White Doves at Morning Page 7

  She awoke in a stupor, unsure of where she was, and for just a moment she thought she heard Robert's voice in the room. She pulled her dress over her head and flung it on the floor and, dressed only in her underthings, went into the backyard and opened the valve on the elevated cistern that fed trapped rainwater into the bathhouse.

  She closed the bathhouse door behind her, stripped off her undergarments, and sat in the tub while the wood sluice that protruded through the wall poured water over her head and shoulders and breasts. It was late afternoon now, almost evening, and the light breaking through the trees was green and gold and spinning with motes of dust. Somewhere a bird was singing. ,

  You don't know that he's dead, she told herself. '

  But when she closed her eyes she saw shells bursting in a field, geysering dirt into the air, while men crouched in the bottom of a trench and prayed and begged and pressed their palms against their ears.

  Poseur, she thought. Self-anointed bride of Christ, walking among the afflicted. Hypocrite. Angel of Death.

  She put her head down and wept.

  LATER, she opened all the windows of her house to let in the evening's coolness and tried to sort out her thoughts but could not. Her skin felt dead to the touch, her heart sick, as though it had been invaded by invisible worms. She thought she understood why primitive people during, mourning rituals, tore their hair and gouged their bodies with stone knives. She lit an oil lamp on her living room table and began a letter to a Quaker church in Bradford, Massachusetts, resigning her title of deacon.

  Then she saw a man walk into her yard, wearing a gray officer's uniform and a soft white hat. He removed his hat when he stepped onto the gallery, and knocked on her door.

  "Mr. Jamison?" she said.

  "Yes. I was visiting in town and heard of your distress. Your neighbors and friends were concerned but didn't want to show a disrespect for your privacy. So I thought I should call upon you," he said.

  "Please come in," she said.

  He stood in the middle of the living room, his face rosy in the light from the oil lamp, his thick hair touching his collar.

  "I understand you've been longtime friends with Robert Perry," he said.

  "Yes, that's correct," she replied.

  "Are you and Lieutenant Perry engaged, Miss Abigail?"

  "No, we're not," she said, clearing her throat. "Could I offer you some tea?"

  "No, thank you." He smiled self-effacingly. "I arrived at your door in a peculiar fashion. By steamboat. Would you take a ride with me?"

  She turned and saw out the back window the lighted compartments and decks of a huge boat, with paddle wheels on both its starboard and port sides; a roped gangway extended from the deck to the bank.

  "The cook has prepared some dinner for us. It's a beautiful evening. As I told you, I'm a widower. It took me some time to learn it's not good to lock ourselves up with our losses," he said.

  The dining room on the steamboat was aft, and through the back windows, in the failing summer light, she could see the boat's wake swelling through the cypress trees and live oaks and elephant ears along the bayou's banks. Ira Jamison poured a glass of burgundy for her.

  "I wasn't aware you were in the army," she said.

  "I've taken a commission in the Orleans Guards. Actually I attended the United States Military Academy with the intention of becoming an engineer but after my mother's death I had to take over the family's business affairs," he replied.

  "Is it true you're instituting some reforms on your plantations?" she said.

  "It hurts nothing to make life a little better for others when you have means and opportunity. I wish I'd done so earlier. No one has to convince me slavery is evil, Miss Abigail. But I don't have an easy solution for it, either," he said.

  When he turned toward the galley, looking for the waiter, she studied his profile, the lack of any guile in his eyes, the smooth texture of his complexion, which did not seem consistent with his age.

  He looked back at her, his eyes curious, resting momentarily on her mouth.

  "You don't like the wine?" he asked.

  "No, it's fine. I don't drink often. I'm afraid I have no appetite, either," she replied.

  He moved her glass aside and folded his hands on top of the tablecloth. They were slender, unfreckled by the sun, each nail pink and trimmed and rounded and scraped clean of any dirt. For a moment she thought he was going to place one hand over hers, which would have both embarrassed and disappointed her, but he did not.

  "Perhaps Lieutenant Perry is a prisoner or simply separated from his regiment. I haven't been to war, but I understand it happens often," he said.

  She rose from her chair and walked to the open French doors gave onto the fantail of the boat.

  "Did I upset you?" he asked behind her.

  "No, no, not at all, sir. You've been very kind. Thank you also for ensuring that your employee did not harm Flower again," she said.

  There was a brief silence. For a moment she thought he had not heard her above the throb of the boat's engines.

  "Oh yes, certainly. Well, let's get our pilot to turn around and we'll dine another evening. It's been a trying day for you," he said.

  She felt his hand touch her lightly between the shoulder blades.

  THE next morning she went to the small brick building on Main that served as stage station and telegraph and post office. Mr. LeBlanc sat behind the counter, his eyeshade fastened on his forehead, garters on his white sleeves, sorting newspapers from Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Atlanta that he would later place in the pigeonholes for the addressees.

  He had married a much younger woman and their son had been born when Mr. LeBlanc was fifty-two. He was a religious man and had opposed Secession and had dearly loved his son. Abigail imagined that his struggle with bitterness and anger must have been almost intolerable. But he held himself erect and his clothes were freshly pressed, his steel-gray hair combed, his grief buried like a dead coal in his face.

  "I'm sorry for your loss, Mr. LeBlanc," Abigail said.

  "Thank you. May I get your mail for you?" he said, rising from his chair without waiting for an answer.

  "Have you heard anything else about casualties among the 8th Louisiana Volunteers?" she said.

  "There's been no other news. The Yankees were chased into Washington. That brings joy to some." Then he seemed to lose his train of thought. "Are you a subscriber to one of the papers? I can't remember."

  He hunted through the pile of newspapers on his desk, his concentration gone.

  "It's all right, Mr. LeBlanc. I'll come back later. Sir? Please, it's all right," she said.

  She went back outside and walked up the street toward her house, staying in the shade under the colonnade. Men tipped their hats to her and women stepped aside to let her pass, more deferentially and graciously than ordinary courtesy would have required of them. Her face burned and sweat rolled down her sides. Again she felt a sense of odium and duplicity about herself she had never experienced before and heard the word traitor inside her head, just as if someone had whispered the word close to her ear.

  That evening Ira Jamison was at her door again, this time with a carriage parked in front. He was out of uniform, dressed in white pants and black boots and a green coat.

  "I thought you might like to take a ride into the country," he said.

  "Not this evening," she replied.

  "I see." He looked wistfully down the street, his face melancholy in the twilight. A mule-drawn wagon, mounted with a perforated water tank, was sprinkling the dust in the street. "I worry about you, Miss Abigail. I've read a bit about what some physicians are now terming 'depression.' It's a bad business."

  He looked at her in a concerned way.

  "Come in, Mr. Jamison," she said.

  After he was inside, she did not notice the glance he gave to his driver, who snapped the reins on the backs of his team and turned the carriage in the street and drove it back toward the business district.


  He sat by her on the couch. The wind rustled the oak trees outside and blew the curtains on the windows. She saw heat lightning flicker in the yard, then heard raindrops begin ticking in the leaves and on the roof.

  "I'll do whatever I can to help find the whereabouts of Robert Perry," he said.

  "I'd appreciate it very much, Mr. Jamison."

  "This may be an inappropriate time to say this, but I think you're a lady of virtue and principle, and also one who's incredibly beautiful. Whatever resources I have, they'll be made immediately available to you whenever you're in need, for whatever reason, regardless of the situation."

  She was sitting on the edge of the couch, her shoulders slightly bent, her hands in her lap. She could feel the emotional fatigue of the last two days wash through her, almost like a drug. Her eyes started to film.

  "It's all right," he said, his arm slipping around her.

  He leaned across her and pulled her against him and spread his fingers on her back, pressing his cheek slightly to hers. Then she felt his lips touch her hair and his hand stroking her back, and she placed her hands on the firmness of his arms and let her forehead rest on his chest.

  He tilted her face up and kissed her lightly on the mouth, then on the eyes and cheeks and the mouth again, and she put her arms around his neck and held him tighter than she should, letting go, surrendering to it, the heat and wetness in her own body now a balm to her soul rather than a threat, the wind blowing the curtains and filling the room with the smell of rain and flowers.

  He extinguished the oil lamp and laid her back on the couch. He bent down over her and she felt his tongue enter her mouth, his hand cup one breast, then the other, and slide down her stomach toward her thighs. His breath was hoarse in his throat. He pressed her leg against the swelling hardness in his pants.

  She twisted her face away from him and sat up, her hands clenched in her lap.

  "Please go, Mr. Jamison," she said.

  "I'm sorry if I've done something wrong, Miss Abigail."

  "The fault isn't yours," she replied.

  He hesitated a moment, then stood up and pushed his hair out of his eyes.

  "If I can make this up-" he began.

  "You need to fetch your driver, sir. Thank you for your kind offer of assistance," she said.

  For the first time she realized one of his eyes was smaller than the other. She did not know why that detail stuck in her mind.

  That night she woke feverish and sweaty and tangled in her sheets, her head filled with images from a dream about a sow eating her farrow. She did not fall asleep again until dawn.

  TWO days later she was walking home from the grocery, stepping around mud puddles in the street, an overly loaded wicker basket in each of her hands. Rufus Atkins stopped his buggy and got down and tried to take one of the baskets from her.

  "Don't do that," she said.

  "Marse Jamison says to look after you," Atkins said.

  "Take your hand off my basket."

  "Sorry, Miss Abigail. I got my orders." He winked at her, then pulled the basket from her hand and swung it up behind the buggy seat. He reached for the other basket.

  "He has also ordered you to stop molesting women in this community," she said.

  "What are you talking about?" Atkins asked.

  "The telegraph message he sent you."

  "He didn't send me a telegraph message. He told me something about not letting the overseers impregnate any of the wenches. But be didn't send me a telegraph message."

  She stared at him blankly.

  Atkins laughed to himself. "Look, Miss Dowling, I don't know what kind of confusion you're under, but Marse Jamison is giving the niggers a little self-government so's he can get himself installed in Jefferson Davis' cabinet. Davis is famous for the nigger councils on his plantations. Is this what you're talking about?"

  "Give my back my basket," she said.

  "By all means. Excuse me for stopping. But your nose was so high up in the air I thought you might walk into a post and knock yourself unconscious," he said.

  He dropped her grocery basket in the mud and drove off, popping his buggy whip above the back of his horse.

  TWO weeks later the Confederate War Department notified the parents of Robert Perry their son had been separated from his regiment during the Battle of Manassas Junction and that he was alive and well and back among his comrades.

  That same night, while the moon was down, Abigail Dowling rowed a runaway slave woman and her two small children to a waiting boat, just north of Vermilion Bay. All three of them were owned by Ira Jamison.

  Chapter Six

  IN THE spring of the following year, 1862, Willie and Jim marched northward, at the rear of the column, along a meandering road through miles of cotton acreage, paintless shacks, barns, corn cribs, smokehouses, privies, tobacco sheds cobbled together from split logs, and hog pens whose stench made their eyes water.

  The people were not simply poor. Their front porches buzzed with horseflies and mosquitoes. The hides of their draft animals were lesioned with sores. The beards of the men grew to their navels and their clothes hung in rags on their bodies. The children were rheumy-eyed and had bowed legs from rickets, their faces flecked with gnats. The women were hard-bitten, dirt-grained creatures from the fields, surly and joyless and resentful of their childbearing and apt to take an ax to the desperate man who tried to put a fond hand on their persons.

  Willie looked around him and nodded. So this is why we came to Tennessee, he thought.

  Two months earlier he and Jim had been on leave from the 18th Louisiana at Camp Moore and had stood in front of a saloon on upper St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, dipping beer out of a bucket, watching other soldiers march under the canopy of live oaks, past columned homes with ceiling-high windows and ventilated green shutters, regimental bands playing, the Stars and Bars and Bonnie Blue flags flying, barefoot Negro children running under the colonnades, pretending they were shooting one another with broomsticks and wood pistols.

  It was a false spring and the air was balmy and filled with the smells of boiled crawfish and crabs and pralines. The sky was ribbed with pink clouds, and palm fronds and banana trees rattled in the breeze off Lake Pontchartrain. Out on the Mississippi giant paddle-wheelers blew their whistles in tribute to the thousands of soldiers turning out of St. Charles into Canal, the silver and gold instruments of the bands flashing in full sunlight now, the mounted Zouaves dressed like Bedouins in white turbans and baggy scarlet pants.

  Women threw flowers off the balconies into the columns of marching men. Prostitutes from Congo Square winked at them from under their parasols and sometimes hoisted their skirts up to their thighs and beyond.

  "Maybe there's something glorious about war after all," Jim said.

  "We might have to rethink that statement later on, Jim," Willie replied.

  "I hear a trip to Congo Square is two dollars," Jim said.

  "The fee for the doctor to stick an eight-inch hot needle up your pole is an additional three," Willie said.

  "If I had a lady like Abigail Dowling on my mind, I'd have the same elevated sentiments." Jim looked at the prostitutes hiking their skirts across the boulevard and sucked his teeth philosophically. "But I'm afraid my virginity is going to die a beautiful and natural death in old New Orleans tonight."

  Now New Orleans was surrounded by Federal gunboats and the city's surrender was expected any day.

  Where were Louisiana's troops? Willie asked himself.

  In Tennessee, protecting hog farmers and their wives, one glance at whom would make any man seriously consider a life of celibacy, Willie said to himself.

  As the column crested a rise he could see the great serpentine length of the army he was marching in, the mismatched gray and butternut uniforms, some regiments,

  like his own, actually wearing blue jackets, all of them heading toward a distant woods on the west bank of the Tennessee River.

  But his deprecating thoughts about
his surroundings and the governance of the Confederate military were not the true cause of his discontent. Nor did he think any longer about the heaviness of the Enfield rifle on his shoulder or the blisters on his feet or the dust that drifted back from the wheels of the ambulance wagons.

  In the pit of his stomach was an emptiness he could not fill or rid himself of. When the sun broke through the clouds that had sealed the sky for days, lighting the hardwood forest in the distance, a bilious liquid surged out of his stomach into the back of his mouth and his bowels slid in and out of his rectum. A vinegary reek rose from his armpits into his nostrils, not the smell of ordinary sweat that comes from work or even tramping miles along a hard-packed dirt road, but the undisguised glandular stench of fear.