White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel (41 page)

Why was this man wearing purple pants instead of the black-and-white stripes that were standard convict issue? The convict's hair was grizzled, his cheeks covered with white whiskers. What was a man that age, probably with cataracts, doing on top of a second-story crossbeam? Again Ira heard the tinkling of music in the rain, a tune that was vaguely familiar and disturbing, like someone rattling a piece of crystal inside his memory. He rose from his chair and looked out the flap at the Negro carpenter, who had paused in his work and was looking back at him now.

Uncle Royal? Ira thought. He pinched his eyes. My God, what was happening to him? Uncle Royal had been dead for years. What was it his father had once said, Niggers would be the damnation of them all? Well, so be it, Ira thought. He didn't create them nor did he invent the rules that governed the affairs of men and principalities.

He walked out into the rain, splattering his white pants with mud. "Get that old man off there!" he yelled at the foreman.

 "Off what?" the foreman asked.

"Off the house. Right there. Why is he wearing purple pants?" Ira replied.

"That ain't no old man up there, Kunnel," the foreman said, half grinning. Then he looked at the expression on Ira's face. "I'll get him down, suh. Ain't nothing here to worry about."

"Good," Ira said, and went back inside the tent and closed the flap. The rain was clicking hard on the canvas now. It had been a mistake to come here, one born purely out of pride, he thought. What was to be gained by confronting Rufus Atkins personally? He was going to pull his convict labor off Atkins' property and ruin his credit by running a newspaper notice to the effect he would not co-sign any of Atkins' loan applications or be responsible for his debts. Ira computed it would take about six weeks for Atkins' paltry business operations to collapse.

When you could do that much damage to a man with a three-dollar newspaper advertisement, why waste time dealing with him on a personal basis?

It was time for a fine lunch and a bottle of good wine and the company of people who weren't idiots. Maybe he should think about a trip to Nashville to see his old friend General Forrest.

He smiled at a story that was beginning to circulate about the regard in which Forrest had been held by General Sherman. After Forrest had driven every Yankee soldier from the state of Mississippi, Sherman supposedly assembled his staff and said, "I don't care what it takes. Lose ten thousand men if you have to. But kill that goddamn sonofabitch Bedford Forrest."

Nathan should have that put on his tombstone, Ira thought.

But where was that tune coming from? In his mind's eye he saw hand-carved wooden horses turning on a miniature merry-go-round, the delicately brushed paint worn by time, the windup key rotating as the music played inside the base.

For just a moment he felt a sense of theft about his life that was indescribable. He tore through the other rooms in the tent, searching for the origin of the sound, kicking over a chair with a black Kluxer robe hung on the back. Then, through a crack in the rear flap, he saw it, a wind chime tinkling on a wood post. He ripped it from the nail that held it and stalked back through Atkins' sleeping area, then ducked through the mosquito netting and curtain that separated it from the front room.

He smelled an odor like camphor and perfume, like flowers pressed between the pages of an old book or blood that had dried inside a balled handkerchief. He straightened his back, the chime clenched in his hand, and thought he saw his mother's silhouette beckoning for him to approach her, the wide folds of her dark blue dress like a portal into memories that he did not want to relive.

WILLIE tethered his team under a huge mimosa tree on the edge of St. Peter's Cemetery, mixed mortar in a wheelbarrow, and bricked together a foundation for Jim's crypt. Then he dragged Jim's box on top of the foundation and began bricking and mortaring four walls around the box. Clouds tumbled across the sky and he could smell wildflowers and salt inside the wind off the Gulf. As he tapped each brick level with the handle of the trowel, the sun warm on his shoulders, he tried to forget the insult that Tige had flung in his face.

If it had come from anyone else, he thought. But Tige was uncanny in his intuition about the truth.

Was it indeed Willie's fate to forever mourn the past, to dwell upon the war and the loss of a love that was probably not meant to be? Had he made his journey to Shiloh less out of devotion to a friend than as a histrionic and grandiose attempt at public penance? Was he simply a self-deluded fool?

There are days when I wish I had fallen at your side, Jim.

You were always my steadfast pal, Willie. Don't talk like that. You have to carry the guidon tor both of us.

I'll never get over the war. I'll never forget Shiloh.

You don't need to, you ole groghead. You were brave. Why should we have to forget? That's for cowards. One day you'll tell your grandchildren you scouted for Bedford Forrest.

And a truly odious experience it was, Willie said. He thought he heard Jim laugh inside the bricks. He saw a shadow break across his own. He turned on his knee, splattering himself with mortar from the trowel.

"Sorry I said them words," Tige said. He took off his kepi and twirled it on the tip of his finger.

"Which words would those be?" Willie said, grinning at the edge of his mouth, one eye squinted against the sunlight.

"Saying Miss Abigail didn't have no interest in you. Saying you didn't care about nobody except dead people."

"I must have been half-asleep, because I have no memory of it," Willie said.

"You sure can tell a mess of fibs, Willie Burke."

"You didn't happen to bring some lunch with you, did you?"

 "No, but Robert Perry was looking for you."

 "Now, why would noble Robert be looking for the likes of me?"

 "Ask him, 'cause there he comes yonder. Y'all are a mysterious kind," Tige said.

 "How's that?"

"You lose a war, then spend every day of your life losing it again in your head. Never seen a bunch so keen on beating theirself up all the time."

"I think you're a man of great wisdom, young Tige," Willie said. Robert Perry walked through the rows of crypts and slung a canvas choke sack on the bed of Willie's wagon. It made a hard, knocking sound when it struck the wood. His skin was deeply tanned, freckled with sunlight under the mimosa, his uncut hair bleached on the tips. The wind gusted behind him, ruffling the leaves in the tree, and the countryside suddenly fell into shadow. "It's going to rain again," Robert said.

 "Looks like it," Willie replied.

"Why don't you tell people where you're going once in a while?" he asked.

"Out of sorts today?" Willie said.

"That worthless fellow Rufus Atkins was drunk down in the bottoms this morning. The word is he and this McCain character, the one who runs the hardware store, put on their sheets last night and paid Flower Jamison a call," Robert said.

"Say that again?" Willie said, rising to his feet.

"Ah, I figured right," Robert said.

"Figured what?"

"You couldn't wait to put your hand in it as soon as you heard," Robert said.

"What's in that bag?" Willie asked.

"My law books."

"What else?"

"My sidearm," Robert said.

Chapter Twenty-eight

ABIGAIL Dowling whipped her buggy horse down the road and into the entrance of Rufus Atkins' property. She felt a sickness in her chest and a dryness in her throat that she could compare only to a recurrent dream in which she was peering over the rim of a canyon into the upended points of rocks far below. She waited for the voices to begin, the ones that had called her a traitor and poseur who fed off the sorrow and the inadequacies of others, the voices that had always drained her energies and robbed her of self-worth and denied her a place in the world that she could claim as her own. But this time she would fight to keep them in abeyance; she would rid herself of self-excoriation and for once in her life surrender herself to a defining, irrevocable act that would not only set her free but save an innocent like Flower Jamison from bearing a cross that an unjust world had placed on her shoulders.

What would her father say to her now? God, she missed him. He was the only human being whose word and wisdom she never doubted. Would he puff on his pipe silently, his eyes smiling with admiration and approval? But she already knew the answer to her question. That jolly, loving, Quaker physician who could walk with beggars and princes  would have only one form of advice for her in this situation, and it would not be what she wanted to hear.

She cracked the whip on her horse's back and tried to empty her mind of thoughts about her father. She would think about the pistol that rested on the seat beside her, substituting one worry for another, and concentrate on questions about the residue of dried mud she had seen wedged between the cylinder and the frame and inside the trigger guard, about the possibility the caps were damp or that mud was impacted inside the barrel.

The rain was as hard and cold as hail on her skin. The convicts were climbing down from the house frame, raking water out of their hair and beards, grinning at the prospect of getting off work early. She reined up her horse and stepped down into the mud.

"Hold up there, missy," the foreman said.

His stomach was the size of a washtub and he wore an enormous vest buttoned across it and a silver watch on a chain. A black trusty guard in prison stripe pants and a red shirt and a palmetto hat stood behind him, the stock of a shotgun propped casually against his hip, his ebony skin slick with rain, his eyes fastened on the outdoor kitchen under the live oak where the cooks were preparing the midday meal.

"My business is with Mr. Atkins," she said.

"Hit ain't none of mine, then. But, tell me, missy, what's that you got hid behind your leg?" the foreman said.

"Are you a Christian man?"

"I try to be."

"If you'd like to see Jesus today, just get in my way and see what happens," she said.

The foreman snapped open the cover on his watch and looked at the time, then snapped the cover closed again and replaced the watch in his vest pocket. "I reckon I've had enough folks fussing at me in one day. How about we eat us some of them beans?" he said to the trusty guard.

Abigail stepped up on the plank walkway that led to Rufus Atkins' tent. The rain was slackening now, the sun breaking from behind a cloud, and the sky seemed filled with slivers of glass. She paused in front of the tent flap and cocked back the hammer on the revolver with both thumbs.

Then her hands began to shake and she lowered the pistol, her resolve draining from her like water through the bottom of a cloth sack. Why was she so weak? Why could she not do this one violent act in defense of a totally innocent creature whom the world had abused for a lifetime? In this moment, caught between the brilliance of the rain slanting across the sun and the grayness of the cane fields behind her, she finally knew who she was, not only a poseur but an empty vessel for whom stridence had always been a surrogate for courage.

She heard a rumbling sound on the road and turned and saw Willie Burke and Robert Perry crouched forward in a wagon, the boy named Tige clinging to the sides in back. Willie had doubled over the reins in his hands and was laying the leather across his horses' flanks.

So once more she would become the burden of others, to be consoled and protected and mollified, a well-intended, neurotic Yankee who was her own worst enemy.

But if she couldn't kill, at least she could put the fear of God in a rotten piece of human flotsam like Rufus Atkins.

She raised the pistol and threw back the tent flap and stepped inside just as a man emerged from a curtain and a tangle of mosquito netting in back, his posture stooped in order to get through the netting, a metal object in his right hand. His eyes lifted to hers, just before she pointed the revolver with both hands and squeezed the trigger and a dirty cloud of smoke erupted into his face.

Her ears rang from the pistol's report. Then she heard his weight collapse as he sank to one knee, a bright ruby in the center of his forehead, the muscle tone in his face melting, his arm fighting for purchase on top of a worktable, like an unpracticed elderly man whose belated attempt at genuflection had proved inadequate.

Outside the tent, she dropped the revolver from her hand and walked toward the stunned faces of Willie Burke, Robert Perry, and Tige McGuffy.

"I killed Ira Jamison by mistake. But I'm glad he's dead just the same. God forgive me," she said.

"You shot Ira Jamison?" Willie said.

"He had a wind chime in his hand. A silly little wind chime," she said.

She buried her face in Willie's chest. He could feel the muscles in her back heaving under the flats of his hands and could not tell if she was laughing or sobbing. 

THE rain stopped and the air filled with a greenish-yellow cast that was like the tarnish on brass. The wind came up hard out of the south, flattening the cane in the fields, whipping the tent in which Ira Jamison died, riffling water in the irrigation ditches, scattering snow egrets that lifted like white rose petals above the canopy in the swamp. Out over the Gulf a tree of lightning pulsed without sound inside a giant stormhead.

As an old man Willie Burke would wonder what the eyes of God saw from above on that cool, windswept, salt-flecked August day of 1865. Did His eyes see the chime pried from Ira Jamison's dead hand and Robert Perry's revolver substituted for it?

Or did His eyes choose not to focus on an individual act but instead on the great panorama taking place below Him, one that involved all His children—leased convicts perched like carrion birds on a house frame in the middle of a wetlands, abolitionists and schoolteachers whose altruism was such they flayed themselves for their inability to change the world's nature, slavers whose ships groaned with sounds that would follow them to the grave, mothers and fathers and children who had no last names and would labor their lives away for the profit of others without ever receiving an explanation?