By habit she did not sit down
in a white person's home until she was in the kitchen. She wished she
had taken her books and writing tablets from her cabin, and she
wondered if the soldiers who had attacked the girls had found the box
she kept under her bed and thrown its contents into the flames that had
climbed out of the laundry's windows.
The fact that their uniforms
were blue didn't matter, she thought.
Their kind hated
books, just
as
the paddy rollers did and Clay
Hatcher and Rufus
Atkins did and all those who feared knowledge because of what it could
reveal to others about themselves.
The cannon fire had stopped
and there was no sound of either horses or wagons in the streets, but
she believed the quietness outside and the easy sweep of wind in the
trees were like the deceptions that had always characterized the world
she had grown up in. Nothing was ever as it seemed. A child was born in
a cabin to a mother and a father and believed it belonged to a family
not totally unlike the one that lived in the columned house up on the
hill. Then one day the mother or the father or perhaps the child was
sold or traded, either for money or land or livestock, and no was
supposed to take particular notice of the fact that the space occupied
by a human being, made of flesh and blood, a member of a family, had
been emptied in the time it took to sign a bill of sale.
But Flower had come to believe
that moral insanity was not confined to people who lived in columned
houses.
That day Yankee soldiers had
come hot and dirty across a burned field, and while a Union flag
flapped from a staff above their wagon, they had lined up to rape two
fifteen-year-old girls whose mother was beaten back from the scene with
a barrel slat.
Abigail Dowling loved human
beings and nursed the dying and risked her life for the living and was
detested as a traitor.
Willie Burke taught her to
read and write. Then served in an army that had no higher purpose than
to keep African people in bondage to ignorance and the overseer's lash.
She thought she had freed
herself of her anger by helping other slaves escape up the Mississippi
to Ohio. But an English poet in one of her books had used a term she
couldn't forget. The term was "mind-forged manacles." They didn't get
left on the banks of the Ohio River, she thought. They were the kind
people carried to the grave.
What if she set about teaching
others to read and write, just as Mr. Willie Burke had taught her, she
thought. Each person she taught would in turn teach another, and that
person another. If the Yankee soldier who stood guard in the hospital
in New Orleans had not been murdered by Ira Jamison's men, she would
have been able to give him what Mr. Willie had given her. But now she
could create an even larger goal for herself. She could do something
that was truly grand, influential in ways she
had
never
imagined. By teaching one person at a time, she had the
potential to empower large numbers of people to forever change their
lives.
The thought made the blood
rush to her head and she wondered if she was not indeed vainglorious
and self-deluded. She heard the wind chimes tinkling on the gazebo and
through the back window saw the moonlight inside the oak branches and
shadows moving on the grass when the wind blew through the limbs
overhead. Then a darkened steamboat passed on the bayou, its stacks
blowing sparks on a roof, its wake slapping hard against the cypress
trunks.
For just a moment she thought
she saw the silhouette of a man on the bank, a stick figure backlit
briefly by the red glow off the steamboat's stacks. She got up from the
kitchen table and walked out into the yard. But the boat was gone and
the bayou was dark again, and all she could see along the bank were the
heart-shaped tops of flooded elephant ears beaded with drops of water
as fat as marbles.
She went back inside the
kitchen and sat down at the table and put her head down on her arms.
She wondered where Ira Jamison was. She wondered what he would do when
Yankee soldiers swept across his lands and drove off or killed his
livestock and fired his barns and cotton fields and freed his slaves
and gutted the inside of his house and perhaps stacked his furniture in
the front yard for burning. She wondered what he would have to say when
he was powerless, sick, and alone.
Then she wondered why she even
cared.
When would she ever free
herself of the father who not only refused to recognize her but who in
a letter to Nathan Forrest said he was "quite sick of being tended by
unwashed niggers"?
Maybe one day some of them
would tend him in hell, she thought.
But the clear, bright edges of
her anger would not hold, and again she fell back into the self-hating
thoughts that invaded her soul whenever she meditated long upon the
name of Ira Jamison.
An image flicked past a side
window, like a shard of light out of dream. She raised her head off her
arms and stared out in the darkness, wondering if she had fallen
asleep. The air smelled like leaves burning on a fall day. A twig
snapped in the yard and she heard feet moving fast across the ground,
then a shadow went across the kitchen window.
She locked down the boll on
the back door and walked to the Iront of the cottage and stepped out on
the gallery. She looked up and down the street, but no one was there
and the only lamp burning on the block was in the house of a mad woman.
Then the riderless white horse thundered across the lawn and crashed
through banana trees into the street, its eyes bulging in a ripple of
heat lightning across the sky.
She went into the kitchen and
fired the woodstove, then uncovered the water barrel by the pantry and
dipped an iron pot with a long handle into the water and set it on top
of the stove lid.
She locked the door in the
living room and sat down in a chair by the front window. She wished she
had a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun, it didn't matter what kind. She
had never held one in her hands, but for a lifetime she had watched
white men handle them, take them apart, clean and oil them, load and
cock and fire them, and she never doubted the degree of affection the
owner of a gun had for his weapon nor the sense of control it gave him.
But Abigail Dowling owned no
firearms and would allow none in her home. So Flower sat with her hands
clenched in her lap, her heart beating, and wondered when Abigail would
return home.
She heard a plank bend under
someone's weight on the gallery. She waited for a knock, but there was
only silence. The doorknob twisted and the door began to ease forward
in the jamb before it caught against the deadbolt. Her heart hammered
in her ears.
She rose from her chair. She
could see no one in the yard and the angle of her vision prevented her
from seeing who was on the gallery. She walked to the door and stood
only inches from it, looking at the threadlike, cracked lines in the
paint on the cypress boards, the exposed, square nailheads that were
darkened with rust, a thimbleful of cobweb stuck behind a hinge. "Who
is it?" she asked.
"Got a message from the aid
station for Miss Abigail Dowling."
"She cain't come to the
door right
now."
"The surgeon don't have a
nurse. He says for her to get down there."
"I'll tell her."
"She in the
privy?"
"Who are you?"
But this time he didn't answer
and she heard feet moving past the side window. She screwed down the
wick in the living room oil lamp until the flame died, then hurried to
the kitchen and took a butcher knife from a drawer. The fire glowed
under the stove lids and the air was hot and close with the steam that
curled off the pot she had set to boil. She stood motionless in the
darkness, her clenched palm sweating on the wood handle of the knife.
The first man through the back
door splintered it loose from the bolt with one full-bodied kick. Then
he plunged into the kitchen with two other men behind him, all three of
them wearing white cotton cloths with eye holes tied tightly across
their faces. They went from room to room in the cottage as though she
were not there, as though the knife in her hand were of no more
significance than the fact she was a witness to a home invasion.
Then all three of them
returned to the kitchen and stared at her through the holes in their
masks. She could hear them breathing and smell the raw odor of corn
liquor on their breaths.
"Where's she at?" one man
said. He wheezed deep down in his chest.
"Not here."
"That's helpful," he said, and
looked at the broken door. He pushed it back in place with his foot. He
grabbed her wrist and swung her hand against the stove and knocked the
butcher knife to the floor. "When will she be back?"
"When she feel like it."
The man looked at the steam
rising off the pot on the stove. He coughed into his hand, then
breathed hard, as though fighting for air, the cloth of his mask
sucking into his mouth. "You making tea?" he asked.
She looked at the wall, her
arms folded across her chest, her pulse jumping in her throat.
"Let's get out of here," a
second man said.
"We got paid for a night's
work. We ought to earn at least part of it," the first man said.
The three men looked at one
another silently, as though considering a profound thought.
"Sounds good to me," the third
man said.
They walked Flower into the
bedroom, releasing her arms when
they reached the bed,
waiting, the night air outside filled with the
singing of tree frogs.
"You want to undress or should
we do it for you?" the first man said. He turned his head, lifted his
mask briefly, and spit out the window. "Enjoy it, gal. We ain't bad
men. Just doin' a piece of work."
For the next half hour she
tried to find a place in her mind that was totally black, without light
or sound or sensation of any kind, safe from the incessant coughing of
a consumptive man an inch from her ear and the smell of chewing tobacco
and testosterone that now seemed ironed on her skin. When the last man
lifted his weight from her, the cloth across his face swung out from
his mouth and his teeth made her think of kernels of yellow corn.
ABIGAIL and Willie rode in her
buggy to his mother's small farm by Spanish Lake, five miles outside of
town. The house was dark inside the overhang of the oak trees, and the
animals were gone from the pens and the barn. The front door of the
house gaped open, the broken latch hanging
by a solitary nail. A dead
chicken lay humped on the gallery, its feathers fluttering in the wind.
Willie stepped inside the doorway and lit a candle on the kitchen
table. The rows of dishes and cups and jars of preserves on the shelves
were undisturbed, but the hearthstones had been prized out of the
fireplace and several blackened bricks chipped loose with a sharp tool
from inside the chimney.
"I've heard tell about
jayhawkers in the area," Abigail said.
"This bunch wore blue
uniforms. Jayhawkers would have taken the food," he replied.
His words lingered in the air,
the syllables touched with an angry stain she couldn't associate with
the boy she used to know.
The entire rural landscape
seemed empty of people as well as livestock. The ground was powdered
with white ash, the pecan orchards sculpted in the moonlight, the sky
full of birds that never seemed to
touch the earth. They
passed Camp Pratt and looked at the deserted
barracks and the wind
wrinkling
t
he surface of the lake. Across
the water there was a red glow in
the bottom of the sky. Briefly they heard the popping of small-arms
fire, then it was quiet again and there was no sound except the wind
and the creaking of the trees. "I'm sure your mother's all right,"
Abigail said. He didn't speak for a long time. She looked at the
profile of his face, the darkness in his eyes, the way his civilian
clothes seemed inappropriate on his body.
"Do you regret this evening?"
he asked.
"Pardon?" she said, looking
straight ahead.
"You hear right
well when you choose to."
"I don't do anything I don't
wish to," she said. She could feel the intensity of his eyes on the
side of her face.
"You're a damn poor liar,
Abby."
"I know of no greater
arrogance than for a man to tell a woman what she feels."
"Perhaps my experience is
inadequate," he replied. The buggy rumbled across a wood bridge that
spanned a coulee. A large, emaciated dog with a bad hind leg climbed
out from under the bridge and ran crookedly into a cane field, a red
bone in its mouth. "Hold up," Willie said.
He got down in the road and
walked to the crest of the coulee. At the bottom of the slope, among
the palmettos, were the bodies of three Union soldiers. Two lay
facedown in the water, an entry wound in the back of each of their
heads, the hair blown back against the scalp by the closeness of the
muzzle blast. The third man lay on his side on the far bank, one eye
staring back at Willie, the other covered by a black leather patch. The
wrists of all three men had been tied behind them. Their weapons were
gone and their pockets had been pulled inside out.