James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning

by White Doves At Morning(Lit)

  Jean-Jacques belched so loudly the men at the billiard table turned around, startled.

  "Better enjoy your own drink, suh. The liquor in here come off my boats. What y'all gonna drink after them Yankees shut me down?" Jean-Jacques said.

  But Willie had long ago given up listening to the self-serving arguments about the moral validity of Secession. Rarely did logic and humanity have any influence over the discussion. Instead, the most naked form of self-interest always seemed to drive the debate, as though venality and avarice had somehow evolved into virtues. He thought about the slave girl Flower and the fact that her literacy had to be concealed as though it were an object of shame.

  He wondered if Rufus Atkins had found Flower's notebook as well as the collection of William Blake's poems. What had he done? Why had he not listened to his mother or his friend Jim Stubbefield?

  He drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass, then sipped from a pitcher of warm beer that he was using as a chaser. He looked at the mouth and breasts of the woman in the painting and through the open window heard someone playing a piano in the brothel next door. His head reeled and the room seemed to tip sideways, and his ears buzzed with sound that had no meaning. The oil lamps in the saloon were like whorls of yellow color inside the cigar smoke that layered the ceiling. The whiskey had brought him no relief and instead had only created a hunger in his loins that made him bite his lip when he looked at the woman above the bar mirror.

  Oh Lord, quiet my desires, he thought. And immediately focused his gaze on the woman's form again. He swallowed the rest of his whiskey in one gulp and thought he was going to fall backward.

  "Gag and buck," he said to no one.

  "What did you say, Willie?" Jean-Jacques asked.

  "What does 'gag and buck' mean?"

  "You don't want to find out. You ain't gone and signed up for the army, you?"

  "I did."

  Po' Willie, why ain't you come to see me first?" Jean-Jacques said, and cupped his hand on the back of Willie's neck.

  "You're a criminal," Willie said.

  "But I got my good points too, ain't I?"

  "Undoubtedly. Oh, Jean-Jacques, I've made a mess of things," Willie said.

  Jean-Jacques put his mouth close to Willie's ear. "I can put you on a boat for Mexico when it's the right time. Let's go next door to my sister's and get your ashes hauled," he said.

  "That's a grand suggestion, and please don't hold it against me for not acting on it. But I have to puke," Willie said.

  He reeled out the back door into an overgrown coulee and bent over behind a tree just as an enormous volume of whiskey and beer and pickled food surged out of his stomach. He gasped for breath, then rinsed his face in a rain barrel and dried it on his shirt. The night air was soft with mist, the moon buried in the clouds above the cane fields. Next door the piano player was playing a minstrel song titled "Dixie's Land." Willie shouldered a mop propped against a cistern and began a parody of close-order drill in the yard behind the brothel, then flung aside the flap on the tent in the side yard and marched through the row of cots inside, counting cadence for himself, "Reep... reep... reep," saluting two naked people caught at the worst possible moment in their coupling.

  He continued out the far end of the tent and on down the road, passing a horseman whose face was shadowed by a wide hat. The wind changed, and he saw dust blowing out of the fields and a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. He left the road and crossed the dirt yard of the laundry where Flower worked and walked through the iron pots in the backyard and the wash that was flapping on the clotheslines and stopped by the back window of her cabin.

  "Flower?" he said.

  He heard her rise from her bed, then push open the wood flap on the window with a stick.

  "What you doing, Mr. Willie?" she asked.

  "Did Rufus Atkins come upon the poetry book I gave you?"

  "Yes, suh, he did."

  "Did he report you?"

  "No, suh, he ain't done that. I mean, he didn't do that."

  "Come close, so I can see your face."

  "You don't sound right, Mr. Willie," she said.

  "Did Rufus Atkins make you do something you didn't want to?"

  "I ain't got no control over them things. It don't do no good to talk about them, either."

  "I've done you a great harm, Flower."

  "No, you ain't. I mean, no, you hasn't. You better go back home now, Mr. Willie."

  He was about to reply when he heard horses out on the road.

  "Who's that?" he said.

  "The paddy rollers. Oh, suh, please don't let them catch you here," she said.

  He walked back through the yard and the darkness of the oaks that grew on each side of the laundry. He was sweating now, the wind suddenly cold on his face. He heard thunder crack in the south and rumble across the sky, like apples tumbling down a wooden chute. He stepped out on the road and walked toward the lights in the saloon and the tinny music in Carrie LaRose's brothel, his pulse beating in his wrists, his palms damp, a tightness in his throat he could not quite explain.

  There were six riders spread across the road in front of him, led by a seventh man in a rain slicker and flop hat, like cavalry advancing on an enemy position, their saddles hung with pistols and coils of rope and braided whips, their faces bladed with purpose.

  "Hold your hands out by your sides, friend," the leader said.

  "I think not. Unless you have governance over a white man talking a walk," Willie said.

  The leader rode his horse forward. Lightning rippled through the clouds overhead and the wind flattened the tops of the young cane in the fields. The leader of the horsemen leaned down on his pommel, the saddle creaking with the shift in his weight.

  "We've got five niggers unaccounted for tonight. It isn't a time for cleverness, Mr. Willie," he said.

  "Oh, it's Captain Atkins, is it? This is a coincidence. I'm on a mission of recovery myself. I took my laundry to the Black girl, whats her name, Flower, the one owned by Mr. Jamison? I think I dropped one or two of my books out of my saddle bags.You didn't find them did you?"

  "Maybe you and I will have a talk about that later," Atkins said.

  "Mr. Jamison often visits at the Shadows. I'll mention it to him. Is there anything I should report about amorous relationships on your part with his niggers?" Willie said.

  Atkins' ringed finger clicked up and down on the stitched top of his pommel.

  "A word of caution to you, Mr. Willie. You were at the home of the abolitionist woman this evening. Now I see you in a neighborhood where five slaves didn't report for bell count. Be aware there are others besides I who feel you bear watching," Atkins said.

  "Say again?"

  "Robert Perry saved his little tit-sucking momma's boy of a friend from being gagged and bucked today. Don't expect that kind of good fortune again," Atkins said.

  "Thank you, sir. It's a great honor to be excoriated by a miserable fuck and white trash such as yourself," Willie said.

  He brushed past Atkins' horse and walked through the other riders, the cane in the fields whipping in the wind, dust and rain now blowing across the lighted front of the saloon.

  He heard Atkins' boot heels thud against his horse's sides and barely had time enough to turn before Atkins rode him down, whipping the lead ball on the butt of his quirt handle across Willie's head.

  He felt the earth rush up at him and explode against his face. Then the booted legs of the paddy rollers surrounded him and through a misting rain he thought he heard the song "Dixie's Land" again.

  "Since he likes the abolitionist woman so much, dump him in the nigger jail," Atkins said.

  Then Willie was being lifted over a saddle, his wrists and feet roped together under the horse's belly. As the horse moved forward blood dripped out of Willie's hair onto his shirtsleeves and the dust from the horse's hooves rose into his nostrils.

  But a huge man stepped into the middle of the road and grasped the horse's bridle.


  "You're a constable and I cain't stop you from taking him in, Mr. Atkins. But if there's another mark on him in the morning, I'm gonna strip the clothes off your body on Main Street and lay a whip to your back, me," Jean-Jacques LaRose said.

  Atkins was dismounted, his stature diminutive in contrast to Jean-Jacques LaRose. He pressed his quirt against Jean-Jacques' chest, bowing the braided leather back on itself.

  "Would you care to see your sister's business establishment shut down?... You don't?... I knew you were a man of reason after all, Jack," he said. He tapped his quirt softly on Jean-Jacques' chest.

  A half hour later Willie lay on a wood bunk inside a log jail, an iron manacle around his ankle. Two Negroes sat on the dirt floor against the far wall, barefoot, their knees drawn up before them. Their clothes were torn, their hair bloody. They smelled of funk and horse barns and night damp and fish that had soured on their stomachs. He could hear them breathing in the dark.

  "You men ran from your owners?" Willie asked.

  But they would not answer him. In the glow of the moon through the barred window their faces were running with sweat, their eyes red, their nostrils cavernous. He could see the pulse jumping in one man's throat.

  He had never seen fear as great in either man or beast.

  Chapter Four

  LATER that same night Flower left her cabin and crossed the cane field through layers of ground fog that felt like damp cotton on her skin. She entered a woods that was strung with air vines and cobwebs and dotted with palmettos and followed the edge of a coulee to a bayou where a flatboat loaded with Spanish moss was moored in a cluster of cypress trees.

  The tide was going out along the coast. In minutes the current in the bayou would reverse itself, and the flatboat, which looked like any other that was used to harvest moss for mattress stuffing, would be poled downstream into a saltwater bay where a larger boat waited for the five black people who sat huddled in the midst of the moss, the women in bonnets, the men wearing flop hats that obscured their faces.

  Two white boatmen, both of them gaunt, with full beards, wearing leather wrist guards and suspenders that hitched their trousers almost to their chests, stood by the tiller. One of them held a shaved pole that was anchored in the bayou, his callused palms tightening audibly against the wood.

  A white woman with chestnut hair in a gray dress that touched the tops of her shoes had just walked up a plank onto the boat, a heavy bundle clasped in both arms. One of the white men took the bundle from her and untied it and began placing loaves of bread, smoked hams, sides of bacon and jars of preserves and cracklings inside the pilothouse.

  Flower stepped out of the heated enclosure of the trees and felt the coolness of the wind on her skin.

  "Miss Abigail?" she said.

  The two white men and the white woman turned and looked at her, their bodies motionless.

  "It's Flower, Miss Abigail. I work at the laundry. I brung something for their trip," she said.

  "You shouldn't be here," Abigail said.

  "The lady yonder is my auntie. I known for a long time y'all was using this place. I ain't tole nobody," Flower said.

  Abigail turned to the two white men. "Does one more make a difference?" she asked.

  "The captain out on the bay is mercenary, but we'll slip her in," one of them said.

  "Would you like to come with your auntie?" Abigail asked her.

  "There's old folks at Angola I got to care for. Here, I got this twenty-dollar gold piece. I brung a juju bag, too." Flower walked up the plank and felt the wood bend under her weight. The water under her was as yellow as paint in the moonlight. She saw the black head and back and S-shaped motion of a water moccasin swimming across the current.

  She placed the coin in Abigail's hand, then removed a small bag fashioned out of red flannel that was tied around her neck with a leather cord and placed it on top of the coin.

  "How'd you come by this money, Flower?" Abigail asked.

  "Found it."

  "Where?"

  Flower watched the moss moving in the trees, a sprinkle of stars in the sky.

  "I best go now," she said.

  She walked back across the plank to the woods, then heard Abigail Dowling behind her.

  "Tell me where you got the gold piece," Abigail said.

  "I stole it from ol Rufus Atkins' britches."

  Abigail studied her face, then touched her hair and cheek.

  "Has he molested you, Flower?" she said.

  "You a good lady, Miss Abigail, but I ain't a child and I ain't axed for nobody's pity," Flower said.

  Abigail's hand ran down Flower's shoulder and arm until she could clasp Flower's hand in her own.

  "No, you're neither a child nor an object of pity, and I would never treat you as such," Abigail said.

  "Them two men yonder? What do you call them?" Flower asked.

  "Their names?"

  "No, the religion they got. What do you call that?"

  "They're called Quakers."

  Flower nodded her head. "Good night, Miss Abigail," she said.

  "Good night, Flower," Abigail said.

  A few minutes later Flower looked back over her shoulder and saw the flatboat slip through the cypress trees into a layer of moonlit fog that reminded her of the phosphorous glow given off by a grave.

  THREE days later Willie Burke was walked in manacles from the Negro jail to the court, a water-stained loft above a saloon, and charged with drunkenness and attacking an officer of the law. The judge was not an unkindly man, simply hard of hearing from a shell burst at the battle of Buena Vista in 1847, and sometimes more concerned with the pigeons whose droppings splattered on his desk than the legal matter at hand.

  Through the yellow film of dirt on the window Willie could see the top of a palm tree and a white woman driving hogs down the dirt street below. His mother and Abigail Dowling and his friend Jim Stubbefield sat on a wood bench in the back of the room, not far from Rufus Atkins and the paddy rollers.

  "How do you plead to the charges, Mr. Burke?" the judge asked.

  "Guilty of drunkenness, Your Honor. But innocent of the rest, which is a bunch of lies," Willie replied.

  "These men all say you attacked Captain Atkins," the judge said, gesturing at the paddy rollers.

  Willie said something the judge couldn't understand.

  "Speak louder!" the judge said.

  "I'd consider the source!" Willie replied.

  "We have two sides of the same story, Mr. Burke. But unfortunately for you the preponderance of testimony comes from your adversaries. Can you pay a fifty-dollar fine?" the judge said.

  "I cannot!"

  The judge cupped his ear and leaned forward. His face was as white as goat's cheese, his hair like a tangle of yellowish-gray flaxen.

  "Speak louder!" he yelled.

  "I have no money, sir! I'll have to serve a penal sentence!" Willie said.

  "Can you pay twenty-five dollars?" the judge said.

  "No, I cannot!"

  "I'll pay his fine, me," a voice at the back of the room said.

  The judge leaned forward and squinted into the gloom until he made out the massive shape of Jean-Jacques LaRose.

  "The only fine you'll pay will be your own, you damn pirate. Get out of my court and don't return unless you're under arrest," the judge said.

  "May I speak, Your Honor?" Abigail Dowling said.

  The judge stared at her, his glasses low on his nose, his head hanging forward from his black coat and the split collar that extended up into his jowls like pieces of white cardboard.

  "You're the nurse from Massachusetts?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir, that's correct!" she yelled.

  "Everybody in this proceeding is red-faced and shouting. What's the matter with you people?" the judge said. "Never mind, go ahead, whatever your name is."

  Abigail walked out of the gloom into a patch of sunlight, her hands folded in front of her. She wore an open-necked purple dress with lace on the
collar and a silver comb in the bun on top of her head.

  "I know Mr. Burke well and do not believe him capable of harming anyone. He's of a gentle spirit and has devoted himself both to his studies and works of charity. His accusers-"

  She paused, her right hand floating in the direction of Rufus Atkins and the paddy rollers. "His accusers are filled with anger at their own lack of self-worth and visit their anger with regularity on the meek and defenseless. It's my view their testimony is not motivated by a desire to further truth or justice. In fact, their very presence here demeans the integrity of the court and is an offense to people of good will," she said.