James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning

by White Doves At Morning(Lit)

  In fact, when anger was controlled and carefully nursed, then sated at the expense of your enemies, the experience could be almost sexual.

  But disobedience on the part of people whose wages he paid was another matter. These were usually white trash whom a Bedouin would not allow to clean his chamber pot, self-hating and genetically defective creatures whom he had housed, fed, and provided medical care for, given their children presents at Christmas and on birthdays, and sometimes seen commissioned in the army. Disobedience from them amounted not only to ingratitude and betrayal but contempt and arrogance, because they were indicating they had read his soul and had concluded he could be deceived and used.

  Clay Hatcher was a perfect example, a self-pitying imbecile who blamed his stupidity on his wife and killed her with an ax while she was fixing his supper, then burned down his own house with all his possessions in it to hide his crime.

  Ira had to laugh thinking about it. He wondered what Hatcher had to say when the Knights of the White Camellia told him the law was the law and they hoped he wouldn't hold it against them when they broke his neck. After all, they were just poor whites like himself, trying to do the right thing.

  But Ira had to take himself to task for not anticipating Rufus Atkins' treachery. Atkins was a cynic and pragmatist and knew how to eat his pride when a greater self-interest was involved. But under those flat, hazel eyes and skin that was like seared alligator hide lay a mean-spirited, sexually driven, and resentful man who, like all white trash, believed the only difference between himself and the rich was the social station arbitrarily handed them at birth.

  Ira Jamison had left Flower's house that morning and had gone immediately to Rufus Atkins' newly acquired property, but he was nowhere in sight. The prison guards overseeing the convict workmen were no help, either, shaking their heads, speaking in demotic French that Ira could barely understand.

  So he tried to put himself in the mind of Rufus Atkins, hung over, probably filled with rut, growing more depleted as the sun climbed in the sky, realizing he had fouled his own nest and made an enemy of the only man in Louisiana who could give him access to the social respectability he had always coveted.

  He had his driver take him to the saloon on Main Street, to the jail, to a row of cribs on a muddy road out by the Yankee camp, and finally to McCain's Hardware Store.

  McCain's eyes were scorched, his face discolored, as though it had been parboiled, his breath like fly ointment. Ira saw him swallow with fear.

  "How do you do, sir?" Ira said.

  "Mighty fine, Colonel. It's an honor to have you in my store."

  "Do you know Captain Atkins?" Ira asked.

  "Yes, suh, I do. Not real well, but I do know him."

  "If you see him, would you tell him I wanted to pay my respects, but regrettably I have to return to Angola this afternoon," Ira said.

  "Yes, suh, I'll get the message to him. He's building himself a fine house. He comes in here reg'lar for nails and such."

  "That's what I thought. Thank you for your goodwill, sir," Ira said.

  Ira had his driver take him back to Rufus Atkins' tent, where, as he expected, Atkins was not to be found. He instructed the driver to take the carriage down the road, out of sight, and not return until Ira sent for him.

  A light rain began to fall and Ira sat on a cane chair by Rufus Atkins' worktable and looked out the tent flap at the convicts perched on top of the framing for Atkins' house. He wondered what kind of thoughts, if any, they had during their day. Did they ever have an inkling of the game that had been run on them and their kind? Did they ever think of possessing more than a woman's thighs and enough liquor to drink? The best any of them could hope for was to become a trusty guard and perhaps survive their sentences. If their fate was his, Ira believed he would either take out a judge's throat or open his own veins.

  But ultimately most of them deserved whatever happened to them, he thought. They were uneducable, conceived and born in squalor and hardly able to concentrate on three sentences in a row that didn't deal with their viscera. Even Flower, who was the most intelligent Negro he had ever known, was somehow offended because he had told her she reminded him of his mother. His father had said there was no difference between the races. That morning Flower had certainly proved she was half-darky, acting rudely after he had journeyed all the way from Angola to see her. What a waste of his time and affections, he thought.

  Ira heard a sound like a music box playing in the rain, rising and falling as the wind popped the tent flaps and the canvas over his head. Perched up high on the framing of Rufus Atkins' house he saw an elderly Negro man fitting a board into place, his face as creased as an old leather glove, his purple pants shiny with wear above his bare ankles.

  Why was this man wearing purple pants instead of the black-and-white stripes that were standard convict issue? The convict's hair was grizzled, his cheeks covered with white whiskers. What was a man that age, probably with cataracts, doing on top of a second-story crossbeam? Again Ira heard the tinkling of music in the rain, a tune that was vaguely familiar and disturbing, like someone rattling a piece of crystal inside his memory. He rose from his chair and looked out the flap at the Negro carpenter, who had paused in his work and was looking back at him now.

  Uncle Royal? Ira thought. He pinched his eyes. My God, what was happening to him? Uncle Royal had been dead for years. What was it his father had once said, Niggers would be the damnation of them all? Well, so be it, Ira thought. He didn't create them nor did he invent the rules that governed the affairs of men and principalities.

  He walked out into the rain, splattering his white pants with mud. "Get that old man off there!" he yelled at the foreman.

  "Off what?" the foreman asked.

  "Off the house. Right there. Why is he wearing purple pants?" Ira replied.

  "That ain't no old man up there, Kunnel," the foreman said, half grinning. Then he looked at the expression on Ira's face. "I'll get him down, suh. Ain't nothing here to worry about."

  "Good," Ira said, and went back inside the tent and closed the flap. The rain was clicking hard on the canvas now. It had been a mistake to come here, one born purely out of pride, he thought. What was to be gained by confronting Rufus Atkins personally? He was going to pull his convict labor off Atkins' property and ruin his credit by running a newspaper notice to the effect he would not co-sign any of Atkins' loan applications or be responsible for his debts. Ira computed it would take about six weeks for Atkins' paltry business operations to collapse.

  When you could do that much damage to a man with a three-dollar newspaper advertisement, why waste time dealing with him on a personal basis?

  It was time for a fine lunch and a bottle of good wine and the company of people who weren't idiots. Maybe he should think about a trip to Nashville to see his old friend General Forrest.

  He smiled at a story that was beginning to circulate about the regard in which Forrest had been held by General Sherman. After Forrest had driven every Yankee soldier from the state of Mississippi, Sherman supposedly assembled his staff and said, "I don't care what it takes. Lose ten thousand men if you have to. But kill that goddamn sonofabitch Bedford Forrest."

  Nathan should have that put on his tombstone, Ira thought.

  But where was that tune coming from? In his mind's eye he saw hand-carved wooden horses turning on a miniature merry-go-round, the delicately brushed paint worn by time, the windup key rotating as the music played inside the base.

  For just a moment he felt a sense of theft about his life that was indescribable. He tore through the other rooms in the tent, searching for the origin of the sound, kicking over a chair with a black Kluxer robe hung on the back. Then, through a crack in the rear flap, he saw it, a wind chime tinkling on a wood post. He ripped it from the nail that held it and stalked back through Atkins' sleeping area, then ducked through the mosquito netting and curtain that separated it from the front room.

  He smelled an odor like camphor and per
fume, like flowers pressed between the pages of an old book or blood that had dried inside a balled handkerchief. He straightened his back, the chime clenched in his hand, and thought he saw his mother's silhouette beckoning for him to approach her, the wide folds of her dark blue dress like a portal into memories that he did not want to relive.

  WILLIE tethered his team under a huge mimosa tree on the edge of St. Peter's Cemetery, mixed mortar in a wheelbarrow, and bricked together a foundation for Jim's crypt. Then he dragged Jim's box on top of the foundation and began bricking and mortaring four walls around the box. Clouds tumbled across the sky and he could smell wildflowers and salt inside the wind off the Gulf. As he tapped each brick level with the handle of the trowel, the sun warm on his shoulders, he tried to forget the insult that Tige had flung in his face.

  If it had come from anyone else, he thought. But Tige was uncanny in his intuition about the truth.

  Was it indeed Willie's fate to forever mourn the past, to dwell upon the war and the loss of a love that was probably not meant to be? Had he made his journey to Shiloh less out of devotion to a friend than as a histrionic and grandiose attempt at public penance? Was he simply a self-deluded fool?

  There are days when I wish I had fallen at your side, Jim.

  You were always my steadfast pal, Willie. Don't talk like that. You have to carry the guidon tor both of us.

  I'll never get over the war. I'll never forget Shiloh.

  You don't need to, you ole groghead. You were brave. Why should we have to forget? That's for cowards. One day you'll tell your grandchildren you scouted for Bedford Forrest.

  And a truly odious experience it was, Willie said. He thought he heard Jim laugh inside the bricks. He saw a shadow break across his own. He turned on his knee, splattering himself with mortar from the trowel.

  "Sorry I said them words," Tige said. He took off his kepi and twirled it on the tip of his finger.

  "Which words would those be?" Willie said, grinning at the edge of his mouth, one eye squinted against the sunlight.

  "Saying Miss Abigail didn't have no interest in you. Saying you didn't care about nobody except dead people."

  "I must have been half-asleep, because I have no memory of it," Willie said.

  "You sure can tell a mess of fibs, Willie Burke."

  "You didn't happen to bring some lunch with you, did you?"

  "No, but Robert Perry was looking for you."

  "Now, why would noble Robert be looking for the likes of me?"

  "Ask him, 'cause there he comes yonder. Y'all are a mysterious kind," Tige said.

  "How's that?"

  "You lose a war, then spend every day of your life losing it again in your head. Never seen a bunch so keen on beating theirself up all the time."

  "I think you're a man of great wisdom, young Tige," Willie said. Robert Perry walked through the rows of crypts and slung a canvas choke sack on the bed of Willie's wagon. It made a hard, knocking sound when it struck the wood. His skin was deeply tanned, freckled with sunlight under the mimosa, his uncut hair bleached on the tips. The wind gusted behind him, ruffling the leaves in the tree, and the countryside suddenly fell into shadow. "It's going to rain again," Robert said.

  "Looks like it," Willie replied.

  "Why don't you tell people where you're going once in a while?" he asked.

  "Out of sorts today?" Willie said.

  "That worthless fellow Rufus Atkins was drunk down in the bottoms this morning. The word is he and this McCain character, the one who runs the hardware store, put on their sheets last night and paid Flower Jamison a call," Robert said.

  "Say that again?" Willie said, rising to his feet.

  "Ah, I figured right," Robert said.

  "Figured what?"

  "You couldn't wait to put your hand in it as soon as you heard," Robert said.

  "What's in that bag?" Willie asked.

  "My law books."

  "What else?"

  "My sidearm," Robert said.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  ABIGAIL Dowling whipped her buggy horse down the road and into the entrance of Rufus Atkins' property. She felt a sickness in her chest and a dryness in her throat that she could compare only to a recurrent dream in which she was peering over the rim of a canyon into the upended points of rocks far below. She waited for the voices to begin, the ones that had called her a traitor and poseur who fed off the sorrow and the inadequacies of others, the voices that had always drained her energies and robbed her of self-worth and denied her a place in the world that she could claim as her own. But this time she would fight to keep them in abeyance; she would rid herself of self-excoriation and for once in her life surrender herself to a defining, irrevocable act that would not only set her free but save an innocent like Flower Jamison from bearing a cross that an unjust world had placed on her shoulders.

  What would her father say to her now? God, she missed him. He was the only human being whose word and wisdom she never doubted. Would he puff on his pipe silently, his eyes smiling with admiration and approval? But she already knew the answer to her question. That jolly, loving, Quaker physician who could walk with beggars and princes would have only one form of advice for her in this situation, and it would not be what she wanted to hear.

  She cracked the whip on her horse's back and tried to empty her mind of thoughts about her father. She would think about the pistol that rested on the seat beside her, substituting one worry for another, and concentrate on questions about the residue of dried mud she had seen wedged between the cylinder and the frame and inside the trigger guard, about the possibility the caps were damp or that mud was impacted inside the barrel.

  The rain was as hard and cold as hail on her skin. The convicts were climbing down from the house frame, raking water out of their hair and beards, grinning at the prospect of getting off work early. She reined up her horse and stepped down into the mud.

  "Hold up there, missy," the foreman said.

  His stomach was the size of a washtub and he wore an enormous vest buttoned across it and a silver watch on a chain. A black trusty guard in prison stripe pants and a red shirt and a palmetto hat stood behind him, the stock of a shotgun propped casually against his hip, his ebony skin slick with rain, his eyes fastened on the outdoor kitchen under the live oak where the cooks were preparing the midday meal.

  "My business is with Mr. Atkins," she said.

  "Hit ain't none of mine, then. But, tell me, missy, what's that you got hid behind your leg?" the foreman said.

  "Are you a Christian man?"

  "I try to be."

  "If you'd like to see Jesus today, just get in my way and see what happens," she said.

  The foreman snapped open the cover on his watch and looked at the time, then snapped the cover closed again and replaced the watch in his vest pocket. "I reckon I've had enough folks fussing at me in one day. How about we eat us some of them beans?" he said to the trusty guard.

  Abigail stepped up on the plank walkway that led to Rufus Atkins' tent. The rain was slackening now, the sun breaking from behind a cloud, and the sky seemed filled with slivers of glass. She paused in front of the tent flap and cocked back the hammer on the revolver with both thumbs.

  Then her hands began to shake and she lowered the pistol, her resolve draining from her like water through the bottom of a cloth sack. Why was she so weak? Why could she not do this one violent act in defense of a totally innocent creature whom the world had abused for a lifetime? In this moment, caught between the brilliance of the rain slanting across the sun and the grayness of the cane fields behind her, she finally knew who she was, not only a poseur but an empty vessel for whom stridence had always been a surrogate for courage.

  She heard a rumbling sound on the road and turned and saw Willie Burke and Robert Perry crouched forward in a wagon, the boy named Tige clinging to the sides in back. Willie had doubled over the reins in his hands and was laying the leather across his horses' flanks.

  So once
more she would become the burden of others, to be consoled and protected and mollified, a well-intended, neurotic Yankee who was her own worst enemy.

  But if she couldn't kill, at least she could put the fear of God in a rotten piece of human flotsam like Rufus Atkins.

  She raised the pistol and threw back the tent flap and stepped inside just as a man emerged from a curtain and a tangle of mosquito netting in back, his posture stooped in order to get through the netting, a metal object in his right hand. His eyes lifted to hers, just before she pointed the revolver with both hands and squeezed the trigger and a dirty cloud of smoke erupted into his face.

  Her ears rang from the pistol's report. Then she heard his weight collapse as he sank to one knee, a bright ruby in the center of his forehead, the muscle tone in his face melting, his arm fighting for purchase on top of a worktable, like an unpracticed elderly man whose belated attempt at genuflection had proved inadequate.