White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (26 page)

A Union sergeant tapped the
sole of Willie's shoe with his own. "Your turn inside," he said.

"Really, now? After three days I get to meet the Massachusetts bobbin boy?" Willie said.

The sergeant's kepi made a damp line across the back of his dark red hair. He wore a goatee and a poor excuse for a mustache and a silver ring with a tiny cross affixed to it on his marriage finger. He started to speak, then touched at a place on his lip and gazed off into space as though a thought had escaped his mind.

Willie got to his feet and started toward the house. Beyond the Deadline he saw a weathered red barn and seven or eight soldiers with rifle-muskets in the shade along the side wall, their weapons propped butt-down in the dirt.

The sergeant pulled Willie's sleeve.

"Listen, the general is handling these interviews because he lost some good men to a gang of cutthroats. You look to be a decent man. Use your head in there, Reb," he said.

"You have problems of conscience?" Willie said.

 "A good man don't have to prove it," the sergeant said.

 "You've lost me, Yank. Say again?"

"I think you're one on whom words are easily wasted," the sergeant said. He escorted Willie inside the house, where Willie stood in front of General Banks.

The general's boots and dark blue uniform were splattered with dried mud. He had tangled eyebrows and deep-set eyes that seemed filled with either conflicting or angry thoughts, and the skin at the top of his forehead was a sickly white. The odor of horse liniment and wood smoke and unrinsed soap emanated from his clothes. He peered down his nose at a list of names on a sheet of paper. By his left hand was Willie's crumpled uniform.

"Who are you? Or rather what are you?" he asked.

 "First Lieutenant William Burke, 18th Louisiana Volunteers, at your service, sir."

"And these rags here are your uniform?"

 "That appears to be the case, sir."

The general lifted up the uniform, revealing a pair of brass binoculars and a folding, horn-handled knife under it.

"These are your knife and your field glasses?" he asked.

"No, I took them off a dead man, probably a forward artillery observer. One of ours."

The general's eyes lingered on a neutral spot in space, then looked at Willie again, the cast in them somehow different now.

"Can you tell me why you're out of uniform?" he asked.

"I was prematurely stuffed into one of your burial wagons. The dead have a way of leaking their shite and other fluids all over their companions, sir."

The general drummed his fingers on the table, gazed out the window, brushed at his nose with his knuckle.

"You look like a civilian to me, Mr. Burke, a good fellow at the wrong place at the wrong time, one probably willing to sign an oath of allegiance and go about his way," he said.

"It's First Lieutenant Willie Burke, sir. I was at Shiloh and Corinth and a half-dozen places since. I'll not be signing a loyalty oath."

"Damn it, man, you were out of uniform!"

"I gave you a reasonable explanation, too!" Willie replied.

It was quiet inside the room. The wind ruffled the papers on the general's desk. Through the window Willie could see the weathered red barn in the distance and a sergeant who was ordering the line of seven or eight enlisted men around to the back side. One of them was arguing, and the sergeant grabbed him by his blouse and shoved him against the wall.

"Take a seat outside in the hall, Lieutenant. I'll continue our talk in a few minutes," he said.

The sergeant who had escorted Willie inside the house walked him into the breezeway and pointed at a chair for him to sit in. Then he shook his finger reprovingly in Willie's face.

"I come from a religious family, but I had to learn the only real pacifist is a dead Quaker. I decided to make an adjustment. Do you get my meaning?" he said.

"It escapes me," Willie said.

The sergeant went outside and returned with a frightened man who had a pie-plate face, arms like bread dough, and rows of tiny yellow teeth.

Willie had seen him around New Iberia. What was his name? He was simpleminded and did janitorial work. Pinky? Yes, that was it. Pinky Strunk. What was he doing here?

Through the open door Willie could hear the general questioning him.

"You were in possession of five Spanish reals. That's a lot of money for a workingman to have clanking in his pocket," the general said.

"Ain't no law against it. Not that I know of," Pinky answered.

"Sixteen of my men were ambushed and butchered on the St. Martinville Road. I think you're one of the men who looted the bodies," the general said.

"Not me. No, suh."

From behind the red barn there was a volley of rifle fire, then a cloud of smoke drifted out into the sunlight.

"Jesus God!" Pinky said.

"How did you come by five Spanish pieces-of-eight?" the general asked.

"Is that a firing squad out there, suh?"

"How did you come by the reals?"

"It's kind of private."

"Not anymore."

"Done a chore for a man. Me and two others."

"What might that be?" the general asked.

The man named Pinky blew his nose in a handkerchief.

"We was s'pposed to—" he began. But his voice faltered.

"Supposed to do what?"

"Fix an uppity nurse who don't know her place. I never stole in my life. Man who says so is a liar."

"Start over again."

"There's a Captain Atkins paid us to put the spurs to a troublesome white woman. She wasn't home so we give it to a darky instead. Three of us topped her. That's the long and the short of it. I ain't looted no dead Yankees."

"Sergeant, take this man to the provost-marshal. The paperwork will follow," the general said.

"Y'all sending me back home?" Pinky said. His eyes blinked as he waited for the general's response.

A half hour later Willie was standing once again in front of the general. Through the window he saw two Yankee soldiers escorting Pinky Strunk behind the barn, gripping him by each arm. He was arguing with them, twisting his face from one to the other.

"Sixteen of my men were butchered, their throats slit, their ring fingers
cut off their hands. Don't be clever with me," the general said.

"The killers of your men are out yonder in the compound, General. Pinky Strunk isn't one of them," Willie said.

"Then you'd damn well better point them out."

A ragged volley of rifle fire exploded from behind the barn.

"Would you have a chew of tobacco on you, sir?" Willie asked.

That evening he stood at the barred window of a brick storehouse on the bank of Bayou Teche and watched the sun descend in a cloud of purple smoke in the west. It was cool and damp-smelling inside the storehouse, and the oaks along the bayou were a dark green in the waning light, swelling with wind, the air heavy with the fecund odor of schooled-up bream popping the surface of the water among the lily pads.

Other men sat on the dirt floor, some with their heads hanging between their knees. They were looters, rapists, guerrillas, jayhawkers, grave robbers, accused spies, or people who just had very bad luck. In fact, Willie believed at that moment that the nature of the crimes they had committed was less important than the fact that anarchy had spread across the land and the deaths of these men would restore some semblance of order to it.

At dawn, the general had said.

How big a price should anyone have to pay to retain his integrity? Willie asked himself. How did he come to this juncture in his life?

Arrogance and pride, his mind answered.

He could hear his heart pounding in his ears.

Chapter Eighteen

FLOWER Jamison did not sleep the night she was raped. She bathed in the iron tub behind Abigail Dowling's cottage, then put back on the same clothes she had worn before the attack and sat alone in the darkness, looking out on the street until Abigail returned home. "What happened?" Abigail asked, staring at the splintered door in the kitchen.

"Three men broke in and raped me," Flower replied.

"Federals broke in here? You were ra—"

"They were civilians. They were looking for you. They took me instead."

"Oh, Flower."

"What one man more than any other wants to hurt you? A man who hates you, who's cruel through and through?"

 "I don't know."

 "Yes, you do," Flower said.

"Rufus Atkins threatened me. Out there, in the street. Yesterday," Abigail said.

Flower nodded her head.

"I saw him give money to three men behind Carrie LaRose's house earlier today."

"That doesn't prove anything."

"Yes, it does. I saw a man's yellow teeth under his mask. I heard the coins clink in their pants. It was them."

"Are you hurt inside?"

"They hurt me everywhere," she replied.

She refused to use the bed Abigail offered her and sat in the chair all night. Before dawn, without eating breakfast, she left the cottage and walked down Main and stood under the wood colonnade in front of McCain's Hardware. She wiped the film off the window with her hand in several places and tried to see inside. Then she walked out in the country to the laundry where she had worked. It and the cabins behind it were burned to the ground.

She walked back up the road to the back door of Carrie LaRose's bordello. She had to knock twice before Carrie came to the door.

"What you mean banging on my do' this early in the morning?" Carrie said.

"Need to earn some money," Flower said.

Carrie looked out at the fog on the fields and the blackened threads of sugarcane on her lawn, as though the morning itself might contain either an omen or threat. She wore glass rings on the fingers of both hands and a housecoat and a kerchief on her head and paper curlers in her hair that made Flower think of a badly plucked chicken inside a piece of cheesecloth.

"Doing what?" Carrie asked.

"Cleaning, washing, ironing, anything you want. I can sew, too. The Yankees are calling us contrabands. That means the Southerners cain't own us anymore."

"Already got somebody to do all them things."

"I can write letters for you. I know how to subtract and add sums."

"Want money? You know how to get it," Carrie said.

"Thank you for your time, Miss Carrie."

"Don't give me a look like I'm hard, no."

"You ain't hard. You just for sale."

"You like a pop in the face?" Carrie said.

Flower looked .it the plank table under the live oak where Captain Rufus Atkins had counted out a short stack of heavy coins in the palms of the paddy rollers only yesterday afternoon.

"I axed for a job. You don't have one. I won't bother you anymore," Flower said.

"Wait up, you," Carrie said. She fitted the thickness of her hand under Flower's chin and turned it back and forth, exposing her throat to the light. "Who give you them marks?"

"I need a job, Miss Carrie."

"Abigail Dowling ain't gonna let you go hungry. You wanting money for somet'ing else, ain't you?"

Flower turned and walked down the steps and into the fog rolling out of the fields. It felt damp and invasive on her skin, like the moist touch of a soiled hand on her arm.

SHE wandered the town until noon, without direction or purpose. Many of the shops along Main Street had been broken open and looted, except the hardware store, which the owner, a man named Todd McCain, had emptied of its goods before the Yankees had come into town during the night. In fact, McCain had taken the extra measure of turning the cash register toward the glass window so passersby could see that the compartments in the drawer contained no money.

Yankee soldiers, some of them still drunk, slept under the trees on the bayou. She sat on a wood bench by the drawbridge and watched a steamboat loaded with blue-clad sharpshooters lounging behind cotton bales work its way upstream toward St. Martinville. The sharpshooters waved at her, and one pointed at his fly and held his hands apart as though showing her the size of an enormous fish.

The Episcopalian church, which had been a field hospital for Confederate wounded, had now been converted into a stable, the pews pushed together to form feed troughs. Flower watched the sun climb in the sky, then disappear among the tree branches over her head. She slept with her head on her chest and dreamed of a man holding a white snake in his hand. He grinned at her, then placed the head of the snake in his mouth and held it there while he unbuttoned and removed his shirt.

She awoke abruptly and cleared her throat and spat into the dirt, widening her eyes until the images from the dream were gone from her mind. Then she rose from the bench and walked unsteadily through the shade, into the heat of the day, toward McCain's Hardware.

"You want to look at what?" the owner, Todd McCain, said.

"The pistol. You had it in the glass case before the Yankees came to town," she replied.

"I don't remember no pistol," McCain said. He had been a drummer from Atlanta who had come to New Iberia on the stage and married an overweight widow ten years his senior. His body was hard and egg-shaped, the shoulders narrow, his metallic hair greased and parted down the middle.

"I want to see the pistol. Or I'll come back with a Yankee soldier who'll help you find it," she said.

"That a fact?" he said.

He fixed his eyes on her face, a smile breaking at the side of his mouth. She turned and started back out the door. "Hold on," he said.

He went into the back of the store and returned to the front and laid a heavy object wrapped in oily flannel on top of the glass case. He glanced at the street, then unwrapped a cap-and-ball revolver with dark brown grips. The blueing on the tip of the barrel and on the cylinder was worn a dull silver from holster friction.

"That's a Colt .36 caliber revolver. Best sidearm you can buy," he said.

"How much is it?"

"You people ain't suppose to have these."

"I'm a contraband now. I can have anything I want. No different than a free person of color."

"Twelve dollars. I ain't talking about Confederate paper, either."