White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (9 page)

He looked at her in a concerned way.

"Come in, Mr. Jamison," she said.

After he was inside, she did not notice the glance he gave to his driver, who snapped the reins on the backs of his team and turned the carriage in the street and drove it back toward the business district.

He sat by her on the couch. The wind rustled the oak trees outside and blew the curtains on the windows. She saw heat lightning flicker in the yard, then heard raindrops begin ticking in the leaves and on the roof.

"I'll do whatever I can to help find the whereabouts of Robert Perry," he said.

"I'd appreciate it very much, Mr. Jamison."

"This may be an inappropriate time to say this, but I think you're a lady of virtue and principle, and also one who's incredibly beautiful. Whatever resources I have, they'll be made immediately available to you whenever you're in need, for whatever reason, regardless of the situation."

She was sitting on the edge of the couch, her shoulders slightly bent, her hands in her lap. She could feel the emotional fatigue of the last two days wash through her, almost like a drug. Her eyes started to film.

"It's all right," he said, his arm slipping around her.

He leaned across her and pulled her against him and spread his fingers on her back, pressing his cheek slightly to hers. Then she felt his lips touch her hair and his hand stroking her back, and she placed her hands on the firmness of his arms and let her forehead rest on his chest.

He tilted her face up and kissed her lightly on the mouth, then on the eyes and cheeks and the mouth again, and she put her arms around his neck and held him tighter than she should, letting go, surrendering to it, the heat and wetness in her own body now a balm to her soul rather than a threat, the wind blowing the curtains and filling the room with the smell of rain and flowers.

He extinguished the oil lamp and laid her back on the couch. He bent down over her and she felt his tongue enter her mouth, his hand
cup one breast, then the other, and slide down her stomach toward her thighs. His breath was hoarse in his throat. He pressed her leg against the swelling hardness in his pants.

She twisted her face away from him and sat up, her hands clenched in her lap.

"Please go, Mr. Jamison," she said.

"I'm sorry if I've done something wrong, Miss Abigail."

"The fault isn't yours," she replied.

He hesitated a moment, then stood up and pushed his hair out of his eyes.

"If I can make this up—" he began.

"You need to fetch your driver, sir. Thank you for your kind offer of assistance," she said.

For the first time she realized one of his eyes was smaller than the other. She did not know why that detail stuck in her mind.

That night she woke feverish and sweaty and tangled in her sheets, her head filled with images from a dream about a sow eating her farrow. She did not fall asleep again until dawn.

TWO days later she was walking home from the grocery, stepping around mud puddles in the street, an overly loaded wicker basket in each of her hands. Rufus Atkins stopped his buggy and got down and tried to take one of the baskets from her.

"Don't do that," she said.

"Marse Jamison says to look after you," Atkins said.

"Take your hand off my basket."

"Sorry, Miss Abigail. I got my orders." He winked at her, then pulled the basket from her hand and swung it up behind the buggy seat. He reached for the other basket.

"He has also ordered you to stop molesting women in this community," she said.

"What are you talking about?" Atkins asked.

"The telegraph message he sent you."

"He didn't send me a telegraph message. He told me something about not letting the overseers impregnate any of the wenches. But be didn't send me a telegraph message."

She stared at him blankly.

Atkins laughed to himself. "Look, Miss Dowling, I don't know what kind of confusion you're under, but Marse Jamison is giving the niggers a little self-government so's he can get himself installed in Jefferson Davis' cabinet. Davis is famous for the nigger councils on his plantations. Is this what you're talking about?"

"Give my back my basket," she said.

"By all means. Excuse me for stopping. But your nose was so high up in the air I thought you might walk into a post and knock yourself unconscious," he said.

He dropped her grocery basket in the mud and drove off, popping his buggy whip above the back of his horse.

TWO weeks later the Confederate War Department notified the parents of Robert Perry their son had been separated from his regiment during the Battle of Manassas Junction and that he was alive and well and back among his comrades.

That same night, while the moon was down, Abigail Dowling rowed a runaway slave woman and her two small children to a waiting boat, just north of Vermilion Bay. All three of them were owned by Ira Jamison.

Chapter Six

IN THE spring of the following year, 1862, Willie and Jim marched northward, at the rear of the column, along a meandering road through miles of cotton acreage, paintless shacks, barns, corn cribs, smokehouses, privies, tobacco sheds cobbled together from split logs, and hog pens whose stench made their eyes water.

The people were not simply poor. Their front porches buzzed with horseflies and mosquitoes. The hides of their draft animals were lesioned with sores. The beards of the men grew to their navels and their clothes hung in rags on their bodies. The children were rheumy-eyed and had bowed legs from rickets, their faces flecked with gnats. The women were hard-bitten, dirt-grained creatures from the fields, surly and joyless and resentful of their childbearing and apt to take an ax to the desperate man who tried to put a fond hand on their persons.

Willie looked around him and nodded. So this is why we came to Tennessee, he thought.

Two months earlier he and Jim had been on leave from the 18th Louisiana at Camp Moore and had stood in front of a saloon on upper St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, dipping beer out of a bucket, watching other soldiers march under the canopy of live oaks, past columned homes with ceiling-high windows and ventilated green shutters, regimental bands playing, the Stars and Bars and Bonnie Blue flags flying, barefoot Negro children running under the colonnades, pretending they were shooting one another with broomsticks and wood pistols.

It was a false spring and the air was balmy and filled with the smells of boiled crawfish and crabs and pralines. The sky was ribbed with pink clouds, and palm fronds and banana trees rattled in the breeze off Lake Pontchartrain. Out on the Mississippi giant paddle-wheelers blew their whistles in tribute to the thousands of soldiers turning out of St. Charles into Canal, the silver and gold instruments of the bands flashing in full sunlight now, the mounted Zouaves dressed like Bedouins in white turbans and baggy scarlet pants.

Women threw flowers off the balconies into the columns of marching men. Prostitutes from Congo Square winked at them from under their parasols and sometimes hoisted their skirts up to their thighs and beyond.

"Maybe there's something glorious about war after all," Jim said.

"We might have to rethink that statement later on, Jim," Willie replied.

"I hear a trip to Congo Square is two dollars," Jim said.

"The fee for the doctor to stick an eight-inch hot needle up your pole is an additional three," Willie said.

"If I had a lady like Abigail Dowling on my mind, I'd have the same elevated sentiments." Jim looked at the prostitutes hiking their skirts across the boulevard and sucked his teeth philosophically. "But I'm afraid my virginity is going to die a beautiful and natural death in old New Orleans tonight."

Now New Orleans was surrounded by Federal gunboats and the city's surrender was expected any day.

Where were Louisiana's troops? Willie asked himself.

In Tennessee, protecting hog farmers and their wives, one glance at whom would make any man seriously consider a life of celibacy, Willie said to himself.

As the column crested a rise he could see the great serpentine length of the army he was marching in, the mismatched gray and butternut uniforms, some regiments,
 like his own, actually wearing blue jackets, all of them heading toward a distant woods on the west bank of the Tennessee River.

But his deprecating thoughts about his surroundings and the governance of the Confederate military were not the true cause of his discontent. Nor did he think any longer about the heaviness of the Enfield rifle on his shoulder or the blisters on his feet or the dust that drifted back from the wheels of the ambulance wagons.

In the pit of his stomach was an emptiness he could not fill or rid himself of. When the sun broke through the clouds that had sealed the sky for days, lighting the hardwood forest in the distance, a bilious liquid surged out of his stomach into the back of his mouth and his bowels slid in and out of his rectum. A vinegary reek rose from his armpits into his nostrils, not the smell of ordinary sweat that comes from work or even tramping miles along a hard-packed dirt road, but the undisguised glandular stench of fear.

"What day is it?" Willie said.

"Saturday, April 5," Jim replied. "Why's that?"

"I don't know. I don't know why I asked. What's that place up yonder called?"

"To my knowledge, it doesn't have a name. It's a woods."

"That's foolishness, Jim. Every place has a name."

"There's nothing there except a Methodist church house. It's called Shiloh. That's it. Shiloh Church," Jim said.

THEY camped late that afternoon in a clearing among trees on the edge of a ravine. The floor of the forest and the sides of the ravine were layered with leaves that had turned gray under the winter snow and were now dry and powdery under their feet. The sun was an ember in the west, the trees bathed in a red light like the radiance from a smithy's forge.

Willie sat on a log and pulled off his shoes and massaged his feet. The odor from his socks made him avert his face and hold his breath. All around him men were stacking their weapons, breaking rations out of their haversacks, kicking together cook fires. The wind was blowing off the river, and the canopy of hickory and chestnut and oak trees flickered against the pinkness of the sky. In the knock of axes, the plunking of a banjo being tuned, the smell of corn mush and fatback frying, it was not hard to pretend they were all young fellows and good friends assembling for a camp meeting or coon hunt.

Maybe that's all it would be, Willie thought. Just another long stroll across the countryside, a collective exercise that would be unmemorable once the grand illusion became obvious to them all.

Jim poured water from his canteen into a big tin cup, then carefully measured out two spoonfuls of real coffee into the water, not chicory and ground corn, and set it to boiling on a flat stone in the center of his cook fire. His face looked composed and thoughtful as he squatted by the fire, his skin sun-browned, his sideburns shaggy, the road dust on his face streaked where his sweat had dried.

Willie went to the field kitchen and got a pan of corn mush, his unlaced shoes flopping on his feet, then squatted next to Jim and greased the bottom of a small frying pan with a piece of salt bacon and poured the mush on top of it and stuck the pan in the coals.

"What's the first thing you're going to do when we get back home?" he asked Jim.

"Start my own shipwright business. Build the first clipper ship to come out of New Iberia, Lou'sana," Jim said.

"Steam is making museum pieces of the clippers, Jim."

"That's good. I won't have competitors," Jim said.

Willie lowered his head so his voice wouldn't travel.

"Are you scared?" he asked.

"If you was as scared as I am, you'd run for home. I'm just too scared to get my legs moving," Jim said.

"You put on a good act, you ole beanpole. But I don't think you're scared of anything," Willie replied.

Jim stood up with his tin cup of boiling coffee and poured half of it into Willie's cup. He rubbed Willie on the top of the head.

"No blue-bellies can do in the likes of us," he said.

"That's right, by God. Here, our mush is ready," Willie said.

"I can't eat. I think I got a stomach cold. Can't hold anything down," Jim said, walking into the shadows so Willie could not see his face.

The sun dipped below the hills and suddenly the woods were cooler the sky the
color of coal dust, without moon or stars, the tree branches knocking together overhead, to the north there were fires on the bluffs above the river and Willie thought he could feel the vibrations of gun carriages and caissons through the ground.

Five men and a drummer boy from the 6th Mississippi, in butternut pants and homespun shirts, were sitting around a fire, six feet away, smoking cob pipes, laughing at a joke.

"Who's out there?" Willie asked them, nodding toward the north.

" 'Who's out there?' Where the hell you been, boy?" a tall man with a concave face said.

"Corinth."

"Them bluffs and ravines is crawling with Yankees. They been out there for weeks," the man said.

"Why not leave them be?" Willie asked.

"We done turned that into a highly skilled craft, son. But the word is we're going at them tomorrow," the man said.

Willie felt his stomach constrict and sweat break on his forehead. He went out of the firelight, into the trees, and vomited.

Fifteen minutes later Jim came back to the fire and sat down on the log beside Willie, his sheathed bowie knife twisting against the log's bark. Willie sniffed the air.

"What have you been up to?" he asked.

Jim opened his coat to reveal a half-pint, corked bottle stuck down in his belt. The clear liquid it contained danced in the firelight.

"This stuff will blow the shoes off a mule," he said.

Three soldiers with a banjo, fiddle, and Jew's harp were playing a dirge by the edge of the ravine. The men from the 6th Mississippi were lying on their blankets or in their tents, and the drummer boy sat by himself, staring into the fire, his drum with crossed sticks on top resting by his foot. He wore an oversized kepi, and his scalp was gray where his hair had been bowl-cut above his ears. His dour face, with downturned mouth and impassive eyes, was like a miniature painting of the Southern mountain man to whom sorrow and adversity are mankind's natural lot.