White Doves at Morning

by James Lee Burke

  "You helped them hurt me, suh."

  "People can change. I'm sorry, Flower. My God, I'm your father. Can't you have some forgiveness?" he said.

  After he was gone she sat on the top step of her gallery, her temples pounding, a solitary crow cawing against the yellow haze that filled the afternoon. She could not comprehend what had just happened. He had looked upon her work, her creations, her life, with admiration and pride, then had accepted paternity for her and in the same sentence had asked forgiveness.

  Why now?

  Because legally he can't own you anymore. This way he can, a voice answered.

  She wanted to shove her fingers in her ears.

  WILLIE saw reprinted copies of the article from the racist newspaper tacked on trees and storefronts all over town. One was even placed in his mailbox by a mounted man who leaned down briefly in the saddle, then rode away in the early morning mist. Willie had run after him, but the mounted man paid him no heed and did not look back at him. Night riders had come into his yard twice now, calling his name, tossing rocks at his windows. So far he had not taken their visits seriously. He had learned the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia, when in earnest, struck without warning and left no doubt about their intentions. A carpetbagger was stripped naked and rope-drug through a woods, a black soldier garrotted on the St. Martinville Road, a political meeting in the tiny settlement of Loreauville literally shot to pieces.

  But what do you do when the names of your friends are smeared by a collection of nameless cowards? he asked himself.

  Make your own statement, he answered.

  He saddled a horse in the livery he had inherited from his mother and rode out to the ends of both East and West Main, then divided the town into quadrants and traversed every street and alley in it, pulling down copies of the defamatory article and stuffing them in a choke sack tied to his pommel. By early afternoon, under a white sun, he was out in the parish, ripping the article from fence posts and the trunks of live oaks that bordered cane fields and dirt roads. His choke sack bulged as though it were stuffed with pine cones.

  South of town, in an undrained area where a group of Ira Jamison's rental convicts were building a board road to a salt mine, Willie looked over his shoulder and saw a lone rider on a buckskin gelding behind him, a man with a poached, wind-burned face wearing a sweat-ringed hat and the flared boots of a cavalryman.

  Willie passed a black man cooking food under a pavilion fashioned from tent poles and canvas. The black man was barefoot and had a shaved, peaked head, like the polished top of a cypress knee. He wore a white jumper and a pair of striped prison pants and rusted leg irons that caused him to take clinking, abbreviated steps from one pot to the next.

  "You one of Colonel Jamison's convicts?" Willie asked.

  "You got it, boss," the black man replied.

  "What are you selling?"

  "Greens, stew meat and tomatoes, red beans, rice and gravy, fresh bread. A plateful for fifteen cents. Or it's free if you wants to build the bo'rd road under the gun," the black man said. He roared at his own joke.

  Willie turned his horse in a circle and waited in the shade of a live oak for the rider to approach him. The rider's eyes seemed lidless and reminded Willie of smoke on a wintry day or perhaps a gray sky flecked with scavenger birds. In spite of the heat, the rider's shirt was buttoned at the wrists and throat and he wore leather cuffs pulled up on his forearms.

  "You wouldn't bird-dog a fellow, would you, Captain Jarrette?" Willie said.

  "I make it my business to check out them that need watching," the rider replied.

  "You put your sword to me when I was unarmed and had done you no injury. But you also saved me from going before a Yankee firing squad. So maybe we're even," Willie said.

  "Meaning?"

  "I'd like to buy you a lunch."

  Jarrette removed his hat and surveyed the countryside, his hair falling over his ears. He leaned in the saddle and blew his nose with his fingers.

  "I ain't got nothing against hit," he said.

  Jarrette waited in the shade while Willie paid for their lunches. He watched the convicts lay split logs in the saw grass and humus and the black mud that oozed over their ankles. His nose was beaked, his chin cut with a cleft, his eyes connecting images with thoughts that probably no one would ever be privy to. Jarrette did not sit but squatted while he ate, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as possible with a wood spoon, scraping the tin in the plate, wiping it clean with bread, then eating the bread and licking his fingers, the muscles in his calves and thighs knotted into rocks.

  "This grub tastes like dog turds," he said, tossing his bare plate on the grass.

  Willie looked at the intensity in Jarrette's face, the heat that seemed to climb out of his buttoned collar, the twitch at the corner of one eye when he heard a convict's ax split a piece of green wood.

  "Tell me, sir, is it possible you're insane?" Willie asked.

  "Maybe. Anything wrong with that?" Jarrette replied.

  "I was just curious."

  Jarrette shifted his weight on his haunches and studied him warily. "Why you tearing down them newspaper stories? Don't lie about it, either," he said.

  "They defame people I know."

  Jarrette seemed to think about the statement.

  "Cole Younger is my brother-in-law, you sonofabitch," he said.

  Willie gathered up his plate and spoon from the grass, then reached down and picked up Jarrette's and returned them to the plank serving table under the canvas-topped pavilion. He walked back into the oak tree's shade. "As one Secesh to another, accept my word on this-" he began. Then he rethought his words and looked out at the wind blowing across the saw grass. "May you have a fine day, Captain Jarrette, and may all your children and grandchildren be just like you and keep you company the rest of your life," he said.

  WHEN the sun was red over the cane fields in the west, Willie pulled the last copy of The Rebel Clarion article he could find from the front porch of a houseboat far down Bayou Teche and turned his horse back toward town.

  Now, all he needed to do was bury his choke sack in a hole or set fire to it on a mud bank and be done with it.

  But a voice that he preferred not to hear told him that was not part of his plan.

  Since his return from the war he had tried to accept the fact that the heart of Abigail Dowling belonged to another and it was fruitless for him to pursue what ultimately had been a boyhood fantasy. Had he not written Robert the same, in the moments before he thought he was going to be shot, at a time when a man knew the absolute truth about his life and himself, when every corner of the soul was laid bare?

  But she wouldn't leave his thoughts. Nor would the memory of her thighs opening under him, the press of her hands in the small of his back, the heat of her breath on his cheek. Her sexual response wasn't entirely out of charity, was it? Women didn't operate in that fashion, he told himself. She obviously respected him, and sometimes at the school he saw a fondness in her eyes that made him want to reach out and touch her.

  Maybe the war had embittered him and had driven her from him, and the fault was neither his nor Abby's but the war. After all, she was an abolitionist and sometimes his own rhetoric sounded little different from the recalcitrant Secessionists who would rather see the South layered with ash and bones than given over to the carpetbag government.

  Why let the war continue to injure both of them? If he could only take contention and vituperation from his speech and let go of the memories, no, that was not the word, the anger he still felt when he saw Jim Stubbefield freeze against a red-streaked sky, his jaw suddenly gone slack, a wound like a rose petal in the center of his brow-

  What had he told Abby? "I'll never get over Jim. I hate the sons of-bitches who caused all this." What woman would not be frightened by the repository of vitriol that still burned inside him?

  If he could only tell Abby the true feelings of his heart. Wouldn't all the other barriers disappear?
Had she not come to him for help when she and Flower started up their school?

  He tethered his horse to the ringed pole in front of Abby's cottage. The street was empty, the sky ribbed with strips of maroon cloud, the shutters on Abby's cottage vibrating in the wind. He walked into the backyard and set fire to the choke sack in Abby's trash pit, then tapped on her back door.

  "Hello, Willie. What are you up to?" she said, looking over his shoulder at the column of black smoke rising out of the ground.

  "A lot of townspeople were incensed at your being slandered by this Kluxer paper in Baton Rouge. So they gathered up the articles and asked me to burn them," he said.

  "What Kluxer paper?" she said.

  He stared at her stupidly, then yawned slightly and looked innocuously out into the trees. "It's nothing of consequence. There's a collection of cretins in Baton Rouge who are always writing things no one takes seriously."

  "Willie, for once would you try to make sense?" she said.

  "It's not important. Believe me. I was just passing by."

  "You look like a boiled crab. Have you been out in the sun?"

  "Abby, love of my heart, I think long ago I was condemned to a life of ineptitude. It's time to say good-bye."

  Before she could reply he walked quickly into the side yard and out into the street.

  Right into a group of seven mounted men, all of whom had either black or white robes draped over the cantles of their saddles. Each of the robes was sewn with an ornate, pink-scrolled camellia. In the middle of the group, mounted on a buckskin gelding, was the man whose colorless eyes had witnessed the burning of Lawrence, Kansas.

  "You was sassing me today, wasn't you?" he said.

  "Wouldn't dream of it, Captain Jarrette," Willie said. He looked up and down the street. There was no one else on it, except an elderly Frenchman who sold taffy from a cart and a little black girl who was aimlessly following him on his route.

  Another rider leaned down from his saddle and bounced a picked camellia off Willie's face.

  "It's the wrong time to be a smart ass, cabbage head," he said.

  "Get about your business and I won't tell your mother the best part of her sunny little chap dripped into her bloomers," Willie said to him.

  The man who had thrown the flower laughed without making sound, then wiped his mouth. He had black hair the color and texture of pitch and was tall and raw-boned, unshaved, with skin that looked like it had been rubbed with black pepper, his neck too long for his torso, his shoulders sloping unnaturally under his shirt, as though they had been surgically pared away.

  He lifted a coiled rope from a saddlebag and began feeding a wrapped end out on the ground.

  "You were one of the convicts on the burial detail that almost put me in the ground," Willie said.

  "I wasn't no convict, boy. I was a prisoner of war," the tall man said. "You sassed the captain?"

  The summer light was high in the sky now, the street deep in shadow. Willie looked between the horses that were now circling him. The yards and galleries of the homes along the street were empty, the ventilated shutters closed, even though the evening was warm.

  "Where's a Yank when you need one?" the convict said.

  "Get on with it," Jarrette said.

  The convict tied a small loop in the end of the rope, then doubled-over the shaft and worked it back through the loop.

  "You listen-" Willie began.

  The convict whirled the lariat over his head and slapped it around Willie's shoulders, hard, cinching the knot tight. Before Willie could pull the rope loose, the convict wrapped the other end around his pommel and kicked his horse in the ribs. Suddenly Willie was jerked through the air, his arms pinned at his sides, the ground rising into his face with the impact of a brick wall. Then he was skidding across the dirt, fighting to gain purchase on the rope, the trees and picket fences and flowers in the yards rushing past him.

  He caromed off a lamppost and bounced across a brick walkway at the street corner. The rider turned his horse and headed back toward the cottage, jerking Willie off his feet when he tried to rise. Willie clenched both his hands on the rope, trying to lift his head above the level of the street, while dust from the horse's hooves clotted his nose and mouth and a purple haze filled his eyes.

  Then the convict reined his horse and was suddenly motionless in the saddle.

  A Union sergeant, with dark red hair, wearing a kepi, was walking down the middle of the street, toward the riders, a double-barrel shotgun held at port arms.

  "The five-cent hand-jobs down in the bottoms must not be available this evening," he said.

  "Don't mix in hit, blue-belly," Jarrette said.

  "Oh, I don't plan to mix in it at all, Captain Jarrette. But my lovely ten-gauge will. By blowing your fucking head off," the sergeant said. He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder and thumbed back the hammer on each barrel.

  Jarrette stared into the shotgun, breathing through his mouth, snuffing down in his nose, as though he had a cold. "How you know my name?" he asked.

  "You were with Cole Younger at Centralia. When he lined up captured Union boys to see how many bodies a ball from his new Enfield could pass through. Haul your sorry ass out of here, you cowardly sack of shit," the sergeant said.

  Jarrette flinched, the blood draining out of his cheeks. He rubbed his palms on his thighs as though he needed to relieve himself. Then his face locked into a disjointed expression, the eyes lidless, the jaw hooked open, like a barracuda thrown onto a beach.

  "That was Bill Anderson's bunch. I wasn't there. I didn't have nothing to do with hit," he said.

  "I can always tell when you're lying, Jarrette. Your lips are moving," the sergeant said.

  "Hit's Cap'n Jarrette. Don't talk to me like that. I wasn't there."

  "In three seconds you're going to be the deadest piece of white trash ever to suck on a load of double-ought buckshot," the sergeant said.

  "Cap?" said a man in a butternut jacket cut off at the armpits. "Cap, it's all right. He don't know what he's talking about."

  But there was no sound except the wind in the trees. The man in the butternut jacket looked at the others, then reached over and turned Jarrette's horse for him.

  Willie watched the seven horsemen ride quietly down the street, the shadows and their wide-brim flop hats smudging their features, their voices lost in the wind. The sergeant released the tension in the shotgun's hammers. He wore a silver ring with a gold cross soldered to it.

  "You again. Everywhere I go," Willie said, wiping the blood from his nose.

  "Oh, had them surrounded, did you?" the sergeant said.

  Willie touched a barked place on his forehead. "No, I allow you're obviously a much more resourceful and adept man than I. Truth is, Sergeant, I regularly make a mess of things," he said.

  The sergeant's face softened. "Wasn't much to it. I know Jarrette's name and what he is. Hold up a mirror to a fellow like that and he's undone by what he sees."

  "What's your name?"

  "Quintinius Earp."

  "It's what?"

  "Ah, I should have known your true, lovable self was never far behind. The name is Quintinius Earp, lately of Ripton, Vermont, now obliged to baby-sit ex-Rebs who can't keep their tallywhackers out of the clothes roller."

  "Earp? As in 'puke'?"

  "Correct, as in 'puke.' Would you do me a favor?"

  "I expect."

  "Go home. Pretend you don't know me. Piss on my grave. Dig up my bones and feed them to your dog. Go back to Ireland and take a job in the peat bogs. But whatever it is, get out of my life!"

  "Could I buy you a drink?" Willie asked.

  Sergeant Earp shut his eyes and made a sound in his throat as though a nail had just been hammered into his head.

  ABIGAIL Dowling had been chopping wood for her stove and loading it into a box when she glanced through the side yard and saw a Yankee soldier armed with a shotgun disperse a group of men in front of her house. He had a red goatee and musta
che and short muscular arms, and his dark blue jacket was pulled tightly down inside his belt so his shoulders and chest were molded as tautly as a statue's.

  She set down the woodbox and walked through the side yard into the front. Down the street she saw a man walking away in the gloaming of the day, the back of his clothes gray with dust. The Union soldier had propped his shotgun against her fence and was buying a twist of taffy from a vendor. The soldier squatted down in front of a small Negro girl and untwisted the paper from the taffy and gave it to the girl.

  "What happened out here?" Abigail said.