James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning

by White Doves At Morning(Lit)

  He saw her forming the world "incrementally" with her lips.

  "He doesn't forgive partway. You're forgiven, absolved, as of this moment," the priest said.

  "What about the house I run?"

  "You might consider a vocational adjustment."

  "Ain't no one tole it to me this way befo'," she said.

  "Come back and see me," he said.

  The following night was Sunday, and the mutton-chopped, potbellied Union major was back at the bordello, charging his liquor and the use of Carrie's best girl to his bill.

  "You're not still mad at me, are you, Carrie? Over my unpaid bill and that sort of thing?" he said. He held a dark green wine bottle in one hand and a glass filled with burgundy in the other. One button on his fly was undone and his underwear showed through the opening.

  She was sitting in a rocker on the gallery, fanning herself, while heat lightning bloomed in the clouds. An oppressive weight seemed to be crushing down on her chest, causing her to constantly straighten her back in order to breathe.

  "I'm glad you brought that up, you. Button up that li'l sawed-off penis of yours, the one all my girls laugh at, and get your ass outta my house," she said.

  "What did you say?"

  The coffee cup she threw at him broke on the wood post just behind his head.

  There were lights in the sky that night, and wind that kicked dust out of the cane fields and dry thunder that sounded like horses' hooves thundering across the earth. She sat on the gallery until midnight, her breath wheezing as though her lungs were filled with burnt cork. In the distance she saw a ball of flaming swamp gas roll through a stand of flooded cypress, its incandescence so bright the details of the trees, the hanging moss, the lacy texture of the leaves, the flanged trunks at the waterline, became like an instant brown and green and gray photograph created in the middle of the darkness.

  Some people believed the balls of light in the swamp were actually the spirits of the loups-garous-werewolves who could take on human, animal or inanimate forms-and secretly Carrie had always believed the same and had crossed herself or clutched her juju bag whenever she saw one. But tonight she simply watched the ball of lightning or burning swamp gas or whatever it was splinter apart in the saw grass as though she were looking back on a childhood fable whose long-ago ability to scare her now made her nostalgic.

  In the morning she called her girls together, paid them their commissions for the previous week, gave each of them a twenty-five-dollar bonus, and fired them all. After they were gone she placed a black man in the front and back yards to tell all her customers the bordello was closed, then locked the doors, took a sponge bath in a bucket, dressed in her best nightgown, and lay down on top of her bedsheets. She slept through the day and woke in the afternoon, thickheaded, unsure of where she was, the room creaking with heat from the late sun. She washed her face in a porcelain basin and shuffled into the kitchen and tried to eat, but the food was like dry paper in her mouth. It seemed the energies in her heart were barely enough to pump blood into her head.

  The yard was empty, the servants gone. She soaked a towel in water and laudanum and placed it on her chest and went back to bed. The light faded outside and she drifted in and out of sleep and once again heard the rumble of horses through the earth. She heard rain sweep across the roof and shutters banging against the sides of the house, then she slipped away inside the dream where a man in heavy shoes

  walked down a long corridor and raped an iron door across stone.

  In her dream she saw herself rise from the bed and kneel on the floor and lift her hair off her neck and lay her head down on the mattress, for some reason no longer afraid. Then the year became 1845 and the place was not Louisiana but Paris, and a great crowd filled the plaza below the platform she knelt on, their faces dirty, their bodies and wine-soaked breaths emanating a collective stench that was like sewer gas in the bordello district in the early hours. The sun was bright above the buildings and the shadow of the guillotine spilled across the cobblestones and the rim of the crowd, who were throwing rotted produce at her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a muscular, black-hooded man ease the top half of the wood stock down on her neck and lock it into place, then step back with a lanyard in his hand.

  A man in a beaver hat and split-tail coat raised his hand and the crowd fell silent and Carrie could hear the wind blowing through the portals that led into the plaza and leaves scratching across stone. The light seemed to harden and grow cold, and she felt a sensation like a ribbon of ice water slice across the back of her neck. Then the headsman jerked the lanyard and she heard the trigger spring loose at the top of the scaffold and the sound of a great metal weight whistling down upon her.

  The plaza and the upturned, dirt-smeared faces in it and the stone buildings framed against the sky toppled away from her like an oil painting tossed end-over-end into a wicker basket.

  When a black man came to work at the bordello in the morning, he found the back door broken open and Carrie LaRose kneeling by the side of her bed, the pillow that had been used to suffocate her still covering her head. A white camellia lay on the floor.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  WEEK later the sheriff sent word to Flower that he wanted to see her in his office. She put on her best dress and opened a parasol over her head and walked down Main to the jail. She had never been to the jail before, and she paused in front of the door and looked automatically at the ground to see if there were paths that led to side entrances for colored. The sheriff, Hipolyte Gautreau, saw her through the window and waved her inside.

  "How you do, Miss Flower? Come in and have a seat. I'll run you t'rew this fast as I can so you can get back to your school," he said.

  She did not understand his solicitousness or the fact he had addressed her as Miss. She folded her parasol and sat down in a chair that was placed closely against the side of his desk.

  He fitted on his spectacles and removed a single sheet of paper from a brown envelope and unfolded it in both hands.

  "You knew Carrie LaRose pretty good, huh?" he said.

  "I did her laundry and cleaned house for her," Flower replied.

  "A month befo' she died-"

  "She didn't die. She was murdered."

  The sheriff nodded. "Last month she had this will wrote up. She left you her house and one hundred dol'ars. The money is at the bank in your name. I'll walk you down to the courthouse to transfer the deed."

  "Suh?" she said.

  "There's fifty arpents that go wit' the house. A cane farmer works it on shares. It's all yours, Miss Flower."

  She sat perfectly still, her face without expression, her hands resting on top of her folded parasol. She gazed through the doorway that gave on to the cells. They were empty, except for a town drunkard, who slept in a fetal position on the floor. The sheriff looked over his shoulder at the cells.

  "Somet'ing wrong?" he said.

  "Nobody is locked up for killing Miss Carrie."

  "She knew a lot of bad t'ings about lots of people," he said. He seemed to study his own words, his expression growing solemn and profound with their implication.

  "She gave Miss Abby the money to buy our school. That's why she's dead," Flower said.

  But the sheriff was shaking his head even before she had finished her statement.

  "I wouldn't say that, Miss Flower. There's lots of people had it in for Carrie LaRose. Lots of-"

  "There was a white camellia by her foot. Everybody knows what the white camellia means."

  "Miss Carrie had camellias growing in her side yard. It don't mean a__"

  "Shame on the people who claimed to be her friend. Shame on every one of them. You don't need to be helping me transfer the deed, either," Flower said. She looked the sheriff in the eyes, then rose from her chair and walked out the door.

  She used the one hundred dollars to buy books for the school and to hire carpenters and painters to refurbish her new house. She and Abigail dug flower beds around the four sides
of the house, spading the clay out of the subsoil so that each bed was like an elongated ceramic tray. They hauled black dirt from the cane fields and mixed it in the wagon with sheep manure and humus from the swamp, then filled the beds with it and planted roses, hibiscus, azalea bushes, windmill palms, hydrangeas and banana trees all around the house.

  On the evening the painters finished the last of the trim, Flower and Abigail sat on a blanket under the live oak in back and drank lemonade and ate fried chicken from a basket and looked at the perfect glow and symmetry of the house in the sunset. Flower's belongings were piled in Abigail's buggy, waiting to be moved inside.

  "I cain't believe all this is happening to me, Miss Abby," Flower said.

  "You're a lady of property. One of these days you'll have to stop calling me 'Miss Abby,'" Abigail said.

  "Not likely," Flower said.

  "You're a dear soul. You deserve every good thing in the world. You don't know how much you mean to me."

  "Miss Abby, sometime you make me a little uncomfortable, the way you talk to me."

  "I wasn't aware of that," Abigail replied, her face coloring.

  "I'm just fussy today," Flower said.

  "I'll try to be a bit more sensitive," Abigail said.

  "I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Miss Abby. Come on now," she said, patting the top of Abigail's hand.

  But Abigail removed her hand and began putting her food back in the picnic basket.

  THE next morning Flower woke in the feather-stuffed bed that had belonged to Carrie LaRose. The wind was cool through the windows, the early sunlight flecked with rain. During the night she had heard horses on the road and loud voices from the saloon next door, perhaps those of night riders whose reputation was spreading through the countryside, but she kept the.36 caliber revolver from McCain's Hardware under her bed, five chambers loaded, with fresh percussion caps on each of the nipples. She did not believe the Knights of the White Camellia or the members of the White League were the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers. In fact, she believed they were moral and physical cowards who hid their failure under bedsheets and she fantasized that one day the men who had attacked her would return, garbed in hoods and robes, and she would have the chance to do something unspeakable and painful to each of them.

  Through her open window she could hear a piece of paper flapping. She got up from the bed and walked barefoot to the front door and opened it. Tied to the door handle with a piece of wire were a thin, rolled newspaper printed with garish headlines and a note written on a piece of hand-soiled butcher paper.

  The note read:

  Dear Nigger,

  Glad you can read. See what you think about the article on you and

  the Yankee bitch who thinks her shit don't stink.

  We got nothing against you. Just don't mess with us.

  It was unsigned.

  The newspaper was printed on low-grade paper, of a dirty gray color, the printer's type undefined and fuzzy along the edges. The newspaper was titled The Rebel Clarion and had sprung to life in Baton Rouge immediately after the Surrender, featuring anonymously written articles and cartoons that depicted Africans with slat teeth, jug ears, lips that protruded like suction cups and bodies with the anatomical proportions of baboons, the knees and elbows punching through the clothes, as though poverty were in itself funny. In the cartoons the emancipated slave spit watermelon seeds, tap-danced while a carpetbagger tossed coins at him, sat with his bare feet on a desk in the state legislature or with a mob of his peers chased a terrified white woman in bonnet and hooped skirts inside the door of a ruined plantation house.

  The article Flower was supposed to read was circled with black charcoal. In her mind's eye she saw herself tearing both the note and the newspaper in half and dropping them in the trash pit behind the house. But when she saw Abigail's name in the first paragraph of the article she sat down in Carrie LaRose's rocker on the gallery and, like a person deciding to glance at the lewd writing on a privy wall, she began to read.

  While Southern soldiers died on the field at Shiloh, Miss Dowling showed her loyalties by joining ranks with the Beast of New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler, and caring for the enemy during the Yankee occupation of that city.

  Later, using a pass from the Sanitary Commission, she smuggled escaped negroes through Confederate lines so they could join the Yankee army and sack the homes of their former owners and benefactors and, in some cases, rape the white women who had clothed and fed and nursed them when they were sick.

  Miss Dowling has now seen fit to use her influence in the Northern press to attack one of Louisiana's greatest Confederate heroes, a patriot who was struck by enemy fire three times at Shiloh but who managed to escape from a prison hospital and once more join in the fight to support the Holy Cause.

  Miss Dowling is well known in New Iberia, not only for her traitorous history during the war but also for propensities that appear directly related to her spinsterhood. Several credible sources have indicated that her close relationship with a freed negro woman is best described by a certain Latin term this newspaper does not make use of.

  She set both the note and the newspaper under a flowerpot, although she could not explain why she didn't simply throw them away, and went inside her new house and fixed breakfast.

  SEVERAL hours later a carriage with waxed black surfaces and white wheels and maroon cushions and a surrey on top pulled into the yard. A black man in a tattered, brushed coat and pants cut off at the knees sat in the driver's seat. A lean, slack-jawed outrider, wearing a flop hat, a gunbelt and holstered revolver hanging from his pommel, preceded the carriage into the yard and dismounted and looked back down the road and out into the fields, as though the great vacant spaces proffered a threat that no one else saw.

  Flower stepped out on the gallery, into the hot wind blowing from the south. Ira Jamison got down from his carriage and removed his hat and wiped the inside of the band with a handkerchief as he nodded approvingly at the house and the mixture of flowers and banana trees and palms planted around it.

  He wore a white shirt with puffed sleeves and a silver vest and dark pants, but because of the heat his coat was folded neatly on the cushions of the carriage. He carried an ebony-black cane with a gold head on it, but Flower noticed his limp was gone and his skin was pink and his eyes bright.

  "This is extraordinary. You've done a wonderful job with the old place," he said. "My heavens, you never cease proving you're one of the most ingenious women I've ever known."

  She looked at him mutely, her face tingling.

  "Aren't you going to say hello?" he asked.

  "How do you do, Colonel?" she said.

  "Smashing, as my British friends in the cotton trade say. I'm in town to check on a few business matters. Looks like the Yanks burned down my laundry and the cabins out back with it."

  "I'm glad you brought that up. My fifty arpents runs into seventy-five of yours. I'll take them off your hands," she said.

  "You'll take them off-" he began, then burst out laughing. "Now, how would you do that?"

  "Use my house and land to borrow the money. I already talked to the bank."

  "Will you pay me for the buildings I lost?"

  "No."

  "By God, you amaze me, Flower. I'm proud of you," he said.

  She felt her heart quicken, and was ashamed at how easily he could manipulate her emotions. She walked down the steps, then tilted up the flowerpot she had stuck the racist newspaper under.

  "Read this and the note that came with it," she said.

  Jamison set down his cane on the steps and unfolded the newspaper in the shade. Behind him, the outrider, whom Flower recognized as Clay Hatcher, stood in the sun, sweating under his hat. His bottom lip was swollen and crusted with black blood along a deep cut. He kept swiping horseflies out of his face.

  Jamison tore the note in half and stuck it inside the newspaper and dropped the newspaper on the step.

  "No one will dare harm you, Flowe
r. I give you my word," he said.

  "They already did. Three men raped me. They were paid by Rufus Atkins."

  "I don't believe that. Rufus has worked for me thirty years. He does-"

  "He does what you tell him?" she said.

  His faced seemed to dilate and redden with his frustration. "In a word, yes," he said.

  "He made me go to bed with him, Colonel. Miss Abby told you about it. But you didn't raise a hand."

  "I set the example. So you're correct, Flower. The guilt is mine."

  He was speaking too fast now, his mercurial nature impossible to connect from one moment to the next.

  "Suh, I don't understand," she said.