White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (16 page)

He picked up the rifles in the Berry Islands, west of Nassau. Cockneys who carried knives on their belts worked all night loading the hold, and the ship's captain Jean-Jacques paid in gold coin was an evil-smelling man who had a rouged West Indian boy in his cabin. But at false dawn Jean-Jacques' visitors were gone. The sails popped with a fresh breeze, and as the tide lifted him over the sandbar at the entrance to the cove where he had anchored, the waves were green and the coconuts floating inside them thudded against the solidness of the hull and the gulls hung on the breeze above his wake like a testament to HIs good fortune. It was going to be a splendid day, he told himself.

At noon he passed over reefs of fire coral, through small islands that swarmed with land crabs, and saw the steel-gray backs of porpoises arcing out of the water and stingrays and jellyfish toppling from the waves that slid against his bow. The air was hot and close and smelled like brass, like hurricane weather, but the sky was clear, the water lime-green with hot blue patches in it like floating clouds of India ink. He saw a ship briefly on the southern horizon, one with stacks and black smoke trailing off its stern, but the ship disappeared and he gave it no more thought.

Not until he was south of Dry Tortugas, in no more than fifteen feet of water, when the wind dropped, his sails went slack, and a Parrott gun at Fort Jefferson lobbed a round forty yards off his bow.

His boilers were cold. Jean-Jacques ran up a Spanish flag. Another round arced out of its trajectory, this one a fused shell that exploded in a dirty scorch overhead and showered his deck with strips of hot metal.

Then he felt the wind at his back, like the collective breath of angels. The sails on his masts filled and soon Fort Jefferson and the Straits of Florida were just a bad memory.

He sailed on a westerly course far south of New Orleans to avoid the noose the Yankee navy had placed around the city, then turned north, toward Cote Blanche Bay, leaving the murky green pitch and roll of the Gulf, entering the alluvial fan of the Mississippi that flowed westward like a river of silt.

He waited for nightfall to go in. But even though the moon was down, the sky flickered with heat lightning, and at three in the morning two Yankee ships opened up on him, at least one of them using cast-iron cannonballs, hooked together with chain, that spun like a windmill and could cut a deckhand in half.

The twin paddle-wheels on his port and starboard were churning full-out, the boilers red-hot, one mast down on the deck, the sails ripped into shreds. Lightning rippled across the sky and in the distance he saw the low, black-green silhouette of the Louisiana coastline. But he knew he would not reach it. Grapeshot that was still glowing rained across the entirety of the ship, fizzing when it hit the bilge down below, blowing the windows out of his cabin, setting fires all over the deck. Then a Confederate shore battery boomed
in the darkness and he saw a shell spark across the sky and light up a Yankee gunboat as though a flare had burst inside its rigging.

As if obeying a prearranged understanding, all the firing ceased and Marsh Island slid by on his port side and he sailed into the quiet waters of Cote Blanche Bay at low tide, scraping across a sandbar, drifting into the smell of schooled-up shrimp and flooded saw grass and sour mud and huge garfish that had died in hoop nets and floated swollen and ratchet-jawed to the surface.

He believed it was the most lovely nocturnal scene he had ever set his eyes on. He breathed the night air into his lungs, uncorked a wine bottle and, with the bottle up-ended, drank most of it in one long, chugging swallow, until he lost his balance and fell backward over a shattered spar. One by one, his four crew members found him, all of them still scared to death, none of them seriously hurt. They threw roped buckets overboard and drenched the fires on deck, then drank a case of wine and went to sleep on the piles of canvas that had fallen from the masts.

The next day Jean-Jacques discovered his real problems had just begun.

Two dozen mule-drawn wagons and twice that many blacks and Confederate enlisted men arrived in a forest of persimmon, pecan, and live oak trees to take possession of the Enfield rifles. The floor of the forest was dotted with palmettos, the air hazy and golden with dust. The officer in charge of the transfer was Captain Rufus Atkins.

"I thought you was off fighting Yankees," Jean-Jacques said.

"Currently on leave from the 18th Lou'sana," Atkins said.

It was warm inside the trees. The wind had died and the bay looked like a sheet of tin. Atkins wiped his face with a handkerchief.

"We need to settle up," Jean-Jacques said.

"This is Mr. Guilbeau. Assistant to the gov'nor. He'll make everything right for you, Jack," Atkins said.

"I don't use that name. My name is Jean-Jacques, me."

"Sorry, I thought your friends called you otherwise," Atkins said.

The man named Guilbeau was tall and had a long face, like a horse's, and a narrow frame and a stomach that protruded in a lopsided fashion, like a person whose liver has calcified. He dropped the tailgate on a wagon and set a crimson carpetbag on it that was woven with a floral design. He unsnapped the wood laches on the bag, then lifted a gold watch from his vest pocket and clicked it open and looked at the time.

Jean-Jacques stuck his hand inside the bag and picked up a sheaf of bills that was tied with string.

"Script?" he said.

"It's the currency of your country, sir," Guilbeau said.

"Wipe your ass wit' it," Jean-Jacques said.

Guilbeau hooked his little finger in his ear, then examined the tip of it.

"Would you prefer a promissory note?" he asked.

"I paid gold for them guns."

"Sorry you feel so badly used. Maybe you can share your complaint with some of our boys who had to fight with flintlocks at Shiloh," Guilbeau said.

"I seen you befo'. Wit' Ira Jamison," Jean-Jacques said.

Guilbeau put a twist of chewing tobacco in his mouth and chewed it thoughtfully in one jaw. He spit in the leaves at his feet and lifted the carpetbag from the tailgate of the wagon and walked it down to the bank and dropped it in the rowboat in which Jean-Jacques had come ashore.

Jean-Jacques watched the black men load the cases of Enfields into the wagons. Most of them were barefoot, their clothes in tatters, sweat sliding down their faces in the heated enclosure of the trees. His own men were hung over and sick, sleeping under a shade tree on the bank. He no longer felt like a ship's captain but instead like an object of contempt who stands by impotently while thieves sack his house. He opened and closed his hands and bit down on his lip, but continued to do nothing while the black men crunched back and forth in the leaves and flung the British rifles heavily into the wagons, case upon case, latching up the tailgates now, the armed enlisted men in the wagon boxes lifting the reins off the mules' backs.

"Ain't right what y'all doing," Jean-Jacques said.

"We'll be mixing it up with the blue-bellies soon. You're welcome to join us. Be a lot of opportunities if this war comes out right," Atkins said.

"Ira Jamison got his thumb in this," Jean-Jacques said.

"That's about like saying there's crawfish in Lou'sana, Jack," Atkins said.

"'It'll him the man who steals from me don't just walk away, no."

 "My regards to your sister. She's an exceptional woman. Two thirds of the soldiers at Camp Pratt can't be wrong," Atkins said.

He mounted his horse and rode to the head of the wagon train. Jean-Jacques watched as the wagons creaked over the live oak roots, snapping pecan husks under the iron rims of the wheels, the sun-heated dust floating back into his face.

SATURDAY afternoon he rode his horse to the brick saloon next to his sister's brothel and stood at the bar and ordered a whiskey. The bartender served him without speaking, and others returned his greeting obliquely, an obstruction in their throats, their eyes not meeting his.

A bearded man with a pinned-up sleeve, his arm taken at Manassas Junction, looked him boldly in the face, then tossed his cigar hissing into a spittoon six inches from Jean-Jacques' shoe.

"I'm glad you got a good aim, you," Jean-Jacques said.

But the ex-soldier studied the brown spots on the back of his hand and took no pleasure in Jean-Jacques' sense of humor.

A cotton trader from up on the Red River, whom he had known for years, was sitting at a table behind him, one corner of the opened newspaper he was reading held down with a beer glass to stop it from fluttering in the breeze that blew through the door.

"Pretty damn hot today, huh?" Jean-Jacques said.

"Why, yes it is," the man said, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes focusing outside.

Jean-Jacques picked up his whiskey and approached the cotton trader, but the cotton trader rose from the table, gathering up his hat hurriedly, and went out the door. Jean-Jacques stared after him, then looked about for an explanation. Every back in the saloon was turned to him.

He looked down at the opened newspaper and tried to make sense out of the headlines. But the only words he recognized on the page were those of his own name, in the first paragraph of an article that might as well have been written in Chinese.

He ripped the page from the newspaper and stuffed it in his pocket, then walked out of the coolness of the building into the late afternoon heat and angrily swung up on his horse. Inside the bar the customers were talking omong themselves again, buying drinks for one another, their cigars glowing inside the dim bourbon-scented darkness of the Saturday afternoon haunt he had always taken for granted.

He rode to the cabin he owned on the bayou south of town, among a grove of cypress trees that stood on high ground above the floodline. He kept a pirogue there and fishnets and cane poles, a worktable where he carved duck decoys for his hunting blind, a pantry full of preserves and smoked fish and beef and corked bottles of wine and rum. Red and yellow four-o'clocks bloomed in the shade and bamboo and elephant ears grew along the water's edge. It was a place that had always made him happy and secure in his feelings about the world and himself when no other place did, but today, in spite of the gold-green evening light and the wind blowing through the trees, a pall like a black film seemed to descend on his soul.

He snicked away at a mallard duck he was carving from a block of cypress wood, then felt the knife slip with his inattention and slice across the edge of his finger.

He crimped his finger in the cone of his right hand and went outside to fill a bucket with rainwater from the cistern. Next door the slave girl named Flower, who worked at the laundry not far from his sister's brothel, was buying carp off a flat-bottomed boat piled with blue-point crabs and yellow catfish that looked like mud-slick logs.

"You hurt yourself, Mr. Jean?" she asked, setting down her basket and taking his hand.

"I passed my hand under the knife and it cut me," he said, dumbly, looking down from his height at the top of her head.

"Here, I'm gonna wash it out, then put some cobweb on it. You got some clean cloth we can tie it up with?" she said.

"No, I ain't got nothing like that," he said.

She went to the buggy she had driven to the bayou and removed a clean napkin from a basket of bread rolls and came back, shaking it out.

"Here, we're gonna get you fixed up. You gonna see," she said.

She went inside the cabin with him and washed and dressed his hand. It felt strange having a black woman care for him, touching and examining his skin, turning his wrist over in her fingers, when he had not asked help of her and when she was not obligated to offer any.

"Why you came back
from New Orleans, you?" he said.

"This is where I? live," she replied.

"You could have been free."

"My family ain't ... it isn't free. They're still up at Angola."

She held his hand tightly and when she pulled the bandage knot tight with her teeth he felt a reaction in his loins that made him glance away from her face. She put his hand down and made ready to go.

"Why you look so sad, Mr. Jean?" she asked.

"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.