White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (38 page)

"His shoes are gone. When we put him in the ground I was sure his shoes was on. I didn't let nobody take Jim's shoes, Willie," Elias said.

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

"Maybe it ain't Jim. There was shooting going on in the trees and people running everywhere."

Willie hollowed the dirt away from the corpse's shoulders and arms and sides, then brushed at the face, touching a piece of cloth that had moldered into the features. He picked up the bottom of the fabric and peeled it back from the chin and nose and forehead and looked down into a face whose skin had turned gray and had shrunken tautly against the skull. The mouth was open and a tin identification tag, still attached to a leather cord, was wedged perpendicularly between the front teeth. Willie clasped the tag between his thumb and index finger and lifted it from the dead man's mouth.

Willie spit on the tag and rubbed it clean on his pants, then read the name on it and wrapped it carefully with the frayed leather cord that had held it around Jim's neck and placed it in his shirt pocket and buttoned his shirt flap on top of it.

Then he took Jim out of the grave and laid him on the piece of canvas. He could not believe how light Jim was, how reduced in density and size he had become. There was no smell of corruption in Jim's body, no odor at all, in fact. The spring water had washed the blood from the wounds in his head, and the wind touched his hair and his mouth seemed to form a word.

Where have you been, you Irish groghead?

Had to take care of a few Yanks, run them out of New Iberia, set General Banks straight about a few things. Ready to go home, you ole beanpole?

"You're giving me the crawlies," Elias said.

Willie folded the corners of the canvas across Jim's body and face and lifted him in both arms, then laid him down in the wood box, with the knees propped against one wall, the head bent against another.

Then, on his hands and knees, he shoved the dirt back into the hole at the foot of the outcropping, packing it down, smoothing it, raking leaves across the topsoil. When he had finished, he glanced up at Elias and saw a mixture of pity and sadness in his face.

"He carried the guidon. He was braver than me. I loved Jim and care not if anyone calls me a ghoul. To hell with them," Willie said.

"Oh, Willie, would that I could change your soul as easy as I can rub the burnt cork on my skin," Elias replied.

IRA Jamison never got over being surprised by the way white trash thought. He assumed their basic problem was genetic. They were born in ignorance and poverty, with no more chance of success than a snowball in a skillet, but as long as they were allowed to feel they were superior to Africans, they remained happy and stupid and believed anything they were told.

They worked from dawn to dusk on other people's farms, bought at the company store, lived in cabins a self-respecting owl wouldn't inhabit, saw their children grow up with rickets and rotted teeth, and with great pride became cannon fodder in wars whose causes had nothing to do with their lives.

Then a day came when, through chance or accident, the great scheme of things crashed on their heads like an asteroid.

What better example than Clay Hatcher, Ira Jamison thought. A man who had lived most of his life with expectations of a reward that most people would consider a punishment. More specifically, a lifetime spent coveting a desiccated, worm-eaten house that had so little structural value a man with heavy boots could kick it into kindling.

But Clay Hatcher was not most people and Angola Plantation was not the rest of the world. The house had four rooms, a cistern and a chicken run, and was built on a bluff overlooking the river. Its geographic prominence meant it went to only one person, the chief overseer. The homes of the other whites who worked on the plantation, now becoming known in the prison nomenclature as "free people," were situated down the back slope, at best on dry ground that didn't breed mosquitoes. Farther on, in acreage that never quite drained or was full of clay, were the old slave cabins, now used by convicts.

The house on the bluff was sunny in winter and cooled by a breeze off the river in summer. Mimosa trees bloomed in the front yard and peach trees in back. The soil was black and loamy, too, wheelbarrowed up from the compost heaps behind the barns, and the vegetable garden produced tomatoes as big as grapefruit.

Hatcher had knocked on the side door under the porte cochere, his battered excuse for a hat in his hand, his bottom lip crusted with a scab that looked like a black centipede.

"I hear Rufus is buying the property where the laundry was at in New Iberia," he said.

"That's right, Clay. Looks like Roof is about to become a gentleman planter," Jamison said.

"Then he'll be moving out directly?"

"Yes, directly it is."

Hatcher cut his head and grinned and fiddled with his hat, his gaze never quite meeting Jamison's.

"Reckon me and my old woman should get our things together, huh?" he said.

"I'm not following you."

"Seeing as how I'm second overseer, I figured you'd want me moving on into Rufus's place. It goes with the job, don't it?"

Jamison heard a boat on the river and looked in its direction. "You're a good man, Clay. But we're in the penal business now. An oldtime jail warden from New Orleans will be replacing Rufus. I'll be relying on you to get him oriented."

Hatcher turned his hat in his hands, his face reddening, his jawbones knotting, a band of sunlight slicing across his eyes.

"Oldtime jail warden, you say?" he said.

But Jamison did not reply, his eyes taking on a glint that Hatcher failed to read.

Hatcher licked the broken place on his lip. "I seen a heap of shit happen on this place. But this takes all," he said.

"I advise you not to create a problem for yourself, my friend."

"Twenty-five years of herding niggers and living one cut above them? Listening to my old woman bitch about it from morning to night? Four goddamn more years of ducking Yankee bullets?
Me
create a problem? Kunnel, when it comes to putting a freight train up a man's ass, you know how to do it proper," Hatcher said.

"Go down to the store and get you a bottle of whiskey and charge it to me. Then come back and talk to me in two days."

"You'll see the devil go to church first," Hatcher said.

He started down the drive, then stopped and turned, glaring at Jamison, all his servile pretense gone now, his hands opening and closing at his sides.

That had been three hours ago. Now Ira Jamison stood on the upstairs veranda, surveying all that he owned, the breeze cool on his skin, the air aromatic with the smell of flowers hanging in baskets from the eaves. But neither his prosperity nor the loveliness and unseasonable coolness of the day brought him comfort. Why had he not acted more diplomatically with Hatcher? Had his father not taught him never to provoke white trash, to treat them as one would coal oil around an open flame?

He had placed a ball of opium the size of a child's marble in his jaw, more than he usually ingested, but it did not seem to be taking effect. The wind gusted against the house and for a moment he thought he felt a vibration through the beams and studs, a tremolo that seemed to reach down into the foundation. But that was foolish, he told himself. His house was solid. An engineer had told him the fissure in his hearth and chimney was cosmetic. Why did Ira worry so much about his house? the engineer had asked.

Because not one person in the world cares whether you live or die. Because you are the sum total of your possessions and the loss of any one of them makes you the less, a voice said to him.

"That's not true. One person does care," he said to the wind.

Then he wondered at his own sanity.

That night Clay Hatcher left the plantation. But not before tying both of his bird dogs to a catalpa tree and shooting each of them with a revolver, then setting fire to his shack with his dead wife inside it.

Chapter Twenty-six

IT HAD rained all afternoon and Flower Jamison's yard was flooded. Through her front window she saw mule-drawn wagons carrying green lumber down to the site of the old laundry, where Rufus Atkins was building a home for himself and pretending to be a member of the local aristocracy. Sometimes the wagons sunk almost to the hubs in the mud and the convict teamsters would have to unload them, free the wheels, then restack the pile before they could continue on in the rain.

While he oversaw the building of his home Rufus Atkins lived in a huge canvas tent, one with crossbeams and big flaps and individual rooms inside. Oil lanterns hung from the tent poles, and when they were lit the tent looked like a warm, yellow smudge inside the mist. He had laid out plank walkways to the entrances and in the morning he walked to the privy in an elegant bathrobe to empty his chamber pot, like a scatological parody of a Victorian gentleman.

He asked others to call him "Captain," reminding them of his service to the Confederacy but never mentioning that his rank was given to him only because he was the employee of Ira Jamison and that during four years of war he was never promoted.

In public places he talked loudly of what he called his "land transact ions." Ex-paddy rollers cadged drinks from him in
the saloons around town and White Leaguers like Todd McCain visited him in his tent late at night, but the invitations that went to Ira Jamison as a matter of course did not go to Rufus Atkins.

So he abused Negroes to show his power over others, flew a Confederate battle flag over his tent in defiance of the Occupation, and kept late hours in the saloon down the road. Twice Flower saw him stop his horse, a black mare, in front of her house and stare at her gallery for a long time, his stiffened arms forming a column on the saddle pommel. But when she went outside to confront him, he was gone.

It was still raining when she started supper, which meant Abigail Dowling would probably show up soon in her buggy and take the two of them to the school for night classes. She poured a cup of coffee and added sugar to it and drank it at the stove, her thoughts on the school, the field hands who worked ten-hour days and tried to learn reading and writing and arithmetic at night, and the meager donations on which she and Abigail operated.

She heard a horse in the yard and footsteps on the gallery. She pulled open the front door and looked into the face of Clay Hatcher, his clothes drenched, the brim of his hat wilted over his ears and brow. A knife was belted on one hip, a pistol on the other. He looked up and down the road, then back at her, the skin of his face stretched against his skull. His breath smelled of funk and boiled shrimp.

"Got something to tell you," he said.

"Not interested," she answered.

"It's about your mother. Her name was Sarie. Her teeth was filed into points 'cause there was an African king back there in her bloodline or something."

She wanted to tell him to get off her gallery, to take his repository of pain and grief and hatred off her land and out of her life. But she knew the umbilical cord that held her to Angola Plantation was one she would never be able to sever, that its legacy in one way or another would poison the rest of her days. So she fixed her eyes on his and waited, her heart pounding.

"Rufus tole Kunnel Jamison your mama killed one of the overseers and that's how come he hit her so hard with his quirt," Hatcher said. "That was the lie he covered his ass with. He beat Sarie's brains out 'cause she sunk her teeth in his hand, and I mean plumb down to the bone. I don't know about no African king in her background, but she was one ferocious nigger when she got a board up her cheeks."

Flower felt the gallery tilt under her, as though she were on board a ship. The wind gusted and a tree slapped the side of the house and rain swept under the eaves.

"They said she was kicked by a horse. She shot the overseer and tried to run away and a horse trampled her," she said.

"That's the story the kunnel wanted us to tell folks. He didn't want other white people knowing his slaves got beat to death. You don't believe me, look at that half-moon scar on Rufus's left hand."

"Leave my property," she said.

"I'm hell-bound, Flower. I kilt my old woman. Look at my face. Devil's done got my soul already. Ain't got no reason to deceive you," he said.

Then he plunged into the rain and mounted his horse, jerking its head about with the reins and slashing it viciously with his boot heels at the same time.

But he had set the hook and set it deep.

SHE went to the school that evening and taught her classes but said nothing to Abigail about Clay Hatcher's visit. That night she dreamed of a man's callused, sun-browned hand, the heel half-mooned with a string of tiny gray pearls. She woke in the morning to the sound of more thunder. She started a fire in her woodstove and fixed coffee and drank it while she watched the wind flatten the cane in the fields and wrinkle the water in her yard. Then she put on a gum coat and wrapped a bandanna on her head, and with her parasol popped open in front of her face she began the long walk down to Rufus Atkins' tent.

The convicts building his house were working under tarps. An empty jail wagon sat forlornly under the live oak in front. Bearded, filthy, lesioned with scabs, the convicts stared at her from the scaffolding as she passed on the plank walkway. Then a guard yelled at them in French and their hammers recommenced a rhythmic smacking against nails and wood.

Sin' pulled open the flap on Atkins' tent and stepped inside. I le was standing it a table, studying the design of his house, his white shirt and dark pants unspotted by the rain. An oil lamp burned above his head, lighting the grainy texture of his face and the flat, hazel eyes that never allowed people to read his thoughts.

He placed one hand on his hip, his booted feet forming a right angle, like a fencer's.

"I don't know what it is, but it's trouble of one kind or another. So get to it and be on your way," he said.

"Clay Hatcher came to my house last night," she said.