the post office she glanced at the floor and saw a sheet of paper the wind had blown loose from the nails. She picked it up, her hand beginning to tremble. At the top of the page was the caption "Missing in Action." The third name in the column was that of Lieutenant Robert S. Perry.

She walked stone-faced down the street to her house, her ears ringing, unaware of the words spoken to her by others on the street or the peculiar looks they gave her when she didn't respond to their greetings.

Later, she did not remember drawing the curtains inside her house, filling it with summer heat that was almost unbearable, nor did she remember pacing from one room to the other, her mind drumming with her father's words about his experience as a surgeon with Zachary Taylor's troops in Mexico.

"I saw a lad, not more than a tyke really, struck by an exploding cannonball. It blew him into small pieces. We buried parts of his fingers and feet. I had to pick them up with forceps and put them in a sack," her father had said.

Why had she lectured Robert on slavery, trying to inculcate guilt in him for deeds that were his family's and not his? Were her piety, the sense of righteousness with which she bore her cause like a personal flag, even her sexual modesty, were all these virtues in which she prided herself simply a vanity, a self-deception that concealed the secret pleasure she took in the superiority of her education and New England background?

Could she deny she was not guilty of pride, the most pernicious of the seven deadly sins? Or of carnal thoughts that took hold of her sleep and caused her to wake hot and wet in the middle of the night?

She saw Robert's face before her, the shine like polished mahogany in the thickness of his hair, his eyes that were the bluest and most beautiful she had ever seen in a man. She saw him on a meandering, pebble-bottomed creek, surrounded by green hills, saw him rise from behind earthworks and walk with an extended sword toward a line of dark-clad soldiers, perhaps boys from Massachusetts, who in unison fired their muskets in a roar of dirty black smoke and covered Robert's face and chest and legs with wounds that looked like the red lesions of the pox.

What about her participation in the Underground Railroad? she asked herself. She had told slaves of the land across the Ohio, filling them with hope, in some cases only to see them delivered into the hands of bounty hunters. Worse, she had personally put Flower's aunt on a boat that overturned and drowned her.

She wanted to cut the word "traitor" into her breast.

She fell asleep in her clothes, the late afternoon heat glowing through the curtains in her bedroom. She became wrapped in the sheet, her body bathed in sweat, and she dreamed she was inside a tunnel, deep underground, the wet clay pressing against her chest, pinning her arms at her sides, her cries lost inside the heated blackness.

She awoke in a stupor, unsure of where she was, and for just a moment she thought she heard Robert's voice in the room. She pulled her dress over her head and flung it on the floor and, dressed only in her underthings, went into the backyard and opened the valve on the elevated cistern that fed trapped rainwater into the bathhouse.

She closed the bathhouse door behind her, stripped off her undergarments, and sat in the tub while the wood sluice that protruded through the wall poured water over her head and shoulders and breasts. It was late afternoon now, almost evening, and the light breaking through the trees was green and gold and spinning with motes of dust. Somewhere a bird was singing. ,

You don't know that he's dead, she told herself. '

But when she closed her eyes she saw shells bursting in a field, geysering dirt into the air, while men crouched in the bottom of a trench and prayed and begged and pressed their palms against their ears.

Poseur, she thought. Self-anointed bride of Christ, walking among the afflicted. Hypocrite. Angel of Death.

She put her head down and wept.

LATER, she opened all the windows of her house to let in the evening's coolness and tried to sort out her thoughts but could not. Her skin felt dead to the touch, her heart sick, as though it had been invaded by invisible worms. She thought she understood why primitive people during, mourning rituals, tore their hair and gouged their bodies with stone knives. She lit an oil lamp on her living room table and began a letter to a Quaker church in Bradford, Massachusetts, resigning her title of deacon.

Then she saw a man walk into her yard, wearing a gray officer's uniform and a soft white hat. He removed his hat when he stepped onto the gallery, and knocked on her door.

"Mr. Jamison?" she said.

"Yes. I was visiting in town and heard of your distress. Your neighbors and friends were concerned but didn't want to show a disrespect for your privacy. So I thought I should call upon you," he said.

"Please come in," she said.

He stood in the middle of the living room, his face rosy in the light from the oil lamp, his thick hair touching his collar.

"I understand you've been longtime friends with Robert Perry," he said.

"Yes, that's correct," she replied.

"Are you and Lieutenant Perry engaged, Miss Abigail?"

"No, we're not," she said, clearing her throat. "Could I offer you some tea?"

"No, thank you." He smiled self-effacingly. "I arrived at your door in a peculiar fashion. By steamboat. Would you take a ride with me?"

She turned and saw out the back window the lighted compartments and decks of a huge boat, with paddle wheels on both its starboard and port sides; a roped gangway extended from the deck to the bank.

"The cook has prepared some dinner for us. It's a beautiful evening. As I told you, I'm a widower. It took me some time to learn it's not good to lock ourselves up with our losses," he said.

The dining room on the steamboat was aft, and through the back windows, in the failing summer light, she could see the boat's wake swelling through the cypress trees and live oaks and elephant ears along the bayou's banks. Ira Jamison poured a glass of burgundy for her.

"I wasn't aware you were in the army," she said.

"I've taken a commission in the Orleans Guards. Actually I attended the United States Military Academy with the intention of becoming an engineer but after my mother's death I had to take over the family's business affairs," he replied.

"Is it true you're instituting some reforms on your plantations?" she said.

"It hurts nothing to make life a little better for others when you have means and opportunity. I wish I'd done so earlier. No one has to convince me slavery is evil, Miss Abigail. But I don't have an easy solution for it, either," he said.

When he turned toward the galley, looking for the waiter, she studied his profile, the lack of any guile in his eyes, the smooth texture of his complexion, which did not seem consistent with his age.

He looked back at her, his eyes curious, resting momentarily on her mouth.

"You don't like the wine?" he asked.

"No, it's fine. I don't drink often. I'm afraid I have no appetite, either," she replied.

He moved her glass aside and folded his hands on top of the tablecloth. They were slender, unfreckled by the sun, each nail pink and trimmed and rounded and scraped clean of any dirt. For a moment she thought he was going to place one hand over hers, which would have both embarrassed and disappointed her, but he did not.

"Perhaps Lieutenant Perry is a prisoner or simply separated from his regiment. I haven't been to war, but I understand it happens often," he said.

She rose from her chair and walked to the open French doors gave onto the fantail of the boat.

"Did I upset you?" he asked behind her.

"No, no, not at all, sir. You've been very kind. Thank you also for ensuring that your employee did not harm Flower again," she said.

There was a brief silence. For a moment she thought he had not heard her above the throb of the boat's engines.

"Oh yes, certainly. Well, let's get our pilot to turn around and we'll dine another evening. It's been a trying day for you," he said.

She felt his hand touch her lightly between the shoulder blades.

THE next morning she went to the small brick building on Main that served as stage station and telegraph and post office. Mr. LeBlanc sat behind the counter, his eyeshade fastened on his forehead, garters on his white sleeves, sorting newspapers from Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Atlanta that he would later place in the pigeonholes for the addressees.

He had married a much younger woman and their son had been born when Mr. LeBlanc was fifty-two. He was a religious man and had opposed Secession and had dearly loved his son. Abigail imagined that his struggle with bitterness and anger must have been almost intolerable. But he held himself erect and his clothes were freshly pressed, his steel-gray hair combed, his grief buried like a dead coal in his face.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. LeBlanc," Abigail said.

"Thank you. May I get your mail for you?" he said, rising from his chair without waiting for an answer.

"Have you heard anything else about casualties among the 8th Louisiana Volunteers?" she said.

"There's been no other news. The Yankees were chased into Washington. That brings joy to some." Then he seemed to lose his train of thought. "Are you a subscriber to one of the papers? I can't remember."

He hunted through the pile of newspapers on his desk, his concentration gone.

"It's all right, Mr. LeBlanc. I'll come back later. Sir? Please, it's all right," she said.

She went back outside and walked up the street toward her house, staying in the shade under the colonnade. Men tipped their hats to her and women stepped aside to let her pass, more deferentially and graciously than ordinary courtesy would have required of them. Her face burned and sweat rolled down her sides. Again she felt a sense of odium and duplicity about herself she had never experienced before and heard the word traitor inside her head, just as if someone had whispered the word close to her ear.

That evening Ira Jamison was at her door again, this time with a carriage parked in front. He was out of uniform, dressed in white pants and black boots and a green coat.

"I thought you might like to take a ride into the country," he said.

"Not this evening," she replied.

"I see." He looked wistfully down the street, his face melancholy in the twilight. A mule-drawn wagon, mounted with a perforated water tank, was sprinkling the dust in the street. "I worry about you, Miss Abigail. I've read a bit about what some physicians are now terming 'depression.' It's a bad business."

He looked at her in a concerned way.

"Come in, Mr. Jamison," she said.

After he was inside, she did not notice the glance he gave to his driver, who snapped the reins on the backs of his team and turned the carriage in the street and drove it back toward the business district.

He sat by her on the couch. The wind rustled the oak trees outside and blew the curtains on the windows. She saw heat lightning flicker in the yard, then heard raindrops begin ticking in the leaves and on the roof.

"I'll do whatever I can to help find the whereabouts of Robert Perry," he said.

"I'd appreciate it very much, Mr. Jamison."

"This may be an inappropriate time to say this, but I think you're a lady of virtue and principle, and also one who's incredibly beautiful. Whatever resources I have, they'll be made immediately available to you whenever you're in need, for whatever reason, regardless of the situation."

She was sitting on the edge of the couch, her shoulders slightly bent, her hands in her lap. She could feel the emotional fatigue of the last two days wash through her, almost like a drug. Her eyes started to film.

"It's all right," he said, his arm slipping around her.

He leaned across her and pulled her against him and spread his fingers on her back, pressing his cheek slightly to hers. Then she felt his lips touch her hair and his hand stroking her back, and she placed her hands on the firmness of his arms and let her forehead rest on his chest.

He tilted her face up and kissed her lightly on the mouth, then on the eyes and cheeks and the mouth again, and she put her arms around his neck and held him tighter than she should, letting go, surrendering to it, the heat and wetness in her own body now a balm to her soul rather than a threat, the wind blowing the curtains and filling the room with the smell of rain and flowers.

He extinguished the oil lamp and laid her back on the couch. He bent down over her and she felt his tongue enter her mouth, his hand cup one breast, then the other, and slide down her stomach toward her thighs. His breath was hoarse in his throat. He pressed her leg against the swelling hardness in his pants.

She twisted her face away from him and sat up, her hands clenched in her lap.

"Please go, Mr. Jamison," she said.

"I'm sorry if I've done something wrong, Miss Abigail."

"The fault isn't yours," she replied.

He hesitated a moment, then stood up and pushed his hair out of his eyes.

"If I can make this up-" he began.

"You need to fetch your driver, sir. Thank you for your kind offer of assistance," she said.

For the first time she realized one of his eyes was smaller than the other. She did not know why that detail stuck in her mind.

That night she woke feverish and sweaty and tangled in her sheets, her head filled with images from a dream about a sow eating her farrow. She did not fall asleep again until dawn.

TWO days later she was walking home from the grocery, stepping around mud puddles in the street, an overly loaded wicker basket in each of her hands. Rufus Atkins stopped his buggy and got down and tried to take one of the baskets from her.

"Don't do that," she said.

"Marse Jamison says to look after you," Atkins said.

"Take your hand off my basket."

"Sorry, Miss Abigail. I got my orders." He winked at her, then pulled the basket from her hand and swung it up behind the buggy seat. He reached for the other basket.

"He has also ordered you to stop molesting women in this community," she said.

"What are you talking about?" Atkins asked.

"The telegraph message he sent you."

"He didn't send me a telegraph message. He told me something about not letting the overseers impregnate any of the wenches. But be didn't send me a telegraph message."

She stared at him blankly.

Atkins laughed to himself. "Look, Miss Dowling, I don't know what kind of confusion you're under, but Marse Jamison is giving the niggers a little self-government so's he can get himself installed in Jefferson Davis' cabinet. Davis is famous for the nigger councils on his plantations. Is this what you're talking about?"

"Give my back my basket," she said.

"By all means. Excuse me for stopping. But your nose was so high up in the air I thought you might walk into a post and knock yourself unconscious," he said.

He dropped her grocery basket in the mud and drove off, popping his buggy whip above the back of his horse.

TWO weeks later the Confederate War Department notified the parents of Robert Perry their son had been separated from his regiment during the Battle of Manassas Junction and that he was alive and well and back among his comrades.

That same night, while the moon was down, Abigail Dowling rowed a runaway slave woman and her two small children to a waiting boat, just north of Vermilion Bay. All three of them were owned by Ira Jamison.