White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  He removed a twenty-dollar gold piece from his watch pocket and flipped it in the air with his thumb, catching it in his palm. He rolled it across the tops of his knuckles and made it disappear from his hand. Then he reached behind her ear and held the coin in her face.

  "Deception's an art, Flower. We all practice it. But white people are a whole sight better at it than y'all are," he said.

  When she didn't reply, he smiled wanly. "Young Willie bring you his wash?" he asked.

  "Yes, suh," she replied.

  "I hope he wasn't here to get anything else washed," he said.

  She lowered her eyes to the floor. Atkins sat down at the table and removed his hat and wiped his face with a handkerchief.

  "Flower, you are the best-looking black woman I've ever seen. Honest to God truth," he said. He picked up the jug of lemonade and drank out of it.

  But when he set the jug down his gaze lighted on an object that was wedged under her mattress pad. He rose from the chair and walked to her bed.

  "I declare, a dictionary and a poetry book and what looks like a tablet somebody's been writing in. Willie Burke give you these?" he said.

  "A preacher traveling through. He ax me to hold them for him," she said.

  "That was mighty thoughtful of you." He folded back a page of her tablet and read from it. "'A cricket sleeped on the pillow by my head.' This preacher doesn't sound like he's got good sense. Well, let's just take these troublesome presences off your hands."

  He walked outside and knelt by a fire burning under a black pot filled with boiling clothes. He began ripping the pages out of her writing tablet and feeding them individually into the flames. He rested one haunch on the heel of his boot and watched each page blacken in the center, then curl around the edges, his long hair and clipped beard flecked with gray, like pieces of ash, his skin as dark and grained as scorched brick.

  Then he opened the book of poems and wet an index finger and methodically turned the pages, puckering his lips as he glanced over each poem, an amused light in his face.

  "Come back inside, Marse Rufus," she said from the doorway.

  "I thought you might say that," he replied, rising to his feet, his stomach as flat and hard as a board under his tucked shirt and tightly buttoned pants.

  AT four-thirty the next morning, April 12, 1861, a Confederate general whose hair was brushed into a greased curlicue on his pate gave the order to a coastal battery to fire on a fort that was barely visible out in the harbor. The shell arced across the sky under a blanket of stars, its fuse sparking like a lighted cigar tossed carelessly into a pile of oily rags.

  Chapter Three

  BY AFTERNOON of the same day the telegraph had carried the news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter to New Iberia, and Camp Pratt, out on Spanish Lake, was suddenly filled with young men who stood in long lines before the enlistment tables, most of them Acadian boys who spoke no English and had never been farther from Bayou Teche than the next parish. The sky was blue through the canopy of oak trees that covered the camp, the lake beaten with sunlight, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, the plank tables in front of the freshly carpentered barracks groaning with platters of sausage, roast chickens, boudin, smoked ducks, crab gumbo, dirty rice, and fruit pies that had been brought in carriages by ladies who lived in the most elegant plantation homes along the bayou.

  Willie's tall friend, Jim Stubbefield, sat barefoot in his militia uniform, his back against a cypress tree by the water's edge, and drank from a cup of buttermilk and looked with puzzlement at the festive atmosphere in the camp. He turned to a young man in civilian clothes sitting next to him and said, "Robert, I think the fates are not working properly here. I enlisted two months ago and no one seemed to notice."

  His friend was named Robert Perry. His hair grew over his collar and was the color of mahogany, his face handsome, his blue eyes never troubled by fear or self-doubt or conflict with the world around him.

  "I'm sure it was just an oversight on the community's part," he said.

  Jim continued to stare in a bemused way at the enlistment lines, then his gaze locked on one individual in particular and he chewed on a piece of skin on his thumb and spit it off his tongue.

  "I think I've made a mistake," he said.

  "A man with your clarity of vision? Seems unlikely," Robert said.

  "Look there. Willie's joining up. Maybe at my urging."

  "Good for Willie," Robert said.

  "I doubt Willie has it in him to shoot anyone," Jim said.

  "Do you?"

  "If they come down here, I figure they've asked for it."

  "I doubt if it was easy for Willie to come here. Don't rob him of his self-respect," Robert said, rising to his feet, pressing a palm down on Jim's shoulder.

  "Your father owns over a hundred and eighty niggers, Robert. You ought not to be lecturing to the rest of us."

  "You're entirely right, Jim," Robert said. He winked at Jim and walked toward the recruitment table, where Willie Burke had just used quill and ink to enter his name among a long list of French and Spanish and Anglo-Saxon ones, many of them printed by an enlistment officer and validated by an X.

  But Robert soon realized Jim's premonitions about their friend were probably correct, that the juncture of Willie Burke and the Confederate army would be akin to a meeting of a wrecking ball and a crystal shop.

  Captain Rufus Atkins stepped out of a tent, in a gray uniform and wide-brimmed ash-colored hat with a gold cord and a pair of tiny gold icons tied around the crown. A blond man, his hair as greasy as tallow, wearing a butternut uniform with corporal's chevrons freshly sewn on the sleeves, stood behind him. The corporal's name was Clay Hatcher.

  "Where do you think you're going, young Willie?" Atkins asked.

  "Back home," Willie answered.

  "I think not," Atkins replied. He looked out at the lake and the moss blowing in the trees, the four-o'clocks riffling in the shade. "One of the privies needs dipping out. After you finish that, spread a little lye around and that will be it until this evening. By the way, are you familiar with the poetry of William Blake?"

  "Never heard of him," Willie replied.

  "I see. Better get started, young Willie. Did you bring a change of clothes?" Atkins said.

  "Excuse me, sir, but I didn't join the army to ladle out your shit-holes. On that subject, can you clear up a question that has bedeviled many in the community? Is it true your mother was stricken with the bloody flux when you were born and perhaps threw the infant away by mistake and raised the afterbirth instead?"

  The corporal to the side of Rufus Atkins pressed his wrist to his mouth to stop from snickering, then glanced at Atkins' face and sucked in his cheeks.

  "Let me gag and buck him, Cap'n," he said.

  Before Atkins could answer, Robert Perry walked up behind Willie.

  "Hello, Captain!" Robert Perry said.

  "How do you do, Master Robert?" Atkins said, bowing slightly and touching his hat. "I saw you signing up earlier. I know your father is proud."

  "My friend Willie isn't getting off to a bad start in the army, is he?" Robert said.

  "A little garrison duty, that's all," Atkins said.

  "I'm sure if you put him in my charge, there will be no trouble," Robert said.

  "Of course, Master Robert. My best to your father," Atkins said.

  "And to your family as well, sir," Robert said, slipping his hand under Willie's arm.

  The two of them walked back toward the lake to join Jim Stubbefield at the cypress tree. Willie felt Robert's hand tighten on his arm.

  "Atkins is an evil and dangerous man. You stay away from him," Robert said.

  "Let him stay away from me," Willie replied.

  "What was that stuff about William Blake?"

  "I have a feeling he found a book I gave to a Negro girl."

  "You did what?" Robert said.

  "Oh, go on with you, Robert. You don't seem bothered by the abolitionist tendencies of Abigail Dowli
ng," Willie said.

  "I love you dearly, Willie, but you're absolutely hopeless, unteachable, beyond the pale, with the thinking processes of a stump, and I suspect an extra thorn in Our Savior's crown," Robert said.

  "Thank you," Willie said.

  "By the way, Abigail is not an abolitionist. She's simply of a kind disposition," Robert said.

  "That's why she circulated a petition begging commutation for John Brown?" Willie said. He heard his friend make a grinding noise in his throat.

  THAT evening Willie bathed in the clawfoot tub inside the bathhouse on the bayou, then dried off and combed his hair in a yellowed mirror and dressed in fresh clothes and walked outside into the sunset and the breeze off the Gulf. The oaks overhead were draped with moss, their limbs ridged with lichen, and the gardenias and azaleas were blooming in his mother's yard.

  Next door, in a last patch of yellow sunshine, a neighbor was boiling crabs in an iron pot on a woodfire. The coolness of the evening and the fecund heaviness of the bayou and a cheerful wave from his neighbor somehow made Willie conclude that in spite of the historical events taking place around him all was right with the world and that it should not be the lot of a young man to carry its weight upon his shoulders.

  He strolled down East Main, past the Shadows and the wide-galleried, gabled overseer's house across the street, past other homes with cupolas and fluted columns that loomed as big as ships out of the floral gardens that surrounded them.

  He paused in front of a shotgun cottage with ventilated green shutters set back in live oak and pine trees, its windows lighted in the gloom, a gazebo in the side yard threaded with bougainvillea. He heard a wind chime tinkle in the breeze.

  The woman who lived inside the cottage was named Abigail Dowling. She had come to New Iberia from Massachusetts as a nurse during a yellow fever epidemic and had stayed, working both in the clinic and teaching in a private school down the street. Her hair was thick, chestnut-colored, her skin without blemish, her bosom and features such that few men, including ones in the company of their wives, could prevent themselves from casting furtive glances at.

  But for many her ways were suspect, her loyalties questionable, her candor intimidating. On one occasion Willie had asked her outright about rumors he'd heard.

  "Which rumors might that be?" she said.

  "A couple of Negroes who disappeared from plantations out by Spanish Lake," he replied.

  "Yes?" she said, waiting.

  "They got through the paddy rollers. In fact, it looks like they got clean out of the state. Some say you might be involved with the Underground Railroad, Miss Abigail."

  "Would you think less of me?" she replied.

  "A lady who hand-feeds those with yellow jack and puts their lives ahead of her own?" he said.

  But she was not reassured.

  Now, in the gloaming of the day, he stood on her gallery and tapped on her door, his straw hat in hand, a discomfort in his chest he could not quite define.

  "Oh, good evening, Miss Abigail, pardon me for dropping by unexpectedly, but I thought you might like to take a walk or allow me to treat you to a dessert down at the cafe," he said.

  "That's very nice of you," she said, stepping outside. She wore a plain blue cotton dress, buttoned not quite to the throat, the sleeves pushed up on her arms. "But someone is due to drop by. Can we just sit on the steps for a bit?"

  "Sure," he said, hoping his disappointment did not show. He waited for her to take a seat on the top step, then sat on the step below her.

  "Is something bothering you, Willie?" she asked.

  "I enlisted today. Out at Camp Pratt. I'm just in the Home Guards now, but I suspect we'll be formed into regular infantry directly."

  The darkening sky was full of birds now, sweeping above the chimneys, the oaks loud with cicadas and the throbbing of tree frogs.

  After a long silence, she said, "I'm sure in your own mind you did the right thing."

  "My own mind?" he said, and felt his face color, both for his rudeness in mimicking her statement and because he was angry at himself for seeking absolution from her, as though he were not possessed of either humanity or a conscience himself.

  "I don't judge you, Willie. Robert Perry is enlisting, too. I think the world of you both," she said.

  "Robert believes in slavery. I don't. He comes from a wealthy family and has a vested interest in seeing the Negro race kept subservient. That's the difference between us," he said, then bit his lip at the self-righteousness in his voice.

  "Robert is reading for the law. He doesn't plan to be a plantation or slave owner." She paused when she saw the injury in Willie's eyes. "Why are you enlisting?"

  Because I'm afraid to be thought a coward, a voice inside him said.

  "What?" she said.

  "Nothing. I said nothing," he replied. He looked out at a carriage passing in the street. Don't say anymore, for God's sakes, he told himself. But his old enemy, his impetuosity, held sway with him once again.

  "I think all this is going to be destroyed. By cannon shot and fire and disease, all of it wiped out," he said, and waved his hand vaguely at the palm trees in the yards, the massive houses hidden inside the live oaks, a paddle-wheeler churning on the Teche, its lighted windows softly muted inside the mist.

  "And you make your own life forfeit for a cause you don't respect? My God, Willie," Abigail said.

  He felt the back of his neck burning. Then, when he believed matters could get no worse, he looked up and saw Robert Perry rein his horse in the dusk and dismount and enter the yard, removing his hat.

  "Good evening, Miss Abigail. You too, Willie. Did I break in on something?" Robert said.

  Robert waited for a reply, his face glowing with goodwill.

  TWO hours later Willie Burke was on his fourth glass of whiskey in the brick saloon next to Carrie LaRose's brothel. The plank floor was scattered with sawdust and burned by cigars and stained with tobacco juice around the cuspidors. Hand towels hung from brass rings along the bar, and above the bar mirror was a painting of a reclining nude, her bottom an ax-handle wide, her stomach like a soft pink pillow, her smile and pubic hair and relaxed arms an invitation to enter the picture frame with her.

  Willie wanted to concentrate on the lovely lines of the woman in the painting and forget the events of the day, particularly the fact he had been so foolish as to enlist in the Home Guards. But the man standing next to him, one Jean-Jacques LaRose, also known as Scavenger Jack, was giving a drunken lecture to anyone within earshot, pounding his fists on the bar, denouncing Secessionists, Copperheads in the North who encouraged them, and people stupid enough to join the army and serve their cause.

  Unlike his sister, Carrie LaRose, who owned the bordello next door, Scavenger Jack operated on the edges of legitimate society, hauling away Chitimacha burial mounds that he mixed with manure and sold for high-grade fertilizer, exporting weevil-infested rice to plantation operators in the West Indies whose food costs for their workers were running too high, and, rumor had it, luring ships onto a reef with a false beacon off Key West in order to salvage the cargo.

  He was a huge man, his black hair and beard streaked with red, a scar across his nose like a flattened worm. His bull neck was corded with veins, his teeth like tombstones, his shoulders so broad they split the seams of his coat.

  "Let me ax you gentlemen somet'ing. When them Yankees blockade our ports, 'cause that's what they gonna do, how you gonna get your sugar and salt and cotton out of Lou'sana, you? Round up the crawfish and pile it on their backs?" he said to his audience.

  "Now, Jean-Jacques, there's more involved here than money," said a member of the town council and part owner of the bank, an older man with an egg-shaped, pleasant face. "The Negroes have already heard about the firing on Fort Sumter. A lady in St. Martinville caught her cook with cyanide this morning. But I worry more about the Negro male population being turned loose on our women. That's the kind of thing these abolitionists have encouraged."

&
nbsp; "Them rich people couldn't convince y'all to fight for their cotton, no. So they got all them newspapers to start y'all t'inking about what's gonna happen to your jelly roll. That done it when nothing else did," Jean-Jacques said.

  "That's not called for, Jean-Jacques. We're all serious men here and we speak respectfully of one another," the older man said.

  "What y'all fixing to do is ruin my bidness. You t'ink a black man who work all day in the field got nothing on his mind except sticking his pole up your wife's dress?" Jean-Jacques said.

  "You should give some thought to your words, sir," the older man said, lowering his eyes, his throat coloring. Then he collected himself and said to the bartender, "Give my friend Jean-Jacques another drink."