White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (33 page)

"I drank water out of the Bloody Pond. I wake up with the taste in my throat. I dream about a fellow with railroad spikes in him," Tige said.

Robert lifted Tige's kepi off the back of his chair and set it on his head and grinned at him.

THAT evening Robert bathed in the clawfoot tub inside Willie's bathhouse and shaved in the oxidized mirror on the wall, then dressed in fresh clothes and went outside. A sunshower was falling on the edge of town and he could smell the heavy, cool odor of the bayou in the shadows. Willie was splitting firewood on a stump by the bayou and stacking it in a shed, his sleeves rolled, his cheeks bright with his work.

Robert suddenly felt an affection for his friend that made him feel perhaps things were right with the world after all, regardless of the times in which they lived. There is a goodness in your face that the war, the likes of Billy Sherman, or the worst of our own kind will never rob you of, Willie, he thought.

"I received the letter you wrote me while you were waiting to be executed by the Federals," Robert said.

"You did?"

"A Yankee chaplain mailed it to me with an attached note. He thought there was a chance you had been killed while escaping and he should honor your last wish by mailing the letter you left behind," Robert said.

"Some of those Yanks weren't bad fellows," Willie said.

"You said you repented of any violation of our friendship and you never wanted in impair my  relationship with another."

"A fellow's thoughts get a bit confused when he's about to have eight Yanks fire their rifles into his lights," Willie said.

"I see," Robert said. "Well, you're a mighty good friend, Willie Burke, and you never have to repent to me about anything. Are we clear on what we're talking about, old pal?"

"It's a tad murky to me. May I get back to my work now?"

Robert watched the wind blowing in the Spanish moss and in the trees along the bayou and grinned at nothing. "Did you sign the oath of allegiance?" he asked.

"The oath? No, never got around to it, I'm afraid," Willie said.

"Thought not. My parents are living in a shack behind a Union officer's house."

"We had a good run at it. We lost. Accept it, Robert. When they give us a bad time, tell them to kiss our ruddy bums."

"A nation that fought honorably shouldn't be treated as less," Robert said. "There are men here who have a plan to take Louisiana back out of the Union. They fought shoulder to shoulder with us. They're fine men, Willie."

Willie set down his ax and wiped his hands on a rag and glanced furtively at his friend. Robert's face was wooden, his eyes troubled. Then he saw Willie watching him and he looked again at the wind in the trees and grinned at nothing.

AT dusk the two of them walked through the streets to the house Abigail and Flower had converted into a school. Robert was not prepared for what he saw. Every room in the house, both upstairs and downstairs, was brightly lit and filled with people of color. They were of all ages and all of them were dressed in their best clothes. And those for whom there was no room sat on the gallery or milled about under the live oak in the front yard.

The desks were fashioned from church pews that had been sawed into segments and placed under plank tables that ran the width of the rooms. The walls were decorated with watercolor paintings and the numbers one to ninety-nine and the letters of the alphabet, which had been scissored from red, yellow, and purple pieces of cloth. Each student  had a square of slate and a piece of chalk and a damp rag to write with, and each of them by the end of the evening had to spell ten words correctly that he could not spell the previous week.

Then Robert looked through a downstairs window and saw Abigail Dowling in front of a class that included a dozen blacks, Tige McGuffy, the bordello operator Carrie LaRose and her pirate of a brother, Scavenger Jack, who looked like a shaggy behemoth stuffed between the plank writing table and sawed-down pew.

Abigail wore a dress that had a silver-purplish sheen to it, and her chestnut hair was pulled back in a bun and fixed with a silver comb, so that the light caught on the broadness of her forehead and the resolute quality of her eyes.

Robert waved when she seemed to glance out the window, then he realized she could not see him in the darkness and she had been reacting to a sound in the street. He turned and watched a flatbed wagon loaded with revelers creak past the school. The revelers were drunk on busthead whiskey, yelling, sometimes jumping down to pick up a dirt clod, flinging it at a schoolroom window. A slope-shouldered man in a suit and a bowler hat followed them on horseback, a gold toothpick set in the corner of his mouth.

"Who's that fellow?" Robert asked.

"Todd McCain. Abby outbid him on the building," Willie said.

"Not a good loser, is he?" Robert said.

"Toddy is one of those whose depths will probably never be quite plumbed," Willie said.

The revelers got down from their wagon, uncorking bottles of corn liquor and drinking as they walked, watching the families of Negroes under the trees part in their path, like layers of soil cleaving off the point of a plowshare. One of them drained his bottle, carefully tamped the cork back down in the neck, then broke it on the roof of the school.

Robert walked through the revelers into the street, where Todd McCain sat on his horse under a street lantern that had been hoisted on a pulley to the top of a pole. McCain's face was shadowed by his bowler, his narrow shoulders pinched inside his coat. Robert stroked the white blaze on the nose of McCain's horse.

"A fine animal you have here," he said.
 

McCain removed the gold toothpick from his mouth, his teeth glistening briefly in the dark, as though he might be smiling. "You're Bob Perry," he said.

"My friends call me Robert. But you can call me Lieutenant Perry. Why is it I have the feeling this collection of drunkards and white trash is under your direction?"

"Search me," McCain said.

"Can I accept your word you're about to take them from our presence?"

"They're just boys having fun."

"I'll put it to you more simply. How would you like to catch a ball between your eyes?"

The wind had died and the air in the street had turned stale and close, stinking of horse and dog droppings, the lantern overhead iridescent with humidity. The joy in the revelers had died, too, as they watched their leader being systematically humiliated. McCain's horse shifted its weight and tossed its head against the reins. McCain brought his fist down between the animal's ears.

"Hold, you shithog!" he said.

"Give me your answer, sir," Robert said.

McCain cleared his throat and spit out into the street. He wiped his mouth.

"You've read for the law. I'm a merchant who doesn't have your verbal skills," he said. He turned his horse in a circle, its hindquarters and swishing tail causing Robert to step backward. Then McCain straightened his shoulders and pulled the creases out of his coat and said something under his breath.

"What? Say that again!" Robert said, starting forward.

But McCain kicked his heels into his horse's ribs and set off in a full gallop down the street, his legs clenched as tightly in the stirrups as a wood clothespin, one hand dipping inside his coat. He jerked the bit back in his horse's mouth, whirled in a circle, and bore down on Robert Perry, his bowler flying from his head, a nickel-plated, double-barrel derringer pointed straight out in front of him.

He popped off only one round, nailing the lantern on the pole dead center, blowing glass in a shower above Robert's head. He held up the derringer in triumph, the unfired barrel a silent testimony to the mercy he was extending an adversary.

The revelers roared  with glee and vindication and climbed aboard their flatbed wagon, then followed their leader back down the street to a saloon. Robert picked a sliver of glass off his shirt and pitched it into the darkness.

"The word is he's a White Leaguer," Willie said.

"I don't think they're all cut out of the same cloth," Robert said.

Willie looked at Robert's profile, the uncut hair on the back of his neck, the clarity in his eyes. "How would you be knowing that?" he said.

"The carpetbaggers are pulling the nails out of our shoes. We don't always get to choose our bedfellows. Wake up, Willie," Robert replied.

"Oh, Robert, don't be taken in by these fellows. They do their deeds in darkness and dishonor our colors. Tell me you're not associating with that bunch."

But Robert did not reply. As Willie watched his friend walk inside the school to find Abigail Dowling, the sword wound in his shoulder seemed to flare as though someone had held a lighted match to his skin.

Chapter Twenty-three

EACH morning Ira Jamison rose to greater prosperity and political expectations. Where others saw the collapse of a nation, he saw vast opportunity. He listened respectfully while his neighbors decried carpetbag venality and gave his money and support to the clandestine groups who spoke of retaking Louisiana from the Union, but in truth he viewed the carpetbaggers as cheaply dressed and poorly educated amateurs who could be bought for pocket change.

His summer days of 1865 began with a fine breakfast on his terrace, with an overview of the Mississippi and the trees and bluffs on the far side. He drank his coffee and read his newspapers and the mail that was delivered in a leather pouch from the plantation store. He subscribed to publications in New Orleans, Atlanta, New York, and Chicago, and read them all while a pink glow spread across the land and fresh convict labor throughout the state arrived by steamboat and jail wagon for processing in the camps and barracks they built themselves as the first down payment on their sentences.

Ira Jamison wondered if Abe Lincoln, moldering in the grave, had any idea what he had done for Ira Jamison when  he emancipated the slaves..

Then he unwrapped the current issue of
Harper's Weekly,
read the lead stories, and turned to the second page. At the top of a four-column essay were the words:

The Resurrection of a Vanquished Enemy? The Negro as Convict in the New South, A View by Our Louisiana Correspondent

Jamison set down his coffee cup and began reading.

Even the apologists for Jefferson Davis would concede he spent a political lifetime attempting to spread slavery throughout the Western territories as well as the Caribbean. His close friend Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest has recently tried to influence congressional legislation that would bring about the importation of one million Cantonese coulees to the United States as a source of post-Emancipation labor.

However, an ex-Confederate colonel by the name of Ira Jamison, who has converted his central Louisiana plantation into an enormous prison, may have come upon a profit-making scheme in the exploitation of African labor that outrivals any precedent his peers may have set.

Mr. Jamison rents convicts to enterprises and businessmen whose vested interest is to keep costs low and productivity high. The reports of beatings, malnutrition, and deaths from exhaustion and exposure to inclement weather are widespread.

Mr. Jamison, who prefers to be called 'Colonel,' is a wounded veteran of Shiloh. But his name has also been associated with the destruction of the 18th Louisiana Infantry, who were sent uphill into Union artillery and were unsupported on the flank by the unit under Mr. Jamison's command—

The name on the byline was Abigail Dowling.

Ira Jamison rolled the journal into a tight cylinder and walked into the house, tapping it on his leg, puffing air in one cheek, then the other, conscious each moment of the anger she could stir in him, the control he had to muster not to let it show in his face. He stood by his fireplace, tapping the cusp of the Journal against the bricks, looking out the window at the brilliance of the day. Then, like a man who could not refrain from picking at a scab, his eye wandered to the fissure that cut across his hearth and climbed up one side of his chimney. Had it grown wider? Why was he looking at it now?

He took a lucifer match from a vase on the mantel and scratched it alight, then touched the flame to the rolled edges of the journal and watched the paper blacken along one side of the cylinder. He dropped the pages like burning leaves on top of the andirons.

He sent his body servant to find both Clay Hatcher and Rufus Atkins. A half hour later they tethered their horses in the backyard and walked into the shade of the porte cochere and knocked on the side door. He did not invite them in and instead stepped outside and motioned for them to follow him to the terrace, where his uneaten breakfast still sat, buzzing with flies.

"One of the niggers serve you spoiled food, Kunnel? Tell us which one," Hatcher said.

"Shut up, Clay," Rufus Atkins said.

Jamison stood on the flagstones of the terrace, his fists propped on his hips, his head lowered in thought. The green boughs and bright red bloom of a mimosa tree feathered in the wind above the three men.

"I understand Abigail Dowling has started up a school for freed slaves," Jamison said.

"She ain't the only one. Flower is teaching there, too," Hatcher said.

Atkins gave Hatcher a heated look.

"Flower?" Jamison said.

"Damn right. Teaching reading and writing and arithmetic. Can you believe hit?" Hatcher said.

"Who put up the money for the school?" Jamison said.

"I hear she got hit from the woman runs the whorehouse," Hatcher said.

"Who is
she?"
Jamison asked.

Hatcher started to speak, but Atkins cut him off.

"Abigail Dowling got the money from Carrie LaRose, Colonel," Atkins said. "Is there something you want done?"

"I've suspected for some time Miss Dowling is an immoralist. Do you know what I mean by that?" Jamison said.

"No, suh," Hatcher said.

"Listen to the colonel, Clay," Atkins said.

"She has unnatural inclinations toward her own gender. I think she has no business teaching anybody anything. She is also trying to embarrass us in the national press. Are you hearing me, Rufus?" Jamison said.