James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning

by White Doves At Morning(Lit)

  The street was deep in shadow, empty of sound and people. The oak limbs overhead creaked in the wind.

  "I guess it's just not your day, Colonel Jamison," the cotton trader said.

  All four men laughed.

  Abigail Dowling pulled the buggy whip from its socket on the side of Ira Jamison's carriage and slashed it across his face. He pressed his hand against his cheek and stared at the blood on his fingers in disbelief.

  She flung the whip to the ground and walked to her cottage, then went through the yard and into the trees in back, trembling all over. She stood among the oaks and cypresses on the bayou, her arms clenched across her chest, her temples pulsing with nests of green veins.

  A wave of revulsion swept through her. But at what? The owner of the hardware store? The rapists? Ira Jamison?

  She knew better. Her violence, her social outrage, her histrionic public displays, all disguised a simple truth. Once again, an innocent person had paid for the deeds she had committed, in this case, Flower Jamison.

  The wind swirled inside the trees and wrinkled the surface of the bayou, and in the rustling of the canebrake she thought she heard the word Judas hissed in her ear.

  Chapter Nineteen

  AT Willie Burke's request, a Union chaplain secured for him three sheets of paper, three envelopes, a bottle of black ink, and a metal writing pen. He sat on straw against the wall of the storehouse, a candle guttering on the brick window ledge above his head, and wrote a letter to his mother and one to Abigail. There was a hollow feeling in his chest and a deadness in his limbs that he had never known before, even at Shiloh. The words he put in his letters contained no grand or spiritual sentiment. In fact, he considered it a victory simply to complete a sentence that did not reflect the fear and weakness eating through his body like weevils through pork.

  His third letter was to Robert Perry, somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

  Dear Robert,

  I was captured out of uniform and will be shot in two hours. This night I have written Abby and told her I love her but I know her heart belongs to you. It could not go to a more fitting and fine man. I repent of any violation of our friendship, Robert, and want you to know I would never deliberately impair your relationship with

  another.

  Jim Stubbefield and I will see you on the other side.

  Your old pal and friend, Willie Burke

  He folded the three letters and placed them in their envelopes and sealed them with wax that had melted on top of the candle burning above his head. Then he gave them to the chaplain, who was consoling a man whose skin had turned as gray as a cadaver's.

  Willie stood at the window and watched the stars fade and the light go out of the sky, and the scattered farmhouses and the trees along the bayou begin to sharpen inside the ground fog that rolled out of the fields. Roosters were crowing beyond his line of sight, and he smelled wood smoke and meat frying on a fire. Eight Union soldiers were camped in pup tents among the oaks on the bayou, their Springfield rifles stacked. The canvas sides of their tents were damp with dew, the flaps tied to the tents' poles. Willie's heart dropped when he saw an enlisted man emerge from his tent and stretch and look in the direction of the storehouse. He stepped back from the window and pressed his hand to his mouth, just as a half cup of bile surged out of his stomach.

  Jim wasn't afraid when he went up the hill with the guidon at Shiloh, he thought. Don't you be, either, he told himself. A brief flash of light, perhaps a little pain, then it's over. There are worse ways to go. How about the poor devils carried into an aid station with their guts hanging out or their jaws shot away? Or the ones who begged for death while their limbs were sawed off?

  But his dialogue with himself brought him no comfort and he wondered if his legs would fail when a Yankee provost walked him to the wall.

  The soldiers camped on the bayou were gathered around their cookfire now, drinking coffee, glancing in the direction of the storehouse, as though preparing themselves for an uncomfortable piece of work that was not of their choosing.

  A ninth man joined them, an erect fellow with a holstered sidearm and stripes on his sleeves. When the firelight struck his face Willie recognized the sergeant who had tried to prevail upon him to use his head and extricate himself from a capital sentence. What were his words, the only real pacifist was a dead Quaker?

  Why had he not listened?

  A man with a stench that made Willie think of cat spray elbowed him aside from the window.

  "Sorry, I didn't know you had your name carved on the bricks," Willie said.

  "Shut up," the man said.

  His eyes, hair and beard looked as though he had been shot out of a cannon. He was barefoot and wore no shirt under a butternut jacket that was stitched with gold braid on the collar. His pants were cinched around his waist with a rope and stippled with blood.

  "You ever kill somebody with your bare hands?" he asked. He pressed his face close to Willie's. The inside of his mouth was black with gunpowder, his fetid breath worse than an outhouse.

  "Bare hands? Can't say I have," Willie replied.

  "You up for it? Tell me now. Don't sass me, either."

  "Could you be giving me a few more details?" Willie asked.

  "Clean the ham hocks out of your mouth. Captain Jarrette is taking us out. Do you want to make a run for it or die like a carp flopping on the ground? Give me an answer," the man said.

  "You were at the ambush on the St. Martinville Road."

  "Of all the people I try to help, it turns out to be another stump from Erin. Anyone ever tell you an Irishman is a nigger turned inside out?"

  "I really don't care to die next to a smelly lunatic. Do you have a plan, sir?" Willie said.

  "Go back to your letter writing, cabbage head," the man said.

  The guerrilla turned away and stared at the locked door and front wall of the storehouse, his arms hanging like sticks from the ragged sleeves of his jacket, his pants reaching only to his ankles. Outside, the sun broke on the eastern horizon and a red glow filled the trees on the bayou and painted the tips of the sugarcane in the fields. Through the window Willie heard the sound of marching feet.

  The sound grew louder and then stopped in front of the storehouse. Someone turned an iron key in the big padlock on the door and shot back the bolt through the rungs that held it in place. The light from outside seemed to burst into the room like a fistful of white needles. A captain and two parallel lines of enlisted men in blue, all wearing kepis, bayonets twist-grooved onto the muzzles of their rifles, waited to escort the prisoners to the barn and the firing squad of eight that had been camped in the pup tents by the bayou. In the distance Willie thought he heard the rumble of thunder or perhaps horses' hooves on a hard-packed road. Then he heard a solitary shout, like an angry man who had mashed his thumb with a hammer.

  "Come out, lads. None of us enjoys this. We'll make it as easy and dignified as possible," the Yankee officer at the door said.

  "Come in and get us, darlin'," a prisoner in the back of the room said.

  Clouds moved across the sun and the countryside dropped into shadow again, the cane in the field bending in the breeze, the air sweet with the smell of morning. Willie heard horses coming hard across a wood bridge, then the shouts of men and the ragged popping of small-arms fire.

  Suddenly there were horsemen everywhere, over a hundred of them, dressed like beggars, some firing a pistol with each hand, the reins in their teeth. The prisoners surged out of the storehouse, knocking the captain to the ground, attacking his men.

  A wheeled cannon on one corner of the prisoner of war compound lurched into the air, blowing a huge plume of smoke across the grass. One second later a load of grapeshot slapped against the walls of the red barn used as the execution site, accidentally cutting down a squad of Yankee soldiers in its path.

  Willie bolted from the door of the storehouse and ran with dozens of other men toward the bayou, while mounted guerrillas and what looked lik
e regular Confederate infantry fired into the Yankees who were trying to form up in the middle of the compound. A shirtless man on horseback thundered past him, the guerrilla leader with the pinned-up hat riding on the rump, clinging to the cantle. The guerrilla leader looked back at him, his face like an outraged jack-o'-lantern under his hat.

  Willie heard the whirring sound of minie balls toppling past his head, then a sound like a dry slap when they struck a tree. He plunged through a woman's front yard, tearing down her wash as he ran, scattering chickens onto the gallery. He crashed through her front door and out the back into a grove of pecan trees, then the lunatic from the storehouse was running in tandum with him, his vinegary stench like a living presence he carried with him..

  They dove into the bayou together, swimming as far as they could underwater, brushing across the sculpted points of submerged tree branches, a stray minie ball breaking the surface and zigzagging through the depths in a chain of bubbles.

  Their feet touched bottom on the far side, then Willie and what he had come to think of as his lunatic companion were up on the bank, running through a cane field, the blades of the cane whipping past their shoulders.

  They fell out of the cane field into a dry irrigation canal, breathless, collapsing on their knees in the shade of persimmon trees. Willie threw his arm around the shoulder of the lunatic.

  "We made it, pard. God love you, even if you're a graduate of Bedlam and have nothing kind to say about His chosen people, that being the children of Erin," he said.

  The lunatic sat back on his heels, his chest laboring, his blackened mouth hanging open. Willie fastened his hand on the man's collarbone, kneading it, grinning from ear to ear at his newfound brother-in-arms.

  "Did you hear me? I bet you're a good soldier. You don't need to ride with brigands. Come with me and we'll find the 18th Louisiana and General Mouton," he said.

  The lunatic's mouth formed into a cone and he pressed four stiffened fingers into his sternum as though he were silently asking Willie a burning question.

  "You got the breath knocked out of you?" Willie said.

  The lunatic shook his head. Willie cupped the lunatic's wrist and removed his fingers from his chest. A ragged exit wound the circumference of a thumb was drilled through his sternum. Willie caught him just as he fell on his side.

  "The Yanks have fucked me with a garden rake, cabbage head. Watch out for yourself," the lunatic whispered.

  "Hang on there, pard. Someone will be along for us directly. You'll see," Willie said.

  The man did not speak again. His eyes stared hazily at the shadows the clouds made on the cane field and the mockingbirds swooping in and out of the shade. Then he coughed softly as though clearing his throat and died.

  Willie rolled him onto his back, placed his ankles together, and covered his face with a palmetto fan. Then he buttoned the dead man's butternut coat over his wound and crossed his arms on his chest.

  Other escaped prisoners ran past him, some of them armed now, all of them sweaty and hot, powdered with dust from the fields. He heard a rider behind him and turned just as the guerrilla leader reined his horse and glared down at him, his horse fighting the bit, spooking sideways.

  The guerrilla hit the horse between the ears with his fist, then stood in the stirrups and adjusted his scrotum, making a face while he did it. The inside of his thighs were dark with sweat, as though he had fouled himself. "That's the body of my junior officer you're looting," he said.

  Willie got to his feet.

  "You're a damn liar," he said.

  "I'll remember your face," the guerrilla said.

  He galloped away, twisting his head to look over his shoulder one more time.

  WILLIE wandered the rest of the day. The sky was plumed with smoke from burning houses and barns, and by noon a haze of dust and lint from the cane fields turned the sun into a pink sliver. He saw a Confederate rear guard form up in a woods and fire a volley across a field at a distant group of men, then break and run through a gully and board a rope-drawn ferryboat and pull themselves across the Vermilion River, all before he could reach them.

  He saw wild dogs attack and tear apart a rabbit in an empty pasture. He passed Confederate deserters who had hidden in coulees or who walked on back roads with their faces averted. He saw four wagons loaded with Negroes and their possessions stopped at a crossroads, wondering in which direction they should go, while their children cried and one man tried to jerk an exhausted horse up on its legs. At evening he saw the same people, this time on the riverbank, without the means to cross to the other side, frightened at the boom of distant artillery. He rooted for food in the charred ruins of a cabin and licked the fried remains of pickled tomatoes off scorched pieces of a preserve jar.

  He climbed into a mulberry tree and watched a column of Union infantry, supply wagons, and wheeled field pieces that took a half hour to pass. When night came the sky was black with storm clouds, the countryside dark except for the flicker of cannon fire in the north. He lost the Vermilion River, which he had been following, and entered a high-canopied woods that swayed in the wind, that had no undergrowth and was thickly layered with old leaves and was good for either walking or finding a soft, cool place that smelled of moss and wildflowers where he could lie down and once more sleep the sleep of the dead.

  He paused under a water oak, unbuttoned his fly, and urinated into the leaves. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement back in the trees and heard the sound of field gear clanking on men's bodies. He mounted the trunk of a tree that had fallen across a coulee and ran along the crest of it to the other side, right into a Union sergeant who aimed the.50 caliber muzzle of a Sharp's carbine at his face.

  Willie raised his hands and grinned as though a stick were turned sideways in his mouth.

  "I'm unarmed and offer no threat to you," he said.

  The sergeant's kepi was low on his brow, one eye squinted behind his rear sight. He lowered his carbine and looked hard into Willie's face. The sergeant had dark red hair and wore a mustache and goatee and a silver ring with a tiny gold cross affixed to it on his marriage finger. Willie could hear him breathing heatedly in the dark.

  "No threat, are you? How about a fucking nuisance?" he said.

  "The pacifist turned soldier?" Willie said.

  "And you, a bloody hemorrhoid," the sergeant replied.

  "Indignant, are we? I tell you what, Yank, within a span of five days you fellows have blown me up with an artillery shell, almost buried me alive, and tried to send me before a firing squad. Would you either be done with it and kindly put a ball between my eyes or go back home to your mother in the North and be the nice lad I'm sure you are."

  "Don't tempt me."

  "I'm neither a spy nor a guerrilla. Your general treated me unjustly back there. I reckon you know it, too."

  Willie could hear the calluses on the sergeant's hands tightening on the stock of his carbine. Then the sergeant stepped back in the leaves, an air vine trailing across his kepi, and pointed the carbine's barrel away from Willie's chest.

  "Pass by, Reb. When you say your prayers this night, ask that in the next life the Good Lord provide you with a brain rather than an elephant turd to think with," he said.

  "Thank you for the suggestion, Yank. Now, would you be knowing where the 18th Louisiana Vols are?" Willie said.

  "You ask the enemy the whereabouts of your own outfit?"

  "No offense meant."

  The sergeant looked at him incredulously. "My guess is somewhere north of Vermilionville," he said.

  "Thank you."

  "What's your name again?" the sergeant asked.

  "Willie Burke."

  "Get into another line of work, Willie Burke," he said.

  Chapter Twenty

  FLOWER Jamison had always thought the beginning and end of the war would be marked by definite dates and events, that great changes would be effected by the battles and the thousands of men she had seen march through New Iberia, and the histori
cal period in which she was living would survive only as a compartmentalized and aberrant experience that fitted between bookends for people to study in a happier time.

  But the changes she saw in 1864 and early 1865 were transitory in nature. The Yankee soldiers camped behind the Episcopalian church pursued the Confederates through Vermilionville and up into the Red River parishes, taking with them the money they spent in bordellos, saloons, and on the washerwomen by the bayou.

  Many freed slaves returned to the plantations and owners they had fled and begged for food and shelter and considered themselves lucky if they were paid any wages at all. Others who preferred privation and even death from hunger over a return to the old ways were on occasion given a choice between the latter or execution.

  Emancipation Day came to be known by people of color as June 'Teenth. Emancipated into what? Flower wondered.