White Doves at Morning (35 page)

"It's my favorite lady from
Mass'chusetts," the sheriff said. He had such difficulty pronouncing
the last word, even incorrectly, that he had to touch a drop of spittle
off his lip.

"It looks like you're about to
have a tax sale," she said.

He fixed his gaze out the
window on a passing wagon, his eyes seemingly empty of thought.

"Tax sale? Oh, you seen me
nailing up that notice on the tree yesterday."

"That's
right. How
much will I need to make a realistic bid?" she said.

"How much money? You want to
have a seat?" he asked.

"No," she replied.

He remained standing and
pushed some papers around on his desk with the tips of his fingers. The
crown of his gray hat was crumpled and sweat-stained and worn through
in the creases. He pulled his shirt off his skin with two fingers and
shook the cloth, as though removing the heat trapped inside.

"You don't need no old
building, Miss Abby. Why not leave t'ings be?" he said.

"What are you up to, Hipolyte?"

He raised his index finger at
her. "Don't be saying that, no. I'm telling you somet'ing for your own
good."

"Somebody else doesn't want a
competitor at the auction?"

He pushed his hat back on his
head. The skin below his hairline was white, prickled with rash.

"Tell her, you old fart.
Yankee jellyroll like that don't come around every day," a voice
shouted from one of the cells. The other men leaning or sitting against
the bars laughed inside the gloom.

The sheriff got up from his
chair and slammed the plank door that separated his office from the
jail.

"Who are those men?" she asked.

"Guerrillas. White trash. They
calling themselves the White League now. You heard about them?"

"No," she replied. "Who else
wants to buy that house, Hipolyte?"

"Mr. Todd."

"Todd McCain? From the
hardware store?"

"He's gonna make it into a
saloon and dance pavilion. Them Yankees gonna be around a long time,"
the sheriff said.

"What an enterprising man."

"You a good lady. Don't mess
wit' him, Miss Abby." The sheriff's voice was almost plaintive.

"I think Mr. McCain should
have been run out of here a long time ago," she replied.

"I knowed you was gonna say
that. Knowed it, knowed it, knowed
it," he said. He
picked up a ring of big iron keys from his desk, then dropped them
heavily on the wood.

AT dawn one week later and two
days before the auction, Carrie LaRose drank coffee at the kitchen
table in the back of her brothel and stared out the window at the red
sun rising inside the mist on the cane fields. She stared at the plank
table under the live oak where her customers drank and sometimes fought
with fists or occasionally with knives, and at the two-hole privy that
she herself would not use at gunpoint, and at the saddled black horse
of a Yankee major who was still upstairs with her most expensive girl.

During the night she had felt
chest pains that left her breathless, then a spasm had struck her right
arm like a bone break. It was the second time in a month she had been
genuinely terrified by premonitions of her own mortality. In each
instance, after the pain had gone out of her chest, she had sat on the
side of the bed and had heard heavy shoes walking in a corridor, then
an iron door scraping across stone. She had pressed her hands over her
ears, and her mouth had gone dry as paper with fear.

Now she sat in her kitchen and
drank coffee laced with brandy and surveyed what she had spent a
lifetime putting together: a termite-eaten house, a two-hole privy that
her clientele shat and pissed upon, and a plank table under a tree
where they got drunk and fought with fists and knives, then lumbered
back into her house, stinking of blood and vomit.

The major, who was stationed
in Abbeville, visited the brothel every Sunday night, mutton-chopped,
bald, potbellied, effusive, his few strands of hair slicked down on his
pate with toilet water. "Your randy fellow is back!" he would announce.
Upon departure, he would wave in a jolly way and call out, "Just add it
on my bill, Carrie!"

Last night he had sent an aide
ahead of him to vacate an enlisted man from the only upstairs room with
a tester bed, consumed two bottles of champagne, and started a fire by
dropping a lit cigar in a clothes basket. But the major did not pay for
services rendered, the liquor he drank, or the damages he did. One
morning, when Carrie pressed him about his bill, he removed three pages
of printed material from his coat pocket and unfolded and shuffled
through them.

At the bottom of the last
page were a signature and official seal.

"Glance over this and tell me
what you think," he said.

"T'ink about what?" she
replied.

"Sporting places have been
banned throughout the district. The proprietresses of such places can
be sent to prison and their property seized. It's all written right
there in the document," he said.

She stared at the page blankly.

"But you don't need to worry.
This is a tavern and cotillion hall and nothing more. Don't you be
long-faced now. I'm going to take care of you," he said, his eyes
trailing after a girl whose breasts bounced inside her blouse like
small watermelons.

Now Carrie sat alone in her
kitchen, her body layered with fat, her nails bitten to the quick, her
fate in the hands of a man who could threaten her with pieces of paper
she could not read.

The day was already growing
hot and humid, but she felt cold inside her robe and short of breath
for no reason. She clutched the holy medal and cross that hung around
her neck and tried to suck air down into her lungs, but her chest felt
as though it were bound and crisscrossed with rope. Again, she thought
she heard footsteps echoing down a long corridor and an iron door
scraping across stone.

The major walked down the
stairs, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a folded handkerchief,
the buttons on his blue coat tight across his paunch.

"Having a late breakfast?" he
said.

"I don't eat breakfast, me,"
she replied.

He looked disappointed. Then
his eyes lit on the coffeepot and a piece of carrot cake on a shelf.

"I thought I might join you,"
he said.

"Last night s'pposed to go on
your bill, too?" she asked.

"Yes, that would be fine."

"I want my money," she said.

"Carrie, Carrie, Carrie," he
said, patting her shoulder.

He leaned across her to pick
up the piece of carrot cake from the shelf. She could feel the outline
of his phallus press against her back.

JUST before noon Carrie bathed
and fixed her hair and dug in the back of her closet for a dress that
had been made for her by a tailor in
New Orleans. Then she
powdered her face until it was almost
white, rouged her cheeks,
darkened her eyes with eyeliner and, with
a silk
parasol held
aloft, sat regally in the back of her carriage while a Negro driver
delivered her to the front of Abigail Dowling's cottage on East Main.

"Could I help you?" Abigail
said, opening the door, looking past Carrie, as though an emergency of
some kind must have developed in the street.

"I want to talk bidness,"
Carrie said.

"I'm probably the wrong person
for that," Abigail said.

 "Not this time, you
ain't," Carrie said.

They sat down in the living
room. Carrie fixed her eyes out the window, her back not touching the
chair. Her red-streaked black hair looked like a wig on a muskmelon.
She took a deep breath and heard a rattling sound in her lungs.

"Are you feeling all right,
Miss LaRose?" Abigail asked.

 "I got chest pains at
night," she said.

 "You need to see a
doctor."

"The only good one we had was
killed at Malvern Hill. I want you to find out what's wrong wit' me."

 "I'm not qualified,"
Abigail replied.

"I wouldn't take my horse to
the doctor we got. What's wrong wit' me?"

"What else happened when you
had the chest pains?"

 "I couldn't breathe. It
hurt real bad under my
right arm, like somebody stuck me wit' a stick."

Abigail started to speak, but
Carrie raised a hand for her to be silent.

"I hear a man walking in a
long corridor. I hear an iron door scraping across a stone flo'," she
said. "I t'ink maybe somebody's coming for me."

"Who?" Abigail said.

"I growed up in Barataria,
right here in Lou'sana, but I run a house in Paris. A colonel in the
French army kilt my husband over some money. When I got the chance I
fixed him good. Wit' a poisoned razor in his boot."

Carrie paused, waiting to see
the reaction in Abigail's face. "I see," Abigail said.

"I was supposed to die on the guillotine. I done some t'ings for the
jailer.
Anyt'ing he wanted, it
didn't
matter.You know what I'm saying to you? I done them t'ings and I
lived."

"Yes?" Abigail said.

"Anot'er woman went to the
headsman 'stead of me. They put a gag in her mout' and tied her feet
and hands. From my window I saw them lift her head out of the basket
and hold it up by the hair for the crowd to see."

Abigail kept her eyes on the
tops of her hands and cleared her throat.

"I think you've had a hard
life, Miss Carrie," Abigail said.

"You been trying to borrow
money around town. Ain't nobody gonna give you money to go up against
Todd McCain. He's in the White League."

"How do you know?"

"He visits my house."

"You're offering to lend me
money?"

"He's gonna set up a saloon,
probably wit' girls out back. What's good for him is bad for me."

"And part of the deal is I
help you with your health? I'd do that, anyway, Miss Carrie."

"There's somet'ing else."
Carrie rotated a ring on her finger.

"What might that be?" Abigail
asked.

"I cain't read and write, me.
Neither can my brother, Jean-Jacques."

IT was late evening when
Willie Burke walked into town and stood in front of his mother's
boardinghouse on the bayou. A rolled and doubled-over blanket, with
his razor, a sliver of soap, a magazine and a change of clothes inside,
was tied on the ends with a leather cord and looped across his back. A
narrow-chested, shirtless boy, wearing a Confederate kepi, was sweeping
the gallery, his face hot with his work, his back powdered with dust in
the twilight.

The boy rested his broom and
stared at the figure standing in the yard.

"Mr. Willie?" he said.

"Yes?"

"Ms Abigail said she thought maybe you was killed."

 "I don't know who you are."

"It's
me—Tige."

"The drummer boy at Shiloh?"

"Lessen hit's a catfish
dressed up in a Tige McGuffy suit."

 "What are you doing on
my mother's
gallery?"

 "Cleaning up, taking
care of things. I'm staying here. Miss
Abby said it was all right."

 "Where's my mother?"

A paddle-wheeler, its windows
brightly lit, blew its whistle as it approached the drawbridge. "She
died, Mr. Willie."

"Died?"

"Last month, in New Orleans.
Miss Abby says it was pneumonia," Tige said. He looked away, his hands
clenched on the broom handle.

 "I think you're
confused, Tige. My mother
never went to New Orleans. She thought it was crowded and dirty. Why
would she go to New Orleans? Where'd you hear all this?"

 Willie said,
his voice rising. "Miss Abby said the Yanks took your mother's hogs and
cows. She thought she could get paid for them 'cause she was from
Ireland," Tige said.

"The Yanks don't pay for what
they take. Where'd you get that nonsense?"

"I done told you."

"Yes, you did. You certainly
did," Willie said. He went inside the house and stamped around in all
the rooms. The beds were made, the washboards and chopping block in the
kitchen scrubbed spotless, the pots and pans hung on hooks above the
hearth and woodstove, the walls and ceiling free of cobweb, the dust
kittens swept out from under all the furnishings. He slammed out the
back of the house and circled through the side yard to the front. He
squeezed his temples with his fingers. "Where is she buried?" he said.
Tige shook his head. "You don't know?" Willie said.

"No, suh."

Willie pulled his blanket roll
off his shoulder and flung it at the gallery, then winced and clasped
his hand on his left collarbone.

"There's blood on your
shirt," Tige said.

"A guerrilla gave me a
taste of his
sword," Willie
replied. He sat down on the steps and
draped his hands between his legs. He was quiet a long time. "She went
to the Yanks to get paid for her livestock?"