White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (15 page)

"I was kidding you about not knowing how to play checkers. I saw you reading a book back there in the foyer. That puts you one up on me," he said.

"You cain't read?"

"Folks in my family is still working on
making their X." He grinned and looked at his feet.

"I can teach you how," she said.

He grinned again. His eyes went away from her, then came back. "You gonna play checkers with me?" he asked.

"I wouldn't mind," she replied.

He placed two chairs at a small table by the window and removed a folded cloth painted with checker squares from his cigar box and flattened the cloth on the table. The checker pieces were carved from wood and looked like big buttons, domed on the top and painted green or red. He lined them up on the cloth squares and glanced out the window just as lightning popped in a yard on the opposite side of the street.

"Wonder what that carriage is doing out there?" he said.

 "It's the hearse. They take the bodies out the back door," she replied.

There was a disjointed expression in his face. "A hearse?" he said.

"They don't want the other patients to see the bodies. There's a room behind the kitchen where they take the ones who are gonna die."

He looked emptily down the long rows of beds in the ward and at the rectangular shadows they cast.

"I bet most of the dead is probably Rebs who got gangrene 'cause their people didn't look out for them," he said. "Probably," she said, avoiding his eyes.

He glanced out the window again, then shook a thought out of his face and pushed a checker piece forward with his index finger. "Your move. I ain't showing no mercy, either," he said. Later, after she had looked in on the colonel for the final time that evening, she pulled the blanket across the length of clothesline she had strung by her cot and lay down and closed her eyes. In her sleep she heard the rain hitting hard on the window glass and she dreamed of birds flying from their cages, flapping their wings loudly in their newfound freedom.

Sometime after midnight she heard a door open and felt a draft course through the corridors and swell against the walls and ceiling. Then in the coldness of the moment she heard the heavy sound of men's boots on the floor and smelled rainwater and horsed and an odor like old clothes moldy with damp.

She pulled the sheet over her head and drew her knees up toward her chest and fell deeper into the dream of birds thropping through the sky, high above the hunters whose guns fired impotently into the air.

But the dream would not hold. A scorched odor, like dry oak pitched on a flame, made her open her eyes. The thunder had stopped and in its vacuum she heard wind and leaves scraping on stone and a door fluttering on its hinges, then the wet, crunching sound of horses' hooves and iron-rimmed carriage wheels sinking in pea gravel.

She rose from her cot and drew aside the blanket that hung from the clothesline stretched across her nook. It was still dark outside and clouds of ground fog rolled and puffed between the palms and live oak trunks. She stepped into the hallway that fed into the ward and saw her friend, the sentry, still seated in his chair, his back to her, his chin on his chest. His rifle was propped against the table they had played checkers on. A brass lamp was knocked askew on the wall above his head, oil oozing from the slit through which the wick extended, igniting in the flame, dripping to the floor like a string of melted gold coins.

The sentry's kepi lay crown-down on the table.

Oh, Lordy, they gonna shoot you for sleeping on guard duty, she said to herself.

But even as she heard the words inside her, she knew they were a deception. She stepped into what should have been the periphery of his vision and saw the paleness in his cheeks and the dark area, like a child's bib, under his chin. A barber's razor with a pearl handle lay in a circle of blood at his feet.

At the end of the ward the screens had been moved aside from the colonel's bed. The sheet he had slept under trailed on the floor like a handkerchief half-pulled from a man's pocket. She ran toward the kitchen to find the night nurse, the Confederate amputees propping themselves up at the sound of feet. The brass lamp still burned on the colonel's nightstand. She glanced at the saucer where he had kept the three .36 caliber pistol balls that had been removed from his body, hoping that perhaps in some way what she had always known about him and denied, namely, that first and last and foremost he thought of no one except himself and his own possessions, was not true.

The saucer was bare, his overturned slop jar running on the floor.

Chapter Ten

LIEUTENANT Robert Perry had always slept without dreaming, or at least without dreaming of events or places or people he remembered in daylight. The world was a fine place, filled with bird-song and the smell of horses and wood smoke at dawn and fish spawning in swamps where the sunlight glowed like a green lantern inside the cypress. In fact, in the quietness of the dawn and the faint pinkness spreading across the cane fields and the cabins of the slaves and the horses blowing in the pasture, Robert sometimes believed he was witness to the quiet hush of God's breath upon the world.

Now sleep came to him fitfully and took him to places to which he did not want to return. The geographical designations—Manassas Junction, Winchester, Front Royal, Cross Keys—were names that never appeared in the dreams. His nocturnal recollection of these places came to him only in images and sounds: a night picket cocking back the hammer on a rifle, a man calling for water, another caught inside a burning woods, a stretcher bearer sitting on the lip of a crater in the middle of a railroad track, holding his ears, screaming, kicking his feet.

When Robert would finally fall into a deep slumber before dawn, he would awake suddenly to the whistling sound of a shell arcing out of its trajectory, then discover the world outside his tent was silent, except perhaps for a cook rattling pans in the back of a wagon. He would lie with his arm across his eyes, his palm resting on the coolness of his revolver, breathing slowly, reciting his morning prayers, waiting for his mind to empty of dreams he told himself had no application in the waking day.

The previous evening he had received a letter from Abigail Dowling, one that perplexed him and also saddened his heart, because even though he had already learned of Jim Stubbefield's death, he had not accepted it, each morning waking with the notion Jim was still alive, in the Western campaign with the 18th Louisiana, the youthful confidence on his face undisturbed by either war or mortality. In Robert's haversack was a
carte de visite,
taken by a photographer at Camp Pratt, showing Willie, Robert and Jim together for the last time, Jim standing while they sat, a hand on each of their shoulders, a gentle scarecrow posed between two smiling friends.

God fashions the pranksters to keep the rest of us honest, Jim. Wasn't right of you to die on us, old pal, he thought, almost resentfully.

But the other portions of Abigail's letter disturbed him as well, although with certainty he could not say why. He sat on a Quaker gun, in front of a cook fire, in the cool, smoky dawn above the Shenandoah Valley, and unfolded her letter and read it again.

Dear Robert,

I saw your father and he said you know of Jim's death at Shiloh. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am at the loss of your friend. Also I need to confide some thoughts of my own to you about the war and what I perceive as a great evil that has fallen upon the land. Please forgive me in advance if my words are hurtful in any way.

I helped prepare the body of a young Union soldier who had been guarding Confederate amputees in the hospital where I have been working in New Orleans. His throat had been cut by men in the employ of Colonel Ira Jamison. Colonel Jamison was offered a parole, but evidently for reasons of political gain he refused it and had a boy of seventeen murdered in order to establish himself as an escaped prisoner of war. I believe this man to be the most despicable human being I have ever met.

I witnessed the hanging of a gambler whose only crime was to possess a piece of a ripped Union flag. The execution was ordered by none other than General Butler himself, supposedly with the approval of President Lincoln. I would like to believe the deaths of the gambler and the young soldier were simply part of war's tragedy. But I would be entertaining a deception. Colonel Jamison and General Butler are emblematic of the arrogance of power. Their cruelty speaks for itself. The young sentry, the gambler, and Jim Stubbefield are their victims. I think there will be others.

Please write and tell me of your health and situation. Day and night you are in my thoughts and my prayers.

Affectionately,

Your friend,

Abigail

The Quaker gun he sat on was a huge log lopped free of branches that had been dragged into the earthworks and positioned to look like a cannon. Robert looked into the cook fire, then across an open field at timbered hills, where, if he listened carefully, he would hear axes chopping into wood, trees crashing among themselves, blue-clad men wheeling light artillery through the underbrush. The wind blew inside the earthworks and the pages of Abigail's letter fluttered in his hands.

"You think we're going across?" he asked a lieutenant sitting next to him.

The man was named Alcibiades LeBlanc. He was heavily bearded and was smoking a long-stem pipe, one leg crossed on his knee. When he removed the pipe from his mouth his cheeks were hollow and his mouth made a puckered button.

"Perhaps," he said.

Robert stood and looked across the field again. There were two round green hills next to each other in the distance, a stream that fed between them and woods on each side of a dammed pond at the bottom of the stream. A Union officer rode out of the trees and cantered his horse up and down the edge of the field. Robert thought he saw sunlight glint on brass or steel inside the trees.

"What troubles you? Not the Yanks, huh?" Alcibiades asked.

Robert handed him
Abigail's letter to read. The
earthworks were stark, constructed from huge baskets that had been braided together out of sticks and packed solidly with dirt and mud and rocks. Logs supported by field stones were laid out horizontally against the walls of the rifle pits so sharpshooters could stand on them and fire across the field. Alcibiades finished reading the letter and refolded it and handed it back to Robert.

"She wants to marry you," he said.

"It's that simple?" Robert said.

Across the field a shell exploded in a black puff of torn cotton high above the mounted officer's head. But the officer was unperturbed and wheeled his horse about and cantered it along the rim of the woods, where men in blue were forming a skirmish line behind the tree trunks.

"I don't know how many times we have to whip them to make them understand they're whipped," Alcibiades said.

"You didn't answer my question," Robert said.

"She loves you dearly, no doubt about it, and she'll marry you the day you turn your slaves loose and denounce all this out here," his friend said, waving his hand at the churned field, the horses that lay bloated and stiff in the irrigation ditches, the dead soldiers who'd had their pockets pulled inside out and their shoes stripped from their feet.

Robert put away Abigail's letter and stared at the shells bursting over the hills in the distance. Ten minutes later he advanced with the others in a long gray and butternut line through the whine of minie balls and the trajectory scream of a Yankee mortar Southerners called Whistling Dick. On either side of him he could hear bullets and canister and case shot thudding into the bodies of friends with whom he had eaten breakfast only a short time ago.

The hills in the distance reminded him of a woman's breasts. That fact made him clench his hands on the stock of his carbine with a degree of visceral anger he did not understand.

JEAN-JACQUES LaRose loved clipper ships, playing the piano, fist-fighting in saloons, and the world of commerce. He thought politics was a confidence game, created to fool those gullible enough to trust their money and well-being to others. The notion of an egalitarian society and seeking justice in the courts was another fool's venture. The real equalizer in the world was money.

Early on he knew he had a knack for business and how to recognize cupidity in others and how to use it to drive them against the wall. In business Scavenger Jack took no prisoners. Money gave him power, and with power he could flaunt his illiteracy and whorehouse manners and stick his bastard birth status in the faces of all those who had sent him around to their back doors when he was a child.

According to the gospel of Jean-Jacques LaRose, anyone who said money was not important was probably working on a plan to take it from you.

He was childish, slovenly, sentimental, a slobbering drunk, a ferocious barroom brawler who could leave a saloon in splinters, true to his word, honest about his debts, at least when he could remember them, and absolutely fearless when it came to running the Union blockade out on the salt.

He also loved the ship he had bought five years before the war from a famous French shipbuilder in the West Indies. It was long and sleek, and was constructed both with boilers and masts and could outdistance most of the Union gunboats that patrolled the mouth of the Mississippi or the entrances to the waterways along the wetlands of Louisiana.

In no time Jean-Jacques discovered that the Secession he had opposed was probably the best stroke of historical luck he could have fallen into. He took cotton out and brought coffee and rum in, with such a regular degree of success two men from the state government and one from the army came to him with a proposal about slipping through the blockade with a cargo of Enfield rifles.

Seems like the patriotic thing to do, Jean-Jacques told himself.