"Hold, you shithog!" he said.
"Give me your answer, sir," Robert said.
McCain cleared his throat and spit out into the street. He wiped his mouth.
"You've read for the law. I'm a merchant who doesn't have your verbal skills," he said. He turned his horse in a circle, its hindquarters and swishing tail causing Robert to step backward. Then McCain straightened his shoulders and pulled the creases out of his coat and said something under his breath.
"What? Say that again!" Robert said, starting forward.
But McCain kicked his heels into his horse's ribs and set off in a full gallop down the street, his legs clenched as tightly in the stirrups as a wood clothespin, one hand dipping inside his coat. He jerked the bit back in his horse's mouth, whirled in a circle, and bore down on Robert Perry, his bowler flying from his head, a nickel-plated, double-barrel derringer pointed straight out in front of him.
He popped off only one round, nailing the lantern on the pole dead center, blowing glass in a shower above Robert's head. He held up the derringer in triumph, the unfired barrel a silent testimony to the mercy he was extending an adversary.
The revelers roared with glee and vindication and climbed aboard their flatbed wagon, then followed their leader back down the street to a saloon. Robert picked a sliver of glass off his shirt and pitched it into the darkness.
"The word is he's a White Leaguer," Willie said.
"I don't think they're all cut out of the same cloth," Robert said.
Willie looked at Robert's profile, the uncut hair on the back of his neck, the clarity in his eyes. "How would you be knowing that?" he said.
"The carpetbaggers are pulling the nails out of our shoes. We don't always get to choose our bedfellows. Wake up, Willie," Robert replied.
"Oh, Robert, don't be taken in by these fellows. They do their deeds in darkness and dishonor our colors. Tell me you're not associating with that bunch."
But Robert did not reply. As Willie watched his friend walk inside the school to find Abigail Dowling, the sword wound in his shoulder seemed to flare as though someone had held a lighted match to his skin.
Chapter Twenty-three
EACH morning Ira Jamison rose to greater prosperity and political expectations. Where others saw the collapse of a nation, he saw vast opportunity. He listened respectfully while his neighbors decried carpetbag venality and gave his money and support to the clandestine groups who spoke of retaking Louisiana from the Union, but in truth he viewed the carpetbaggers as cheaply dressed and poorly educated amateurs who could be bought for pocket change.
His summer days of 1865 began with a fine breakfast on his terrace, with an overview of the Mississippi and the trees and bluffs on the far side. He drank his coffee and read his newspapers and the mail that was delivered in a leather pouch from the plantation store. He subscribed to publications in New Orleans, Atlanta, New York, and Chicago, and read them all while a pink glow spread across the land and fresh convict labor throughout the state arrived by steamboat and jail wagon for processing in the camps and barracks they built themselves as the first down payment on their sentences.
Ira Jamison wondered if Abe Lincoln, moldering in the grave, had any idea what he had done for Ira Jamison when he emancipated the slaves..
Then he unwrapped the current issue of Harper's Weekly, read the lead stories, and turned to the second page. At the top of a four-column essay were the words:
The Resurrection of a Vanquished Enemy? The Negro as Convict in the New South, A View by Our Louisiana Correspondent
Jamison set down his coffee cup and began reading.
Even the apologists for Jefferson Davis would concede he spent a political lifetime attempting to spread slavery throughout the Western territories as well as the Caribbean. His close friend Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest has recently tried to influence congressional legislation that would bring about the importation of one million Cantonese coulees to the United States as a source of post-Emancipation labor.
However, an ex-Confederate colonel by the name of Ira Jamison, who has converted his central Louisiana plantation into an enormous prison, may have come upon a profit-making scheme in the exploitation of African labor that outrivals any precedent his peers may have set.
Mr. Jamison rents convicts to enterprises and businessmen whose vested interest is to keep costs low and productivity high. The reports of beatings, malnutrition, and deaths from exhaustion and exposure to inclement weather are widespread.
Mr. Jamison, who prefers to be called 'Colonel,' is a wounded veteran of Shiloh. But his name has also been associated with the destruction of the 18th Louisiana Infantry, who were sent uphill into Union artillery and were unsupported on the flank by the unit under Mr. Jamison's command-
The name on the byline was Abigail Dowling.
Ira Jamison rolled the journal into a tight cylinder and walked into the house, tapping it on his leg, puffing air in one cheek, then the other, conscious each moment of the anger she could stir in him, the control he had to muster not to let it show in his face. He stood by his fireplace, tapping the cusp of the Journal against the bricks, looking out the window at the brilliance of the day. Then, like a man who could not refrain from picking at a scab, his eye wandered to the fissure that cut across his hearth and climbed up one side of his chimney. Had it grown wider? Why was he looking at it now?
He took a lucifer match from a vase on the mantel and scratched it alight, then touched the flame to the rolled edges of the journal and watched the paper blacken along one side of the cylinder. He dropped the pages like burning leaves on top of the andirons.
He sent his body servant to find both Clay Hatcher and Rufus Atkins. A half hour later they tethered their horses in the backyard and walked into the shade of the porte cochere and knocked on the side door. He did not invite them in and instead stepped outside and motioned for them to follow him to the terrace, where his uneaten breakfast still sat, buzzing with flies.
"One of the niggers serve you spoiled food, Kunnel? Tell us which one," Hatcher said.
"Shut up, Clay," Rufus Atkins said.
Jamison stood on the flagstones of the terrace, his fists propped on his hips, his head lowered in thought. The green boughs and bright red bloom of a mimosa tree feathered in the wind above the three men.
"I understand Abigail Dowling has started up a school for freed slaves," Jamison said.
"She ain't the only one. Flower is teaching there, too," Hatcher said.
Atkins gave Hatcher a heated look.
"Flower?" Jamison said.
"Damn right. Teaching reading and writing and arithmetic. Can you believe hit?" Hatcher said.
"Who put up the money for the school?" Jamison said.
"I hear she got hit from the woman runs the whorehouse," Hatcher said.
"Who is she?" Jamison asked.
Hatcher started to speak, but Atkins cut him off.
"Abigail Dowling got the money from Carrie LaRose, Colonel," Atkins said. "Is there something you want done?"
"I've suspected for some time Miss Dowling is an immoralist. Do you know what I mean by that?" Jamison said.
"No, suh," Hatcher said.
"Listen to the colonel, Clay," Atkins said.
"She has unnatural inclinations toward her own gender. I think she has no business teaching anybody anything. She is also trying to embarrass us in the national press. Are you hearing me, Rufus?" Jamison said.
"Yes, sir. To borrow a phrase from my friend Clay here, maybe it's time that abolitionist bitch got her buckwheats," Atkins said.
"Yes, and leave footprints right back to my front door," Jamison said.
Atkins' gaze focused on the river bottoms and a work gang hauling dirt up the side of a levee. The striped jumpers and pants of the convicts were stained red with sweat and clay. Atkins sucked in his cheeks, his eyes neutral, the colonel's insult leaving no trace in his face.
"I reckon we have a situation that requires a
message without a signature," he said.
"Good. We're done here," Jamison said, and began to walk away. Then he turned, his hand cupped on his chin, his thoughts veiled.
"Rufus?" he said.
"Yes, sir?"
"No one is to harm Flower. Not under any circumstances. The man who does will have his genitalia taken out," Jamison said.
Jamison crossed the yard and walked under the porte cochere and into the house. Clay Hatcher stared after him, breathing through his mouth, his eyes dull.
"A little late, ain't hit? Don't he know Flower got raped by them lamebrains you hired?" he said.
Atkins used the flat of his fist to break Hatcher's bottom lip against his teeth.
ABIGAIL Dowling had discovered she did not know how to talk with Robert Perry. The previous evening she had seen him for the first time in almost four years. When she had run out of the classroom into the hallway to greet him, he had placed his hands on her shoulders and touched the skin along her collar with one finger. Instead of happiness, she felt a rush of guilt in her chest and a sense of physical discomfort that bordered on resentment. Why? she asked herself. The more she tried to think her way out of her feelings, the more confused she became.
He had stood up to Todd McCain and the drunkards who were harassing the Negroes under the live oak; his manners and good looks and the brightness in his eyes and his obvious affection for her were undiminished by the war. He walked her and Flower home, dismissing the shot fired over his head by McCain, offering to sleep on her gallery in case the revelers on the flatbed wagon returned.
But she didn't even ask him in and was glad she could honestly tell him she was feeling ill. When he was gone she made tea for Flower and herself and experienced a sudden sense of quietude and release for which she could offer herself no explanation.
Who in reality was she? she asked herself. Now, more than ever, she believed she was an impostor, a sojourner not only in Louisiana and in the lives of others but in her own life as well.
The next morning she looked out the front window and saw Robert opening the gate to her yard. He wore a brushed brown suit, shined shoes, and a soft blue shirt with a black tie, and his hair was wet and combed back on his neck. In the daylight she realized he was even thinner than she had thought.
"I hope you don't mind my dropping by unannounced," he said.
"Of course not," she said, and unconsciously closed her left hand, which her father had told her was the way he could always tell when she fibbed to him as a girl."Why don't we walk out here in the yard?"
They strolled through the trees toward the bayou. The camellias and four-o'clocks were blooming in the shade, and a family of black people were perched among the cypress knees on the bank, bobber-fishing in the shallows.
She heard Robert clear his throat and pull a deep breath into his lungs.
"Abby, what is it? Why is there this stone wall between us?" he said.
"I feel I've deceived you."
"In what way?"
Her heart raced and the trees and the air vines swaying in the breeze and the black family among the shadows seemed to go in and out of focus.
"You fought for a cause in which you believed. You spent almost two years in prison. I was a member of the Underground Railroad. I never told you that," she said.
"You're a woman of conscience.You don't have to explain yourself to me."
"Well," she said, her mouth dry, her blood hammering in her ears with a new deceit she had just perpetrated upon him.
"Is that the sum of your concerns?" he said.
She paused under an ancient live oak, one that was gnarled, hollowed by lightning, green with lichen and crusted with fern, the trunk wrapped with poisonous vines.
"No, I was romantically intimate with another," she said.
"I see," he replied.
His hair had dried in the heat and it had lights in it, like polished mahogany, and the wind blew it on his collar. His eyes were crystal blue and seemed to focus on a little Negro boy who was cane-lifting a hooked perch out of the water.
"With Willie?" he said.
"I can only speak to my own deeds," she said.
"Neither of you should feel guilt, at least not toward me. Nor does either of you owe me an apology."
"We're different, you and I," she said.
"And Willie is not?"
"You believed in the cause you served. Willie never did. He fought because he was afraid not to. Then his heart filled with hatred when he saw Jim Stubbefield killed," she said.
"I lost friends, too, Abby," Robert said.
BUT she was already walking back toward the house, her hands balled into fists, the leaves and persimmons and molded pecan husks snapping under her feet, the world swimming around her as though she were seeing it from the bottom of a deep, green pool.
"Did you hear me, Abby? I lost friends, too," Robert called behind her.
The following week, on a sun-spangled, rain-scented Saturday evening, Carrie LaRose entered St. Peter's Church and knelt down inside the confessional. The inside of the confessional was hot and dark and smelled of dust and oil and her own perfume and body powder and the musk in her clothes.
The priest who pulled back the wood slide in the partition was very old, with a nervous jitter in his eyes and hands which often shook
uncontrollably, to such a degree he was no longer allowed to perform the consecration at Mass or to administer communion. Through a space between the black gauze that hung over the small window in the partition and the wood paneling, Carrie could see the hands and wrists of the priest framed inside a shaft of sunlight. His bones looked like sticks, the skin almost translucent, the veins little more than pieces of blue string.
The priest waited, then his head turned toward the window. "What is it? Why is it you don't speak?" he said.
"You don't know me. I run the brot'el sout' of town," she replied.
"Could I help you with something?"
"You don't talk French?"
"No, not well."
"I done a lot of sins in my life. The Lord already knows what they are and I ain't gonna bore Him talking about them, no. But I done one t'ing that don't never let go of me. 'Cause for me to wish I ain't done what I did is the same t'ing as wishing I wasn't alive."
"You've lost me."
Carrie tried to start over but couldn't think. "My knees is aching. Just a minute," she said. She left the confessional and found a chair and dragged it back inside, then plunked down in it and closed the curtain again.
"Are we comfortable now?" the priest asked.
"Yes, t'ank you. I was in a prison cell in Paris. I could see the guillotine from the window. I kneeled down on the stone and practiced putting my head on the bench so I'd know how to do it when they took me in the cart to die. But I'd get sick all over myself. I knowed then I'd do anyt'ing to stay alive."
"I'm confused. You want absolution for a murder you committed?"
"You ain't listening. The other woman in my cell was a cutpurse. I done sexual t'ings for the jailer so he'd take her 'stead of me. I go over it in my head again and again, but each time it comes out the same way. In my t'oughts I still want to live and I want that woman to die so I ain't got to lay my head down under that blade way up at the top of the scaffold. So in troot I ain't really sorry for sending her to the headsman 'stead of me. That means I ain't never gonna have no peace."
The priest's silhouette was tilted forward on his thumb and forefinger.He seemed to rock back and forth, as though teetering on the edge of a thought or an angry moment. Then he closed the slide on the partition and rose from his seat and left the confessional.
She sat motionless in her chair, the walls around her like an upended coffin. Sweat ran down her sides and an odor like sour milk seemed to rise from her clothes. A hand that trembled so badly it could hardly find purchase gripped the edge of the curtain and jerked it back.
"Step out here with me," the priest said, and gestured for her to take a seat in
a pew by a rack of burning candles.
He sat down next to her, his small hands knotted on his thighs. The rack of votive candles behind him glittered like a hundred points of blue light.
"You don't have to sort through these things with a garden rake. You just have to be sorry for having done them and change your way. God doesn't forgive incrementally. His forgiveness is absolute," the priest said.