White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (20 page)

AS he matured Ira did not grow in understanding of his father and mother's jealousies and the lack of love that consumed their lives. Instead, he thought of his parents with resentment and anger, not only because they had destroyed his home but also because they had made him the double instrument of his father's death, first as an informer of his father's adultery, then as an accomplice in his mother's deception and treachery.

He spent one year at West Point and told others upon his resignation that he had to return home to run his family's business affairs. But the reality was he did not like the confines of military life. In fact, he thought anyone who willingly ate dry bread and unsweetened black coffee and shaved and bathed in cold water was probably possessed of a secret desire to be used as cannon wadding.

At age twenty he was the master of his estate, a dead shot with a dueling pistol, and a man who did not give quarter in business dealings or spare the rod with his workers. His parents rested in a plot on a grassy knoll above the river, but he never visited their graves nor shared his feelings about the unbearable sense of loss that defined his childhood memories.

He learned not to brood upon the past nor to think analytically about the events that had caused him to become the hard-edged man he had grown into. The whirrings in his blood, the heat that would balloon in his chest at a perceived insult, gave an elan to his manner that made his adversaries walk cautiously around him. A man he had cuckolded called him out on the street in New Iberia. The cuckold's hand shook and his ball went wide, striking Ira in the arm. But Ira's aim didn't waver and he drove a ball through the man's mouth and out the back of his head, then sipped coffee at a saloon bar while a physician dressed his wound.

His young wife was at first bemused and intrigued by his insatiable sexual desires, then finally alienated and frightened by them. In a fit of remorse and guilt about her participation in what she called her husband's lust, she confided the intimate details of her marriage to her pastor, a nervous sycophant with smallpox scars on his cheeks and dandruff on his shoulders. After Ira learned of his wife's visit to the minister, he rode his horse to the parsonage and talked to the minister in his garden. The minister boarded a steamboat in Baton Rouge the next day and was never seen in Louisiana again. "What did you say to him?" Ira's wife asked.

"I told him he was to denounce both of us every Sunday from his pulpit. If he didn't, I was going to shoot him."

But there were moments in Ira Jamison's life that made him wonder if, like his father, more than one person lived inside his skin.

He was cleaning out his attic on a late fall afternoon when he came across the windup merry-go-round his father had given him on his eleventh birthday. He inserted the key in the base and twisted the spring tight, then pushed a small lever and listened to the tune played by the spiked brass cylinder inside.

For no reason he could quite explain he walked into the quarters, in a tea-colored sunset, among tumbling leaves and the smell of gas in the trees, and knocked on Uncle Royal's door.

"Yes, suh?" Uncle Royal said, his frosted eyes blinking uncertainly.

 "You still have any young grandchildren?" Ira asked.

 "No, suh, they grown and in the fields now. But I got a young great-gran'child."

"Then give him this," Ira said.

The old man took the merry-go-ground from Ira's hand and felt the carved smoothness of the horses with the ends of his fingers. "Thank you, suh," he said. Ira turned to go.

"How come you to think of this now, Master Ira?" Uncle Royal asked.

"My father made you a promise he couldn't keep. So I kept it for him. That's all it means. Nothing else," he replied.

 "Yes, suh," Uncle Royal said.

On the way back to the house Ira wondered if his words to Uncle Royal had become his way of saying good-bye forever to the innocent and vulnerable child who had once lived inside him and caused him so much pain.

NOW the spring of 1863 was upon him, and he knew enough of history to realize that the events taking place around him did not bode well for his future. Some of his slaves had been shipped to unoccupied areas of Arkansas, but it was only a matter of time until the South fell and emancipation became a fact of life.

In the meantime someone had hijacked two dozen slaves from his property, taking them downriver to New Orleans through a Confederate blockade, murdering one of his paddy rollers in the bargain. Ira could not get the image of the dead paddy roller out of his mind. Three of his overseers had carted the body up to the front porch, stuffed in a lidless packing case, the knife wound in his throat like a torn purple rose.

Ira did not believe in coincidences. One of his own men had now died in the same fashion as the young sentry in the New Orleans hospital the night Ira escaped from Yankee custody.

Nor was it coincidence that a woman with a Northern accent was on board the boat that transported a cargo of Negroes supposedly infected with yellow jack to a quarantine area north of New Orleans the same night two dozen of his slaves had disappeared from the plantation.

Abigail Dowling, he thought.

Every morning he woke with her name in his mind. She bothered him in ways he had difficulty defining. She had a kind of pious egalitarian manner that made him want to slap her face. At the same time she aroused feelings in him that left his loins aching. She was the most stunning woman he'd ever seen, with the classical proportions of a Renaissance sculpture, and she bore herself with a dignity and intellectual grace that few beautiful women ever possessed.

The spring rains came and the earth turned green and the fruit trees bloomed outside Ira's window. But the name of Abigail Dowling would not leave his thoughts, and sometimes he woke throbbing in the morning and had images of her moaning under his weight. Nor did it help for him to remember that she had rebuffed him and made him feel obscene and sexually perverse.

He looked out upon the sodden feilds and at an oak tree that was stiff and hard-looking in the wind. What was it that bothered him most about her? But he already knew the answer to his own question. She was intelligent, educated, unafraid and seemed to want nothing he was aware of. He did not trust people who did not want something. But most of all she bothered him because she had looked into his soul and seen something there that repelled her.

What was her weakness? he asked himself. Everybody had one. Maybe he had been looking in the wrong place. She seemed to have male friends rather than suitors or lovers. A woman that beautiful? He gazed out the window at the white bloom on his peach trees and a slave girl pulling weeds inside the drip lines. His side ached miserably. He placed a small lump of opium under his lip and felt a sensation like warm water leaking through his nervous system.

He had thought of Abigail Dowling as a flesh-and-blood replication of Renaissance sculpture, an Aphrodite rising from a tidal pool on the Massachusetts coast. He watched the slave girl drop a handful of weeds into her basket and get to her feet, the tops of her breasts exposed to his view. Maybe he had been only partially correct about Abigail's classical origins.

Were her antecedents on the island of Lesbos rather than Melos? He wondered.

Chapter Thirteen

AFTER the retreat from Shiloh, Willie began to dream about a choleric-faced man, someone he did not know, advancing out of a mist with a bayonet fixed to the end of his rifle. The choleric-faced man would not fall down when Willie fired upon him. He also dreamed about the sound of a distant siege gun coughing in a woods, then a shell arcing in a dark blur out of a blue sky, exploding in a trench full of men with the force of a ship's boiler blowing apart. He began to take his dreams into the waking day, and his anxieties and fears would be so great with the passage of each hour that contact with the enemy became a welcomed release.

That's when a line sergeant gave him what the sergeant considered the key to survival for a common foot soldier: You never thought about it before you did it and you never thought about it when it was over.

Nor did thinking make life easier for a commissioned officer, Willie told himself later.

Lieutenant Willie Burke peered through the spyglass at the steam engine and the line of freight cars parked on the railway track. The sun was white in the sky, the woods breathless, the leaves in the canopy coated with dust. His clothes stuck to his skin; his hair was drenched with sweat inside his hat. There was a humming sound in his head, like the drone of mosquitoes, except the woods were dry and there were no mosquitoes in them.

But their eggs were in his blood, and at night, and sometimes in daylight, he would see gray spots before his eyes and hear mosquitoes humming in his head, as was now the case, and he wished he was lying in a cold stream somewhere and not sighting through a spyglass, breathing dust inside a sweltering woods.

The train was deserted, the steam engine pocked with holes from caseshot. Two of the boxcars that had been loaded with munitions had burned to the wheels. Another boxcar, a yellow one with sliding doors that had carried Negro troops, was embedded from stem to stern with iron railroad spikes, like rust-colored quills on a porcupine.

The black soldiers, almost all of them newly emancipated slaves, untrained, with no experience in the field, had melted away into thickly wooded river bottoms and had taken a mule-drawn field piece with them, whipping the mules across the flanks, powdering dust in the air as they crushed through the palmettos and underbrush.

Willie moved the spyglass over the river bottoms but could see no movement inside the trees. The train tracks shimmered in the heat and he could smell the hot odor of creosote in the ties. He focused the glass far down the line on an observation balloon captured from the Federals. It was silver, as bright as tin, tethered to the earth by a rope that must have been two hundred feet long. A bearded man in a wicker basket was looking back in Willie's direction with a spyglass similar to his own.

Willie got down on one knee and gestured for Sergeant Clay Hatcher to do the same. The sudden movement made his head swim and his eyes momentarily go out of focus. He spread a map on the ground and tapped on it with his finger.

"That woods yonder is probably a couple of miles deep. Their officers are dead, so my guess is they're bunched up," he said.

Hatcher nodded as though he understood. But in reality he didn't. He carried a Henry repeater he had taken off the body of a Federal soldier. He was unshaved and sweaty, his kepi crimped wetly into his hair.

"Take two men and get around behind them. When you do I want you to make life very uncomfortable for them."

"I can do that," he said.

"I don't think you follow me, Hatch."

Hatcher looked at him, his eyes uncertain.

"I want them to unlimber that field piece. You'll be on the receiving end of it. You up for that?" Willie said.

"As good as the next," Hatcher said.

"Better get moving, then," Willie said.

Hatcher kept his gaze on the map without seeming to see it.

"You want prisoners?" he asked.

"If they surrender," Willie said.

"The rumor is there ain't a great need for them in the rear."

"Well, you hear this. If I catch you operating under a black flag, I'll take you before a provost and you'll be off to your heavenly reward before the sun sets."

Hatcher nodded, his eyes looking at nothing, a lump of cartilage flexing in his jaw. "One of these days all this will be over," he said.

"Yes?"

"That's all. It'll be over and my stripes and those acorns on your hat won't mean very much."

"I look forward to the day, Hatch."

Willie watched Hatcher crunch across the floor of the woods toward the train track, his spine slightly bent, his clothes stiff with salt and dirt, his Henry repeater cupped in a horizontal position, like a prehistoric creature carrying a spear. Two other men joined him, both of them dressed in tattered butternut, and the three of them crossed the railway embankment and disappeared into the trees on the far side.

Willie wondered when Hatcher would eventually muster up the nerve to frame Willie's back in his rifle sights.

Someone touched him on the shoulder.

"Major is asking for you, Lieutenant," a soldier said. He could not have been over sixteen. There were no buttons on his shirt and the cloth was held against his chest by the crossed straps of his haversack and a bullet pouch. He wore a domed, round-brimmed straw hat that sat on his head like a cake bowl.

"How is he?" Willie asked.

"He falls asleep and says funny things," the boy answered.

Willie walked back through the woods to a bayou that
was spangled with sunlight and draped with air vines that hung from the trees. The major lay on a blanket in the leaves, his head propped on a haversack stuffed with his rubber coat.

Back in the shade, under a mulberry tree clattering with bluejays, the feet of four dead soldiers stuck out from the gum blankets that had been pulled over their bodies. Their shoes had been taken and the blankets that covered them were spotted with the white droppings of birds.

Both of the major's arms were broken and hung uselessly at his sides. A bandage with a scarlet circle the size of a half dollar in the center was tied just below his heart. His muttonchop sideburns looked as thick as hemp on his jowls.

"I had a dream about snow. Everything was white and a red dog was barking inside some trees," the major said.

"We have a boat coming up the bayou, sir. We'll have you back at battalion aid soon," Willie said.

"We shot the living hell out of them, didn't we?"

"You bet," Willie said.

"I need to ask you something."

"Yes, sir."

"When we stopped that steamboat on the Mis'sippi, the one carrying yellow jack?"

Willie let his eyes slip off the major's face.

"Yes, sir, I remember it," he said.

"I had a feeling you knew the woman on board, the one with the Yankee accent."