James Burke - White Doves at Morning

Because I'm afraid to be thought a coward, a voice inside him said.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing. I said nothing," he replied. He looked out at a carriage passing in the street. Don't say anymore, for God's sakes, he told himself. But his old enemy, his impetuosity, held sway with him once again.

"I think all this is going to be destroyed. By cannon shot and fire and disease, all of it wiped out," he said, and waved his hand vaguely at the palm trees in the yards, the massive houses hidden inside the live oaks, a paddle-wheeler churning on the Teche, its lighted windows softly muted inside the mist.

"And you make your own life forfeit for a cause you don't respect? My God, Willie," Abigail said.

He felt the back of his neck burning. Then, when he believed matters could get no worse, he looked up and saw Robert Perry rein his horse in the dusk and dismount and enter the yard, removing his hat.

"Good evening, Miss Abigail. You too, Willie. Did I break in on something?" Robert said.

Robert waited for a reply, his face glowing with goodwill.

TWO hours later Willie Burke was on his fourth glass of whiskey in the brick saloon next to Carrie LaRose's brothel. The plank floor was scattered with sawdust and burned by cigars and stained with tobacco juice around the cuspidors. Hand towels hung from brass rings along the bar, and above the bar mirror was a painting of a reclining nude, her bottom an ax-handle wide, her stomach like a soft pink pillow, her smile and pubic hair and relaxed arms an invitation to enter the picture frame with her.

Willie wanted to concentrate on the lovely lines of the woman in the painting and forget the events of the day, particularly the fact he had been so foolish as to enlist in the Home Guards. But the man standing next to him, one Jean-Jacques LaRose, also known as Scavenger Jack, was giving a drunken lecture to anyone within earshot, pounding his fists on the bar, denouncing Secessionists, Copperheads in the North who encouraged them, and people stupid enough to join the army and serve their cause.

Unlike his sister, Carrie LaRose, who owned the bordello next door, Scavenger Jack operated on the edges of legitimate society, hauling away Chitimacha burial mounds that he mixed with manure and sold for high-grade fertilizer, exporting weevil-infested rice to plantation operators in the West Indies whose food costs for their workers were running too high, and, rumor had it, luring ships onto a reef with a false beacon off Key West in order to salvage the cargo.

He was a huge man, his black hair and beard streaked with red, a scar across his nose like a flattened worm. His bull neck was corded with veins, his teeth like tombstones, his shoulders so broad they split the seams of his coat.

"Let me ax you gentlemen somet'ing. When them Yankees blockade our ports, 'cause that's what they gonna do, how you gonna get your sugar and salt and cotton out of Lou'sana, you? Round up the crawfish and pile it on their backs?" he said to his audience.

"Now, Jean-Jacques, there's more involved here than money," said a member of the town council and part owner of the bank, an older man with an egg-shaped, pleasant face. "The Negroes have already heard about the firing on Fort Sumter. A lady in St. Martinville caught her cook with cyanide this morning. But I worry more about the Negro male population being turned loose on our women. That's the kind of thing these abolitionists have encouraged."

"Them rich people couldn't convince y'all to fight for their cotton, no. So they got all them newspapers to start y'all t'inking about what's gonna happen to your jelly roll. That done it when nothing else did," Jean-Jacques said.

"That's not called for, Jean-Jacques. We're all serious men here and we speak respectfully of one another," the older man said.

"What y'all fixing to do is ruin my bidness. You t'ink a black man who work all day in the field got nothing on his mind except sticking his pole up your wife's dress?" Jean-Jacques said.

"You should give some thought to your words, sir," the older man said, lowering his eyes, his throat coloring. Then he collected himself and said to the bartender, "Give my friend Jean-Jacques another drink."

Jean-Jacques belched so loudly the men at the billiard table turned around, startled.

"Better enjoy your own drink, suh. The liquor in here come off my boats. What y'all gonna drink after them Yankees shut me down?" Jean-Jacques said.

But Willie had long ago given up listening to the self-serving arguments about the moral validity of Secession. Rarely did logic and humanity have any influence over the discussion. Instead, the most naked form of self-interest always seemed to drive the debate, as though venality and avarice had somehow evolved into virtues. He thought about the slave girl Flower and the fact that her literacy had to be concealed as though it were an object of shame.

He wondered if Rufus Atkins had found Flower's notebook as well as the collection of William Blake's poems. What had he done? Why had he not listened to his mother or his friend Jim Stubbefield?

He drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass, then sipped from a pitcher of warm beer that he was using as a chaser. He looked at the mouth and breasts of the woman in the painting and through the open window heard someone playing a piano in the brothel next door. His head reeled and the room seemed to tip sideways, and his ears buzzed with sound that had no meaning. The oil lamps in the saloon were like whorls of yellow color inside the cigar smoke that layered the ceiling. The whiskey had brought him no relief and instead had only created a hunger in his loins that made him bite his lip when he looked at the woman above the bar mirror.

Oh Lord, quiet my desires, he thought. And immediately focused his gaze on the woman's form again. He swallowed the rest of his whiskey in one gulp and thought he was going to fall backward.

"Gag and buck," he said to no one.

"What did you say, Willie?" Jean-Jacques asked.

"What does 'gag and buck' mean?"

"You don't want to find out. You ain't gone and signed up for the army, you?"

"I did."

Po' Willie, why ain't you come to see me first?" Jean-Jacques said, and cupped his hand on the back of Willie's neck.

"You're a criminal," Willie said.

"But I got my good points too, ain't I?"

"Undoubtedly. Oh, Jean-Jacques, I've made a mess of things," Willie said.

Jean-Jacques put his mouth close to Willie's ear. "I can put you on a boat for Mexico when it's the right time. Let's go next door to my sister's and get your ashes hauled," he said.

"That's a grand suggestion, and please don't hold it against me for not acting on it. But I have to puke," Willie said.

He reeled out the back door into an overgrown coulee and bent over behind a tree just as an enormous volume of whiskey and beer and pickled food surged out of his stomach. He gasped for breath, then rinsed his face in a rain barrel and dried it on his shirt. The night air was soft with mist, the moon buried in the clouds above the cane fields. Next door the piano player was playing a minstrel song titled "Dixie's Land." Willie shouldered a mop propped against a cistern and began a parody of close-order drill in the yard behind the brothel, then flung aside the flap on the tent in the side yard and marched through the row of cots inside, counting cadence for himself, "Reep… reep… reep," saluting two naked people caught at the worst possible moment in their coupling.

He continued out the far end of the tent and on down the road, passing a horseman whose face was shadowed by a wide hat. The wind changed, and he saw dust blowing out of the fields and a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. He left the road and crossed the dirt yard of the laundry where Flower worked and walked through the iron pots in the backyard and the wash that was flapping on the clotheslines and stopped by the back window of her cabin.