White Doves at Morning (22 page)

"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 inno
cent 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
t
aking 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 bore 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.

What was her weakness? he
asked himself. Everybody had one. Maybe he had been looking in the
wrong place. She seemed to have male friends rather than suitors or
lovers. A woman that beautiful? He gazed out the window at the white
bloom on his peach trees and a slave girl pulling weeds inside the drip
lines. His side ached miserably. He placed a small lump of opium under
his lip and felt a sensation like warm water leaking through his
nervous system.

He had thought of Abigail
Dowling as a flesh-and-blood replication of Renaissance sculpture, an
Aphrodite rising from a tidal pool on the Massachusetts coast. He
watched the slave girl drop a handful of weeds into her basket and get
to her feet, the tops of her breasts exposed to his view. Maybe he had
been only partially correct about Abigail's classical origins.

Were her antecedents on the
island of Lesbos rather than Melos? He wondered.

AFTER the retreat from Shiloh,
Willie began to dream about a choleric-faced man, someone he did not
know, advancing out of a mist with a bayonet fixed to the end of his
rifle. The choleric-faced man would not fall down when Willie fired
upon him. He also dreamed about the sound of a distant siege gun
coughing in a woods, then a shell arcing in a dark blur out of a blue
sky, exploding in a trench full of men with the force of a ship's
boiler blowing apart. He began to take his dreams into the waking day,
and his anxieties and fears would be so great with the passage of each
hour that contact with the enemy became a welcomed release.

That's when a line sergeant
gave him what the sergeant considered the key to survival for a common
foot soldier: You never thought about it before you did it and you
never thought about it when it was over.

Nor did thinking make life
easier for a commissioned officer, Willie told himself later.

Lieutenant Willie Burke peered
through the spyglass at the steam engine and the line of freight cars
parked on the railway track. The sun was white in the sky, the woods
breathless, the leaves in the canopy coated with dust. His
clothes stuck to his skin; his hair was drenched with sweat inside his
hat. There was a humming sound in his head, like the drone of
mosquitoes, except the woods were dry and there were no mosquitoes in
them.

But their eggs were in his
blood, and at night, and sometimes in daylight, he would see gray spots
before his eyes and hear mosquitoes humming in his head, as was now the
case, and he wished he was lying in a cold stream somewhere and not
sighting through a spyglass, breathing dust inside a sweltering woods.

The train was deserted, the
steam engine pocked with holes from caseshot. Two of the boxcars that
had been loaded with munitions had burned to the wheels. Another
boxcar, a yellow one with sliding doors that had carried Negro troops,
was embedded from stem to stern with iron railroad spikes, like
rust-colored quills on a porcupine.

The black soldiers, almost all
of them newly emancipated slaves, untrained, with no experience in the
field, had melted away into thickly wooded river bottoms and had taken
a mule-drawn field piece with them, whipping the mules across the
flanks, powdering dust in the air as they crushed through the palmettos
and underbrush.

Willie moved the spyglass over
the river bottoms but could see no movement inside the trees. The train
tracks shimmered in the heat and he could smell the hot odor of
creosote in the ties. He focused the glass far down the line on an
observation balloon captured from the Federals. It was silver, as
bright as tin, tethered to the earth by a rope that must have been two
hundred feet long. A bearded man in a wicker basket was looking back in
Willie's direction with a spyglass similar to his own.

Willie got down on one knee
and gestured for Sergeant Clay Hatcher to do the same. The sudden
movement made his head swim and his eyes momentarily go out of focus.
He spread a map on the ground and tapped on it with his finger.

"That woods yonder is probably
a couple of miles deep. Their officers are dead, so my guess is they're
bunched up," he said.

Hatcher nodded as though he
understood. But in reality he didn't. He carried a Henry repeater he
had taken off the body of a Federal soldier. He was unshaved and
sweaty, his kepi crimped wetly into his hair.

"Take two men and get around
behind them. When you do I
want you to make life very
uncomfortable for them."

"I can do that," he said.

"I don't think you follow me,
Hatch."

Hatcher looked at him, his
eyes uncertain.

"I want them to unlimber that
field piece. You'll be on the receiving end of it. You up for that?"
Willie said.

"As good as the next," Hatcher
said.

"Better get moving, then,"
Willie said.

Hatcher kept his gaze on the
map without seeming to see it.

"You want prisoners?" he asked.

"If they surrender," Willie
said.

"The rumor is there ain't a
great need for them in the rear."