White Doves at Morning (41 page)

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 bric
k 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
mustache 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.

The sergeant stood up and
touched the brim of his kepi. "Not much. Some miscreants giving a local
fellow a bad time," he said.

 "Was that Willie Burke?"
she asked,
looking down the street.

"Has a way of showing up all
over the planet?
Yes, I think that's his name."

"Is he all right?"

 "Seems fine
enough to me."

The black girl had finished
her taffy and was now standing a few feet away, her eyes uplifted to
the sergeant's. He removed a penny from his pocket and gave it to her.
"Get yourself one more, then you'd better find your mommy," he said.

Abigail and the soldier looked
at one another in the silence. "You sound as though you're from my neck
of the woods," he said.

"On the Merrimack, in
Massachusetts. My name is Abigail Dowling," she said.

"It's a pleasure to meet you,
Miss Abigail," he said. He stepped forward awkwardly and removed his
kepi and shook her hand. He continued to stare at her, his lips seeming
to form words that were somehow not connected to his thoughts. He
grinned sheepishly at his own emotional disorganization.

 "Do you have a
name?" she asked.

"Oh, excuse me. It's
Sergeant Earp.
Quintinius Earp."

She smiled, her head tilting
slightly. A look of undisguised disappointment stole across his face.

"Quintinius? My, what a
beautiful Roman name," she said.

When he grinned he looked like
the happiest, most handsome and kindly man she had ever seen.

UNDER a bright moon, deep
inside the network of canals, bayous, oxbows, sand bogs, flooded woods,
and open freshwater bays that comprised the Atchafalaya Basin, Robert
Perry watched two dozen of his compatriots off-load crate after crate
of Henry and Spencer repeaters from a steamboat that had worked its way
up the Atchafalaya River from the Gulf of Mexico.

The wind was balmy and strong
out of the south, capping the water in the bays, puffing leaves out of
the trees, driving the mosquitoes back into the woods. Some of the men
wore pieces of their old uniforms—a sun-faded kepi, perhaps, a
butternut jacket, a pair of dress-gray pants, with a purple stripe down
each leg. With just a little imagination Robert was back in Virginia,
at the beginning of Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign, reunited with the
bravest fellows he had ever known, all of them convinced that honor was
its own reward and that politics was the stuff of bureaucrats and death
was a subject unworthy of discussion.

In his mind's eye he could
still see them, pausing among the hills in the early dawn to drink from
a stream, to eat hardtack from their
packs, or si
mply to
remove
their shoes and rub their feet. T
he fields and trees
were strung with mist, the light in the valley a greenish yellow, as
though it had been trapped inside an uncured whiskey barrel. Propped
among the thousands of resting men were their regimental colors, the
Cross of Saint Andrew, and the Bonnie Blue flag sewn with eleven white
stars.

The denigrators and
revisionists would eventually have their way with history, as they
always did, Robert thought, but for those who participated in the war,
it would remain the most important, grand and transforming experience
in their lives. And if a war could make a gift to its participants,
this one's gift came in the form of a new faith: No one who was at
Marye's Heights, Cemetery Ridge, or the Bloody Lane at Sharpsburg would
ever doubt the courage and stoicism and spiritual resolve of which
their fellow human beings were capable.

Robert did not know all of the
men who came into the Atchafalaya Basin either by boat or mule-drawn
wagon that evening. Some were White Leaguers, others Kluxers; some
probably belonged to both groups or to neither. How had he put it to
Willie? You don't always choose your bedfellows in a war? But none of
these looked like bad men; certainly they were no worse than the
carpetbaggers appointed to office by the provisional governor.

They had shot and butchered a
feral hog and great chunks of meat were now broiling on iron stakes
driven into the ground by a roaring fire under a cypress tree. The
crates of Henry and Spencer lever-action repeaters and ammunition were
stacked in the wagons now and within a week they would be distributed
all over southern Louisiana. If events turned out badly, the Yankees
had cast the die, not these fellows in the swamp, he told himself.

But his thoughts were
troubled. A guerrilla leader in a flop hat, a man named Jarrette, was
squatting on his haunches by the fire, sawing at a shank of broiled
meat, sticking it into his mouth with the point of his bowie knife.
Some said he had ridden with Quantrill, a psychopath and arsonist whom
Robert E. Lee had officially read out of the Confederate army. Jarrette
spoke little, but the moral vacuity in his eyes was of a kind Robert
Perry had seen in others, usually men for whom war became a sanctuary.

The other men were eating now
from tin plates, passing around three bottles of clear whiskey someone
had produced from under a
wagon seat. Their
faces
were happy in the
firelight,
the whiskey glittering inside the bottles they tilted to their mouths.
In this moment, in
their mismatched pieces of uniform, they looked as though they had
stepped out of a photograph taken on the banks of the Rappahannock
River.

Then a man he recognized all
too well walked out of the darkness and joined the others. His hair was
greased and parted down the middle, his body egg-shaped and compact,
his brow furrowed, the corners of his mouth downturned, as though he
did not quite approve of whatever his eyes fell upon.

The egg-shaped,
narrow-shouldered man sat down on a log and unfolded a sheet of paper
and began reading off the names of people in the community whose
activities were, in his words, "questionable or meriting further
investigation on our part."

A two-shot nickel-plated
derringer was stuck down tightly in the side of his belt.

"It looks like you've got the
dirt on some right suspicious folk, Mr. McCain," Robert said.

" 'Dirt' is a word of your
choosing, not mine," McCain replied. Robert sat down on the log next to
him.

 "Do you mind?" he asked,
lifting the sheet of paper from McCain's
hands. "Which outfit did you serve in?"

"I was exempted from service,
although that was not my preference," McCain replied.

"How is it you were exempted,
sir?" Robert asked.

 "Provider of war
materials and sole support of a
family."

 "Some used to call those
fellows 'the Druthers.' They'd
druther not fight," Robert said. Then he popped the sheet of paper
between his hands and studied the list before McCain could reply.
"Well, I see you have the name of Willie Burke down here. That disturbs
me."

"It should. He's a nigger
lover and he regularly insults the leadership of the Knights of the
White Camellia," McCain said

"That sounds like Willie, all
right. There's a little boy in town, a veteran of the 6th Mississippi,
who says Willie told off Bedford Forrest. Can you believe that? May I
see your gun?" Robert said.

Without waiting for an answer
he lifted the derringer from McCain's belt. The nickel plate on it was
new, unscratched, the pearl handles rippling with color in the
firelight. Robert broke open the
breech and
looked
at
the
two brass
cartridges
inserted in the
chambers.
He snicked the breech shut.