White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  "Start over again."

  "There's a Captain Atkins paid us to put the spurs to a troublesome white woman. She wasn't home so we give it to a darky instead. Three of us topped her. That's the long and the short of it. I ain't looted no dead Yankees."

  "Sergeant, take this man to the provost-marshal. The paperwork will follow," the general said.

  "Y'all sending me back home?" Pinky said. His eyes blinked as he waited for the general's response.

  A half hour later Willie was standing once again in front of the general. Through the window he saw two Yankee soldiers escorting Pinky Strunk behind the barn, gripping him by each arm. He was arguing with them, twisting his face from one to the other.

  "Sixteen of my men were butchered, their throats slit, their ring fingers cut off their hands. Don't be clever with me," the general said.

  "The killers of your men are out yonder in the compound, General. Pinky Strunk isn't one of them," Willie said.

  "Then you'd damn well better point them out."

  A ragged volley of rifle fire exploded from behind the barn.

  "Would you have a chew of tobacco on you, sir?" Willie asked.

  That evening he stood at the barred window of a brick storehouse on the bank of Bayou Teche and watched the sun descend in a cloud of purple smoke in the west. It was cool and damp-smelling inside the storehouse, and the oaks along the bayou were a dark green in the waning light, swelling with wind, the air heavy with the fecund odor of schooled-up bream popping the surface of the water among the lily pads.

  Other men sat on the dirt floor, some with their heads hanging between their knees. They were looters, rapists, guerrillas, jayhawkers, grave robbers, accused spies, or people who just had very bad luck. In fact, Willie believed at that moment that the nature of the crimes they had committed was less important than the fact that anarchy had spread across the land and the deaths of these men would restore some semblance of order to it.

  At dawn, the general had said.

  How big a price should anyone have to pay to retain his integrity? Willie asked himself. How did he come to this juncture in his life?

  Arrogance and pride, his mind answered.

  He could hear his heart pounding in his ears.

  Chapter Eighteen

  FLOWER Jamison did not sleep the night she was raped. She bathed in the iron tub behind Abigail Dowling's cottage, then put back on the same clothes she had worn before the attack and sat alone in the darkness, looking out on the street until Abigail returned home. "What happened?" Abigail asked, staring at the splintered door in the kitchen.

  "Three men broke in and raped me," Flower replied.

  "Federals broke in here? You were ra-"

  "They were civilians. They were looking for you. They took me instead."

  "Oh, Flower."

  "What one man more than any other wants to hurt you? A man who hates you, who's cruel through and through?"

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do," Flower said.

  "Rufus Atkins threatened me. Out there, in the street. Yesterday," Abigail said.

  Flower nodded her head.

  "I saw him give money to three men behind Carrie LaRose's house earlier today."

  "That doesn't prove anything."

  "Yes, it does. I saw a man's yellow teeth under his mask. I heard the coins clink in their pants. It was them."

  "Are you hurt inside?"

  "They hurt me everywhere," she replied.

  She refused to use the bed Abigail offered her and sat in the chair all night. Before dawn, without eating breakfast, she left the cottage and walked down Main and stood under the wood colonnade in front of McCain's Hardware. She wiped the film off the window with her hand in several places and tried to see inside. Then she walked out in the country to the laundry where she had worked. It and the cabins behind it were burned to the ground.

  She walked back up the road to the back door of Carrie LaRose's bordello. She had to knock twice before Carrie came to the door.

  "What you mean banging on my do' this early in the morning?" Carrie said.

  "Need to earn some money," Flower said.

  Carrie looked out at the fog on the fields and the blackened threads of sugarcane on her lawn, as though the morning itself might contain either an omen or threat. She wore glass rings on the fingers of both hands and a housecoat and a kerchief on her head and paper curlers in her hair that made Flower think of a badly plucked chicken inside a piece of cheesecloth.

  "Doing what?" Carrie asked.

  "Cleaning, washing, ironing, anything you want. I can sew, too. The Yankees are calling us contrabands. That means the Southerners cain't own us anymore."

  "Already got somebody to do all them things."

  "I can write letters for you. I know how to subtract and add sums."

  "Want money? You know how to get it," Carrie said.

  "Thank you for your time, Miss Carrie."

  "Don't give me a look like I'm hard, no."

  "You ain't hard. You just for sale."

  "You like a pop in the face?" Carrie said.

  Flower looked.it the plank table under the live oak where Captain Rufus Atkins had counted out a short stack of heavy coins in the palms of the paddy rollers only yesterday afternoon.

  "I axed for a job. You don't have one. I won't bother you anymore," Flower said.

  "Wait up, you," Carrie said. She fitted the thickness of her hand under Flower's chin and turned it back and forth, exposing her throat to the light. "Who give you them marks?"

  "I need a job, Miss Carrie."

  "Abigail Dowling ain't gonna let you go hungry. You wanting money for somet'ing else, ain't you?"

  Flower turned and walked down the steps and into the fog rolling out of the fields. It felt damp and invasive on her skin, like the moist touch of a soiled hand on her arm.

  SHE wandered the town until noon, without direction or purpose. Many of the shops along Main Street had been broken open and looted, except the hardware store, which the owner, a man named Todd McCain, had emptied of its goods before the Yankees had come into town during the night. In fact, McCain had taken the extra measure of turning the cash register toward the glass window so passersby could see that the compartments in the drawer contained no money.

  Yankee soldiers, some of them still drunk, slept under the trees on the bayou. She sat on a wood bench by the drawbridge and watched a steamboat loaded with blue-clad sharpshooters lounging behind cotton bales work its way upstream toward St. Martinville. The sharpshooters waved at her, and one pointed at his fly and held his hands apart as though showing her the size of an enormous fish.

  The Episcopalian church, which had been a field hospital for Confederate wounded, had now been converted into a stable, the pews pushed together to form feed troughs. Flower watched the sun climb in the sky, then disappear among the tree branches over her head. She slept with her head on her chest and dreamed of a man holding a white snake in his hand. He grinned at her, then placed the head of the snake in his mouth and held it there while he unbuttoned and removed his shirt.

  She awoke abruptly and cleared her throat and spat into the dirt, widening her eyes until the images from the dream were gone from her mind. Then she rose from the bench and walked unsteadily through the shade, into the heat of the day, toward McCain's Hardware.

  "You want to look at what?" the owner, Todd McCain, said.

  "The pistol. You had it in the glass case before the Yankees came to town," she replied.

  "I don't remember no pistol," McCain said. He had been a drummer from Atlanta who had come to New Iberia on the stage and married an overweight widow ten years his senior. His body was hard and egg-shaped, the shoulders narrow, his metallic hair greased and parted down the middle.

  "I want to see the pistol. Or I'll come back with a Yankee soldier who'll help you find it," she said.

  "That a fact?" he said.

  He fixed his eyes on her face, a smile breaking at the side of his
mouth. She turned and started back out the door. "Hold on," he said.

  He went into the back of the store and returned to the front and laid a heavy object wrapped in oily flannel on top of the glass case. He glanced at the street, then unwrapped a cap-and-ball revolver with dark brown grips. The blueing on the tip of the barrel and on the cylinder was worn a dull silver from holster friction.

  "That's a Colt.36 caliber revolver. Best sidearm you can buy," he said.

  "How much is it?"

  "You people ain't suppose to have these."

  "I'm a contraband now. I can have anything I want. No different than a free person of color."

  "Twelve dollars. I ain't talking about Confederate paper, either."

  "Maybe I don't have twelve right now. But maybe part of it."

  "That a fact?" He looked into space, as though calculating figures in his head. "Under the right circumstances I can come down to ten, maybe eight."

  "Right circumstances?"

  "I could use a little hep in the storeroom. Won't take long. If you feel like walking on back there with me."

  "I'll be back later."

  "Tell you what, hep me out and I'll go down to six. I cain't make more right than that," he said. He wet his bottom lip, as though it were chapped, and looked away from her face.

  "You all right, suh?" she asked.

  He averted his eyes and didn't reply. After she was gone he threw the revolver angrily in a drawer.

  SHE walked down the street toward Abigail Dowling's cottage and saw a carriage parked in front of the Shadows. Through the iron gate she caught sight of Ira Jamison, sitting at a table on a flagstone terrace under oak trees, with two Yankee officers and a cotton trader from Opelousas. The grass was sprinkled with azalea petals, the gazebo and trellises in the gardens humped with blue bunches of wisteria. The gate creaked on its hinges when she pulled it open.

  She followed the brick walkway through the trees to the terrace. The four men at the table were drinking coffee from small cups and laughing at a joke. A walking cane rested against the arm of Ira Jamison's chair. His hair had grown to his shoulders and looked freshly shampooed and dried, and the weight he had lost gave his face a kind of fatal beauty, perhaps like a poisonous flower she had read of in a poem.

  "I need you to lend me twelve dol'ars," she said.

  He twisted around in his chair. "My heavens, Flower, you certainly know how to sneak up on a man," he said.

  "The man at the store says that's the price for a Colt.36 revolver. I 'spect he's lying, but I still need the twelve dol'ars," she said.

  The other three men had stopped talking. Ira Jamison pulled on his earlobe.

  "What in heaven's name do you need a pistol for?" he said.

  "Your overseer, Rufus Atkins, paid three men to rape Miss Abigail. She wasn't home, so they did it to me. I aim to kill all three of them and then find Rufus Atkins and kill him, too."

  The other three men shifted in their chairs and glanced at Ira Jamison. He pinched a napkin on his mouth and dropped it into a plate.

  "I think you'd better leave the premises, Flower," he said.

  "You had that Yankee soldier killed at the hospital in New Orleans, just so you could escape and make everybody think you were a hero. Now I 'spek these Yankee officers are helping you sell cotton to the North. You something else, Colonel."

  "I'll walk you to the gate," Ira Jamison said.

  He rose from the chair and took her arm, his fingers biting with surprising strength into the muscle.

  "Why's he letting a darky talk to him like that?" she heard one of the officers say behind her.

  The cotton trader raised a finger in the air, indicating the officer should not pursue the subject further.

  AT the cottage she told Abigail Dowling what had happened.

  "You should have come to me first," Abigail said.

  "You would have bought me a gun?"

  "We could have talked," Abigail said. Then she looked into space and bit her lip at the banality of her own words.

  "You been good to me, but I'm going on down to the soldiers' camp," Flower said.

  "To do what?"

  "Someone said they're hiring washerwomen."

  "Did you eat anything today?"

  "Maybe. I don't remember."

  Abigail pressed her hands down on Flower's shoulders until Flower was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. She smoothed Flower's hair and caressed her cheek with her hand.

  "Wish you wouldn't do that, Miss Abby."

  Abigail's face flushed. "I'm sorry," she said.

  Then she fried four eggs in the skillet and scraped the mold off a half loaf of bread and sliced it and browned the slices in ham fat. She divided the food between them and sat across from Flower and ate without speaking.

  "What are you studying on?" Flower asked.

  "I was thinking of my father and what he would do in certain situations. You two would have liked each other," Abigail said.

  Ten minutes later Abigail went out the back door and removed a spade from the shed and walked through the dappled shade along the rim of the coulee and began scraping away a layer ot blackened leaves from under an oak tree. She dug down one root to a tin box that was wrapped in a piece of old gum coat. Then she gathered her purse and a parasol from the house and walked down Main Street, past the Shadows, to the hardware store.

  Todd McCain walked out from the back when he heard the bell tinkle above the front door. He and two black men had been restocking the front of the store with the inventory he had hidden from looters, and his shirt was damp at the armpits, his greased hair flecked with grit.

  "Yes, ma'am?"

  "You offered to sell a revolver to Flower Jamison for six dollars, provided she'd go in the back room with you," Abigail said.

  "Sounds like somebody's daydream to me," he said. She pulled open the drawstring on her purse. "Here are your six dollars. How much is it for the ammunition?"

  He touched the inside of one nostril with a thumbnail, then huffed air out his nose.

  "You got some nerve insulting me on the word of a nigger," he said.

  He waited for a response, but there was only silence. When he tried to return her stare, he saw a repository of contempt and disgust in her eyes, aimed at him and no other, that made him clear his throat and look away.

  "It's ten dollars for the pistol. I don't have any balls or powder for it," he said.

  She continued to look into his face, as though his words had no application to the situation.

  "Seven dollars, take it or leave it. I don't need any crazy people in my store," he said.

  He waited while she found another dollar in her purse, then picked up the coins one at a time from the glass counter. "I'll wrap it up for you and throw in some gun oil so you don't have no reason to come back," he said.

  "Don't presume," she said.

  "Presume what?"

  "That because I'm a woman your behavior and your remarks won't be dealt with."

  He felt one eye twitch at the corner.

  After she was gone he returned to the storeroom where he had been working and walked in a circle, his hands on his hips, searching in the gloom for all the words he should have spoken. She had made him play the fool, he told himself, and now his face felt as if it had been stung by bumblebees. Without his knowing why, his gaze rested on a saw, a short-handled sledgehammer, a can of kerosene, a barrel filled with serpentine coils of chain, a prizing bar with a forked claw on it.

  One day, he told himself.

  Down the street Abigail walked along the curtain of bamboo that bordered the front yard of the Shadows. The azaleas were a dusty purple in the shade, the air loud with the cawing of blue jays. The iron gate swung open in front of her, and Ira Jamison, the cotton trader, and two Union officers stepped directly in her path.

  "Miss Abby, how are you?" Jamison said, touching his hat.

  "Did you ask the same of your daughter?"

  "My wife and I had no children, so
I'm not sure whom you're referring to. But no matter. Have a fine day, Miss Abigail," he said.

  "Your own daughter told you she was raped and you manhandled her. In front of these men. What kind of human being are you?" she said.

  The street was deep in shadow, empty of sound and people. The oak limbs overhead creaked in the wind.