"They ain't ever tole me."
"Don't be playing on the job
anymore. Can you do that for me?" Jamison said.
"Yes, suh."
"Get on back to work now,"
Jamison said.
"Yes, suh."
By day's end the log skid was
almost completed, the graves excavated and filled in, packed down with
clay and smoothed over with iron rollers, the sides of the depression
overlaid with cypress planks and stobs to prevent erosion. In fact, it
was a masterpiece of engineering, Jamison thought, a huge sluice that
could convert timber into money, seven days a week, as fast as the
loggers could fell trees and slide them down the slope.
As he turned his horse toward
the house he saw Clay Hatcher pick up an object from a mound of mud on
the edge of the work area. Hatcher knocked the mud off it and held it
up in the light to see the
object more clearly.
Then he stooped over and washed it in a bucket of
water the convicts had used to
clean their shovels in. Jamison walked his horse toward Hatcher.
"What do you have there,
Clay?" he asked.
"It looks to be an old
merry-go-round. It's still got a windup key plugged in it. I wonder
what it was doing in the graveyard," Hatcher replied.
Jamison reached down and took
the merry-go-round from Hatcher's fingers and studied the hand-carved
horses, the corroded brass cylinder inside the base, the key that was
impacted with dirt and feeder roots. He had given it to Uncle Royal,
who in turn had given it to his great-grandson, the one who died of a
fever. Or was it an accident, something about an overturned wagon
crushing him? Jamison couldn't remember.
He returned it to Hatcher.
"Wash it off and give it to
the skull-thrower," he said.
"That little nigra boy?"
"Yes."
"Why would you be doing that,
Kunnel?"
"He's intelligent and brave.
You never make a future enemy of his kind if you can avoid it."
"I'll be switched if I'll ever
understand you, Kunnel," Hatcher said.
Jamison flipped his reins idly
across the back of his hand. The day you do is the day I and every
other plantation owner in the South will have a problem, he thought,
and was surprised at his own candor.
WILLIE Burke had long ago
given up the notion of sleeping through the night from dark to dawn.
His dreams woke him up with regularity, every one to two hours, and his
sleep was filled with images and feelings that were less terrifying
than simply disjointed and unrelieved, like the quiet throbbing of a
headache or an impacted tooth. Tonight, as he slept under a wagon
behind a farmhouse, he dreamed he was marching on a soft, powdery road
through hills that were covered with thistle and dead grass. Up ahead,
a brass cannon, its muzzle pointed back at him, flopped crazily on its
carriage, and brown dust cascaded like water off the rims and spokes of
the wheels.
His feet burned with blisters
and his back ached from the weight of his rifle and pack. He wanted to
escape fom the dream and the heat of the march into the cool of the
morning and the early fog that had marked each dawn since he had begun
walking back toward New Iberia
from
Natchitoches in northwestern Louisiana. In his sleep he heard roosters
crowing, a hog snuffing inside a railed lot, horses nickering and
thudding their hooves impatiently in a woods. He sat up in the softness
of the dawn and saw a pecan orchard that was still bare of leaves, the
trunks and branches wet with dew, and the dream of the brass cannon
barrel flopping crazily under a murderous sun gradually became unreal
and unimportant, its meaning, if it had one, lost in the beginning of a
new day.
He got to his feet and
urinated behind a corncrib, then realized he was not alone. Between
thirty and forty mounted men moved out of the fog in the pecan orchard
and formed a half circle around the back of the farmhouse.
They wore ragged beards and
bayonet-cut hair. Their elbows poked through their shirts; their pants
were streaked with grease and road grime, their skin the color of
saddle leather, as though it had been smoked over a fire.
The leader wore gray pants and
a blue cotton shirt and a cavalry officer's hat that had wilted over
his ears. A sword inside a leather scabbard and a belt strung with
three holstered cap-and-ball pistols were looped over his saddle
pommel. Even though the morning was peppered with mist, his face looked
dilated, overheated, his eyes scalded.
"You Secesh?" he asked.
"I was," Willie replied.
"I've seen you. You was
looting the body of one of my men at St. Martinville," the guerrilla
said, his horse shifting under him.
"You're wrong, my friend. I
won't be abiding the insult, either."
The guerrilla touched his
horse's side with his boot heel and approached Willie, leaning down in
the saddle to get a better look. His eyes were colorless, filled with
energies that seemed to have no moral source. His coppery hair was
pushed up under his hat, like a woman's.
"You know who I am?" he asked.
"I think your name is
Jarrette. I think you rode with William Quantrill and Bloody Bill
Anderson and helped burn Lawrence, Kansas, to the ground," Willie said.
"You
got a mouth on
you,
do you?"
"I
saw your handiwork
on
the St. Martinville Road. Your
men
give no quarter."
"That's life under a black
flag. We recognize no authority except Jehovah and Jefferson Davis.
What's inside that house?"
"A woman with a gun and a
three - or four-day-old corpse." The guerrilla leader stared at the
house, then looked in both directions, as though he heard bugles or
gunfire, although there were no sounds except those of a rural morning
and the buzzing of bottle flies inside the house.
One of the guerrilla leader's
men leaned in the saddle and whispered in his ear.
"We was here?" the leader said.
The other guerrilla nodded.
The leader, whose name was Jarrette, turned his attention back to
Willie. "I don't want you walking behind me," he said.
"The war's over," Willie said.
"The hell it is."
Jarrette's face twitched under
his hat. He glared into the distance, his back straightening, his
thighs tightening on his horse. Willie looked in the direction of his
interest but saw nothing but gray fields and a fog-shrouded pecan
orchard.
"I gut blue-bellies and fill
up their cavities with stones and sink them to the bottoms of rivers.
Jayhawkers get the same. You saying I'm a liar?" Jarrette said.
Willie looked at his pie-plate
face and the moral insanity in his eyes and the rubbery, unnatural
configuration of his mouth. "I mean you no harm," he said.
"Stay out of my road,"
Jarrette said.
"My pleasure. Top of the
morning to you," Willie said.
He watched Jarrette and his men ride out of the dirt yard toward the
road, then scooped off his flop hat and began collecting chicken's eggs
from under a manure wagon and in the depressions along the barn wall.
He had put three brown eggs inside the crown of his hat and was walking
toward a smokehouse that lay on its side, dripping grease and
smoldering in its own ashes, when he heard the hooves of a solitary
horse thundering across the earth behind him.
He turned just as the
guerrilla leader bore down upon him, leaning from the saddle, the point
of hes hilted sword extended in frong of him.
The sword's
sharpened e
dge
knifed
through the top of Willie's shirt, just above the collarbone, and
sliced across the skin of his shoulder as coldly as an icicle.
Willie crumpled his hat
against his wound and collapsed against a rick fence, the eggs breaking
and running down his clothes. He stared stupidly at the guerrilla
leader, who disappeared in the mist, an idiot's grin on his mouth.
THE two-story gabled house
next
to the Catholic cemetery had been built in the 1840s by an eccentric
ornithologist and painter who had worked with James Audubon in Key West
and the Florida Everglades. Unfortunately his insatiable love of
painting tropical birds as well as Tahitian nudes seemed to be related
to a libidinous passion for red wine, Parisian prostitutes, gambling,
and trysts with the wives of the wealthiest and best duelists in
southern Louisiana.
Residents of the town believed
it was only a matter of time before a cuckold drove a pistol ball
through his brain. They were wrong. Syphilis got to it first. Just
before the first Federal troops reached New Iberia, he gave all his
paintings to his slaves, put on a tailored gray officer's uniform he
had worn as a member of the Home Guards, then mounted a horse and
charged down the bayou road, waving a sword over his head, straight
into an artillery barrage that blew him and his uniform into pieces
that floated down as airily as flamingo feathers on the bayou's surface.
The first night Federals
occupied the town they tore the doors off the house, broke out the
windows and turned the downstairs rooms into horse stalls. After the
Union cavalry moved on up the 'I'echc into the Red Rivet country, the
house remained empty, the white paint darkening from stubble fires, the
oak floors scoured by horseshoes, the eaves clustered with
yellow-jacket and mud-dauber nests. The taxes on the house were not
paid for two years, and on a hot afternoon in late May, the sheriff
tacked an auction announcement on the trunk of the live oak that shaded
the dirt yard in front of the gallery.
Abigail Dowling happened to be
passing in her buggy when the sheriff tapped down the four corners of
the auction notice on the tree and stood back to evaluate his
handiwork. But Abigail's attention was focused on the gallery steps,
where Flower Jamison was sitting with two black children, teaching them
how to write the letters of the alphabet on a piece of slate. In fact,
at that moment, the broad back of the sheriff, the auction notice
puffing against the bark of the tree, Flower and the black children
arranged like a triptych on the steps and the vandalized and neglected
house of a sybaritic artist, all seemed to be related, like prophetic
images caught inside a perfect historical photograph.
Abigail pulled the buggy into
the shade and walked past Flower into the building, trailing her
fingers across Flower's shoulders. She walked from room to room,
computing the measurements in her mind, seeing furnishings and
arrangements that were not there. Tramps or ex-soldiers passing through
town had scattered trash through the rooms and built unconfined cook
fires on the hearths, blackening the walls and scorching the ceilings.
She could hear red squirrels and field mice clattering across the roof
and the attic. The wind blew hot and dusty through the open windows and
smelled of fish heads behind a market and horse manure in the streets.
But when she looked out on the gallery and saw the two black children,
both of them barefoot, bending down attentively on each side of Flower
while she showed them how to print their names in chalk on the piece of
slate, Abigail felt a prescience about the future that was more
optimistic than any she had experienced in years.
Wasn't it time to put aside
anger and loss and self-accusation and live in the sunlight for a
while? she thought.
She went back out on the
gallery and sat down on the top step next to Flower and placed her palm
in the center of Flower's back. She could feel the heat and moisture in
Flower's skin through her dress,
and she removed her hand
and rested it in her lap. She looked at
Flower's
profile
against the light breaking in the live oak, the clarity
in her eyes, the resolute tilt of
her chin, and experienced a
strange tightening in her throat.
The two black children, a boy
and a girl, both grinned at her. To call their clothes rags was a
euphemism, she thought. Their poverty, the dried sweat lines on their
faces, the untreated red cuts and abrasions on their black skin made
her heart ache.
"You were born to teach," she
said to Flower.
"That's what I'm doing. Every
afternoon, right here on these steps," Flower replied.
Abigail touched Flower's hair.
It felt as thick and warm as sun-heated cotton in a field. "Yes, you
are. Like an African princess inside a painting. One of the loveliest,
most beautiful creatures Our Lord ever made," she said.
She felt her face flush but
knew it was only from the heat and the unnatural dryness of the season.
THE next morning Abigail went
to the brick jailhouse set between Main Street and Bayou Teche, where
the sheriff kept his office in the front part of the building. When she
opened the door, he glanced up from the paperwork on his desk, then
rose heavily from his chair, hypertension glowing in his cheeks, his
mustache hanging like pieces of hemp from each side of his mouth. The
sheriff's name was Hipolyte Gautreau, and he wore a hat both indoors
and outdoors, even in church, to hide a burn scar from Mobile Bay that
looked like a large, hourglass-shaped piece of red rubber that had been
inserted in his scalp. The cuspidor and plank floor by his desk were
splattered with tobacco juice, and through an open wood door that gave
on to the cells, Abigail could see several unshaved, long-haired white
men standing at the bars or sitting against them.