White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (3 page)

One of them almost vomited. Another threw a dried horse turd at his back. But Willie took no offense. Most of them were poor, unlettered, brave and innocent at the same time, imbued with whatever vision of the world others created for them. When he glanced back over his shoulder they were playing mumblety-peg with their pocketknives.

He was on a dirt road now, one that led southward into the sugarcane fields that stretched all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. He passed hog lot and slaughterhouse buzzing with bottle flies and a brick saloon with a railed bar inside, then a paint-skinned, two-story frame house with a sagging gallery that served as New Iberia's only bordello. The owner, Carrie LaRose, who some said had been in prison in the West Indies or France, had added a tent in the side yard, with cots inside, to handle the increase in business from Camp Pratt.

A dark-haired chub of a girl in front of the tent scooped up her dress and lifted it high above her bloomers. "How about a ride, Willie? Only a dollar," she said.

Willie raised himself in the saddle and removed his hat. "It's a terrible temptation, May, but I'd be stricken blind by your beauty and would never find my home or
dear mother again," he said.
The girl grinned broadly and was about to shout back a rejoinder, when she was startled by a young barefoot man, six and a half feet tall, running hard after Willie Burke.

The tall youth vaulted onto the rump of Willie's horse, grabbing Willie around the sides for purchase while Willie's horse spooked sideways and almost caved with the additional weight.

Willie could smell an odor like milk and freshly mowed hay in the tall youth's clothes.

"You pass by without saying hello to your pal?" the young man said.

"Hello, Jim!"

 "Hello there, Willie!"

"You get enough grog in you last night?" Willie asked.

 "Hardly," Jim replied. "Are you going to see that nigger girl again?"

"It's a possibility. Care to come along?" Willie said. The young man named Jim had hair the color of straw and an angular, self-confident face that reflected neither judgment of himself nor others. He pulled slightly at the book that protruded from Willie's pocket and flipped his thumb along the edges of the pages.

"What you're about to do is against the law, Willie," Jim said.

Willie looked at the dust blowing out of the new sugarcane, a solitary drop of rain that made a star in the dust. "Smell the salt? It's a fine day, Jim. I think you should stay out of saloons for a spell," he said.

"That girl is owned by Ira Jamison. He's not a man to fool with," Jim said.

"Really, now?"

"Join the Home Guards with me. You should see the Enfield rifles we uncrated yesterday. The Yankees come down here, by God we'll lighten their load."

"I'm sure they're properly frightened at the prospect. You'd better drop off now, Jim. I don't want to get you in trouble with Marse Jamison," Willie said.

Jim's silence made Willie truly wish for the first time that day he'd kept his own counsel. He felt Jim's hands let go of his sides, then heard his weight hit the dirt road. Willie turned to wave good-bye to his friend, sorry for his condescending attitude, even sorrier for the fear in his breast that he could barely conceal. But his friend did not look back.

THE last house on the road was a ramshackle laundry owned by Ira Jamison, set between two spreading oaks, behind which Flower sat in an open-air wash shed, scrubbing stains out of a man's nightshirt, her face beaded with perspiration from the iron pots steaming around her. Her hair was black and straight, like an Indian's, her cheekbones pronounced, her skin the color of coffee with milk poured in it.

She looked at the sun's place in the sky and set the shirt down in the boiling water again and went into the cypress cabin where she lived by the coulee and wiped her face and neck and underarms with a rag she dipped into a cypress bucket.

From under her bed she removed the lined tablet and dictionary Willie had given her and sat in a chair by the window and read the lines she had written in the tablet:

A owl flown acrost the moon late last night.
 A cricket sleeped on the pillow by my head.

The gator down in the coulee look like dark stone when the sunlite turn red and spill out on the land.

There is talk of a war. A free man of color who have a big house on the bayou say for the rest of us not to listen to no such talk. He own slaves hisself and makes bricks in a big oven.

I learned to spell 3 new words this morning. Mr. Willie say not to write down hard words lessen I look them up first.

A band played on the big lawn on the bayou yesterday. A man in a silk hat and purple suit tole the young soldiers they do not haf to worry about the Yankees cause the Yankees is cowards. The brass horns were gold in the sunshine. So was the sword the man in the silk hat and purple suit carry on his side.

Mr. Willie say not to say aint. Not to say he dont or she dont either.

This is all my thoughts for the day.

Signed, Flower Jamison

She heard Willie's horse in the yard and glanced around her cabin at the wildflowers she had cut and placed in a water jar that morning, her clean Sunday dress, which hung on a wood peg, the bedspread given to her by a white woman on Main, now tucked around the moss-stuffed mattress pad on her bed. When she stepped out the door Willie was swinging down from his horse, slipping a bag of dirty clothes loose from the pommel of his saddle.

He smiled at her, then squinted up at the sunlight through the trees and glanced back casually at the house, as though he were simply taking in the morning and his surroundings with no particular thought in mind.

"You by yourself today?" he asked.

"Some other girls are ironing inside the big house. We iron inside so the dust don't get on the clothes," she said.

"Could you give a fellow a drink of water?" he said.

"I done made some lemonade," she replied, and waited for him to enter the cabin first.

He removed his hat as though he were entering a white person's home, then sat in the chair at the table by the window and gazed wistfully out onto the young sugarcane bending in the breeze off the Gulf. His hair was combed but uncut and grew in black locks on his neck.

"What did you write for us today, Flower?" he asked, his gaze still focused outside the cabin.

She handed him her tablet, then stood motionlessly, her hands behind her.

He put the tablet flat on the table and read what she had written, his elbows on the table, his fingers propped on his temples. His cheeks were shaved and pooled with color that never seemed to change in hue.

"You look at the world only as a poet can," he said.

He saw her lips say the word "poet" silently.

"That's a person who sees radiance when others only see objects. That's you, Flower," he said.

But she disregarded the compliment and felt the most important line she had written in the notebook was one he had not understood. In fact, she was not quite sure what she had meant when she made the entry. But the martial speech of the man in the silk hat still rang in her ears, and the hard gold light beating on his sword and the brass instruments of the band hovered before her eyes like the angry reflection off a heliograph.

"Is there gonna be a war, Mr. Willie?" she asked.

"Why don't you sit down? I'm getting a crick in my neck looking up at you," he said. "Look, y'all are going to be free one day. Peace or war, it's just a matter of time."

"You gonna join the army, ain't you, suh?"

In spite of his invitation she had made no movement to sit down at the table with him, which would have caused her to violate a protocol that was on a level with looking a white person directly in the face. But after having shown her obedience to a plantation code that systematically degraded her as well as others, she realized she was now, of her own volition, invading the privacy and perhaps exposing the weakness of a man she genuinely admired and was fond of.

For just a moment she wondered if it was true, as white people always said, that slaves behaved morally only when they were afraid.

"I try not to study on it," Willie replied. Then, as though to distract himself from his own thoughts, he told her of his father's participation in the Texas Revolution, the massacre of prisoners at Goliad, the intercession of a camp follower who probably saved his father's life.

"A prostitute saved all them men from being killed?" she said.

"She surely did. No one ever learned her name or what became of her. The Texans called her the Angel of Goliad. But think of the difference one poor woman made," he said.

She sat down on her bed, her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap.

"I ain't meant to be prying or rude. You're always kind to the niggers, Mr. Willie. You don't belong with them others," she said.

"Don't call your people niggers," he said.

"It's the only name we got," she said, with a sharpness in her voice that surprised her. "You gonna let the Yankees kill you so men like Marse Jamison can make more money off their cotton? You gonna let them do that to you, suh?"

"I think I should go now. Here, I brought you a book of poems. They're by an English poet named William Blake." He rose from his chair and offered her the book.

But she wasn't listening now. Her gaze was fixed outside the door. Through the crisscross of wash lines and steam drifting off the wash pots scattered throughout the yard, she saw Rufus Atkins rein his carriage, one with a surrey on top, and dismount and tether his horse to an iron weight attached to a leather strap he let slide through his fingers.

"You best go, Mr. Willie," she said.

"Has Mr. Rufus been bothering you, Flower?"

"I ain't said that."

"Mr. Rufus is a coward. His kind always are. If he hurts you, you tell me about it, you hear?"

"What you gonna do, suh? What you gonna do?" she said.

He started to speak, then crimped his lips together and was silent.

AFTER he was gone she sat by herself in the cabin, her heart beating, her breasts rising and falling in the silence. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rufus Atkins' silhouette break across the light.

He stepped inside the cabin, his wide-brimmed hat on his head, his gaze sweeping over the room, the taut bedspread on her mattress, the jug of lemonade on her table, the cut flowers in the water jar.

He removed a twenty-dollar gold piece from his watch pocket and flipped it in the air with his thumb, catching it in his palm. He rolled it across the tops of his knuckles and made it disappear from his hand. Then he reached behind her ear and held the coin in her face.

"Deception's an art, Flower. We all practice it. But white people are a whole sight better at it than y'all are," he said.

When she didn't reply, he smiled wanly. "Young Willie bring you his wash?" he asked.

"Yes, suh," she replied.

"I hope he wasn't here to get anything else washed," he said.

She lowered her eyes to the floor. Atkins sat down at the table and removed his hat and wiped his face with a handkerchief.

"Flower, you are the best-looking black woman I've ever seen. Honest to God truth," he said. He picked up the jug of lemonade and drank out of it.

But when he set the jug down his gaze lighted on an object that was wedged under her mattress pad. He rose from the chair and walked to her bed.

"I declare, a dictionary and a poetry book and what looks like a tablet somebody's been writing in. Willie Burke give you these?" he said.

"A preacher traveling through. He ax me to hold them for him," she said.

"That was mighty thoughtful of you." He folded back a page of her tablet and read from it. "'A cricket sleeped on the pillow by my head.' This preacher doesn't sound like he's got good sense. Well, let's just take these troublesome presences off your hands."

He walked outside and knelt by a fire burning under a black pot filled with boiling clothes. He began ripping the pages out of her writing tablet and feeding them individually into the flames. He rested one haunch on the heel of his boot and watched each page blacken in the center, then curl around the edges, his long hair and clipped beard flecked with gray, like pieces of ash, his skin as dark and grained as scorched brick.

Then he opened the book of poems and wet an index finger and methodically turned the pages, puckering his lips as he glanced over each poem, an amused light in his face.

"Come back inside, Marse Rufus," she said from the doorway.

"I thought you might say that," he replied, rising to his feet, his stomach as flat and hard as a board under his tucked shirt and tightly buttoned pants.

AT four-thirty the next morning, April 12, 1861, a Confederate general whose hair was brushed into a greased curlicue on his pate gave the order to a coastal battery to fire on a fort that was barely visible out in the harbor. The shell arced across the sky under a blanket of stars, its fuse sparking like a lighted cigar tossed carelessly into a pile of oily rags.

Chapter Three

BY AFTERNOON of the same day the telegraph had carried the news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter to New Iberia, and Camp Pratt, out on Spanish Lake, was suddenly filled with young men who stood in long lines before the enlistment tables, most of them Acadian boys who spoke no English and had never been farther from Bayou Teche than the next parish. The sky was blue through the canopy of oak trees that covered the camp, the lake beaten with sunlight, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, the plank tables in front of the freshly carpentered barracks groaning with platters of sausage, roast chickens, boudin, smoked ducks, crab gumbo, dirty rice, and fruit pies that had been brought in carriages by ladies who lived in the most elegant plantation homes along the bayou.

Willie's tall friend, Jim Stubbefield, sat barefoot in his militia uniform, his back against a cypress tree by the water's edge, and drank from a cup of buttermilk and looked with puzzlement at the festive atmosphere in the camp. He turned to a young man in civilian clothes sitting next to him and said, "Robert, I think the fates are not working properly here. I enlisted two months ago and no one seemed to notice."