White Doves at Morning (37 page)

"Some of those Yanks
weren't bad fellows," Willie said.

"You said you repented of
any violation of our friendship and you
never wanted in impair my  relationship
with another."

"A fellow's
thoughts get
a bit confused when he's about to have eight Yanks fire their rifles
into his lights," Willie said.

"I see," Robert said. "Well,
you're a mighty good friend, Willie Burke, and you never have to repent
to me about anything. Are we clear on what we're talking about, old
pal?"

"It's a tad murky to me. May I
get back to my work now?"

Robert watched the wind
blowing in the Spanish moss and in the trees along the bayou and
grinned at nothing. "Did you sign the oath of allegiance?" he asked.

"The oath? No, never got
around to it, I'm afraid," Willie said.

"Thought not. My parents are
living in a shack behind a Union officer's house."

"We had a good run at it. We
lost. Accept it, Robert. When they give us a bad time, tell them to
kiss our ruddy bums."

"A nation that fought
honorably shouldn't be treated as less," Robert said. "There are men
here who have a plan to take Louisiana back out of the Union. They
fought shoulder to shoulder with us. They're fine men, Willie."

Willie set down his ax and
wiped his hands on a rag and glanced furtively at his friend. Robert's
face was wooden, his eyes troubled. Then he saw Willie watching him and
he looked again at the wind in the trees and grinned at nothing.

AT dusk the two of them walked
through the streets to the house Abigail and Flower had converted into
a school. Robert was not prepared for what he saw. Every room in the
house, both upstairs and downstairs, was brightly lit and filled with
people of color. They were of all ages and all of them were dressed in
their best clothes. And those for whom there was no room sat on the
gallery or milled about under the live oak in the front yard.

The desks were fashioned from
church pews that had been sawed into segments and placed under plank
tables that ran the width of the rooms. The walls were decorated with
watercolor paintings and the numbers one to ninety-nine and the letters
of the alphabet, which had been scissored from red, yellow, and purple
pieces of cloth. Each student
  had a square of slate and
a piece of chalk and a da
mp rag
to write with, and each of
them by the end of the evening had to spell ten words correctly that he
could not spell the previous week.

Then Robert looked through a
downstairs window and saw Abigail Dowling in front of a class that
included a dozen blacks, Tige McGuffy, the bordello operator Carrie
LaRose and her pirate of a brother, Scavenger Jack, who looked like a
shaggy behemoth stuffed between the plank writing table and sawed-down
pew.

Abigail wore a dress that had
a silver-purplish sheen to it, and her chestnut hair was pulled back in
a bun and fixed with a silver comb, so that the light caught on the
broadness of her forehead and the resolute quality of her eyes.

Robert waved when she seemed
to glance out the window, then he realized she could not see him in the
darkness and she had been reacting to a sound in the street. He turned
and watched a flatbed wagon loaded with revelers creak past the school.
The revelers were drunk on busthead whiskey, yelling, sometimes jumping
down to pick up a dirt clod, flinging it at a schoolroom window. A
slope-shouldered man in a suit and a bowler hat followed them on
horseback, a gold toothpick set in the corner of his mouth.

"Who's that fellow?" Robert
asked.

"Todd McCain. Abby outbid him
on the building," Willie said.

"Not a good loser, is he?"
Robert said.

"Toddy is one of those whose
depths will probably never be quite plumbed," Willie said.

The revelers got down from
their wagon, uncorking bottles of corn liquor and drinking as they
walked, watching the families of Negroes under the trees part in their
path, like layers of soil cleaving off the point of a plowshare. One of
them drained his bottle, carefully tamped the cork back down in the
neck, then broke it on the roof of the school.

Robert walked through the
revelers into the street, where Todd McCain sat on his horse under a
street lantern that had been hoisted on a pulley to the top of a pole.
McCain's face was shadowed by his bowler, his narrow shoulders pinched
inside his coat. Robert stroked the white blaze on the nose of McCain's
horse.

"A fine animal you have here,"
he said.
 

McCain removed the gold
toothpick from his mouth, his teeth glistening b
riefly
in the dark, as though he might be smiling. "You're Bob Perry," he
said.

"My friends call me Robert.
But you can call me Lieutenant Perry. Why is it I have the feeling this
collection of drunkards and white trash is under your direction?"

"Search me," McCain said.

"Can I accept your word you're
about to take them from our presence?"

"They're just boys having fun."

"I'll put it to you more
simply. How would you like to catch a ball between your eyes?"

The wind had died and the air
in the street had turned stale and close, stinking of horse and dog
droppings, the lantern overhead iridescent with humidity. The joy in
the revelers had died, too, as they watched their leader being
systematically humiliated. McCain's horse shifted its weight and tossed
its head against the reins. McCain brought his fist down between the
animal's ears.

"Hold, you shithog!" he said.

"Give me your answer, sir,"
Robert said.

McCain cleared his throat and
spit out into the street. He wiped his mouth.

"You've read for the law. I'm
a merchant who doesn't have your verbal skills," he said. He turned his
horse in a circle, its hindquarters and swishing tail causing Robert to
step backward. Then McCain straightened his shoulders and pulled the
creases out of his coat and said something under his breath.

"What? Say that again!" Robert
said, starting forward.

But McCain kicked his heels
into his horse's ribs and set off in a full gallop down the street, his
legs clenched as tightly in the stirrups as a wood clothespin, one hand
dipping inside his coat. He jerked the bit back in his horse's mouth,
whirled in a circle, and bore down on Robert Perry, his bowler flying
from his head, a nickel-plated, double-barrel derringer pointed
straight out in front of him.

He popped off only one round,
nailing the lantern on the pole dead center, blowing glass in a shower
above Robert's head. He held up the derringer in triumph, the unfired
barrel a silent testimony to the mercy he was extending an adversary.

The revelers roared  with
glee and vindication and climbed aboard their
flatbed wagon, then followed
their leader
back down the street to a saloon. Robert picked a sliver of glass off
his shirt and pitched it into the darkness.

"The word is he's a White
Leaguer," Willie said.

"I don't think they're all cut
out of the same cloth," Robert said.

Willie looked at Robert's
profile, the uncut hair on the back of his neck, the clarity in his
eyes. "How would you be knowing that?" he said.

"The carpetbaggers are pulling
the nails out of our shoes. We don't always get to choose our
bedfellows. Wake up, Willie," Robert replied.

"Oh, Robert, don't be taken in
by these fellows. They do their deeds in darkness and dishonor our
colors. Tell me you're not associating with that bunch."

But Robert did not reply. As
Willie watched his friend walk inside the school to find Abigail
Dowling, the sword wound in his shoulder seemed to flare as though
someone had held a lighted match to his skin.

EACH morning Ira Jamison rose
to greater prosperity and political expectations. Where others saw the
collapse of a nation, he saw vast opportunity. He listened respectfully
while his neighbors decried carpetbag venality and gave his money and
support to the clandestine groups who spoke of retaking Louisiana from
the Union, but in truth he viewed the carpetbaggers as cheaply dressed
and poorly educated amateurs who could be bought for pocket change.

His summer days of 1865 began
with a fine breakfast on his terrace, with an overview of the
Mississippi and the trees and bluffs on the far side. He drank his
coffee and read his newspapers and the mail that was delivered in a
leather pouch from the plantation store. He subscribed to publications
in New Orleans, Atlanta, New York, and Chicago, and read them all while
a pink glow spread across the land and fresh convict labor throughout
the state arrived by steamboat and jail wagon for processing in the
camps and barracks they built themselves as the first down payment on
their sentences.

Ira Jamison wondered if Abe
Lincoln, moldering in the grave, had any idea what he had done for Ira
Jamison when  he emancipated the slaves.
.

Then he unwrapped the current
issue of
Harper's Weekly,
read the lead stories, and turned to
the second page. At the top of a four-column essay were the words:

The Resurrection of a
Vanquished Enemy? The Negro as Convict in the New South, A View by Our
Louisiana Correspondent

Jamison set down his coffee
cup and began reading.

Even the apologists for
Jefferson Davis would concede he spent a political lifetime attempting
to spread slavery throughout the Western territories as well as the
Caribbean. His close friend Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest
has recently tried to influence congressional legislation that would
bring about the importation of one million Cantonese coulees to the
United States as a source of post-Emancipation labor.

However, an ex-Confederate
colonel by the name of Ira Jamison, who has converted his central
Louisiana plantation into an enormous prison, may have come upon a
profit-making scheme in the exploitation of African labor that
outrivals any precedent his peers may have set.

Mr. Jamison rents convicts to
enterprises and businessmen whose vested interest is to keep costs low
and productivity high. The reports of beatings, malnutrition, and
deaths from exhaustion and exposure to inclement weather are widespread.

Mr. Jamison, who prefers to be
called 'Colonel,' is a wounded veteran of Shiloh. But his name has also
been associated with the destruction of the 18th Louisiana Infantry,
who were sent uphill into Union artillery and were unsupported on the
flank by the unit under Mr. Jamison's command—

The name on the byline was
Abigail Dowling.

Ira Jamison rolled the journal
into a tight cylinder and walked into the house, tapping it on his leg,
puffing air in one cheek, then the other, conscious each moment of the
anger she could stir in him, the control he had to muster not to let it
show in his face. He stood by his fireplace, tapping the cusp of the
Journal against the bricks, looking out the window at
the brilliance of the day. Then, like a man who could not refrain from
picking at a scab, his eye wandered to the fissure that cut across his
hearth and climbed up one side of his chimney. Had it grown wider? Why
was he looking at it now?

He took a lucifer match from a
vase on the mantel and scratched it alight, then touched the flame to
the rolled edges of the journal and watched the paper blacken along one
side of the cylinder. He dropped the pages like burning leaves on top
of the andirons.

He sent his body servant to
find both Clay Hatcher and Rufus Atkins. A half hour later they
tethered their horses in the backyard and walked into the shade of the
porte cochere and knocked on the side door. He did not invite them in
and instead stepped outside and motioned for them to follow him to the
terrace, where his uneaten breakfast still sat, buzzing with flies.

"One of the niggers serve you
spoiled food, Kunnel? Tell us which one," Hatcher said.

"Shut up, Clay," Rufus Atkins
said.

Jamison stood on the
flagstones of the terrace, his fists propped on his hips, his head
lowered in thought. The green boughs and bright red bloom of a mimosa
tree feathered in the wind above the three men.

"I understand Abigail Dowling
has started up a school for freed slaves," Jamison said.

"She ain't the only one.
Flower is teaching there, too," Hatcher said.

Atkins gave Hatcher a heated
look.

"Flower?" Jamison said.

"Damn right. Teaching reading
and writing and arithmetic. Can you believe hit?" Hatcher said.

"Who put up the money for the
school?" Jamison said.

"I hear she got hit from the
woman runs the whorehouse," Hatcher said.

"Who is
she?"
Jamison
asked.

Hatcher started to speak, but
Atkins cut him off.

"Abigail Dowling got the money
from Carrie LaRose, Colonel," Atkins said. "Is there something you want
done?"

"I've suspected for some time
Miss Dowling is an immoralist. Do you know what I mean by that?"
Jamison said.