"Twenty-five years of herding
niggers and living one cut above them? Listening to my old woman bitch
about it from morning to night? Four goddamn more years of ducking
Yankee bullets?
Me
create a problem? Kunnel, when it comes to
putting a freight train up a man's ass, you know how to do it proper,"
Hatcher said.
"Go down to the store and get
you a bottle of whiskey and charge it to me. Then come back and talk to
me in two days."
"You'll see the devil go to
church first," Hatcher
said.
He started down the
drive, then stopped and turned, glaring at
Jamison, all his servile
pretense gone now, his hands opening and closing at his sides.
That had been three hours ago.
Now Ira Jamison stood on the upstairs veranda, surveying all that he
owned, the breeze cool on his skin, the air aromatic with the smell of
flowers hanging in baskets from the eaves. But neither his prosperity
nor the loveliness and unseasonable coolness of the day brought him
comfort. Why had he not acted more diplomatically with Hatcher? Had his
father not taught him never to provoke white trash, to treat them as
one would coal oil around an open flame?
He had placed a ball of opium
the size of a child's marble in his jaw, more than he usually ingested,
but it did not seem to be taking effect. The wind gusted against the
house and for a moment he thought he felt a vibration through the beams
and studs, a tremolo that seemed to reach down into the foundation. But
that was foolish, he told himself. His house was solid. An engineer had
told him the fissure in his hearth and chimney was cosmetic. Why did
Ira worry so much about his house? the engineer had asked.
Because not one person in the
world cares whether you live or die. Because you are the sum total of
your possessions and the loss of any one of them makes you the less, a
voice said to him.
"That's not true. One person
does care," he said to the wind.
Then he wondered at his own
sanity.
That night Clay Hatcher left
the plantation. But not before tying both of his bird dogs to a catalpa
tree and shooting each of them with a revolver, then setting fire to
his shack with his dead wife inside it.
IT HAD rained all afternoon
and
Flower Jamison's yard was flooded. Through her front window she saw
mule-drawn wagons carrying green lumber down to the site of the old
laundry, where Rufus Atkins was building a home for himself and
pretending to be a member of the local aristocracy. Sometimes the
wagons sunk almost to the hubs in the mud and the convict teamsters
would have to unload them, free the wheels, then restack the pile
before they could continue on in the rain.
While he oversaw the building
of his home Rufus Atkins lived in a huge canvas tent, one with
crossbeams and big flaps and individual rooms inside. Oil lanterns hung
from the tent poles, and when they were lit the tent looked like a
warm, yellow smudge inside the mist. He had laid out plank walkways to
the entrances and in the morning he walked to the privy in an elegant
bathrobe to empty his chamber pot, like a scatological parody of a
Victorian gentleman.
He asked others to call him
"Captain," reminding them of his service to the Confederacy but never
mentioning that his rank was given to him only because he was the
employee of Ira Jamison and that during four years of war he was never
promoted.
In public places he talked
loudly of what he called his "land tr
ansact ions." Ex-paddy
rollers cadged drinks from
him in
the saloons around town and
White Leaguers like Todd McCain visited him in his tent late at night,
but the invitations that went to Ira Jamison as a matter of course did
not go to Rufus Atkins.
So he abused Negroes to show
his power over others, flew a Confederate battle flag over his tent in
defiance of the Occupation, and kept late hours in the saloon down the
road. Twice Flower saw him stop his horse, a black mare, in front of
her house and stare at her gallery for a long time, his stiffened arms
forming a column on the saddle pommel. But when she went outside to
confront him, he was gone.
It was still raining when she
started supper, which meant Abigail Dowling would probably show up soon
in her buggy and take the two of them to the school for night classes.
She poured a cup of coffee and added sugar to it and drank it at the
stove, her thoughts on the school, the field hands who worked ten-hour
days and tried to learn reading and writing and arithmetic at night,
and the meager donations on which she and Abigail operated.
She heard a horse in the yard
and footsteps on the gallery. She pulled open the front door and looked
into the face of Clay Hatcher, his clothes drenched, the brim of his
hat wilted over his ears and brow. A knife was belted on one hip, a
pistol on the other. He looked up and down the road, then back at her,
the skin of his face stretched against his skull. His breath smelled of
funk and boiled shrimp.
"Got something to tell you,"
he said.
"Not interested," she answered.
"It's about your mother. Her
name was Sarie. Her teeth was filed into points 'cause there was an
African king back there in her bloodline or something."
She wanted to tell him to get
off her gallery, to take his repository of pain and grief and hatred
off her land and out of her life. But she knew the umbilical cord that
held her to Angola Plantation was one she would never be able to sever,
that its legacy in one way or another would poison the rest of her
days. So she fixed her eyes on his and waited, her heart pounding.
"Rufus tole Kunnel Jamison
your mama killed one of the overseers and that's how come he hit her so
hard with his quirt," Hatcher said. "That was the lie he covered his
ass with. He beat Sarie's brains
out 'cause she sunk her teeth
in his
hand, and I mean plu
mb down to
the bone. I don't know about no
African king in her background, but she was one ferocious nigger when
she got a board up her cheeks."
Flower felt the gallery tilt
under her, as though she were on board a ship. The wind gusted and a
tree slapped the side of the house and rain swept under the eaves.
"They said she was kicked by a
horse. She shot the overseer and tried to run away and a horse trampled
her," she said.
"That's the story the kunnel
wanted us to tell folks. He didn't want other white people knowing his
slaves got beat to death. You don't believe me, look at that half-moon
scar on Rufus's left hand."
"Leave my property," she said.
"I'm hell-bound, Flower. I
kilt my old woman. Look at my face. Devil's done got my soul already.
Ain't got no reason to deceive you," he said.
Then he plunged into the rain
and mounted his horse, jerking its head about with the reins and
slashing it viciously with his boot heels at the same time.
But he had set the hook and
set it deep.
SHE went to the school that
evening and taught her classes but said nothing to Abigail about Clay
Hatcher's visit. That night she dreamed of a man's callused,
sun-browned hand, the heel half-mooned with a string of tiny gray
pearls. She woke in the morning to the sound of more thunder. She
started a fire in her woodstove and fixed coffee and drank it while she
watched the wind flatten the cane in the fields and wrinkle the water
in her yard. Then she put on a gum coat and wrapped a bandanna on her
head, and with her parasol popped open in front of her face she began
the long walk down to Rufus Atkins' tent.
The convicts building his
house were working under tarps. An empty jail wagon sat forlornly under
the live oak in front. Bearded, filthy, lesioned with scabs, the
convicts stared at her from the scaffolding as she passed on the plank
walkway. Then a guard yelled at them in French and their hammers
recommenced a rhythmic smacking against nails and wood.
Sin' pulled open the flap on
Atkins' tent and stepped inside. I le was standing it a table,
studying the design of his house, his white shirt and dark pants
unspotted by the rain. An oil lamp burned above his head, lighting the
grainy texture of his face and the flat, hazel eyes that never allowed
people to read his thoughts.
He placed one hand on his hip,
his booted feet forming a right angle, like a fencer's.
"I don't know what it is, but
it's trouble of one kind or another. So get to it and be on your way,"
he said.
"Clay Hatcher came to my house
last night," she said.
"You should have gone for the
sheriff. He went crazy and killed his wife. You didn't hear about it?"
His left hand rested on the
table, behind him, in a pool of shadow.
"How did my mother die?" she
asked.
"Sarie? A horse ran her down,"
he replied. His face seemed to show puzzlement.
But Rufus Atkins had made a
lifetime study of not revealing his emotions about anything, she
thought. Not even puzzlement. So why now?
"She shot a man, Flower. Right
in the head. Then took off running," he said, although she had not
challenged his statement.
"She'd just given birth."
He shook his head. "I'm
telling you how it happened, girl." He raised his left hand and touched
at his nose with his wrist. Then she saw it, a barely noticeable
half-circle of tiny scars on the rim of his hand.
Her gum coat felt like an oven
on her body. She could smell all of his odors in the tent's stale
air—testosterone, unwashed hair, shaving water that hadn't been thrown
out, a thunder mug in a corner. She unbuttoned her coat and pulled her
bandanna off her head and pushed her hair out of her eyes, as though
she were rising out of dark water that was crushing the air from her
lungs.
"She bit you and you beat her
to death," Flower said.
"Now, hold on there." He
looked at her open coat and at her hands and involuntarily backed away
from her, knocking into the tent pole. The oil lamp clattered above his
head.
She stepped toward him and saw
his mouth open, his hand clench on the edge of the table.
"I can hurt you Fower
. Don't make me do it," he said.
She gathered
all the
spittle in her mouth and spat it full in his face.
RAIN swept in sheets across
the wetlands throughout the day, then the storm intensified and bolts
of lightning trembled like white-hot wires in the heart of the swamp,
igniting fires among the cypress trees. Long columns of smoke flattered
across the canopy and hung on the fields and roads in a dirty gray
vapor.
Flower told no one of her
encounter with Rufus Atkins nor of the knowledge that had come to her
about the nature of her mother's death in 1837. Who besides herself
would care? she asked herself. What legal authority would concern
itself with the murder of a slave woman twenty-eight years in the past?
But she knew the real reason
for her silence and it was not one she would share, not even with
herself, at least not until she had to.
The cap-and-ball revolver
Abigail had bought from McCain's Hardware was wrapped in a piece of
flannel under Flower's bed. She removed it and set it on the kitchen
table and peeled back the cloth from the frame. The metal and brown
grips glistened with oil; the caps were snug in the nipples of each
loaded chamber. She touched the cylinder and the barrel with the balls
of her fingers, then curved her hand around the grips. The cylindrical
hardness that she cupped in her palm caused an image to flit across her
mind that both embarrassed and excited her.
That evening the rain stopped,
but fires still burned in the swamp and the air was wet and heavy with
the smell of woodsmoke. She drove with Abigail in the buggy to the
school, passing the saloon often frequented by Rufus Atkins. His black
mare was tethered outside, and through the doorway she caught a glimpse
of him standing at the bar, by himself, tilting a glass to his mouth.
That night she taught her
classes, then extinguished all the lamps in the rooms and locked the
doors to the building and climbed up on the buggy for the trip home.
"You're sure quiet these
days," Abigail said.
"Weather's enough to get a
person down," Flower said.
"Sure you haven't met a
fellow?"
"I could go the rest of my
life without
seeing a man. No, I take that back. I c
ould
go two lifetimes without seeing
one."
Both of them laughed.
By the drawbridge over the
Teche they saw a crowd of workingmen from the Main Street saloon, Union
soldiers, the sheriff, their faces lit like tallow under the street
lamps. Two Negroes had tied a rope around a body that was caught in a
pile of trash under the bridge. They pulled the body free, but the
wrists were bound with wire and the wire snagged on the rootball of a
submerged cypress tree. A barrel-chested, red-faced white man, with a
constable's star pinned to his vest, rode his horse into the shallows
and grabbed the end of the rope from the Negroes, twisted it around his
pommel, and dragged the body, skittering like a log, up on dry ground.