White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (28 page)

"Come out, lads. None of us enjoys this. We'll make it as easy and dignified as possible," the Yankee officer at the door said.

"Come in and get us, darlin'," a prisoner in the back of the room said.

Clouds moved across the sun and the countryside dropped into shadow again, the cane in the field bending in the breeze, the air sweet with the smell of morning. Willie heard horses coming hard across a wood bridge, then the shouts of men and the ragged popping of small-arms fire.

Suddenly there were horsemen everywhere, over a hundred of them, dressed like beggars, some firing a pistol with each hand, the reins in their teeth. The prisoners surged out of the storehouse, knocking the captain to the ground, attacking his men.

A wheeled cannon on one corner of the prisoner of war compound lurched into the air, blowing a huge plume of smoke across the grass. One second later a load of grapeshot slapped against the walls of the red barn used as the execution site, accidentally cutting down a squad of Yankee soldiers in its path.

Willie bolted from the door of the storehouse and ran with dozens of other men toward the bayou, while mounted guerrillas and what looked like regular Confederate infantry fired into the Yankees who were trying to form up in the middle of the compound. A shirtless man on horseback thundered past him, the guerrilla leader with the pinned-up hat riding on the rump, clinging to the cantle. The guerrilla leader looked back at him, his face like an outraged jack-o'-lantern under his hat.

Willie heard the whirring sound of minie balls toppling past his head, then a sound like a dry slap when they struck a tree. He plunged through a woman's front yard, tearing down her wash as he ran, scattering chickens onto the gallery. He crashed through her front door and out the back into a grove of pecan trees, then the lunatic from the storehouse was running in tandum with him, his vinegary stench like a living presence he carried with him. .

They dove into the bayou together, swimming as far as they could underwater, brushing across the sculpted points of submerged tree branches, a stray minie ball breaking the surface and zigzagging through the depths in a chain of bubbles.

Their feet touched bottom on the far side, then Willie and what he had come to think of as his lunatic companion were up on the bank, running through a cane field, the blades of the cane whipping past their shoulders.

They fell out of the cane field into a dry irrigation canal, breathless, collapsing on their knees in the shade of persimmon trees. Willie threw his arm around the shoulder of the lunatic.

"We made it, pard. God love you, even if you're a graduate of Bedlam and have nothing kind to say about His chosen people, that being the children of Erin," he said.

The lunatic sat back on his heels, his chest laboring, his blackened mouth hanging open. Willie fastened his hand on the man's collarbone, kneading it, grinning from ear to ear at his newfound brother-in-arms.

"Did you hear me? I bet you're a good soldier. You don't need to ride with brigands. Come with me and we'll find the 18th Louisiana and General Mouton," he said.

The lunatic's mouth formed into a cone and he pressed four stiffened fingers into his sternum as though he were silently asking Willie a burning question.

"You got the breath knocked out of you?" Willie said.

The lunatic shook his head. Willie cupped the lunatic's wrist and removed his fingers from his chest. A ragged exit wound the circumference of a thumb was drilled through his sternum. Willie caught him just as he fell on his side.

"The Yanks have fucked me with a garden rake, cabbage head. Watch out for yourself," the lunatic whispered.

"Hang on there, pard. Someone will be along for us directly. You'll see," Willie said.

The man did not speak again. His eyes stared hazily at the shadows the clouds made on the cane field and the mockingbirds swooping in and out of the shade. Then he coughed softly as though clearing his throat and died.

Willie rolled him onto his back, placed his ankles together, and covered his face with a palmetto fan. Then he buttoned the dead man's butternut coat over his wound and crossed his arms on his chest.

Other escaped prisoners ran past him, some of them armed now, all of them sweaty and hot, powdered with dust from the fields. He heard a rider behind him and turned just as the guerrilla leader reined his horse and glared down at him, his horse fighting the bit, spooking sideways.

The guerrilla hit the horse between the ears with his fist, then stood in the stirrups and adjusted his scrotum, making a face while he did it. The inside of his thighs were dark with sweat, as though he had fouled himself. "That's the body of my junior officer you're looting," he said.

Willie got to his feet.

"You're a damn liar," he said.

"I'll remember your face," the guerrilla said.

He galloped away, twisting his head to look over his shoulder one more time.

WILLIE wandered the rest of the day. The sky was plumed with smoke from burning houses and barns, and by noon a haze of dust and lint from the cane fields turned the sun into a pink sliver. He saw a Confederate rear guard form up in a woods and fire a volley across a field at a distant group of men, then break and run through a gully and board a rope-drawn ferryboat and pull themselves across the Vermilion River, all before he could reach them.

He saw wild dogs attack and tear apart a rabbit in an empty pasture. He passed Confederate deserters who had hidden in coulees or who walked on back roads with their faces averted. He saw four wagons loaded with Negroes and their possessions stopped at a crossroads, wondering in which direction they should go, while their children cried and one man tried to jerk an exhausted horse up on its legs. At evening he saw the same people, this time on the riverbank, without the means to cross to the other side, frightened at the boom of distant artillery. He rooted for food in the charred ruins of a cabin and licked the fried remains of pickled tomatoes off scorched pieces of a preserve jar.

He climbed into a mulberry tree and watched a column of Union infantry, supply wagons, and wheeled field pieces that took a half hour to pass. When night came the sky was black with storm clouds, the countryside dark except for the flicker of cannon fire in the north. He lost the Vermilion River, which he had been following, and entered a high-canopied woods that swayed in the wind, that had no undergrowth and was thickly layered with old leaves and was good for either walking or finding a soft, cool place that smelled of moss and wildflowers where he could lie down and once more sleep the sleep of the dead.

He paused under a water oak, unbuttoned his fly, and urinated into the leaves. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement back in the trees and heard the sound of field gear clanking on men's bodies. He mounted the trunk of a tree that had fallen across a coulee and ran along the crest of it to the other side, right into a Union sergeant who aimed the .50 caliber muzzle of a Sharp's carbine at his face.

Willie raised his hands and grinned as though a stick were turned sideways in his mouth.

"I'm unarmed and offer no threat to you," he said.

The sergeant's kepi was low on his brow, one eye squinted behind his rear sight. He lowered his carbine and looked hard into Willie's face. The sergeant had dark red hair and wore a mustache and goatee and a silver ring with a tiny gold cross affixed to it on his marriage finger. Willie could hear him breathing heatedly in the dark.

"No threat, are you? How about a fucking nuisance?" he said.

"The pacifist turned soldier?" Willie said.

"And you, a bloody hemorrhoid," the sergeant replied.

"Indignant, are we? I tell you what, Yank, within a span of five days you fellows have blown me up with an artillery shell, almost buried me alive, and tried to send me before a firing squad. Would you either be done with it and kindly put a ball between my eyes or go back home to your mother in the North and be the nice lad I'm sure you are."

"Don't tempt me."

"I'm neither a spy nor a guerrilla. Your general treated me unjustly back there. I reckon you know it, too."

Willie could hear the calluses on the sergeant's hands tightening on
the stock of his carbine. Then the sergeant stepped back in the leaves, an air vine trailing across his kepi, and pointed the carbine's barrel away from Willie's chest.

"Pass by, Reb. When you say your prayers this night, ask that in the next life the Good Lord provide you with a brain rather than an elephant turd to think with," he said.

"Thank you for the suggestion, Yank. Now, would you be knowing where the 18th Louisiana Vols are?" Willie said.

"You ask the enemy the whereabouts of your own outfit?"

"No offense meant."

The sergeant looked at him incredulously. "My guess is somewhere north of Vermilionville," he said.

"Thank you."

"What's your name again?" the sergeant asked.

"Willie Burke."

"Get into another line of work, Willie Burke," he said.

Chapter Twenty

FLOWER Jamison had always thought the beginning and end of the war would be marked by definite dates and events, that great changes would be effected by the battles and the thousands of men she had seen march through New Iberia, and the historical period in which she was living would survive only as a compartmentalized and aberrant experience that fitted between bookends for people to study in a happier time.

But the changes she saw in 1864 and early 1865 were transitory in nature. The Yankee soldiers camped behind the Episcopalian church pursued the Confederates through Vermilionville and up into the Red River parishes, taking with them the money they spent in bordellos, saloons, and on the washerwomen by the bayou.

Many freed slaves returned to the plantations and owners they had fled and begged for food and shelter and considered themselves lucky if they were paid any wages at all. Others who preferred privation and even death from hunger over a return to the old ways were on occasion given a choice between the latter or execution.

Emancipation Day came to be known by people of color as June 'Teenth. Emancipated into what? Flower wondered.

She moved into an unpainted cypress cabin in the trees behind Amilia Dowling's house and did housework for wages. For a brief time she sorted mail for a nickel an hour at the post office, then was let go, with a sincere apology from the postmaster, Mr. LeBlanc, because he felt obligated to give the work to a woman whose husband had been killed at Petersburg.

Many of the Confederate soldiers from New Iberia returned home before the Surrender, either as paroled prisoners of war with chronic diseases or wounds that would not allow them to serve as noncombatants. Flower thought she would have little sympathy for them, regardless of the degree of their suffering. Why should she? she asked herself. The flag they had fought under should have been emblazoned with the overseer's lash rather than the Stars and Bars, she thought. But when she saw them on the street, or sitting on benches among the oaks in the small park across the bayou, the injuries done to some of them were so visibly grievous she had to force herself not to flinch or swallow in their presence and hence add to the burden they already carried.

Since the rape her anger had become her means of defense and survival. She fed it daily so that it lived inside her like a bright, clean flame that she would one day draw upon, like a blacksmith extracting a white-hot iron from a furnace. It was her anger and the possibilities of revenge that allowed her to avoid a life of victimhood. But an incident in the park almost robbed her of it.

An ex-soldier who had lost his eyes, his nose, and his chin to an exploding artillery shell was escorted each evening to the park by a child. A veil of black gauze hung from his brow, covering his destroyed face, but the wind blew it aside once and what Flower saw in a period of less than three seconds made her stomach constrict.

One week later, on a Sunday afternoon, when the park was almost deserted, the child wandered off. Rain began to patter on the trees, and the soldier rose to his feet and tried to tap his way with a cane to the drawbridge. From across the bayou Flower saw him trip and fall, then gather himself up and walk in the wrong direction.

She crossed the bridge and took him by the arm. It felt as light as a stick in her hand.

"I can take you home if you tell me where you live," she said. "That's very good of you, ma'am. I stay with my father and mother, just behind St. Peter's," he said.

The two of them walked the length ot Main Street, then went through a brick alley toward the Catholic church.

"There's a cafe here on the corner. They have coffee. I'd love to treat you to a cup," the soldier said.

"I'm colored, suh."

The ex-soldier stopped, the gauze molded damply against the skeletal outline of his face. He seemed to be staring into the distance, although Flower knew he had no eyes.

"I see," he said. "Well, everyone looks the same to me these days, and you seem a very sweet person to whom I'm greatly indebted. I'm sure my mother has tea on the stove, if you would join me."

She refused his invitation and told herself she could not look any longer upon his suffering. But in the secret chambers of the heart she knew that the pity he inspired in her was her enemy and the day the clean and comforting flame of her anger died would be the day that every bruise and probing act of the hand and tongue and phallus visited upon her by the three rapists would take on a second life and not only occupy her dreams but come aborning in her waking day.

She and Abigail had driven out in the country with the revolver Abigail had bought at the hardware store. An elderly Frenchman who lived in a houseboat on the bayou and spoke no English showed them how to remove the cylinder from the frame and pour powder and drop the conically shaped .36 caliber balls in each of the chambers and tamp down the wadding on top of the ball with the mechanical rod inset under the barrel and insert the percussion caps in the nipples of the chambers. Then he stepped back on the bank as though he were not sure in which direction they might shoot.