White Doves at Morning (16 page)

But conscience and honor
require me to state I also have a practical concern. I plan to enter
politics once the war is over. Because my name will be associated in a
causal fashion, fairly or unfairly, with the tragedy of the 18th
Louisiana, I think accepting a parole will not contribute to my chances
of gaining high office. Neither do I relish the prospect or eating
dried pras on a Yankee prison camp. I'm also quitesickof being tended
by unwashed niggers in a Yankee hospital that stinks of urine-
 

She heard a Catholic sister
pass on the other side of the screen and she refolded the letter and
replaced it inside the ledger book.

Jamison woke and stared
straight up into her face. For the first time she noticed that one of
his eyes was smaller than the other, liquid, with a bead in it, like a
glimmering, narrow conduit into a part of his mind he shared with no
one.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"What you brung me here for.
To tend you. To carry out your slop jar, to fetch your food, to wash
the sweat off your skin, to listen to your grief. That's why you brung
me, ain't you, suh?"

He propped himself up on one
elbow and looked at her with a new and cautionary awareness.

ON her way out the door
to
catch the public car back to Basin Street, she saw Abigail Dowling
sitting on a stone bench under a live oak tree, next to a
double-amputee who was sleeping in a wheelchair, his head on his chest,
the bandaged stubs of his legs sticking out into space.

"Could I sit down, ma'am?" she
said.

"You don't have to ask,"
Abigail replied.

"What do the word 'par-old'
mean?"

"Say it again."

"Par-old. Like something
somebody don't want."

"You mean 'parole'?
P-a-r-o-l-e?"

"That's it."

"Prisoners of war are
exchanged sometimes so they don't have to go to a jail or a prison
camp. Or sometimes they sign an oath of allegiance and just go back
home. But you say there's somebody who doesn't want a parole?"

Flower watched the ice wagon
turn off St. Charles and enter the hospital driveway. The driver
stopped and chatted with a Creole woman who was cutting flowers and
laying them delicately in a straw basket. Vapor rose from the tarp
covering the sawed blocks of ice that had been brought in ships all the
way from New England, and were
now melting and running off
the tailgate of a dray on a dappled, pea
gravel driveway lined with pink and gray
caladium. Blue-streaked, white-crusted blocks of ice carefully packed
in sawdust that could refrigerate medicines and numb the pain in
suffering men, now melting needlessly because a man and a lady wanted
to exchange pleasantries in a floral garden in New Orleans, Louisiana.
She felt her breath catch in her throat. "Are you all right, Flower?"
Abigail asked.

"I can read. I can write some,
too. Nobody know it, though, except Willie Burke, 'cause he taught
me."  

"What is it you're trying to
tell me?"

Flower loosened the drawstring
on the cloth bag she carried and removed the dictionary given her by
Willie Burke. She flipped the pages to the P's and ran her finger down
a page until she located the word her mind had unclearly formed and
associated with an idea and an image which now seemed inextricably
linked. "'Possession,'" she said.

 "Pardon?" Abigail said.

"Colonel Jamison got one eye
smaller than the other. It got a wet blue gleam in it. I didn't know
what that look meant. It's possession, Miss Abigail. It's the control
he got over other people that keeps him alive. Not love for no family,
no cause, no little nigger baby who was found almost froze to death in
a woods."

Abigail put her arm around her
shoulders and squeezed her. "I'll always be your friend," she said.

But Flower rose from her grasp
and walked quickly to the street, her face obscured in the shadows, her
back shaking.

AFTER she returned to the
hospital that evening, the sky turned black and the wind began to blow
hard out of the south. She could hear rain hitting on the window glass
and the open shutters vibrating against the latches that moored them to
the bricks. When she looked out the window she saw leaves whipping in
circles and the highest limbs in the oak trees thrashing against the
sky and spiderwebs of lightning bursting inside the clouds.

"Sounds like cannons popping
out there, don't it?" the young sentry said. He sat in a chair by the
end of the ward, near the foyer where she kept her cot. His rifle
  was propped between his legs.

"Have you been in the war?"
she asked.

"The Rebs potshot at us out on
the river. They floated burning rafts past us so they could see us on
the far bank. But they didn't hit nobody."

When she made no reply, he
added, "I hear we're going up to Baton Rouge and kick their behinds.
I'm ready for it."

"You be careful," she said.

"I ain't afraid."

"I know you're not," she said.

He pulled a cigar box from
under his chair and shook it.

"You want to play checkers?"
he asked.

"You ain't s'pposed to be
sitting down."

"The lieutenant's a good
fellow. Bet you don't know how."

She went to the kitchen and
began washing Colonel Jamison's supper dishes. His food and drink were
never served on the same dishware or in the same glasses or cups used
by the other patients. His own china, along with his reading matter,
personal stationery, nightgown, underwear and socks, even a tailored
gray Confederate uniform, had all been brought to him by an Angola
Plantation overseer, with permission, through Union lines. Flower dried
each dish and cup and fork and knife with a soft cloth and placed them
inside a big tin breadbox painted with flowers and set the breadbox
inside a cabinet. She glanced outside and saw a closed carriage roll by
under the trees, a driver in a black slouch hat and slicker backlit
against the flicker of lightning through the canopy.

She looked in on Colonel
Jamison, who was sleeping with a pillow over his head, perhaps to
muffle the boom of thunder outside. She wondered if he dreamed of the
boys who had died under his command or if in his sleep he relived only
his own fear and wounding on the battlefield. She glanced at the three
pistol balls lying in a saucer on his nightstand and knew the answer to
her own question.

When she walked back to the
foyer the sentry was looking out the window at the leaves blowing
against the glass and the white flicker of electricity through the tops
of the trees. He had left his rifle at his post, the bayonet-tipped
barrel propped tautly against the wall.

"I was kidding you about not
knowing how to play checkers. I saw you reading a book back there in
the foyer. That puts you one up on me," he said.

"You cain't read?"

"Folks in my family is
still working on
making
their X." He grinned and looked at his
feet.

"I can teach you how," she
said.

He grinned again. His eyes
went away from her, then came back. "You gonna play checkers with me?"
he asked.

"I wouldn't mind," she replied.

He placed two chairs at a
small table by the window and removed a folded cloth painted with
checker squares from his cigar box and flattened the cloth on the
table. The checker pieces were carved from wood and looked like big
buttons, domed on the top and painted green or red. He lined them up on
the cloth squares and glanced out the window just as lightning popped
in a yard on the opposite side of the street.

"Wonder what that carriage is
doing out there?" he said.

 "It's the hearse. They
take the bodies out
the back door," she replied.

There was a disjointed
expression in his face. "A hearse?" he said.

"They don't want the other
patients to see the bodies. There's a room behind the kitchen where
they take the ones who are gonna die."

He looked emptily down the
long rows of beds in the ward and at the rectangular shadows they cast.

"I bet most of the dead is
probably Rebs who got gangrene 'cause their people didn't look out for
them," he said. "Probably," she said, avoiding his eyes.

He glanced out the window
again, then shook a thought out of his face and pushed a checker piece
forward with his index finger. "Your move. I ain't showing no mercy,
either," he said. Later, after she had looked in on the colonel for the
final time that evening, she pulled the blanket across the length of
clothesline she had strung by her cot and lay down and closed her eyes.
In her sleep she heard the rain hitting hard on the window glass and
she dreamed of birds flying from their cages, flapping their wings
loudly in their newfound freedom.

Sometime after midnight she
heard a door open and felt a draft course through the corridors and
swell against the walls and ceiling. Then in the coldness of the moment
she heard the heavy sound of
men's boots on the floor and
smelled rainwater and horsed and an odor like old clothes moldy with
damp.

She pulled the sheet over her
head and drew her knees up toward her chest and fell deeper into the
dream of birds thropping through the sky, high above the hunters whose
guns fired impotently into the air.

But the dream would not hold.
A scorched odor, like dry oak pitched on a flame, made her open her
eyes. The thunder had stopped and in its vacuum she heard wind and
leaves scraping on stone and a door fluttering on its hinges, then the
wet, crunching sound of horses' hooves and iron-rimmed carriage wheels
sinking in pea gravel.

She rose from her cot and drew
aside the blanket that hung from the clothesline stretched across her
nook. It was still dark outside and clouds of ground fog rolled and
puffed between the palms and live oak trunks. She stepped into the
hallway that fed into the ward and saw her friend, the sentry, still
seated in his chair, his back to her, his chin on his chest. His rifle
was propped against the table they had played checkers on. A brass lamp
was knocked askew on the wall above his head, oil oozing from the slit
through which the wick extended, igniting in the flame, dripping to the
floor like a string of melted gold coins.

The sentry's kepi lay
crown-down on the table.

Oh, Lordy, they gonna shoot
you for sleeping on guard duty, she said to herself.

But even as she heard the
words inside her, she knew they were a deception. She stepped into what
should have been the periphery of his vision and saw the paleness in
his cheeks and the dark area, like a child's bib, under his chin. A
barber's razor with a pearl handle lay in a circle of blood at his feet.

At the end of the ward the
screens had been moved aside from the colonel's bed. The sheet he had
slept under trailed on the floor like a handkerchief half-pulled from a
man's pocket. She ran toward the kitchen to find the night nurse, the
Confederate amputees propping themselves up at the sound of feet. The
brass lamp still burned on the colonel's nightstand. She glanced at the
saucer where he had kept the three .36 caliber pistol balls that had
been removed from his body, hoping that perhaps in some way what she
had always known about him and denied, namely, that first and last and
foremost he thought of no one except himself and his own possessions,
was not true.

The saucer was bare, his
overturned slop jar running on the floor.

LIEUTENANT Robert Perry had
always slept without dreaming, or at least without dreaming of events
or places or people he remembered in daylight. The world was a fine
place, filled with bird-song and the smell of horses and wood smoke at
dawn and fish spawning in swamps where the sunlight glowed like a green
lantern inside the cypress. In fact, in the quietness of the dawn and
the faint pinkness spreading across the cane fields and the cabins of
the slaves and the horses blowing in the pasture, Robert sometimes
believed he was witness to the quiet hush of God's breath upon the
world.

Now sleep came to him fitfully
and took him to places to which he did not want to return. The
geographical designations—Manassas Junction, Winchester, Front Royal,
Cross Keys—were names that never appeared in the dreams. His nocturnal
recollection of these places came to him only in images and sounds: a
night picket cocking back the hammer on a rifle, a man calling for
water, another caught inside a burning woods, a stretcher bearer
sitting on the lip of a crater in the middle of a railroad track,
holding his ears, screaming, kicking his feet.

When
Robert
would
finally fall into a
deep slumber before dawn,
he would awake suddenly to the
whistling sound of a shell arcing out of its trajectory, then discover
the world outside his tent was silent, except perhaps for a cook
rattling pans in the back of a wagon. He would lie with his arm across
his eyes, his palm resting on the coolness of his revolver, breathing
slowly, reciting his morning prayers, waiting for his mind to empty of
dreams he told himself had no application in the waking day.