The dead man was white,
without shoes, his eyes sealed shut, the belt gone from his pants, the
pockets turned inside out. His head rolled on his neck like a poppy
gourd on a broken stem. The sheriff leaned over him with a lantern in
his hand.
"They mark him?" someone in
the crowd called out.
"On the forehead. 'K.W.C.,'"
the sheriff said. Then the disgust grew in his face and he waved his
arms angrily. "Y'all get out of here! This ain't your bidness! What
kind of town we becoming here? If the Knights can do that to him, they
can do it to us. Y'all t'ought of that?"
Abigail slapped the reins on
her horse's rump and headed down the road toward Flower's house. She
glanced back over her shoulder at the crowd by the bridge.
"Wasn't that the man who
worked for Ira Jamison, what was his name, a posse was looking for him
yesterday? He murdered his wife up at Angola Plantation," she said.
"Cain't really say. I've shut
out a lot of bad things from Angola, Miss Abby," Flower replied.
Abigail looked at her
curiously. "What are you hiding from me?" she asked.
FLOWER read in the front room
of her house until late, getting up to fix tea, silhouetting against
the lamp, twice stepping out on the gallery to look at the weather, the
light from the doorway leaping into the
yard. At midnight she
heard
the sounds of the saloon closing, the oak door being secured, shutters
being latched, horses clopping on the road,
men's voices calling out a final
"good
night" in the darkness.
But she saw no sign of Rufus
Atkins.
She stood at the front window,
the lamp burning behind her, until the road was empty, then blew out
the lamp and sat in a chair with the cap-and-ball revolver in her lap
and watched the sky clear and the moon rise above the fields.
The revolver rested across the
tops of her thighs, and her fingers rested on the grips and coolness of
the barrel. She felt no fear, only a strange sense of anticipation, as
though she were discovering an aspect of herself she didn't know
existed. She heard a wagon pass on the road, then the sounds of owls
and tree frogs. The curtains fluttered on the windows and she smelled
the odor of gardenias on the wind. In a secure part of her mind she
knew she was falling asleep, but her physical state didn't seem
important anymore. Her hand was cupped over the cylinder of the pistol,
the back of the house locked up, the front door deliberately unbolted,
cooking pots stacked against the jamb.
She awoke at two in the
morning, her bladder full. She locked the front door and went out the
back into the yard, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on
the smooth wood seat inside the heated cypress enclosure that had
served the patrons of Carrie LaRose's brothel for over twenty years,
the revolver next to her. Through the ventilation gap at the top of the
door, she could see the sky and stars and smell the faint tracings of
smoke from the fires burning in the swamp. The only sounds outside were
those of nightbirds calling to one another and water dripping from the
yard's solitary live oak, under which Rufus Atkins had paid the men who
raped her.
She had overestimated him, she
thought. Perhaps a lifetime of being abused by his kind had made her
believe men like Atkins possessed powers which they did not, not even
the self-engendered power or resolve to seek revenge after they were
spat upon.
She wiped herself and rose
from the seat, straightening her dress, and crossed the yard with the
pistol hanging from her right hand. She turned in a half circle and
looked about the yard one more time, then unlocked the door and went
inside.
She rechecked all the doors and sashes to see that they were locked,
then ate a
piece of bread and
ham and drank a glass of buttermilk and went into her bedroom. She put
the revolver under the bed and left two of the windows open to cool the
room and balanced a stack of cook pots on each of the sills in case an
intruder tried to climb in. Then she lay down on top of the covers and
went to sleep.
When she woke later it was not
because she heard glass breaking or a door hasp tearing loose from wood
or pans clattering to the floor. It was a collective odor, a smell of
whiskey and horses and crushed gardenias and night damp trapped inside
cloth.
And of leather. The braided
end of a quirt that a man in a black robe and a peaked black hood
teased across her face.
She sat straight up in bed, at
first believing she was having a dream. Then the man in the peaked hood
sat next to her on the mattress and fitted the quirt across her throat
and pressed her back down on the pillow. Behind him was a second man,
this one in white, her cap-and-ball revolver clutched in his hand.
"How did you get in?" Flower
said.
The man in the black robe and
hood leaned close to her, as though he wanted his breath as well as his
words to injure her skin. The image of a camellia was stitched with
pink and white thread on the breast of his robe. "A hideaway door with
a spring catch on the side of the house. Lots of things I know you
don't, Flower," the voice of Rufus Atkins said. "I know the places you
go, the names of the niggers you teach, the time of day you eat your
food, the exact time you piss and shit and empty your thunder mug in
the privy. Have you figured out what I'm telling you?"
"Explain it to her," the other
visitor said.
Flower recognized the voice of
Todd McCain, the owner of the hardware store.
"You think you're free," Rufus
Atkins' voice said, the mouth hole in his hood puffing with his breath.
"But you spit in the wrong man's face. That means no matter where you
go, what you do, who you see, either me or my friend here or a hundred
like us will be watching you. You won't be able to take a squat over
your two-holer back there without wondering if we're listening outside.
Starting to get the picture? We own you, girl. Throw all the temper
tantrums you want. That sweet little brown ass is ours."
When she didn't answer, he
moved the quirt over her breasts, pressi
ng
it against her nipples,
flattening it
against her stomach.
"Damned if you're
not
prime
cut," he said. He blew his breath along the down on her skin and she
felt her loins constrict and a wave of nausea course through her body.
The two hooded figures left
the front door open behind them. She sat numbly on the side of her bed
and watched them ride away, their robes riffling over their horses'
rumps, the cap-and-ball revolver on which she had relied thrown into
the mud.
EARLY the next morning she
took
the sheets off her bed, not touching the area where the man in the
black hood had sat. She put them in a washtub, then bathed and dressed
to go to school. When she tried to eat, her food tasted like paper in
her mouth. The sky had cleared, the sun was shining, and birds sang in
the trees, but the brilliance and color of the world outside seemed to
have nothing to do with her life now.
She drank a cup of hot tea and
scraped her uneaten food into a garbage bucket and washed her dishes,
then prepared to leave for school. But when she closed and opened her
eyes, her head spun and bile rose in her throat and her skin felt dead
to the touch, as though she had been systemically poisoned.
You've gone through worse, she
told herself. They raped you, but they didn't make you afraid. They
murdered your mother but they couldn't steal her soul. Why do you keep
your wounds green and allow men as base as Atkins and McCain to control
your thoughts? she asked herself.
But she knew the answer. The
house, the land, the school, the flower beds she and Abigail had
planted, her collection of books, her new life as a teacher,
everything she was and had become
and
would eventually be was about to be
taken from her. All because of a choice, a deed, she knew she would
eventually commit herself to, because if she did not, she would never
have peace.
She went outside and picked up
the cap-and-ball revolver from the edge of a rain puddle. She carried
it into the kitchen and wiped the mud off the frame and the cylinder
and caps with a dry rag and rewrapped it in the flannel cloth and
replaced it under her bed.
In the corner of her eye she
saw a black carriage with a surrey and white wheels pull to a stop in
front of the gallery. Ira Jamison walked up the steps, his hair cut
short, his jaws freshly shaved, looking at least twenty years younger
than his actual age.
"I hope I haven't dropped by
too early," he said, removing his hat. "I was in the neighborhood and
felt an uncommonly strong desire to see you."
"I'm on my way to work," she
said.
"At your school?"
"Yes. Where else?"
"I'll take you. Just let me
talk with you a minute," he said. She stepped back from the doorway to
let him enter. She reached to take his hat but he took no heed of her
gesture and placed it himself on a large, hand-carved knob at the foot
of the staircase banister. He smiled.
"Flower, I'm probably a fond
and foolish man, but I wanted to tell you how much you mean to me, how
much you remind me of" He stopped in mid-sentence and studied her
face. "Have I said the wrong thing here?"
"No, Colonel, you haven't."
"You don't look well."
"Two men got in my house last
night. They had on the robes of the White Camellia. One was Rufus
Atkins. The other man owns the hardware store on Main Street."
"Atkins came here? He touched
you?"
"Not with his hand. With his
whip. He told me he'd be with me everywhere I went. He'd see everything
I did."
She saw the bone flex along
his jaw, the crow's feet deepen at the corner of one eye. "He whipped
you?"
"I don't have any more
to say about it, Colonel."
"You must believe what
I tell you, Flower. This man and the others who ride with him, I
'm talking about
these fellows who pretend to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers, this
man knew he'd better not hurt you in any way. Do you understand that?"
"He beat my mother to death."
The colonel's face blanched.
"You don't know that," he said.
"Clay Hatcher was here. He
told me how you made him and Rufus Atkins lie about how my mother died."
"Listen, Flower, that was a
long time ago. I made mistakes as a young man."
"You lied to me. You lied to
the world. You going to lie to God now?"
Jamison took a breath. "I'm
going to get to the bottom of this. You have my word on it," he said.
She rested her hand on the
banister, just above where his hat rested on the mahogany knob. Her
eyes were downcast and he could not read her expression.
"Colonel?" she said.
"Yes?"
"You started to say I reminded
you of someone."
"Oh yes. My mother. I never
realized how much you look like my mother. That's why you'll always
have a special place in my heart."
Flower stared at him, then
picked up his hat and placed it in his hand. "Good-bye, Colonel. I
won't be seeing you again," she said.
"Pardon?" he said.
"Good-bye, suh. You're a sad
man," she said.
"What? What did you say?"
But she stood silently by the
open door and refused to speak again, until he finally gave it up and
walked out on the gallery, confused and for once in his life at a loss
for words. When he glanced back at her, his forehead was knitted with
lines, like those in the skin of an old man.
When he got into his carriage
she saw him produce a small whiskey-colored ball that looked like dried
honey from a tobacco pouch and place it inside his jaw, then bark at
his driver.
WILLIE Burke's return
journey from Shiloh had been one he did not
measure in days but in images
that he seemed to perceive through a glass darklythe emptiness of the
Mississippi countryside that he and Elias traversed in a rented wagon,
a region of dust devils, weed-spiked fields, Doric columns blackened by
fire and deserted cabins scrolled with the scales of dead morning glory
vines; the box that held Jim's bones vibrating on the deck of a
steamboat and a gaggle of little girls in pinafores playing atop the
box; a train ride on a flatcar through plains of saw grass and tunnels
of trees and sunlight that spoked through rain clouds like grace from a
divine hand that he seemed unable to clasp.
Willie's clothes were rent,
vinegary with his own smell, his hair peppered with grit. He drank huge
amounts of pond water to deaden his hunger. When the train stopped to
take on wood he and Elias got into a line of French-speaking Negro
trackworkers and were given plates piled with rice and fried fish that
they ate with the trackworkers without ever being asked their origins.
At a predawn hour on a day that had no date attached to it they dragged
the box off a wagon in front of Willie's house and set it down in the
grass. The sky was the color of gunmetal, bursting with stars, the
surface of the bayou blanketed with ground fog. "Come in," Willie said.