White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  Outside the tent, she dropped the revolver from her hand and walked toward the stunned faces of Willie Burke, Robert Perry, and Tige McGuffy.

  "I killed Ira Jamison by mistake. But I'm glad he's dead just the same. God forgive me," she said.

  "You shot Ira Jamison?" Willie said.

  "He had a wind chime in his hand. A silly little wind chime," she said.

  She buried her face in Willie's chest. He could feel the muscles in her back heaving under the flats of his hands and could not tell if she was laughing or sobbing.

  THE rain stopped and the air filled with a greenish-yellow cast that was like the tarnish on brass. The wind came up hard out of the south, flattening the cane in the fields, whipping the tent in which Ira Jamison died, riffling water in the irrigation ditches, scattering snow egrets that lifted like white rose petals above the canopy in the swamp. Out over the Gulf a tree of lightning pulsed without sound inside a giant stormhead.

  As an old man Willie Burke would wonder what the eyes of God saw from above on that cool, windswept, salt-flecked August day of 1865. Did His eyes see the chime pried from Ira Jamison's dead hand and Robert Perry's revolver substituted for it?

  Or did His eyes choose not to focus on an individual act but instead on the great panorama taking place below Him, one that involved all His children-leased convicts perched like carrion birds on a house frame in the middle of a wetlands, abolitionists and schoolteachers whose altruism was such they flayed themselves for their inability to change the world's nature, slavers whose ships groaned with sounds that would follow them to the grave, mothers and fathers and children who had no last names and would labor their lives away for the profit of others without ever receiving an explanation?

  Did God's eyes see the past, present and future taking place simultaneously, perhaps on a mist-shrouded, alluvial landscape threaded by Indians and Spanish and French explorers and Jesuit missionaries, its hummocks surrounded with either saw grass or endless rows of cotton and cane, its earth pounded with the hooves of mounted jayhawkers and Confederate guerrillas or covered with flocks of birds and roving herds of wild animals, its mists flaring with either the spatter of musket fire and the red glow of burning crosses or lanterns lighting quiet residential streets and children at play in the yards?

  Sometimes in the clarity of his sleep Willie Burke saw the same protean landscape he believed God saw, and a long column of soldiers wending their way toward the horizon, their butternut uniforms crusted with salt, their bullet-rent flags aflame in the sunset, a sergeant-major in a skull-tight kepi counting cadence, "Reep, reep, reep," while a brass band thundered out a joyful song like the one that had made Jim Stubbefield wonder if there wasn't something glorious about war after all. For reasons Willie did not understand, he wanted to join their ranks and disappear with them over the rim of the earth.

  But in the mornings the dream escaped his grasp and his days were often filled with memories he shared with no one.

  Then, five years after that late August afternoon when Abigail Dowling shot down Ira Jamison, Willie woke to an early frost, to the smell of wood smoke and the sound of trees stiff with ice and breakfast wagons creaking across stone. He walked out into the freshness of the dawn and, in a place inside his mind that had nothing to do with reason, he once again remembered his speculation about how the eyes of God viewed creation. He stood on the gallery in his nightshirt, the sunlight breaking on his bare feet, and imagined himself caught between the Alpha and the Omega, in the hush of God's breath upon the world, and for just a second believed he actually heard the words I am the beginning and the end. I am He who makes all things new.

  In that moment he let go of his contention with both the quick and the dead and experienced an unbridled gladness of heart. He was a participant in the great adventure, on the right side of things, a celebrant at the big party, a role that until the day of his death no one would ever be able to deny him.

  Epilogue

  IN THE year 1868, one year after her release from the women's prison at Baton Rouge, Tige McGuffy, Flower Jamison, Robert Perry, and Willie Burke stood on the gallery of the school and watched Abigail Dowling become Mrs. Quintinius Earp.

  Later the same year Lieutenant and Mrs. Earp would find themselves stationed on the Bozeman Trail, in southern Montana, in the middle of Chief Red Cloud's War. After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, she testified before the U.S. Congress in hopes of gaining support for the protection of Indian lands, but to no avail. Until her husband's retirement from the army, she worked as a volunteer nurse and teacher among the Oglala Sioux and the Northern Cheyenne. Later, she moved with him to a small town outside Boston, where she became active in the Populist and early feminist movements of the 1890s. In 1905 she became a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, was the friend of Molly Brown and Elizabeth Flynn, and before her death in 1918 marched with the striking miners at Ludlow, Colorado.

  Willie Burke became a teacher and later the superintendent of schools m New Iberia. For the remainder of his life he was known for his bravery as a soldier, his refusal to discuss the war, his prescience about human events and his irreverence toward all those who seek authority and power over others.

  Flower Jamison married a black veteran of the Louisiana Corps d'Afrique and taught at the school she and Abigail Dowling founded until her seventy-ninth year. The school remained open well into the twentieth century and changed the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of black children. Among the many distinguished educators who visited it were George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington.

  Robert S. Perry read for the law and practiced in St. Martin Parish, served in the state senate, and was appointed an appeals judge in 1888. He died in the year 1900 and is buried in New Iberia, in St. Peter's Cemetery, not far from his friend Willie Burke.

  Jean-Jacques LaRose moved to Cuba and became a planter and shipbuilder and supposedly increased his fortune during the Spanish-American War by scuttling a ship loaded with gold coin off the Dry Tortugas and salvaging the wreck after the owner, who had made his money in the illegal arms and slave trade, committed suicide.

  Captain Rufus Atkins continued to prosper immediately after the war, buying up tax-sale cotton acreage in the Red River parishes and supplying convict labor in the salt and sulfur mines along the coast. Then he began to drink more heavily and wear soft leather gloves wherever he went. After a while his business associates were bothered by an odor the nostrums and perfumes he poured inside his gloves could not disguise. The lesions on his hands spread to his neck and face, until all his skin from his shirt collar to his hairline was covered with bulbous nodules.

  His disfigurement was such that he had to wear a hood over his head in public. His businesses failed and his lands were seized for payment of his debts. When ordered confined to a leper colony by the court, he fled the state to Florida, where he died in an insane asylum.

  A guerrilla leader by the name of Jarrette, who was brought to Louisiana from Missouri by the Confederate general Kirby Smith and who claimed to be the brother-in-law of Cole Younger, left the state after the war and lived out his days as a sheep rancher in Arizona Territory.

  The White League and the Knights of the White Camellia continued to terrorize black voters throughout the Reconstruction era and were instrumental in the bloody 1874 takeover of New Orleans, which they occupied for three days, before they were driven out of the city by Union forces partially under the command of the ex-Confederate general, James Longstreet.

  The convict lease system at Angola Plantation, which became the prototype for the exploitation of cheap labor throughout the postbellum South, lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century. The starvation and beating and murder by prison personnel of both black and white convicts at Angola Farm was legendary well into modern times. The bodies that are buried in the levee rimming the prison farm remain unmarked and unacknowledged to this day.

  Tige McGuffy, at age twenty-two, became one of the
first cadets admitted to Louisiana State University, which was created out of the old United States Army barracks at Baton Rouge, largely through the efforts of General William T. Sherman, the same Union general who burned Atlanta and whose sixty-mile scorched-earth sweep into northern Mississippi became the raison d'etre for the retaliatory massacre of black troops at Front Pillow by Confederate soldiers under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  Tige McGuffy received the Medal of Honor for his heroism at the battle of Kettle Hill during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

  The End