White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (30 page)

It was a place she went back to again and again in her memory. It was a special place where she lived when she felt threatened, if the world seemed too much for her late and soon, like a cathedral in which she and her father were the only visitors.

When she came to south Louisiana during the yellow fever epidemic and smelled the salt breeze blowing off Lake Pontchartrain and saw roses blooming in December and palm trees rising starkly against the coastline, like those around Cadiz, she felt that the best memories in her life had suddenly been externalized and made real again and perhaps down a cobbled street in the old part of New Orleans her father waited for her at an outdoor cafe table under a balcony that was hung with tropical flowers.

Perhaps it was a foolish way to be, but her father had always taught her the greatest evil one person could do to another was to interfere in his or her destiny, and to Abigail that meant no one had a right to intrude upon either the province of her soul or her imagination or the ties that bound her to the past and allowed her to function in the present.

But now, in the drowsy shade of a colonnade in April 1865, at the close of the greatest epoch in American history, she wished she was on board a sailing ship, within sight ol Malaga, the palm trees banked thickly at the base of the Sierra Nevada, like a displaced piece of Africa, the troubles and conflicts of war-torn Louisiana far behind her.

"You all right, Miss Dowling?"

She looked up, startled, at Mr. LeBlanc. The boy in brown homespun and the Confederate-issue kepi stood behind him, his choke sack tied with a string around his wrist.

"This young fellow here says a preacher bought him a stage ticket to find Willie Burke," Mr. LeBlanc said.

The boy stared down the street, as though unconcerned about the events taking place around him.

"What's your name again?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.

"Tige McGuffy."

"Where did you know Mr. Willie from?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.

"Shiloh Church. I was with the 6th Mis'sippi. Me and him was both at the Peach Orchard."

"And you have no family?" Mr. LeBlanc said.

"I just ain't sure where they're at right now."

"Don't lie to people when they're trying to help you, son," Mr. LeBlanc said.

The boy's cheeks pooled with color.

"My daddy was with Gen'l Forrest. He never come back. The sheriff was gonna send me to the orphans' home. The preacher from our church give me the money for a stage ticket here," he said.

His skin was brown, filmed with dust, his throat beaded with dirt rings. He studied the far end of the street, his mousy hair blowing at the edges of his kepi.

"When did you eat last?" Abigail asked.

"A while back. At a stage stop," he replied.

"When?" Abigail asked.

"Yesterday. I don't eat much. It ain't a big deal with me."

"I see. Pick up your things and let's see what you and I can find for lunch," she said.

"I wasn't looking for no handouts," he said.

"I know you're not," she said, and winked at him. "Come on, walk me home. I never know when a carriage is going to run me down."

He thought about it, then crooked his arm and extended it for her to hold on to.

"It's a mighty nice town you got here," he said; admiring the buildings and the trees on the bayou. "Did Willie Burke make it through the war all right?"

"I think so. I'm not sure. The 18th Louisiana had a bad time of it, Tige," she said.

"Think so?"
he said, looking up at her, his forehead wrinkling.

IRA Jamison sat astride a white gelding and watched his first shipment of convicts from the jails of New Orleans and Baton Rouge go to work along the river's edge, chopping down trees, burning underbrush and digging out the coffins in a slaves' cemetery that had filled with water seepage and formed a large depiession in the woods.

Most of the convicts were Negroes. A few were white and a few were children, some as young as seven years old. All of them wore black-and-white-striped jumpers and pants, and hats that were woven together from palmetto leaves. They flung the chopped trees and underbrush onto bonfires that were burning by the river's edge and raked the rotted wood and bones from the slaves' coffins into the water. As Ira Jamison moved his horse out of the smoke blowing off the fires, he tried to form in his mind's eye a picture of the log skid and sawmill and loading docks that would replace the woods and the Negro cemetery.

He did not like the idea of the children working among the adults. They were not only in the way, they were not cost-effective. But his state contract required he take all the inmate men, women, and children, from the parish jails throughout Louisiana; house, clothe and feed them; and put them to work in some form of rehabilitative activity and simultaneously contribute to the states economy.

He watched a Negro boy, no more than twelve, clean a nest of bones and rags from a coffin and begin flinging them off the bank into the current. The boy picked up the skull by inserting his fingers in the eye sockets and pitched it in a high arc onto a pile of driftwood that was floating south toward Baton Rouge, the boy nudged a companion and pointed at his handiwork.

"Bring that one to me," Jamison said to Clay Hatcher, who was now back at his former job on the plantation, his blond hair the color of old wood, the skin under his right eye grained black from a musket that had blown up in his face at the battle of Mansfield.

"You got it, Kunnel," Hatcher said.

He walked into the trees and the trapped smoke from the bonfires and tapped the skull-thrower on top of his palmetto hat.

When the boy approached Jamison's horse he removed his hat and raised his face uncertainly. His striped jumper was grimed with red dirt, his hair sparkling with sweat.

"Yes, suh?" he said.

"It doesn't bother you to handle dead people's bones?" Jamison asked.

"No, suh."

"Why not?"                                                                        

"'Cause they dead," the boy said, and grinned. Then his face seemed to brighten with curiosity as he gazed up at Jamison.

"You have a reason for looking at me like that?" Jamison asked.

"You gots one eye mo' little than the other, that's all," the boy replied.

Jamison felt the gelding shift its weight under him.

"Why were you sent to jail?" he asked.

"They ain't ever tole me."

"Don't be playing on the job anymore. Can you do that for me?" Jamison said.

"Yes, suh."

"Get on back to work now," Jamison said.

"Yes, suh."

By day's end the log skid was almost completed, the graves excavated and filled in, packed down with clay and smoothed over with iron rollers, the sides of the depression overlaid with cypress planks and stobs to prevent erosion. In fact, it was a masterpiece of engineering, Jamison thought, a huge sluice that could convert timber into money, seven days a week, as fast as the loggers could fell trees and slide them down the slope.

As he turned his horse toward the house he saw Clay Hatcher pick up an object from a mound of mud on the edge of the work area. Hatcher knocked the mud off it and held it up in the light to see the object more clearly. Then he stooped over and washed it in a bucket of water the convicts had used to clean their shovels in. Jamison walked his horse toward Hatcher.

"What do you have there, Clay?" he asked.

"It looks to be an old merry-go-round. It's still got a windup key plugged in it. I wonder what it was doing in the graveyard," Hatcher replied.

Jamison reached down and took the merry-go-round from Hatcher's fingers and studied the hand-carved horses, the corroded brass cylinder inside the base, the key that was impacted with dirt and feeder roots. He had given it to Uncle Royal, who in turn had given it to his great-grandson, the one who died of a fever. Or was it an accident, something about an overturned wagon crushing him? Jamison couldn't remember.

He returned it to Hatcher.

"Wash it off and give it to the skull-thrower," he said.

"That little nigra boy?"

"Yes."

"Why would you be doing that, Kunnel?"

"He's intelligent and brave. You never make a future enemy of his kind if you can avoid it."

"I'll be switched if I'll ever understand you, Kunnel," Hatcher said.

Jamison flipped his reins idly across the back of his hand. The day you do is the day I and every other plantation owner in the South will have a problem, he thought, and was surprised at his own candor.

WILLIE Burke had long ago given up the notion of sleeping through the night from dark to dawn. His dreams woke him up with regularity, every one to two hours, and his sleep was filled with images and feelings that were less terrifying than simply disjointed and unrelieved, like the quiet throbbing of a headache or an impacted tooth. Tonight, as he slept under a wagon behind a farmhouse, he dreamed he was marching on a soft, powdery road through hills that were covered with thistle and dead grass. Up ahead, a brass cannon, its muzzle pointed back at him, flopped crazily on its carriage, and brown dust cascaded like water off the rims and spokes of the wheels.

His feet burned with blisters and his back ached from the weight of his rifle and pack. He wanted to escape fom the dream and the heat of the march into the cool of the morning and the early fog that had marked each dawn since he had begun walking back toward New Iberia from Natchitoches in northwestern Louisiana. In his sleep he heard roosters crowing, a hog snuffing inside a railed lot, horses nickering and thudding their hooves impatiently in a woods. He sat up in the softness of the dawn and saw a pecan orchard that was still bare of leaves, the trunks and branches wet with dew, and the dream of the brass cannon barrel flopping crazily under a murderous sun gradually became unreal and unimportant, its meaning, if it had one, lost in the beginning of a new day.

He got to his feet and urinated behind a corncrib, then realized he was not alone. Between thirty and forty mounted men moved out of the fog in the pecan orchard and formed a half circle around the back of the farmhouse.

They wore ragged beards and bayonet-cut hair. Their elbows poked through their shirts; their pants were streaked with grease and road grime, their skin the color of saddle leather, as though it had been smoked over a fire.

The leader wore gray pants and a blue cotton shirt and a cavalry officer's hat that had wilted over his ears. A sword inside a leather scabbard and a belt strung with three holstered cap-and-ball pistols were looped over his saddle pommel. Even though the morning was peppered with mist, his face looked dilated, overheated, his eyes scalded.

"You Secesh?" he asked.

"I was," Willie replied.

"I've seen you. You was looting the body of one of my men at St. Martinville," the guerrilla said, his horse shifting under him.

"You're wrong, my friend. I won't be abiding the insult, either."

The guerrilla touched his horse's side with his boot heel and approached Willie, leaning down in the saddle to get a better look. His eyes were colorless, filled with energies that seemed to have no moral source. His coppery hair was pushed up under his hat, like a woman's.

"You know who I am?" he asked.

"I think your name is Jarrette. I think you rode with William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson and helped burn Lawrence, Kansas, to the ground," Willie said.

"You got a mouth on you, do you?"

"I saw your handiwork on the St. Martinville Road. Your men give no quarter."

"That's life under a black flag. We recognize no authority except Jehovah and Jefferson Davis. What's inside that house?"

"A woman with a gun and a three - or four-day-old corpse." The guerrilla leader stared at the house, then looked in both directions, as though he heard bugles or gunfire, although there were no sounds except those of a rural morning and the buzzing of bottle flies inside the house.

One of the guerrilla leader's men leaned in the saddle and whispered in his ear.

"We was here?" the leader said.

The other guerrilla nodded. The leader, whose name was Jarrette, turned his attention back to Willie. "I don't want you walking behind me," he said.

"The war's over," Willie said.

"The hell it is."

Jarrette's face twitched under his hat. He glared into the distance, his back straightening, his thighs tightening on his horse. Willie looked in the direction of his interest but saw nothing but gray fields and a fog-shrouded pecan orchard.

"I gut blue-bellies and fill up their cavities with stones and sink them to the bottoms of rivers. Jayhawkers get the same. You saying I'm a liar?" Jarrette said.

Willie looked at his pie-plate face and the moral insanity in his eyes and the rubbery, unnatural configuration of his mouth. "I mean you no harm," he said.

"Stay out of my road," Jarrette said.

 "My pleasure. Top of the morning to you," Willie said. He watched Jarrette and his men ride out of the dirt yard toward the road, then scooped off his flop hat and began collecting chicken's eggs from under a manure wagon and in the depressions along the barn wall. He had put three brown eggs inside the crown of his hat and was walking toward a smokehouse that lay on its side, dripping grease and smoldering in its own ashes, when he heard the hooves of a solitary horse thundering across the earth behind him.

He turned just as the guerrilla leader bore down upon him, leaning from the saddle, the point of hes hilted sword extended in frong of him.The sword's sharpened edge knifed through the top of Willie's shirt, just above the collarbone, and sliced across the skin of his shoulder as coldly as an icicle.

Willie crumpled his hat against his wound and collapsed against a rick fence, the eggs breaking and running down his clothes. He stared stupidly at the guerrilla leader, who disappeared in the mist, an idiot's grin on his mouth.

Chapter Twenty-one

THE two-story gabled house next to the Catholic cemetery had been built in the 1840s by an eccentric ornithologist and painter who had worked with James Audubon in Key West and the Florida Everglades. Unfortunately his insatiable love of painting tropical birds as well as Tahitian nudes seemed to be related to a libidinous passion for red wine, Parisian prostitutes, gambling, and trysts with the wives of the wealthiest and best duelists in southern Louisiana.