White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  "The surgeon says my intestines were probably damaged. There's a term for it," he said.

  "Peritonitis?"

  "Yes."

  She pressed down the lid on the wooden bucket and let her face show no expression. When she returned from the lime pit he was looking out the window at a sunshower falling on the live oaks and floral gardens between the hospital and the street.

  "Flower is attending me. She'll be here this evening," he said.

  "Pardon?" Abigail said.

  "I had her brought from New Iberia. She's a good girl, isn't she?"

  He turned his head on the pollow and smiled. For the first time she looked upon him with pity and wondered if indeed, as her religion taught, there were those who found genuine erdempion in their last days.

  HER thoughts were still on the colonel and his illegitimate daughter, the slave girl Flower, when she took a public carriage downtown that evening and walked to the room provided her by the Sanitary Commission. She stopped at the open-air market and bought a fried catfish sandwich and sat on a bench by the river, watching the paddle-wheelers in the sunset and the children playing in the street. The wind smelled of wet trees and rain falling on warm stone in a different part of the city, and when she closed her eyes she felt more alone than she had ever felt in her life.

  She had dedicated herself to the plight of the infirm and the abandoned and the oppressed who had no voice, hadn't she? Why this unrelieved sense of loneliness, of always feeling that the comforting notion of safe harbor would never be hers?

  Because there was no one solidly defined world she belonged to, no one family, no one person, she thought. She saw herself in an accurate way only twice during any given twenty-four-hour period, at twilight and at false dawn, when the world was neither night nor day, when shadows gave ambiguity a legitimacy that sunlight did not.

  Amid the cries of children wheeling barrel hoops down the street and a band playing in front of a saloon, she heard another sound, a guttural shout, like a visceral cheer from a single individual who spoke for many. Then she heard collective laughter and yelling, a crowd moving up the street toward the U.S. Mint, a mixture of soldiers trying to maintain the appearance of discipline, loafers from the saloons, drunk prostitutes, a dancing barefoot Negro in green felt pants and a red-and-white-striped hat, a man with a peg leg stumping his way along the edge of things, a dwarf carrying a parasol over his head, grinning with a mouthful of tombstone teeth.

  In the center of the crowd was a disheveled and terrified white man, his hands shackled behind him with a chain and heavy metal cuffs. He wore a thin mustache that looked grease-penciled on his upper lip, like an actor playing a villain in a cheap melodrama. He twisted his

  head back and forth, pleading to anyone who would listen. But his words were lost in their jeers.

  "What did he do?" Abigail asked an elderly man with a goatee sitting next to her, his hands folded on the crook of a cane.

  "He was wearing a piece of the ripped flag in his buttonhole," the man replied.

  Then she remembered the account given her by the sentry, something about a man who had torn down the Stars and Stripes from the front of the U.S. Mint.

  "The army knows it was he?" she asked.

  "I don't think they care. He's a cardsharp by trade," the elderly man replied.

  She set down her sandwich on the piece of newspaper it had come wrapped in and stood up from the bench.

  "My God, what are they going to do?" she said. When the man on the bench didn't reply, she tried again. "Who's in charge of this?"

  His eyes looked at her casually, as though he were considering the implications of her accent before he answered.

  "General Butler. 'Spoons' Butler to some. He has a way of ending up with people's silverware. Where you from, anyway?" the man said.

  She walked hurriedly toward the balloon of people who surrounded the man in manacles, her shoes splashing in water. She jerked on a soldier's arm.

  "What are you going to do to this man?" she asked.

  "Whatever it is, it's none of your business. Go back to the edge of the street," the soldier replied.

  "You take me to your commanding officer," she said.

  "Maybe you should kiss my smelly bum, too," he said.

  "What did you say?" she said.

  He shifted his rifle to his left hand and spun her in the opposite direction, then pushed her hard between the shoulder blades, snapping her head back. When she turned around again, the other soldiers had already worked their captive inside the building.

  Someone on the second story pulled aside the curtains above the empty flag staff that protruded from the bricks. She could see the man in manacles fighting now, butting the soldiers with his head, spitting at their faces.

  She tried to push her way inside the door and was shoved back by a sentry. She heard he crowd roar behind her and looked up, just as the manacled man was hoisted onto the windowsill, a narrow-gauge greased length of rope looped around his throat. He fell three feet ingo space before the rope came taut.

  But his neck did not snap. Brick mortar shaled from his shoes and fell on her head and shoulders as he twisted on the rope and his feet kicked against the wall.

  She fought her way back through the crowd and suddenly found herself inside the collective odor of its members, the dried sweat under the perfume and caked body powder, the dirty hair, the wine breath and decayed meat impacted between their teeth, all of it washing over her in a fetid wave as they shouted out their ridicule of the man whose eyes bulged like walnuts above them, some twisting their own heads and sticking their tongues out the sides of their mouths in mockery.

  She pushed her way to the edge of the crowd into the open. She dropped her purse in a mud puddle and almost fell down when she tried to pick it up. The whistle of a steamboat screamed on the river and one of the ironclads fired off a cannon in celebration of the hanging. Then a black woman took her around the waist and walked with her toward the open-air market and the empty bench where a cat was eating the sandwich Abigail had left behind.

  "You gonna be all right, Miss Abigail. No, no, don't watch what them people are doing no more. You and me are just gonna keep putting one foot after the other and not worry about them folks back yonder," the black woman said.

  "Is that you, Flower?" Abigail said.

  "Sure it is, Miss Abigail. I ain't gonna let you down, either," Flower said.

  "That poor man."

  "No, no, do what I tell you and don't be looking over there," Flower said, touching Abigail's eyes with her fingers. "You a brave lady. I wish I was as brave as you. One day everybody gonna know how brave you been, how much you done for us. I'm gonna see to it."

  When they sat down on the bench together they clenched hands like schoolchildren. The palm and banana trees along the levee clattered in the wind off the river, and the deepening color of the sky made her think of the purple cloak Jesus was supposedly made to wear at his crucifixion. The street was empty now. The manacled man hung like a long, narrow exclamation mark against the wall of the Mint.

  "My own people did this. Those who claim to be the voice of justice," Abigail said.

  "But we didn't. That's what counts, Miss Abigail. You and me didn't do it. Sometimes that's about all the relief the world give you," Mower said.

  "It's not enough," Abigail said.

  Chapter Nine

  FLOWER Jamison walked through Jackson Square, past St. Louis Cathedral, and down cobbled streets under colonnades and scrolled-iron balconies that dripped with bougainvillea and passion vine. A man in a constable's uniform was lighting the gas lamps along the street, and the breeze smelled of freshly sprinkled flower beds on the opposite side of a gated wall, spearmint, old brick that was dark with mold, and ponded water in a courtyard where the etched shadows of palm fronds moved like lace across a bright window.

  The moon rose above the rooftops and chimneys and cast her shadow in front of her, at first startling her, then making her laugh.
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  She walked past the brothels in Congo Square, two-story wood-frame buildings, their closed shutters slitted with an oily yellow light from inside. The only customers now were Yankee soldiers, boys, really, who entered the houses in groups, never singly, loud, boisterous, probably with little money, she thought, anxious to hide their fear and innocence and the paucity of their resources.

  She passed a house that resonated with piano music and offered only mulatto women to its customers, what were always called quadroons, no matter what the racial mix of the woman actually was.

  A baby-faced soldier not older than seventeen sat on the front step, klicking pebbles with his thumb into the yard, a kepi cocked on his head. He watched her pass and then for some unaccountable reason tipped his kepi to her.

  She nodded at him and smiled.

  "Some other fellows went inside. I was just waiting on them," he said.

  The overseer who had brought her from New Iberia had placed her with a husband and wife who were free people of color and lived in an elevated cottage overlooking Basin and the drainage ditch that sawed its way down the middle of the street to a sinkhole that was gray with insects. She ate supper with the husband and wife, then waited for the husband to drive her to the hospital on St. Charles.

  He was a light-skinned man who ran a tannery and looked more Indian than African. He seemed irritable as he pulled a pair of gloves over his palms, vexed somehow by her presence or his need to transport her back and forth to her work.

  "Is something wrong, suh?" she asked.

  "The overseer tole me yesterday you're Ira Jamison's daughter," he said.

  "He ain't said it to me. No white person ever has."

  "I seen you walking past them houses down there tonight. Flirting wit' a Yankee soldier on the porch," he said. He wagged his finger back and forth. "You don't do that when you stay at my house."

  "Colonel Jamison is a prisoner of war. He cain't hurt you, suh."

  "I bought my freedom, girl. I ain't ever gonna lose it. If you come to New Orleans, scheming to get free, you better not drag me into it, no," he said, pulling down his shirt to expose a circular scar that looked like dried plaster, of a kind left by a branding iron poorly laid on.

  FLOWER knew she should have been depressed by the hostility and fear of her host and the hanging she had witnessed that evening, but oddly she was not. In fact, since the day an overseer had arrived in New Iberia from Angola Plantation and had told her Colonel Jamison was in New Orleans, badly wounded, asking for her, she could hardly deal with rhe strange and conflicting emotons that assailed her heart.

  She remembered when she had seen him for the first time as a little girl, dressed in skintight white breeches and a blue velvet jacket, his hair flowing behind him as he galloped his horse across a field of alfalfa and jumped a fence like a creature with invisible wings. A teenage boy picking cotton in the row next to hers had said, "He ride that hoss just like he rode yo' mama, Flower."

  The boy's mother had slapped him on the ear.

  Flower did not understand what the boy had meant or why his mother had been provoked to such a level of anger, which to Flower, even as a child, was always an indicator of fear.

  She saw Marse Jamison again, on a Christmas Day, when her grandmother brought her to work with her in the big house. Flower had peeked out from the kitchen and had seen him talking with other men by the fireplace, the whiskey in his glass bright against the flames. When he saw her watching him, he winked and picked up a piece of hard candy from a crystal plate and gave it to her.

  In that moment she believed she was in the presence of the most important man in the world.

  She did not see him again for fifteen years.

  Then, on what might become his deathbed, he had asked for her. She felt herself forgiving him for sins that he had neither acknowledged nor had asked forgiveness for, and she wondered if she were driven less by charity than by weakness and personal need. But people were what they did, she told herself, not what they said or didn't say, but what they did. And Colonel Ira Jamison had sent for his daughter.

  Now she enclosed him in mosquito-netting at night and sponge-bathed him and changed his bandages and brought his food from the hospital kitchen on a cloth-covered tray. He was melancholy and remote, but always grateful for her attentions, and there were moments when his hand lingered on hers and his eyes seemed to turn inward and view a scene she could hardly imagine, a field churning with smoke and terrified horses or a surgeon's tent where human limbs were piled like spoiled pork.

  He read until late at night and slept with the flame turned low in the lamp. On one occasion, when the oil had burned out, she found him sitting on the side of the bed, his bare feet in a pool of moonlight, his face disjointed with his own thoughts.

  "The war won't let you sleep, Colonel Jamison?" she asked him.

  "The laudanum makes you have strange dreams, that's all," he replied.

  "It ain't good to take it if you don't need it no more," she said.

  "I suspect your wisdom may be greater than mine, Flower," he said, and looked at her fondly.

  But tonight when she reported to the hospital he was not reading either the Bible or one of the several novels he kept on his nightstand. Instead, he sat propped up on pillows with a big ledger book spread open on his knees. The pages were lined with the first names of people-Jim, Patsy, Spring, Cleo, Tuff, Clotile, Jeff, Batist-and beside each name was a birthdate.

  As he turned the pages and read the lists of names, which must have numbered almost two hundred, he moved his lips silently and seemed to count with his fingers. He extinguished the lamp and went to sleep with the ledger book under his pillow.

  In the morning a new sentry was on duty at the entrance to the ward. His cheeks were pink, his hair so blond it was almost white. He straightened as she walked by, clearing his throat, a hesitant grin at the corner of his mouth.

  "'Member me?" he said.

  "No," she said.

  "Sitting on the porch at that house on Congo Square? Place I probably didn't have no business?" he said.

  "Oh yes, how do you do?" she said.

  He shifted his hands on his rifle barrel and looked past her out the window, his eyes full of light, thinking about his response but finding no words that he felt would be very interesting to anyone else.

  "I'm on our regimental rounders team. We're gonna play some Vermont boys soon as I get off duty," he said.

  "Rounders?"

  "It's a game you play with a ball and a bat. You run around bases. That's how come it's called 'rounders.'" He grinned at her.

  "It's nice seeing you," she said.

  "Ma'am, I didn't go in that place last night," he said hurriedly, before she could walk away.

  "I know you didn't," she said.

  He had just called her "ma'am," something no white person had

  ever done. She looked back over her shouldee at him. He was twirling his kepi on the point of his fixed bayonet, like a child intrigued with a top.

  THAT night, when she returned to the hospital, Ira Jamison was in an ebullient mood, one she did not understand in a dying man. He had two visitors, men with coarse skin and uncut hair, with a lascivious look in their eyes and the smell of horses in their clothes. They pushed the screens around the bed and lowered their voices, but she heard one man laugh softly and say, "Ain't no problem, Kunnel. We'll move the whole bunch up into Arkansas, safe and sound, ready to fetch when the shooting is over."

  After they were gone she brought Ira Jamison hot tea and a piece of toast with jam. The ledger book with the lists of names was on the nightstand. On top of it was a page of stationery that Jamison had been writing on. Her eyes slipped across the salutation and the words in the first paragraph as she propped up the tray on Jamison's lap.

  "Who was them men, Colonel?" she said.

  "Some fellows who do work for me from time to time."

  "They got dirty eyes," she replied.

  He looked at her curiously.r />
  "I could have sworn you were reading the letter I was writing to a friend," he said.

  "How could I do that, suh?"

  "I don't know, but you're no ordinary-"

  "Ordinary what?"

  "No ordinary girl. Neither was your mother."

  "I ain't a girl no more, Colonel."

  She picked up his soiled bedclothes from the floor and carried them to the laundry.

  DURING the night, out in the foyer where she kept a cot, she overheard a Union physician talking to one of the nurses.

  "You say he's mighty cheerful? By God, he should be. I thought sure we'd be dropping him into a hole, but his specimen has been clear two days now. The colonel will probably be back abusing his darkies in no time. I guess if I ever wanted to see a nonsuccess in the treatment of a patient, my vote would he for this fellow."