"I reckon. Miss Abby said
'cause your mother was from Ireland, the Yankees didn't have no right
to take her property. How come they'd have the right if she was from
here? That's what I cain't figure."
"This war never seems to get
over, does it, Tige? How you been doin'?" Willie said.
"Real good." Tige studied the
failing light in the trees and the birds descending into the chimney
tops. "Most of the time, anyway."
"Will you forgive a fellow for
speaking sharply?" Willie asked.
"Some folks say my daddy got
killed at Brice's Crossroads. Others say he just run off 'cause he
didn't have no use for his family. I busted a window in a church after
somebody told me that. Knocked stained glass all over the pews," Tige
said.
"I doubt Our Lord holds it
against you," Willie said.
Tige sat down beside him. He
aimed his broom into the dusk as though it were a musket and sighted
down the handle, then rested it by his foot. "Miss Abby done bought a
big building she's turning into a schoolhouse. Her and a high-yellow
lady named Flower is gonna teach there. She talks about you all the
time, what a good man you are and what kind ways you have. In fact, I
ain't never heard a lady talk so much about a man."
"Miss Abigail does that?"
"I was talking about the
colored ladyMiss Flower."
ROBERT Perry was released from
prison at Johnson's Island, Ohio, two months after the Surrender. The
paddle-wheeler he boarded without a ticket was packed with Northern
cotton traders, gamblers, real estate speculators, and political
appointees seizing upon opportunities that seemed to be a gift from a
divine hand. At night the saloons and dining and card rooms blazed with
light and reverberated with orchestra music, while outside torrents of
rain blistered the decks and the upside-down lifeboat Robert huddled
under with a tiger-striped cat, a guilt-haunted, one-armed participant
in the Fort Pillow Massacre, and an escaped Negro convict whose ankles
were layered with leg-iron scars and who stole food for the four of
them until they reached New Orleans.
Robert rode the spine of a
freight car as far as the Atchafalaya River, then walked forty miles in
a day and a half and went to sleep in a woods not more than two hours
from the house where he had been born. When he woke in the morning he
sat on a tree-shaded embankment on the side of the road and ate a
withered apple and drank water from a wood canteen he had carried with
him from Johnson's Island.
A squad of black soldiers
passed him on the road, talking among themselves, their eyes never
registering his presence, as
though
his gray clothes were less an
indicator of an old enemy than a flag of defeat. Then a mounted Union
sergeant, this one white, reined up his horse in front of Robert and
looked down at him curiously. He wore a goatee and mustache and a kepi
pulled down tightly on his brow and a silver ring with a gold cross on
it.
"What happened to your shoes?"
he asked.
"Lost them crossing the
Atchafalaya," Robert replied.
"We've had trouble with
guerrillas hereabouts. You wouldn't be one of those fellows, would you?"
Robert stared thoughtfully
into space. "Simian creatures who hang in trees? No, I don't know much
about those fellows," he said.
"Your feet look like spoiled
bananas."
"Why, thank you," Robert said.
"Where'd you fight, Reb?"
"Virginia and Pennsylvania."
Cedar and mulberry and wild
pecan trees grew along the edge of the road, and the canopy seemed to
form a green tunnel of light for almost a half mile.
"I have a feeling you didn't
sign an oath of allegiance in a prison camp and they decided to keep
you around a while," the sergeant said.
"You never can tell," Robert
said.
The sergeant removed his foot
from the left stirrup. "Swing up behind me. I can take you into
Abbeville," he said.
An hour later Robert slid off
the horse's rump a half mile from his home and began walking again. He
left the road and cut through a neighbor's property that was completely
deserted, the main house doorless and empty of furniture, the fields
spiked with dandelions and palmettos and the mud towers of crawfish.
Then he climbed through a rick fence onto his father's plantation and
crossed pastureland that was green and channeled with wildflowers. New
cane waved in the fields, and in the distance he could see the swamp
where he had fished as a boy, and snow egrets rising from the cypress
canopy like white rose petals in the early sun.
The two-story house and the
slave cabins seemed unharmed by the war but the barn had been burned to
the ground and in the mounds of
ashes and charcoal Robert
could see the rib cages and long, hollow
eyed skulls of
horses. He
did
not recognize any of the
black people living in the cabins,
nor
could he explain the presence of the whites living among them. His
mother's flowerpots and hanging baskets were gone from the gallery, and
the live oak that had shaded one side of the house, its branches always
raking across the slate roof, had been nubbed back so that the trunk
looked like a celery stalk.
He lifted the brass knocker on
the front door and tapped it three times. He heard a chair scrape
inside the house, then heavy footsteps approaching the front, not like
those of either his mother or his father. The man who opened the door
looked like an upended hogshead. He wore checkered pants and polished,
high-top shoes, like a carnival barker might wear; his face was florid,
whiskered like a walrus's. In his right hand he clutched a boned
porkchop wrapped in a thick piece of bread.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"I'm Robert Perry. I live
here."
"No, I don't hardly see how
you could live here, since I've never seen you before. That would be
pretty impossible, young fellow," the man said. His accent was from the
East, the vowels as hard as rocks. His wife sat at the dining room
table in a housecoat, her hair tied up on her head with a piece of
gauze.
"Where are my parents? What
are you doing in my house?" Robert said.
"You say Perry? Some people by
that name moved into town. Ask around. You'll find them."
"He probably just wants
something to eat. Offer him some work," the man's wife said from the
table.
"You want to do some chores
for a meal?" the man said. Robert looked out at the fields and the pink
sun over the cane.
"That would be fine," he said.
"The privy's got to be cleaned
out. Better eat before you do it, though," the man said. He laughed and
slapped Robert hard on the upper arm. "Not much meat on your bones.
Want a regular job? I run the Freedman's Bureau. You were a Johnny?"
"Yes."
"I'll see what I can do. We
don't aim to rub your noses in it," the man said.
ONE week later, just before
dawn, Tige McGuffy woke to a rolling sound on the roof of Willie
Burke's house. Then he heard a soft thud against the side of the house
and another on the roof. He looked out the window just as a man in the
backyard flung a pine cone into the eaves.
Tige went to the dresser
drawer, then walked down the stairs and opened the back door. Mist hung
in layers on the bayou and in the trees and canebrakes. The man in the
yard stood next to an unsaddled, emaciated horse, tossing a pine cone
in
the air and catching it in his palm.
"Why you chunking at Mr.
Willie's house?" Tige asked.
"Thought it was time for y'all
to get up. You always sleep in a nightshirt and a kepi?" the man in the
yard said.
"If I feel like it," Tige
replied.
"Where's Mr. Willie?"
"None of your dadburned
business."
"I like your kepi. Would you
tell Willie that if Robert Perry had two coins he could rub together he
would treat him to breakfast. But unfortunately he doesn't have a sou."
Tige set a heavy object in his
hand on the kitchen drainboard. "Why ain't you said who you was?" he
asked.
Robert Perry walked out of the
yard and onto the steps, his horse's reins dangling on the ground. His
clothes and hair were damp with dew, his face unshaved, his belt
notched tightly under his ribs. He came inside and glanced down at the
drainboard.
"What are you doing with that
pistol?" he said.
"Night riders got it in for
Mr. Willie. I was pert' near ready to blow you into the bayou," Tige
replied.
"Night riders?" Robert said.
Ten minutes later Willie left
Robert and Tige at the house and went on a shopping trip down Main
Street, then returned and fixed a breakfast of scrambled eggs and green
onions, hash browns, real coffee, warm milk, bacon, chunks of ham,
fresh bread, and blackberries and cream. He and Robert and Tige piled
their plates and made smacking
and grunting
sounds while they ate, forking and spooning
more food into their mouths
than they could chew.
"I didn't know meals like this
existed anymore. How'd you pay for this?" Robert said.
"Took advantage of the credit
system . . . Then signed your name to the bill," Willie said.
"Tige was telling me about
your local night riders," Robert said.
"Have you heard of the White
League or the Knights of the White Camellia?"
"I heard Bedford Forrest is
the head of a group of some kind. Ex-Masons, I think. They use a
strange nomenclature," Robert replied.
"Some are just fellows who
don't want to give it up. But some will put a bedsheet over their heads
and park one in your brisket," Willie said.
"What have you gone and done,
Willie?"
"Abigail and Flower Jamison
started up a school for Negroes or anybody else who wants to learn. I
helped them get started," Willie replied.
Robert was silent.
"You haven't seen her?" Willie
asked.
"Not yet."
"You going to?" Willie asked.
Robert set down his knife and
fork. He kept his eyes on his plate. "Her letters are confessional. But
I'm not sure what it is that bothers her. Would you know, Willie?"
Robert said.
"Would I be knowing? You're
asking me?" Willie said.
Robert was silent again.
"Who knows the soul of
another?" Willie said.
"You're a dreadful liar."
"Don't be talking about your
old pals like that."
"I won't," Robert said.
The sun was in the yard and on
the trees now, and mockingbirds and jays were flitting past the window.
The horse Robert had ridden from Abbeville was drinking from the bayou,
the reins trailing in the water.
"You were at Mansfield when
General Mouton was killed?" Robert said.
"Yes," Willie replied.
"It's true that half the 18th was wiped
out again?" Robert said.
Willie looked at him but
didn't reply.
"You dream about it?" Robert
asked.
"A little. Not every night.
I've let the war go for the most part," Willie said. He twisted his
head slightly and touched at a shaving nick on his jawbone, his eyelids
blinking.
The wind blew the curtains,
and out on the bayou a large fish flopped in the shade of a cypress.
"Thank you for the fine breakfast," Robert said.
"I see grape blowing people
all over the trees," Tige said.
Robert and Willie looked at
his upturned face and at the darkness in his eyes and the grayness
around his mouth.
"I drank water out of the
Bloody Pond. I wake up with the taste in my throat. I dream about a
fellow with railroad spikes in him," Tige said.
Robert lifted Tige's kepi off
the back of his chair and set it on his head and grinned at him.
THAT evening Robert bathed in
the clawfoot tub inside Willie's bathhouse and shaved in the oxidized
mirror on the wall, then dressed in fresh clothes and went outside. A
sunshower was falling on the edge of town and he could smell the heavy,
cool odor of the bayou in the shadows. Willie was splitting firewood on
a stump by the bayou and stacking it in a shed, his sleeves rolled, his
cheeks bright with his work.
Robert suddenly felt an
affection for his friend that made him feel perhaps things were right
with the world after all, regardless of the times in which they lived.
There is a goodness in your face that the war, the likes of Billy
Sherman, or the worst of our own kind will never rob you of, Willie, he
thought.
"I received the letter you
wrote me while you were waiting to be executed by the Federals," Robert
said.
"You did?"
"A Yankee chaplain mailed it
to me with an attached note. He thought there was a chance you had been
killed while escaping and he should honor your last wish by mailing the
letter you left behind," Robert said.