White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (14 page)

Flower did not understand what the boy had meant or why his mother had been provoked to such a level of anger, which to Flower, even as a child, was always an indicator of fear.

She saw Marse Jamison again, on a Christmas Day, when her grandmother brought her to work with her in the big house. Flower had peeked out from the kitchen and had seen him talking with other men by the fireplace, the whiskey in his glass bright against the flames. When he saw her watching him, he winked and picked up a piece of hard candy from a crystal plate and gave it to her.

In that moment she believed she was in the presence of the most important man in the world.

She did not see him again for fifteen years.

Then, on what might become his deathbed, he had asked for her. She felt herself forgiving him for sins that he had neither acknowledged nor had asked forgiveness for, and she wondered if she were driven less by charity than by weakness and personal need. But people were what they did, she told herself, not what they said or didn't say, but what they did. And Colonel Ira Jamison had sent for his daughter.

Now she enclosed him in mosquito-netting at night and sponge-bathed him and changed his bandages and brought his food from the hospital kitchen on a cloth-covered tray. He was melancholy and remote, but always grateful for her attentions, and there were moments when his hand lingered on hers and his eyes seemed to turn inward and view a scene she could hardly imagine, a field churning with smoke and terrified horses or a surgeon's tent where human limbs were piled like spoiled pork.

He read until late at night and slept with the flame turned low in the lamp. On one occasion, when the oil had burned out, she found him sitting on the side of the bed, his bare feet in a pool of moonlight, his face disjointed with his own thoughts.

"The war won't let you sleep, Colonel Jamison?" she asked him.

"The laudanum makes you have strange dreams, that's all," he replied.

"It ain't good to take it if you don't need it no more," she said.

"I suspect your wisdom may be greater than mine, Flower," he said, and looked at her fondly.

But tonight when she reported to the hospital he was not reading either the Bible or one of the several novels he kept on his nightstand. Instead, he sat propped up on pillows with a big ledger book spread open on his knees. The pages were lined with the first names of people—Jim, Patsy, Spring, Cleo, Tuff, Clotile, Jeff, Batist—and beside each name was a birthdate.

As he turned the pages and read the lists of names, which must have numbered almost two hundred, he moved his lips silently and seemed to count with his fingers. He extinguished the lamp and went to sleep with the ledger book under his pillow.

In the morning a new sentry was on duty at the entrance to the ward. His cheeks were pink, his hair so blond it was almost white. He straightened as she walked by, clearing his throat, a hesitant grin at the corner of his mouth.

"'Member me?" he said.

"No," she said.

"Sitting on the porch at that house on Congo Square? Place I probably didn't have no business?" he said.

"Oh yes, how do you do?" she said.

He shifted his hands on his rifle barrel and looked past her out the window, his eyes full of light, thinking about his response but finding no words that he felt would be very interesting to anyone else.

"I'm on our regimental rounders team. We're gonna play some Vermont boys soon as I get off duty," he said.

"Rounders?"

"It's a game you play with a ball and a bat. You run around bases. That's how come it's called 'rounders.'" He grinned at her.

"It's nice seeing you," she said.

"Ma'am, I didn't go in that place last night," he said hurriedly, before she could walk away.

"I know you didn't," she said.

He had just called her "ma'am," something no white person had

ever done. She looked back over her shouldee at him. He was twirling his kepi on the point of his fixed bayonet, like a child
intrigued with a
top.

THAT night, when she returned to the hospital, Ira Jamison was in an ebullient mood, one she did not understand in a dying man. He had two visitors, men with coarse skin and uncut hair, with a lascivious look in their eyes and the smell of horses in their clothes. They pushed the screens around the bed and lowered their voices, but she heard one man laugh softly and say, "Ain't no problem, Kunnel. We'll move the whole bunch up into Arkansas, safe and sound, ready to fetch when the shooting is over."

After they were gone she brought Ira Jamison hot tea and a piece of toast with jam. The ledger book with the lists of names was on the nightstand. On top of it was a page of stationery that Jamison had been writing on. Her eyes slipped across the salutation and the words in the first paragraph as she propped up the tray on Jamison's lap.

"Who was them men, Colonel?" she said.

"Some fellows who do work for me from time to time."

"They got dirty eyes," she replied.

He looked at her curiously.

"I could have sworn you were reading the letter I was writing to a friend," he said.

"How could I do that, suh?"

"I don't know, but you're no ordinary—"

"Ordinary what?"

"No ordinary girl. Neither was your mother."

"I ain't a girl no more, Colonel."

She picked up his soiled bedclothes from the floor and carried them to the laundry.

DURING the night, out in the foyer where she kept a cot, she overheard a Union physician talking to one of the nurses.

"You say he's mighty cheerful? By God, he should be. I thought sure we'd be dropping him into a hole, but his specimen has been clear two days now. The colonel will probably be back abusing his darkies in no time. I guess if I ever wanted to see a nonsuccess in the treatment of a patient, my vote would he for this fellow."

Flower sat up on her cot, her body still warm from sleep. The ward was dimly lit by oil lamps at each end, the air heavy with the smell of medicine and bandages and the sounds of snoring and night dreams. She walked softly between the rows of beds to the screened enclosure where Jamison slept, unable to think through the words she had just heard. She stood over his bed and looked down at the mound of his hip under the sheet and the pale smoothness of his exposed shoulder.

His face was turned into the shadows, but even in sleep he was a handsome man, his body firm, without fat, his skin clear and unwrinkled, his mouth tender, almost like a girl's.

Had he known his life was out of danger and not bothered to tell her? Was he that indifferent about the affections and loyalties of others?

She had other questions, too. What about the visitors whose clothes smelled of horse sweat and whose eyes moved up and down her body? Why had the colonel been reading from a ledger book that contained the names of all his slaves?

He had completed the letter he had been writing and had stuck it inside the cover of the ledger book and had slipped the book under his pillow. She eased the sheets of paper out of the book and unfolded them in the light that was breaking through the window. Each line of his flowing calligraphy was perfectly linear, each letter precise, without swirls or any attempt at grandiosity. She began reading, moving her lips silently, tilting the page into the grayness of the dawn.

Dear Colonel Forrest,

I have good news from the Union surgeon and am on my way to a fine recovery. However, I am still haunted by the destruction of the 18th Louisiana Regiment at Shiloh and the fact the Orleans Guards, partially under my command, were not there on their flank when they advanced so bravely into Yankee artillery.

But conscience and honor require me to state I also have a practical concern. I plan to enter politics once the war is over. Because my name will be associated in a causal fashion, fairly or unfairly, with the tragedy of the 18th Louisiana, I think accepting a parole will not contribute to my chances of gaining high office. Neither do I relish the prospect or eating dried pras on a Yankee prison camp. I'm also quitesickof being tended by unwashed niggers in a Yankee hospital that stinks of urine-
 

She heard a Catholic sister pass on the other side of the screen and she refolded the letter and replaced it inside the ledger book.

Jamison woke and stared straight up into her face. For the first time she noticed that one of his eyes was smaller than the other, liquid, with a bead in it, like a glimmering, narrow conduit into a part of his mind he shared with no one.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"What you brung me here for. To tend you. To carry out your slop jar, to fetch your food, to wash the sweat off your skin, to listen to your grief. That's why you brung me, ain't you, suh?"

He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her with a new and cautionary awareness.

ON her way out the door to catch the public car back to Basin Street, she saw Abigail Dowling sitting on a stone bench under a live oak tree, next to a double-amputee who was sleeping in a wheelchair, his head on his chest, the bandaged stubs of his legs sticking out into space.

"Could I sit down, ma'am?" she said.

"You don't have to ask," Abigail replied.

"What do the word 'par-old' mean?"

"Say it again."

"Par-old. Like something somebody don't want."

"You mean 'parole'? P-a-r-o-l-e?"

"That's it."

"Prisoners of war are exchanged sometimes so they don't have to go to a jail or a prison camp. Or sometimes they sign an oath of allegiance and just go back home. But you say there's somebody who doesn't want a parole?"

Flower watched the ice wagon turn off St. Charles and enter the hospital driveway. The driver stopped and chatted with a Creole woman who was cutting flowers and laying them delicately in a straw basket. Vapor rose from the tarp covering the sawed blocks of ice that had been brought in ships all the way from New England, and were now melting and running off the tailgate of a dray on a dappled, pea gravel driveway lined with pink and gray caladium. Blue-streaked, white-crusted blocks of ice carefully packed in sawdust that could refrigerate medicines and numb the pain in suffering men, now melting needlessly because a man and a lady wanted to exchange pleasantries in a floral garden in New Orleans, Louisiana. She felt her breath catch in her throat. "Are you all right, Flower?" Abigail asked.

"I can read. I can write some, too. Nobody know it, though, except Willie Burke, 'cause he taught me."  

"What is it you're trying to tell me?"

Flower loosened the drawstring on the cloth bag she carried and removed the dictionary given her by Willie Burke. She flipped the pages to the P's and ran her finger down a page until she located the word her mind had unclearly formed and associated with an idea and an image which now seemed inextricably linked. "'Possession,'" she said.

 "Pardon?" Abigail said.

"Colonel Jamison got one eye smaller than the other. It got a wet blue gleam in it. I didn't know what that look meant. It's possession, Miss Abigail. It's the control he got over other people that keeps him alive. Not love for no family, no cause, no little nigger baby who was found almost froze to death in a woods."

Abigail put her arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. "I'll always be your friend," she said.

But Flower rose from her grasp and walked quickly to the street, her face obscured in the shadows, her back shaking.

AFTER she returned to the hospital that evening, the sky turned black and the wind began to blow hard out of the south. She could hear rain hitting on the window glass and the open shutters vibrating against the latches that moored them to the bricks. When she looked out the window she saw leaves whipping in circles and the highest limbs in the oak trees thrashing against the sky and spiderwebs of lightning bursting inside the clouds.

"Sounds like cannons popping out there, don't it?" the young sentry said. He sat in a chair by the end of the ward, near the foyer where she kept her cot. His rifle   was propped between his legs.

"Have you been in the war?" she asked.

"The Rebs potshot at us out on the river. They floated burning rafts past us so they could see us on the far bank. But they didn't hit nobody."

When she made no reply, he added, "I hear we're going up to Baton Rouge and kick their behinds. I'm ready for it."

"You be careful," she said.

"I ain't afraid."

"I know you're not," she said.

He pulled a cigar box from under his chair and shook it.

"You want to play checkers?" he asked.

"You ain't s'pposed to be sitting down."

"The lieutenant's a good fellow. Bet you don't know how."

She went to the kitchen and began washing Colonel Jamison's supper dishes. His food and drink were never served on the same dishware or in the same glasses or cups used by the other patients. His own china, along with his reading matter, personal stationery, nightgown, underwear and socks, even a tailored gray Confederate uniform, had all been brought to him by an Angola Plantation overseer, with permission, through Union lines. Flower dried each dish and cup and fork and knife with a soft cloth and placed them inside a big tin breadbox painted with flowers and set the breadbox inside a cabinet. She glanced outside and saw a closed carriage roll by under the trees, a driver in a black slouch hat and slicker backlit against the flicker of lightning through the canopy.

She looked in on Colonel Jamison, who was sleeping with a pillow over his head, perhaps to muffle the boom of thunder outside. She wondered if he dreamed of the boys who had died under his command or if in his sleep he relived only his own fear and wounding on the battlefield. She glanced at the three pistol balls lying in a saucer on his nightstand and knew the answer to her own question.

When she walked back to the foyer the sentry was looking out the window at the leaves blowing against the glass and the white flicker of electricity through the tops of the trees. He had left his rifle at his post, the bayonet-tipped barrel propped tautly against the wall.