FLOWER Jamison had always thought the beginning and end of the war would be marked by definite dates and events, that great changes would be effected by the battles and the thousands of men she had seen march through New Iberia, and the historical period in which she was living would survive only as a compartmentalized and aberrant experience that fitted between bookends for people to study in a happier time.
But the changes she saw in 1864 and early 1865 were transitory in nature. The Yankee soldiers camped behind the Episcopalian church pursued the Confederates through Vermilionville and up into the Red River parishes, taking with them the money they spent in bordellos, saloons, and on the washerwomen by the bayou.
Many freed slaves returned to the plantations and owners they had fled and begged for food and shelter and considered themselves lucky if they were paid any wages at all. Others who preferred privation and even death from hunger over a return to the old ways were on occasion given a choice between the latter or execution.
Emancipation Day came to be known by people of color as June 'Teenth. Emancipated into what? Flower wondered.
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 was 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.
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.
He was defrauded by his New York business partners and sued in Massachusetts by men who owed their very lives to him, but his spirits never dimmed and he never lost his faith in either God or humanity or the abolitionist movement, which he had championed all his life.
After his death she could not bear the New England winters in their family home up on the Merrimack, nor the unrelieved whiteness of the fields that seemed to flow into the horizon like the blue beginnings of eternity. The inside of the house had become a mausoleum, its hardwood surfaces enameled with cold, and by mid-January she had felt that her soul was sheathed in ice. In her mind she would re-create their clipper ship voyages to Spain, Italy, and Greece, and she would see the two of them together in late summer, hiking with backpacks on a red dirt road in Andalusia, the olive trees a dark green against a hillside of yellow grass that was sear and rustling in the heat. She and her father would hike all the way to the top of the mountain and sit in the warm shade of a Moorish castle, then fix lunch and eat it, while in the distance the azure brilliance of the Mediterranean stretched away as far as the eye could see.
It was a place she went back to again and again in her memory. It was a special place where she lived when she felt threatened, if the world seemed too much for her late and soon, like a cathedral in which she and her father were the only visitors.
When she came to south Louisiana during the yellow fever epidemic and smelled the salt breeze blowing off Lake Pontchartrain and saw roses blooming in December and palm trees rising starkly against the coastline, like those around Cadiz, she felt that the best memories in her life had suddenly been externalized and made real again and perhaps down a cobbled street in the old part of New Orleans her father waited for her at an outdoor cafe table under a balcony that was hung with tropical flowers.
Perhaps it was a foolish way to be, but her father had always taught her the greatest evil one person could do to another was to interfere in his or her destiny, and to Abigail that meant no one had a right to intrude upon either the province of her soul or her imagination or the ties that bound her to the past and allowed her to function in the present.
But now, in the drowsy shade of a colonnade in April 1865, at the close of the greatest epoch in American history, she wished she was on board a sailing ship, within sight ol Malaga, the palm trees banked thickly at the base of the Sierra Nevada, like a displaced piece of Africa, the troubles and conflicts of war-torn Louisiana far behind her.
"You all right, Miss Dowling?"
She looked up, startled, at Mr. LeBlanc. The boy in brown homespun and the Confederate-issue kepi stood behind him, his choke sack tied with a string around his wrist.
"This young fellow here says a preacher bought him a stage ticket to find Willie Burke," Mr. LeBlanc said.
The boy stared down the street, as though unconcerned about the events taking place around him.
"What's your name again?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.
"Tige McGuffy."
"Where did you know Mr. Willie from?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.
"Shiloh Church. I was with the 6th Mis'sippi. Me and him was both at the Peach Orchard."
"And you have no family?" Mr. LeBlanc said.
"I just ain't sure where they're at right now."
"Don't lie to people when they're trying to help you, son," Mr. LeBlanc said.
The boy's cheeks pooled with color.
"My daddy was with Gen'l Forrest. He never come back. The sheriff was gonna send me to the orphans' home. The preacher from our church give me the money for a stage ticket here," he said.
His skin was brown, filmed with dust, his throat beaded with dirt rings. He studied the far end of the street, his mousy hair blowing at the edges of his kepi.
"When did you eat last?" Abigail asked.
"A while back. At a stage stop," he replied.
"When?" Abigail asked.
"Yesterday. I don't eat much. It ain't a big deal with me."
"I see. Pick up your things and let's see what you and I can find for lunch," she said.
"I wasn't looking for no handouts," he said.
"I know you're not," she said, and winked at him. "Come on, walk me home. I never know when a carriage is going to run me down."
He thought about it, then crooked his arm and extended it for her to hold on to.
"It's a mighty nice town you got here," he said; admiring the buildings and the trees on the bayou. "Did Willie Burke make it through the war all right?"
"I think so. I'm not sure. The 18th Louisiana had a bad time of it, Tige," she said.
"Think so?" he said, looking up at her, his forehead wrinkling.
IRA Jamison sat astride a white gelding and watched his first shipment of convicts from the jails of New Orleans and Baton Rouge go to work along the river's edge, chopping down trees, burning underbrush and digging out the coffins in a slaves' cemetery that had filled with water seepage and formed a large depiession in the woods.
Most of the convicts were Negroes. A few were white and a few were children, some as young as seven years old. All of them wore black-and-white-striped jumpers and pants, and hats that were woven together from palmetto leaves. They flung the chopped trees and underbrush onto bonfires that were burning by the river's edge and raked the rotted wood and bones from the slaves' coffins into the water. As Ira Jamison moved his horse out of the smoke blowing off the fires, he tried to form in his mind's eye a picture of the log skid and sawmill and loading docks that would replace the woods and the Negro cemetery.
He did not like the idea of the children working among the adults. They were not only in the way, they were not cost-effective. But his state contract required he take all the inmate men, women, and children, from the parish jails throughout Louisiana; house, clothe and feed them; and put them to work in some form of rehabilitative activity and simultaneously contribute to the states economy.
He watched a Negro boy, no more than twelve, clean a nest of bones and rags from a coffin and begin flinging them off the bank into the current. The boy picked up the skull by inserting his fingers in the eye sockets and pitched it in a high arc onto a pile of driftwood that was floating south toward Baton Rouge, the boy nudged a companion and pointed at his handiwork.
"Bring that one to me," Jamison said to Clay Hatcher, who was now back at his former job on the plantation, his blond hair the color of old wood, the skin under his right eye grained black from a musket that had blown up in his face at the battle of Mansfield.
"You got it, Kunnel," Hatcher said.
He walked into the trees and the trapped smoke from the bonfires and tapped the skull-thrower on top of his palmetto hat.
When the boy approached Jamison's horse he removed his hat and raised his face uncertainly. His striped jumper was grimed with red dirt, his hair sparkling with sweat.
"Yes, suh?" he said.
"It doesn't bother you to handle dead people's bones?" Jamison asked.
"No, suh."
"Why not?"
"'Cause they dead," the boy said, and grinned. Then his face seemed to brighten with curiosity as he gazed up at Jamison.
"You have a reason for looking at me like that?" Jamison asked.
"You gots one eye mo' little than the other, that's all," the boy replied.
Jamison felt the gelding shift its weight under him.
"Why were you sent to jail?" he asked.
"They ain't ever tole me."
"Don't be playing on the job anymore. Can you do that for me?" Jamison said.
"Yes, suh."
"Get on back to work now," Jamison said.
"Yes, suh."
By day's end the log skid was almost completed, the graves excavated and filled in, packed down with clay and smoothed over with iron rollers, the sides of the depression overlaid with cypress planks and stobs to prevent erosion. In fact, it was a masterpiece of engineering, Jamison thought, a huge sluice that could convert timber into money, seven days a week, as fast as the loggers could fell trees and slide them down the slope.
As he turned his horse toward the house he saw Clay Hatcher pick up an object from a mound of mud on the edge of the work area. Hatcher knocked the mud off it and held it up in the light to see the object more clearly. Then he stooped over and washed it in a bucket of water the convicts had used to clean their shovels in. Jamison walked his horse toward Hatcher.
"What do you have there, Clay?" he asked.
"It looks to be an old merry-go-round. It's still got a windup key plugged in it. I wonder what it was doing in the graveyard," Hatcher replied.
Jamison reached down and took the merry-go-round from Hatcher's fingers and studied the hand-carved horses, the corroded brass cylinder inside the base, the key that was impacted with dirt and feeder roots. He had given it to Uncle Royal, who in turn had given it to his great-grandson, the one who died of a fever. Or was it an accident, something about an overturned wagon crushing him? Jamison couldn't remember.
He returned it to Hatcher.
"Wash it off and give it to the skull-thrower," he said.
"That little nigra boy?"
"Yes."
"Why would you be doing that, Kunnel?"
"He's intelligent and brave. You never make a future enemy of his kind if you can avoid it."
"I'll be switched if I'll ever understand you, Kunnel," Hatcher said.
Jamison flipped his reins idly across the back of his hand. The day you do is the day I and every other plantation owner in the South will have a problem, he thought, and was surprised at his own candor.
WILLIE Burke had long ago given up the notion of sleeping through the night from dark to dawn. His dreams woke him up with regularity, every one to two hours, and his sleep was filled with images and feelings that were less terrifying than simply disjointed and unrelieved, like the quiet throbbing of a headache or an impacted tooth. Tonight, as he slept under a wagon behind a farmhouse, he dreamed he was marching on a soft, powdery road through hills that were covered with thistle and dead grass. Up ahead, a brass cannon, its muzzle pointed back at him, flopped crazily on its carriage, and brown dust cascaded like water off the rims and spokes of the wheels.
His feet burned with blisters and his back ached from the weight of his rifle and pack. He wanted to escape fom the dream and the heat of the march into the cool of the morning and the early fog that had marked each dawn since he had begun walking back toward New Iberia from Natchitoches in northwestern Louisiana. In his sleep he heard roosters crowing, a hog snuffing inside a railed lot, horses nickering and thudding their hooves impatiently in a woods. He sat up in the softness of the dawn and saw a pecan orchard that was still bare of leaves, the trunks and branches wet with dew, and the dream of the brass cannon barrel flopping crazily under a murderous sun gradually became unreal and unimportant, its meaning, if it had one, lost in the beginning of a new day.
He got to his feet and urinated behind a corncrib, then realized he was not alone. Between thirty and forty mounted men moved out of the fog in the pecan orchard and formed a half circle around the back of the farmhouse.
They wore ragged beards and bayonet-cut hair. Their elbows poked through their shirts; their pants were streaked with grease and road grime, their skin the color of saddle leather, as though it had been smoked over a fire.
The leader wore gray pants and a blue cotton shirt and a cavalry officer's hat that had wilted over his ears. A sword inside a leather scabbard and a belt strung with three holstered cap-and-ball pistols were looped over his saddle pommel. Even though the morning was peppered with mist, his face looked dilated, overheated, his eyes scalded.
"You Secesh?" he asked.
"I was," Willie replied.
"I've seen you. You was looting the body of one of my men at St. Martinville," the guerrilla said, his horse shifting under him.
"You're wrong, my friend. I won't be abiding the insult, either."
The guerrilla touched his horse's side with his boot heel and approached Willie, leaning down in the saddle to get a better look. His eyes were colorless, filled with energies that seemed to have no moral source. His coppery hair was pushed up under his hat, like a woman's.
"You know who I am?" he asked.
"I think your name is Jarrette. I think you rode with William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson and helped burn Lawrence, Kansas, to the ground," Willie said.
"You got a mouth on you, do you?"
"I saw your handiwork on the St. Martinville Road. Your men give no quarter."
"That's life under a black flag. We recognize no authority except Jehovah and Jefferson Davis. What's inside that house?"
"A woman with a gun and a three – or four-day-old corpse." The guerrilla leader stared at the house, then looked in both directions, as though he heard bugles or gunfire, although there were no sounds except those of a rural morning and the buzzing of bottle flies inside the house.
One of the guerrilla leader's men leaned in the saddle and whispered in his ear.
"We was here?" the leader said.
The other guerrilla nodded. The leader, whose name was Jarrette, turned his attention back to Willie. "I don't want you walking behind me," he said.
"The war's over," Willie said.
"The hell it is."
Jarrette's face twitched under his hat. He glared into the distance, his back straightening, his thighs tightening on his horse. Willie looked in the direction of his interest but saw nothing but gray fields and a fog-shrouded pecan orchard.
"I gut blue-bellies and fill up their cavities with stones and sink them to the bottoms of rivers. Jayhawkers get the same. You saying I'm a liar?" Jarrette said.
Willie looked at his pie-plate face and the moral insanity in his eyes and the rubbery, unnatural configuration of his mouth. "I mean you no harm," he said.
"Stay out of my road," Jarrette said.
"My pleasure. Top of the morning to you," Willie said. He watched Jarrette and his men ride out of the dirt yard toward the road, then scooped off his flop hat and began collecting chicken's eggs from under a manure wagon and in the depressions along the barn wall. He had put three brown eggs inside the crown of his hat and was walking toward a smokehouse that lay on its side, dripping grease and smoldering in its own ashes, when he heard the hooves of a solitary horse thundering across the earth behind him.
He turned just as the guerrilla leader bore down upon him, leaning from the saddle, the point of hes hilted sword extended in frong of him.The sword's sharpened edge knifed through the top of Willie's shirt, just above the collarbone, and sliced across the skin of his shoulder as coldly as an icicle.
Willie crumpled his hat against his wound and collapsed against a rick fence, the eggs breaking and running down his clothes. He stared stupidly at the guerrilla leader, who disappeared in the mist, an idiot's grin on his mouth.