James Burke - White Doves at Morning

Sin' pulled open the flap on Atkins' tent and stepped inside. I le was standing it a table, studying the design of his house, his white shirt and dark pants unspotted by the rain. An oil lamp burned above his head, lighting the grainy texture of his face and the flat, hazel eyes that never allowed people to read his thoughts.

He placed one hand on his hip, his booted feet forming a right angle, like a fencer's.

"I don't know what it is, but it's trouble of one kind or another. So get to it and be on your way," he said.

"Clay Hatcher came to my house last night," she said.

"You should have gone for the sheriff. He went crazy and killed his wife. You didn't hear about it?"

His left hand rested on the table, behind him, in a pool of shadow.

"How did my mother die?" she asked.

"Sarie? A horse ran her down," he replied. His face seemed to show puzzlement.

But Rufus Atkins had made a lifetime study of not revealing his emotions about anything, she thought. Not even puzzlement. So why now?

"She shot a man, Flower. Right in the head. Then took off running," he said, although she had not challenged his statement.

"She'd just given birth."

He shook his head. "I'm telling you how it happened, girl." He raised his left hand and touched at his nose with his wrist. Then she saw it, a barely noticeable half-circle of tiny scars on the rim of his hand.

Her gum coat felt like an oven on her body. She could smell all of his odors in the tent's stale air-testosterone, unwashed hair, shaving water that hadn't been thrown out, a thunder mug in a corner. She unbuttoned her coat and pulled her bandanna off her head and pushed her hair out of her eyes, as though she were rising out of dark water that was crushing the air from her lungs.

"She bit you and you beat her to death," Flower said.

"Now, hold on there." He looked at her open coat and at her hands and involuntarily backed away from her, knocking into the tent pole. The oil lamp clattered above his head.

She stepped toward him and saw his mouth open, his hand clench on the edge of the table.

"I can hurt you Fower. Don't make me do it," he said.

She gathered all the spittle in her mouth and spat it full in his face.

RAIN swept in sheets across the wetlands throughout the day, then the storm intensified and bolts of lightning trembled like white-hot wires in the heart of the swamp, igniting fires among the cypress trees. Long columns of smoke flattered across the canopy and hung on the fields and roads in a dirty gray vapor.

Flower told no one of her encounter with Rufus Atkins nor of the knowledge that had come to her about the nature of her mother's death in 1837. Who besides herself would care? she asked herself. What legal authority would concern itself with the murder of a slave woman twenty-eight years in the past?

But she knew the real reason for her silence and it was not one she would share, not even with herself, at least not until she had to.

The cap-and-ball revolver Abigail had bought from McCain's Hardware was wrapped in a piece of flannel under Flower's bed. She removed it and set it on the kitchen table and peeled back the cloth from the frame. The metal and brown grips glistened with oil; the caps were snug in the nipples of each loaded chamber. She touched the cylinder and the barrel with the balls of her fingers, then curved her hand around the grips. The cylindrical hardness that she cupped in her palm caused an image to flit across her mind that both embarrassed and excited her.

That evening the rain stopped, but fires still burned in the swamp and the air was wet and heavy with the smell of woodsmoke. She drove with Abigail in the buggy to the school, passing the saloon often frequented by Rufus Atkins. His black mare was tethered outside, and through the doorway she caught a glimpse of him standing at the bar, by himself, tilting a glass to his mouth.

That night she taught her classes, then extinguished all the lamps in the rooms and locked the doors to the building and climbed up on the buggy for the trip home.

"You're sure quiet these days," Abigail said.

"Weather's enough to get a person down," Flower said.

"Sure you haven't met a fellow?"

"I could go the rest of my life without seeing a man. No, I take that back. I could go two lifetimes without seeing one."

Both of them laughed.

By the drawbridge over the Teche they saw a crowd of workingmen from the Main Street saloon, Union soldiers, the sheriff, their faces lit like tallow under the street lamps. Two Negroes had tied a rope around a body that was caught in a pile of trash under the bridge. They pulled the body free, but the wrists were bound with wire and the wire snagged on the rootball of a submerged cypress tree. A barrel-chested, red-faced white man, with a constable's star pinned to his vest, rode his horse into the shallows and grabbed the end of the rope from the Negroes, twisted it around his pommel, and dragged the body, skittering like a log, up on dry ground.

The dead man was white, without shoes, his eyes sealed shut, the belt gone from his pants, the pockets turned inside out. His head rolled on his neck like a poppy gourd on a broken stem. The sheriff leaned over him with a lantern in his hand.

"They mark him?" someone in the crowd called out.

"On the forehead. 'K.W.C.,'" the sheriff said. Then the disgust grew in his face and he waved his arms angrily. "Y'all get out of here! This ain't your bidness! What kind of town we becoming here? If the Knights can do that to him, they can do it to us. Y'all t'ought of that?"

Abigail slapped the reins on her horse's rump and headed down the road toward Flower's house. She glanced back over her shoulder at the crowd by the bridge.

"Wasn't that the man who worked for Ira Jamison, what was his name, a posse was looking for him yesterday? He murdered his wife up at Angola Plantation," she said.

"Cain't really say. I've shut out a lot of bad things from Angola, Miss Abby," Flower replied.

Abigail looked at her curiously. "What are you hiding from me?" she asked.

FLOWER read in the front room of her house until late, getting up to fix tea, silhouetting against the lamp, twice stepping out on the gallery to look at the weather, the light from the doorway leaping into the yard. At midnight she heard the sounds of the saloon closing, the oak door being secured, shutters being latched, horses clopping on the road, men's voices calling out a final "good night" in the darkness.

But she saw no sign of Rufus Atkins.

She stood at the front window, the lamp burning behind her, until the road was empty, then blew out the lamp and sat in a chair with the cap-and-ball revolver in her lap and watched the sky clear and the moon rise above the fields.

The revolver rested across the tops of her thighs, and her fingers rested on the grips and coolness of the barrel. She felt no fear, only a strange sense of anticipation, as though she were discovering an aspect of herself she didn't know existed. She heard a wagon pass on the road, then the sounds of owls and tree frogs. The curtains fluttered on the windows and she smelled the odor of gardenias on the wind. In a secure part of her mind she knew she was falling asleep, but her physical state didn't seem important anymore. Her hand was cupped over the cylinder of the pistol, the back of the house locked up, the front door deliberately unbolted, cooking pots stacked against the jamb.

She awoke at two in the morning, her bladder full. She locked the front door and went out the back into the yard, locking the door behind her. Then she sat down on the smooth wood seat inside the heated cypress enclosure that had served the patrons of Carrie LaRose's brothel for over twenty years, the revolver next to her. Through the ventilation gap at the top of the door, she could see the sky and stars and smell the faint tracings of smoke from the fires burning in the swamp. The only sounds outside were those of nightbirds calling to one another and water dripping from the yard's solitary live oak, under which Rufus Atkins had paid the men who raped her.