He felt her fingers stroking his hair, then he put his arms around her hips and pulled her body against his face and held her more tightly than was reasonable or dignified, burying his face in her stomach, touching the backs of her thighs now, raising his head to her breasts, gathering her dress in both his hands.
She lay down with him, and he kissed her mouth and eyes and neck and felt the roundness of her breasts and put his hand between her thighs, without shame or even embarrassment at the nakedness of his own need and dependence.
It was raining in the trees and the bayou, and he could smell grass burning inside the rain and hear the cough of the mortar round called Whistling Dick. He climbed between Abigail Dowling's thighs and kissed the tops of her breasts and put her nipples in his mouth, then kissed the flat taper of her stomach and raised himself up on his arms while she cupped his sex with her palm and placed it inside her.
He came a moment later, early on beyond any attempt at self-control, his eyes tightly shut. Inside his mind he saw an endless field of dead soldiers under a night sky rimmed by hills that looked like women's breasts. But even as his heart twisted inside him and his seed filled her womb, he knew the safe harbor and succor she had given him were an act of mercy, and the tenderness in her eyes and the caress of her thighs and the kiss he now felt on his cheek were the gifts granted to a needy supplicant and not to a lover.
He lay next to her and looked at the shadows on her face.
"I'm sorry my performance is not the kind Sir Walter Scott would have probably been interested in writing about," he said.
"Oh, no, you were fine," she said, and touched the top of his hand.
He stared at the ceiling, wondering why ineptitude seemed to follow him like a curse.
He heard a plank creak on the front gallery and a knock on the door.
"Miss Abigail, the Yankees set fire to the laundry. They attacked some girls in the quarters. You in there, Miss Abby?" the voice of Flower Jamison said.
Chapter Sixteen
FLOWER had to wait outside almost five minutes before Abigail Dowling finally came to the door. Then she saw Willie Burke step out of the bedroom into the glow of the living room lamp and her face tightened with embarrassment.
"I'm sorry. I reckon I caught y'all at supper," she said.
"Come in, Flower," Abigail said, holding back the door.
"How you do, Mr. Willie?" Flower said.
"Hello, Flower. It's good to see you again. Miss Abby says you've been doing splendidly with your lessons." His voice was thick, his cheeks pooled with color, as though he had a fever. His eyes did not quite meet hers.
"Thank you, suh," she said.
"What was that about the laundry?" Abigail asked.
"Some Yankees came across the fields and started pushing people out of the cabins. They drug a corn-shuck mattress behind the laundry and chased down some girls and drug them back there, too. When they were finished they lit a cannonball and threw it through the kitchen".
"Where'd they go?" Willie asked.
"To the saloon. They were carrying all the rum out the door."
"Did you see other troops? Soldiers in large numbers?" Willie asked.
"No," she said.
"You stay here tonight," Abigail said. "I'm going to take Mr. Willie to his mother's."
"Mr. Willie, you suppose to be in reg'lar clothes like that?" Flower said.
"Not exactly," he replied.
"Suh, there's bad things going on. Don't let them hurt you," she said.
"They're not interested in people like me," he said.
"I hid in the coulee, but I could hear what they were doing on the other side of the laundry. You don't want them to catch you, suh."
"You be good, Flower. The next time I see you, I'm going to have a new book for you," he said.
Please don't talk down to me, she thought. "Yes, suh. Thank you," she said.
Abigail and Willie walked out into the yard. Flower followed them as far as the gallery.
"Mr. Willie, put your uniform on," she said.
He grinned at her, then climbed into the buggy beside Abigail. Flower stood on the gallery and watched them ride away toward the center of town.
Miss Abby, aren't you a surprise? she thought.
The sky was red in the south, and pieces of burnt cane, like black thread, drifted into the yard. A riderless white horse cinched with a military saddle wandered in the street, its hooves stepping on the reins. The shutters and doors of every house on the street were latched shut.
By habit she did not sit down in a white person's home until she was in the kitchen. She wished she had taken her books and writing tablets from her cabin, and she wondered if the soldiers who had attacked the girls had found the box she kept under her bed and thrown its contents into the flames that had climbed out of the laundry's windows.
The fact that their uniforms were blue didn't matter, she thought.
Their kind hated books, just as the paddy rollers did and Clay Hatcher and Rufus Atkins did and all those who feared knowledge because of what it could reveal to others about themselves.
The cannon fire had stopped and there was no sound of either horses or wagons in the streets, but she believed the quietness outside and the easy sweep of wind in the trees were like the deceptions that had always characterized the world she had grown up in. Nothing was ever as it seemed. A child was born in a cabin to a mother and a father and believed it belonged to a family not totally unlike the one that lived in the columned house up on the hill. Then one day the mother or the father or perhaps the child was sold or traded, either for money or land or livestock, and no was supposed to take particular notice of the fact that the space occupied by a human being, made of flesh and blood, a member of a family, had been emptied in the time it took to sign a bill of sale.
But Flower had come to believe that moral insanity was not confined to people who lived in columned houses.
That day Yankee soldiers had come hot and dirty across a burned field, and while a Union flag flapped from a staff above their wagon, they had lined up to rape two fifteen-year-old girls whose mother was beaten back from the scene with a barrel slat.
Abigail Dowling loved human beings and nursed the dying and risked her life for the living and was detested as a traitor.
Willie Burke taught her to read and write. Then served in an army that had no higher purpose than to keep African people in bondage to ignorance and the overseer's lash.
She thought she had freed herself of her anger by helping other slaves escape up the Mississippi to Ohio. But an English poet in one of her books had used a term she couldn't forget. The term was "mind-forged manacles." They didn't get left on the banks of the Ohio River, she thought. They were the kind people carried to the grave.
What if she set about teaching others to read and write, just as Mr. Willie Burke had taught her, she thought. Each person she taught would in turn teach another, and that person another. If the Yankee soldier who stood guard in the hospital in New Orleans had not been murdered by Ira Jamison's men, she would have been able to give him what Mr. Willie had given her. But now she could create an even larger goal for herself. She could do something that was truly grand, influential in ways she had never imagined. By teaching one person at a time, she had the potential to empower large numbers of people to forever change their lives.
The thought made the blood rush to her head and she wondered if she was not indeed vainglorious and self-deluded. She heard the wind chimes tinkling on the gazebo and through the back window saw the moonlight inside the oak branches and shadows moving on the grass when the wind blew through the limbs overhead. Then a darkened steamboat passed on the bayou, its stacks blowing sparks on a roof, its wake slapping hard against the cypress trunks.
For just a moment she thought she saw the silhouette of a man on the bank, a stick figure backlit briefly by the red glow off the steamboat's stacks. She got up from the kitchen table and walked out into the yard. But the boat was g
one and the bayou was dark again, and all she could see along the bank were the heart-shaped tops of flooded elephant ears beaded with drops of water as fat as marbles.
She went back inside the kitchen and sat down at the table and put her head down on her arms. She wondered where Ira Jamison was. She wondered what he would do when Yankee soldiers swept across his lands and drove off or killed his livestock and fired his barns and cotton fields and freed his slaves and gutted the inside of his house and perhaps stacked his furniture in the front yard for burning. She wondered what he would have to say when he was powerless, sick, and alone.
Then she wondered why she even cared.
When would she ever free herself of the father who not only refused to recognize her but who in a letter to Nathan Forrest said he was "quite sick of being tended by unwashed niggers"?
Maybe one day some of them would tend him in hell, she thought.
But the clear, bright edges of her anger would not hold, and again she fell back into the self-hating thoughts that invaded her soul whenever she meditated long upon the name of Ira Jamison.
An image flicked past a side window, like a shard of light out of dream. She raised her head off her arms and stared out in the darkness, wondering if she had fallen asleep. The air smelled like leaves burning on a fall day. A twig snapped in the yard and she heard feet moving fast across the ground, then a shadow went across the kitchen window.
She locked down the boll on the back door and walked to the Iront of the cottage and stepped out on the gallery. She looked up and down the street, but no one was there and the only lamp burning on the block was in the house of a mad woman. Then the riderless white horse thundered across the lawn and crashed through banana trees into the street, its eyes bulging in a ripple of heat lightning across the sky.
She went into the kitchen and fired the woodstove, then uncovered the water barrel by the pantry and dipped an iron pot with a long handle into the water and set it on top of the stove lid.
She locked the door in the living room and sat down in a chair by the front window. She wished she had a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun, it didn't matter what kind. She had never held one in her hands, but for a lifetime she had watched white men handle them, take them apart, clean and oil them, load and cock and fire them, and she never doubted the degree of affection the owner of a gun had for his weapon nor the sense of control it gave him.
But Abigail Dowling owned no firearms and would allow none in her home. So Flower sat with her hands clenched in her lap, her heart beating, and wondered when Abigail would return home.
She heard a plank bend under someone's weight on the gallery. She waited for a knock, but there was only silence. The doorknob twisted and the door began to ease forward in the jamb before it caught against the deadbolt. Her heart hammered in her ears.
She rose from her chair. She could see no one in the yard and the angle of her vision prevented her from seeing who was on the gallery. She walked to the door and stood only inches from it, looking at the threadlike, cracked lines in the paint on the cypress boards, the exposed, square nailheads that were darkened with rust, a thimbleful of cobweb stuck behind a hinge. "Who is it?" she asked.
"Got a message from the aid station for Miss Abigail Dowling."
"She cain't come to the door right now."
"The surgeon don't have a nurse. He says for her to get down there."
"I'll tell her."
"She in the privy?"
"Who are you?"
But this time he didn't answer and she heard feet moving past the side window. She screwed down the wick in the living room oil lamp until the flame died, then hurried to the kitchen and took a butcher knife from a drawer. The fire glowed under the stove lids and the air was hot and close with the steam that curled off the pot she had set to boil. She stood motionless in the darkness, her clenched palm sweating on the wood handle of the knife.
The first man through the back door splintered it loose from the bolt with one full-bodied kick. Then he plunged into the kitchen with two other men behind him, all three of them wearing white cotton cloths with eye holes tied tightly across their faces. They went from room to room in the cottage as though she were not there, as though the knife in her hand were of no more significance than the fact she was a witness to a home invasion.
Then all three of them returned to the kitchen and stared at her through the holes in their masks. She could hear them breathing and smell the raw odor of corn liquor on their breaths.
"Where's she at?" one man said. He wheezed deep down in his chest.
"Not here."
"That's helpful," he said, and looked at the broken door. He pushed it back in place with his foot. He grabbed her wrist and swung her hand against the stove and knocked the butcher knife to the floor. "When will she be back?"
"When she feel like it."
The man looked at the steam rising off the pot on the stove. He coughed into his hand, then breathed hard, as though fighting for air, the cloth of his mask sucking into his mouth. "You making tea?" he asked.
She looked at the wall, her arms folded across her chest, her pulse jumping in her throat.
"Let's get out of here," a second man said.
"We got paid for a night's work. We ought to earn at least part of it," the first man said.
The three men looked at one another silently, as though considering a profound thought.
"Sounds good to me," the third man said.
They walked Flower into the bedroom, releasing her arms when they reached the bed, waiting, the night air outside filled with the singing of tree frogs.
"You want to undress or should we do it for you?" the first man said. He turned his head, lifted his mask briefly, and spit out the window. "Enjoy it, gal. We ain't bad men. Just doin' a piece of work."
For the next half hour she tried to find a place in her mind that was totally black, without light or sound or sensation of any kind, safe from the incessant coughing of a consumptive man an inch from her ear and the smell of chewing tobacco and testosterone that now seemed ironed on her skin. When the last man lifted his weight from her, the cloth across his face swung out from his mouth and his teeth made her think of kernels of yellow corn.
Chapter Seventeen
ABIGAIL and Willie rode in her buggy to his mother's small farm by Spanish Lake, five miles outside of town. The house was dark inside the overhang of the oak trees, and the animals were gone from the pens and the barn. The front door of the house gaped open, the broken latch hanging by a solitary nail. A dead chicken lay humped on the gallery, its feathers fluttering in the wind. Willie stepped inside the doorway and lit a candle on the kitchen table. The rows of dishes and cups and jars of preserves on the shelves were undisturbed, but the hearthstones had been prized out of the fireplace and several blackened bricks chipped loose with a sharp tool from inside the chimney.
"I've heard tell about jayhawkers in the area," Abigail said.
"This bunch wore blue uniforms. Jayhawkers would have taken the food," he replied.
His words lingered in the air, the syllables touched with an angry stain she couldn't associate with the boy she used to know.
The entire rural landscape seemed empty of people as well as livestock. The ground was powdered with white ash, the pecan orchards sculpted in the moonlight, the sky full of birds that never seemed to touch the earth. They passed Camp Pratt and looked at the deserted barracks and the wind wrinkling the surface of the lake. Across the water there was a red glow in the bottom of the sky. Briefly they heard the popping of small-arms fire, then it was quiet again and there was no sound except the wind and the creaking of the trees. "I'm sure your mother's all right," Abigail said. He didn't speak for a long time. She looked at the profile of his face, the darkness in his eyes, the way his civilian clothes seemed inappropriate on his body.
"Do you regret this evening?" he asked.
"Pardon?" she said, looking straight ahead.
"You hear right well w
hen you choose to."
"I don't do anything I don't wish to," she said. She could feel the intensity of his eyes on the side of her face.
"You're a damn poor liar, Abby."
"I know of no greater arrogance than for a man to tell a woman what she feels."
"Perhaps my experience is inadequate," he replied. The buggy rumbled across a wood bridge that spanned a coulee. A large, emaciated dog with a bad hind leg climbed out from under the bridge and ran crookedly into a cane field, a red bone in its mouth. "Hold up," Willie said.
He got down in the road and walked to the crest of the coulee. At the bottom of the slope, among the palmettos, were the bodies of three Union soldiers. Two lay facedown in the water, an entry wound in the back of each of their heads, the hair blown back against the scalp by the closeness of the muzzle blast. The third man lay on his side on the far bank, one eye staring back at Willie, the other covered by a black leather patch. The wrists of all three men had been tied behind them. Their weapons were gone and their pockets had been pulled inside out.