White Doves at Morning

She moved into an unpainted cypress cabin in the trees behind Amilia Dowling's house and did housework for wages. For a brief time she sorted mail for a nickel an hour at the post office, then was let go, with a sincere apology from the postmaster, Mr. LeBlanc, because he felt obligated to give the work to a woman whose husband had been killed at Petersburg.

  Many of the Confederate soldiers from New Iberia returned home before the Surrender, either as paroled prisoners of war with chronic diseases or wounds that would not allow them to serve as noncombatants. Flower thought she would have little sympathy for them, regardless of the degree of their suffering. Why should she? she asked herself. The flag they had fought under should have been emblazoned with the overseer's lash rather than the Stars and Bars, she thought. But when she saw them on the street, or sitting on benches among the oaks in the small park across the bayou, the injuries done to some of them were so visibly grievous she had to force herself not to flinch or swallow in their presence and hence add to the burden they already carried.

  Since the rape her anger had become her means of defense and survival. She fed it daily so that it lived inside her like a bright, clean flame that she would one day draw upon, like a blacksmith extracting a white-hot iron from a furnace. It was her anger and the possibilities of revenge that allowed her to avoid a life of victimhood. But an incident in the park almost robbed her of it.

  An ex-soldier who had lost his eyes, his nose, and his chin to an exploding artillery shell was escorted each evening to the park by a child. A veil of black gauze hung from his brow, covering his destroyed face, but the wind blew it aside once and what Flower saw in a period of less than three seconds made her stomach constrict.

  One week later, on a Sunday afternoon, when the park was almost deserted, the child wandered off. Rain began to patter on the trees, and the soldier rose to his feet and tried to tap his way with a cane to the drawbridge. From across the bayou Flower saw him trip and fall, then gather himself up and walk in the wrong direction.

  She crossed the bridge and took him by the arm. It felt as light as a stick in her hand.

  "I can take you home if you tell me where you live," she said. "That's very good of you, ma'am. I stay with my father and mother, just behind St. Peter's," he said.

  The two of them walked the length ot Main Street, then went through a brick alley toward the Catholic church.

  "There's a cafe here on the corner. They have coffee. I'd love to treat you to a cup," the soldier said.

  "I'm colored, suh."

  The ex-soldier stopped, the gauze molded damply against the skeletal outline of his face. He seemed to be staring into the distance, although Flower knew he had no eyes.

  "I see," he said. "Well, everyone looks the same to me these days, and you seem a very sweet person to whom I'm greatly indebted. I'm sure my mother has tea on the stove, if you would join me."

  She refused his invitation and told herself she could not look any longer upon his suffering. But in the secret chambers of the heart she knew that the pity he inspired in her was her enemy and the day the clean and comforting flame of her anger died would be the day that every bruise and probing act of the hand and tongue and phallus visited upon her by the three rapists would take on a second life and not only occupy her dreams but come aborning in her waking day.

  She and Abigail had driven out in the country with the revolver Abigail had bought at the hardware store. An elderly Frenchman who lived in a houseboat on the bayou and spoke no English showed them how to remove the cylinder from the frame and pour powder and drop the conically shaped.36 caliber balls in each of the chambers and tamp down the wadding on top of the ball with the mechanical rod inset under the barrel and insert the percussion caps in the nipples of the chambers. Then he stepped back on the bank as though he were not sure in which direction they might shoot.

  Abigail aimed at a dead cypress across the bayou and fired. The ball grazed an iron mooring plate nailed to a nearby oak and whined away in a field. She cocked the hammer with both thumbs, squinted one eye, and fired a second time. The ball popped a spout of water out of the middle of the bayou and clattered into a canebrake.

  Abigail blinked her eyes and lowered the revolver, opening her mouth to clear her ears, then handed the revolver to Flower. "I think I'd have better luck throwing it at someone," she said.

  Flower extended the revolver with both hands in front of her. The steel frame and wood grips felt cool and hard and solid in her palms as she forced back the hammer. But unlike Abigail, she didn't try to sight down the barrel at the cypress; she simply pointed, like a finger of accusation, and pulled the trigger.

  The ball struck dead center.

  She fire'd the remaining three rounds, each time notching wood out of the tree. Her palms stung and her ears were ringing when she lowered the revolver, but she felt a sense of power and control that was almost sexual.

  "I'd like to keep the gun at my house, Miss Abby," she said on the way back to town.

  "Maybe I should keep it for both of us," Abby said.

  "Hitting a man with a buggy whip is a long way from being able to kill somebody."

  "You're right, it is, and I think you're too willing to do that, Flower," Abby said. She turned and looked into Flower's face.

  "You worry for my soul?" Flower asked.

  "The commandment is that we don't kill one another," Abigail said.

  "Rufus Atkins and those men who raped me already tried to take my soul. They wanted to take my soul, my heart, my self-respect, my mind, my private thoughts, everything that was me. If they could, they would have pulled off my skin. Pray to God men like that never get their hands on you, Miss Abby."

  They rode in silence the rest of the way to the cottage. But that evening Abigail carried the pistol and the gunpowder, bullets, and caps for it to Flower's cabin.

  "I was unctuous at your expense. There's no worse kind of fool," she said, and handed the gun and ammunition through the door.

  In the evenings and at night Flower read. She now had sixteen books in what she called her "li'l library," the books propped up neatly on her writing table between two bricks she had wrapped and sewn with pieces cut out of a red velvet curtain a white woman down the street had thrown away. Some of the books were leather-bound, some had no covers at all; many of the pages in her dictionary were dog-eared and loose in the binding. Each day in her journal she recorded the number of pages she had read, the new words she had learned, and her observations about characters and events that struck her as singular.

  Some of her entries:

  "Mr. Melville must have known his Bible. Ishmael and Hagar were cast out and unwanted and I think that is why the story of Moby Dick is told by a sailor with the name of Ishmael. I think Mr. Melville must have been a lonely man."

  "I like Mr. Poe. But nobody can tell a story like Mr. Hawthorne. He tells us about the Puritans but what he tells us most about is ourself."

  "I saw ball lightning in the swamp last night. It looked like a mess of electric snakes rolling across the water, bouncing off the trees. I wish I could write about it in a way other people could see it but I cannot."

  For the remainder of the war she did not see Rufus Atkins or Ira Jamison. As with the mutilated ex-soldier, she sometimes experienced feelings for Jamison that made her angry at herself and ashamed of her own capacity for self-delusion. When she had last seen him, on the lawn at the Shadows, he had walked her to the street, his hand biting into her arm, and had fastened the gate behind her, without speaking, as though he were locking an animal out of the yard. But she found excuses for him. Hadn't she deliberately embarrassed him in front of his friends, making him somehow the instrument of the assault on her person rather than his overseer, Rufus Atkins? In fact, for just a moment, she had enjoyed her role as victim. For once she had left him speechless and awkward and foolish in front of others.

  But just when she had almost convinced herself that the problem was perhaps hers, not his, and hence her attachment to him wa
s not a form of self-abasement, she remembered the hospital in New Orleans, Jamison's letter to General Forrest referring to the "unwashed niggers" who tended him, and the murder by his men of the young Union sentry. Then she burned with shame at her own vulnerability.

  In moments like these she emptied her mind of thoughts about her father by concentrating her anger on the men who had raped her. Each day she hoped she would recognize one of them on the street. It should have been easy. Each was defective or impaired in some fashion. But the rapists seemed to have disappeared into the war, into the broad sweep of the countryside and the detritus of armies whose purposes made less and less sense. The injury done to her had become just another account among many told by the victims of Union soldiers, jayhawkers, Confederate guerrillas, stray minie balls and artillery rounds and naval mines, or wildfires that burned homes and cabins and barns to charcoal.

  Most of the Yankee soldiers had gone somewhere up in the Red River parishes. The windows of their paddle-wheelers, headed up the Teche with supplies, were darkened at night because of sniper fire from guerrillas, but otherwise the war had simply gone away. Flower came to believe wars didn't end. People just got tired of them and didn't participate in them for a while.

  On a Sunday in April 1865 she was sitting on a bench in the park when she picked up a discarded New Orleans newspaper and read an article that perhaps told more about the future of her race than she wanted to know. The article was about Ira Jamison and described his wounding at Shiloh and how his slaves had fled their master's protection and goodwill after his fields and storehouses had been burned by Yankees. But Flower sensed the article was more a promotion for a new enterprise than a laudatory account about her father. Ira Jamison was transforming Angola Plantation into a penal farm and would soon be in the business of leasing convict labor on a large scale.

  The writer of the article said most of the convicts sentenced to Angola came from the enormous population of Negro criminals who had been empowered by the Freedmen's Bureau and turned loose upon the law-abiding whites of Louisiana. The writer also said the cost of convict labor would be far less than the cost of maintaining what he termed "servants in the old system."

  A shadow fell across the page she was reading. She turned and looked up at the face of Todd McCain, the hardware store owner on Main Street. He had just come from church and was wearing a narrow-cut suit with a vest that made him sweat and a stiff white shirt with a high collar and one of the new bowler hats.

  "I heard you could read," he said.

  She folded the newspaper on her lap and looked through the oak trees at the sunlight on the bayou. His loins brushed the top of the backrest on the bench.

  "I read that same article this morning. I don't agree with everything that's in it. But there's a mess of criminals out there belong on a chain gang, you ask me," he said.

  "I d like to read my paper, suh," she said.

  "I got a lot of colored customers nowadays. I could use a clerk. I'll pay you fifty cents a day."

  "Please leave me alone."

  It was quiet a long time. "You're an uppity bitch, ain't you?" he said.

  "Bother me again and find out," she replied.

  "What did you say?"

  She rose from the bench and walked out of the coolness of the trees into the sunlight, hating herself for her rashness. When she got to the drawbridge and looked over her shoulder, Todd McCain was still watching her.

  ABIGAIL did not believe in omens, but sometimes she wondered if human events and the ways of the season and four-footed animals and winged creatures did not conspire to weave patterns whose portent for good or evil was undeniable. If God revealed His will in Scripture, should He be proscribed from revealing it in His creations?

  The azaleas and wisteria were in bloom, the destroyed countryside greening from the spring rains, and the telegraphic news bulletins from Virginia all indicated the same conclusion-that the surrender would come any day and all the soldiers who had survived the war, including Robert Perry, would soon be on their way home.

  But instead of joy she felt a sense of quiet trepidation that seemed to have no origin. The night she heard that General Lee had given it up at Appomattox Courthouse she dreamed of carrion birds in a sulfurous sky and woke in the darkness, her heart beating, her ears filled with the sound of throbbing wings.

  She went to the window and realized her dream of birds was not a dream at all. There were hundreds of them in the trees, cawing, defecating whitely on the ground, their feathers a purplish-black in the moonlight. They flew blindly about, without direction, thudding into the sides of her cottage, freckling the sky and settling into the trees again. One struck the window with such force she thought the glass would break.

  In the morning she pulled on a pair of work gloves and went outside with a burlap sack and began picking dead birds off the ground.

  All of them were crows, their layered feathers traced with lines of tiny white parasites. They were as light as air in her hands, as though they had been hollowed out by disease, and she knew they had either starved to death or in their hunger broken their necks seeking food.

  She dug a deep hole and buried the burlap sack and covered it with bricks so animals would not dig it up.

  If birds could not find provender in a tropical environment like southern Louisiana, what must the rest of the South be like? she asked herself.

  At noon she walked to the post office to get her mail, unable to rid herself of a sense of foreboding that made her wonder if she was coming down with a sickness. Mr. LeBlanc, the postmaster, stood up behind his desk at the rear of the building and put on his coat and came from behind the counter, an envelope in his hand. He had aged dramatically since the death of his son at Manassas Junction, but he never discussed his loss or showed any public sign of grief or indicated any bitterness toward those who had killed him. When Abigail looked at the deep lines in his face, she wanted to press his hands in hers and tell him it was all right to feel anger and rage against those who had caused the war, but she knew her statement would be met with silence.

  Seated on a bench in the corner, hardly noticeable in the gloom, was a thin, solemn-faced boy in his early teens, wearing brown homespun, a Confederate-issue kepi, and oversized workshoes that had chaffed his ankles. A choke sack containing his belongings sat by his foot. Mr. LeBlanc studied him for a moment as though the boy were an ongoing problem he had not found a solution for. Then his attention shifted back to Abigail.

  "Do you know any way to contact Willie Burke?" he asked.

  "No, I've heard nothing from him in months," she replied.

  "I received a telegraph message for him this morning. I don't quite know what to do. His mother died in New Orleans."

  "Sir?" Abby said.

  "She went there to file a claim as a British subject. Something about getting paid for livestock the Yankees appropriated at her farm. She contracted pneumonia and died in the hospital. Do you want to sign for the telegram?"

  "No."

  He looked at her blankly. "I guess I can hold on to it," he said.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. LaBlanc. I'm just not thinking very clearly right now."

  "I have a letter for you from Johnson Island, Ohio. Maybe it's a little brighter in content," Mr. LeBlanc said.

  "You do?" she said, her face lighting.

  "Of course," he said, smiling.

  Before he could speak further, she hurried out the door, tearing at the envelope's seal with her thumb.

  "Miss Abigail, would you talk with me for a minute or two after you've read your mail?" he called after her.

  She sat on a bench under a colonnade where the stage passengers waited and read the letter that had been written in a prisoner of war camp in Ohio.

  Dear Abby,

  Thank you for sending me the hat and suit of clothes. They are the exact size and right color (gray) and have been sorely needed, as my uniform had deteriorated into rags. As always, you have proved remarkable in all your endeavors.
br />   But your letters continue to confuse me. You seem to be harboring a guilt of some kind, as though you've done me injury. Nothing could be farther from the truth. You are a true and compassionate and loyal friend. Who could have a better spiritual companion than one such as yourself?

  Do you hear from Willie? Even though he has seen much of war, I think he has never gotten over the death of our friend Jim Stubbefield.

  She folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope without finishing it. Robert Perry's words were like acid on her skin. Not only did they exacerbate her guilt over her self-perceived infidelity, the term "spiritual companion" reduced her to a presumption, an adjunct in Robert's life rather than a participant.

  Why had she stayed in Louisiana? she asked herself. But she already knew the answer, and it had to do with her father and it made, her wonder about her level of maturity. Sometimes she missed him in a way that was almost intolerable. In an unguarded moment, when the world surrounded her and her own resolve was not sufficient to deal with it, the image of his broad, jolly face and big shoulders and pipe-smelling clothes would invade her mind and her eyes would begin to film.