James Lee Burke - White Doves at Morning Read online

  They were called wage slaves, rented out by their owner, in this case, Ira Jamison, on an hourly basis. The taskmaster, a man named Rufus Atkins, rented a room at the boardinghouse and worked the Negroes in his charge unmercifully. Willie walked out into the misty softness of the morning, into the residual smell of night-blooming flowers and bream spawning in the bayou and trees dripping with dew, and tried to occupy his mind with better things than the likes of Rufus Atkins. But when he sat on a hole in the privy and heard Rufus Atkins driving and berating his charges, he wondered if there might be an exemption in heaven for the Negro who raked a cane knife across Atkins' throat.

  When Willie walked back up the slope and encountered Atkins on his way into breakfast, he touched his straw hat, fabricated a smile and said, "Top of the morning to you, sir."

  "And to you, Mr. Willie," Rufus Atkins replied.

  Then Willie's nemesis, his inability to keep his own counsel, caught up with him.

  "If words could flay, I'd bet you could take the hide off a fellow, Mr. Atkins," he said.

  "That's right clever of you, Mr. Willie. I'm sure you must entertain your mother at great length while tidying the house and carrying out slop jars for her."

  "Tell me, sir, since you're in a mood for profaning a fine morning, would you be liking your nose broken as well?" Willie inquired.

  AFTER the boarders had been fed, including Rufus Atkins, Willie helped his mother clean the table and scrape the dishes into a barrel of scraps that later they would take out to their farm by Spanish Lake and feed to their hogs. His mother, Ellen Lee, had thick, round, pink arms and brown hair that was turning gray, and a small Irish mouth and a cleft in her chin.

  "Did I hear you have words with Mr. Atkins?" she asked.

  Willie seemed to study the question. "I don't rightly recall. It may have been a distortion on the wind, perhaps," he replied.

  "You're a poor excuse for a liar," she said.

  He began washing dishes in the sink. But unfortunately she was not finished.

  "The times might be good for others but not always for us. Our livery is doing poorly, Willie. We need every boarder we can get," she said.

  "Would you like me to apologize?" he asked.

  "That's up to your conscience. Remember he's a Protestant and given to their ways. We have to forgive those whom chance and accident have denied access to the Faith."

  "You're right, Mother. There he goes now. I'll see if I can straighten things out," Willie replied, looking through the back window.

  He hurried out the door and touched Rufus Atkins on the sleeve.

  "Oh, excuse me, I didn't mean to startle you, Mr. Atkins," he said. "I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry for the sharpness of my tongue. I pray one day you find the Holy Roman Church and then die screaming for a priest."

  WHEN he came back into the house his mother said nothing to him, even though she had heard his remarks to Rufus Atkins through the window. But just before noon she found him in his reading place under a live oak by the bayou and pulled up a cane chair next to him and sat down with her palms propped on her knees.

  "What ails you, Willie?" she asked.

  "I was just a little out of sorts," he replied.

  "You've decided, haven't you?" she said.

  "What might that be?"

  "Oh, Willie, you're signing up for the army. This isn't our war," she said.

  "What should I do, stay home while others die?"

  She looked emptily at the bayou and a covey of ducklings fluttering on the water around their mother.

  "You'll get in trouble," she said.

  "Over what?"

  "You're cursed with the gift of Cassandra. For that reason you'll always be out of place and condemned by others."

  "Those are the myths that our Celtic ancestors used to console themselves for their poverty," he replied.

  She shook her head, knowing her exhortations were of little value. "I need you to fix the roof. What are your plans for today?" she asked.

  "To take my clothes to Ira Jamison's laundry."

  "And get in trouble with that black girl? Willie, tell me I haven't raised a lunatic for a son," she said.

  HE put a notebook with lined pages, a pencil, and a small collection of William Blake's poems in his pants pockets and rode his horse down Main Street. The town had been laid out along the serpentine contours of Bayou Teche, which took its name from an Atakapa Indian word that meant snake. The business district stretched from a brick warehouse on the bend, with huge iron doors and iron shutters over the windows, down to the Shadows, a two-story, pillared plantation home surrounded by live oaks whose shade was so deep the night-blooming flowers in the gardens often opened in the late afternoon.

  An Episcopalian church marked one religious end of the town, a Catholic church the other. On the street between the two churches shopkeepers swept the plank walks under their colonnades, a constable spaded up horse dung and tossed it into the back of a wagon, and a dozen or so soldiers from Camp Pratt, out by Spanish Lake, sat in the shade between two brick buildings, still drunk from the night before, flinging a pocketknife into the side of a packing case.

  Actually the word "soldier" didn't quite describe them, Willie thought. They had been mustered in as state militia, most of them outfitted in mismatched uniforms paid for by three or four Secessionist fanatics who owned cotton interests in the Red River parishes.

  The most ardent of these was Ira Jamison. His original farm, named Angola Plantation because of the geographical origins of its slaves, had expanded itself in ancillary fashion from the hilly brush country on a bend of the Mississippi River north of Baton Rouge to almost every agrarian enterprise in Louisiana, reaching as far away as a slave market in Memphis run by a man named Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  Willie rode his horse between the two buildings where the boys in militia uniforms lounged. Some were barefoot, some with their shirts off and pimples on their shoulders and skin as white as a frog's belly. One, who was perhaps six and a half feet tall, his fly partially buttoned, slept with a straw hat over his face.

  "You going to sign up today, Willie?" a boy said.

  "Actually Jefferson Davis was at our home only this morning, asking me the same thing," he replied. "Say, you boys wouldn't be wanting more whiskey or beer, would you?"

  One of them almost vomited. Another threw a dried horse turd at his back. But Willie took no offense. Most of them were poor, unlettered, brave and innocent at the same time, imbued with whatever vision of the world others created for them. When he glanced back over his shoulder they were playing mumblety-peg with their pocketknives.

  He was on a dirt road now, one that led southward into the sugarcane fields that stretched all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. He passed hog lot and slaughterhouse buzzing with bottle flies and a brick saloon with a railed bar inside, then a paint-skinned, two-story frame house with a sagging gallery that served as New Iberia's only bordello. The owner, Carrie LaRose, who some said had been in prison in the West Indies or France, had added a tent in the side yard, with cots inside, to handle the increase in business from Camp Pratt.

  A dark-haired chub of a girl in front of the tent scooped up her dress and lifted it high above her bloomers. "How about a ride, Willie? Only a dollar," she said.

  Willie raised himself in the saddle and removed his hat. "It's a terrible temptation, May, but I'd be stricken blind by your beauty and would never find my home or dear mother again," he said. The girl grinned broadly and was about to shout back a rejoinder, when she was startled by a young barefoot man, six and a half feet tall, running hard after Willie Burke.

  The tall youth vaulted onto the rump of Willie's horse, grabbing Willie around the sides for purchase while Willie's horse spooked sideways and almost caved with the additional weight.

  Willie could smell an odor like milk and freshly mowed hay in the tall youth's clothes.

  "You pass by without saying hello to your pal?" the young man said.

  "Hello,
Jim!"

  "Hello there, Willie!"

  "You get enough grog in you last night?" Willie asked.

  "Hardly," Jim replied. "Are you going to see that nigger girl again?"

  "It's a possibility. Care to come along?" Willie said. The young man named Jim had hair the color of straw and an angular, self-confident face that reflected neither judgment of himself nor others. He pulled slightly at the book that protruded from Willie's pocket and flipped his thumb along the edges of the pages.

  "What you're about to do is against the law, Willie," Jim said.

  Willie looked at the dust blowing out of the new sugarcane, a solitary drop of rain that made a star in the dust. "Smell the salt? It's a fine day, Jim. I think you should stay out of saloons for a spell," he said.

  "That girl is owned by Ira Jamison. He's not a man to fool with," Jim said.

  "Really, now?"

  "Join the Home Guards with me. You should see the Enfield rifles we uncrated yesterday. The Yankees come down here, by God we'll lighten their load."

  "I'm sure they're properly frightened at the prospect. You'd better drop off now, Jim. I don't want to get you in trouble with Marse Jamison," Willie said.

  Jim's silence made Willie truly wish for the first time that day he'd kept his own counsel. He felt Jim's hands let go of his sides, then heard his weight hit the dirt road. Willie turned to wave good-bye to his friend, sorry for his condescending attitude, even sorrier for the fear in his breast that he could barely conceal. But his friend did not look back.

  THE last house on the road was a ramshackle laundry owned by Ira Jamison, set between two spreading oaks, behind which Flower sat in an open-air wash shed, scrubbing stains out of a man's nightshirt, her face beaded with perspiration from the iron pots steaming around her. Her hair was black and straight, like an Indian's, her cheekbones pronounced, her skin the color of coffee with milk poured in it.

  She looked at the sun's place in the sky and set the shirt down in the boiling water again and went into the cypress cabin where she lived by the coulee and wiped her face and neck and underarms with a rag she dipped into a cypress bucket.

  From under her bed she removed the lined tablet and dictionary Willie had given her and sat in a chair by the window and read the lines she had written in the tablet:

  A owl flown acrost the moon late last night.

  A cricket sleeped on the pillow by my head.

  The gator down in the coulee look like dark stone when the sunlite turn red and spill out on the land.

  There is talk of a war. A free man of color who have a big house on the bayou say for the rest of us not to listen to no such talk. He own slaves hisself and makes bricks in a big oven.

  I learned to spell 3 new words this morning. Mr. Willie say not to write down hard words lessen I look them up first.

  A band played on the big lawn on the bayou yesterday. A man in a silk hat and purple suit tole the young soldiers they do not haf to worry about the Yankees cause the Yankees is cowards. The brass horns were gold in the sunshine. So was the sword the man in the silk hat and purple suit carry on his side.

  Mr. Willie say not to say aint. Not to say he dont or she dont either.

  This is all my thoughts for the day.

  Signed, Flower Jamison

  She heard Willie's horse in the yard and glanced around her cabin at the wildflowers she had cut and placed in a water jar that morning, her clean Sunday dress, which hung on a wood peg, the bedspread given to her by a white woman on Main, now tucked around the moss-stuffed mattress pad on her bed. When she stepped out the door Willie was swinging down from his horse, slipping a bag of dirty clothes loose from the pommel of his saddle.

  He smiled at her, then squinted up at the sunlight through the trees and glanced back casually at the house, as though he were simply taking in the morning and his surroundings with no particular thought in mind.

  "You by yourself today?" he asked.

  "Some other girls are ironing inside the big house. We iron inside so the dust don't get on the clothes," she said.

  "Could you give a fellow a drink of water?" he said.

  "I done made some lemonade," she replied, and waited for him to enter the cabin first.

  He removed his hat as though he were entering a white person's home, then sat in the chair at the table by the window and gazed wistfully out onto the young sugarcane bending in the breeze off the Gulf. His hair was combed but uncut and grew in black locks on his neck.

  "What did you write for us today, Flower?" he asked, his gaze still focused outside the cabin.

  She handed him her tablet, then stood motionlessly, her hands behind her.

  He put the tablet flat on the table and read what she had written, his elbows on the table, his fingers propped on his temples. His cheeks were shaved and pooled with color that never seemed to change in hue.

  "You look at the world only as a poet can," he said.

  He saw her lips say the word "poet" silently.

  "That's a person who sees radiance when others only see objects. That's you, Flower," he said.

  But she disregarded the compliment and felt the most important line she had written in the notebook was one he had not understood. In fact, she was not quite sure what she had meant when she made the entry. But the martial speech of the man in the silk hat still rang in her ears, and the hard gold light beating on his sword and the brass instruments of the band hovered before her eyes like the angry reflection off a heliograph.

  "Is there gonna be a war, Mr. Willie?" she asked.

  "Why don't you sit down? I'm getting a crick in my neck looking up at you," he said. "Look, y'all are going to be free one day. Peace or war, it's just a matter of time."

  "You gonna join the army, ain't you, suh?"

  In spite of his invitation she had made no movement to sit down at the table with him, which would have caused her to violate a protocol that was on a level with looking a white person directly in the face. But after having shown her obedience to a plantation code that systematically degraded her as well as others, she realized she was now, of her own volition, invading the privacy and perhaps exposing the weakness of a man she genuinely admired and was fond of.

  For just a moment she wondered if it was true, as white people always said, that slaves behaved morally only when they were afraid.

  "I try not to study on it," Willie replied. Then, as though to distract himself from his own thoughts, he told her of his father's participation in the Texas Revolution, the massacre of prisoners at Goliad, the intercession of a camp follower who probably saved his father's life.

  "A prostitute saved all them men from being killed?" she said.

  "She surely did. No one ever learned her name or what became of her. The Texans called her the Angel of Goliad. But think of the difference one poor woman made," he said.

  She sat down on her bed, her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap.

  "I ain't meant to be prying or rude. You're always kind to the niggers, Mr. Willie. You don't belong with them others," she said.

  "Don't call your people niggers," he said.

  "It's the only name we got," she said, with a sharpness in her voice that surprised her. "You gonna let the Yankees kill you so men like Marse Jamison can make more money off their cotton? You gonna let them do that to you, suh?"

  "I think I should go now. Here, I brought you a book of poems. They're by an English poet named William Blake." He rose from his chair and offered her the book.

  But she wasn't listening now. Her gaze was fixed outside the door. Through the crisscross of wash lines and steam drifting off the wash pots scattered throughout the yard, she saw Rufus Atkins rein his carriage, one with a surrey on top, and dismount and tether his horse to an iron weight attached to a leather strap he let slide through his fingers.

  "You best go, Mr. Willie," she said.

  "Has Mr. Rufus been bothering you, Flower?"

  "I ain't said that."

  "Mr. R
ufus is a coward. His kind always are. If he hurts you, you tell me about it, you hear?"

  "What you gonna do, suh? What you gonna do?" she said.

  He started to speak, then crimped his lips together and was silent.

  AFTER he was gone she sat by herself in the cabin, her heart beating, her breasts rising and falling in the silence. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rufus Atkins' silhouette break across the light.

  He stepped inside the cabin, his wide-brimmed hat on his head, his gaze sweeping over the room, the taut bedspread on her mattress, the jug of lemonade on her table, the cut flowers in the water jar.