"I think I'll go out to my
mother's place and crawl in a hammock for six weeks," Elias replied.
His face became introspective. "Willie, the next time I say I'll help
you out with a little favor?"
"Yes?"
"Lend me a dollar so I can
rent a gun and stick it in my mouth," Elias said.
Willie walked into the house,
not pausing in the kitchen to either eat or drink, and on out the back
door to use the privy. He dragged Jim's box onto a wagon at the barn,
shoved it forward until it was snug against the headboard, then began
stacking bricks in the wagon bed. The stars were fading from the sky
now, the oaks along the bayou becoming darker, more sharply edged,
against the fog. He heard footsteps behind him.
Tige McGuffy heaved a wooden
bucket filled with cistern water across Willie's head and face and
shoulders.
"Good God, Tige, what was that
for?" Willie asked, spitting water out of his mouth.
"You trailed a smell through
the house I could have heat down on the floor with a broom."
"Would you be going out to the
cemetery with me this fine morning?"
"Cemetery? What you got in
that box?" Tige replied. But before Willie could speak Tige waved his
hand, indicating he wasn't interested in Willie's response. "The
Knights or them White Leaguers lynched a fellow last night. A bunch of
them rode through our yard. Where you been, Willie? Don't you care
about nobody except a dead man or a lady ain't got no interest in you?
Why don't you wake up?"
AT the school that same
morning Abigail Dowling noticed the circles under Flower's eyes, her
inability to concentrate on the content of a conversation. During
recess Flower shook a ten-year-old boy in the yard for throwing rocks
at a squirrel. She shook him hard, jarring his chin on his chest,
squatting down to yell in his face. The boy lived in a dirt-floor shack
with his grandmother and often came to school without breakfast. Until
today he had been one of her best students. The boy began to cry and
ran into the street.
Flower caught him and led him
by the hand into the shade.
"I'm sorry, Isaac. I was sick
last night and I'm not feeling good today. Just don't be chunkin' at
the squirrels. You forgive me?" she said.
"Yessum," he said.
He rubbed the back of his neck
when he spoke and she could see that neither the pain nor the shock had
left his eyes. She got to her knees and held him against her breast.
Then she walked to the gallery, where Abigail had been watching her.
"I'm going home, Miss Abby,"
she said.
"Tell me what it is," Abigail
said.
"I don't think I'll be back."
"That's nonsense."
"No, it's a heap of trouble,"
Flower said.
"I'm going to dismiss the
children and take you home," Abigail said.
"I don't need any help, Miss
Abby."
"We'll see about that,"
Abigail said.
It was almost noon, and
Abigail told the children they could leave the school early
and not return until the
next
day. While they poured out the front
door into the yard and street, she brought her buggy around from the
back and went after Flower.
"Get in," she said in front of
the hardware store.
"Miss Abby, you mean well, but
don't mix in this," Flower said.
"Stop calling me 'Miss Abby.'
I'm your friend. I admire you more than any person I've ever known."
Flower paused, then stepped up
into the buggy and sat down, her face straight ahead.
"There's a door with a secret
catch on it in the side of my house. Last night I woke up with Rufus
Atkins and Todd McCain standing by my bed," she said. She glanced back
at the hardware store. "They were wearing Kluxer robes and hoods, but
it was them."
Abigail reined up the horse
and started to speak, but Flower grasped the reins and popped them down
on the horse's rump.
"Atkins touched me with his
whip, like I was a piece of livestock. He wanted me to know I'd never
be free, that he or a hundred like him could come for me anytime they
wanted," Flower said.
"I'll
never get them out of my life."
"Oh yes, we will," Abigail
said.
"It's a nigger girl's word
against a captain in the Confederate army, Miss Abby. Plus I didn't see
his face."
"Don't you dare call yourself
that. Don't you dare."
But Flower refused to speak
the rest of the way home.
The house and yard and flower
beds were marbled with shadows, the wind touched with rain, the cane
rustling in the fields. Down the road Abigail could see convict
carpenters in striped pants and jumpers framing Rufus Atkins' new
house, hammering boards into place, sitting on the crossbeams like
clothespins. Farther down the road, past the burned remnants of the
laundry, she thought she saw the polished, black carriage of Ira
Jamison disappearing around a bend.
Flower got down from the buggy
and went inside the house, leaving the door open behind her. Abigail
followed her.
"What are you planning to do?"
Abigail asked.
"Go to the
privy and make water."
"You answer my question,
Flower."
"I aim to put Rufus Atkins
in hell for what he did to my mother
and me. And before he dies I
aim to make him hurt."
"It doesn't have to be like
this."
"Yes, it does. You know it
does. Don't lie. You don't realize how much some folks can hate a lie,"
Flower said, and went out the back door.
Abigail stood for a long time
by the entrance. She felt the wind blowing through the house, twisting
the curtains, flipping the pages of a book in Flower's bedroom. She
could smell rain outside and see the sunlight disappearing from the
yard. She stared through the open door of the bedroom and at the
bedroom floor and the pool of shadow under the bed.
When Flower returned from the
privy, the house was empty.
"Abigail?" she said into the
silence.
She looked outside. The buggy
was gone. She glanced through the doorway into her bedroom. The piece
of oily flannel in which she had wrapped her revolver lay discarded on
the floor.
FOR Ira Jamison anger had
never been a character defect to which he attached any degree of
seriousness. If your business or personal adversaries tried to injure
you, you did not brood over biblical admonitions about an eye for an
eye. You buried your enemies alive. Anger wasn't a problem.
If someone challenged your
authority, as the dandruff-flecked minister had when he allowed Ira's
wife to confide her husband's sexual habits to him, you publicly
humiliated the person in such a way he would dread sleep because he
might see you in his dreams.
In fact, when anger was
controlled and carefully nursed, then sated at the expense of your
enemies, the experience could be almost sexual.
But disobedience on the part
of people whose wages he paid was another matter. These were usually
white trash whom a Bedouin would not allow to clean his chamber pot,
self-hating and genetically defective creatures whom he had housed,
fed, and provided medical care for, given their children presents at
Christmas and on birthdays, and sometimes seen commissioned in the
army. Disobedience from them amounted not only to ingratitude and
betrayal but contempt and arrogance, because they
were
indicating
they
had read his soul and had concluded he could be deceived and used.
Clay Hatcher was a perfect
example, a self-pitying imbecile who blamed his stupidity on his wife
and killed her with an ax while she was fixing his supper, then burned
down his own house with all his possessions in it to hide his crime.
Ira had to laugh thinking
about it. He wondered what Hatcher had to say when the Knights of the
White Camellia told him the law was the law and they hoped he wouldn't
hold it against them when they broke his neck. After all, they were
just poor whites like himself, trying to do the right thing.
But Ira had to take himself to
task for not anticipating Rufus Atkins' treachery. Atkins was a cynic
and pragmatist and knew how to eat his pride when a greater
self-interest was involved. But under those flat, hazel eyes and skin
that was like seared alligator hide lay a mean-spirited, sexually
driven, and resentful man who, like all white trash, believed the only
difference between himself and the rich was the social station
arbitrarily handed them at birth.
Ira Jamison had left Flower's
house that morning and had gone immediately to Rufus Atkins' newly
acquired property, but he was nowhere in sight. The prison guards
overseeing the convict workmen were no help, either, shaking their
heads, speaking in demotic French that Ira could barely understand.
So he tried to put himself in
the mind of Rufus Atkins, hung over, probably filled with rut, growing
more depleted as the sun climbed in the sky, realizing he had fouled
his own nest and made an enemy of the only man in Louisiana who could
give him access to the social respectability he had always coveted.
He had his driver take him to
the saloon on Main Street, to the jail, to a row of cribs on a muddy
road out by the Yankee camp, and finally to McCain's Hardware Store.
McCain's eyes were scorched,
his face discolored, as though it had been parboiled, his breath like
fly ointment. Ira saw him swallow with fear.
"How do you do, sir?" Ira said.
"Mighty fine, Colonel. It's an
honor to have you in my store."
"Do you know Captain Atkins?"
Ira asked.
"Yes, suh, I do. Not
real well, but I do know him."
"If you see him, would you
tell him I wanted to pay my respects, but regrettably I have to return
to Angola this afternoon," Ira said.
"Yes, suh, I'll get the
message to him. He's building himself a fine house. He comes in here
reg'lar for nails and such."
"That's what I thought. Thank
you for your goodwill, sir," Ira said.
Ira had his driver take him
back to Rufus Atkins' tent, where, as he expected, Atkins was not to be
found. He instructed the driver to take the carriage down the road, out
of sight, and not return until Ira sent for him.
A light rain began to fall and
Ira sat on a cane chair by Rufus Atkins' worktable and looked out the
tent flap at the convicts perched on top of the framing for Atkins'
house. He wondered what kind of thoughts, if any, they had during their
day. Did they ever have an inkling of the game that had been run on
them and their kind? Did they ever think of possessing more than a
woman's thighs and enough liquor to drink? The best any of them could
hope for was to become a trusty guard and perhaps survive their
sentences. If their fate was his, Ira believed he would either take out
a judge's throat or open his own veins.
But ultimately most of them
deserved whatever happened to them, he thought. They were uneducable,
conceived and born in squalor and hardly able to concentrate on three
sentences in a row that didn't deal with their viscera. Even Flower,
who was the most intelligent Negro he had ever known, was somehow
offended because he had told her she reminded him of his mother. His
father had said there was no difference between the races. That morning
Flower had certainly proved she was half-darky, acting rudely after he
had journeyed all the way from Angola to see her. What a waste of his
time and affections, he thought.
Ira heard a sound like a music
box playing in the rain, rising and falling as the wind popped the tent
flaps and the canvas over his head. Perched up high on the framing of
Rufus Atkins' house he saw an elderly Negro man fitting a board into
place, his face as creased as an old leather glove, his purple pants
shiny with wear above his bare ankles.
Why was this man wearing
purple pants instead of the black-and-white stripes that were standard
convict issue? The convict's hair was grizzled, his cheeks covered with
white whiskers. What was a man that age, probably with cataracts, doing
on top of a second-story crossbeam? Again Ira heard the tinkling of
music in the rain, a tune
that was vaguely familiar and
disturbing, like someone rattling a piece
of crystal inside his memory.
He rose from his chair and looked out the flap at the Negro carpenter,
who had paused in his work and was looking back at him now.
Uncle Royal? Ira thought. He
pinched his eyes. My God, what was happening to him? Uncle Royal had
been dead for years. What was it his father had once said, Niggers
would be the damnation of them all? Well, so be it, Ira thought. He
didn't create them nor did he invent the rules that governed the
affairs of men and principalities.
He walked out into the rain,
splattering his white pants with mud. "Get that old man off there!" he
yelled at the foreman.
"Off what?" the foreman
asked.
"Off the house. Right there.
Why is he wearing purple pants?" Ira replied.
"That ain't no old man up
there, Kunnel," the foreman said, half grinning. Then he looked at the
expression on Ira's face. "I'll get him down, suh. Ain't nothing here
to worry about."