White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  What was her weakness? he asked himself. Everybody had one. Maybe he had been looking in the wrong place. She seemed to have male friends rather than suitors or lovers. A woman that beautiful? He gazed out the window at the white bloom on his peach trees and a slave girl pulling weeds inside the drip lines. His side ached miserably. He placed a small lump of opium under his lip and felt a sensation like warm water leaking through his nervous system.

  He had thought of Abigail Dowling as a flesh-and-blood replication of Renaissance sculpture, an Aphrodite rising from a tidal pool on the Massachusetts coast. He watched the slave girl drop a handful of weeds into her basket and get to her feet, the tops of her breasts exposed to his view. Maybe he had been only partially correct about Abigail's classical origins.

  Were her antecedents on the island of Lesbos rather than Melos? He wondered.

  Chapter Thirteen

  AFTER the retreat from Shiloh, Willie began to dream about a choleric-faced man, someone he did not know, advancing out of a mist with a bayonet fixed to the end of his rifle. The choleric-faced man would not fall down when Willie fired upon him. He also dreamed about the sound of a distant siege gun coughing in a woods, then a shell arcing in a dark blur out of a blue sky, exploding in a trench full of men with the force of a ship's boiler blowing apart. He began to take his dreams into the waking day, and his anxieties and fears would be so great with the passage of each hour that contact with the enemy became a welcomed release.

  That's when a line sergeant gave him what the sergeant considered the key to survival for a common foot soldier: You never thought about it before you did it and you never thought about it when it was over.

  Nor did thinking make life easier for a commissioned officer, Willie told himself later.

  Lieutenant Willie Burke peered through the spyglass at the steam engine and the line of freight cars parked on the railway track. The sun was white in the sky, the woods breathless, the leaves in the canopy coated with dust. His clothes stuck to his skin; his hair was drenched with sweat inside his hat. There was a humming sound in his head, like the drone of mosquitoes, except the woods were dry and there were no mosquitoes in them.

  But their eggs were in his blood, and at night, and sometimes in daylight, he would see gray spots before his eyes and hear mosquitoes humming in his head, as was now the case, and he wished he was lying in a cold stream somewhere and not sighting through a spyglass, breathing dust inside a sweltering woods.

  The train was deserted, the steam engine pocked with holes from caseshot. Two of the boxcars that had been loaded with munitions had burned to the wheels. Another boxcar, a yellow one with sliding doors that had carried Negro troops, was embedded from stem to stern with iron railroad spikes, like rust-colored quills on a porcupine.

  The black soldiers, almost all of them newly emancipated slaves, untrained, with no experience in the field, had melted away into thickly wooded river bottoms and had taken a mule-drawn field piece with them, whipping the mules across the flanks, powdering dust in the air as they crushed through the palmettos and underbrush.

  Willie moved the spyglass over the river bottoms but could see no movement inside the trees. The train tracks shimmered in the heat and he could smell the hot odor of creosote in the ties. He focused the glass far down the line on an observation balloon captured from the Federals. It was silver, as bright as tin, tethered to the earth by a rope that must have been two hundred feet long. A bearded man in a wicker basket was looking back in Willie's direction with a spyglass similar to his own.

  Willie got down on one knee and gestured for Sergeant Clay Hatcher to do the same. The sudden movement made his head swim and his eyes momentarily go out of focus. He spread a map on the ground and tapped on it with his finger.

  "That woods yonder is probably a couple of miles deep. Their officers are dead, so my guess is they're bunched up," he said.

  Hatcher nodded as though he understood. But in reality he didn't. He carried a Henry repeater he had taken off the body of a Federal soldier. He was unshaved and sweaty, his kepi crimped wetly into his hair.

  "Take two men and get around behind them. When you do I want you to make life very uncomfortable for them."

  "I can do that," he said.

  "I don't think you follow me, Hatch."

  Hatcher looked at him, his eyes uncertain.

  "I want them to unlimber that field piece. You'll be on the receiving end of it. You up for that?" Willie said.

  "As good as the next," Hatcher said.

  "Better get moving, then," Willie said.

  Hatcher kept his gaze on the map without seeming to see it.

  "You want prisoners?" he asked.

  "If they surrender," Willie said.

  "The rumor is there ain't a great need for them in the rear."

  "Well, you hear this. If I catch you operating under a black flag, I'll take you before a provost and you'll be off to your heavenly reward before the sun sets."

  Hatcher nodded, his eyes looking at nothing, a lump of cartilage flexing in his jaw. "One of these days all this will be over," he said.

  "Yes?"

  "That's all. It'll be over and my stripes and those acorns on your hat won't mean very much."

  "I look forward to the day, Hatch."

  Willie watched Hatcher crunch across the floor of the woods toward the train track, his spine slightly bent, his clothes stiff with salt and dirt, his Henry repeater cupped in a horizontal position, like a prehistoric creature carrying a spear. Two other men joined him, both of them dressed in tattered butternut, and the three of them crossed the railway embankment and disappeared into the trees on the far side.

  Willie wondered when Hatcher would eventually muster up the nerve to frame Willie's back in his rifle sights.

  Someone touched him on the shoulder.

  "Major is asking for you, Lieutenant," a soldier said. He could not have been over sixteen. There were no buttons on his shirt and the cloth was held against his chest by the crossed straps of his haversack and a bullet pouch. He wore a domed, round-brimmed straw hat that sat on his head like a cake bowl.

  "How is he?" Willie asked.

  "He falls asleep and says funny things," the boy answered.

  Willie walked back through the woods to a bayou that was spangled with sunlight and draped with air vines that hung from the trees. The major lay on a blanket in the leaves, his head propped on a haversack stuffed with his rubber coat.

  Back in the shade, under a mulberry tree clattering with bluejays, the feet of four dead soldiers stuck out from the gum blankets that had been pulled over their bodies. Their shoes had been taken and the blankets that covered them were spotted with the white droppings of birds.

  Both of the major's arms were broken and hung uselessly at his sides. A bandage with a scarlet circle the size of a half dollar in the center was tied just below his heart. His muttonchop sideburns looked as thick as hemp on his jowls.

  "I had a dream about snow. Everything was white and a red dog was barking inside some trees," the major said.

  "We have a boat coming up the bayou, sir. We'll have you back at battalion aid soon," Willie said.

  "We shot the living hell out of them, didn't we?"

  "You bet," Willie said.

  "I need to ask you something."

  "Yes, sir."

  "When we stopped that steamboat on the Mis'sippi, the one carrying yellow jack?"

  Willie let his eyes slip off the major's face.

  "Yes, sir, I remember it," he said.

  "I had a feeling you knew the woman on board, the one with the Yankee accent."

  "Could be, sir."

  "I don't think those darkies had yellow jack. I think they were escaped slaves."

  "Lots of things are out of our control, Major," Willie said. He was propped on one knee, his gaze fixed on the air vines that fluttered in the wind.

  "I worked my whole life as a trainman. I owned nary a slave. I always thought slavery was a mistake,"
the major said.

  Willie nodded. "Yes, sir," he said.

  "Those who got through us on the river? They might have joined up with the colored outfit we just shot up, the ones who put the ball under my heart. That'd be something, wouldn't it?"

  Willie's eyes returned to the major's and he felt something drop inside him.

  "It's nothing to worry about. The boat will be here soon," the major said, and tried to smile.

  "Sir-" Willie began.

  "Watch your back, Willie. Hatcher and Captain Atkins are no good. They hate a young fellow such as yourself."

  Then the major widened his eyes briefly and turned his face away, into the shadows, as though the world of sunlight and the activity of the quick held little interest for him.

  When Willie got back to his position inside the edge of the woods, he sat very still on a log and waited for his head to stop spinning. Then he poured water out of his canteen into his palm and wiped his face with it. The boxcars on the track went in and out of focus and a pang like a shard of glass sliced across the lining of his stomach. For a moment he thought he would lose control of his sphincter muscle.

  In the distance he saw snow egrets and black geese rising from the canopy in the river bottoms, then he heard the spatter of small-arms fire that meant Hatcher's group had made contact with the black soldiers who had fled the train.

  Both the men with Hatcher carried captured Spencer rifles and bags of brass cartridges, and they, along with Hatcher and his Henry repeater, were laying down a murderous field of fire. The shooting went on for five minutes, then a field piece roared deep in the river bottoms and the gum trees overhead trembled with the shock and a cloud of smoke and grayish-orange dust rose out of the leaves into the sunlight. A moment later the field piece roared again and a second cloud of dust and smoke caught the light and flattened in the wind.

  Willie looked through his spyglass at the observation balloon tethered by the railway track far down the line. The bearded man in the wicker basket was using a pair of handheld flags to semaphore a battery down below, one consisting of three rifled twenty-pounder Parrotts that had been removed from a scuttled Union gunboat.

  One of the cannons fired, and a shell arced over the spot in the river bottoms where the dust clouds had risen out of the canopy. The round went long by thirty yards, and the man in the basket leaned over the side and whipped his flags in the air. The next round was short and the man in the basket semaphored the ground again.

  Then all three Confederate cannons fired for effect, again and again, the fused shells whistling shrilly only seconds before they struck.

  Uprooted trees and columns of dirt fountained into the air, and through the spyglass Willie could see shoes and pieces of blue uniform mixed in with the dirt and palmetto leaves.

  The barrage went on for almost a half hour. When Willie and his platoon marched across the railway embankment and entered the bottoms, he saw a black soldier huddled on the ground, trembling all over as though he had malaria, his forearms pressed tightly against his ears. Deeper in the bottoms the ground was pocked with craters, the dirt still smoking, and the trees were decorated in ways he had not seen since Shiloh.

  Back in the underbrush he saw one of Hatcher's men cut the ear from a dead man's head, fold it in a handkerchief, and place it carefully in a leather pouch.

  So that's the way it goes, he thought. You turn a blind eye to slaves escaping downriver, and later they join up with the blue-bellies and perhaps drive a ball under your friend's heart, and you trap the poor devils under a barrage that paints the trees with their blood and nappy hair. Ah, isn't it all a lovely business, he thought.

  He wondered what Abigail would have to say about his work and hers.

  An hour later he passed out. When he woke, he was in a tent and rain was ticking on the canvas. Through the flap he saw two enlisted men digging a grave by the bayou. The major lay next to the mound of dirt, his face covered with his gray coat.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE morning did not feel like spring, Abigail thought. The air was hot and smelled of dust and trash fires, the sky gray, the clouds crackling with electricity. Then her neighbor's dogs began barking and she heard a banging noise down the Teche, like a houseful of carpenters smacking nails down in green wood. She walked out on the gallery and saw birds lifting out of the trees all the way down the street as a long column of soldiers and wagons rounded a bend in the distance and advanced toward the center of town.

  The soldiers were unshaved, gaunt as scarecrows, some of them without shoes, the armpits of their butternut and gray uniforms white with salt, their knees patched like the pants on beggars. Three wagons carrying wounded passed in front of her. The teamsters in the wagon boxes were leaning forward, away from their charges, with handkerchiefs tied across their faces. The wind shifted, and she smelled the unmistakable odor of gangrene and of men who had become incontinent and left to sit in their own excretions. She saw no one with a surgeon's insignia in the column.

  She walked out into the yard just as a mounted officer rode his horse to the head of column. He wore a slouch hat, a sweat-peppered gray shirt, no coat, and a pistol in a shoulder holster on his chest. His face was narrow, his skin as coarse and dark as if it had been rubbed with the dust from a foundry.

  He picked his hat off his head by the crown and combed back his hair with his fingers.

  "Still in our midst, are you?" he said.

  "This is where I live," Abigail replied.

  "Bring as many ladies as you can find up to the Episcopalian church," he said.

  "You don't need to tell me my obligations, Captain Atkins," she replied.

  "There's nothing like hearing a Yankee accent behind our own lines. But I'm sure you've been loyal to the cause, haven't you?"

  "Where is Willie Burke?"

  "Can't rightly say. Saw him puking his guts out last week. Don't think he was quite up to blowing railroad spikes into freed niggers."

  "What?"

  "You haven't heard? The Yanks give them uniforms and guns and permission to kill their previous owners. We waylaid a whole train-load of them. Made good niggers out of a goodly number."

  Dry lightning rippled through the clouds. Atkins replaced his hat on his head and looked up at the sky.

  "By the way, that was some of General Banks' skirmishers shooting behind us," he said. "They say he was a bobbin boy in one of your Massachusetts textile mills. Does not like rich people. No, sir. So he's turned his men loose on the civilian population. I hear they're a horny bunch. You might fasten on a chastity belt."

  She wouldn't let the level of his insult register in her face, but the fact that he had insulted her sexually, in public, indicated only one conclusion about her status in the community: She was utterly powerless. She wanted to turn and walk away, but instead she fixed her eyes on the exhaustion in the faces of the enlisted men marching past her, the sores on the horses and mules, a mobile field kitchen whose cabinet doors swung back and forth on empty shelves.

  "Captain Atkins, I suspect you may be a gift from God," she said.

  His head tilted sideways, an amused question mark in the middle of his face.

  "Sometimes we're all tempted to think of our own race as being superior to others," she said. "Then we meet someone such as yourself and immediately we're beset with the terrible knowledge that there's something truly cretinous at work in the Caucasian gene pool. Thank you for stopping by."

  He studied her for a moment and scratched his cheek, his gaze slightly out of focus. He touched his horse with one spur and rode slowly toward the front of the column, his head bent down as though he were lost in thought. Then he reined his horse in a circle and rode back to Abigail's gate. He leaned with both arms on the pommel, the leather creaking under his weight. His flat, hazel eyes looked like they had been cut out of another face and pasted on his own.

  He pointed at her with a dirt-rimmed fingernail. "A pox on you, you snooty cunt. Be assured your comeuppance is in th
e making," he said.

  When Abigail arrived at the brick church at the far end of Main Street, the pews had been upended against the walls and the injured placed in rows on the floor. She peeled bandages from wounds that were rife with infection, scissored the trousers and underwear off men who had fouled themselves, and bathed their bodies with sponges and soap and warm water. A local physician, untrained as a surgeon, created an operating table by propping a door across two pews, then sawed limbs off men as though he were pruning trees. After each patient was carried away, he threw a bucket of water on the table and began on the next. There was no laudanum, and Abigail had to hold the heel of her hand in one man's mouth to keep him from biting through his tongue.