"Who are you? Or rather what
are you?" he asked.
"First Lieutenant
William Burke, 18th Louisiana
Volunteers, at your service, sir."
"And these rags here are your
uniform?"
"That appears to be the
case, sir."
The general lifted up the
uniform, revealing a pair of brass binoculars and a folding,
horn-handled knife under it.
"These are your knife and your
field glasses?" he asked.
"No, I took
them off a
dead man, probably a forward a
rtillery
observer. One of ours."
The general's eyes lingered on
a neutral spot in space, then looked at Willie again, the cast in them
somehow different now.
"Can you tell me why you're
out of uniform?" he asked.
"I was prematurely stuffed
into one of your burial wagons. The dead have a way of leaking their
shite and other fluids all over their companions, sir."
The general drummed his
fingers on the table, gazed out the window, brushed at his nose with
his knuckle.
"You look like a civilian to
me, Mr. Burke, a good fellow at the wrong place at the wrong time, one
probably willing to sign an oath of allegiance and go about his way,"
he said.
"It's First Lieutenant Willie
Burke, sir. I was at Shiloh and Corinth and a half-dozen places since.
I'll not be signing a loyalty oath."
"Damn it, man, you were out of
uniform!"
"I gave you a reasonable
explanation, too!" Willie replied.
It was quiet inside the room.
The wind ruffled the papers on the general's desk. Through the window
Willie could see the weathered red barn in the distance and a sergeant
who was ordering the line of seven or eight enlisted men around to the
back side. One of them was arguing, and the sergeant grabbed him by his
blouse and shoved him against the wall.
"Take a seat outside in the
hall, Lieutenant. I'll continue our talk in a few minutes," he said.
The sergeant who had escorted
Willie inside the house walked him into the breezeway and pointed at a
chair for him to sit in. Then he shook his finger reprovingly in
Willie's face.
"I come from a religious
family, but I had to learn the only real pacifist is a dead Quaker. I
decided to make an adjustment. Do you get my meaning?" he said.
"It escapes me," Willie said.
The sergeant went outside and
returned with a frightened man who had a pie-plate face, arms like
bread dough, and rows of tiny yellow teeth.
Willie had seen him around New
Iberia. What was his name? He was simpleminded and did janitorial work.
Pinky? Yes, that was it. Pinky Strunk. What was he doing here?
Through the open door Willie
could hear the general questioning
him.
"You were in possession of
five Spanish reals. That's a lot of money for a workingman to have
clanking in his pocket," the general said.
"Ain't no law against it. Not
that I know of," Pinky answered.
"Sixteen of my men were
ambushed and butchered on the St. Martinville Road. I think you're one
of the men who looted the bodies," the general said.
"Not me. No, suh."
From behind the red barn there
was a volley of rifle fire, then a cloud of smoke drifted out into the
sunlight.
"Jesus God!" Pinky said.
"How did you come by five
Spanish pieces-of-eight?" the general asked.
"Is that a firing squad out
there, suh?"
"How did you come by the
reals?"
"It's kind of private."
"Not anymore."
"Done a chore for a man. Me
and two others."
"What might that be?" the
general asked.
The man named Pinky blew his
nose in a handkerchief.
"We was s'pposed to" he
began. But his voice faltered.
"Supposed to do what?"
"Fix an uppity nurse who don't
know her place. I never stole in my life. Man who says so is a liar."
"Start over again."
"There's a Captain Atkins paid
us to put the spurs to a troublesome white woman. She wasn't home so we
give it to a darky instead. Three of us topped her. That's the long and
the short of it. I ain't looted no dead Yankees."
"Sergeant, take this man to
the provost-marshal. The paperwork will follow," the general said.
"Y'all sending me back home?"
Pinky said. His eyes blinked as he waited for the general's response.
A half hour later Willie was
standing once again in front of the general. Through the window he saw
two Yankee soldiers escorting Pinky Strunk behind the barn, gripping
him by each arm. He was arguing with them, twisting his face from one
to the other.
"Sixteen of my men were
butchered, their throats slit, their ring fingers
cut off their hands.
Don't be
clever with me," the general said.
"The killers of your men are
out yonder in the compound, General. Pinky Strunk isn't one of them,"
Willie said.
"Then you'd damn well better
point them out."
A ragged volley of rifle fire
exploded from behind the barn.
"Would you have a chew of
tobacco on you, sir?" Willie asked.
That evening he stood at the
barred window of a brick storehouse on the bank of Bayou Teche and
watched the sun descend in a cloud of purple smoke in the west. It was
cool and damp-smelling inside the storehouse, and the oaks along the
bayou were a dark green in the waning light, swelling with wind, the
air heavy with the fecund odor of schooled-up bream popping the surface
of the water among the lily pads.
Other men sat on the dirt
floor, some with their heads hanging between their knees. They were
looters, rapists, guerrillas, jayhawkers, grave robbers, accused
spies, or people who just had very bad luck. In fact, Willie believed
at that moment that the nature of the crimes they had committed was
less important than the fact that anarchy had spread across the land
and the deaths of these men would restore some semblance of order to it.
At dawn, the general had said.
How big a price should anyone
have to pay to retain his integrity? Willie asked himself. How did he
come to this juncture in his life?
Arrogance and pride, his mind
answered.
He could hear his heart
pounding in his ears.
FLOWER Jamison did not sleep
the night she was raped. She bathed in the iron tub behind Abigail
Dowling's cottage, then put back on the same clothes she had worn
before the attack and sat alone in the darkness, looking out on the
street until Abigail returned home. "What happened?" Abigail asked,
staring at the splintered door in the kitchen.
"Three men broke in and raped
me," Flower replied.
"Federals broke in here? You
were ra"
"They were civilians. They
were looking for you. They took me instead."
"Oh, Flower."
"What one man more than any
other wants to hurt you? A man who hates you, who's cruel through and
through?"
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do," Flower
said.
"Rufus Atkins threatened me.
Out there, in the street. Yesterday," Abigail said.
Flower nodded her head.
"I saw him give money
to
three men behind Carrie LaRose's house
earlier today."
"That doesn't prove anything."
"Yes, it does. I saw a man's
yellow teeth under his mask. I heard the coins clink in their pants. It
was them."
"Are you hurt inside?"
"They hurt me everywhere," she
replied.
She refused to use the bed
Abigail offered her and sat in the chair all night. Before dawn,
without eating breakfast, she left the cottage and walked down Main and
stood under the wood colonnade in front of McCain's Hardware. She wiped
the film off the window with her hand in several places and tried to
see inside. Then she walked out in the country to the laundry where she
had worked. It and the cabins behind it were burned to the ground.
She walked back up the road to
the back door of Carrie LaRose's bordello. She had to knock twice
before Carrie came to the door.
"What you mean banging on my
do' this early in the morning?" Carrie said.
"Need to earn some money,"
Flower said.
Carrie looked out at the fog
on the fields and the blackened threads of sugarcane on her lawn, as
though the morning itself might contain either an omen or threat. She
wore glass rings on the fingers of both hands and a housecoat and a
kerchief on her head and paper curlers in her hair that made Flower
think of a badly plucked chicken inside a piece of cheesecloth.
"Doing what?" Carrie asked.
"Cleaning, washing, ironing,
anything you want. I can sew, too. The Yankees are calling us
contrabands. That means the Southerners cain't own us anymore."
"Already got somebody to do
all them things."
"I can write letters for you.
I know how to subtract and add sums."
"Want money? You know how to
get it," Carrie said.
"Thank you for your time, Miss
Carrie."
"Don't give me a look like I'm
hard, no."
"You ain't hard. You just for
sale."
"You like a pop in the face?"
Carrie said.
Flower looked .it the plank
table under the live oak where Captain Rufus Atkins had counted out a
short stack of heavy coins in the palms of the paddy rollers only
yesterday afternoon.
"I axed for a job. You don't
have one. I won't bother you anymore," Flower said.
"Wait up, you," Carrie said.
She fitted the thickness of her hand under Flower's chin and turned it
back and forth, exposing her throat to the light. "Who give you them
marks?"
"I need a job, Miss Carrie."
"Abigail Dowling ain't gonna
let you go hungry. You wanting money for somet'ing else, ain't you?"
Flower turned and walked down
the steps and into the fog rolling out of the fields. It felt damp and
invasive on her skin, like the moist touch of a soiled hand on her arm.
SHE wandered the town until
noon, without direction or purpose. Many of the shops along Main Street
had been broken open and looted, except the hardware store, which the
owner, a man named Todd McCain, had emptied of its goods before the
Yankees had come into town during the night. In fact, McCain had taken
the extra measure of turning the cash register toward the glass window
so passersby could see that the compartments in the drawer contained no
money.
Yankee soldiers, some of them
still drunk, slept under the trees on the bayou. She sat on a wood
bench by the drawbridge and watched a steamboat loaded with blue-clad
sharpshooters lounging behind cotton bales work its way upstream toward
St. Martinville. The sharpshooters waved at her, and one pointed at his
fly and held his hands apart as though showing her the size of an
enormous fish.
The Episcopalian church, which
had been a field hospital for Confederate wounded, had now been
converted into a stable, the pews pushed together to form feed troughs.
Flower watched the sun climb in the sky, then disappear among the tree
branches over her head. She slept with her head on her chest and
dreamed of a man holding a white snake in his hand. He grinned at her,
then placed the head of the snake in his mouth and held it there while
he unbuttoned and removed his shirt.
She awoke abruptly and cleared her throat and spat into the dirt
,
widening her eyes until the images
from the dream were gone from her mind. Then she rose from the bench
and walked unsteadily through the shade, into the heat of the day,
toward McCain's Hardware.
"You want to look at what?"
the owner, Todd McCain, said.
"The pistol. You had it in the
glass case before the Yankees came to town," she replied.
"I don't remember no pistol,"
McCain said. He had been a drummer from Atlanta who had come to New
Iberia on the stage and married an overweight widow ten years his
senior. His body was hard and egg-shaped, the shoulders narrow, his
metallic hair greased and parted down the middle.
"I want to see the pistol. Or
I'll come back with a Yankee soldier who'll help you find it," she said.
"That a fact?" he said.
He fixed his eyes on her face,
a smile breaking at the side of his mouth. She turned and started back
out the door. "Hold on," he said.
He went into the back of the
store and returned to the front and laid a heavy object wrapped in oily
flannel on top of the glass case. He glanced at the street, then
unwrapped a cap-and-ball revolver with dark brown grips. The blueing on
the tip of the barrel and on the cylinder was worn a dull silver from
holster friction.
"That's a Colt .36 caliber
revolver. Best sidearm you can buy," he said.