"How much is it?"
"You people ain't suppose to
have these."
"I'm a contraband now. I can
have anything I want. No different than a free person of color."
"Twelve dollars. I ain't
talking about Confederate paper, either."
"Maybe I don't have twelve
right now. But maybe part of it."
"That a fact?" He looked into
space, as though calculating figures in his head. "Under the right
circumstances I can come down to ten, maybe eight."
"Right circumstances?"
"I could use a little hep in
the storeroom. Won't take long. If you feel like walking on back there
with me."
"I'll be back later."
"Tell you what,
hep me out and I'll go down to six. I cain't
make more right
than that," he said. He wet his bottom lip, as though it were
chapped, and looked away from her face.
"You all right, suh?" she
asked.
He averted his eyes and didn't
reply. After she was gone he threw the revolver angrily in a drawer.
SHE walked down the street
toward Abigail Dowling's cottage and saw a carriage parked in front of
the Shadows. Through the iron gate she caught sight of Ira Jamison,
sitting at a table on a flagstone terrace under oak trees, with two
Yankee officers and a cotton trader from Opelousas. The grass was
sprinkled with azalea petals, the gazebo and trellises in the gardens
humped with blue bunches of wisteria. The gate creaked on its hinges
when she pulled it open.
She followed the brick walkway
through the trees to the terrace. The four men at the table were
drinking coffee from small cups and laughing at a joke. A walking cane
rested against the arm of Ira Jamison's chair. His hair had grown to
his shoulders and looked freshly shampooed and dried, and the weight he
had lost gave his face a kind of fatal beauty, perhaps like a poisonous
flower she had read of in a poem.
"I need you to lend me twelve
dol'ars," she said.
He twisted around in his
chair. "My heavens, Flower, you certainly know how to sneak up on a
man," he said.
"The man at the store says
that's the price for a Colt .36 revolver. I 'spect he's lying, but I
still need the twelve dol'ars," she said.
The other three men had
stopped talking. Ira Jamison pulled on his earlobe.
"What in heaven's name do you
need a pistol for?" he said.
"Your overseer, Rufus Atkins,
paid three men to rape Miss Abigail. She wasn't home, so they did it to
me. I aim to kill all three of them and then find Rufus Atkins and kill
him, too."
The other three men shifted in
their chairs and glanced at Ira Jamison. He pinched a napkin on his
mouth and dropped it into a plate.
"I think you'd better leave
the premises, Flower," he said.
"You had that Yankee soldier
killed at the hospital in New Orleans, just so you could escape and
make everybody think you were a hero. Now I 'spek these
Yankee officers are helping you sell cotton to the North. You something
else, Colonel."
"I'll walk you to the gate,"
Ira Jamison said.
He rose from the chair and
took her arm, his fingers biting with surprising strength into the
muscle.
"Why's he letting a darky talk
to him like that?" she heard one of the officers say behind her.
The cotton trader raised a
finger in the air, indicating the officer should not pursue the subject
further.
AT the cottage she told
Abigail Dowling what had happened.
"You should have come to me
first," Abigail said.
"You would have bought me a
gun?"
"We could have talked,"
Abigail said. Then she looked into space and bit her lip at the
banality of her own words.
"You been good to me, but I'm
going on down to the soldiers' camp," Flower said.
"To do what?"
"Someone said they're hiring
washerwomen."
"Did you eat anything today?"
"Maybe. I don't remember."
Abigail pressed her hands down
on Flower's shoulders until Flower was sitting in a chair at the
kitchen table. She smoothed Flower's hair and caressed her cheek with
her hand.
"Wish you wouldn't do that,
Miss Abby."
Abigail's face flushed. "I'm
sorry,"
she said.
Then she fried four eggs in
the skillet and scraped the mold off a half loaf of bread and sliced it
and browned the slices in ham fat. She divided the food between them
and sat across from Flower and ate without speaking.
"What are you studying on?"
Flower asked.
"I was thinking of my father
and what he would do in certain situations. You two would have liked
each other," Abigail said.
Ten minutes later Abigail went
out the back door and removed a spade from the shed and walked through
the dappled shade along the rim of the coulee and began
scraping away a layer ot blackened leaves from under an oak tree. She
dug down one root to a tin box that was wrapped in a piece of old gum
coat. Then she gathered her purse and a parasol from the house and
walked down Main Street, past the Shadows, to the hardware store.
Todd McCain walked out from
the back when he heard the bell tinkle above the front door. He and two
black men had been restocking the front of the store with the inventory
he had hidden from looters, and his shirt was damp at the armpits, his
greased hair flecked with grit.
"Yes, ma'am?"
"You offered to sell a
revolver to Flower Jamison for six dollars, provided she'd go in the
back room with you," Abigail said.
"Sounds like somebody's
daydream to
me," he said. She pulled open the drawstring on her purse. "Here are
your six dollars. How much is it for the ammunition?"
He touched the inside of one
nostril with a thumbnail, then huffed air out his nose.
"You got some nerve insulting
me on the word of a nigger," he said.
He waited for a response, but
there was only silence. When he tried to return her stare, he saw a
repository of contempt and disgust in her eyes, aimed at him and no
other, that made him clear his throat and look away.
"It's ten dollars for the
pistol. I don't have any balls or powder for it," he said.
She continued to look into his
face, as though his words had no application to the situation.
"Seven dollars, take it or
leave it. I don't need any crazy people in my store," he said.
He waited while she found
another dollar in her purse, then picked up the coins one at a time
from the glass counter. "I'll wrap it up for you and throw in some gun
oil so you don't have no reason to come back," he said.
"Don't presume," she said.
"Presume what?"
"That because I'm a woman your
behavior and your remarks won't be dealt with."
He felt one eye twitch at
the corner.
After she was gone he returned
to the storeroom where he had been working and walked in a circle, his
hands on his hips, searching in the gloom for all the words he should
have spoken. She had made him play the fool, he told himself, and now
his face felt as if it had been stung by bumblebees. Without his
knowing why, his gaze rested on a saw, a short-handled sledgehammer, a
can of kerosene, a barrel filled with serpentine coils of chain, a
prizing bar with a forked claw on it.
One day, he told himself.
Down the street Abigail walked
along the curtain of bamboo that bordered the front yard of the
Shadows. The azaleas were a dusty purple in the shade, the air loud
with the cawing of blue jays. The iron gate swung open in front of her,
and Ira Jamison, the cotton trader, and two Union officers stepped
directly in her path.
"Miss Abby, how are you?"
Jamison said, touching his hat.
"Did you ask the same of your
daughter?"
"My wife and I had no
children, so I'm not sure whom you're referring to. But no matter. Have
a fine day, Miss Abigail," he said.
"Your own daughter told you
she was raped and you manhandled her. In front of these men. What kind
of human being are you?" she said.
The street was deep in shadow,
empty of sound and people. The oak limbs overhead creaked in the wind.
"I guess it's just not your
day, Colonel Jamison," the cotton trader said.
All four men laughed.
Abigail Dowling pulled the
buggy whip from its socket on the side
of
Ira Jamison's
carriage and slashed it across his face. He pressed his hand against
his cheek and stared at the blood on his fingers in disbelief.
She flung the whip to the
ground and walked to her cottage, then went through the yard and into
the trees in back, trembling all over. She stood among the oaks and
cypresses on the bayou, her arms clenched across her chest, her temples
pulsing with nests of green veins.
A wave of revulsion swept
through her. But at what? The owner of the hardware store? The rapists?
Ira Jamison?
She knew
better. Her
violence, her social outrage, her histrionic
public displays, all disguised
a simple truth. Once again, an innocent person had paid for the deeds
she had committed, in this case, Flower Jamison.
The wind swirled inside the
trees and wrinkled the surface of the bayou, and in the rustling of the
canebrake she thought she heard the word
Judas
hissed in her
ear.
AT
Willie Burke's
request, a Union chaplain secured for him three sheets of paper, three
envelopes, a bottle of black ink, and a metal writing pen. He sat on
straw against the wall of the storehouse, a candle guttering on the
brick window ledge above his head, and wrote a letter to his mother and
one to Abigail. There was a hollow feeling in his chest and a deadness
in his limbs that he had never known before, even at Shiloh. The words
he put in his letters contained no grand or spiritual sentiment. In
fact, he considered it a victory simply to complete a sentence that did
not reflect the fear and weakness eating through his body like weevils
through pork.
His third letter was to Robert
Perry, somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
Dear Robert,
I was captured out of uniform
and will be shot in two hours. This night I have written Abby and told
her I love her but I know her heart belongs to you. It could not go to
a more fitting and fine man. I repent of any violation of our
friendship, Robert, and want you to
know I would never
deliberately impair your relationship with
another.
Jim Stubbefield and I will see
you on the other side.
Your old pal and friend,
Willie Burke
He folded the three letters
and placed them in their envelopes and sealed them with wax that had
melted on top of the candle burning above his head. Then he gave them
to the chaplain, who was consoling a man whose skin had turned as gray
as a cadaver's.
Willie stood at the window and
watched the stars fade and the light go out of the sky, and the
scattered farmhouses and the trees along the bayou begin to sharpen
inside the ground fog that rolled out of the fields. Roosters were
crowing beyond his line of sight, and he smelled wood smoke and meat
frying on a fire. Eight Union soldiers were camped in pup tents among
the oaks on the bayou, their Springfield rifles stacked. The canvas
sides of their tents were damp with dew, the flaps tied to the tents'
poles. Willie's heart dropped when he saw an enlisted man emerge from
his tent and stretch and look in the direction of the storehouse. He
stepped back from the window and pressed his hand to his mouth, just as
a half cup of bile surged out of his stomach.
Jim wasn't afraid when he went
up the hill with the guidon at Shiloh, he thought. Don't you be,
either, he told himself. A brief flash of light, perhaps a little pain,
then it's over. There are worse ways to go. How about the poor devils
carried into an aid station with their guts hanging out or their jaws
shot away? Or the ones who begged for death while their limbs were
sawed off?
But his dialogue with himself
brought him no comfort and he wondered if his legs would fail when a
Yankee provost walked him to the wall.
The soldiers camped on the
bayou were gathered around their cookfire now, drinking coffee,
glancing in the direction of the storehouse, as though preparing
themselves for an uncomfortable piece of work that was not of their
choosing.
A ninth man joined them, an
erect fellow with a holstered sidearm and stripes on his sleeves. When
the firelight struck his face Willie recognized the sergeant who had
tried to prevail upon him to use his
head and extricate himself
from a capital sentence. What were his words, th
e only real
pacifist was a dead Quaker?
Why had he not listened?
A man with a stench that made
Willie think of cat spray elbowed him aside from the window.