Jamison tore the note in half
and stuck it inside the newspaper and dropped the newspaper on the step.
"No one will dare harm you,
Flower. I give you my word," he said.
"They already did. Three men
raped me. They were paid by Rufus Atkins."
"I don't believe that. Rufus
has worked for me thirty years. He does"
"He does what you tell
him?" she said.
His faced
seemed to
dilate
and redden with his frustration. "In a
word, yes," he said.
"He made me go to bed with
him, Colonel. Miss Abby told you about it. But you didn't raise a hand."
"I set the example. So you're
correct, Flower. The guilt is mine."
He was speaking too fast now,
his mercurial nature impossible to connect from one moment to the next.
"Suh, I don't understand," she
said.
"Years ago I visited the
quarters at night. I took all the privileges of a wealthy young
plantation owner. People like Rufus and our man Clay over there are
products of my own class."
"You helped them hurt me, suh."
"People can change. I'm sorry,
Flower. My God, I'm your father. Can't you have some forgiveness?" he
said.
After he was gone she sat on
the top step of her gallery, her temples pounding, a solitary crow
cawing against the yellow haze that filled the afternoon. She could not
comprehend what had just happened. He had looked upon her work, her
creations, her life, with admiration and pride, then had accepted
paternity for her and in the same sentence had asked forgiveness.
Why now?
Because legally he can't own
you anymore. This way he can, a voice answered.
She wanted to shove her
fingers in her ears.
WILLIE saw reprinted copies of
the article from the racist newspaper tacked on trees and storefronts
all over town. One was even placed in his mailbox by a mounted man who
leaned down briefly in the saddle, then rode away in the early morning
mist. Willie had run after him, but the mounted man paid him no heed
and did not look back at him. Night riders had come into his yard twice
now, calling his name, tossing rocks at his windows. So far he had not
taken their visits seriously. He had learned the White League and the
Knights of the White Camellia, when in earnest, struck without warning
and left no doubt about their intentions. A carpetbagger was stripped
naked and rope-drug through a woods, a black soldier garrotted on the
St. Martinville Road, a political meeting in the tiny settlement of
Loreauville literally shot to pieces.
But what do you do when the
names of your friends are smeared by a collection of nameless cowards?
he asked himself.
Make your own statement, he
answered.
He saddled a horse in the
livery he had inherited from his mother and rode out to the ends of
both East and West Main, then divided the town into quadrants and
traversed every street and alley in it, pulling down copies of the
defamatory article and stuffing them in a choke sack tied to his
pommel. By early afternoon, under a white sun, he was out in the
parish, ripping the article from fence posts and the trunks of live
oaks that bordered cane fields and dirt roads. His choke sack bulged as
though it were stuffed with pine cones.
South of town, in an undrained
area where a group of Ira Jamison's rental convicts were building a
board road to a salt mine, Willie looked over his shoulder and saw a
lone rider on a buckskin gelding behind him, a man with a poached,
wind-burned face wearing a sweat-ringed hat and the flared boots of a
cavalryman.
Willie passed a black man
cooking food under a pavilion fashioned from tent poles and canvas. The
black man was barefoot and had a shaved, peaked head, like the polished
top of a cypress knee. He wore a white jumper and a pair of striped
prison pants and rusted leg irons that caused him to take clinking,
abbreviated steps from one pot to the next.
"You one of Colonel Jamison's
convicts?" Willie asked.
"You got it, boss," the black
man replied.
"What are you selling?"
"Greens, stew meat and
tomatoes, red beans, rice and gravy, fresh bread. A plateful for
fifteen cents. Or it's free if you wants to build the bo'rd road under
the gun," the black man said. He roared at his own joke.
Willie turned his horse in a
circle and waited in the shade of a live oak for the rider to approach
him. The rider's eyes seemed lidless and reminded Willie of smoke on a
wintry day or perhaps a gray sky flecked with scavenger birds. In spite
of the heat, the rider's shirt was buttoned at the wrists and throat
and he wore leather cuffs pulled up on his forearms.
"You
wouldn't bird-dog
a
fellow, would you, Captain Jarrette?"
Willie said.
"I make it my business to
check out them that need watching," the rider replied.
"You put your sword to me when
I was unarmed and had done you no injury. But you also saved me from
going before a Yankee firing squad. So maybe we're even," Willie said.
"Meaning?"
"I'd like to buy you a lunch."
Jarrette removed his hat and
surveyed the countryside, his hair falling over his ears. He leaned in
the saddle and blew his nose with his fingers.
"I ain't got nothing against
hit," he said.
Jarrette waited in the shade
while Willie paid for their lunches. He watched the convicts lay split
logs in the saw grass and humus and the black mud that oozed over their
ankles. His nose was beaked, his chin cut with a cleft, his eyes
connecting images with thoughts that probably no one would ever be
privy to. Jarrette did not sit but squatted while he ate, shoveling
food into his mouth as fast as possible with a wood spoon, scraping the
tin in the plate, wiping it clean with bread, then eating the bread and
licking his fingers, the muscles in his calves and thighs knotted into
rocks.
"This grub tastes like dog
turds," he said, tossing his bare plate on the grass.
Willie looked at the intensity
in Jarrette's face, the heat that seemed to climb out of his buttoned
collar, the twitch at the corner of one eye when he heard a convict's
ax split a piece of green wood.
"Tell me, sir, is it possible
you're insane?" Willie asked.
"Maybe. Anything wrong with
that?" Jarrette replied.
"I was just curious."
Jarrette shifted his weight on
his haunches and studied him warily. "Why you tearing down them
newspaper stories? Don't lie about it, either," he said.
"They defame people I know."
Jarrette seemed to think about
the statement.
"Cole Younger is my
brother-in-law, you sonofabitch," he said.
Willie gathered up his plate
and spoon from the grass, then reached down and picked up Jarrette's
and returned
them to the plank
serving table under the
canvas-topped pavilion. He walked back into the oak tree's shade. "As
one Secesh to another, accept my word on this" he began. Then he
rethought his words and looked out at the wind blowing across the saw
grass. "May you have a fine day, Captain Jarrette, and may all your
children and grandchildren be just like you and keep you company the
rest of your life," he said.
WHEN the sun was red over the
cane fields in the west, Willie pulled the last copy of
The Rebel
Clarion
article he could find from the front porch of a houseboat
far down Bayou Teche and turned his horse back toward town.
Now, all he needed to do was
bury his choke sack in a hole or set fire to it on a mud bank and be
done with it.
But a voice that he preferred
not to hear told him that was not part of his plan.
Since his return from the war
he had tried to accept the fact that the heart of Abigail Dowling
belonged to another and it was fruitless for him to pursue what
ultimately had been a boyhood fantasy. Had he not written Robert the
same, in the moments before he thought he was going to be shot, at a
time when a man knew the absolute truth about his life and himself,
when every corner of the soul was laid bare?
But she wouldn't leave his
thoughts. Nor would the memory of her thighs opening under him, the
press of her hands in the small of his back, the heat of her breath on
his cheek. Her sexual response wasn't entirely out of charity, was it?
Women didn't operate in that fashion, he told himself. She obviously
respected him, and sometimes at the school he saw a fondness in her
eyes that made him want to reach out and touch her.
Maybe the war had embittered
him and had driven her from him, and the fault was neither his nor
Abby's but the war. After all, she was an abolitionist and sometimes
his own rhetoric sounded little different from the recalcitrant
Secessionists who would rather see the South layered with ash and bones
than given over to the carpetbag government.
Why let the war continue to injure both of them? If he could only
take contention and
vituperation from his speech and let g
o of the memories, no, that was not
the word, the anger he still felt when he saw Jim Stubbefield freeze
against a red-streaked sky, his jaw suddenly gone slack, a wound like a
rose petal in the center of his brow
What had he told Abby? "I'll
never get over Jim. I hate the sons of-bitches who caused all this."
What woman would not be frightened by the repository of vitriol that
still burned inside him?
If he could only tell Abby the
true feelings of his heart. Wouldn't all the other barriers disappear?
Had she not come to him for help when she and Flower started up their
school?
He tethered his horse to the
ringed pole in front of Abby's cottage. The street was empty, the sky
ribbed with strips of maroon cloud, the shutters on Abby's cottage
vibrating in the wind. He walked into the backyard and set fire to the
choke sack in Abby's trash pit, then tapped on her back door.
"Hello, Willie. What are you
up to?" she said, looking over his shoulder at the column of black
smoke rising out of the ground.
"A lot of townspeople were
incensed at your being slandered by this Kluxer paper in Baton Rouge.
So they gathered up the articles and asked me to burn them," he said.
"What Kluxer paper?" she said.
He stared at her stupidly,
then yawned slightly and looked innocuously out into the trees. "It's
nothing of consequence. There's a collection of cretins in Baton Rouge
who are always writing things no one takes seriously."
"Willie, for once would you
try to make sense?" she said.
"It's not important. Believe
me. I was
just passing by."
"You look like a boiled
crab. Have you been out in
the sun?"
"Abby, love of my heart,
I think long ago I was condemned to
a life of ineptitude. It's time to say good-bye."
Before she could reply he
walked quickly into the side yard and out into the street.
Right into a group of seven
mounted men, all of whom had either black or white robes draped over
the cantles of their saddles. Each of the robes was sewn with an
ornate, pink-scrolled camellia. In the middle of the group, mounted on
a buckskin gelding, was the man whose colorless eyes had witnessed
the
burning
of
Lawrence, Kansas.
"You was sassing me today,
wasn't you?" he said.
"Wouldn't dream of it, Captain
Jarrette," Willie said. He looked up and down the street. There was no
one else on it, except an elderly Frenchman who sold taffy from a cart
and a little black girl who was aimlessly following him on his route.
Another rider leaned down from
his saddle and bounced a picked camellia off Willie's face.
"It's the wrong time to be a
smart ass, cabbage head," he said.
"Get about your business and I
won't tell your mother the best part of her sunny little chap dripped
into her bloomers," Willie said to him.
The man who had thrown the
flower laughed without making sound, then wiped his mouth. He had black
hair the color and texture of pitch and was tall and raw-boned,
unshaved, with skin that looked like it had been rubbed with black
pepper, his neck too long for his torso, his shoulders sloping
unnaturally under his shirt, as though they had been surgically pared
away.
He lifted a coiled rope from a
saddlebag and began feeding a wrapped end out on the ground.
"You were one of the convicts
on the burial detail that almost put me in the ground," Willie said.
"I wasn't no convict, boy. I
was a prisoner of war," the tall man said. "You sassed the captain?"
The summer light was high in
the sky now, the street deep in shadow. Willie looked between the
horses that were now circling him. The yards and galleries of the homes
along the street were empty, the ventilated shutters closed, even
though the evening was warm.
"Where's a Yank when you need
one?" the convict said.
"Get on with it," Jarrette
said.