White Doves at Morning (17 page)

The previous evening he had
received a letter from Abigail Dowling, one that perplexed him and
also saddened his heart, because even though he had already learned of
Jim Stubbefield's death, he had not accepted it, each morning waking
with the notion Jim was still alive, in the Western campaign with the
18th Louisiana, the youthful confidence on his face undisturbed by
either war or mortality. In Robert's haversack was a
carte de
visite,
taken by a photographer at Camp Pratt, showing Willie,
Robert and Jim together for the last time, Jim standing while they sat,
a hand on each of their shoulders, a gentle scarecrow posed between two
smiling friends.

God fashions the pranksters to
keep the rest of us honest, Jim. Wasn't right of you to die on us, old
pal, he thought, almost resentfully.

But the other portions of
Abigail's letter disturbed him as well, although with certainty he
could not say why. He sat on a Quaker gun, in front of a cook fire, in
the cool, smoky dawn above the Shenandoah Valley, and unfolded her
letter and read it again.

Dear Robert,

I saw your father and he said
you know of Jim's death at Shiloh. I just wanted to tell you how sorry
I am at the loss of your friend. Also I need to confide some thoughts
of my own to you about the war and what I perceive as a great evil that
has fallen upon the land. Please forgive me in advance if my words are
hurtful in any way.

I helped prepare the body of a
young Union soldier who had been guarding Confederate amputees in the
hospital where I have been working in New Orleans. His throat had been
cut by men in the employ of Colonel Ira Jamison. Colonel Jamison was
offered a parole, but evidently for reasons of political gain he
refused it and had a boy of seventeen murdered in order to establish
himself as an escaped prisoner of war. I
believe this man to be the most despicable human being I have ever met.

I witnessed the hanging of a
gambler whose only crime was to possess a piece of a ripped Union flag.
The execution was ordered by none other than General Butler himself,
supposedly with the approval of President Lincoln. I would like to
believe the deaths of the gambler and the young soldier were simply
part of war's tragedy. But I would be entertaining a deception. Colonel
Jamison and General Butler are emblematic of the arrogance of power.
Their cruelty speaks for itself. The young sentry, the gambler, and Jim
Stubbefield are their victims. I think there will be others.

Please write and tell me of
your health and situation. Day and night you are in my thoughts and my
prayers.

Affectionately,

Your friend,

Abigail

The Quaker gun he sat on was a
huge log lopped free of branches that had been dragged into the
earthworks and positioned to look like a cannon. Robert looked into the
cook fire, then across an open field at timbered hills, where, if he
listened carefully, he would hear axes chopping into wood, trees
crashing among themselves, blue-clad men wheeling light artillery
through the underbrush. The wind blew inside the earthworks and the
pages of Abigail's letter fluttered in his hands.

"You think we're going
across?" he asked a lieutenant sitting next to him.

The man was named Alcibiades
LeBlanc. He was heavily bearded and was smoking a long-stem pipe, one
leg crossed on his knee. When he removed the pipe from his mouth his
cheeks were hollow and his mouth made a puckered button.

"Perhaps," he said.

Robert stood and looked across
the field again. There were two round green hills next to each other in
the distance, a stream that fed between them and woods on each side of
a dammed pond at the bottom of the stream. A Union officer rode out of
the trees and cantered his horse up and down the edge of the field.
Robert thought he saw sunlight glint on brass or steel inside the trees.

"What troubles you? Not the
Yanks, huh?" Alcibiades asked.

Robert handed him
Abigail's
letter to read. The
earthworks
were stark, constructed from huge
baskets that had been braided together out of sticks and packed solidly
with dirt and mud and rocks. Logs supported by field stones were laid
out horizontally against the walls of the rifle pits so sharpshooters
could stand on them and fire across the field. Alcibiades finished
reading the letter and refolded it and handed it back to Robert.

"She wants to marry you," he
said.

"It's that simple?" Robert
said.

Across the field a shell
exploded in a black puff of torn cotton high above the mounted
officer's head. But the officer was unperturbed and wheeled his horse
about and cantered it along the rim of the woods, where men in blue
were forming a skirmish line behind the tree trunks.

"I don't know how many times
we have to whip them to make them understand they're whipped,"
Alcibiades said.

"You didn't answer my
question," Robert said.

"She loves you dearly, no
doubt about it, and she'll marry you the day you turn your slaves loose
and denounce all this out here," his friend said, waving his hand at
the churned field, the horses that lay bloated and stiff in the
irrigation ditches, the dead soldiers who'd had their pockets pulled
inside out and their shoes stripped from their feet.

Robert put away Abigail's
letter and stared at the shells bursting over the hills in the
distance. Ten minutes later he advanced with the others in a long gray
and butternut line through the whine of minie balls and the trajectory
scream of a Yankee mortar Southerners called Whistling Dick. On either
side of him he could hear bullets and canister and case shot thudding
into the bodies of friends with whom he had eaten breakfast only a
short time ago.

The hills in the distance
reminded him of a woman's breasts. That fact made him clench his hands
on the stock of his carbine with a degree of visceral anger he did not
understand.

JEAN-JACQUES LaRose loved
clipper ships, playing the piano, fist-fighting in saloons, and the
world of commerce. He thought politics was a confidence game, created
to fool those gullible enough to trust their money and well-being to
others. The notion of an egalitarian society and seeking justice in
the courts was another fool's venture. The real equalizer in the world
was money.

Early on he knew he had a
knack for business and how to recognize cupidity in others and how to
use it to drive them against the wall. In business Scavenger Jack took
no prisoners. Money gave him power, and with power he could flaunt his
illiteracy and whorehouse manners and stick his bastard birth status in
the faces of all those who had sent him around to their back doors when
he was a child.

According to the gospel of
Jean-Jacques LaRose, anyone who said money was not important was
probably working on a plan to take it from you.

He was childish, slovenly,
sentimental, a slobbering drunk, a ferocious barroom brawler who could
leave a saloon in splinters, true to his word, honest about his debts,
at least when he could remember them, and absolutely fearless when it
came to running the Union blockade out on the salt.

He also loved the ship he had
bought five years before the war from a famous French shipbuilder in
the West Indies. It was long and sleek, and was constructed both with
boilers and masts and could outdistance most of the Union gunboats that
patrolled the mouth of the Mississippi or the entrances to the
waterways along the wetlands of Louisiana.

In no time Jean-Jacques
discovered that the Secession he had opposed was probably the best
stroke of historical luck he could have fallen into. He took cotton out
and brought coffee and rum in, with such a regular degree of success
two men from the state government and one from the army came to him
with a proposal about slipping through the blockade with a cargo of
Enfield rifles.

Seems like the patriotic thing
to do, Jean-Jacques told himself.

He picked up the rifles in the
Berry Islands, west of Nassau. Cockneys who carried knives on their
belts worked all night loading the hold, and the ship's captain
Jean-Jacques paid in gold coin was an evil-smelling man who had a
rouged West Indian boy in his cabin. But at false dawn Jean-Jacques'
visitors were gone. The sails popped with a fresh breeze, and as the
tide lifted him over the sandbar at the entrance to the cove where he
had anchored, the waves were green and the coconuts floating inside
them thudded against the solidness of the hull and the gulls hung on
the breeze above his wake like a testa
ment to HIs good
fortune. It was going to be a splendid day, he told
himself.

At noon he passed over reefs
of fire coral, through small islands that swarmed with land crabs, and
saw the steel-gray backs of porpoises arcing out of the water and
stingrays and jellyfish toppling from the waves that slid against his
bow. The air was hot and close and smelled like brass, like hurricane
weather, but the sky was clear, the water lime-green with hot blue
patches in it like floating clouds of India ink. He saw a ship briefly
on the southern horizon, one with stacks and black smoke trailing off
its stern, but the ship disappeared and he gave it no more thought.

Not until he was south of Dry
Tortugas, in no more than fifteen feet of water, when the wind dropped,
his sails went slack, and a Parrott gun at Fort Jefferson lobbed a
round forty yards off his bow.

His boilers were cold.
Jean-Jacques ran up a Spanish flag. Another round arced out of its
trajectory, this one a fused shell that exploded in a dirty scorch
overhead and showered his deck with strips of hot metal.

Then he felt the wind at his
back, like the collective breath of angels. The sails on his masts
filled and soon Fort Jefferson and the Straits of Florida were just a
bad memory.

He sailed on a westerly course
far south of New Orleans to avoid the noose the Yankee navy had placed
around the city, then turned north, toward Cote Blanche Bay, leaving
the murky green pitch and roll of the Gulf, entering the alluvial fan
of the Mississippi that flowed westward like a river of silt.

He waited for nightfall to go
in. But even though the moon was down, the sky flickered with heat
lightning, and at three in the morning two Yankee ships opened up on
him, at least one of them using cast-iron cannonballs, hooked together
with chain, that spun like a windmill and could cut a deckhand in half.

The twin paddle-wheels on his
port and starboard were churning full-out, the boilers red-hot, one
mast down on the deck, the sails ripped into shreds. Lightning rippled
across the sky and in the distance he saw the low, black-green
silhouette of the Louisiana coastline. But he knew he would not reach
it. Grapeshot that was still glowing rained across the entirety of the
ship, fizzing when it hit the bilge down below, blowing the windows out
of his cabin, setting fires
all over the deck. Then a
Confederate shore battery boomed
in the darkness and he saw a shell
spark across the sky and light up a Yankee gunboat as though a flare
had burst inside its rigging.

As if obeying a prearranged
understanding, all the firing ceased and Marsh Island slid by on his
port side and he sailed into the quiet waters of Cote Blanche Bay at
low tide, scraping across a sandbar, drifting into the smell of
schooled-up shrimp and flooded saw grass and sour mud and huge garfish
that had died in hoop nets and floated swollen and ratchet-jawed to the
surface.

He believed it was the most
lovely nocturnal scene he had ever set his eyes on. He breathed the
night air into his lungs, uncorked a wine bottle and, with the bottle
up-ended, drank most of it in one long, chugging swallow, until he lost
his balance and fell backward over a shattered spar. One by one, his
four crew members found him, all of them still scared to death, none of
them seriously hurt. They threw roped buckets overboard and drenched
the fires on deck, then drank a case of wine and went to sleep on the
piles of canvas that had fallen from the masts.

The next day Jean-Jacques
discovered his real problems had just begun.

Two dozen mule-drawn wagons
and twice that many blacks and Confederate enlisted men arrived in a
forest of persimmon, pecan, and live oak trees to take possession of
the Enfield rifles. The floor of the forest was dotted with palmettos,
the air hazy and golden with dust. The officer in charge of the
transfer was Captain Rufus Atkins.

"I thought you was off
fighting Yankees," Jean-Jacques said.

"Currently on leave from the
18th Lou'sana," Atkins said.

It was warm inside the trees.
The wind had died and the bay looked like a sheet of tin. Atkins wiped
his face with a handkerchief.

"We need to settle up,"
Jean-Jacques said.

"This is Mr. Guilbeau.
Assistant to the gov'nor. He'll make everything right for you, Jack,"
Atkins said.

"I don't use that name. My
name is Jean-Jacques, me."

"Sorry, I thought your friends
called you otherwise," Atkins said.

The man named Guilbeau was
tall and had a long face, like a horse's, and a narrow frame and a
stomach that protruded in a lopsided fashion, like a person whose liver
has calcified. He dropped the tailgate on a wagon and set a crimson
carpetbag on it that was woven with a floral design. He unsnapped the
wood laches on the bag, then lifted a gold watch from his vest pocket
and clicked it open and looked at the time.