White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (21 page)

"Could be, sir."

"I don't think those darkies had yellow jack. I think they were escaped slaves."

"Lots of things are out of our control, Major," Willie said. He was propped on one knee, his gaze fixed on the air vines that fluttered in the wind.

"I worked my whole life as a trainman. I owned nary a slave. I always thought slavery was a mistake," the major said.

Willie nodded. "Yes, sir," he said.

"Those who got through us on the river? They might have joined up with the colored outfit we just shot up, the ones who put the ball under my heart. That'd be
something, wouldn't it?"

Willie's eyes returned to the major's and he felt something drop inside him.

"It's nothing to worry about. The boat will be here soon," the major said, and tried to smile.

"Sir—" Willie began.

"Watch your back, Willie. Hatcher and Captain Atkins are no good. They hate a young fellow such as yourself."

Then the major widened his eyes briefly and turned his face away, into the shadows, as though the world of sunlight and the activity of the quick held little interest for him.

When Willie got back to his position inside the edge of the woods, he sat very still on a log and waited for his head to stop spinning. Then he poured water out of his canteen into his palm and wiped his face with it. The boxcars on the track went in and out of focus and a pang like a shard of glass sliced across the lining of his stomach. For a moment he thought he would lose control of his sphincter muscle.

In the distance he saw snow egrets and black geese rising from the canopy in the river bottoms, then he heard the spatter of small-arms fire that meant Hatcher's group had made contact with the black soldiers who had fled the train.

Both the men with Hatcher carried captured Spencer rifles and bags of brass cartridges, and they, along with Hatcher and his Henry repeater, were laying down a murderous field of fire. The shooting went on for five minutes, then a field piece roared deep in the river bottoms and the gum trees overhead trembled with the shock and a cloud of smoke and grayish-orange dust rose out of the leaves into the sunlight. A moment later the field piece roared again and a second cloud of dust and smoke caught the light and flattened in the wind.

Willie looked through his spyglass at the observation balloon tethered by the railway track far down the line. The bearded man in the wicker basket was using a pair of handheld flags to semaphore a battery down below, one consisting of three rifled twenty-pounder Parrotts that had been removed from a scuttled Union gunboat.

One of the cannons fired, and a shell arced over the spot in the river bottoms where the dust clouds had risen out of the
canopy. The round
went long by thirty yards, and the man in the basket leaned over the side and whipped his flags in the air. The next round was short and the man in the basket semaphored the ground again.

Then all three Confederate cannons fired for effect, again and again, the fused shells whistling shrilly only seconds before they struck.

Uprooted trees and columns of dirt fountained into the air, and through the spyglass Willie could see shoes and pieces of blue uniform mixed in with the dirt and palmetto leaves.

The barrage went on for almost a half hour. When Willie and his platoon marched across the railway embankment and entered the bottoms, he saw a black soldier huddled on the ground, trembling all over as though he had malaria, his forearms pressed tightly against his ears. Deeper in the bottoms the ground was pocked with craters, the dirt still smoking, and the trees were decorated in ways he had not seen since Shiloh.

Back in the underbrush he saw one of Hatcher's men cut the ear from a dead man's head, fold it in a handkerchief, and place it carefully in a leather pouch.

So that's the way it goes, he thought. You turn a blind eye to slaves escaping downriver, and later they join up with the blue-bellies and perhaps drive a ball under your friend's heart, and you trap the poor devils under a barrage that paints the trees with their blood and nappy hair. Ah, isn't it all a lovely business, he thought.

He wondered what Abigail would have to say about his work and hers.

An hour later he passed out. When he woke, he was in a tent and rain was ticking on the canvas. Through the flap he saw two enlisted men digging a grave by the bayou. The major lay next to the mound of dirt, his face covered with his gray coat.

Chapter Fourteen

THE morning did not feel like spring, Abigail thought. The air was hot and smelled of dust and trash fires, the sky gray, the clouds crackling with electricity. Then her neighbor's dogs began barking and she heard a banging noise down the Teche, like a houseful of carpenters smacking nails down in green wood. She walked out on the gallery and saw birds lifting out of the trees all the way down the street as a long column of soldiers and wagons rounded a bend in the distance and advanced toward the center of town.

The soldiers were unshaved, gaunt as scarecrows, some of them without shoes, the armpits of their butternut and gray uniforms white with salt, their knees patched like the pants on beggars. Three wagons carrying wounded passed in front of her. The teamsters in the wagon boxes were leaning forward, away from their charges, with handkerchiefs tied across their faces. The wind shifted, and she smelled the unmistakable odor of gangrene and of men who had become incontinent and left to sit in their own excretions. She saw no one with a surgeon's insignia in the column.

She walked out into the yard just as a mounted officer rode his horse to the head of column. He wore a slouch hat, a sweat-peppered gray shirt, no coat, and a pistol in a shoulder holster on his chest. His face was narrow, his skin as coarse and dark as if it had been rubbed with the dust from a foundry.

He picked his hat off his head by the crown and combed back his hair with his fingers.

"Still in our midst, are you?" he said.

"This is where I live," Abigail replied.

"Bring as many ladies as you can find up to the Episcopalian church," he said.

"You don't need to tell me my obligations, Captain Atkins," she replied.

"There's nothing like hearing a Yankee accent behind our own lines. But I'm sure you've been loyal to the cause, haven't you?"

"Where is Willie Burke?"

"Can't rightly say. Saw him puking his guts out last week. Don't think he was quite up to blowing railroad spikes into freed niggers."

"What?"

"You haven't heard? The Yanks give them uniforms and guns and permission to kill their previous owners. We waylaid a whole train-load of them. Made good niggers out of a goodly number."

Dry lightning rippled through the clouds. Atkins replaced his hat on his head and looked up at the sky.

"By the way, that was some of General Banks' skirmishers shooting behind us," he said. "They say he was a bobbin boy in one of your Massachusetts textile mills. Does not like rich people. No, sir. So he's turned his men loose on the civilian population. I hear they're a horny bunch. You might fasten on a chastity belt."

She wouldn't let the level of his insult register in her face, but the fact that he had insulted her sexually, in public, indicated only one conclusion about her status in the community: She was utterly powerless. She wanted to turn and walk away, but instead she fixed her eyes on the exhaustion in the faces of the enlisted men marching past her, the sores on the horses and mules, a mobile field kitchen whose cabinet doors swung back and forth on empty shelves.

"Captain Atkins, I suspect you may be a gift from God," she said.

His head tilted sideways, an amused question mark in the middle of his face.

"Sometimes we're all tempted to think of our own race as being superior to others," she said. "Then we meet someone such as yourself and immediately we're beset with the terrible knowledge that there's something truly cretinous at work in the Caucasian gene pool. Thank you for stopping by."

He studied her for a moment and scratched his cheek, his gaze slightly out of focus. He touched his horse with one spur and rode slowly toward the front of the column, his head bent down as though he were lost in thought. Then he reined his horse in a circle and rode back to Abigail's gate. He leaned with both arms on the pommel, the leather creaking under his weight. His flat, hazel eyes looked like they had been cut out of another face and pasted on his own.

He pointed at her with a dirt-rimmed fingernail. "A pox on you, you snooty cunt. Be assured your comeuppance is in the making," he said.

When Abigail arrived at the brick church at the far end of Main Street, the pews had been upended against the walls and the injured placed in rows on the floor. She peeled bandages from wounds that were rife with infection, scissored the trousers and underwear off men who had fouled themselves, and bathed their bodies with sponges and soap and warm water. A local physician, untrained as a surgeon, created an operating table by propping a door across two pews, then sawed limbs off men as though he were pruning trees. After each patient was carried away, he threw a bucket of water on the table and began on the next. There was no laudanum, and Abigail had to hold the heel of her hand in one man's mouth to keep him from biting through his tongue.

Outside, she heard men and horses running in the street, their gear clanking, a wheeled cannon bouncing off a parked wagon, then the spatter of small-arms fire in the distance.

"Are you with the 18th?" she asked a private who lay on a litter, a mound of bloody rags on the floor beside him.

He nodded. His eyes were receded in his face, his cheeks hollow. The bones in his chest looked like sticks under his skin. One pants leg had been cut away, and a swollen red line ran from a bandage on his thigh into his groin.

"What happened out there?" she asked.

"We divided our numbers and tried to fight on both sides of the bayou. They chewed us up. They been running us for six days."

"Do you know where Willie Burke is?"

"Lieutenant Burke?"

"Yes."

"Captain Atkins put him on rear guard."

"You mean now?"

"Yes, ma'am," the soldier said.

"Captain Atkins recently saw Lieutenant Burke?" she said.

But the soldier's eyes had lost interest in her questions.

"Fix my arms and my feet," he said.

"Pardon?"

"You know what I mean. Fix me," he said.

She started to speak, then gave up the pretense, the lie, that was in reality an insult to the dying. She folded his arms across his chest and lifted his good leg and pressed it close to the other, then tied his ankles with a strip of rag. His tin identification disk, with a leather thong looped through a hole at the top, was clenched tightly in his palm.

"Do you want me to write a letter to someone?" she asked.

"No, no letter," he said. His eyes filled with a terrible intensity and roved the vaulted ceiling above him, where a bird was battering itself against the glass windows, trying to escape into the treetops outside. "I stole money from a poor man once. I had a wife and wasn't good to her. I did mean things to others when I was a boy."

"I bet you were forgiven of your sins a long time ago," she said.

"Lean close," he said.

She bent down over his face, turning her ear to his mouth. His breath touched her skin like a moist feather.

"When I'm dead, set my tag so it's up and down between my teeth and knock my jaws shut," he whispered.

She nodded.

"If you got your tag in your mouth, they got to put your name on a marker," he said.

"I'll make sure. I promise," she said.

"I'm scared, ma'am. Ain't nobody ever been as scared as I am right now."

She raised her head and gazed down at him, but whatever conclulion he had reached about the unchartcred course of his life or the fear that had beset him in his last moments had already drifted out of his face like ash off a dead fire.

The bird he had been watching dipped under the arch of the front doorway and lifted into the sky, its wings throbbing.

THE next day Flower Jamison rose before sunup and lit her wood-stove and fixed coffee that was made from chicory and ground acorns. Then she lit the lamp on her table and in the misty coolness between false dawn and the moment when the sun would break above the horizon she removed from under her bed the box of books and writing materials given her by both Willie Burke and later by Abigail Dowling and opened the writing tablet in which she kept her daily journal.

She no longer hid her books or her ability to read them from white people. But her fear of her literacy being discovered did not leave her as a result of any decision or conscious act of her own. It had simply gone away as she looked about her and saw both privation and the cost of war on distant battlefields indelibly mark the faces of those who had always exercised complete power and control over her life. She could not say that she felt compassion or pity for them. Instead, she had simply come to realize that the worst in her life was probably behind her, and adversity and struggle and powerlessness were about to become the lot of the plantation owners who had seemed anointed at birth and placed beyond the reach of the laws of mortality and chance and accident.

At least that is what she thought.

Outside her window the new cane was green and wet inside the mist and she could hear it rustling when the wind blew from the south. She placed her dictionary next to her writing tablet and began writing, pausing on every fourth or fifth word to look up a spelling:

Last night there was either shooting or thunder down the bayou. The dead were took out of the back of the church and laid on the grass under a oak tree. There were flashes of light in the sky and a loud explosion in the bayou. A free man of color say a yankee gunboat was blowed up and fish rained down in the trees and some hungry people picked them up with their hands for food to eat.

Miss Abigail ask me why I come back from New Orleans when I could stay there and he free. I told her this is my home and inside myself I'm free wherever I go. I told her I want to stay and help other slaves escape up the Mississippi to the north. I have been telling myself this too.