White Doves at Morning (18 page)

Jean-Jacques stuck his hand
inside the bag and picked up a sheaf of bills that was tied with string.

"Script?" he said.

"It's the currency of your
country, sir," Guilbeau said.

"Wipe your ass wit' it,"
Jean-Jacques said.

Guilbeau hooked his little
finger in his ear, then examined the tip of it.

"Would you prefer a promissory
note?" he asked.

"I paid gold for them guns."

"Sorry you feel so badly used.
Maybe you can share your complaint with some of our boys who had to
fight with flintlocks at Shiloh," Guilbeau said.

"I seen you befo'. Wit' Ira
Jamison," Jean-Jacques said.

Guilbeau put a twist of
chewing tobacco in his mouth and chewed it thoughtfully in one jaw. He
spit in the leaves at his feet and lifted the carpetbag from the
tailgate of the wagon and walked it down to the bank and dropped it in
the rowboat in which Jean-Jacques had come ashore.

Jean-Jacques watched the black
men load the cases of Enfields into the wagons. Most of them were
barefoot, their clothes in tatters, sweat sliding down their faces in
the heated enclosure of the trees. His own men were hung over and sick,
sleeping under a shade tree on the bank. He no longer felt like a
ship's captain but instead like an object of contempt who stands by
impotently while thieves sack his house. He opened and closed his hands
and bit down on his lip, but continued to do nothing while the black
men crunched back and forth in the leaves and flung the British rifles
heavily into the wagons, case upon case, latching up the tailgates now,
the armed enlisted men in the wagon boxes lifting the reins off the
mules' backs.

"Ain't right what y'all
doing," Jean-Jacques said.

"We'll be mixing it up with
the blue-bellies soon. You're welcome to join us. Be a lot of
opportunities if this war comes out right," Atkins said.

"Ira Jamison got his thumb in
this," Jean-Jacques said.

"That's about like saying
there's crawfish in
Lou'sana, Jack," Atkins said.

"'It'll him the man who steals from me don't just walk away, no."

 "
My regards to your
sister. She's an
exceptional woman. Two thirds of the soldiers at Camp Pratt can't be
wrong," Atkins said.

He mounted his horse and rode
to the head of the wagon train. Jean-Jacques watched as the wagons
creaked over the live oak roots, snapping pecan husks under the iron
rims of the wheels, the sun-heated dust floating back into his face.

SATURDAY afternoon he rode his
horse to the brick saloon next to his sister's brothel and stood at the
bar and ordered a whiskey. The bartender served him without speaking,
and others returned his greeting obliquely, an obstruction in their
throats, their eyes not meeting his.

A bearded man with a pinned-up
sleeve, his arm taken at Manassas Junction, looked him boldly in the
face, then tossed his cigar hissing into a spittoon six inches from
Jean-Jacques' shoe.

"I'm glad you got a good aim,
you," Jean-Jacques said.

But the ex-soldier studied the
brown spots on the back of his hand and took no pleasure in
Jean-Jacques' sense of humor.

A cotton trader from up on the
Red River, whom he had known for years, was sitting at a table behind
him, one corner of the opened newspaper he was reading held down with a
beer glass to stop it from fluttering in the breeze that blew through
the door.

"Pretty damn hot today, huh?"
Jean-Jacques said.

"Why, yes it is," the man
said, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes focusing outside.

Jean-Jacques picked up his
whiskey and approached the cotton trader, but the cotton trader rose
from the table, gathering up his hat hurriedly, and went out the door.
Jean-Jacques stared after him, then looked about for an explanation.
Every back in the saloon was turned to him.

He looked down at the opened
newspaper and tried to make sense out of the headlines. But the only
words he recognized on the page were those of his own name, in the
first paragraph of an article that might as well have been written in
Chinese.

He ripped the page from the
newspaper and stuffed it in his pocket, then walked out of the coolness
of the building into the late afternoon heat and angrily swung up on
his horse. Inside the bar the customers were talking omong themselves
again, buying drinks for one another,
 their
cigars glowing inside the dim
bourbon-scented darkness of the Saturday afternoon haunt he had always
taken for granted.

He rode to the cabin he owned
on the bayou south of town, among a grove of cypress trees that stood
on high ground above the floodline. He kept a pirogue there and
fishnets and cane poles, a worktable where he carved duck decoys for
his hunting blind, a pantry full of preserves and smoked fish and beef
and corked bottles of wine and rum. Red and yellow four-o'clocks
bloomed in the shade and bamboo and elephant ears grew along the
water's edge. It was a place that had always made him happy and secure
in his feelings about the world and himself when no other place did,
but today, in spite of the gold-green evening light and the wind
blowing through the trees, a pall like a black film seemed to descend
on his soul.

He snicked away at a mallard
duck he was carving from a block of cypress wood, then felt the knife
slip with his inattention and slice across the edge of his finger.

He crimped his finger in the
cone of his right hand and went outside to fill a bucket with rainwater
from the cistern. Next door the slave girl named Flower, who worked at
the laundry not far from his sister's brothel, was buying carp off a
flat-bottomed boat piled with blue-point crabs and yellow catfish that
looked like mud-slick logs.

"You hurt yourself, Mr. Jean?"
she asked, setting down her basket and taking his hand.

"I passed my hand under the
knife and it cut me," he said, dumbly, looking down from his height at
the top of her head.

"Here, I'm gonna wash it out,
then put some cobweb on it. You got some clean cloth we can tie it up
with?" she said.

"No, I ain't got nothing like
that," he said.

She went to the buggy she had
driven to the bayou and removed a clean napkin from a basket of bread
rolls and came back, shaking it out.

"Here, we're gonna get you
fixed up. You gonna see," she said.

She went inside the cabin with
him and washed and dressed his hand. It felt strange having a black
woman care for him, touching and examining his skin, turning his wrist
over in her fingers, when he had not asked help of her and when she was
not obligated to offer any.

"Why you
came back
from
New
Orleans, you?" he said.

"This is where I? live," she
replied.

"You could have been free."

"My family ain't ... it isn't
free. They're still up at Angola."

She held his hand tightly and
when she pulled the bandage knot tight with her teeth he felt a
reaction in his loins that made him glance away from her face. She put
his hand down and made ready to go.

"Why you look so sad, Mr.
Jean?" she asked.

"I was in the saloon. People
treated me like I done somet'ing wrong. Maybe I was drunk in there and
I done somet'ing I don't remember."

"Sometime people are just that
way, Mr. Jean. It don't mean ... it doesn't mean you done anything
wrong."

He was seated in a chair by
the window. He looked out on the bayou at a white man in a pirogue
raking moss from the tree limbs that the man would later sell for
stuffing in mattresses. Jean-Jacques remembered the crumpled newspaper
page from his pants pocket and smoothed it on the tabletop. His finger
moved down a column of print and stopped.

"My name's right there. See?
But I don't know why, me. Maybe they're writing in there about my ship
getting shot up, huh?" he said.

She walked around behind him
and peered over his shoulder. He could smell the red hibiscus she wore
in her hair and a clean, crisp odor in her clothes. Her breastline rose
and fell on the corner of his vision.

"You a good man, Mr. Jean. You
always been good to people of color. You ain't got to ... I mean, you
don't have to pay attention to what somebody write in a paper about
you," she said.

"You can read that?" he said,
turning in his chair, his finger still spear-pointed in the middle of
the article.

"I reckon," she said.

He stared at her stupidly.
Then his eyes blinked.

"What it say?" he asked.

"'Unlike Colonel Jamison, who
risked his life to escape from a prison hospital, a local gentleman by
the name of Jean-Jacques LaRose tried to extract gold from our treasury
in payment for rifles that should have been donated to our soldiers.
This man's greed should sicken every patriot.'"

Jean-Jacques looked at the man harvesting moss from the trees limbs
that extended
t
he bayou. The man was white -haired
and old, his
clothes mended in many places, and he was struggling to free his rake
from where it had become entangled in the branches over his head. If
the man was lucky, he would make perhaps a half-dollar's wage for his
day's work.

"Men who work for Ira Jamison
cheated me. They give me script for guns I bought with gold. Then they
made me out a traitor," Jean-Jacques said.

It was quiet a long time
inside the cabin. Flower's weight shifted on the floor boards.

"Mr. Jean, Colonel Jamison is
moving all his slaves up into Arkansas. A whole bunch is already gone.
Maybe they never gonna be free," Flower said.

"What you saying?"
             
                   
                   
           
,

"Miss Abigail is looking to
hire a boat."

He looked sharply into her
face. "Boat for what?" he asked.

"I ain't... I haven't said."

"My ship was raked with grape
out on the salt. I got one mast down and holes in the boiler." He
looked thoughtfully out the window. The old man was gone and the bayou
was empty, wrinkled now with wind and sunlight.

"I see," she said.

"But I got another one, me.
Tied up in a backwater, just outside Baton Rouge," he said.

SE
RGEANT Willie Burke stood on
a promontory above the Mississippi River and looked down at the
gathering dusk in the trees on the far shore. The late sun was molten
and red in the west, and down below he could see dark shapes, like the
backs of terrapins, floating in the water, oscillating slowly, sliding
off logs that had snagged in jams on sandbars. Except they were not
terrapins. They were men, and their blue blouses were puffed with air,
their wooly hair bejeweled with drops of water, their wounds pecked
clean and bloodless by carrion birds that perched on their heads or
necks or the pockets of air in their uniforms.

They had been members of the
Louisiana Native Guards, originally
a regiment of free black
men in the service of the Confederacy. After
the fall of New Orleans, they
had been reorganized by the Federals into the 1st Louisiana Infantry
and assigned to guard the railway leading into New Orleans.

There were stories about
captured Negro soldiers who were being sold into slavery, and also
rumors about Negro soldiers who had not been allowed to surrender.
Willie wondered if those floating down had died under a black flag, one
that meant no quarter.

Clay Hatcher and another man
just like him, rodent-eyed, despised inside the womb, went out each
night by themselves and did not tell others of what they did. But at
dawn, when they returned to camp, there was a sated gleam in their
eyes, a shared knowledge between them, like pride in an erotic conquest.

Hatcher had used a nail file
to saw sixteen narrow indentations along the stock of the scoped
Springfield that he kept cleaned and oiled in the way a watchmaker
cleans and oils the delicate mechanisms inside a fine clock. Hatcher
had also taken to wearing a woman's garter high up on his right
shirtsleeve, the purpose of which, he claimed, was to keep his forearm
and wrist unencumbered when crawling up on a target.

Each day or night a story
passed on the river and Willie wondered why those who wrote about war
concentrated on battles and seldom studied the edges of grand events
and the detritus that wars created: livestock with their throats slit,
the swollen carcasses of horses gut-shot by grape or canister, a
burning houseboat spinning around a bend at night, with no one aboard,
the flames singeing the leaves in the gum trees along the bank, a naked
lunatic drifting by on a raft, a cowbell hanging from his throat, a
Bible open in his hand, yelling a sermon at the soldiers on the shore,
a pimp from Baton Rouge trying to put in to shore with a boatload of
whores.

But who was he to reflect upon
the infinite manifestations of human insanity, he asked himself. The
hardness of his body, his sun-browned skin, the sergeant's stripes that
were already becoming sun-bleached on his sleeve, were all a new and
strange way of looking at himself, but in truth he didn't know if he
had grown into the person he had always been or if a cynical and
insentient stranger lived inside him.