White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  "I was in the saloon. People treated me like I done somet'ing wrong. Maybe I was drunk in there and I done somet'ing I don't remember."

  "Sometime people are just that way, Mr. Jean. It don't mean... it doesn't mean you done anything wrong."

  He was seated in a chair by the window. He looked out on the bayou at a white man in a pirogue raking moss from the tree limbs that the man would later sell for stuffing in mattresses. Jean-Jacques remembered the crumpled newspaper page from his pants pocket and smoothed it on the tabletop. His finger moved down a column of print and stopped.

  "My name's right there. See? But I don't know why, me. Maybe they're writing in there about my ship getting shot up, huh?" he said.

  She walked around behind him and peered over his shoulder. He could smell the red hibiscus she wore in her hair and a clean, crisp odor in her clothes. Her breastline rose and fell on the corner of his vision.

  "You a good man, Mr. Jean. You always been good to people of color. You ain't got to... I mean, you don't have to pay attention to what somebody write in a paper about you," she said.

  "You can read that?" he said, turning in his chair, his finger still spear-pointed in the middle of the article.

  "I reckon," she said.

  He stared at her stupidly. Then his eyes blinked.

  "What it say?" he asked.

  "'Unlike Colonel Jamison, who risked his life to escape from a prison hospital, a local gentleman by the name of Jean-Jacques LaRose tried to extract gold from our treasury in payment for rifles that should have been donated to our soldiers. This man's greed should sicken every patriot.'"

  Jean-Jacques looked at the man harvesting moss from the trees limbs that extended the bayou. The man was white -haired and old, his clothes mended in many places, and he was struggling to free his rake from where it had become entangled in the branches over his head. If the man was lucky, he would make perhaps a half-dollar's wage for his day's work.

  "Men who work for Ira Jamison cheated me. They give me script for guns I bought with gold. Then they made me out a traitor," Jean-Jacques said.

  It was quiet a long time inside the cabin. Flower's weight shifted on the floor boards.

  "Mr. Jean, Colonel Jamison is moving all his slaves up into Arkansas. A whole bunch is already gone. Maybe they never gonna be free," Flower said.

  "What you saying?" ,

  "Miss Abigail is looking to hire a boat."

  He looked sharply into her face. "Boat for what?" he asked.

  "I ain't... I haven't said."

  "My ship was raked with grape out on the salt. I got one mast down and holes in the boiler." He looked thoughtfully out the window. The old man was gone and the bayou was empty, wrinkled now with wind and sunlight.

  "I see," she said.

  "But I got another one, me. Tied up in a backwater, just outside Baton Rouge," he said.

  SERGEANT Willie Burke stood on a promontory above the Mississippi River and looked down at the gathering dusk in the trees on the far shore. The late sun was molten and red in the west, and down below he could see dark shapes, like the backs of terrapins, floating in the water, oscillating slowly, sliding off logs that had snagged in jams on sandbars. Except they were not terrapins. They were men, and their blue blouses were puffed with air, their wooly hair bejeweled with drops of water, their wounds pecked clean and bloodless by carrion birds that perched on their heads or necks or the pockets of air in their uniforms.

  They had been members of the Louisiana Native Guards, originally a regiment of free black men in the service of the Confederacy. After the fall of New Orleans, they had been reorganized by the Federals into the 1st Louisiana Infantry and assigned to guard the railway leading into New Orleans.

  There were stories about captured Negro soldiers who were being sold into slavery, and also rumors about Negro soldiers who had not been allowed to surrender. Willie wondered if those floating down had died under a black flag, one that meant no quarter.

  Clay Hatcher and another man just like him, rodent-eyed, despised inside the womb, went out each night by themselves and did not tell others of what they did. But at dawn, when they returned to camp, there was a sated gleam in their eyes, a shared knowledge between them, like pride in an erotic conquest.

  Hatcher had used a nail file to saw sixteen narrow indentations along the stock of the scoped Springfield that he kept cleaned and oiled in the way a watchmaker cleans and oils the delicate mechanisms inside a fine clock. Hatcher had also taken to wearing a woman's garter high up on his right shirtsleeve, the purpose of which, he claimed, was to keep his forearm and wrist unencumbered when crawling up on a target.

  Each day or night a story passed on the river and Willie wondered why those who wrote about war concentrated on battles and seldom studied the edges of grand events and the detritus that wars created: livestock with their throats slit, the swollen carcasses of horses gut-shot by grape or canister, a burning houseboat spinning around a bend at night, with no one aboard, the flames singeing the leaves in the gum trees along the bank, a naked lunatic drifting by on a raft, a cowbell hanging from his throat, a Bible open in his hand, yelling a sermon at the soldiers on the shore, a pimp from Baton Rouge trying to put in to shore with a boatload of whores.

  But who was he to reflect upon the infinite manifestations of human insanity, he asked himself. The hardness of his body, his sun-browned skin, the sergeant's stripes that were already becoming sun-bleached on his sleeve, were all a new and strange way of looking at himself, but in truth he didn't know if he had grown into the person he had always been or if a cynical and insentient stranger lived inside him.

  He no longer questioned the authority or wisdom of those who had power over his life, no more than he would question the legitimacy of the weather in the morning or the rising and setting of the sun. He also kept his own counsel and did not express his disapproval of others, even when they committed cruel or atrocious acts. The ebb and flow of armies was not his to judge anymore. Years from now the great issues of the war would be forgotten and the consequences of his actions would have importance only to himself. He was determined he would never be ashamed of them, and that simple goal seemed to be honor enough.

  He could not believe that to some degree he had probably earned a footnote in history by having scouted for Nathan Forrest at the battle of Shiloh. But if someone were to ask him of his impressions about the colonel, he would reply he recalled little about him, other than the fact he was a coarse-skinned, profane man who bathed in horse tanks and put enough string tobacco in his mouth to clog a cannon, and if Willie saw him amid a gathering of grocery clerks, he would probably not recognize him nor wish to do so.

  He watched the cooks butcher a flock of chickens they had taken from the farm of a widow downstream. She had refused the Confederate script a major had tried to give her and had pleaded in French for him not to take her poultry, that they were her only source of eggs for a sickly grandchild. When the major took his brass trainman's watch from his pocket and hung it across her palm, she swung it by the chain and smashed it on a stump.

  Willie stared down from the promontory at the body of a dead Negro soldier caught on a snag, the current eddying around the crown of his head, the closed eyes and upturned face like a carved deathmask superimposed on the water's surface. Downstream a flat-bottomed boat was headed north, its decks covered with canvas, a Southern flag flying from the stern, its windows filled with the sun's last red glow.

  Willie smelled the chickens frying in skillets over a fire. He got his mess kit from his tent and sat on a log with his comrades and waited for the food to be done.

  Chapter Eleven

  IT WAS sunset on the river now, and Abigail Dowling sat next to Flower Jamison on a rough-hewn bench in the pilothouse of Jean-Jacques LaRose's salvage boat as it moved northward against the current, past a wooded promontory dotted with campfires and the biscuit-colored tents of Confederate soldiers. The river was swollen and dark yellow from the summer ra
ins, and back in the shadows under the overhang the water roiled with gars feeding on dead livestock.

  Abigail thought about the work that lay ahead for her that night, and the prospect of it made her throat swallow. She had helped transport escaped slaves out of the wetlands, onto boats that waited for them in salt water, but this was not the same. This time she was going into the heart of enemy country, into a primitive and oftentimes cruel area not tempered by either the mercies of French Catholicism or its libertine and pagan form of Renaissance humanism. And she was taking others with her.

  The conflicts of her conscience seemed endless, like the thinking processes of a neurotic and self-concerned girl incapable of acquiring her own compass, she thought. In moments like these she longed for the presence of herdead father. What was it he had once said about the obligations and restraints of those who fight the good fight of St. Paul? "We will do many things in the service of justice. But shedding blood isn't one of them. The likes of us have a heavy burden, Abby." In more ways than one, she thought.

  The air smelled like sulfur and distant rain and smoke from cypress stumps that had been chain-pulled out of the dirt and set burning while still wet. Abigail looked out the back door of the pilothouse at the riverwater cascading in sheets off the paddle-wheel. For a moment she thought she saw a blue-sleeved arm and shoulder roll out of the froth in the boat's wake, then be lapped over and disappear. She rose to her feet and stared at the water's surface, the waves from the boat now sliding into the shore.

  "Something wrong, Miss Abigail?" Flower asked.

  "No, the light's bad. I imagine things sometimes," she replied. Jean-Jacques turned from the wheel and looked at her but said nothing. They followed the channel markers through a wide bend in the river and passed lighted plantation homes couched among cedar and oak trees, a half-sunken gunboat whose cannons and boilers had been removed, a slave cemetery whose banks were eroding into the river, cotton acreage that was still under cultivation in spite of the war, and a pine woods that had been sawed into a stump farm. Then the moon broke from behind the clouds and the river loomed up ahead of them, straight as far as the eye could see, immense, rain-dented, tree-lined, wrinkled with wind, blown with leaves and dust out of the fields.

  Abigail looked over Jean-Jacques' shoulder at the raindrops striking against the glass.

  "You're a problem of conscience for me," she said.

  He turned around and squinted his eyes to show his incomprehension.

  "I took advantage of your resentment toward Ira Jamison," she said.

  "When this is all over, who you t'ink is gonna come out on top?"

  "The Union," she replied.

  "Remember who hepped you," he said.

  But the rum on his breath belied his cavalier attitude. If they were caught, his fate and that of the two white men who fed the boiler belowdecks would not be an easy one. At best they would be sent to a prison where the convicts were literally worked to death. But chances were they would never make trial and would die on a tree.

  Nor would the fate of Flower Jamison be much better-. Although Abigail had never witnessed an instance of branding or hamstringing herself, she had heard stories and had known slaves who turned to stone if they were questioned about the scars on their bodies.

  But when she tried to imagine her own fate, she realized once again her risks were like those of a rear echelon officer in a war. Slavers might hate her; a bounty hunter could spit on her skirts; and a newspaper editorialist could refer to her as "Miss Lover-of-all-Darkies." But if they didn't respect her, they respected money, and they knew her family had been rich, at least at one time, and her father had been the friend of United States presidents from both the North and South and had served at the side of Jefferson Davis in the War of the Mexican Cession. It was doubtful she would ever die on a tree or experience the touch of a hot iron on her back.

  Flower was sleeping with her head on her chest, the hat she had woven from palmetto leaves quivering from the vibration of the engines. Her face looked troubled, as though she had walked through a spiderweb in her dreams.

  Abigail squeezed her hand.

  "You're the bravest person I've ever known," she said.

  Flower's eyes opened like the weighted eyelids on a doll.

  "Brave about what?" she asked, unsure of where she was.

  "We're almost there," Abigail said.

  Flower smiled sleepily.

  "My gran'mama never thought she could be free. I cain't believe this is happening, Miss Abigail," she said.

  The river was blanketed with rain rings now, the moon buried deep in clouds, like a pool of scorched pewter. Jean-Jacques steered his boat past a lighted plantation home on a bluff, then rounded a bend where the land flattened and the river had risen into groves of willow and gum trees and out in a field a trash fire was burning inside the mist, the sparks fanning over the water.

  Jean-Jacques blew out his breath and looked through the glass at the canvas that was stretched across the deck, swelling in the wind and tugging against the ropes that held it, canvas that in reality sheltered nothing except a few crates of tools and plowshares. He reached into his shirt and lifted a religious medal to his lips and kissed it.

  "Lord, if you cain't forgive me all my sins, just don't remember them too good, no. Thank you. Amen," he said.

  He steered the boat close to shore, until the overhang scratched against the gunnel and the top of the pilothouse, then shut down the paddle-wheel while his boatmates slipped the anchors on the bow and stern. Curds of yellow smoke rose from the trash fire burning in the field. A black man walked through the trees toward the boat, the fire bright behind him. He stood motionless on the bank, squinting at the darkened windows in the pilothouse.

  "That's my uncle!" Flower said, and ran out on the deck.

  "Why don't she yell it at them people in that plantation house back yonder?" Jean-Jacques said.

  "We'll be back in a few minutes. It's going to be fine," Abigail said.

  Lightning rippled through the clouds over the river. Jean-Jacques' face looked dilated, his eyes like black marbles. He pulled the cork from a green bottle and drank from the neck.

  "Miss Abigail, my heart done aged ten years tonight. Get back quick with them colored people. Don't make me grow no older, no," he said.

  "Fifteen minutes. You'll see," she said, and winked at him.

  She and Flower went down the plank the boatmates had propped against the bank and followed Flower's uncle up an eroded coulee through a stand of gum trees. The mist was gray and damp, like a cotton glove, the air tannic with the smell of dead leaves that had pooled inside stagnant water. The coulee led like a jagged wound through a sweet potato field, steep-sided, thick with ferns and air vines, the soft clay at the bottom laced with the stenciled tracks of deer and possums and raccoons.

  Lightning jumped between the clouds, and Abigail saw perhaps two dozen adults and children sitting down on each side of the stream at the bottom of coulee, their faces frightened, their belongings tied inside blankets.

  A tall, thick-necked black woman, with cheekbones as big as a hog's, wearing an ankle-length gray dress, rose to her feet, her eyes fastened on Abigail.

  "This the one?" she asked Flower, nodding at Abigail.

  "There ain't... there isn't a better white person on earth," Flower said.

  "Some white mens from Baton Rouge has talked slaves into running and turned them in for the bounty," the older black woman said.

  "You're Flower's grandmother?" Abigail said.

  "That's right."

  "I don't blame you for your suspicions. But we don't have much time, ma'am. You must trust me or otherwise return to your home. You have to make that decision now," Abigail said.

  Flower's grandmother picked up her bundle in one hand and took the hand of a little boy in another.

  "The paddy rollers are scared of the Yankees. They was looking along the river with lanterns," she said.

  "Then let's be gone," Abigail
said.

  They walked single file back down the coulee toward the river, the sparks from the fire in the field drifting over their heads. A thunderous clap of lightning struck in the trees, and behind her Abigail heard an infant begin to cry. She stepped out of the line and worked her way back to a teenage girl who was walking with an infant not over three or four months old in each arm.

  "Cain't carry them both. I gots to go back," the girl said.

  "No, you don't," Abigail said, and took one of the babies from her.

  The line of people splashed ankle-deep down the coulee toward the sound of the river coursing through the willow trees in the shallows. Then they heard someone snap a dry branch off a tree and throw it angrily aside with a curse, as though an object of nature had deliberately targeted him for injury. A balloon of light burst out of the tree trunks and flooded the bottom of the coulee.