He no longer questioned the
authority or wisdom of those who had power over
his life, no
more
than he would question the legitimacy of the weather in the morning or
the rising and setting of the sun. He also kept his own counsel and did
not express his disapproval of others, even when they committed cruel
or atrocious acts. The ebb and flow of armies was not his to judge
anymore. Years from now the great issues of the war would be forgotten
and the consequences of his actions would have importance only to
himself. He was determined he would never be ashamed of them, and that
simple goal seemed to be honor enough.
He could not believe that to
some degree he had probably earned a footnote in history by having
scouted for Nathan Forrest at the battle of Shiloh. But if someone were
to ask him of his impressions about the colonel, he would reply he
recalled little about him, other than the fact he was a coarse-skinned,
profane man who bathed in horse tanks and put enough string tobacco in
his mouth to clog a cannon, and if Willie saw him amid a gathering of
grocery clerks, he would probably not recognize him nor wish to do so.
He watched the cooks butcher a
flock of chickens they had taken from the farm of a widow downstream.
She had refused the Confederate script a major had tried to give her
and had pleaded in French for him not to take her poultry, that they
were her only source of eggs for a sickly grandchild. When the major
took his brass trainman's watch from his pocket and hung it across her
palm, she swung it by the chain and smashed it on a stump.
Willie stared down from the
promontory at the body of a dead Negro soldier caught on a snag, the
current eddying around the crown of his head, the closed eyes and
upturned face like a carved deathmask superimposed on the water's
surface. Downstream a flat-bottomed boat was headed north, its decks
covered with canvas, a Southern flag flying from the stern, its windows
filled with the sun's last red glow.
Willie smelled the chickens
frying in skillets over a fire. He got his mess kit from his tent and
sat on a log with his comrades and waited for the food to be done.
IT WAS sunset on the river
now, and Abigail Dowling sat next to Flower Jamison on a rough-hewn
bench in the pilothouse of Jean-Jacques LaRose's salvage boat as it
moved northward against the current, past a wooded promontory dotted
with campfires and the biscuit-colored tents of Confederate soldiers.
The river was swollen and dark yellow from the summer rains, and back
in the shadows under the overhang the water roiled with gars feeding on
dead livestock.
Abigail thought about the work
that lay ahead for her that night, and the prospect of it made her
throat swallow. She had helped transport escaped slaves out of the
wetlands, onto boats that waited for them in salt water, but this was
not the same. This time she was going into the heart of enemy country,
into a primitive and oftentimes cruel area not tempered by either the
mercies of French Catholicism or its libertine and pagan form of
Renaissance humanism. And she was taking others with her.
The conflicts of her
conscience seemed endless, like the thinking processes of a neurotic
and self-concerned girl incapable of acquiring her own compass, she
thought. In moments like these she longed for the presence of herdead
father. What was it he had once said about the obligations and
restraints of those who fight the good fight of St. Paul?
"We
will do many things in the service of justice. But shedding blood isn't
one of them. The likes of us have a heavy burden, Abby." In more ways
than one, she thought.
The air smelled like sulfur
and distant rain and smoke from cypress stumps that had been
chain-pulled out of the dirt and set burning while still wet. Abigail
looked out the back door of the pilothouse at the riverwater cascading
in sheets off the paddle-wheel. For a moment she thought she saw a
blue-sleeved arm and shoulder roll out of the froth in the boat's wake,
then be lapped over and disappear. She rose to her feet and stared at
the water's surface, the waves from the boat now sliding into the shore.
"Something wrong, Miss
Abigail?" Flower asked.
"No, the light's bad. I
imagine things sometimes," she replied. Jean-Jacques turned from the
wheel and looked at her but said nothing. They followed the channel
markers through a wide bend in the river and passed lighted plantation
homes couched among cedar and oak trees, a half-sunken gunboat whose
cannons and boilers had been removed, a slave cemetery whose banks were
eroding into the river, cotton acreage that was still under cultivation
in spite of the war, and a pine woods that had been sawed into a stump
farm. Then the moon broke from behind the clouds and the river loomed
up ahead of them, straight as far as the eye could see, immense,
rain-dented, tree-lined, wrinkled with wind, blown with leaves and dust
out of the fields.
Abigail looked over
Jean-Jacques' shoulder at the raindrops striking against the glass.
"You're a problem of
conscience for me," she said.
He turned around and squinted
his eyes to show his incomprehension.
"I took advantage of your
resentment toward Ira Jamison," she said.
"When this is all over, who
you t'ink is gonna come out on top?"
"The Union," she replied.
"Remember who hepped you," he
said.
But the rum on his breath
belied his cavalier attitude. If they were caught, his fate and that of
the two white men who fed the boiler belowdecks would not be an easy
one.
At best they would be sent to a prison where the c
onvicts were
literally worked to death. B
u
t chances were they would never
make trial and would die on a tree.
Nor would the fate of Flower
Jamison be much better-. Although Abigail had never witnessed an
instance of branding or hamstringing herself, she had heard stories and
had known slaves who turned to stone if they were questioned about the
scars on their bodies.
But when she tried to imagine
her own fate, she realized once again her risks were like those of a
rear echelon officer in a war. Slavers might hate her; a bounty hunter
could spit on her skirts; and a newspaper editorialist could refer to
her as "Miss Lover-of-all-Darkies." But if they didn't respect
her,
they respected money, and they knew her family had been rich, at
least at one time, and her father had been the friend of United States
presidents from both the North and South and had served at the side of
Jefferson Davis in the War of the Mexican Cession. It was doubtful she
would ever die on a tree or experience the touch of a hot iron on her
back.
Flower was sleeping with her
head on her chest, the hat she had woven from palmetto leaves quivering
from the vibration of the engines. Her face looked troubled, as though
she had walked through a spiderweb in her dreams.
Abigail squeezed her hand.
"You're the bravest person
I've ever known," she said.
Flower's eyes opened like the
weighted eyelids on a doll.
"Brave about what?" she asked,
unsure of where she was.
"We're almost there," Abigail
said.
Flower smiled sleepily.
"My gran'mama never thought
she could be free. I cain't believe this is happening, Miss Abigail,"
she said.
The river was blanketed with
rain rings now, the moon buried deep in clouds, like a pool of scorched
pewter. Jean-Jacques steered his boat past a lighted plantation home on
a bluff, then rounded a bend where the land flattened and the river had
risen into groves of willow and gum trees and out in a field a trash
fire was burning inside the mist, the sparks fanning over the water.
Jean-Jacques blew out his
breath and looked through the glass at the canvas that was stretched
across the deck, swelling
in
the wind and tugging against
the ropes that held it, canvas that in reality shel
tered nothing
except a few
crates of tools and plowshares. He reached into his shirt and lifted a
religious
medal to his lips and kissed it.
"Lord, if you cain't forgive
me all my sins, just don't remember them too good, no. Thank you.
Amen," he said.
He steered the boat close to
shore, until the overhang scratched against the gunnel and the top of
the pilothouse, then shut down the paddle-wheel while his boatmates
slipped the anchors on the bow and stern. Curds of yellow smoke rose
from the trash fire burning in the field. A black man walked through
the trees toward the boat, the fire bright behind him. He stood
motionless on the bank, squinting at the darkened windows in the
pilothouse.
"That's my uncle!" Flower
said, and ran out on the deck.
"Why don't she yell it at them
people in that plantation house back yonder?" Jean-Jacques said.
"We'll be back in a few
minutes. It's going to be fine," Abigail said.
Lightning rippled through the
clouds over the river. Jean-Jacques' face looked dilated, his eyes like
black marbles. He pulled the cork from a green bottle and drank from
the neck.
"Miss Abigail, my heart done
aged ten years tonight. Get back quick with them colored people. Don't
make me grow no older, no," he said.
"Fifteen minutes. You'll see,"
she said, and winked at him.
She and Flower went down the
plank the boatmates had propped against the bank and followed Flower's
uncle up an eroded coulee through a stand of gum trees. The mist was
gray and damp, like a cotton glove, the air tannic with the smell of
dead leaves that had pooled inside stagnant water. The coulee led like
a jagged wound through a sweet potato field, steep-sided, thick with
ferns and air vines, the soft clay at the bottom laced with the
stenciled tracks of deer and possums and raccoons.
Lightning jumped between the
clouds, and Abigail saw perhaps two dozen adults and children sitting
down on each side of the stream at the bottom of coulee, their faces
frightened, their belongings tied inside blankets.
A tall, thick-necked black
woman, with cheekbones as big as a hog's, wearing an ankle-length gray
dress, rose to her feet, her eyes fastened on Abigail.
"This the one?" she asked
Flower, nodding at Abigail.
"There ain't... there
isn't a better white person on earth,"
Flower said.
"Some white mens from Baton
Rouge has talked slaves into running and turned them in for the
bounty," the older black woman said.
"You're Flower's grandmother?"
Abigail said.
"That's right."
"I don't blame you for your
suspicions. But we don't have much time, ma'am. You must trust me or
otherwise return to your home. You have to make that decision now,"
Abigail said.
Flower's grandmother picked up
her bundle in one hand and took the hand of a little boy in another.
"The paddy rollers are scared
of the Yankees. They was looking along the river with lanterns," she
said.
"Then let's be gone," Abigail
said.
They walked single file back
down the coulee toward the river, the sparks from the fire in the field
drifting over their heads. A thunderous clap of lightning struck in the
trees, and behind her Abigail heard an infant begin to cry. She stepped
out of the line and worked her way back to a teenage girl who was
walking with an infant not over three or four months old in each arm.
"Cain't carry them both. I
gots to go back," the girl said.
"No, you don't," Abigail said,
and took one of the babies from her.
The line of people splashed
ankle-deep down the coulee toward the sound of the river coursing
through the willow trees in the shallows. Then they heard someone snap
a dry branch off a tree and throw it angrily aside with a curse, as
though an object of nature had deliberately targeted him for injury. A
balloon of light burst out of the tree trunks and flooded the bottom of
the coulee.
"Tell me y'all ain't the most
bothersome bunch of ungrateful pea brains I ever seen," a voice said
from behind the lantern.
His name was Olin Mayfield. He
had a jug head and a torso that looked as soft as mush. He wore a
slicker and a slouch hat whose brim had gone shapeless in the rain and
an army cap-and-ball .44 revolver on his hip. When the light of his
lantern swung into his face his eyes were as green and empty of thought
as stagnant water in a cattle tank.
"No, I ain't gonna hit you.
Just get your worthless asses out of the ditch and follow me back to
the quarters. Colonel Jamison is gonna
flat shit his britches,"
he said and he laughed. he carouched down to pull a
woman
up by her hand.
Then he stiffened, his nostrols swelling with air, as though the odor
of a
dangerous animal had suddenly wrapped itself around him. He rose from
his crouch, turning, hoisting the lantern above his head, and stared
straight into the face of Jean-Jacques LaRose.
Abigail watched the next
events take place as though she were caught in a dream from which she
could not wake. Olin Mayfield's expression shaped and reshaped itself,
as though he could not decide whether to grin or to scowl. Then he
gripped the heavy Colt revolver on his hip and pulled it halfway from
his holster, his lip curling up from his teeth, perhaps, Abigail
thought, in imitation of an illustration he had seen on the cover of a
dime novel.