White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  Ira fell into the banana sta;ks and ran through the yard, dirty and hot and itching with ants, his head ringing as though someone had clapped him on both ears.

  A moment later his father appeared on the gallery, barefoot, his shirt hanging outside his pants.

  "Sit down with me, son," his father said.

  "No," Ira said.

  His father walked down the steps, his silhouette blocking out the sun. He touched Ira under each eye with his thumb. "There's nothing to cry about," he said.

  "Who is she?" Ira said.

  "A woman I see sometimes." He took his son's hand and led him back up to the gallery. They sat together on a swing that was suspended on chains from an overhead beam. It was spring and the willows and cypresses along the riverbanks were filled with wind and green with new leaf.

  "Your mother has the consumption. That means we can't have the normal life of a husband and wife. I just hope God and you both forgive my weakness," his father said.

  "She's a nigger. She was sitting on top of you," the boy said. His father had been stroking his head. But now he took his hand away and looked at the river and a hawk that hung motionlessly in the wind above the trees.

  "Will you be telling your mother about this?" he asked.

  "I hate you," Ira said.

  "You tear my heart out, son."

  "I hate you. I hate you. I hate you," Ira said.

  Then he was running out of the yard and down the street in his short pants, running through mud puddles, past the grinning faces of whores and teamsters and drunk Irishmen, his legs and face splattered with water that was black and oily and smelled like sewage and felt like leeches on his skin.

  BACK at Angola Plantation, Ira refused to eat, fought with his British schoolmaster, and attacked a mulatto dressmaker at the dirt crossroads in front of the plantation store.

  She was a statuesque, coffee-colored woman who wore petticoats and carried a parasol. She had been waiting for a carriage, fanning herself, her chin pointed upward, when Ira had gathered up a handful of rocks, sharp ones, and began pelting her in the back.

  The store clerk had to pick him up like a sack of meal and carry him across the pommel of his saddle to Ira's house.

  His mother sat with him in the kitchen, her eyes and cheeks bright with the fever that never left her body. The light was failing outside, the clouds like purple smoke above the bluffs on the river. Ira could hear the pendulum swinging on the clock in the dining room, the soft chimes echoing off the walls.

  "What frightens you so?" his mother said, stroking his head.

  "I'm not afraid of anything," he replied.

  "Something happened in Baton Rouge, didn't it? Something you're trying to hide from your mother."

  He clenched his hands in his lap and looked at the floor.

  "Is that why you hit the sewing woman with rocks? A well-dressed mulatto woman?" she said.

  He scraped a scab on his hand with his thumbnail. His mother lifted his chin with her finger. Her black hair was pulled back like wire against her scalp, her dark eyes burning.

  "You have my looks and my skin. If you don't inherit my family's bad lungs, you'll always be young," she said.

  "He let her sit on him. He put her-"

  "What?" his mother said, her face contorting.

  "He had her breast in his mouth. They were naked. On a bed in Nigger Town."

  "Get control of yourself. Now, start over. You can trust me, Ira. But you have to tell me the truth."

  She made him go through every detail, describing the woman, the positions on the bed, the words his father had spoken to him outside the cottage.

  "What is her name?" she asked.

  "I don't know," he said, shaking his head.

  "You must know. He must have used her name."

  But Ira couldn't speak now. His face was hot, his eyes swimming with tears, his voice hiccuping in his throat. His mother rose from her chair and looked for a long time out the window. Ira's father was in the garden, snipping roses, placing them in a bucket of water. He did not see his wife watching him. Then he glanced up at the window and waved.

  She turned back toward her son.

  "You must never tell anyone about this," she said.

  "Is Papa going to know I told?"

  "You didn't tell me anything, Ira. This didn't happen," she said.

  She walked close to him and pulled his face into the folds of her dress and rubbed the top of his head with both hands. He could smell an odor like camphor and animal musk in her clothes. He put his arms around her thighs and buried his face against her stomach.

  "When you were a baby I bathed you every morning and kissed you all over. I kissed your hands and your little feet and your bottom and your little private places. You'll always be my little man. You're my good little man, aren't you?" she said.

  "Yes," he replied.

  She released him and, with no expression on her face, walked out of the room. For reasons he could not understand he felt a sense of numbness, violation, shame and desertion, all at the same time. It was a feeling that would come aborning in his dreams the rest of his life.

  FOR his birthday a week later, his father had the cook bake a strawberry cake and fry a dinner basket of chicken and convinced Ira's mother to join the two of them and an elderly black body servant named Uncle Royal for a picnic on the southern end of their property, three miles down the river.

  His father chose this particular spot because it had been the site of a Spanish military garrison, supposedly overrun and massacred by Atakapa Indians in the eighteenth century, and as a boy Ira's father had played there and dug up the rusted shell of a Spanish helmet and a horseman's spur with an enormous spiked rowel on it.

  They spread a blanket in a glade and set fishing lines in the river, and for a birthday present his father gave him a windup merry-go-round with hand-carved wooden horses on it that rotated in a circle while a musical cylinder played inside the base.

  The river was yellow from the spring rains, thick and choked with mud, swirling with uprooted trees that floated southward toward New Orleans. The wind was drowsy and warm, the glade dotted with buttercups and bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush, and for a while Ira forgot his father's infidelity and the brooding anger in his mother eyes and the blood-spotted handkerchief that stayed balled in the palm of her hand.

  The body servant, Uncle Royal, wore a tattered black coat, a white shirt, a pair of purple pants and looked like he was made of sticks. He was fascinated by the windup merry-go-round that rested in the center of the blanket, next to the cake.

  "Where something like that come from, Master Jamison?" he asked.

  "All the way from England, across the big pond," Ira's father said.

  "Lord, what my gran'child would give to play with something like that," Uncle Royal said.

  "I tell you what, Royal, the storekeeper in Baton Rouge has another one just like it. On my next trip there, I'll buy it for you as an early Christmas present," Ira's father said.

  "You'll do that, suh?" Uncle Royal said.

  "You bet I will, old-timer," Ira's father said.

  Ira never admired his father more.

  He and his parents ate the chicken and strawberry cake on the blanket while Uncle Royal fished, then Ira's father decided he would entertain his wife and son by climbing on a pyramid of pine logs that were stacked and penned with stobs on a grassy shelf six feet above the shallows.

  He walked up and down on the crest of the logs, perhaps twenty feet above the glade, his arms outstretched for balance, grinning idiotically.

  "Watch this!" he called. Then he flipped up on his hands and held his feet straight up in the air, his muscular body quivering with tension.

  The ground was soft and moist from a week's rain. A stob on the far side of the logs bent backward against the additional weight on the pile, then one log bounced down from the top, followed by another. Ira's father flipped back on his feet and balanced himself, smiling, looking about, waiting for
the rush of blood to leave his head. Suddenly the entire pile collapsed and rumbled downward into the river, taking Ira's father with it.

  Ira and his mother and Uncle Royal rushed to the edge of the bluff and stared down at the mudflat. Ira's father lay pinioned under a halfdozen crisscrossed logs, his legs in the water, his face white, his powerful arms trying to push away the weight that was crushing the air from his lungs.

  Ira and Uncle Royal climbed down from the embankment and pushed and lifted and tugged on the logs that held his father, but to no avail.

  "Go to the house. Come back with a team and chains," Ira's father said.

  "I got to get your head up out of the water, Master," Uncle Royal said.

  "I think my back's broken. You have to get help," Ira's father said.

  "You gonna be all right, suh?" Uncle Royal asked.

  "Don't be long," Ira's father replied.

  Ira watched Uncle Royal climb back up the embankment, the clay shaling over his bare ankles.

  "Come on, son," his mother said, reaching her hand down to Ira. Her eyes seemed to avoid both him and his father.

  "I'm staying," he replied.

  "No, you can't be out here by yourself," she said.

  "Then you or Uncle Royal stay," he said.

  "We have to get axes and saws and chains. We have to bring a whole crew of men back. Now you do what I say."

  He crawled up the embankment, then looked back down at his father.

  "We'll hurry," he said.

  His father winked at him and tried to hold his smile in place. "I can stay in if you want, Miz Jamison," Uncle Royal said.

  "Get in the carriage," she replied.

  Uncle Royal turned the carriage around, then got down from the driver's seat to help Ira's mother up the step. "Drive to the crossroads," she said.

  "To the sto'?" Uncle Royal asked.

  "Yes, to the store."

  "That's eight miles, Miz Jamison," Uncle Royal said.

  "All the workers are in the fields. Drive to the crossroads. We'll find help there," she said.

  "Miz Jamison, the river's going up a couple of inches every hour. It's all that rainwater."

  "Do I have in hit you with the whip?" she said.

  Ira and his mother and Uncle Royal and the wagonload of men they put together did not get back to the river until after dark. When the manager of the plantation store held a lantern over the water, Ira saw the softly muted features of his father's face just below the surface, the eyes and mouth open, one hand frozen in a death grasp on a broken reed he had tried to breathe through.

  AS he matured Ira did not grow in understanding of his father and mother's jealousies and the lack of love that consumed their lives. Instead, he thought of his parents with resentment and anger, not only because they had destroyed his home but also because they had made him the double instrument of his father's death, first as an informer of his father's adultery, then as an accomplice in his mother's deception and treachery.

  He spent one year at West Point and told others upon his resignation that he had to return home to run his family's business affairs. But the reality was he did not like the confines of military life. In fact, he thought anyone who willingly ate dry bread and unsweetened black coffee and shaved and bathed in cold water was probably possessed of a secret desire to be used as cannon wadding.

  At age twenty he was the master of his estate, a dead shot with a dueling pistol, and a man who did not give quarter in business dealings or spare the rod with his workers. His parents rested in a plot on a grassy knoll above the river, but he never visited their graves nor shared his feelings about the unbearable sense of loss that defined his childhood memories.

  He learned not to brood upon the past nor to think analytically about the events that had caused him to become the hard-edged man he had grown into. The whirrings in his blood, the heat that would balloon in his chest at a perceived insult, gave an elan to his manner that made his adversaries walk cautiously around him. A man he had cuckolded called him out on the street in New Iberia. The cuckold's hand shook and his ball went wide, striking Ira in the arm. But Ira's aim didn't waver and he drove a ball through the man's mouth and out the back of his head, then sipped coffee at a saloon bar while a physician dressed his wound.

  His young wife was at first bemused and intrigued by his insatiable sexual desires, then finally alienated and frightened by them. In a fit of remorse and guilt about her participation in what she called her husband's lust, she confided the intimate details of her marriage to her pastor, a nervous sycophant with smallpox scars on his cheeks and dandruff on his shoulders. After Ira learned of his wife's visit to the minister, he rode his horse to the parsonage and talked to the minister in his garden. The minister boarded a steamboat in Baton Rouge the next day and was never seen in Louisiana again. "What did you say to him?" Ira's wife asked.

  "I told him he was to denounce both of us every Sunday from his pulpit. If he didn't, I was going to shoot him."

  But there were moments in Ira Jamison's life that made him wonder if, like his father, more than one person lived inside his skin.

  He was cleaning out his attic on a late fall afternoon when he came across the windup merry-go-round his father had given him on his eleventh birthday. He inserted the key in the base and twisted the spring tight, then pushed a small lever and listened to the tune played by the spiked brass cylinder inside.

  For no reason he could quite explain he walked into the quarters, in a tea-colored sunset, among tumbling leaves and the smell of gas in the trees, and knocked on Uncle Royal's door.

  "Yes, suh?" Uncle Royal said, his frosted eyes blinking uncertainly.

  "You still have any young grandchildren?" Ira asked.

  "No, suh, they grown and in the fields now. But I got a young great-gran'child."

  "Then give him this," Ira said.

  The old man took the merry-go-ground from Ira's hand and felt the carved smoothness of the horses with the ends of his fingers. "Thank you, suh," he said. Ira turned to go.

  "How come you to think of this now, Master Ira?" Uncle Royal asked.

  "My father made you a promise he couldn't keep. So I kept it for him. That's all it means. Nothing else," he replied.

  "Yes, suh," Uncle Royal said.

  On the way back to the house Ira wondered if his words to Uncle Royal had become his way of saying good-bye forever to the innocent and vulnerable child who had once lived inside him and caused him so much pain.

  NOW the spring of 1863 was upon him, and he knew enough of history to realize that the events taking place around him did not bode well for his future. Some of his slaves had been shipped to unoccupied areas of Arkansas, but it was only a matter of time until the South fell and emancipation became a fact of life.

  In the meantime someone had hijacked two dozen slaves from his property, taking them downriver to New Orleans through a Confederate blockade, murdering one of his paddy rollers in the bargain. Ira could not get the image of the dead paddy roller out of his mind. Three of his overseers had carted the body up to the front porch, stuffed in a lidless packing case, the knife wound in his throat like a torn purple rose.

  Ira did not believe in coincidences. One of his own men had now died in the same fashion as the young sentry in the New Orleans hospital the night Ira escaped from Yankee custody.

  Nor was it coincidence that a woman with a Northern accent was on board the boat that transported a cargo of Negroes supposedly infected with yellow jack to a quarantine area north of New Orleans the same night two dozen of his slaves had disappeared from the plantation.

  Abigail Dowling, he thought.

  Every morning he woke with her name in his mind. She bothered him in ways he had difficulty defining. She had a kind of pious egalitarian manner that made him want to slap her face. At the same time she aroused feelings in him that left his loins aching. She was the most stunning woman he'd ever seen, with the classical proportions of a Renaissance sculpture, and she bor
e herself with a dignity and intellectual grace that few beautiful women ever possessed.

  The spring rains came and the earth turned green and the fruit trees bloomed outside Ira's window. But the name of Abigail Dowling would not leave his thoughts, and sometimes he woke throbbing in the morning and had images of her moaning under his weight. Nor did it help for him to remember that she had rebuffed him and made him feel obscene and sexually perverse.

  He looked out upon the sodden feilds and at an oak tree that was stiff and hard-looking in the wind. What was it that bothered him most about her? But he already knew the answer to his own question. She was intelligent, educated, unafraid and seemed to want nothing he was aware of. He did not trust people who did not want something. But most of all she bothered him because she had looked into his soul and seen something there that repelled her.