She awoke at two in the morning, her bladder full. She locked the front door and went out the back into the yard, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on the smooth wood seat inside the heated cypress enclosure that had served the patrons of Carrie LaRose's brothel for over twenty years, the revolver next to her. Through the ventilation gap at the top of the door, she could see the sky and stars and smell the faint tracings of smoke from the fires burning in the swamp. The only sounds outside were those of nightbirds calling to one another and water dripping from the yard's solitary live oak, under which Rufus Atkins had paid the men who raped her.
She had overestimated him, she thought. Perhaps a lifetime of being abused by his kind had made her believe men like Atkins possessed powers which they did not, not even the self-engendered power or resolve to seek revenge after they were spat upon.
She wiped herself and rose from the seat, straightening her dress, and crossed the yard with the pistol hanging from her right hand. She turned in a half circle and looked about the yard one more time, then unlocked the door and went inside.
She rechecked all the doors and sashes to see that they were locked, then ate a piece of bread and ham and drank a glass of buttermilk and went into her bedroom. She put the revolver under the bed and left two of the windows open to cool the room and balanced a stack of cook pots on each of the sills in case an intruder tried to climb in. Then she lay down on top of the covers and went to sleep.
When she woke later it was not because she heard glass breaking or a door hasp tearing loose from wood or pans clattering to the floor. It was a collective odor, a smell of whiskey and horses and crushed gardenias and night damp trapped inside cloth.
And of leather. The braided end of a quirt that a man in a black robe and a peaked black hood teased across her face.
She sat straight up in bed, at first believing she was having a dream. Then the man in the peaked hood sat next to her on the mattress and fitted the quirt across her throat and pressed her back down on the pillow. Behind him was a second man, this one in white, her cap-and-ball revolver clutched in his hand.
"How did you get in?" Flower said.
The man in the black robe and hood leaned close to her, as though he wanted his breath as well as his words to injure her skin. The image of a camellia was stitched with pink and white thread on the breast of his robe. "A hideaway door with a spring catch on the side of the house. Lots of things I know you don't, Flower," the voice of Rufus Atkins said. "I know the places you go, the names of the niggers you teach, the time of day you eat your food, the exact time you piss and shit and empty your thunder mug in the privy. Have you figured out what I'm telling you?"
"Explain it to her," the other visitor said.
Flower recognized the voice of Todd McCain, the owner of the hardware store.
"You think you're free," Rufus Atkins' voice said, the mouth hole in his hood puffing with his breath. "But you spit in the wrong man's face. That means no matter where you go, what you do, who you see, either me or my friend here or a hundred like us will be watching you. You won't be able to take a squat over your two-holer back there without wondering if we're listening outside. Starting to get the picture? We own you, girl. Throw all the temper tantrums you want. That sweet little brown ass is ours."
When she didn't answer, he moved the quirt over her breasts, pressing it against her nipples, flattening it against her stomach.
"Damned if you're not prime cut," he said. He blew his breath along the down on her skin and she felt her loins constrict and a wave of nausea course through her body.
The two hooded figures left the front door open behind them. She sat numbly on the side of her bed and watched them ride away, their robes riffling over their horses' rumps, the cap-and-ball revolver on which she had relied thrown into the mud.
Chapter Twenty-seven
EARLY the next morning she took the sheets off her bed, not touching the area where the man in the black hood had sat. She put them in a washtub, then bathed and dressed to go to school. When she tried to eat, her food tasted like paper in her mouth. The sky had cleared, the sun was shining, and birds sang in the trees, but the brilliance and color of the world outside seemed to have nothing to do with her life now.
She drank a cup of hot tea and scraped her uneaten food into a garbage bucket and washed her dishes, then prepared to leave for school. But when she closed and opened her eyes, her head spun and bile rose in her throat and her skin felt dead to the touch, as though she had been systemically poisoned.
You've gone through worse, she told herself. They raped you, but they didn't make you afraid. They murdered your mother but they couldn't steal her soul. Why do you keep your wounds green and allow men as base as Atkins and McCain to control your thoughts? she asked herself.
But she knew the answer. The house, the land, the school, the flower beds she and Abigail had planted, her collection of books, her new life as a teacher, everything she was and had become and would eventually be was about to be taken from her. All because of a choice, a deed, she knew she would eventually commit herself to, because if she did not, she would never have peace.
She went outside and picked up the cap-and-ball revolver from the edge of a rain puddle. She carried it into the kitchen and wiped the mud off the frame and the cylinder and caps with a dry rag and rewrapped it in the flannel cloth and replaced it under her bed.
In the corner of her eye she saw a black carriage with a surrey and white wheels pull to a stop in front of the gallery. Ira Jamison walked up the steps, his hair cut short, his jaws freshly shaved, looking at least twenty years younger than his actual age.
"I hope I haven't dropped by too early," he said, removing his hat. "I was in the neighborhood and felt an uncommonly strong desire to see you."
"I'm on my way to work," she said.
"At your school?"
"Yes. Where else?"
"I'll take you. Just let me talk with you a minute," he said. She stepped back from the doorway to let him enter. She reached to take his hat but he took no heed of her gesture and placed it himself on a large, hand-carved knob at the foot of the staircase banister. He smiled.
"Flower, I'm probably a fond and foolish man, but I wanted to tell you how much you mean to me, how much you remind me of-" He stopped in mid-sentence and studied her face. "Have I said the wrong thing here?"
"No, Colonel, you haven't."
"You don't look well."
"Two men got in my house last night. They had on the robes of the White Camellia. One was Rufus Atkins. The other man owns the hardware store on Main Street."
"Atkins came here? He touched you?"
"Not with his hand. With his whip. He told me he'd be with me everywhere I went. He'd see everything I did."
She saw the bone flex along his jaw, the crow's feet deepen at the corner of one eye. "He whipped you?"
"I don't have any more to say about it, Colonel."
"You must believe what I tell you, Flower. This man and the others who ride with him, I'm talking about these fellows who pretend to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers, this man knew he'd better not hurt you in any way. Do you understand that?"
"He beat my mother to death."
The colonel's face blanched. "You don't know that," he said.
"Clay Hatcher was here. He told me how you made him and Rufus Atkins lie about how my mother died."
"Listen, Flower, that was a long time ago. I made mistakes as a young man."
"You lied to me. You lied to the world. You going to lie to God now?"
Jamison took a breath. "I'm going to get to the bottom of this. You have my word on it," he said.
She rested her hand on the banister, just above where his hat rested on the mahogany knob. Her eyes were downcast and he could not read her expression.
"Colonel?" she said.
"Yes?"
"You started to say I reminded you of someone."
"Oh yes. My mother. I never realized how much yo
u look like my mother. That's why you'll always have a special place in my heart."
Flower stared at him, then picked up his hat and placed it in his hand. "Good-bye, Colonel. I won't be seeing you again," she said.
"Pardon?" he said.
"Good-bye, suh. You're a sad man," she said.
"What? What did you say?"
But she stood silently by the open door and refused to speak again, until he finally gave it up and walked out on the gallery, confused and for once in his life at a loss for words. When he glanced back at her, his forehead was knitted with lines, like those in the skin of an old man.
When he got into his carriage she saw him produce a small whiskey-colored ball that looked like dried honey from a tobacco pouch and place it inside his jaw, then bark at his driver.
WILLIE Burke's return journey from Shiloh had been one he did not measure in days but in images that he seemed to perceive through a glass darkly-the emptiness of the Mississippi countryside that he and Elias traversed in a rented wagon, a region of dust devils, weed-spiked fields, Doric columns blackened by fire and deserted cabins scrolled with the scales of dead morning glory vines; the box that held Jim's bones vibrating on the deck of a steamboat and a gaggle of little girls in pinafores playing atop the box; a train ride on a flatcar through plains of saw grass and tunnels of trees and sunlight that spoked through rain clouds like grace from a divine hand that he seemed unable to clasp.
Willie's clothes were rent, vinegary with his own smell, his hair peppered with grit. He drank huge amounts of pond water to deaden his hunger. When the train stopped to take on wood he and Elias got into a line of French-speaking Negro trackworkers and were given plates piled with rice and fried fish that they ate with the trackworkers without ever being asked their origins. At a predawn hour on a day that had no date attached to it they dragged the box off a wagon in front of Willie's house and set it down in the grass. The sky was the color of gunmetal, bursting with stars, the surface of the bayou blanketed with ground fog. "Come in," Willie said.
"I think I'll go out to my mother's place and crawl in a hammock for six weeks," Elias replied. His face became introspective. "Willie, the next time I say I'll help you out with a little favor?"
"Yes?"
"Lend me a dollar so I can rent a gun and stick it in my mouth," Elias said.
Willie walked into the house, not pausing in the kitchen to either eat or drink, and on out the back door to use the privy. He dragged Jim's box onto a wagon at the barn, shoved it forward until it was snug against the headboard, then began stacking bricks in the wagon bed. The stars were fading from the sky now, the oaks along the bayou becoming darker, more sharply edged, against the fog. He heard footsteps behind him.
Tige McGuffy heaved a wooden bucket filled with cistern water across Willie's head and face and shoulders.
"Good God, Tige, what was that for?" Willie asked, spitting water out of his mouth.
"You trailed a smell through the house I could have heat down on the floor with a broom."
"Would you be going out to the cemetery with me this fine morning?"
"Cemetery? What you got in that box?" Tige replied. But before Willie could speak Tige waved his hand, indicating he wasn't interested in Willie's response. "The Knights or them White Leaguers lynched a fellow last night. A bunch of them rode through our yard. Where you been, Willie? Don't you care about nobody except a dead man or a lady ain't got no interest in you? Why don't you wake up?"
AT the school that same morning Abigail Dowling noticed the circles under Flower's eyes, her inability to concentrate on the content of a conversation. During recess Flower shook a ten-year-old boy in the yard for throwing rocks at a squirrel. She shook him hard, jarring his chin on his chest, squatting down to yell in his face. The boy lived in a dirt-floor shack with his grandmother and often came to school without breakfast. Until today he had been one of her best students. The boy began to cry and ran into the street.
Flower caught him and led him by the hand into the shade.
"I'm sorry, Isaac. I was sick last night and I'm not feeling good today. Just don't be chunkin' at the squirrels. You forgive me?" she said.
"Yessum," he said.
He rubbed the back of his neck when he spoke and she could see that neither the pain nor the shock had left his eyes. She got to her knees and held him against her breast. Then she walked to the gallery, where Abigail had been watching her.
"I'm going home, Miss Abby," she said.
"Tell me what it is," Abigail said.
"I don't think I'll be back."
"That's nonsense."
"No, it's a heap of trouble," Flower said.
"I'm going to dismiss the children and take you home," Abigail said.
"I don't need any help, Miss Abby."
"We'll see about that," Abigail said.
It was almost noon, and Abigail told the children they could leave the school early and not return until the next day. While they poured out the front door into the yard and street, she brought her buggy around from the back and went after Flower.
"Get in," she said in front of the hardware store.
"Miss Abby, you mean well, but don't mix in this," Flower said.
"Stop calling me 'Miss Abby.' I'm your friend. I admire you more than any person I've ever known."
Flower paused, then stepped up into the buggy and sat down, her face straight ahead.
"There's a door with a secret catch on it in the side of my house. Last night I woke up with Rufus Atkins and Todd McCain standing by my bed," she said. She glanced back at the hardware store. "They were wearing Kluxer robes and hoods, but it was them."
Abigail reined up the horse and started to speak, but Flower grasped the reins and popped them down on the horse's rump.
"Atkins touched me with his whip, like I was a piece of livestock. He wanted me to know I'd never be free, that he or a hundred like him could come for me anytime they wanted," Flower said. "I'll never get them out of my life."
"Oh yes, we will," Abigail said.
"It's a nigger girl's word against a captain in the Confederate army, Miss Abby. Plus I didn't see his face."
"Don't you dare call yourself that. Don't you dare."
But Flower refused to speak the rest of the way home.
The house and yard and flower beds were marbled with shadows, the wind touched with rain, the cane rustling in the fields. Down the road Abigail could see convict carpenters in striped pants and jumpers framing Rufus Atkins' new house, hammering boards into place, sitting on the crossbeams like clothespins. Farther down the road, past the burned remnants of the laundry, she thought she saw the polished, black carriage of Ira Jamison disappearing around a bend.
Flower got down from the buggy and went inside the house, leaving the door open behind her. Abigail followed her.
"What are you planning to do?" Abigail asked.
"Go to the privy and make water."
"You answer my question, Flower."
"I aim to put Rufus Atkins in hell for what he did to my mother and me. And before he dies I aim to make him hurt."
"It doesn't have to be like this."
"Yes, it does. You know it does. Don't lie. You don't realize how much some folks can hate a lie," Flower said, and went out the back door.
Abigail stood for a long time by the entrance. She felt the wind blowing through the house, twisting the curtains, flipping the pages of a book in Flower's bedroom. She could smell rain outside and see the sunlight disappearing from the yard. She stared through the open door of the bedroom and at the bedroom floor and the pool of shadow under the bed.
When Flower returned from the privy, the house was empty.
"Abigail?" she said into the silence.
She looked outside. The buggy was gone. She glanced through the doorway into her bedroom. The piece of oily flannel in which she had wrapped her revolver lay discarded on the floor.
FOR Ira Jamison anger had never been a character defect t
o which he attached any degree of seriousness. If your business or personal adversaries tried to injure you, you did not brood over biblical admonitions about an eye for an eye. You buried your enemies alive. Anger wasn't a problem.
If someone challenged your authority, as the dandruff-flecked minister had when he allowed Ira's wife to confide her husband's sexual habits to him, you publicly humiliated the person in such a way he would dread sleep because he might see you in his dreams.
White Doves at Morning Page 33
