In the morning she pulled on a
pair of work gloves and went outside with a burlap sack and began
picking dead birds off the ground.
All
of them were
crows,
their layered feathers traced
with
lines of tiny white parasites.
They were as light as air in her hands, as though they had been
hollowed out by disease, and she knew they had either starved to death
or in their hunger broken their necks seeking food.
She dug a deep hole and buried
the burlap sack and covered it with bricks so animals would not dig it
up.
If birds could not find
provender in a tropical environment like southern Louisiana, what must
the rest of the South be like? she asked herself.
At noon she walked to the post
office to get her mail, unable to rid herself of a sense of foreboding
that made her wonder if she was coming down with a sickness. Mr.
LeBlanc, the postmaster, stood up behind his desk at the rear of the
building and put on his coat and came from behind the counter, an
envelope in his hand. He had aged dramatically since the death of his
son at Manassas Junction, but he never discussed his loss or showed any
public sign of grief or indicated any bitterness toward those who had
killed him. When Abigail looked at the deep lines in his face, she
wanted to press his hands in hers and tell him it was all right to feel
anger and rage against those who had caused the war, but she knew her
statement would be met with silence.
Seated on a bench in the
corner, hardly noticeable in the gloom, was a thin, solemn-faced boy in
his early teens, wearing brown homespun, a Confederate-issue kepi, and
oversized workshoes that had chaffed his ankles. A choke sack
containing his belongings sat by his foot. Mr. LeBlanc studied him for
a moment as though the boy were an ongoing problem he had not found a
solution for. Then his attention shifted back to Abigail.
"Do you know any way to
contact Willie Burke?" he asked.
"No, I've heard nothing from
him in months," she replied.
"I received a telegraph
message for him this morning. I don't quite know what to do. His mother
died in New Orleans."
"Sir?" Abby said.
"She went there to file a
claim as a British subject. Something about getting paid for livestock
the Yankees appropriated at her farm. She contracted pneumonia and died
in the hospital. Do you want to sign for the telegram?"
"No."
He looked at her blankly. "I
guess I can hold on to it," he said.
"
I'm sorry, Mr.
LaBlanc.
I'm just not thinking very clearly right now."
"I have a letter for you from
Johnson Island, Ohio. Maybe it's a little brighter
in content," Mr. LeBlanc said.
"You do?" she said, her face
lighting.
"Of course," he said, smiling.
Before he could speak further,
she hurried out the door, tearing at the envelope's seal with her thumb.
"Miss Abigail, would you talk
with me for a minute or two after you've read your mail?" he called
after her.
She sat on a bench under a
colonnade where the stage passengers waited and read the letter that
had been written in a prisoner of war camp in Ohio.
Dear Abby,
Thank you for sending me the
hat and suit of clothes. They are the exact size and right color (gray)
and have been sorely needed, as my uniform had deteriorated into rags.
As always, you have proved remarkable in all your endeavors.
But your letters continue to
confuse me. You seem to be harboring a guilt of some kind, as though
you've done me injury. Nothing could be farther from the truth. You are
a true and compassionate and loyal friend. Who could have a better
spiritual companion than one such as yourself?
Do you hear from Willie? Even
though he has seen much of war, I think he has never gotten over the
death of our friend Jim Stubbefield.
She folded the letter and
replaced it in the envelope without finishing it. Robert Perry's words
were like acid on her skin. Not only did they exacerbate her guilt over
her self-perceived infidelity, the term "spiritual companion" reduced
her to a presumption, an adjunct in Robert's life rather than a
participant.
Why had she stayed in
Louisiana? she asked herself. But she already knew the answer, and it
had to do with her father and it made, her wonder about her level of
maturity. Sometimes she missed him in a way that was almost
intolerable. In an unguarded moment, when the world surrounded her and
her own resolve was not sufficient to deal with it, the image of his
broad, jolly face and big shoulders and pipe-smelling clothes would
invade her mind and her eyes would begin to film.
He was defrauded by his New
York business partners and sued in Massachusetts by men who owed their
very lives to him, but his spirits never dimmed and he never lost
his faith in either God or humanity or the abolitionist movement, which
he had championed all his life.
After his death she could not
bear the New England winters in their family home up on the Merrimack,
nor the unrelieved whiteness of the fields that seemed to flow into the
horizon like the blue beginnings of eternity. The inside of the house
had become a mausoleum, its hardwood surfaces enameled with cold, and
by mid-January she had felt that her soul was sheathed in ice. In her
mind she would re-create their clipper ship voyages to Spain, Italy,
and Greece, and she would see the two of them together in late summer,
hiking with backpacks on a red dirt road in Andalusia, the olive trees
a dark green against a hillside of yellow grass that was sear and
rustling in the heat. She and her father would hike all the way to the
top of the mountain and sit in the warm shade of a Moorish castle, then
fix lunch and eat it, while in the distance the azure brilliance of the
Mediterranean stretched away as far as the eye could see.
It was a place she went back
to again and again in her memory. It was a special place where she
lived when she felt threatened, if the world seemed too much for her
late and soon, like a cathedral in which she and her father were the
only visitors.
When she came to south
Louisiana during the yellow fever epidemic and smelled the salt breeze
blowing off Lake Pontchartrain and saw roses blooming in December and
palm trees rising starkly against the coastline, like those around
Cadiz, she felt that the best memories in her life had suddenly been
externalized and made real again and perhaps down a cobbled street in
the old part of New Orleans her father waited for her at an outdoor
cafe table under a balcony that was hung with tropical flowers.
Perhaps it was a foolish way
to be, but her father had always taught her the greatest evil one
person could do to another was to interfere in his or her destiny, and
to Abigail that meant no one had a right to intrude upon either the
province of her soul or her imagination or the ties that bound her to
the past and allowed her to function in the present.
But now, in the drowsy shade
of a colonnade in April 1865, at the close of the greatest epoch in
American history, she wished she was on
board a sailing ship,
within sight ol Malaga, the palm trees banked thickly at the base of
the Sierra Nevada, like a displaced
piece of Africa, the troubles
and conflicts of war-torn Louisiana far behind her.
"You all right, Miss Dowling?"
She looked up, startled, at
Mr. LeBlanc. The boy in brown homespun and the Confederate-issue kepi
stood behind him, his choke sack tied with a string around his wrist.
"This young fellow here says a
preacher bought him a stage ticket to find Willie Burke," Mr. LeBlanc
said.
The boy stared down the
street, as though unconcerned about the events taking place around him.
"What's your name again?" Mr.
LeBlanc asked.
"Tige McGuffy."
"Where did you know Mr. Willie
from?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.
"Shiloh Church. I was with the
6th Mis'sippi. Me and him was both at the Peach Orchard."
"And you have no family?" Mr.
LeBlanc said.
"I just ain't sure where
they're at right now."
"Don't lie to people when
they're trying to help you, son," Mr. LeBlanc said.
The boy's cheeks pooled with
color.
"My daddy was with Gen'l
Forrest. He never come back. The sheriff was gonna send me to the
orphans' home. The preacher from our church give me the money for a
stage ticket here," he said.
His skin was brown, filmed
with dust, his throat beaded with dirt rings. He studied the far end of
the street, his mousy hair blowing at the edges of his kepi.
"When did you eat last?"
Abigail asked.
"A while back. At a stage
stop," he replied.
"When?" Abigail asked.
"Yesterday. I don't eat much.
It ain't a big deal with me."
"I see. Pick up your things
and let's see what you and I can find for lunch," she said.
"I wasn't looking for no
handouts," he said.
"I know you're not," she said,
and winked at him. "Come on, walk me home. I never know when a carriage
is going to run me down."
He thought about it, then
crooked his arm and extended it for her to
hold on to.
"It's a mighty nice town you
got here," h
e said;
admiring
the
buildings and the trees on the bayou. "Did Willie
Burke make
it through the war all right?"
"I think so. I'm not sure. The
18th
Louisiana had
a bad
time of it, Tige," she said.
"Think so?"
he said,
looking up at her,
his
forehead wrinkling.
IRA Jamison sat astride a
white gelding and watched his first shipment of convicts from the jails
of New Or
leans and B
aton
Rouge go to work along
the river's edge, chopping
down trees, b
urning
underbrush and digging out the coffins in a slav
es' c
emetery
that had filled with water seepage and formed a large de
piession
in th
e woods.
Most of the convicts were
Negroes.
A few were white
and a few were children
, some as
young as sev
en years old. All of
them
wore black-and-white-striped jumpers and pants,
and
hats
that were woven together from palmetto leaves. They flu
ng th
e
chopped trees and underbrush onto bonfires that were burning by the
river's edge and raked the rotted wood and bones from the slaves'
coffins into the water. As Ira Jamison moved his horse ou
t of
the smok
e blowing off the fires,
he tried to form
in his mind's eye a picture of the log skid and sawmill and loading
docks that
would replace the
wo
ods and the Negro cemetery.
He did not like the idea of
the children working
among the ad
ults. They were not only
in the way, they w
ere not cost-effective.
But his state
contract required he take all the inmate men, women, and children, from
the parish jails
throughout Louisiana;
house, cloth
e and feed them; and
put them to work in so
me form
of
rehabilitative activity and
simultaneously contribute to
the states econo
my.
He watched a Negro boy, no
more
than twelve
, clean a
nest of
bones and rags from a coffin and begin flinging them off the bank into
the current. The boy picked up the skull by inserting his fingers in
the eye sockets and pitched it in a high
arc onto a pile
of
driftwood that was floating south toward Baton Rouge, the boy nudged a
companion and pointed at his handiwork.
"Bring
that one to me,"
Jamison said to Clay Hatcher, who was now back at his former job on
the plantation, his blond hair the color of old wood, the skin under
his right eye grained black from a musket that had blown up in his face
at the battle of Mansfield.
"You got it, Kunnel," Hatcher
said.
He walked into the trees and
the trapped smoke from the bonfires and tapped the skull-thrower on top
of his palmetto hat.
When the boy approached
Jamison's horse he removed his hat and raised his face uncertainly. His
striped jumper was grimed with red dirt, his hair sparkling with sweat.
"Yes, suh?" he said.
"It doesn't bother you to
handle dead people's bones?" Jamison asked.
"No, suh."
"Why not?"
"'Cause they dead," the boy
said, and grinned. Then his face seemed to brighten with curiosity as
he gazed up at Jamison.
"You have a reason for looking
at me like that?" Jamison asked.
"You gots one eye mo' little
than the other, that's all," the boy replied.
Jamison felt the gelding shift
its weight under him.
"Why were you sent to jail?"
he asked.