Willie's tall friend, Jim
Stubbefield, sat barefoot in his militia uniform, his back against a
cypress tree by the water's edge, and drank from a cup of buttermilk
and looked with puzzlement at the festive atmosphere in the camp. He
turned to a young man in civilian clothes sitting next to him and said,
"Robert, I think the fates are not working properly here. I enlisted
two months ago and no one seemed to notice."
His friend was named Robert
Perry. His hair grew over his collar and was the color of mahogany, his
face handsome, his blue eyes never troubled by fear or self-doubt or
conflict with the world around him.
"I'm sure it was just an
oversight on the community's part," he said.
Jim continued to stare in a
bemused way at the enlistment lines, then his gaze locked on one
individual in particular and he chewed on a piece of skin on his thumb
and spit it off his tongue.
"I think I've made a mistake,"
he said.
"A man with your clarity of
vision? Seems unlikely," Robert said.
"Look there. Willie's joining
up. Maybe at my urging."
"Good for Willie," Robert said.
"I doubt Willie has it in him
to shoot anyone," Jim said.
"Do you?"
"If they come down here, I
figure they've asked for it."
"I doubt if it was easy for
Willie to come here. Don't rob him of his self-respect," Robert said,
rising to his feet, pressing a palm down on Jim's shoulder.
"Your father owns over a
hundred and eighty niggers, Robert. You ought not to be lecturing to
the rest of us."
"You're entirely right, Jim,"
Robert said. He winked at Jim and walked toward the recruitment table,
where Willie Burke had just used quill and ink to enter his name among
a long list of French and Spanish and Anglo-Saxon ones, many of them
printed by an enlistment officer and validated by an X.
But Robert soon realized Jim's
premonitions about their friend were probably correct, that the
juncture of Willie Burke and the Confederate army would be akin to a
meeting of a wrecking ball and a crystal shop.
Captain Rufus Atkins stepped
out of a tent, in a gray uniform and wide-brimmed ash-colored hat with
a gold cord and a pair of tiny gold icons tied around the crown. A
blond man, his hair as greasy as tallow, wearing a butternut uniform
with corporal's chevrons freshly sewn on the sleeves, stood behind him.
The corporal's name was Clay Hatcher.
"Where do you think you're
going, young Willie?" Atkins asked.
"Back home," Willie answered.
"I think not," Atkins replied.
He looked out at the lake and the moss blowing in the trees, the
four-o'clocks riffling in the shade. "One of the privies needs dipping
out. After you finish that, spread a little lye around and that will be
it until this evening. By the way, are you familiar with the poetry of
William Blake?"
"Never heard of him," Willie
replied.
"I see. Better get started,
young Willie. Did you bring a change of clothes?" Atkins said.
"Excuse me, sir, but I didn't
join the army to ladle out your shit-holes. On that subject, can you
clear up a question that has bedeviled many in the community? Is it
true your mother was stricken with the bloody flux when you were born
and perhaps threw the infant away by mistake and raised the afterbirth
instead?"
The corporal to the side of
Rufus Atkins pressed his wrist to his mouth to stop from snickering,
then glanced at Atkins' face and sucked in his cheeks.
"Let me gag and buck him,
Cap'n," he said.
Before Atkins could answer,
Robert Perry walked up behind Willie.
"Hello, Captain!" Robert Perry
said.
"How do you do, Master
Robert?" Atkins said, bowing slightly and touching his hat. "I saw you
signing up earlier. I know your father is proud."
"My friend Willie isn't
getting off to a bad start in the army, is he?" Robert said.
"A little garrison duty,
that's all," Atkins said.
"I'm sure if you put him in my
charge, there will be no trouble," Robert said.
"Of course, Master Robert. My
best to your father," Atkins said.
"And to your family as well,
sir," Robert said, slipping his hand under Willie's arm.
The two of them walked back
toward the lake to join Jim Stubbefield at the cypress tree. Willie
felt Robert's hand tighten on his arm.
"Atkins is an evil and
dangerous man. You stay away from him," Robert said.
"Let him stay away from me,"
Willie replied.
"What was that stuff about
William Blake?"
"I have a feeling he found a
book I gave to a Negro girl."
"You did what?" Robert said.
"Oh, go on with you, Robert.
You don't seem bothered by the abolitionist tendencies of Abigail
Dowling," Willie said.
"I l
ove you dearly, Willie, but you're
absolutely
hopeless, unteachable, beyond the pale, with the thinking processes of
a stump, and I suspect an extra thorn in Our Savior's crown," Robert
said.
"Thank you," Willie said.
"By the way, Abigail is not an
abolitionist. She's simply of a kind disposition," Robert said.
"That's why she circulated a
petition begging commutation for John Brown?" Willie said. He heard his
friend make a grinding noise in his throat.
THAT evening Willie bathed in
the clawfoot tub inside the bathhouse on the bayou, then dried off and
combed his hair in a yellowed mirror and dressed in fresh clothes and
walked outside into the sunset and the breeze off the Gulf. The oaks
overhead were draped with moss, their limbs ridged with lichen, and the
gardenias and azaleas were blooming in his mother's yard.
Next door, in a last patch of
yellow sunshine, a neighbor was boiling crabs in an iron pot on a
woodfire. The coolness of the evening and the fecund heaviness of the
bayou and a cheerful wave from his neighbor somehow made Willie
conclude that in spite of the historical events taking place around him
all was right with the world and that it should not be the lot of a
young man to carry its weight upon his shoulders.
He strolled down East Main,
past the Shadows and the wide-galleried, gabled overseer's house across
the street, past other homes with cupolas and fluted columns that
loomed as big as ships out of the floral gardens that surrounded them.
He paused in front of a
shotgun cottage with ventilated green shutters set back in live oak and
pine trees, its windows lighted in the gloom, a gazebo in the side yard
threaded with bougainvillea. He heard a wind chime tinkle in the breeze.
The woman who lived inside the
cottage was named Abigail Dowling. She had come to New Iberia from
Massachusetts as a nurse during a yellow fever epidemic and had stayed,
working both in the clinic and teaching in a private school down the
street. Her hair was thick, chestnut-colored, her skin without blemish,
her bosom and features such that few men, including ones in the company
of their wives, could prevent themselves from casting furtive glances
at.
But for many her ways were
suspect, her loyalties questionable, her candor intimidating. On one
occasion Willie had asked her outright about rumors he'd heard.
"Which rumors might that be?"
she said.
"A couple of Negroes who
disappeared from plantations out by Spanish Lake," he replied.
"Yes?" she said, waiting.
"They got through the paddy
rollers. In fact, it looks like they got clean out of the state. Some
say you might be involved with the Underground Railroad, Miss Abigail."
"Would you think less of me?"
she replied.
"A lady who hand-feeds those
with yellow jack and puts their lives ahead of her own?" he said.
But she was not reassured.
Now, in the gloaming of the
day, he stood on her gallery and tapped on her door, his straw hat in
hand, a discomfort in his chest he could not quite define.
"Oh, good evening, Miss
Abigail, pardon me for dropping by unexpectedly, but I thought you
might like to take a walk or allow me to treat you to a dessert down at
the cafe," he said.
"That's very nice of you," she
said, stepping outside. She wore a plain blue cotton dress, buttoned
not quite to the throat, the sleeves pushed up on her arms. "But
someone is due to drop by. Can we just sit on the steps for a bit?"
"Sure," he said, hoping his
disappointment did not show. He waited for her to take a seat on the
top step, then sat on the step below her.
"Is something bothering you,
Willie?" she asked.
"I enlisted today. Out at Camp
Pratt. I'm just in the Home Guards now, but I suspect we'll be formed
into regular infantry directly."
The darkening sky was full of
birds now, sweeping above the chimneys, the oaks loud with cicadas and
the throbbing of tree frogs.
After a long silence, she said, "I'm sure in your own mind you did
the right thing."
"My own mind?" he said, and
felt his face color, both for his rudeness in mimicking her statement
and because he was angry at himself for seeking absolution from her, as
though he were not possessed of either humanity or a conscience himself.
"I don't judge you, Willie.
Robert Perry is enlisting, too. I think the world of you both," she
said.
"Robert believes in slavery. I
don't. He comes from a wealthy family and has a vested interest in
seeing the Negro race kept subservient. That's the difference between
us," he said, then bit his lip at the self-righteousness in his voice.
"Robert is reading for the
law. He doesn't plan to be a plantation or slave owner." She paused
when she saw the injury in Willie's eyes. "Why are you enlisting?"
Because I'm afraid to be
thought a coward, a voice inside him said.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing. I said nothing," he
replied. He looked out at a carriage passing in the street. Don't say
anymore, for God's sakes, he told himself. But his old enemy, his
impetuosity, held sway with him once again.
"I think all this is going to
be destroyed. By cannon shot and fire and disease, all of it wiped
out," he said, and waved his hand vaguely at the palm trees in the
yards, the massive houses hidden inside the live oaks, a paddle-wheeler
churning on the Teche, its lighted windows softly muted inside the mist.
"And you make your own life
forfeit for a cause you don't respect? My God, Willie," Abigail said.
He felt the back of his neck
burning. Then, when he believed matters could get no worse, he looked
up and saw Robert Perry rein his horse in the dusk and dismount and
enter the yard, removing his hat.
"Good evening, Miss Abigail.
You too, Willie. Did I break in on something?" Robert said.
Robert waited for a reply, his
face glowing with goodwill.
TWO hours later Willie Burke
was on his fourth glass of whiskey in the brick saloon next to Carrie
LaRose's brothel. The plank floor was scattered with sawdust and burned
by cigars and stained with tobacco juice around the cuspidors. Hand
towels hung from brass rings along the bar, and above the bar mirror
was a painting of a reclining nude, her bottom an ax-handle wide, her
stomach like a soft pink pillow, her smile and pubic hair and relaxed
arms an invitation to enter the picture frame with her.
Willie wanted to concentrate
on the lovely lines of the woman in the painting and forget the events
of the day, particularly the fact he had been so foolish as to enlist
in the Home Guards. But the man standing next to him, one Jean-Jacques
LaRose, also known as Scavenger Jack, was giving a drunken lecture to
anyone within earshot, pounding his fists on the bar, denouncing
Secessionists, Copperheads in the North who encouraged them, and people
stupid enough to join the army and serve their cause.
Unlike his sister, Carrie
LaRose, who owned the bordello next door, Scavenger Jack operated on
the edges of legitimate society, hauling away Chitimacha burial mounds
that he mixed with manure and sold for high-grade fertilizer, exporting
weevil-infested rice to plantation operators in the West Indies whose
food costs for their workers were running too high, and, rumor had it,
luring ships onto a reef with a false beacon off Key West in order to
salvage the cargo.
He was a huge man, his black
hair and beard streaked with red, a scar across his nose like a
flattened worm. His bull neck was corded with veins, his teeth like
tombstones, his shoulders so broad they split the seams of his coat.
"Let me ax you gentlemen
somet'ing. When them Yankees blockade our ports, 'cause that's what
they gonna do, how you gonna get your sugar and salt and cotton out of
Lou'sana, you? Round up the crawfish and pile it on their backs?" he
said to his audience.
"Now, Jean-Jacques, there's
more involved here than money," said a member of the town council and
part owner of the bank, an older man with an egg-shaped, pleasant face.
"The Negroes have already heard about the firing on Fort Sumter. A lady
in St. Martinville caught her cook with cyanide this morning. But I
worry more about the Negro male population being turned loose on our
women. That's the kind of thing these abolitionists have encouraged."