James Burke - White Doves at Morning

"I'm confused. You want absolution for a murder you committed?"

"You ain't listening. The other woman in my cell was a cutpurse. I done sexual t'ings for the jailer so he'd take her 'stead of me. I go over it in my head again and again, but each time it comes out the same way. In my t'oughts I still want to live and I want that woman to die so I ain't got to lay my head down under that blade way up at the top of the scaffold. So in troot I ain't really sorry for sending her to the headsman 'stead of me. That means I ain't never gonna have no peace."

The priest's silhouette was tilted forward on his thumb and forefinger.He seemed to rock back and forth, as though teetering on the edge of a thought or an angry moment. Then he closed the slide on the partition and rose from his seat and left the confessional.

She sat motionless in her chair, the walls around her like an upended coffin. Sweat ran down her sides and an odor like sour milk seemed to rise from her clothes. A hand that trembled so badly it could hardly find purchase gripped the edge of the curtain and jerked it back.

"Step out here with me," the priest said, and gestured for her to take a seat in a pew by a rack of burning candles.

He sat down next to her, his small hands knotted on his thighs. The rack of votive candles behind him glittered like a hundred points of blue light.

"You don't have to sort through these things with a garden rake. You just have to be sorry for having done them and change your way. God doesn't forgive incrementally. His forgiveness is absolute," the priest said.

He saw her forming the world "incrementally" with her lips.

"He doesn't forgive partway. You're forgiven, absolved, as of this moment," the priest said.

"What about the house I run?"

"You might consider a vocational adjustment."

"Ain't no one tole it to me this way befo'," she said.

"Come back and see me," he said.

The following night was Sunday, and the mutton-chopped, potbellied Union major was back at the bordello, charging his liquor and the use of Carrie's best girl to his bill.

"You're not still mad at me, are you, Carrie? Over my unpaid bill and that sort of thing?" he said. He held a dark green wine bottle in one hand and a glass filled with burgundy in the other. One button on his fly was undone and his underwear showed through the opening.

She was sitting in a rocker on the gallery, fanning herself, while heat lightning bloomed in the clouds. An oppressive weight seemed to be crushing down on her chest, causing her to constantly straighten her back in order to breathe.

"I'm glad you brought that up, you. Button up that li'l sawed-off penis of yours, the one all my girls laugh at, and get your ass outta my house," she said.

"What did you say?"

The coffee cup she threw at him broke on the wood post just behind his head.

There were lights in the sky that night, and wind that kicked dust out of the cane fields and dry thunder that sounded like horses' hooves thundering across the earth. She sat on the gallery until midnight, her breath wheezing as though her lungs were filled with burnt cork. In the distance she saw a ball of flaming swamp gas roll through a stand of flooded cypress, its incandescence so bright the details of the trees, the hanging moss, the lacy texture of the leaves, the flanged trunks at the waterline, became like an instant brown and green and gray photograph created in the middle of the darkness.

Some people believed the balls of light in the swamp were actually the spirits of the loups-garous-werewolves who could take on human, animal or inanimate forms-and secretly Carrie had always believed the same and had crossed herself or clutched her juju bag whenever she saw one. But tonight she simply watched the ball of lightning or burning swamp gas or whatever it was splinter apart in the saw grass as though she were looking back on a childhood fable whose long-ago ability to scare her now made her nostalgic.

In the morning she called her girls together, paid them their commissions for the previous week, gave each of them a twenty-five-dollar bonus, and fired them all. After they were gone she placed a black man in the front and back yards to tell all her customers the bordello was closed, then locked the doors, took a sponge bath in a bucket, dressed in her best nightgown, and lay down on top of her bedsheets. She slept through the day and woke in the afternoon, thickheaded, unsure of where she was, the room creaking with heat from the late sun. She washed her face in a porcelain basin and shuffled into the kitchen and tried to eat, but the food was like dry paper in her mouth. It seemed the energies in her heart were barely enough to pump blood into her head.

The yard was empty, the servants gone. She soaked a towel in water and laudanum and placed it on her chest and went back to bed. The light faded outside and she drifted in and out of sleep and once again heard the rumble of horses through the earth. She heard rain sweep across the roof and shutters banging against the sides of the house, then she slipped away inside the dream where a man in heavy shoes walked down a long corridor and raped an iron door across stone.

In her dream she saw herself rise from the bed and kneel on the floor and lift her hair off her neck and lay her head down on the mattress, for some reason no longer afraid. Then the year became 1845 and the place was not Louisiana but Paris, and a great crowd filled the plaza below the platform she knelt on, their faces dirty, their bodies and wine-soaked breaths emanating a collective stench that was like sewer gas in the bordello district in the early hours. The sun was bright above the buildings and the shadow of the guillotine spilled across the cobblestones and the rim of the crowd, who were throwing rotted produce at her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a muscular, black-hooded man ease the top half of the wood stock down on her neck and lock it into place, then step back with a lanyard in his hand.

A man in a beaver hat and split-tail coat raised his hand and the crowd fell silent and Carrie could hear the wind blowing through the portals that led into the plaza and leaves scratching across stone. The light seemed to harden and grow cold, and she felt a sensation like a ribbon of ice water slice across the back of her neck. Then the headsman jerked the lanyard and she heard the trigger spring loose at the top of the scaffold and the sound of a great metal weight whistling down upon her.

The plaza and the upturned, dirt-smeared faces in it and the stone buildings framed against the sky toppled away from her like an oil painting tossed end-over-end into a wicker basket.

When a black man came to work at the bordello in the morning, he found the back door broken open and Carrie LaRose kneeling by the side of her bed, the pillow that had been used to suffocate her still covering her head. A white camellia lay on the floor.

WEEK later the sheriff sent word to Flower that he wanted to see her in his office. She put on her best dress and opened a parasol over her head and walked down Main to the jail. She had never been to the jail before, and she paused in front of the door and looked automatically at the ground to see if there were paths that led to side entrances for colored. The sheriff, Hipolyte Gautreau, saw her through the window and waved her inside.

"How you do, Miss Flower? Come in and have a seat. I'll run you t'rew this fast as I can so you can get back to your school," he said.

She did not understand his solicitousness or the fact he had addressed her as Miss. She folded her parasol and sat down in a chair that was placed closely against the side of his desk.

He fitted on his spectacles and removed a single sheet of paper from a brown envelope and unfolded it in both hands.