"Good God, you done lost your
mind?" Clay said.
"Sarie killed Jackson, Clay.
That's the story you take to the grave. Nigger who kills a white man
isn't worth six hundred dollars. Nigger who kills a white man buys the
scaffold. That's Lou'sana law," he said.
The blond man, whose full name
was Clay Hatcher, stood stupefied, his nose red in the cold, his breath
loud inside his checkered scarf.
"Whoever made the world sure
didn't care much about the likes of us, did He?" Rufus said to no one
in particular. "Bring up Jackson's horse and get him across the saddle,
would you? Best be careful. I think he messed himself."
AFTER she was told of her
daughter's death and the baby who had been abandoned somewhere deep in
the woods, Sarie's mother left her job in the washhouse without
permission and went to the site where her daughter had died. She
followed the blood trail back to the slough, then stood on the thawing
mudflat and watched the water coursing southward toward the river and
knew which direction Sarie had been going when she had finally been
forced to stop and give birth to her child. It had been north, toward
the river called the Ohio.
Sarie's mother and a wet nurse
with breasts that hung inside her shirt like swollen eggplants walked
along the banks of the slough until late afternoon. The sun was warm
now, the trees filled with a smoky yellow light, as though the ice
storm had never passed through Ira Jamison's plantation. Sarie's mother
and the wet nurse rounded a bend in the woods, then saw footprints
leading up to a leafy bower and a lean-to whose opening was covered
with a bright green branch from a slash pine.
The child lay wrapped in a
blanket like a caterpillar inside a cocoon, the eyes shut, the mouth
puckered. The ground was soft now, scattered with pine needles, and
among the pine needles were wild-flowers that had been buried under
snow. Sarie's mother unwrapped the child from the blanket and wiped it
clean with a cloth, then handed it to the wet nurse, who held the
baby's mouth to her breast and covered it with her coat.
"Sarie wanted a man-child. But
this li'l girl beautiful," the wet nurse said.
"She gonna be my darlin'
thing, too. Sarie gonna live inside her. Her name gonna be Spring. No,
that ain't right. Her name gonna be Flower," Sarie's mother said.
IN THE spring of 1861 Willie
Burke's dreams took him to a place he had never been and to an event he
had not experienced. He saw himself on a dusty Texas road south of
Goliad, where the wind was blowing in the trees and there was a hint of
salt water or distant rain in the air. The soldiers around him were
glad of heart, their backs strung with blanket rolls and haversacks,
some of them singing in celebration of their impending freedom and
passage aboard a parole ship to New Orleans.
Then their Mexican warders
began forming up into squads, positioning themselves on one side of the
road only, the hammers to their heavy muskets collectively cocking into
place.
"Them sonsofbitches are gonna
shoot us. Run for hit, boys," a Texas soldier shouted.
"Fuego!"
a Mexican
officer shouted.
The musket fire was almost
point-blank. The grass and tree trunks alongside the road were striped
with blood splatter. Then the Mexicans bayoneted the wounded and
fallen, smashing skulls with their musket butts, firing with their
pistols at the backs of those still trying to flee. In the dream Willie
smelled the bodies of the men piled on top of him, the dried sweat in
their clothes, the blood that seeped from their wounds. His heart
thundered in his chest; his nose and throat were clotted with dust. He
knew he had just begun his last day on Earth, here, in the year 1836,
in a revolution in which no Irishman should have had a vested interest.
Then he heard a woman, a
prostitute, running from one officer to the next, begging mercy for the
wounded. The musket fire dissipated, and Willie got to his feet and ran
for the treeline, not a survivor, but instead cursed with an abiding
sense of shame and guilt that he had lived, fleeing through woods while
the screams of his comrades filled his ears.
When Willie woke from the
dream in a backroom of his mother's boardinghouse on Bayou Teche, he
knew the fear that beat in his heart had nothing to do with his dead
father's tale of his own survival at the Goliad Massacre during the
Texas Revolution. The war he feared was now only the stuff of rumors,
political posturing, and young men talking loudly of it in a saloon,
but he had no doubt it was coming, like a crack in a dike that would
eventually flood and destroy an entire region, beginning in Virginia or
Maryland, perhaps, at a nameless crossroads or creek bed or sunken lane
or stone wall meandering through a farmer's field, and as surely as he
had wakened to birdsong in his mother's house that morning he would be
in it, shells bursting above his head while he soiled his pants and
killed others or was killed himself over an issue that had nothing to
do with his life.
He washed his face in a bowl
on the dresser and threw the water out the window onto the grassy yard
that sloped down to the bayou. By the drawbridge a gleaming white
paddle-wheeler, its twin stacks leaking smoke into the mist, was being
loaded with barrels of molasses by a dozen Negro men, all of whom had
begun work before dawn, their bodies glowing with sweat and humidity in
the light from the fires they had built on the bank.
They were called wage slaves,
rented out by their owner, in this case, Ira Jamison, on an hourly
basis. The taskmaster, a man named Rufus Atkins, rented a room at the
boardinghouse and worked the Negroes in his charge unmercifully. Willie
walked out into the misty softness of the morning, into the residual
smell of night-blooming flowers and bream spawning in the bayou and
trees dripping with dew, and tried to occupy his mind with better
things than the likes of Rufus Atkins. But when he sat on a hole in the
privy and heard Rufus Atkins driving and berating his charges, he
wondered if there might be an exemption in heaven for the Negro who
raked a cane knife across Atkins' throat.
When Willie walked back up the
slope and encountered Atkins on his way into breakfast, he touched his
straw hat, fabricated a smile and said, "Top of the morning to you,
sir."
"And to you, Mr. Willie,"
Rufus Atkins replied.
Then Willie's nemesis, his
inability to keep his own counsel, caught up with him.
"If words could flay, I'd bet
you could take the hide off a fellow, Mr. Atkins," he said.
"That's right clever of you,
Mr. Willie. I'm sure you must entertain your mother at great length
while tidying the house and carrying out slop jars for her."
"Tell me, sir, since you're in
a mood for profaning a fine morning, would you be liking your nose
broken as well?" Willie inquired.
AFTER the boarders had been
fed, including Rufus Atkins, Willie helped his mother clean the table
and scrape the dishes into a barrel of scraps that later they would
take out to their farm by Spanish Lake and feed to their hogs. His
mother, Ellen Lee, had thick, round, pink arms and brown hair that was
turning gray, and a small Irish mouth and a cleft in her chin.
"Did I hear you have words
with Mr. Atkins?" she asked.
Willie seemed to study the
question. "I don't rightly recall. It may have been a distortion on the
wind, perhaps," he replied.
"You're a poor excuse for a
liar," she said.
He began washing dishes in the
sink. But unfortunately she was not finished.
"The times might be good for
others but not always for us. Our livery is doing poorly, Willie. We
need every boarder we can get," she said.
"Would you like me to
apologize?" he asked.
"That's up to your conscience. Remember he's a Protestant and given
to their ways. We have to forgive those whom chance and accident have
denied access to the Faith."
"You're right, Mother. There
he goes now. I'll see if I can straighten things out," Willie replied,
looking through the back window.
He hurried out the door and
touched Rufus Atkins on the sleeve.
"Oh, excuse me, I didn't mean
to startle you, Mr. Atkins," he said. "I just wanted to tell you I'm
sorry for the sharpness of my tongue. I pray one day you find the Holy
Roman Church and then die screaming for a priest."
WHEN he came back into the
house his mother said nothing to him, even though she had heard his
remarks to Rufus Atkins through the window. But just before noon she
found him in his reading place under a live oak by the bayou and pulled
up a cane chair next to him and sat down with her palms propped on her
knees.
"What ails you, Willie?" she
asked.
"I was just a little out of
sorts," he replied.
"You've decided, haven't you?"
she said.
"What might that be?"
"Oh, Willie, you're signing up
for the army. This isn't our war," she said.
"What should I do, stay home
while others die?"
She looked emptily at the
bayou and a covey of ducklings fluttering on the water around their
mother.
"You'll get in trouble," she
said.
"Over what?"
"You're cursed with the gift
of Cassandra. For that reason you'll always be out of place and
condemned by others."
"Those are the myths that our
Celtic ancestors used to console themselves for their poverty," he
replied.
She shook her head, knowing
her exhortations were of little value. "I need you to fix the roof.
What are your plans for today?" she asked.
"To take my clothes to Ira
Jamison's laundry."
"And get in trouble with that
black girl? Willie, tell me I haven't raised a lunatic for a son," she
said.
HE put a notebook with lined
pages, a pencil, and a small collection of William Blake's poems in his
pants pockets and rode his horse down Main Street. The town had been
laid out along the serpentine contours of Bayou Teche, which took its
name from an Atakapa Indian word that meant snake. The business
district stretched from a brick warehouse on the bend, with huge iron
doors and iron shutters over the windows, down to the Shadows, a
two-story, pillared plantation home surrounded by live oaks whose shade
was so deep the night-blooming flowers in the gardens often opened in
the late afternoon.
An Episcopalian church marked
one religious end of the town, a Catholic church the other. On the
street between the two churches shopkeepers swept the plank walks under
their colonnades, a constable spaded up horse dung and tossed it into
the back of a wagon, and a dozen or so soldiers from Camp Pratt, out by
Spanish Lake, sat in the shade between two brick buildings, still drunk
from the night before, flinging a pocketknife into the side of a
packing case.
Actually the word "soldier"
didn't quite describe them, Willie thought. They had been mustered in
as state militia, most of them outfitted in mismatched uniforms paid
for by three or four Secessionist fanatics who owned cotton interests
in the Red River parishes.
The most ardent of these was
Ira Jamison. His original farm, named Angola Plantation because of the
geographical origins of its slaves, had expanded itself in ancillary
fashion from the hilly brush country on a bend of the Mississippi River
north of Baton Rouge to almost every agrarian enterprise in Louisiana,
reaching as far away as a slave market in Memphis run by a man named
Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Willie rode his horse between
the two buildings where the boys in militia uniforms lounged. Some were
barefoot, some with their shirts off and pimples on their shoulders and
skin as white as a frog's belly. One, who was perhaps six and a half
feet tall, his fly partially buttoned, slept with a straw hat over his
face.
"You going to sign up today,
Willie?" a boy said.
"Actually Jefferson Davis was
at our home only this morning, asking me the same thing," he replied.
"Say, you boys wouldn't be wanting more whiskey or beer, would you?"
One of them almost vomited. Another threw a dried horse turd at his
back. But Willie took no offense. Most of them were poor, unlettered,
brave and innocent at the same time, imbued with whatever
vision of the world others created
for them.
When he glanced back over his shoulder they were playing mumblety-peg
with their pocketknives.
He was on a dirt road now, one
that led southward into the sugarcane fields that stretched all the way
to the Gulf of Mexico. He passed hog lot and slaughterhouse buzzing
with bottle flies and a brick saloon with a railed bar inside, then a
paint-skinned, two-story frame house with a sagging gallery that served
as New Iberia's only bordello. The owner, Carrie LaRose, who some said
had been in prison in the West Indies or France, had added a tent in
the side yard, with cots
inside, to handle the increase in
business from Camp Pratt.
A dark-haired chub of a girl
in front of the tent scooped up her dress and lifted it high above her
bloomers. "How about a ride, Willie? Only a dollar," she said.