White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (19 page)

His father was a rough-hewn Scotsman, mercurial in his moods, keenly aware of his wife's education and his lack of one, generous and loving with his son, but always fearful that his wife's indulgent and sentimental ways would make the boy a victim of a predatory world. He was a curious mixture of humanity, severity and self-irony, and Ira loved him fiercely and sought his approval in everything he did.

"Spare the rod to feel good about yourself and create a lazy Negro," his father used to say. Then he would add, with a smile, "Spare the rod enough and create an impoverished plantation owner. Truth is, lad, in spite of everything we're told, there's no difference between the African and white races. The day the Negroes figure that one out is the day they'll take all this from us."

Ira's father was built like a stump, his chest streaked with fine black hair. He enjoyed stripping to the waist and working alongside his Negroes to demonstrate he was their equal if not superior at any physical task, heaving sacks of sweet potatoes into a wagon, prizing a cypress tree out of clay, splitting firewood that cracked like a rifle shot.

One winter Ira's mother contracted pneumonia. The fever and deliriums passed but the cough never left her lungs and the handkerchief she often kept balled in her fist was sometimes freckled with blood. When she leaned down to kiss her son's head, her breath made the skin of his face tighten against the bone.

His father moved out of the main bedroom and slept on a leather

sofa in the library. Unlike some of his male neighbors, he did not visit the
slave quarters at night. He didn't have to. As Ira learned at age ten, his father had another life in Baton Rouge.

Ira's father left him to play in the yard of a friend while he rode a livery horse down into the bottoms, an area of Baton Rouge that was still undrained, the streets lined with saloons and tanneries. But Ira had always been allowed to go anywhere his father went, and he slipped out of the yard and followed his father to a cottage, the only one on the street that was painted white and had ventilated green shutters on the windows and a vegetable garden in the side yard.

The front door was closed, even though the weather was warm. Hanging baskets of flowers and ferns swayed from the eaves of the gallery, creaking in the wind, their colors riffling in the shade. Ira sat on the top step and watched the paddle-wheelers and scows on the river and the Irish boat hands from New Orleans unloading stacks of cowhides that they dumped into smoking vats behind the tanneries. He felt himself dozing off, then he heard his father's voice and the laughter of a woman inside the cottage.

He rose from the step and walked into the side yard where the shutters of a window were opened behind a stand of banana trees. He pushed aside the banana leaves and propped a wood box against the side of the cottage and pulled himself up to eye level on the windowsill, expecting to play a joke on his father and see his father's face light with surprise and goodwill.

Instead, he looked upon the naked, clay-colored back of a woman whose knees were splayed across his father's loins. Her head reared back and her mouth opened silently, then a sound broke from her lips that he had never heard a woman make before. She blew out her breath, as though the room had grown cold, bending down toward his father now, her knees and thighs clenching him as if she was mounted on a horse. Her back shuddered again and her hands touched his father's face with a tenderness and intimacy that somehow seemed stolen from his mother and misused by another.

Ira's thoughts made no sense and were like shards of glass in his head.

Then the box broke under his feet and he was left hanging from the sill, the woman's eyes fastening on his now, his father's uplifted face popping with sweat like pinpoints of dew on a pumpkin.

Ira fell into the banana sta;ks and ran through the yard, dirty and hot and itching with ants, his head ringing as though someone had clapped him on both ears.

A moment later his father appeared on the gallery, barefoot, his shirt hanging outside his pants.

"Sit down with me, son," his father said.

 "No," Ira said.

His father walked down the steps, his silhouette blocking out the sun. He touched Ira under each eye with his thumb. "There's nothing to cry about," he said.

 "Who is she?" Ira said.

"A woman I see sometimes." He took his son's hand and led him back up to the gallery. They sat together on a swing that was suspended on chains from an overhead beam. It was spring and the willows and cypresses along the riverbanks were filled with wind and green with new leaf.

"Your mother has the consumption. That means we can't have the normal life of a husband and wife. I just hope God and you both forgive my weakness," his father said.

"She's a nigger. She was sitting on top of you," the boy said. His father had been stroking his head. But now he took his hand away and looked at the river and a hawk that hung motionlessly in the wind above the trees.

"Will you be telling your mother about this?" he asked.

 "I hate you," Ira said.

 "You tear my heart out, son."

 "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you," Ira said.

Then he was running out of the yard and down the street in his short pants, running through mud puddles, past the grinning faces of whores and teamsters and drunk Irishmen, his legs and face splattered with water that was black and oily and smelled like sewage and felt like leeches on his skin.

BACK at Angola Plantation, Ira refused to eat, fought with his British schoolmaster, and attacked a mulatto dressmaker at the dirt crossroads in front of the plantation store.

She was a statuesque, coffee-colored woman who wore petticoats and carried a parasol. She had been waiting for a carriage, fanning herself, her chin pointed upward, when Ira had gathered up a handful of rocks, sharp ones, and began pelting her in the back. 

The store clerk had to pick him up like a sack of meal and carry him across the pommel of his saddle to Ira's house.

His mother sat with him in the kitchen, her eyes and cheeks bright with the fever that never left her body. The light was failing outside, the clouds like purple smoke above the bluffs on the river. Ira could hear the pendulum swinging on the clock in the dining room, the soft chimes echoing off the walls.

"What frightens you so?" his mother said, stroking his head.

"I'm not afraid of anything," he replied.

"Something happened in Baton Rouge, didn't it? Something you're trying to hide from your mother."

He clenched his hands in his lap and looked at the floor.

"Is that why you hit the sewing woman with rocks? A well-dressed mulatto woman?" she said.

He scraped a scab on his hand with his thumbnail. His mother lifted his chin with her finger. Her black hair was pulled back like wire against her scalp, her dark eyes burning.

"You have my looks and my skin. If you don't inherit my family's bad lungs, you'll always be young," she said.

"He let her sit on him. He put her—"

"What?"
his mother said, her face contorting.

"He had her breast in his mouth. They were naked. On a bed in Nigger Town."

"Get control of yourself. Now, start over. You can trust me, Ira. But you have to tell me the truth."

She made him go through every detail, describing the woman, the positions on the bed, the words his father had spoken to him outside the cottage.

"What is her name?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said, shaking his head.

"You must know. He must have used her name."

But Ira couldn't speak now. His face was hot, his eyes swimming with tears, his voice hiccuping in his throat. His mother rose from her chair and looked for a long time out the window. Ira's father was in the garden, snipping roses, placing them in a bucket of water. He did not see his wife watching him. Then he glanced up at the window and waved.

She turned back toward her son.

"You must never tell anyone about this," she said.

"Is Papa going to know I told?"

"You didn't tell me anything, Ira. This didn't happen," she said.

She walked close to him and pulled his face into the folds of her dress and rubbed the top of his head with both hands. He could smell an odor like camphor and animal musk in her clothes. He put his arms around her thighs and buried his face against her stomach.

"When you were a baby I bathed you every morning and kissed you all over. I kissed your hands and your little feet and your bottom and your little private places. You'll always be my little man. You're my good little man, aren't you?" she said.

"Yes," he replied.

She released him and, with no expression on her face, walked out of the room. For reasons he could not understand he felt a sense of numbness, violation, shame and desertion, all at the same time. It was a feeling that would come aborning in his dreams the rest of his life.

FOR his birthday a week later, his father had the cook bake a strawberry cake and fry a dinner basket of chicken and convinced Ira's mother to join the two of them and an elderly black body servant named Uncle Royal for a picnic on the southern end of their property, three miles down the river.

His father chose this particular spot because it had been the site of a Spanish military garrison, supposedly overrun and massacred by Atakapa Indians in the eighteenth century, and as a boy Ira's father had played there and dug up the rusted shell of a Spanish helmet and a horseman's spur with an enormous spiked rowel on it.

They spread a blanket in a glade and set fishing lines in the river, and for a birthday present his father gave him a windup merry-go-round with hand-carved wooden horses on it that rotated in a circle while a musical cylinder played inside the base.

The river was yellow from the spring rains, thick and choked with mud, swirling with uprooted trees that floated southward toward New Orleans. The wind was drowsy and warm, the glade dotted with buttercups and bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, and for a while Ira forgot his father's infidelity and the brooding anger
in his mother
eyes and the blood-spotted handkerchief that stayed balled in the palm of her hand.

The body servant, Uncle Royal, wore a tattered black coat, a white shirt, a pair of purple pants and looked like he was made of sticks. He was fascinated by the windup merry-go-round that rested in the center of the blanket, next to the cake.

"Where something like that come from, Master Jamison?" he asked.

"All the way from England, across the big pond," Ira's father said.

"Lord, what my gran'child would give to play with something like that," Uncle Royal said.

"I tell you what, Royal, the storekeeper in Baton Rouge has another one just like it. On my next trip there, I'll buy it for you as an early Christmas present," Ira's father said.

"You'll do that, suh?" Uncle Royal said.

"You bet I will, old-timer," Ira's father said.

Ira never admired his father more.

He and his parents ate the chicken and strawberry cake on the blanket while Uncle Royal fished, then Ira's father decided he would entertain his wife and son by climbing on a pyramid of pine logs that were stacked and penned with stobs on a grassy shelf six feet above the shallows.

He walked up and down on the crest of the logs, perhaps twenty feet above the glade, his arms outstretched for balance, grinning idiotically.

"Watch this!" he called. Then he flipped up on his hands and held his feet straight up in the air, his muscular body quivering with tension.

The ground was soft and moist from a week's rain. A stob on the far side of the logs bent backward against the additional weight on the pile, then one log bounced down from the top, followed by another. Ira's father flipped back on his feet and balanced himself, smiling, looking about, waiting for the rush of blood to leave his head. Suddenly the entire pile collapsed and rumbled downward into the river, taking Ira's father with it.

Ira and his mother and Uncle Royal rushed to the edge of the bluff and stared down at the mudflat. Ira's father lay pinioned under a halfdozen
crisscrossed logs, his legs in the
water, his face white, his powerful arms trying to push away the weight that was crushing the air from his lungs.

Ira and Uncle Royal climbed down from the embankment and pushed and lifted and tugged on the logs that held his father, but to no avail.

"Go to the house. Come back with a team and chains," Ira's father said.

"I got to get your head up out of the water, Master," Uncle Royal said.

"I think my back's broken. You have to get help," Ira's father said.

 "You gonna be all right, suh?" Uncle Royal asked.

 "Don't be long," Ira's father replied.

Ira watched Uncle Royal climb back up the embankment, the clay shaling over his bare ankles.

"Come on, son," his mother said, reaching her hand down to Ira. Her eyes seemed to avoid both him and his father.

 "I'm staying," he replied.

"No, you can't be out here by yourself," she said.

"Then you or Uncle Royal stay," he said.

"We have to get axes and saws and chains. We have to bring a whole crew of men back. Now you do what I say."

He crawled up the embankment, then looked back down at his father.

"We'll hurry," he said.

His father winked at him and tried to hold his smile in place. "I can stay in if you want, Miz Jamison," Uncle Royal said.

 "Get in the carriage," she replied.

Uncle Royal turned the carriage around, then got down from the driver's seat to help Ira's mother up the step. "Drive to the crossroads," she said.

 "To the sto'?" Uncle Royal asked.

 "Yes, to the store."

"That's eight miles, Miz Jamison," Uncle Royal said.

 "All the workers are in the fields. Drive to the crossroads. We'll find help there," she said.

"Miz Jamison, the river's going up a couple of inches every hour. It's all that rainwater."

"Do I have in hit you with the whip?" she said.

Ira and his mother and Uncle Royal and the wagonload of men they put together did not get back to the river until after dark. When the manager of the plantation store held a lantern over the water, Ira saw the softly muted features of his father's face just below the surface, the eyes and mouth open, one hand frozen in a death grasp on a broken reed he had tried to breathe through.