James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning

by White Doves At Morning(Lit)

  Flower sat up on her cot, her body still warm from sleep. The ward was dimly lit by oil lamps at each end, the air heavy with the smell of medicine and bandages and the sounds of snoring and night dreams. She walked softly between the rows of beds to the screened enclosure where Jamison slept, unable to think through the words she had just heard. She stood over his bed and looked down at the mound of his hip under the sheet and the pale smoothness of his exposed shoulder.

  His face was turned into the shadows, but even in sleep he was a handsome man, his body firm, without fat, his skin clear and unwrinkled, his mouth tender, almost like a girl's.

  Had he known his life was out of danger and not bothered to tell her? Was he that indifferent about the affections and loyalties of others?

  She had other questions, too. What about the visitors whose clothes smelled of horse sweat and whose eyes moved up and down her body? Why had the colonel been reading from a ledger book that contained the names of all his slaves?

  He had completed the letter he had been writing and had stuck it inside the cover of the ledger book and had slipped the book under his pillow. She eased the sheets of paper out of the book and unfolded them in the light that was breaking through the window. Each line of his flowing calligraphy was perfectly linear, each letter precise, without swirls or any attempt at grandiosity. She began reading, moving her lips silently, tilting the page into the grayness of the dawn.

  Dear Colonel Forrest,

  I have good news from the Union surgeon and am on my way to a fine recovery. However, I am still haunted by the destruction of the 18th Louisiana Regiment at Shiloh and the fact the Orleans Guards, partially under my command, were not there on their flank when they advanced so bravely into Yankee artillery.

  But conscience and honor require me to state I also have a practical concern. I plan to enter politics once the war is over. Because my name will be associated in a causal fashion, fairly or unfairly, with the tragedy of the 18th Louisiana, I think accepting a parole will not contribute to my chances of gaining high office. Neither do I relish the prospect or eating dried pras on a Yankee prison camp. I'm also quitesickof being tended by unwashed niggers in a Yankee hospital that stinks of urine-

  She heard a Catholic sister pass on the other side of the screen and she refolded the letter and replaced it inside the ledger book.

  Jamison woke and stared straight up into her face. For the first time she noticed that one of his eyes was smaller than the other, liquid, with a bead in it, like a glimmering, narrow conduit into a part of his mind he shared with no one.

  "What are you doing?" he asked.

  "What you brung me here for. To tend you. To carry out your slop jar, to fetch your food, to wash the sweat off your skin, to listen to your grief. That's why you brung me, ain't you, suh?"

  He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her with a new and cautionary awareness.

  ON her way out the door to catch the public car back to Basin Street, she saw Abigail Dowling sitting on a stone bench under a live oak tree, next to a double-amputee who was sleeping in a wheelchair, his head on his chest, the bandaged stubs of his legs sticking out into space.

  "Could I sit down, ma'am?" she said.

  "You don't have to ask," Abigail replied.

  "What do the word 'par-old' mean?"

  "Say it again."

  "Par-old. Like something somebody don't want."

  "You mean 'parole'? P-a-r-o-l-e?"

  "That's it."

  "Prisoners of war are exchanged sometimes so they don't have to go to a jail or a prison camp. Or sometimes they sign an oath of allegiance and just go back home. But you say there's somebody who doesn't want a parole?"

  Flower watched the ice wagon turn off St. Charles and enter the hospital driveway. The driver stopped and chatted with a Creole woman who was cutting flowers and laying them delicately in a straw basket. Vapor rose from the tarp covering the sawed blocks of ice that had been brought in ships all the way from New England, and were now melting and running off the tailgate of a dray on a dappled, pea gravel driveway lined with pink and gray caladium. Blue-streaked, white-crusted blocks of ice carefully packed in sawdust that could refrigerate medicines and numb the pain in suffering men, now melting needlessly because a man and a lady wanted to exchange pleasantries in a floral garden in New Orleans, Louisiana. She felt her breath catch in her throat. "Are you all right, Flower?" Abigail asked.

  "I can read. I can write some, too. Nobody know it, though, except Willie Burke, 'cause he taught me."

  "What is it you're trying to tell me?"

  Flower loosened the drawstring on the cloth bag she carried and removed the dictionary given her by Willie Burke. She flipped the pages to the P's and ran her finger down a page until she located the word her mind had unclearly formed and associated with an idea and an image which now seemed inextricably linked. "'Possession,'" she said.

  "Pardon?" Abigail said.

  "Colonel Jamison got one eye smaller than the other. It got a wet blue gleam in it. I didn't know what that look meant. It's possession, Miss Abigail. It's the control he got over other people that keeps him alive. Not love for no family, no cause, no little nigger baby who was found almost froze to death in a woods."

  Abigail put her arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. "I'll always be your friend," she said.

  But Flower rose from her grasp and walked quickly to the street, her face obscured in the shadows, her back shaking.

  AFTER she returned to the hospital that evening, the sky turned black and the wind began to blow hard out of the south. She could hear rain hitting on the window glass and the open shutters vibrating against the latches that moored them to the bricks. When she looked out the window she saw leaves whipping in circles and the highest limbs in the oak trees thrashing against the sky and spiderwebs of lightning bursting inside the clouds.

  "Sounds like cannons popping out there, don't it?" the young sentry said. He sat in a chair by the end of the ward, near the foyer where she kept her cot. His rifle was propped between his legs.

  "Have you been in the war?" she asked.

  "The Rebs potshot at us out on the river. They floated burning rafts past us so they could see us on the far bank. But they didn't hit nobody."

  When she made no reply, he added, "I hear we're going up to Baton Rouge and kick their behinds. I'm ready for it."

  "You be careful," she said.

  "I ain't afraid."

  "I know you're not," she said.

  He pulled a cigar box from under his chair and shook it.

  "You want to play checkers?" he asked.

  "You ain't s'pposed to be sitting down."

  "The lieutenant's a good fellow. Bet you don't know how."

  She went to the kitchen and began washing Colonel Jamison's supper dishes. His food and drink were never served on the same dishware or in the same glasses or cups used by the other patients. His own china, along with his reading matter, personal stationery, nightgown, underwear and socks, even a tailored gray Confederate uniform, had all been brought to him by an Angola Plantation overseer, with permission, through Union lines. Flower dried each dish and cup and fork and knife with a soft cloth and placed them inside a big tin breadbox painted with flowers and set the breadbox inside a cabinet. She glanced outside and saw a closed carriage roll by under the trees, a driver in a black slouch hat and slicker backlit against the flicker of lightning through the canopy.

  She looked in on Colonel Jamison, who was sleeping with a pillow over his head, perhaps to muffle the boom of thunder outside. She wondered if he dreamed of the boys who had died under his command or if in his sleep he relived only his own fear and wounding on the battlefield. She glanced at the three pistol balls lying in a saucer on his nightstand and knew the answer to her own question.

  When she walked back to the foyer the sentry was looking out the window at the leaves blowing against the glass and the white flicker of electricity through the tops of the trees.
He had left his rifle at his post, the bayonet-tipped barrel propped tautly against the wall.

  "I was kidding you about not knowing how to play checkers. I saw you reading a book back there in the foyer. That puts you one up on me," he said.

  "You cain't read?"

  "Folks in my family is still working on making their X." He grinned and looked at his feet.

  "I can teach you how," she said.

  He grinned again. His eyes went away from her, then came back. "You gonna play checkers with me?" he asked.

  "I wouldn't mind," she replied.

  He placed two chairs at a small table by the window and removed a folded cloth painted with checker squares from his cigar box and flattened the cloth on the table. The checker pieces were carved from wood and looked like big buttons, domed on the top and painted green or red. He lined them up on the cloth squares and glanced out the window just as lightning popped in a yard on the opposite side of the street.

  "Wonder what that carriage is doing out there?" he said.

  "It's the hearse. They take the bodies out the back door," she replied.

  There was a disjointed expression in his face. "A hearse?" he said.

  "They don't want the other patients to see the bodies. There's a room behind the kitchen where they take the ones who are gonna die."

  He looked emptily down the long rows of beds in the ward and at the rectangular shadows they cast.

  "I bet most of the dead is probably Rebs who got gangrene 'cause their people didn't look out for them," he said. "Probably," she said, avoiding his eyes.

  He glanced out the window again, then shook a thought out of his face and pushed a checker piece forward with his index finger. "Your move. I ain't showing no mercy, either," he said. Later, after she had looked in on the colonel for the final time that evening, she pulled the blanket across the length of clothesline she had strung by her cot and lay down and closed her eyes. In her sleep she heard the rain hitting hard on the window glass and she dreamed of birds flying from their cages, flapping their wings loudly in their newfound freedom.

  Sometime after midnight she heard a door open and felt a draft course through the corridors and swell against the walls and ceiling. Then in the coldness of the moment she heard the heavy sound of men's boots on the floor and smelled rainwater and horsed and an odor like old clothes moldy with damp.

  She pulled the sheet over her head and drew her knees up toward her chest and fell deeper into the dream of birds thropping through the sky, high above the hunters whose guns fired impotently into the air.

  But the dream would not hold. A scorched odor, like dry oak pitched on a flame, made her open her eyes. The thunder had stopped and in its vacuum she heard wind and leaves scraping on stone and a door fluttering on its hinges, then the wet, crunching sound of horses' hooves and iron-rimmed carriage wheels sinking in pea gravel.

  She rose from her cot and drew aside the blanket that hung from the clothesline stretched across her nook. It was still dark outside and clouds of ground fog rolled and puffed between the palms and live oak trunks. She stepped into the hallway that fed into the ward and saw her friend, the sentry, still seated in his chair, his back to her, his chin on his chest. His rifle was propped against the table they had played checkers on. A brass lamp was knocked askew on the wall above his head, oil oozing from the slit through which the wick extended, igniting in the flame, dripping to the floor like a string of melted gold coins.

  The sentry's kepi lay crown-down on the table.

  Oh, Lordy, they gonna shoot you for sleeping on guard duty, she said to herself.

  But even as she heard the words inside her, she knew they were a deception. She stepped into what should have been the periphery of his vision and saw the paleness in his cheeks and the dark area, like a child's bib, under his chin. A barber's razor with a pearl handle lay in a circle of blood at his feet.

  At the end of the ward the screens had been moved aside from the colonel's bed. The sheet he had slept under trailed on the floor like a handkerchief half-pulled from a man's pocket. She ran toward the kitchen to find the night nurse, the Confederate amputees propping themselves up at the sound of feet. The brass lamp still burned on the colonel's nightstand. She glanced at the saucer where he had kept the three.36 caliber pistol balls that had been removed from his body, hoping that perhaps in some way what she had always known about him and denied, namely, that first and last and foremost he thought of no one except himself and his own possessions, was not true.

  The saucer was bare, his overturned slop jar running on the floor.

  Chapter Ten

  LIEUTENANT Robert Perry had always slept without dreaming, or at least without dreaming of events or places or people he remembered in daylight. The world was a fine place, filled with bird-song and the smell of horses and wood smoke at dawn and fish spawning in swamps where the sunlight glowed like a green lantern inside the cypress. In fact, in the quietness of the dawn and the faint pinkness spreading across the cane fields and the cabins of the slaves and the horses blowing in the pasture, Robert sometimes believed he was witness to the quiet hush of God's breath upon the world.

  Now sleep came to him fitfully and took him to places to which he did not want to return. The geographical designations-Manassas Junction, Winchester, Front Royal, Cross Keys-were names that never appeared in the dreams. His nocturnal recollection of these places came to him only in images and sounds: a night picket cocking back the hammer on a rifle, a man calling for water, another caught inside a burning woods, a stretcher bearer sitting on the lip of a crater in the middle of a railroad track, holding his ears, screaming, kicking his feet.

  When Robert would finally fall into a deep slumber before dawn, he would awake suddenly to the whistling sound of a shell arcing out of its trajectory, then discover the world outside his tent was silent, except perhaps for a cook rattling pans in the back of a wagon. He would lie with his arm across his eyes, his palm resting on the coolness of his revolver, breathing slowly, reciting his morning prayers, waiting for his mind to empty of dreams he told himself had no application in the waking day.

  The previous evening he had received a letter from Abigail Dowling, one that perplexed him and also saddened his heart, because even though he had already learned of Jim Stubbefield's death, he had not accepted it, each morning waking with the notion Jim was still alive, in the Western campaign with the 18th Louisiana, the youthful confidence on his face undisturbed by either war or mortality. In Robert's haversack was a carte de visite, taken by a photographer at Camp Pratt, showing Willie, Robert and Jim together for the last time, Jim standing while they sat, a hand on each of their shoulders, a gentle scarecrow posed between two smiling friends.

  God fashions the pranksters to keep the rest of us honest, Jim. Wasn't right of you to die on us, old pal, he thought, almost resentfully.

  But the other portions of Abigail's letter disturbed him as well, although with certainty he could not say why. He sat on a Quaker gun, in front of a cook fire, in the cool, smoky dawn above the Shenandoah Valley, and unfolded her letter and read it again.

  Dear Robert,

  I saw your father and he said you know of Jim's death at Shiloh. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am at the loss of your friend. Also I need to confide some thoughts of my own to you about the war and what I perceive as a great evil that has fallen upon the land. Please forgive me in advance if my words are hurtful in any way.

  I helped prepare the body of a young Union soldier who had been guarding Confederate amputees in the hospital where I have been working in New Orleans. His throat had been cut by men in the employ of Colonel Ira Jamison. Colonel Jamison was offered a parole, but evidently for reasons of political gain he refused it and had a boy of seventeen murdered in order to establish himself as an escaped prisoner of war. I believe this man to be the most despicable human being I have ever met.

  I witnessed the hanging of a gambler whose only crime was to possess a piece of a ripped U
nion flag. The execution was ordered by none other than General Butler himself, supposedly with the approval of President Lincoln. I would like to believe the deaths of the gambler and the young soldier were simply part of war's tragedy. But I would be entertaining a deception. Colonel Jamison and General Butler are emblematic of the arrogance of power. Their cruelty speaks for itself. The young sentry, the gambler, and Jim Stubbefield are their victims. I think there will be others.

  Please write and tell me of your health and situation. Day and night you are in my thoughts and my prayers.

  Affectionately,

  Your friend,

  Abigail