White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (7 page)

"He says he didn't do it, sir. I think he's lying," Hatcher said. Atkins cut a piece off a plug of tobacco and fed it off the back of his pocketknife into his mouth.

"Tell me, Private, do you see anyone else around here cleaning fish besides yourself and Corporal Stubbefield?" he said.

"Absolutely not, sir," Willie replied.

"Did Corporal Stubbefield throw fish guts under my window?"

 "Not while I was around," Willie said.

 "Then that leaves only you, doesn't it?" Atkins said.

 "There could be another explanation, sir," Willie said.

"What might that be?" Atkins asked.

"Perhaps there are no fish guts under your window," Willie said.

 "Excuse me?" Atkins said.

"Could it be you still have a bit of Carrie LaRose's hot pillow house in your mustache, sir?" Willie said. Atkins' eyes blazed.

"Buck and gag him. The rag and stick. Five hours' worth of it," he said to the corporal. 

"We're s'pposed to keep it at three, Cap," Hatcher said.

 "Do you have wax in your ears?" Atkins said.

"Five sounds right as rain," Hatcher replied.

WILLIE remained in an upright ball by the lake's edge for three hours, his wrists tied to his ankles, a stick inserted between his forearms and the backs of his knees, a rag stuffed in his mouth. A stick protruded from each side of his mouth, the ends looped with leather thongs that were tied tightly behind his head.

Water ran from his tear ducts and he choked on his own saliva. The small of his back felt like a hot iron had been pressed against his spine. He watched the sun descend on the lake and tried to think of the fish swimming under the water, the wind blowing through the trees, the way the four-o'clocks rippled like a spray of purple and gold confetti in the grass.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rufus Atkins mount his horse and ride out of the camp. The pain spread through Willie's shoulders and wrapped around his thighs, like the tentacles of a jellyfish.

Jim Stubbefield could not watch it any longer. He pulled aside the flap on the corporal's tent and went inside, closing the flap behind him. Hanging from Jim's belt was a bowie knife with a ten-inch blade that could divide a sheet of paper in half as cleanly as a barber's razor.

Hatcher was combing his hair in a mirror attached to the tent pole when Jim locked his arm under Hatcher's neck and simultaneously stuck the knife between his buttocks and wedged the blade upward into his genitals.

"You cut Willie loose and keep your mouth shut about it. If that's not acceptable, I'll be happy to slice off your package and hang it on your tent," Jim said.

Two minutes later Corporal Hatcher cut the ropes on Willie's wrists and ankles and the thong that held the stick in his mouth. Willie stumbled back to the tent he and Jim shared and fell on his cot. Jim sat down next to him and gazed into his face.

"What's on your mind, you ole beanpole?" Willie said.

"You have to stop sassing them, Willie," Jim said.

"They cut bait, didn't they?" Willie said.

"What do you mean?" Jim asked.

"I outlasted them. They're blowhards and yellow-backs, Jim."

"I put a bowie to Hatcher and told him I'd make a regimental flag out of his manhood," Jim said.

"Go on with you?" Willie said, rising up on his elbows. "Hey, come back here. Tell me you didn't do that, Jim."

But Jim had already gone out the tent flap to relieve himself in the privy.

Willie got up from his cot and walked unsteadily behind the mess hall and picked up the severed pieces of rope that had bound his wrists and ankles and the salvia-soaked gun rag that had been stuffed in his mouth and the sticks that had been threaded under his knees and pushed back in his teeth. He crossed the parade ground to Corporal Clay Hatcher's tent and went inside.

A small oil lamp burned on the floor, a coil of black smoke twisting from the glass up through an opening in the canvas. Hatcher slept on his side, in a pair of long underwear, his head on a dirty pillow, his mouth open. The inside of the tent smelled like re-breathed whiskey fumes, unwashed hair, and shoes someone had worn for long hours in a dirt field.

Willie kicked the cot. Hatcher lifted his head uncertainly from the pillow, his pale blue eyes bleary with sleep.

Willie threw the sticks and pieces of rope and thong into his chest. "God love Jim for his loyalty to a friend. But you finish your work, you malignant cretin, or one morning find glass in your mush," Willie said.

Hatcher sat up, his lips caked with mucus. "Finish my work?" he said stupidly.

"Did your mother not clean your ears when she dug you out of her shite? You and Atkins do your worst. I'll live to piss in your coffin, you pitiful fuck."

Hatcher continued to stare at Willie, unable to comprehend the words being spoken to him, the bad whiskey he had drunk throbbing in his head.

Willie started for him.

"I'm coming. I got to relieve myself first," Hatcher said, jerking backward, clutching his groin under the coarse cotton sheet. His throat swallowed in shame at the fear his voice couldn't hide.

EXCEPT for the house servants, Ira Jamison's slaves were free to do as they wished on Sunday. Until sunset they could visit on other plantations, sit upstairs at a white church, play a card game called pitty-pat, roll dice, or dance to fiddle music. Even though Jamison's slaves were forbidden to possess "julep," a fermented mixture of water, yeast, and fruit or cane pulp, Jamison's overseers looked the other way on Sunday, as long as no slave became outrageously drunk or was sick when he or she reported for bell count on Monday.

On Sunday mornings Flower usually put on her gingham dress and bonnet and walked one and a half miles to a slat church house, where a white Baptist minister conducted a service for slaves and free people of color after he had completed services at the white church in town. He was considered a liberal minister and tolerant man because he often allowed one of the congregation to give the homily.

This morning the homilist was a free man of color by the name of Jubal Labiche, who actually never attended services in the church unless he was asked to give the sermon. He owned slaves and, upstream from town, a brick kiln on Bayou Teche. Behind a long tunnel of oak trees on the St. Martinville Road he had built a house that sought to imitate the classical design of his neighbors' houses, except the columns and porch were wood, not marble, the workmanship utilitarian, the paint an off-white that seemed to darken each year from the smoke of stubble fires.

He was a plump, short man, his eyes turquoise, his skin golden, his hair flattened with grease against his scalp. Even though it was warm inside the building, he wore a checkered silk vest with his suit, a gold watch as fat as a biscuit tucked in the pocket.

"No one loved God more than St. Paul. He was bound and jailed and whipped, but no matter how great his suffering, he never listened to false prophets. When the Ephesians were of a rebellious mind, this is what he told them ..."

Jubal Labiche fitted on his spectacles and looked down at the Bible that rested on the podium in front of him.

" 'Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ,'" he read.

The people seated on the plank benches knotted their hands in their laps uncomfortably or looked at their shoes, or glanced furtively at the white minister, a sheep-shorn rail of a man with a long nose and pointed chin. Some of the people in the congregation nodded assent, before anyone perceived a glimmer of dissent in their eyes.

Flower looked directly into Jubal Labiche's face. He stared back at her, then raised his eyes, as though he were caught in a sudden spiritual moment. He began a long prayer of thanks to God during which the congregation would say in unison "Amen" or "Yes, Lord" whenever he paused.

After the service Jubal Labiche was climbing into his carriage when Flower walked past him. He stepped back down in the road and automatically started to touch his hat, then lowered his hand.

"You seemed to have great interest in the homily," he said.

"St. Paul wrote down that slaves is s'pposed to do what the master say?" she asked.                        /

"He's telling us to put our faith in the Lord. Sometime the Lord's voice comes to us - through those who know more about the world than
a simple servant such as myself," he replied, bowing slightly.

"How come we cain't learn from the Bible ourself? How come it got to be read to us?"

"I guess I'm not really qualified to talk about that," he said.

"I guess you ain't," she said.

She turned and walked down the dirt road through the cane fields, her bonnet in her hand, her hair blowing. She could almost feel his eyes burrowing into her back. 

BUT
all the way home she found no release from the words Jubal Labiche had read to the congregation. Was it the will of God that people should own one another? If that was true, then God was not just. Or was the Scripture itself a white man's fraud?

She warmed a tin cup of coffee and fixed a plate of corn bread and molasses, peas, and a piece of fried ham and sat down to eat by her back window. But her food was like dry paper in her mouth. She felt a sense of abandonment and loneliness she could not describe. Outside, the wind was hot blowing across the cane fields, and the blue sky had filled with plumes of dust.

God wanted her to be a slave and Jesus, His son, was a teacher of submission?

She looked through her front door at the empty yard and laundry house. The widow who ran the laundry for Ira Jamison was away for the day, gone with a suitor who owned a hunting cabin on stilts back in the swamp.

Flower walked across the backyard, through the wash pots and clotheslines, and entered the back door of the laundry. The widow's bedroom door was open, and on the dresser was a leather-bound edition of the King James Bible.

It took her less than five minutes to find the lines Jubal Labiche had read aloud from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Labiche had carefully avoided reading the passages that followed his selective excerpt, namely, that Christians should live and perform "not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with goodwill doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men."

And a bit farther on: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

She closed the cover on the book and went back to her cabin and finished her lunch, a strange sense of both confidence and tranquility in her heart, which she did not as yet quite understand.

Before sunset she walked downtown and bought a peppermint stick from the drugstore for a penny. She ate it on the bank of the bayou, not far from the boardinghouse operated by Willie Burke's mother. She watched the dusk gather in the trees along the bayou and the water darken and the sunfish and gars rolling in the shallows. The western sky was red and black now and she could smell the rain falling on the fields somewhere out on the rim of the earth.                   

She stood up from the bank and brushed off her dress and started to walk back to the quarters behind the laundry, before the paddy rollers came out on the roads. But now, for some unexplained reason, the thought of encountering them did not fill her with apprehension.

Then she realized the origin of the feelings that had flooded through her after she had gone into the widow's bedroom and hunted through the New Testament for the excerpt from St. Paul. She could read. No one could ever take that gift from her, and no one could hide knowledge or the truth about the world from her again.

AT sunrise the next morning she heard Rufus Atkins' horse in the yard, then heard him swing down from the saddle and approach her door. She was undressed, and she gathered up her clothes and sat on her bed and held them in her lap and over her breasts. He stepped inside the door, smelling of tobacco and cooked bacon, steam rising from his uniform in the morning coolness.

He removed the bent twenty-dollar gold piece from the watch pocket of his trousers and began working it over the tops of his knuckles.                                         
 

"I got to go to bell count," she said.

"No, you don't."

"All the niggers got to be there, suh. The widow don't abide lateness."

"Not you, Flower. You can do almost any goddamn thing you want. You're a juicy bitch and you know it."

"Ain't right you talk to me like that, suh."

"I'm not here for what you think," he said. He walked to the back window and looked out on the cane field. The sun had just broken the edge of the horizon, like a soft red lump of molten metal.

"Marse Jamison is establishing a slaves council on all his plantations," Atkins said. "That means the slaves will lay out the punishment for anybody who breaks the rules. Marse Jamison reserves only the right—to overturn a punishment if he thinks it's too severe . . . are you listening?"

"I'm not dressed, suh."

Atkins took a deep breath and went outside the door. She heard him light a cigar and lean against the railing on her small gallery. She put on her work dress and lit the kindling in her stove and washed her face in the water bucket, then pushed the coffee pot over the flames that leaked around one of the iron pothole lids. She heard Atkins clear his throat and spit and then felt his weight bend the floorboards in the cabin.

"You're going to be on the slaves council for the laundry and two of the plantations up the road," he said.

"This don't sound like Marse Jamison," she said.

"What do you care? It gives you a little power you didn't have before."

"What if I say I don't want it?"

"I'd say you were a mighty stupid black girl."

"Tell him the stupid black girl don't want it."

He removed the cigar from his mouth and tossed it through the back window.

"You're a handful, Flower. In lots of ways," he said, biting down on his lip.