"Tell me y'all ain't the most bothersome bunch of ungrateful pea brains I ever seen," a voice said from behind the lantern.
His name was Olin Mayfield. He had a jug head and a torso that looked as soft as mush. He wore a slicker and a slouch hat whose brim had gone shapeless in the rain and an army cap-and-ball.44 revolver on his hip. When the light of his lantern swung into his face his eyes were as green and empty of thought as stagnant water in a cattle tank.
"No, I ain't gonna hit you. Just get your worthless asses out of the ditch and follow me back to the quarters. Colonel Jamison is gonna flat shit his britches," he said and he laughed. he carouched down to pull a woman up by her hand.
Then he stiffened, his nostrols swelling with air, as though the odor of a dangerous animal had suddenly wrapped itself around him. He rose from his crouch, turning, hoisting the lantern above his head, and stared straight into the face of Jean-Jacques LaRose.
Abigail watched the next events take place as though she were caught in a dream from which she could not wake. Olin Mayfield's expression shaped and reshaped itself, as though he could not decide whether to grin or to scowl. Then he gripped the heavy Colt revolver on his hip and pulled it halfway from his holster, his lip curling up from his teeth, perhaps, Abigail thought, in imitation of an illustration he had seen on the cover of a dime novel.
The knife Jean-Jacques carried in his right hand was made from a wagon spring, a quarter-inch thick, reheated and beveled down to an edge that was sharp enough to shave with, mounted inside an oak handle with a brass guard. He thrust the blade through Olin Mayfield's throat and extracted it just as fast.
Mayfield's mouth opened in dismay as the blood drained out of his head and face and spilled down his chest. Then he slumped to his knees, his head tilted on his shoulder, as though the trees and sweet potato fields and the empty wagons in the rows had become unfairly torn loose from their fastenings and set adrift in the sky.
His lantern bounced to the bottom of the coulee and hissed in the stream but continued to burn. Then the entire band of escaping slaves bolted for the shoreline and the gangplank that led onto Jean-Jacques' boat.
Abigail was at the end of the line as it moved past Olin Mayfield. He lay on his side, his mouth pursed open, at eye level with her, his hands on his throat. When she looked at the twitch in his cheek and the solitary tear in one eye and the froth on his bottom lip she knew he was still alive, unable to speak or to fully comprehend what had happened to him.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
She gathered the infant she was carrying closer to her and dashed after the others.
AN hour later the rain stopped and the sky cleared and Abigail stood in the darkness of the pilothouse and looked out on the vast moonlit emptiness of the river and the black-green border of trees on the banks and the stump fires that smelled like burning garbage. She wondered if any sort of moral victory was possible in human affairs or if addressing and confronting evil only empowered it and produced casualties of a different kind.
The slaves had at first been terrified at the slaying of the paddy roller, but once they were in a new and seemingly secure environment, hidden inside the cargo hold or under the canvas on deck, the fear went out of their faces and they began to laugh and joke among themselves. Abigail had found herself laughing with them; then one man in the hold found a splintered piece of wood from a packing crate and hacked at the air with it, pretending he was executing Olin Mayfield. Everyone clapped their hands.
What had her father said? "We will do many things in the service of justice. But shedding blood isn't one of them." She drew a ragged breath and shut her eyes and saw again the scene in the coulee. What a mockery she had made of her father's admonition.
"You still t'inking about that man back there?" Jean-Jacques said. A palpable aura of rum and dried sweat and tobacco smoke rose from his skin and clothes.
"Yes, I am," she replied.
"He made his choice. He got what he deserved. Look out yonder. We got a lot more serious t'ings to deal wit'," he said.
They had just made a bend in the river and should have been churning past the Confederate encampment, unchallenged, on their way to New Orleans, with nothing to fear until they approached the Union ironclads anchored in the river north of the city. Instead, a ship-of-war with twin stacks was anchored close to the shore, and soldiers with rifles moved in silhouette across the lighted windows. A pair of wheeled cannons had been moved into a firing position on a bluff above the river and all the undergrowth and willows chopped down in front of the barrels. Abigail heard an anchor chain on the Confederate boat clanking upward through an iron scupper. Jean-Jacques wiped his mouth with his hand. "Maybe I can run it. But we gonna take some balls t'rew the starboard side," he said.
"Turn in to shore," she said.
"That don't sound like a good idea."
"Get everyone down below," she said.
"There ain't room," she said.
"You have to make some."
She pulled up her dress and lifted the bottom of her petticoat in both hands and began to tear at it. The petticoat was pale yellow in color and sewn with lace on the edges. Jean-Jacques stared at her, his face contorted.
"I ain't having no parts in this," he said.
"Get Flower to help you. Please do what I say."
He frowned and rubbed the stubble on his jaw.
"Leave me your knife," she said.
"My knife?"
This time she didn't speak. She fixed her eyes on his and let her anger well into her face.
He called one of his boat mates to take the wheel and went out on the deck and opened a hatch in front of the pilothouse. One by one the black people who were hidden under the canvas crawled on their hands and knees to the ladder and dropped down into the heat of the boiler room.
Abigail ripped a large piece out of her petticoat, and knelt on the floor with Jean-Jacques' knife and cut the cloth in a square the size of a ship's flag. Then she tied two strips from the trimmings onto the corners and went to the stern. She pulled down the Confederate flag from its staff and replaced it with the piece from her petticoat.
Jean-Jacques came back into the pilothouse and steered his boat out of the channel, into dead water, cutting the engines just as the Confederates came alongside.
"What we doing, Miss Abigail?" he asked. He watched two soldiers latch a boat hook onto his gunnel and throw a boarding plank across it.
She patted her hand on top of his. He waited for her to answer his question.
"Miss Abigail?" he said.
But she only touched her finger to her lips.
Then he glanced at the tops of his shoes and his heart sank.
A major, a sergeant and three enlisted men dropped down onto the deck. Jean-Jacques went outside to meet them, his smile as natural as glazed ceramic.
"Had a bad storm up there. It's cleared up all right, though," he said.
The faces of the soldiers held no expression. Their eyes swept the decks, the pilothouse, the canvas stretched across the front of the boat. But one of them was not acting like the others, Jean-Jacques noted. The sergeant, who was unshaved and wore his kepi low on his brow, was looking directly into Jean-Jacques' face.
"You see any Yanks north of here?" the major asked.
"No, suh," Jean-Jacques said.
The major lit a lantern and held it up at eye level. He was a stout, be-whiskered man, his jowls flecked with tiny red and blue veins. A gray cord, with two acorns on it, was tied around the crown of his hat.
"You'll find them for sure if you keep going south," he said.
"I give a damn, me," Jean-Jacques said.
"They can confiscate your vessel," the major said.
"What they gonna do, they gonna do."
"What's your cargo?" the major asked.
Before Jean-Jacques could answer Abigail stepped out in front of him.
"You didn't see our yellow warning?" she said.
"Pardon?" the officer sa
id.
"We have yellow jack on board," she said.
"Yellow fever?" the major said.
"We're taking a group of infected Negroes to a quarantine and treatment station outside New Orleans. I have a pass from the Sanitary Commission if you'd like to see it."
The enlisted men involuntarily stepped back, craning their necks, looking about.
"Where are these infected Negroes from?" the major asked.
"Up the river. There's been an outbreak on two plantations," Abigail answered, busying herself inside her purse. She handed him a Sanitary Commission identification card. He cupped it in his palm but did not look at it.
"Where are they?" he asked.
"In the cargo hold."
"Something's not right here," the major said.
"Why is that?" she replied.
"Is that blood on your shoes?" the major asked Jean-Jacques.
Jean-Jacques studied his feet. "That's what it look like."
"Happen to know where it came from?" the major asked.
"People tole me I busted a bottle on a fellow's head last night. I ain't sure about that, though. I t'ink I would remember it if I done somet'ing that bad, me."
"Why are you transporting the Negroes in the hold?" the major asked.
"It's an airborne disease. Sir, why don't you inspect them and come to your own conclusions?" Abigail said.
The major's eyes broke. He brushed at one nostril and thought for a moment.
"I'll do it, sir," the sergeant interrupted.
"Very well," the major said.
Willie Burke hooked his hand through the bail of the lantern and walked aft. He hesitated a moment, then grasped the iron ring on the hatch and lifted it. His face darkened as he stared down into the hold.
"What is it?" the major asked.
"There appear to be a couple of families down here, sir," Willie replied.
"And?" the major said.
Willie wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I think their yellow flag is one we should heed, sir."
"Close it up," the major said. He handed Abigail her identification card. "You appear to be a brave woman."
"I'm not," she replied.
"Don't you people do this again," he said.
"Sir?"
"You know what I mean," the major said, and gestured for his men to follow him.
Willie passed within inches of her. He wore a mustache now and his faded gray shirt was tight on his body, his skin browned by the sun, his black hair ragged on his neck. His armpits were looped with sweat stains and he smelled of campfire smoke and leaves and testosterone.
His dark eyes met hers for only a moment, then he was gone.
A half hour later Abigail stood on the stern, the Confederate camp far behind her, and once again she looked at the great emptiness of the river and the coldness of the stars. She had never felt more desolate in her life. In her victory, the joy of danger and adrenaline had been stolen from her, and she was left to contemplate the lighted face of a dying man on the edge of a coulee, a red-veined bubble forming on his lips.
Chapter Twelve
THE winter of 1862 and the following spring were not a good time for Ira Jamison. The weather turned wet and blustery, the temperature dipping below freezing at night, and the wounds in his side festered. From his bedroom window on the second story of his home he saw his fruit trees wither, his fields lie fallow, and many of the slave cabins remain empty. In order to sleep he placed a lump of opium in his cheek. The smell of the infection in his wounds filled his dreams.
Even before his wife had died in childbirth, his life had been one of solitude. But solitude should not mean loneliness, his father had always said. A real man planted his feet solidly in the world, chose his own friends, male and female, in his own time, and was never alone except when he wanted to be, his father had said.
But when Ira Jamison's possessions were in jeopardy, he experienced a form of soul sickness that did not seem connected to the loss of the material items themselves. His fireplaces seemed to give no heat, a tryst with an octoroon girl no solace. He wandered his house in his bathrobe, voices out of his childhood echoing from the coldness in the walls. For some reason the fissure in the living room hearth and chimney would catch his eye and obsess him, and he would find himself feeling the rough edges of the mortar and separated brick with his thumb, rolling a marble across the hearth to determine if the foundation of the house was still settling.On Christmas Eve he piled oak logs on the andirons and stoked the fire until his face was sweating. An oil painting of his mother looked down at him from above the mantelpiece. Her cheeks were red, her lips mauve-colored, her black hair pulled tightly behind her head. When his eyes lingered on the painting, he could almost smell her breath, like dried flowers, like cloth that had moldered in a grave.
She had liked to stroke his hair when he was a child and sometimes she pulled him into her skirts, smothering him with her smell. His father had said nothing on these occasions, but his eyes smoldered and one hand clenched and unclenched at his side.
His father was a rough-hewn Scotsman, mercurial in his moods, keenly aware of his wife's education and his lack of one, generous and loving with his son, but always fearful that his wife's indulgent and sentimental ways would make the boy a victim of a predatory world. He was a curious mixture of humanity, severity and self-irony, and Ira loved him fiercely and sought his approval in everything he did.
"Spare the rod to feel good about yourself and create a lazy Negro," his father used to say. Then he would add, with a smile, "Spare the rod enough and create an impoverished plantation owner. Truth is, lad, in spite of everything we're told, there's no difference between the African and white races. The day the Negroes figure that one out is the day they'll take all this from us."
Ira's father was built like a stump, his chest streaked with fine black hair. He enjoyed stripping to the waist and working alongside his Negroes to demonstrate he was their equal if not superior at any physical task, heaving sacks of sweet potatoes into a wagon, prizing a cypress tree out of clay, splitting firewood that cracked like a rifle shot.
One winter Ira's mother contracted pneumonia. The fever and deliriums passed but the cough never left her lungs and the handkerchief she often kept balled in her fist was sometimes freckled with blood. When she leaned down to kiss her son's head, her breath made the skin of his face tighten against the bone.
His father moved out of the main bedroom and slept on a leather
sofa in the library. Unlike some of his male neighbors, he did not visit the slave quarters at night. He didn't have to. As Ira learned at age ten, his father had another life in Baton Rouge.
Ira's father left him to play in the yard of a friend while he rode a livery horse down into the bottoms, an area of Baton Rouge that was still undrained, the streets lined with saloons and tanneries. But Ira had always been allowed to go anywhere his father went, and he slipped out of the yard and followed his father to a cottage, the only one on the street that was painted white and had ventilated green shutters on the windows and a vegetable garden in the side yard.
The front door was closed, even though the weather was warm. Hanging baskets of flowers and ferns swayed from the eaves of the gallery, creaking in the wind, their colors riffling in the shade. Ira sat on the top step and watched the paddle-wheelers and scows on the river and the Irish boat hands from New Orleans unloading stacks of cowhides that they dumped into smoking vats behind the tanneries. He felt himself dozing off, then he heard his father's voice and the laughter of a woman inside the cottage.
He rose from the step and walked into the side yard where the shutters of a window were opened behind a stand of banana trees. He pushed aside the banana leaves and propped a wood box against the side of the cottage and pulled himself up to eye level on the windowsill, expecting to play a joke on his father and see his father's face light with surprise and goodwill.
Instead, he looked upon the naked, clay-colored back of a woman whose knees we
re splayed across his father's loins. Her head reared back and her mouth opened silently, then a sound broke from her lips that he had never heard a woman make before. She blew out her breath, as though the room had grown cold, bending down toward his father now, her knees and thighs clenching him as if she was mounted on a horse. Her back shuddered again and her hands touched his father's face with a tenderness and intimacy that somehow seemed stolen from his mother and misused by another.
Ira's thoughts made no sense and were like shards of glass in his head.
Then the box broke under his feet and he was left hanging from the sill, the woman's eyes fastening on his now, his father's uplifted face popping with sweat like pinpoints of dew on a pumpkin.