White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  "I outlasted them. They're blowhards and yellow-backs, Jim."

  "I put a bowie to Hatcher and told him I'd make a regimental flag out of his manhood," Jim said.

  "Go on with you?" Willie said, rising up on his elbows. "Hey, come back here. Tell me you didn't do that, Jim."

  But Jim had already gone out the tent flap to relieve himself in the privy.

  Willie got up from his cot and walked unsteadily behind the mess hall and picked up the severed pieces of rope that had bound his wrists and ankles and the salvia-soaked gun rag that had been stuffed in his mouth and the sticks that had been threaded under his knees and pushed back in his teeth. He crossed the parade ground to Corporal Clay Hatcher's tent and went inside.

  A small oil lamp burned on the floor, a coil of black smoke twisting from the glass up through an opening in the canvas. Hatcher slept on his side, in a pair of long underwear, his head on a dirty pillow, his mouth open. The inside of the tent smelled like re-breathed whiskey fumes, unwashed hair, and shoes someone had worn for long hours in a dirt field.

  Willie kicked the cot. Hatcher lifted his head uncertainly from the pillow, his pale blue eyes bleary with sleep.

  Willie threw the sticks and pieces of rope and thong into his chest. "God love Jim for his loyalty to a friend. But you finish your work, you malignant cretin, or one morning find glass in your mush," Willie said.

  Hatcher sat up, his lips caked with mucus. "Finish my work?" he said stupidly.

  "Did your mother not clean your ears when she dug you out of her shite? You and Atkins do your worst. I'll live to piss in your coffin, you pitiful fuck."

  Hatcher continued to stare at Willie, unable to comprehend the words being spoken to him, the bad whiskey he had drunk throbbing in his head.

  Willie started for him.

  "I'm coming. I got to relieve myself first," Hatcher said, jerking backward, clutching his groin under the coarse cotton sheet. His throat swallowed in shame at the fear his voice couldn't hide.

  EXCEPT for the house servants, Ira Jamison's slaves were free to do as they wished on Sunday. Until sunset they could visit on other plantations, sit upstairs at a white church, play a card game called pitty-pat, roll dice, or dance to fiddle music. Even though Jamison's slaves were forbidden to possess "julep," a fermented mixture of water, yeast, and fruit or cane pulp, Jamison's overseers looked the other way on Sunday, as long as no slave became outrageously drunk or was sick when he or she reported for bell count on Monday.

  On Sunday mornings Flower usually put on her gingham dress and bonnet and walked one and a half miles to a slat church house, where a white Baptist minister conducted a service for slaves and free people of color after he had completed services at the white church in town. He was considered a liberal minister and tolerant man because he often allowed one of the congregation to give the homily.

  This morning the homilist was a free man of color by the name of Jubal Labiche, who actually never attended services in the church unless he was asked to give the sermon. He owned slaves and, upstream from town, a brick kiln on Bayou Teche. Behind a long tunnel of oak trees on the St. Martinville Road he had built a house that sought to imitate the classical design of his neighbors' houses, except the columns and porch were wood, not marble, the workmanship utilitarian, the paint an off-white that seemed to darken each year from the smoke of stubble fires.

  He was a plump, short man, his eyes turquoise, his skin golden, his hair flattened with grease against his scalp. Even though it was warm inside the building, he wore a checkered silk vest with his suit, a gold watch as fat as a biscuit tucked in the pocket.

  "No one loved God more than St. Paul. He was bound and jailed and whipped, but no matter how great his suffering, he never listened to false prophets. When the Ephesians were of a rebellious mind, this is what he told them..."

  Jubal Labiche fitted on his spectacles and looked down at the Bible that rested on the podium in front of him.

  " 'Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ,'" he read.

  The people seated on the plank benches knotted their hands in their laps uncomfortably or looked at their shoes, or glanced furtively at the white minister, a sheep-shorn rail of a man with a long nose and pointed chin. Some of the people in the congregation nodded assent, before anyone perceived a glimmer of dissent in their eyes.

  Flower looked directly into Jubal Labiche's face. He stared back at her, then raised his eyes, as though he were caught in a sudden spiritual moment. He began a long prayer of thanks to God during which the congregation would say in unison "Amen" or "Yes, Lord" whenever he paused.

  After the service Jubal Labiche was climbing into his carriage when Flower walked past him. He stepped back down in the road and automatically started to touch his hat, then lowered his hand.

  "You seemed to have great interest in the homily," he said.

  "St. Paul wrote down that slaves is s'pposed to do what the master say?" she asked. /

  "He's telling us to put our faith in the Lord. Sometime the Lord's voice comes to us - through those who know more about the world than a simple servant such as myself," he replied, bowing slightly.

  "How come we cain't learn from the Bible ourself? How come it got to be read to us?"

  "I guess I'm not really qualified to talk about that," he said.

  "I guess you ain't," she said.

  She turned and walked down the dirt road through the cane fields, her bonnet in her hand, her hair blowing. She could almost feel his eyes burrowing into her back.

  BUT all the way home she found no release from the words Jubal Labiche had read to the congregation. Was it the will of God that people should own one another? If that was true, then God was not just. Or was the Scripture itself a white man's fraud?

  She warmed a tin cup of coffee and fixed a plate of corn bread and molasses, peas, and a piece of fried ham and sat down to eat by her back window. But her food was like dry paper in her mouth. She felt a sense of abandonment and loneliness she could not describe. Outside, the wind was hot blowing across the cane fields, and the blue sky had filled with plumes of dust.

  God wanted her to be a slave and Jesus, His son, was a teacher of submission?

  She looked through her front door at the empty yard and laundry house. The widow who ran the laundry for Ira Jamison was away for the day, gone with a suitor who owned a hunting cabin on stilts back in the swamp.

  Flower walked across the backyard, through the wash pots and clotheslines, and entered the back door of the laundry. The widow's bedroom door was open, and on the dresser was a leather-bound edition of the King James Bible.

  It took her less than five minutes to find the lines Jubal Labiche had read aloud from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Labiche had carefully avoided reading the passages that followed his selective excerpt, namely, that Christians should live and perform "not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with goodwill doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men."

  And a bit farther on: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

  She closed the cover on the book and went back to her cabin and finished her lunch, a strange sense of both confidence and tranquility in her heart, which she did not as yet quite understand.

  Before sunset she walked downtown and bought a peppermint stick from the drugstore for a penny. She ate it on the bank of the bayou, not far from the boardinghouse operated by Willie Burke's mother. She watched the dusk gather in the trees along the bayou and the water darken and the sunfish and gars rolling in the shallows. The western sky was red and black now and she could smell the rain falling on the fields somewhere out on the rim of the earth.

  She stood up from the bank and brushed off her dress and started to wal
k back to the quarters behind the laundry, before the paddy rollers came out on the roads. But now, for some unexplained reason, the thought of encountering them did not fill her with apprehension.

  Then she realized the origin of the feelings that had flooded through her after she had gone into the widow's bedroom and hunted through the New Testament for the excerpt from St. Paul. She could read. No one could ever take that gift from her, and no one could hide knowledge or the truth about the world from her again.

  AT sunrise the next morning she heard Rufus Atkins' horse in the yard, then heard him swing down from the saddle and approach her door. She was undressed, and she gathered up her clothes and sat on her bed and held them in her lap and over her breasts. He stepped inside the door, smelling of tobacco and cooked bacon, steam rising from his uniform in the morning coolness.

  He removed the bent twenty-dollar gold piece from the watch pocket of his trousers and began working it over the tops of his knuckles.

  "I got to go to bell count," she said.

  "No, you don't."

  "All the niggers got to be there, suh. The widow don't abide lateness."

  "Not you, Flower. You can do almost any goddamn thing you want. You're a juicy bitch and you know it."

  "Ain't right you talk to me like that, suh."

  "I'm not here for what you think," he said. He walked to the back window and looked out on the cane field. The sun had just broken the edge of the horizon, like a soft red lump of molten metal.

  "Marse Jamison is establishing a slaves council on all his plantations," Atkins said. "That means the slaves will lay out the punishment for anybody who breaks the rules. Marse Jamison reserves only the right-to overturn a punishment if he thinks it's too severe... are you listening?"

  "I'm not dressed, suh."

  Atkins took a deep breath and went outside the door. She heard him light a cigar and lean against the railing on her small gallery. She put on her work dress and lit the kindling in her stove and washed her face in the water bucket, then pushed the coffee pot over the flames that leaked around one of the iron pothole lids. She heard Atkins clear his throat and spit and then felt his weight bend the floorboards in the cabin.

  "You're going to be on the slaves council for the laundry and two of the plantations up the road," he said.

  "This don't sound like Marse Jamison," she said.

  "What do you care? It gives you a little power you didn't have before."

  "What if I say I don't want it?"

  "I'd say you were a mighty stupid black girl."

  "Tell him the stupid black girl don't want it."

  He removed the cigar from his mouth and tossed it through the back window.

  "You're a handful, Flower. In lots of ways," he said, biting down on his lip.

  "You been in my bed, Marse Rufus. But it ain't gonna happen again."

  "Say that again?"

  "You heard me. I ain't afraid of you no more."

  It was silent inside the cabin. Outside, the wind off the Gulf rustled the cane and flapped the clothes drying in the yard.

  "I wouldn't be talking out of school, Flower. There are houses in Congo Square for girls who do that," he said.

  "I ain't afraid."

  He took a step toward her, his eyes roving over her face and the tops of her breasts. Her hand touched the oyster knife she kept on the table next to the stove.

  Atkins rubbed his mouth and laughed.

  "Damned if being white makes any man less of a fool. If I ever get rich I'll buy you and carry you off on my saddle and keep you as my personal strumpet. You believe that? It's a fact. Wouldn't lie to you, girl," he said.

  His eyes seemed to be laughing at her now, as though he were reliving each moment he had probed inside her, put her nipples in his mouth, lifted her up spread-eagled across his loins. She turned away and picked up the coffeepot and burned her hand. Behind her, she heard him walk out the door, his boots knocking with a hollow sound on her gallery.

  I hope the Yankees kill you, she said under her breath. But the vehemence in her thoughts brought her little solace.

  WHEN she was a child, Abigail Dowling's father, who was a physician and a Quaker, taught her that a lie was an act of theft as well as one of deceit. A lie stole people's faith in their fellow man, he said, and the loss was often irreparable, whereas a monetary one was not.

  In early August of 1861 the first casualty lists from Manassas Junction made their way back to New Iberia. The postmaster sat down behind the counter where he daily sorted the mail into pigeonholes, an eyeshade fastened on his forehead, and went down the alphabetized row of names from the 8th Louisiana Volunteers with his finger. Then he removed his glasses and placed them on his desk and with some very tiny nails he tacked all the lists to the post office wall.

  He put on his coat and went out the front door and walked toward the end of Main, where he lived in a tree-shaded house behind the Episcopalian church. Without apparent cause he began to sway from side to side, as though he were drunk or possessed of epilepsy. When he collapsed against a hitching rail, a black deliveryman picked him up and sat him down in a chair against the front wall of the grocery. Then two white men took him inside and peeled off his coat and fanned his face and tried to get him to drink a glass of water.

  Abigail stared through the grocery window at the scene taking place inside.

  "What happened?" she asked the black man.

  "Mr. LeBlanc's son got kilt in Virginia," the black man said.

  "How did he learn?" she asked.

  "I reckon it come t'rew the wire or the mail, Miss Abigail. That po' man."

  Abigail hurried inside the post office. The wind through the open door and windows was lightly rattling the casualty lists against the wall. Her heart beating, she read the names of the soldiers under the captions "Wounded" and "Killed" and saw none there she could put a face with. She let out her breath and pressed her hand against her heart and then felt shame that her joy was at the expense of families that would never see their soldier boys again.

  When she turned to leave the post office she glanced at the floor and saw a sheet of paper the wind had blown loose from the nails. She picked it up, her hand beginning to tremble. At the top of the page was the caption "Missing in Action." The third name in the column was that of Lieutenant Robert S. Perry.

  She walked stone-faced down the street to her house, her ears ringing, unaware of the words spoken to her by others on the street or the peculiar looks they gave her when she didn't respond to their greetings.

  Later, she did not remember drawing the curtains inside her house, filling it with summer heat that was almost unbearable, nor did she remember pacing from one room to the other, her mind drumming with her father's words about his experience as a surgeon with Zachary Taylor's troops in Mexico.

  "I saw a lad, not more than a tyke really, struck by an exploding cannonball. It blew him into small pieces. We buried parts of his fingers and feet. I had to pick them up with forceps and put them in a sack," her father had said.

  Why had she lectured Robert on slavery, trying to inculcate guilt in him for deeds that were his family's and not his? Were her piety, the sense of righteousness with which she bore her cause like a personal flag, even her sexual modesty, were all these virtues in which she prided herself simply a vanity, a self-deception that concealed the secret pleasure she took in the superiority of her education and New England background?

  Could she deny she was not guilty of pride, the most pernicious of the seven deadly sins? Or of carnal thoughts that took hold of her sleep and caused her to wake hot and wet in the middle of the night?

  She saw Robert's face before her, the shine like polished mahogany in the thickness of his hair, his eyes that were the bluest and most beautiful she had ever seen in a man. She saw him on a meandering, pebble-bottomed creek, surrounded by green hills, saw him rise from behind earthworks and walk with an extended sword toward a line of dark-clad soldiers, perhaps boys from Massachusetts,
who in unison fired their muskets in a roar of dirty black smoke and covered Robert's face and chest and legs with wounds that looked like the red lesions of the pox.

  What about her participation in the Underground Railroad? she asked herself. She had told slaves of the land across the Ohio, filling them with hope, in some cases only to see them delivered into the hands of bounty hunters. Worse, she had personally put Flower's aunt on a boat that overturned and drowned her.

  She wanted to cut the word "traitor" into her breast.

  She fell asleep in her clothes, the late afternoon heat glowing through the curtains in her bedroom. She became wrapped in the sheet, her body bathed in sweat, and she dreamed she was inside a tunnel, deep underground, the wet clay pressing against her chest, pinning her arms at her sides, her cries lost inside the heated blackness.