White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (39 page)

"You should have gone for the sheriff. He went crazy and killed his wife. You didn't hear about it?"

His left hand rested on the table, behind him, in a pool of shadow.

"How did my mother die?" she asked.

"Sarie? A horse ran her down," he replied. His face seemed to show puzzlement.

But Rufus Atkins had made a lifetime study of not revealing his emotions about anything, she thought. Not even puzzlement. So why now?

"She shot a man, Flower. Right in the head. Then took off running," he said, although she had not challenged his statement.

"She'd just given birth."

He shook his head. "I'm telling you how it happened, girl." He raised his left hand and touched at his nose with his wrist. Then she saw it, a barely noticeable half-circle of tiny scars on the rim of his hand.

Her gum coat felt like an oven on her body. She could smell all of his odors in the tent's stale air—testosterone, unwashed hair, shaving water that hadn't been thrown out, a thunder mug in a corner. She unbuttoned her coat and pulled her bandanna off her head and pushed her hair out of her eyes, as though she were rising out of dark water that was crushing the air from her lungs.

"She bit you and you beat her to death," Flower said.

"Now, hold on there." He looked at her open coat and at her hands and involuntarily backed away from her, knocking into the tent pole. The oil lamp clattered above his head.

She stepped toward him and saw his mouth open, his hand clench on the edge of the table.

"I can hurt you Fower. Don't make me do it," he said.

She gathered all the spittle in her mouth and spat it full in his face.

RAIN swept in sheets across the wetlands throughout the day, then the storm intensified and bolts of lightning trembled like white-hot wires in the heart of the swamp, igniting fires among the cypress trees. Long columns of smoke flattered across the canopy and hung on the fields and roads in a dirty gray vapor.

Flower told no one of her encounter with Rufus Atkins nor of the knowledge that had come to her about the nature of her mother's death in 1837. Who besides herself would care? she asked herself. What legal authority would concern itself with the murder of a slave woman twenty-eight years in the past?

But she knew the real reason for her silence and it was not one she would share, not even with herself, at least not until she had to.

The cap-and-ball revolver Abigail had bought from McCain's Hardware was wrapped in a piece of flannel under Flower's bed. She removed it and set it on the kitchen table and peeled back the cloth from the frame. The metal and brown grips glistened with oil; the caps were snug in the nipples of each loaded chamber. She touched the cylinder and the barrel with the balls of her fingers, then curved her hand around the grips. The cylindrical hardness that she cupped in her palm caused an image to flit across her mind that both embarrassed and excited her.

That evening the rain stopped, but fires still burned in the swamp and the air was wet and heavy with the smell of woodsmoke. She drove with Abigail in the buggy to the school, passing the saloon often frequented by Rufus Atkins. His black mare was tethered outside, and through the doorway she caught a glimpse of him standing at the bar, by himself, tilting a glass to his mouth.

That night she taught her classes, then extinguished all the lamps in the rooms and locked the doors to the building and climbed up on the buggy for the trip home.

"You're sure quiet these days," Abigail said.

"Weather's enough to get a person down," Flower said.

"Sure you haven't met a fellow?"

"I could go the rest of my life without seeing a man. No, I take that back. I could go two lifetimes without seeing one."

Both of them laughed.

By the drawbridge over the Teche they saw a crowd of workingmen from the Main Street saloon, Union soldiers, the sheriff, their faces lit like tallow under the street lamps. Two Negroes had tied a rope around a body that was caught in a pile of trash under the bridge. They pulled the body free, but the wrists were bound with wire and the wire snagged on the rootball of a submerged cypress tree. A barrel-chested, red-faced white man, with a constable's star pinned to his vest, rode his horse into the shallows and grabbed the end of the rope from the Negroes, twisted it around his pommel, and dragged the body, skittering like a log, up on dry ground.

The dead man was white, without shoes, his eyes sealed shut, the belt gone from his pants, the pockets turned inside out. His head rolled on his neck like a poppy gourd on a broken stem. The sheriff leaned over him with a lantern in his hand.

"They mark him?" someone in the crowd called out.

"On the forehead. 'K.W.C.,'" the sheriff said. Then the disgust grew in his face and he waved his arms angrily. "Y'all get out of here! This ain't your bidness! What kind of town we becoming here? If the Knights can do that to him, they can do it to us. Y'all t'ought of that?"

Abigail slapped the reins on her horse's rump and headed down the road toward Flower's house. She glanced back over her shoulder at the crowd by the bridge.

"Wasn't that the man who worked for Ira Jamison, what was his name, a posse was looking for him yesterday? He murdered his wife up at Angola Plantation," she said.

"Cain't really say. I've shut out a lot of bad things from Angola, Miss Abby," Flower replied.

Abigail looked at her curiously. "What are you hiding from me?" she asked.

FLOWER read in the front room of her house until late, getting up to fix tea, silhouetting against the lamp, twice stepping out on the gallery to look at the weather, the light from the doorway leaping into the yard. At midnight she heard the sounds of the saloon closing, the oak door being secured, shutters being latched, horses clopping on the road, men's voices calling out a final "good night" in the darkness.

But she saw no sign of Rufus Atkins.

She stood at the front window, the lamp burning behind her, until the road was empty, then blew out the lamp and sat in a chair with the cap-and-ball revolver in her lap and watched the sky clear and the moon rise above the fields.

The revolver rested across the tops of her thighs, and her fingers rested on the grips and coolness of the barrel. She felt no fear, only a strange sense of anticipation, as though she were discovering an aspect of herself she didn't know existed. She heard a wagon pass on the road, then the sounds of owls and tree frogs. The curtains fluttered on the windows and she smelled the odor of gardenias on the wind. In a secure part of her mind she knew she was falling asleep, but her physical state didn't seem important anymore. Her hand was cupped over the cylinder of the pistol, the back of the house locked up, the front door deliberately unbolted, cooking pots stacked against the jamb.

She awoke at two in the morning, her bladder full. She locked the front door and went out the back into the yard, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on the smooth wood seat inside the heated cypress enclosure that had served the patrons of Carrie LaRose's brothel for over twenty years, the revolver next to her. Through the ventilation gap at the top of the door, she could see the sky and stars and smell the faint tracings of smoke from the fires burning in the swamp. The only sounds outside were those of nightbirds calling to one another and water dripping from the yard's solitary live oak, under which Rufus Atkins had paid the men who raped her.

She had overestimated him, she thought. Perhaps a lifetime of being abused by his kind had made her believe men like Atkins possessed powers which they did not, not even the self-engendered power or resolve to seek revenge after they were spat upon.

She wiped herself and rose from the seat, straightening her dress, and crossed the yard with the pistol hanging from her right hand. She turned in a half circle and looked about the yard one more time, then unlocked the door and went inside.

She rechecked all the doors and sashes to see that they were locked, then ate a piece of bread and ham and drank a glass of buttermilk and went into her bedroom. She put the revolver under the bed and left two of the windows open to cool the room and balanced a stack of cook pots on each of the sills in case an intruder tried to climb in. Then she lay down on top of the covers and went to sleep.

When she woke later it was not because she heard glass breaking or a door hasp tearing loose from wood or pans clattering to the floor. It was a collective odor, a smell of whiskey and horses and crushed gardenias and night damp trapped inside cloth.

And of leather. The braided end of a quirt that a man in a black robe and a peaked black hood teased across her face.

She sat straight up in bed, at first believing she was having a dream. Then the man in the peaked hood sat next to her on the mattress and fitted the quirt across her throat and pressed her back down on the pillow. Behind him was a second man, this one in white, her cap-and-ball revolver clutched in his hand.

"How did you get in?" Flower said.

The man in the black robe and hood leaned close to her, as though he wanted his breath as well as his words to injure her skin. The image of a camellia was stitched with pink and white thread on the breast of his robe. "A hideaway door with a spring catch on the side of the house. Lots of things I know you don't, Flower," the voice of Rufus Atkins said. "I know the places you go, the names of the niggers you teach, the time of day you eat your food, the exact time you piss and shit and empty your thunder mug in the privy. Have you figured out what I'm telling you?"

"Explain it to her," the other visitor said.

Flower recognized the voice of Todd McCain, the owner of the hardware store.

"You think you're free," Rufus Atkins' voice said, the mouth hole in his hood puffing with his breath. "But you spit in the wrong man's face. That means no matter where you go, what you do, who you see, either me or my friend here or a hundred like us will be watching you. You won't be able to take a squat over your two-holer back there without wondering if we're listening outside. Starting to get the picture? We own you, girl. Throw all the temper tantrums you want. That sweet little brown ass is ours."

When she didn't answer, he moved the quirt over her breasts, pressing it against her nipples, flattening it against her stomach.

"Damned if you're not
prime cut," he said. He blew his breath along the down on her skin and she felt her loins constrict and a wave of nausea course through her body.

The two hooded figures left the front door open behind them. She sat numbly on the side of her bed and watched them ride away, their robes riffling over their horses' rumps, the cap-and-ball revolver on which she had relied thrown into the mud.

Chapter Twenty-seven

EARLY the next morning she took the sheets off her bed, not touching the area where the man in the black hood had sat. She put them in a washtub, then bathed and dressed to go to school. When she tried to eat, her food tasted like paper in her mouth. The sky had cleared, the sun was shining, and birds sang in the trees, but the brilliance and color of the world outside seemed to have nothing to do with her life now.

She drank a cup of hot tea and scraped her uneaten food into a garbage bucket and washed her dishes, then prepared to leave for school. But when she closed and opened her eyes, her head spun and bile rose in her throat and her skin felt dead to the touch, as though she had been systemically poisoned.

You've gone through worse, she told herself. They raped you, but they didn't make you afraid. They murdered your mother but they couldn't steal her soul. Why do you keep your wounds green and allow men as base as Atkins and McCain to control your thoughts? she asked herself.

But she knew the answer. The house, the land, the school, the flower beds she and Abigail had planted, her collection of books, her new life as a teacher, everything she was and had become and would eventually be was about to be taken from her. All because of a choice, a deed, she knew she would eventually commit herself to, because if she did not, she would never have peace.

She went outside and picked up the cap-and-ball revolver from the edge of a rain puddle. She carried it into the kitchen and wiped the mud off the frame and the cylinder and caps with a dry rag and rewrapped it in the flannel cloth and replaced it under her bed.

In the corner of her eye she saw a black carriage with a surrey and white wheels pull to a stop in front of the gallery. Ira Jamison walked up the steps, his hair cut short, his jaws freshly shaved, looking at least twenty years younger than his actual age.

"I hope I haven't dropped by too early," he said, removing his hat. "I was in the neighborhood and felt an uncommonly strong desire to see you."

"I'm on my way to work," she said.

"At your school?"

 "Yes. Where else?"

"I'll take you. Just let me talk with you a minute," he said. She stepped back from the doorway to let him enter. She reached to take his hat but he took no heed of her gesture and placed it himself on a large, hand-carved knob at the foot of the staircase banister. He smiled.

"Flower, I'm probably a fond and foolish man, but I wanted to tell you how much you mean to me, how much you remind me of—" He stopped in mid-sentence and studied her face. "Have I said the wrong thing here?"

"No, Colonel, you haven't."

 "You don't look well."

"Two men got in my house last night. They had on the robes of the White Camellia. One was Rufus Atkins. The other man owns the hardware store on Main Street."

"Atkins came here? He touched you?"

"Not with his hand. With his whip. He told me he'd be with me everywhere I went. He'd see everything I did."

She saw the bone flex along his jaw, the crow's feet deepen at the corner of one eye. "He whipped you?"

"I don't have any more to say about it, Colonel."

"You must believe what I tell you, Flower. This man and the others who ride with him, I'm talking about these fellows who pretend to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers, this man knew he'd better not hurt you in any way. Do you understand that?"