White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (27 page)

"Maybe I don't have twelve right now. But maybe part of it."

"That a fact?" He looked into space, as though calculating figures in his head. "Under the right circumstances I can come down to ten, maybe eight."

"Right circumstances?"

"I could use a little hep in the storeroom. Won't take long. If you feel like walking on back there with me."

"I'll be back later."

"Tell you what, hep me out and I'll go down to six. I cain't make more right than that," he said. He wet his bottom lip, as though it were chapped, and looked away from her face.

"You all right, suh?" she asked.

He averted his eyes and didn't reply. After she was gone he threw the revolver angrily in a drawer.

SHE walked down the street toward Abigail Dowling's cottage and saw a carriage parked in front of the Shadows. Through the iron gate she caught sight of Ira Jamison, sitting at a table on a flagstone terrace under oak trees, with two Yankee officers and a cotton trader from Opelousas. The grass was sprinkled with azalea petals, the gazebo and trellises in the gardens humped with blue bunches of wisteria. The gate creaked on its hinges when she pulled it open.

She followed the brick walkway through the trees to the terrace. The four men at the table were drinking coffee from small cups and laughing at a joke. A walking cane rested against the arm of Ira Jamison's chair. His hair had grown to his shoulders and looked freshly shampooed and dried, and the weight he had lost gave his face a kind of fatal beauty, perhaps like a poisonous flower she had read of in a poem.

"I need you to lend me twelve dol'ars," she said.

He twisted around in his chair. "My heavens, Flower, you certainly know how to sneak up on a man," he said.

"The man at the store says that's the price for a Colt .36 revolver. I 'spect he's lying, but I still need the twelve dol'ars," she said.

The other three men had stopped talking. Ira Jamison pulled on his earlobe.

"What in heaven's name do you need a pistol for?" he said.

"Your overseer, Rufus Atkins, paid three men to rape Miss Abigail. She wasn't home, so they did it to me. I aim to kill all three of them and then find Rufus Atkins and kill him, too."

The other three men shifted in their chairs and glanced at Ira Jamison. He pinched a napkin on his mouth and dropped it into a plate.

"I think you'd better leave the premises, Flower," he said.

"You had that Yankee soldier killed at the hospital in New Orleans, just so you could escape and make everybody think you were a hero. Now I 'spek these Yankee officers are helping you sell cotton to the North. You something else, Colonel."

"I'll walk you to the gate," Ira Jamison said.

He rose from the chair and took her arm, his fingers biting with surprising strength into the muscle.

"Why's he letting a darky talk to him like that?" she heard one of the officers say behind her.

The cotton trader raised a finger in the air, indicating the officer should not pursue the subject further.

AT the cottage she told Abigail Dowling what had happened.

"You should have come to me first," Abigail said.

"You would have bought me a gun?"

"We could have talked," Abigail said. Then she looked into space and bit her lip at the banality of her own words.

"You been good to me, but I'm going on down to the soldiers' camp," Flower said.

"To do what?"

"Someone said they're hiring washerwomen."

"Did you eat anything today?"

"Maybe. I don't remember."

Abigail pressed her hands down on Flower's shoulders until Flower was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. She smoothed Flower's hair and caressed her cheek with her hand.

"Wish you wouldn't do that, Miss Abby."

Abigail's face flushed. "I'm sorry," she said.

Then she fried four eggs in the skillet and scraped the mold off a half loaf of bread and sliced it and browned the slices in ham fat. She divided the food between them and sat across from Flower and ate without speaking.

"What are you studying on?" Flower asked.

"I was thinking of my father and what he would do in certain situations. You two would have liked each other," Abigail said.

Ten minutes later Abigail went out the back door and removed a spade from the shed and walked through the dappled shade along the rim of the coulee and began scraping away a layer ot blackened leaves from under an oak tree. She dug down one root to a tin box that was wrapped in a piece of old gum coat. Then she gathered her purse and a parasol from the house and walked down Main Street, past the Shadows, to the hardware store.

Todd McCain walked out from the back when he heard the bell tinkle above the front door. He and two black men had been restocking the front of the store with the inventory he had hidden from looters, and his shirt was damp at the armpits, his greased hair flecked with grit.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"You offered to sell a revolver to Flower Jamison for six dollars, provided she'd go in the back room with you," Abigail said.

 "Sounds like somebody's daydream to me," he said. She pulled open the drawstring on her purse. "Here are your six dollars. How much is it for the ammunition?"

He touched the inside of one nostril with a thumbnail, then huffed air out his nose.

"You got some nerve insulting me on the word of a nigger," he said.

He waited for a response, but there was only silence. When he tried to return her stare, he saw a repository of contempt and disgust in her eyes, aimed at him and no other, that made him clear his throat and look away.

"It's ten dollars for the pistol. I don't have any balls or powder for it," he said.

She continued to look into his face, as though his words had no application to the situation.

"Seven dollars, take it or leave it. I don't need any crazy people in my store," he said.

He waited while she found another dollar in her purse, then picked up the coins one at a time from the glass counter. "I'll wrap it up for you and throw in some gun oil so you don't have no reason to come back," he said.

"Don't presume," she said.

 "Presume what?"

"That because I'm a woman your behavior and your remarks won't be dealt with."

He felt one eye twitch at the corner.

After she was gone he returned to the storeroom where he had been working and walked in a circle, his hands on his hips, searching in the gloom for all the words he should have spoken. She had made him play the fool, he told himself, and now his face felt as if it had been stung by bumblebees. Without his knowing why, his gaze rested on a saw, a short-handled sledgehammer, a can of kerosene, a barrel filled with serpentine coils of chain, a prizing bar with a forked claw on it.

One day, he told himself.

Down the street Abigail walked along the curtain of bamboo that bordered the front yard of the Shadows. The azaleas were a dusty purple in the shade, the air loud with the cawing of blue jays. The iron gate swung open in front of her, and Ira Jamison, the cotton trader, and two Union officers stepped directly in her path.

"Miss Abby, how are you?" Jamison said, touching his hat.

"Did you ask the same of your daughter?"

"My wife and I had no children, so I'm not sure whom you're referring to. But no matter. Have a fine day, Miss Abigail," he said.

"Your own daughter told you she was raped and you manhandled her. In front of these men. What kind of human being are you?" she said.

The street was deep in shadow, empty of sound and people. The oak limbs overhead creaked in the wind.

"I guess it's just not your day, Colonel Jamison," the cotton trader said.

All four men laughed.

Abigail Dowling pulled the buggy whip from its socket on the side of
Ira Jamison's carriage and slashed it across his face. He pressed his hand against his cheek and stared at the blood on his fingers in disbelief.

She flung the whip to the ground and walked to her cottage, then went through the yard and into the trees in back, trembling all over. She stood among the oaks and cypresses on the bayou, her arms clenched across her chest, her temples pulsing with nests of green veins.

A wave of revulsion swept through her. But at what? The owner of the hardware store? The rapists? Ira Jamison?

She knew better. Her violence, her social outrage, her histrionic public displays, all disguised a simple truth. Once again, an innocent person had paid for the deeds she had committed, in this case, Flower Jamison.

The wind swirled inside the trees and wrinkled the surface of the bayou, and in the rustling of the canebrake she thought she heard the word
Judas
hissed in her ear.

Chapter Nineteen

AT Willie Burke's request, a Union chaplain secured for him three sheets of paper, three envelopes, a bottle of black ink, and a metal writing pen. He sat on straw against the wall of the storehouse, a candle guttering on the brick window ledge above his head, and wrote a letter to his mother and one to Abigail. There was a hollow feeling in his chest and a deadness in his limbs that he had never known before, even at Shiloh. The words he put in his letters contained no grand or spiritual sentiment. In fact, he considered it a victory simply to complete a sentence that did not reflect the fear and weakness eating through his body like weevils through pork.

His third letter was to Robert Perry, somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Dear Robert,

I was captured out of uniform and will be shot in two hours. This night I have written Abby and told her I love her but I know her heart belongs to you. It could not go to a more fitting and fine man. I repent of any violation of our friendship, Robert, and want you to know I would never deliberately impair your relationship with
another.

Jim Stubbefield and I will see you on the other side.

Your old pal and friend, Willie Burke

He folded the three letters and placed them in their envelopes and sealed them with wax that had melted on top of the candle burning above his head. Then he gave them to the chaplain, who was consoling a man whose skin had turned as gray as a cadaver's.

Willie stood at the window and watched the stars fade and the light go out of the sky, and the scattered farmhouses and the trees along the bayou begin to sharpen inside the ground fog that rolled out of the fields. Roosters were crowing beyond his line of sight, and he smelled wood smoke and meat frying on a fire. Eight Union soldiers were camped in pup tents among the oaks on the bayou, their Springfield rifles stacked. The canvas sides of their tents were damp with dew, the flaps tied to the tents' poles. Willie's heart dropped when he saw an enlisted man emerge from his tent and stretch and look in the direction of the storehouse. He stepped back from the window and pressed his hand to his mouth, just as a half cup of bile surged out of his stomach.

Jim wasn't afraid when he went up the hill with the guidon at Shiloh, he thought. Don't you be, either, he told himself. A brief flash of light, perhaps a little pain, then it's over. There are worse ways to go. How about the poor devils carried into an aid station with their guts hanging out or their jaws shot away? Or the ones who begged for death while their limbs were sawed off?

But his dialogue with himself brought him no comfort and he wondered if his legs would fail when a Yankee provost walked him to the wall.

The soldiers camped on the bayou were gathered around their cookfire now, drinking coffee, glancing in the direction of the storehouse, as though preparing themselves for an uncomfortable piece of work that was not of their choosing.

A ninth man joined them, an erect fellow with a holstered sidearm and stripes on his sleeves. When the firelight struck his face Willie recognized the sergeant who had tried to prevail upon him to use his head and extricate himself from a capital sentence. What were his words, the only real pacifist was a dead Quaker?

Why had he not listened?

A man with a stench that made Willie think of cat spray elbowed him aside from the window.

"Sorry, I didn't know you had your name carved on the bricks," Willie said.

"Shut up," the man said.

His eyes, hair and beard looked as though he had been shot out of a cannon. He was barefoot and wore no shirt under a butternut jacket that was stitched with gold braid on the collar. His pants were cinched around his waist with a rope and stippled with blood.

"You ever kill somebody with your bare hands?" he asked. He pressed his face close to Willie's. The inside of his mouth was black with gunpowder, his fetid breath worse than an outhouse.

"Bare hands? Can't say I have," Willie replied.

"You up for it? Tell me now. Don't sass me, either."

"Could you be giving me a few more details?" Willie asked.

"Clean the ham hocks out of your mouth. Captain Jarrette is taking us out. Do you want to make a run for it or die like a carp flopping on the ground? Give me an answer," the man said.

"You were at the ambush on the St. Martinville Road."

"Of all the people I try to help, it turns out to be another stump from Erin. Anyone ever tell you an Irishman is a nigger turned inside out?"

"I really don't care to die next to a smelly lunatic. Do you have a plan, sir?" Willie said.

"Go back to your letter writing, cabbage head," the man said.

The guerrilla turned away and stared at the locked door and front wall of the storehouse, his arms hanging like sticks from the ragged sleeves of his jacket, his pants reaching only to his ankles. Outside, the sun broke on the eastern horizon and a red glow filled the trees on the bayou and painted the tips of the sugarcane in the fields. Through the window Willie heard the sound of marching feet.

The sound grew louder and then stopped in front of the storehouse. Someone turned an iron key in the big padlock on the door and shot back the bolt through the rungs that held it in place. The light from outside seemed to burst into the room like a fistful of white needles. A captain and two parallel lines of enlisted men in blue, all wearing kepis, bayonets twist-grooved onto the muzzles of their rifles, waited to escort the prisoners to the barn and the firing squad of eight that had been camped in the pup tents by the bayou. In the distance Willie thought he heard the rumble of thunder or perhaps horses' hooves on a hard-packed road. Then he heard a solitary shout, like an angry man who had mashed his thumb with a hammer.