But Clay Hatcher was not most people and Angola Plantation was not the rest of the world. The house had four rooms, a cistern and a chicken run, and was built on a bluff overlooking the river. Its geographic prominence meant it went to only one person, the chief overseer. The homes of the other whites who worked on the plantation, now becoming known in the prison nomenclature as "free people," were situated down the back slope, at best on dry ground that didn't breed mosquitoes. Farther on, in acreage that never quite drained or was full of clay, were the old slave cabins, now used by convicts.
The house on the bluff was sunny in winter and cooled by a breeze off the river in summer. Mimosa trees bloomed in the front yard and peach trees in back. The soil was black and loamy, too, wheelbarrowed up from the compost heaps behind the barns, and the vegetable garden produced tomatoes as big as grapefruit.
Hatcher had knocked on the side door under the porte cochere, his battered excuse for a hat in his hand, his bottom lip crusted with a scab that looked like a black centipede.
"I hear Rufus is buying the property where the laundry was at in New Iberia," he said.
"That's right, Clay. Looks like Roof is about to become a gentleman planter," Jamison said.
"Then he'll be moving out directly?"
"Yes, directly it is."
Hatcher cut his head and grinned and fiddled with his hat, his gaze never quite meeting Jamison's.
"Reckon me and my old woman should get our things together, huh?" he said.
"I'm not following you."
"Seeing as how I'm second overseer, I figured you'd want me moving on into Rufus's place. It goes with the job, don't it?"
Jamison heard a boat on the river and looked in its direction. "You're a good man, Clay. But we're in the penal business now. An oldtime jail warden from New Orleans will be replacing Rufus. I'll be relying on you to get him oriented."
Hatcher turned his hat in his hands, his face reddening, his jawbones knotting, a band of sunlight slicing across his eyes.
"Oldtime jail warden, you say?" he said.
But Jamison did not reply, his eyes taking on a glint that Hatcher failed to read.
Hatcher licked the broken place on his lip. "I seen a heap of shit happen on this place. But this takes all," he said.
"I advise you not to create a problem for yourself, my friend."
"Twenty-five years of herding niggers and living one cut above them? Listening to my old woman bitch about it from morning to night? Four goddamn more years of ducking Yankee bullets? Me create a problem? Kunnel, when it comes to putting a freight train up a man's ass, you know how to do it proper," Hatcher said.
"Go down to the store and get you a bottle of whiskey and charge it to me. Then come back and talk to me in two days."
"You'll see the devil go to church first," Hatcher said.
He started down the drive, then stopped and turned, glaring at Jamison, all his servile pretense gone now, his hands opening and closing at his sides.
That had been three hours ago. Now Ira Jamison stood on the upstairs veranda, surveying all that he owned, the breeze cool on his skin, the air aromatic with the smell of flowers hanging in baskets from the eaves. But neither his prosperity nor the loveliness and unseasonable coolness of the day brought him comfort. Why had he not acted more diplomatically with Hatcher? Had his father not taught him never to provoke white trash, to treat them as one would coal oil around an open flame?
He had placed a ball of opium the size of a child's marble in his jaw, more than he usually ingested, but it did not seem to be taking effect. The wind gusted against the house and for a moment he thought he felt a vibration through the beams and studs, a tremolo that seemed to reach down into the foundation. But that was foolish, he told himself. His house was solid. An engineer had told him the fissure in his hearth and chimney was cosmetic. Why did Ira worry so much about his house? the engineer had asked.
Because not one person in the world cares whether you live or die. Because you are the sum total of your possessions and the loss of any one of them makes you the less, a voice said to him.
"That's not true. One person does care," he said to the wind.
Then he wondered at his own sanity.
That night Clay Hatcher left the plantation. But not before tying both of his bird dogs to a catalpa tree and shooting each of them with a revolver, then setting fire to his shack with his dead wife inside it.
Chapter Twenty-six
IT HAD rained all afternoon and Flower Jamison's yard was flooded. Through her front window she saw mule-drawn wagons carrying green lumber down to the site of the old laundry, where Rufus Atkins was building a home for himself and pretending to be a member of the local aristocracy. Sometimes the wagons sunk almost to the hubs in the mud and the convict teamsters would have to unload them, free the wheels, then restack the pile before they could continue on in the rain.
While he oversaw the building of his home Rufus Atkins lived in a huge canvas tent, one with crossbeams and big flaps and individual rooms inside. Oil lanterns hung from the tent poles, and when they were lit the tent looked like a warm, yellow smudge inside the mist. He had laid out plank walkways to the entrances and in the morning he walked to the privy in an elegant bathrobe to empty his chamber pot, like a scatological parody of a Victorian gentleman.
He asked others to call him "Captain," reminding them of his service to the Confederacy but never mentioning that his rank was given to him only because he was the employee of Ira Jamison and that during four years of war he was never promoted.
In public places he talked loudly of what he called his "land transact ions." Ex-paddy rollers cadged drinks from him in the saloons around town and White Leaguers like Todd McCain visited him in his tent late at night, but the invitations that went to Ira Jamison as a matter of course did not go to Rufus Atkins.
So he abused Negroes to show his power over others, flew a Confederate battle flag over his tent in defiance of the Occupation, and kept late hours in the saloon down the road. Twice Flower saw him stop his horse, a black mare, in front of her house and stare at her gallery for a long time, his stiffened arms forming a column on the saddle pommel. But when she went outside to confront him, he was gone.
It was still raining when she started supper, which meant Abigail Dowling would probably show up soon in her buggy and take the two of them to the school for night classes. She poured a cup of coffee and added sugar to it and drank it at the stove, her thoughts on the school, the field hands who worked ten-hour days and tried to learn reading and writing and arithmetic at night, and the meager donations on which she and Abigail operated.
She heard a horse in the yard and footsteps on the gallery. She pulled open the front door and looked into the face of Clay Hatcher, his clothes drenched, the brim of his hat wilted over his ears and brow. A knife was belted on one hip, a pistol on the other. He looked up and down the road, then back at her, the skin of his face stretched against his skull. His breath smelled of funk and boiled shrimp.
"Got something to tell you," he said.
"Not interested," she answered.
"It's about your mother. Her name was Sarie. Her teeth was filed into points 'cause there was an African king back there in her bloodline or something."
She wanted to tell him to get off her gallery, to take his repository of pain and grief and hatred off her land and out of her life. But she knew the umbilical cord that held her to Angola Plantation was one she would never be able to sever, that its legacy in one way or another would poison the rest of her days. So she fixed her eyes on his and waited, her heart pounding.
"Rufus tole Kunnel Jamison your mama killed one of the overseers and that's how come he hit her so hard with his quirt," Hatcher said. "That was the lie he covered his ass with. He beat Sarie's brains out 'cause she sunk her teeth in his hand, and I mean plumb down to the bone. I don't know about no African king in her background, but she was one ferocious nigger when she got a board up her cheeks."
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Flower felt the gallery tilt under her, as though she were on board a ship. The wind gusted and a tree slapped the side of the house and rain swept under the eaves.
"They said she was kicked by a horse. She shot the overseer and tried to run away and a horse trampled her," she said.
"That's the story the kunnel wanted us to tell folks. He didn't want other white people knowing his slaves got beat to death. You don't believe me, look at that half-moon scar on Rufus's left hand."
"Leave my property," she said.
"I'm hell-bound, Flower. I kilt my old woman. Look at my face. Devil's done got my soul already. Ain't got no reason to deceive you," he said.
Then he plunged into the rain and mounted his horse, jerking its head about with the reins and slashing it viciously with his boot heels at the same time.
But he had set the hook and set it deep.
SHE went to the school that evening and taught her classes but said nothing to Abigail about Clay Hatcher's visit. That night she dreamed of a man's callused, sun-browned hand, the heel half-mooned with a string of tiny gray pearls. She woke in the morning to the sound of more thunder. She started a fire in her woodstove and fixed coffee and drank it while she watched the wind flatten the cane in the fields and wrinkle the water in her yard. Then she put on a gum coat and wrapped a bandanna on her head, and with her parasol popped open in front of her face she began the long walk down to Rufus Atkins' tent.
The convicts building his house were working under tarps. An empty jail wagon sat forlornly under the live oak in front. Bearded, filthy, lesioned with scabs, the convicts stared at her from the scaffolding as she passed on the plank walkway. Then a guard yelled at them in French and their hammers recommenced a rhythmic smacking against nails and wood.
Sin' pulled open the flap on Atkins' tent and stepped inside. I le was standing it a table, studying the design of his house, his white shirt and dark pants unspotted by the rain. An oil lamp burned above his head, lighting the grainy texture of his face and the flat, hazel eyes that never allowed people to read his thoughts.
He placed one hand on his hip, his booted feet forming a right angle, like a fencer's.
"I don't know what it is, but it's trouble of one kind or another. So get to it and be on your way," he said.
"Clay Hatcher came to my house last night," she said.
"You should have gone for the sheriff. He went crazy and killed his wife. You didn't hear about it?"
His left hand rested on the table, behind him, in a pool of shadow.
"How did my mother die?" she asked.
"Sarie? A horse ran her down," he replied. His face seemed to show puzzlement.
But Rufus Atkins had made a lifetime study of not revealing his emotions about anything, she thought. Not even puzzlement. So why now?
"She shot a man, Flower. Right in the head. Then took off running," he said, although she had not challenged his statement.
"She'd just given birth."
He shook his head. "I'm telling you how it happened, girl." He raised his left hand and touched at his nose with his wrist. Then she saw it, a barely noticeable half-circle of tiny scars on the rim of his hand.
Her gum coat felt like an oven on her body. She could smell all of his odors in the tent's stale air-testosterone, unwashed hair, shaving water that hadn't been thrown out, a thunder mug in a corner. She unbuttoned her coat and pulled her bandanna off her head and pushed her hair out of her eyes, as though she were rising out of dark water that was crushing the air from her lungs.
"She bit you and you beat her to death," Flower said.
"Now, hold on there." He looked at her open coat and at her hands and involuntarily backed away from her, knocking into the tent pole. The oil lamp clattered above his head.
She stepped toward him and saw his mouth open, his hand clench on the edge of the table.
"I can hurt you Fower. Don't make me do it," he said.
She gathered all the spittle in her mouth and spat it full in his face.
RAIN swept in sheets across the wetlands throughout the day, then the storm intensified and bolts of lightning trembled like white-hot wires in the heart of the swamp, igniting fires among the cypress trees. Long columns of smoke flattered across the canopy and hung on the fields and roads in a dirty gray vapor.
Flower told no one of her encounter with Rufus Atkins nor of the knowledge that had come to her about the nature of her mother's death in 1837. Who besides herself would care? she asked herself. What legal authority would concern itself with the murder of a slave woman twenty-eight years in the past?
But she knew the real reason for her silence and it was not one she would share, not even with herself, at least not until she had to.
The cap-and-ball revolver Abigail had bought from McCain's Hardware was wrapped in a piece of flannel under Flower's bed. She removed it and set it on the kitchen table and peeled back the cloth from the frame. The metal and brown grips glistened with oil; the caps were snug in the nipples of each loaded chamber. She touched the cylinder and the barrel with the balls of her fingers, then curved her hand around the grips. The cylindrical hardness that she cupped in her palm caused an image to flit across her mind that both embarrassed and excited her.
That evening the rain stopped, but fires still burned in the swamp and the air was wet and heavy with the smell of woodsmoke. She drove with Abigail in the buggy to the school, passing the saloon often frequented by Rufus Atkins. His black mare was tethered outside, and through the doorway she caught a glimpse of him standing at the bar, by himself, tilting a glass to his mouth.
That night she taught her classes, then extinguished all the lamps in the rooms and locked the doors to the building and climbed up on the buggy for the trip home.
"You're sure quiet these days," Abigail said.
"Weather's enough to get a person down," Flower said.
"Sure you haven't met a fellow?"
"I could go the rest of my life without seeing a man. No, I take that back. I could go two lifetimes without seeing one."
Both of them laughed.
By the drawbridge over the Teche they saw a crowd of workingmen from the Main Street saloon, Union soldiers, the sheriff, their faces lit like tallow under the street lamps. Two Negroes had tied a rope around a body that was caught in a pile of trash under the bridge. They pulled the body free, but the wrists were bound with wire and the wire snagged on the rootball of a submerged cypress tree. A barrel-chested, red-faced white man, with a constable's star pinned to his vest, rode his horse into the shallows and grabbed the end of the rope from the Negroes, twisted it around his pommel, and dragged the body, skittering like a log, up on dry ground.
The dead man was white, without shoes, his eyes sealed shut, the belt gone from his pants, the pockets turned inside out. His head rolled on his neck like a poppy gourd on a broken stem. The sheriff leaned over him with a lantern in his hand.
"They mark him?" someone in the crowd called out.
"On the forehead. 'K.W.C.,'" the sheriff said. Then the disgust grew in his face and he waved his arms angrily. "Y'all get out of here! This ain't your bidness! What kind of town we becoming here? If the Knights can do that to him, they can do it to us. Y'all t'ought of that?"
Abigail slapped the reins on her horse's rump and headed down the road toward Flower's house. She glanced back over her shoulder at the crowd by the bridge.
"Wasn't that the man who worked for Ira Jamison, what was his name, a posse was looking for him yesterday? He murdered his wife up at Angola Plantation," she said.
"Cain't really say. I've shut out a lot of bad things from Angola, Miss Abby," Flower replied.
Abigail looked at her curiously. "What are you hiding from me?" she asked.
FLOWER read in the front room of her house until late, getting up to fix tea, silhouetting against the lamp, twice stepping out on the gallery to look at the weather, the light from the doorway leaping into the yard. At midnight she heard the sounds o
f the saloon closing, the oak door being secured, shutters being latched, horses clopping on the road, men's voices calling out a final "good night" in the darkness.
But she saw no sign of Rufus Atkins.
She stood at the front window, the lamp burning behind her, until the road was empty, then blew out the lamp and sat in a chair with the cap-and-ball revolver in her lap and watched the sky clear and the moon rise above the fields.
The revolver rested across the tops of her thighs, and her fingers rested on the grips and coolness of the barrel. She felt no fear, only a strange sense of anticipation, as though she were discovering an aspect of herself she didn't know existed. She heard a wagon pass on the road, then the sounds of owls and tree frogs. The curtains fluttered on the windows and she smelled the odor of gardenias on the wind. In a secure part of her mind she knew she was falling asleep, but her physical state didn't seem important anymore. Her hand was cupped over the cylinder of the pistol, the back of the house locked up, the front door deliberately unbolted, cooking pots stacked against the jamb.