James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning

by White Doves At Morning(Lit)

  "I doubt Our Lord holds it against you," Willie said.

  Tige sat down beside him. He aimed his broom into the dusk as though it were a musket and sighted down the handle, then rested it by his foot. "Miss Abby done bought a big building she's turning into a schoolhouse. Her and a high-yellow lady named Flower is gonna teach there. She talks about you all the time, what a good man you are and what kind ways you have. In fact, I ain't never heard a lady talk so much about a man."

  "Miss Abigail does that?"

  "I was talking about the colored lady-Miss Flower."

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ROBERT Perry was released from prison at Johnson's Island, Ohio, two months after the Surrender. The paddle-wheeler he boarded without a ticket was packed with Northern cotton traders, gamblers, real estate speculators, and political appointees seizing upon opportunities that seemed to be a gift from a divine hand. At night the saloons and dining and card rooms blazed with light and reverberated with orchestra music, while outside torrents of rain blistered the decks and the upside-down lifeboat Robert huddled under with a tiger-striped cat, a guilt-haunted, one-armed participant in the Fort Pillow Massacre, and an escaped Negro convict whose ankles were layered with leg-iron scars and who stole food for the four of them until they reached New Orleans.

  Robert rode the spine of a freight car as far as the Atchafalaya River, then walked forty miles in a day and a half and went to sleep in a woods not more than two hours from the house where he had been born. When he woke in the morning he sat on a tree-shaded embankment on the side of the road and ate a withered apple and drank water from a wood canteen he had carried with him from Johnson's Island.

  A squad of black soldiers passed him on the road, talking among themselves, their eyes never registering his presence, as though his gray clothes were less an indicator of an old enemy than a flag of defeat. Then a mounted Union sergeant, this one white, reined up his horse in front of Robert and looked down at him curiously. He wore a goatee and mustache and a kepi pulled down tightly on his brow and a silver ring with a gold cross on it.

  "What happened to your shoes?" he asked.

  "Lost them crossing the Atchafalaya," Robert replied.

  "We've had trouble with guerrillas hereabouts. You wouldn't be one of those fellows, would you?"

  Robert stared thoughtfully into space. "Simian creatures who hang in trees? No, I don't know much about those fellows," he said.

  "Your feet look like spoiled bananas."

  "Why, thank you," Robert said.

  "Where'd you fight, Reb?"

  "Virginia and Pennsylvania."

  Cedar and mulberry and wild pecan trees grew along the edge of the road, and the canopy seemed to form a green tunnel of light for almost a half mile.

  "I have a feeling you didn't sign an oath of allegiance in a prison camp and they decided to keep you around a while," the sergeant said.

  "You never can tell," Robert said.

  The sergeant removed his foot from the left stirrup. "Swing up behind me. I can take you into Abbeville," he said.

  An hour later Robert slid off the horse's rump a half mile from his home and began walking again. He left the road and cut through a neighbor's property that was completely deserted, the main house doorless and empty of furniture, the fields spiked with dandelions and palmettos and the mud towers of crawfish. Then he climbed through a rick fence onto his father's plantation and crossed pastureland that was green and channeled with wildflowers. New cane waved in the fields, and in the distance he could see the swamp where he had fished as a boy, and snow egrets rising from the cypress canopy like white rose petals in the early sun.

  The two-story house and the slave cabins seemed unharmed by the war but the barn had been burned to the ground and in the mounds of ashes and charcoal Robert could see the rib cages and long, hollow eyed skulls of horses. He did not recognize any of the black people living in the cabins, nor could he explain the presence of the whites living among them. His mother's flowerpots and hanging baskets were gone from the gallery, and the live oak that had shaded one side of the house, its branches always raking across the slate roof, had been nubbed back so that the trunk looked like a celery stalk.

  He lifted the brass knocker on the front door and tapped it three times. He heard a chair scrape inside the house, then heavy footsteps approaching the front, not like those of either his mother or his father. The man who opened the door looked like an upended hogshead. He wore checkered pants and polished, high-top shoes, like a carnival barker might wear; his face was florid, whiskered like a walrus's. In his right hand he clutched a boned porkchop wrapped in a thick piece of bread.

  "What do you want?" he asked.

  "I'm Robert Perry. I live here."

  "No, I don't hardly see how you could live here, since I've never seen you before. That would be pretty impossible, young fellow," the man said. His accent was from the East, the vowels as hard as rocks. His wife sat at the dining room table in a housecoat, her hair tied up on her head with a piece of gauze.

  "Where are my parents? What are you doing in my house?" Robert said.

  "You say Perry? Some people by that name moved into town. Ask around. You'll find them."

  "He probably just wants something to eat. Offer him some work," the man's wife said from the table.

  "You want to do some chores for a meal?" the man said. Robert looked out at the fields and the pink sun over the cane.

  "That would be fine," he said.

  "The privy's got to be cleaned out. Better eat before you do it, though," the man said. He laughed and slapped Robert hard on the upper arm. "Not much meat on your bones. Want a regular job? I run the Freedman's Bureau. You were a Johnny?"

  "Yes."

  "I'll see what I can do. We don't aim to rub your noses in it," the man said.

  ONE week later, just before dawn, Tige McGuffy woke to a rolling sound on the roof of Willie Burke's house. Then he heard a soft thud against the side of the house and another on the roof. He looked out the window just as a man in the backyard flung a pine cone into the eaves.

  Tige went to the dresser drawer, then walked down the stairs and opened the back door. Mist hung in layers on the bayou and in the trees and canebrakes. The man in the yard stood next to an unsaddled, emaciated horse, tossing a pine cone in the air and catching it in his palm.

  "Why you chunking at Mr. Willie's house?" Tige asked.

  "Thought it was time for y'all to get up. You always sleep in a nightshirt and a kepi?" the man in the yard said.

  "If I feel like it," Tige replied.

  "Where's Mr. Willie?"

  "None of your dadburned business."

  "I like your kepi. Would you tell Willie that if Robert Perry had two coins he could rub together he would treat him to breakfast. But unfortunately he doesn't have a sou."

  Tige set a heavy object in his hand on the kitchen drainboard. "Why ain't you said who you was?" he asked.

  Robert Perry walked out of the yard and onto the steps, his horse's reins dangling on the ground. His clothes and hair were damp with dew, his face unshaved, his belt notched tightly under his ribs. He came inside and glanced down at the drainboard.

  "What are you doing with that pistol?" he said.

  "Night riders got it in for Mr. Willie. I was pert' near ready to blow you into the bayou," Tige replied.

  "Night riders?" Robert said.

  Ten minutes later Willie left Robert and Tige at the house and went on a shopping trip down Main Street, then returned and fixed a breakfast of scrambled eggs and green onions, hash browns, real coffee, warm milk, bacon, chunks of ham, fresh bread, and blackberries and cream. He and Robert and Tige piled their plates and made smacking and grunting sounds while they ate, forking and spooning more food into their mouths than they could chew.

  "I didn't know meals like this existed anymore. How'd you pay for this?" Robert said.

  "Took advantage of the credit system... Then signed your name to the bill," Willi
e said.

  "Tige was telling me about your local night riders," Robert said.

  "Have you heard of the White League or the Knights of the White Camellia?"

  "I heard Bedford Forrest is the head of a group of some kind. Ex-Masons, I think. They use a strange nomenclature," Robert replied.

  "Some are just fellows who don't want to give it up. But some will put a bedsheet over their heads and park one in your brisket," Willie said.

  "What have you gone and done, Willie?"

  "Abigail and Flower Jamison started up a school for Negroes or anybody else who wants to learn. I helped them get started," Willie replied.

  Robert was silent.

  "You haven't seen her?" Willie asked.

  "Not yet."

  "You going to?" Willie asked.

  Robert set down his knife and fork. He kept his eyes on his plate. "Her letters are confessional. But I'm not sure what it is that bothers her. Would you know, Willie?" Robert said.

  "Would I be knowing? You're asking me?" Willie said.

  Robert was silent again.

  "Who knows the soul of another?" Willie said.

  "You're a dreadful liar."

  "Don't be talking about your old pals like that."

  "I won't," Robert said.

  The sun was in the yard and on the trees now, and mockingbirds and jays were flitting past the window. The horse Robert had ridden from Abbeville was drinking from the bayou, the reins trailing in the water.

  "You were at Mansfield when General Mouton was killed?" Robert said.

  "Yes," Willie replied.

  "It's true that half the 18th was wiped out again?" Robert said.

  Willie looked at him but didn't reply.

  "You dream about it?" Robert asked.

  "A little. Not every night. I've let the war go for the most part," Willie said. He twisted his head slightly and touched at a shaving nick on his jawbone, his eyelids blinking.

  The wind blew the curtains, and out on the bayou a large fish flopped in the shade of a cypress. "Thank you for the fine breakfast," Robert said.

  "I see grape blowing people all over the trees," Tige said.

  Robert and Willie looked at his upturned face and at the darkness in his eyes and the grayness around his mouth.

  "I drank water out of the Bloody Pond. I wake up with the taste in my throat. I dream about a fellow with railroad spikes in him," Tige said.

  Robert lifted Tige's kepi off the back of his chair and set it on his head and grinned at him.

  THAT evening Robert bathed in the clawfoot tub inside Willie's bathhouse and shaved in the oxidized mirror on the wall, then dressed in fresh clothes and went outside. A sunshower was falling on the edge of town and he could smell the heavy, cool odor of the bayou in the shadows. Willie was splitting firewood on a stump by the bayou and stacking it in a shed, his sleeves rolled, his cheeks bright with his work.

  Robert suddenly felt an affection for his friend that made him feel perhaps things were right with the world after all, regardless of the times in which they lived. There is a goodness in your face that the war, the likes of Billy Sherman, or the worst of our own kind will never rob you of, Willie, he thought.

  "I received the letter you wrote me while you were waiting to be executed by the Federals," Robert said.

  "You did?"

  "A Yankee chaplain mailed it to me with an attached note. He thought there was a chance you had been killed while escaping and he should honor your last wish by mailing the letter you left behind," Robert said.

  "Some of those Yanks weren't bad fellows," Willie said.

  "You said you repented of any violation of our friendship and you never wanted in impair my relationship with another."

  "A fellow's thoughts get a bit confused when he's about to have eight Yanks fire their rifles into his lights," Willie said.

  "I see," Robert said. "Well, you're a mighty good friend, Willie Burke, and you never have to repent to me about anything. Are we clear on what we're talking about, old pal?"

  "It's a tad murky to me. May I get back to my work now?"

  Robert watched the wind blowing in the Spanish moss and in the trees along the bayou and grinned at nothing. "Did you sign the oath of allegiance?" he asked.

  "The oath? No, never got around to it, I'm afraid," Willie said.

  "Thought not. My parents are living in a shack behind a Union officer's house."

  "We had a good run at it. We lost. Accept it, Robert. When they give us a bad time, tell them to kiss our ruddy bums."

  "A nation that fought honorably shouldn't be treated as less," Robert said. "There are men here who have a plan to take Louisiana back out of the Union. They fought shoulder to shoulder with us. They're fine men, Willie."

  Willie set down his ax and wiped his hands on a rag and glanced furtively at his friend. Robert's face was wooden, his eyes troubled. Then he saw Willie watching him and he looked again at the wind in the trees and grinned at nothing.

  AT dusk the two of them walked through the streets to the house Abigail and Flower had converted into a school. Robert was not prepared for what he saw. Every room in the house, both upstairs and downstairs, was brightly lit and filled with people of color. They were of all ages and all of them were dressed in their best clothes. And those for whom there was no room sat on the gallery or milled about under the live oak in the front yard.

  The desks were fashioned from church pews that had been sawed into segments and placed under plank tables that ran the width of the rooms. The walls were decorated with watercolor paintings and the numbers one to ninety-nine and the letters of the alphabet, which had been scissored from red, yellow, and purple pieces of cloth. Each student had a square of slate and a piece of chalk and a damp rag to write with, and each of them by the end of the evening had to spell ten words correctly that he could not spell the previous week.

  Then Robert looked through a downstairs window and saw Abigail Dowling in front of a class that included a dozen blacks, Tige McGuffy, the bordello operator Carrie LaRose and her pirate of a brother, Scavenger Jack, who looked like a shaggy behemoth stuffed between the plank writing table and sawed-down pew.

  Abigail wore a dress that had a silver-purplish sheen to it, and her chestnut hair was pulled back in a bun and fixed with a silver comb, so that the light caught on the broadness of her forehead and the resolute quality of her eyes.

  Robert waved when she seemed to glance out the window, then he realized she could not see him in the darkness and she had been reacting to a sound in the street. He turned and watched a flatbed wagon loaded with revelers creak past the school. The revelers were drunk on busthead whiskey, yelling, sometimes jumping down to pick up a dirt clod, flinging it at a schoolroom window. A slope-shouldered man in a suit and a bowler hat followed them on horseback, a gold toothpick set in the corner of his mouth.

  "Who's that fellow?" Robert asked.

  "Todd McCain. Abby outbid him on the building," Willie said.

  "Not a good loser, is he?" Robert said.

  "Toddy is one of those whose depths will probably never be quite plumbed," Willie said.

  The revelers got down from their wagon, uncorking bottles of corn liquor and drinking as they walked, watching the families of Negroes under the trees part in their path, like layers of soil cleaving off the point of a plowshare. One of them drained his bottle, carefully tamped the cork back down in the neck, then broke it on the roof of the school.

  Robert walked through the revelers into the street, where Todd McCain sat on his horse under a street lantern that had been hoisted on a pulley to the top of a pole. McCain's face was shadowed by his bowler, his narrow shoulders pinched inside his coat. Robert stroked the white blaze on the nose of McCain's horse.

  "A fine animal you have here," he said.

  McCain removed the gold toothpick from his mouth, his teeth glistening briefly in the dark, as though he might be smiling. "You're Bob Perry," he said.

  "My friends call me
Robert. But you can call me Lieutenant Perry. Why is it I have the feeling this collection of drunkards and white trash is under your direction?"

  "Search me," McCain said.

  "Can I accept your word you're about to take them from our presence?"

  "They're just boys having fun."

  "I'll put it to you more simply. How would you like to catch a ball between your eyes?"

  The wind had died and the air in the street had turned stale and close, stinking of horse and dog droppings, the lantern overhead iridescent with humidity. The joy in the revelers had died, too, as they watched their leader being systematically humiliated. McCain's horse shifted its weight and tossed its head against the reins. McCain brought his fist down between the animal's ears.