"No, suh," Hatcher said.
"Listen to the colonel,
Clay," Atkins said.
"She has unnatural
inclinations toward her own gender. I think she has no business
teaching anybody anything. She is also trying to embarrass us in the
national press. Are you hearing me, Rufus?" Jamison said.
"Yes, sir. To borrow a phrase
from my friend Clay here, maybe it's time that abolitionist bitch got
her buckwheats," Atkins said.
"Yes, and leave footprints
right back to my front door," Jamison said.
Atkins' gaze focused on the
river bottoms and a work gang hauling dirt up the side of a levee. The
striped jumpers and pants of the convicts were stained red with sweat
and clay. Atkins sucked in his cheeks, his eyes neutral, the colonel's
insult leaving no trace in his face.
"I reckon we have a situation
that requires a message without a signature," he said.
"Good. We're done here,"
Jamison said, and began to walk away. Then he turned, his hand cupped
on his chin, his thoughts veiled.
"Rufus?" he said.
"Yes, sir?"
"No one is to harm Flower. Not
under any circumstances. The man who does will have his genitalia taken
out," Jamison said.
Jamison crossed the yard and
walked under the porte cochere and into the house. Clay Hatcher stared
after him, breathing through his mouth, his eyes dull.
"A little late, ain't hit?
Don't he know Flower got raped by them lamebrains you hired?" he said.
Atkins used the flat of his
fist to break Hatcher's bottom lip against his teeth.
ABIGAIL Dowling had discovered
she did not know how to talk with Robert Perry. The previous evening
she had seen him for the first time in almost four years. When she had
run out of the classroom into the hallway to greet him, he had placed
his hands on her shoulders and touched the skin along her collar with
one finger. Instead of happiness, she felt a rush of guilt in her chest
and a sense of physical discomfort that bordered on resentment. Why?
she asked herself. The more she tried to think her way out of her
feelings, the more confused she became.
He had stood up to Todd
McCain and the drunkards who were
harassing
the Negroes under
the live oak; his manners and good looks and the brightness in his eyes
and his obvious affection for her were undiminished by the war. He
walked her and Flower home, dismissing the shot fired over his head by
McCain, offering to sleep on her gallery in case the revelers on the
flatbed wagon returned.
But she didn't even ask him in
and was glad she could honestly tell him she was feeling ill. When he
was gone she made tea for Flower and herself and experienced a sudden
sense of quietude and release for which she could offer herself no
explanation.
Who in reality was she? she
asked herself. Now, more than ever, she believed she was an impostor, a
sojourner not only in Louisiana and in the lives of others but in her
own life as well.
The next morning she looked
out the front window and saw Robert opening the gate to her yard. He
wore a brushed brown suit, shined shoes, and a soft blue shirt with a
black tie, and his hair was wet and combed back on his neck. In the
daylight she realized he was even thinner than she had thought.
"I hope you don't mind my
dropping by unannounced," he said.
"Of course not," she said, and
unconsciously closed her left hand, which her father had told her was
the way he could always tell when she fibbed to him as a girl."Why
don't we walk out here in the yard?"
They strolled through the
trees toward the bayou. The camellias and four-o'clocks were blooming
in the shade, and a family of black people were perched among the
cypress knees on the bank, bobber-fishing in the shallows.
She heard Robert clear his
throat and pull a deep breath into his lungs.
"Abby, what is it? Why is
there this stone wall between us?" he said.
"I feel I've deceived you."
"In what way?"
Her heart raced and the trees
and the air vines swaying in the breeze and the black family among the
shadows seemed to go in and out of focus.
"You fought for a cause in
which you believed. You spent almost two years in prison. I was a
member of the Underground Railroad. I never told you that," she said.
"You're a woman of
conscience.You don't
have to
explain yourself to me."
"Well," she said, her mouth
dry, her blood hammering in her ears with a new deceit she had just
perpetrated upon him.
"Is that the sum of your
concerns?" he said.
She paused under an ancient
live oak, one that was gnarled, hollowed by lightning, green with
lichen and crusted with fern, the trunk wrapped with poisonous vines.
"No, I was romantically
intimate with another," she said.
"I see," he replied.
His hair had dried in the heat
and it had lights in it, like polished mahogany, and the wind blew it
on his collar. His eyes were crystal blue and seemed to focus on a
little Negro boy who was cane-lifting a hooked perch out of the water.
"With Willie?" he said.
"I can only speak to my own
deeds," she said.
"Neither of you should feel
guilt, at least not toward me. Nor does either of you owe me an
apology."
"We're different, you and I,"
she said.
"And Willie is not?"
"You believed in the cause you
served. Willie never did. He fought because he was afraid not to. Then
his heart filled with hatred when he saw Jim Stubbefield killed," she
said.
"I lost friends, too, Abby,"
Robert said.
BUT she was already walking
back toward the house, her hands balled into fists, the leaves and
persimmons and molded pecan husks snapping under her feet, the world
swimming around her as though she were seeing it from the bottom of a
deep, green pool.
"Did you hear me, Abby? I lost
friends, too," Robert called behind her.
The following week, on a
sun-spangled, rain-scented Saturday evening, Carrie LaRose entered St.
Peter's Church and knelt down inside the confessional. The inside of
the confessional was hot and dark and smelled of dust and oil and her
own perfume and body powder and the musk in her clothes.
The priest who pulled back the
wood slide in the partition was very old, with a nervous
jitter
in
his eyes and hands
which
often shook
uncontrollably, to such a
degree he was no longer allowed to perform the consecration
at Mass or to administer communion. Through a space between the black
gauze that hung over the small window in the partition and the wood
paneling, Carrie could see the hands and wrists of the priest framed
inside a shaft of sunlight. His bones looked like sticks, the skin
almost translucent, the veins little more than pieces of blue string.
The priest waited, then his
head turned toward the window. "What is it? Why is it you don't speak?"
he said.
"You don't know me. I
run the brot'el sout' of town," she
replied.
"Could I help you with
something?"
"You don't talk French?"
"No, not well."
"I done a lot of sins in my
life. The Lord already knows what they are and I ain't gonna bore Him
talking about them, no. But I done one t'ing that don't never let go of
me. 'Cause for me to wish I ain't done what I did is the same t'ing as
wishing I wasn't alive."
"You've lost me."
Carrie tried to start over but
couldn't think. "My knees is aching. Just a minute," she said. She left
the confessional and found a chair and dragged it back inside, then
plunked down in it and closed the curtain again.
"Are we comfortable
now?" the priest asked.
"Yes, t'ank you. I was
in a prison cell in
Paris. I could see the guillotine from the window. I kneeled down on
the stone and practiced putting my head on the bench so I'd know how to
do it when they took me in the cart to die. But I'd get sick all over
myself. I knowed then I'd do anyt'ing to stay alive."
"I'm confused. You want
absolution for a murder you committed?"
"You ain't listening. The
other
woman in my cell was a cutpurse. I done sexual t'ings for the jailer so
he'd take her 'stead of me. I go over it in my head again and again,
but each time it comes out the same way. In my t'oughts I still want to
live and I want that woman to die so I ain't got to lay my head down
under that blade way up at the top of the scaffold. So in troot I ain't
really sorry for sending her to the headsman 'stead of me. That means I
ain't never gonna have no peace."
The priest's silhouette was
tilted forward on his thumb and forefin
ger.He seemed to rock
back and forth, as though teetering on the edge
of a thought or an angry moment. Then
he closed the slide on the partition and rose from his seat and left
the confessional.
She sat motionless in her
chair, the walls around her like an upended coffin. Sweat ran down her
sides and an odor like sour milk seemed to rise from her clothes. A
hand that trembled so badly it could hardly find purchase gripped the
edge of the curtain and jerked it back.
"Step out here with me," the
priest said, and gestured for her to take a seat in a pew by a rack of
burning candles.
He sat down next to her, his
small hands knotted on his thighs. The rack of votive candles behind
him glittered like a hundred points of blue light.
"You don't have to sort
through these things with a garden rake. You just have to be sorry for
having done them and change your way. God doesn't forgive
incrementally. His forgiveness is absolute," the priest said.
He saw her forming the world
"incrementally" with her lips.
"He doesn't forgive partway.
You're forgiven, absolved, as of this moment," the priest said.
"What about the house I run?"
"You might consider a
vocational adjustment."
"Ain't no one tole it to me
this way befo'," she said.
"Come back and see me," he
said.
The following night was
Sunday, and the mutton-chopped, potbellied Union major was back at the
bordello, charging his liquor and the use of Carrie's best girl to his
bill.
"You're not still mad at me,
are you, Carrie? Over my unpaid bill and that sort of thing?" he said.
He held a dark green wine bottle in one hand and a glass filled with
burgundy in the other. One button on his fly was undone and his
underwear showed through the opening.
She was sitting in a rocker on
the gallery, fanning herself, while heat lightning bloomed in the
clouds. An oppressive weight seemed to be crushing down on her chest,
causing her to constantly straighten her back in order to breathe.
"I'm glad you brought that up,
you. Button up that li'l sawed-off penis of yours, the one all my girls
laugh at, and get your ass outta my house," she said.
"What did you say?"
The coffee cup she threw at
him broke on the wood post just
behind his head.
There were lights in the sky
that night, and wind that kicked dust out of the cane fields and dry
thunder that sounded like horses' hooves thundering across the earth.
She sat on the gallery until midnight, her breath wheezing as though
her lungs were filled with burnt cork. In the distance she saw a ball
of flaming swamp gas roll through a stand of flooded cypress, its
incandescence so bright the details of the trees, the hanging moss, the
lacy texture of the leaves, the flanged trunks at the waterline, became
like an instant brown and green and gray photograph created in the
middle of the darkness.
Some people believed the balls
of light in the swamp were actually the spirits of the
loups-garouswerewolves who could take on human, animal or inanimate
formsand secretly Carrie had always believed the same and had crossed
herself or clutched her juju bag whenever she saw one. But tonight she
simply watched the ball of lightning or burning swamp gas or whatever
it was splinter apart in the saw grass as though she were looking back
on a childhood fable whose long-ago ability to scare her now made her
nostalgic.
In the morning she called her
girls together, paid them their commissions for the previous week, gave
each of them a twenty-five-dollar bonus, and fired them all. After they
were gone she placed a black man in the front and back yards to tell
all her customers the bordello was closed, then locked the doors, took
a sponge bath in a bucket, dressed in her best nightgown, and lay down
on top of her bedsheets. She slept through the day and woke in the
afternoon, thickheaded, unsure of where she was, the room creaking with
heat from the late sun. She washed her face in a porcelain basin and
shuffled into the kitchen and tried to eat, but the food was like dry
paper in her mouth. It seemed the energies in her heart were barely
enough to pump blood into her head.
The yard was empty, the
servants gone. She soaked a towel in water and laudanum and placed it
on her chest and went back to bed. The light faded outside and she
drifted in and out of sleep and once again heard the rumble of horses
through the earth. She heard rain sweep across the roof and shutters
banging against the sides of the house, then she slipped away inside
the dream where a man in heavy shoes