EARLY the next morning she took the sheets off her bed, not touching the area where the man in the black hood had sat. She put them in a washtub, then bathed and dressed to go to school. When she tried to eat, her food tasted like paper in her mouth. The sky had cleared, the sun was shining, and birds sang in the trees, but the brilliance and color of the world outside seemed to have nothing to do with her life now.
She drank a cup of hot tea and scraped her uneaten food into a garbage bucket and washed her dishes, then prepared to leave for school. But when she closed and opened her eyes, her head spun and bile rose in her throat and her skin felt dead to the touch, as though she had been systemically poisoned.
You've gone through worse, she told herself. They raped you, but they didn't make you afraid. They murdered your mother but they couldn't steal her soul. Why do you keep your wounds green and allow men as base as Atkins and McCain to control your thoughts? she asked herself.
But she knew the answer. The house, the land, the school, the flower beds she and Abigail had planted, her collection of books, her new life as a teacher, everything she was and had become and would eventually be was about to be taken from her. All because of a choice, a deed, she knew she would eventually commit herself to, because if she did not, she would never have peace.
She went outside and picked up the cap-and-ball revolver from the edge of a rain puddle. She carried it into the kitchen and wiped the mud off the frame and the cylinder and caps with a dry rag and rewrapped it in the flannel cloth and replaced it under her bed.
In the corner of her eye she saw a black carriage with a surrey and white wheels pull to a stop in front of the gallery. Ira Jamison walked up the steps, his hair cut short, his jaws freshly shaved, looking at least twenty years younger than his actual age.
"I hope I haven't dropped by too early," he said, removing his hat. "I was in the neighborhood and felt an uncommonly strong desire to see you."
"I'm on my way to work," she said.
"At your school?"
"Yes. Where else?"
"I'll take you. Just let me talk with you a minute," he said. She stepped back from the doorway to let him enter. She reached to take his hat but he took no heed of her gesture and placed it himself on a large, hand-carved knob at the foot of the staircase banister. He smiled.
"Flower, I'm probably a fond and foolish man, but I wanted to tell you how much you mean to me, how much you remind me of-" He stopped in mid-sentence and studied her face. "Have I said the wrong thing here?"
"No, Colonel, you haven't."
"You don't look well."
"Two men got in my house last night. They had on the robes of the White Camellia. One was Rufus Atkins. The other man owns the hardware store on Main Street."
"Atkins came here? He touched you?"
"Not with his hand. With his whip. He told me he'd be with me everywhere I went. He'd see everything I did."
She saw the bone flex along his jaw, the crow's feet deepen at the corner of one eye. "He whipped you?"
"I don't have any more to say about it, Colonel."
"You must believe what I tell you, Flower. This man and the others who ride with him, I'm talking about these fellows who pretend to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers, this man knew he'd better not hurt you in any way. Do you understand that?"
"He beat my mother to death."
The colonel's face blanched. "You don't know that," he said.
"Clay Hatcher was here. He told me how you made him and Rufus Atkins lie about how my mother died."
"Listen, Flower, that was a long time ago. I made mistakes as a young man."
"You lied to me. You lied to the world. You going to lie to God now?"
Jamison took a breath. "I'm going to get to the bottom of this. You have my word on it," he said.
She rested her hand on the banister, just above where his hat rested on the mahogany knob. Her eyes were downcast and he could not read her expression.
"Colonel?" she said.
"Yes?"
"You started to say I reminded you of someone."
"Oh yes. My mother. I never realized how much you look like my mother. That's why you'll always have a special place in my heart."
Flower stared at him, then picked up his hat and placed it in his hand. "Good-bye, Colonel. I won't be seeing you again," she said.
"Pardon?" he said.
"Good-bye, suh. You're a sad man," she said.
"What? What did you say?"
But she stood silently by the open door and refused to speak again, until he finally gave it up and walked out on the gallery, confused and for once in his life at a loss for words. When he glanced back at her, his forehead was knitted with lines, like those in the skin of an old man.
When he got into his carriage she saw him produce a small whiskey-colored ball that looked like dried honey from a tobacco pouch and place it inside his jaw, then bark at his driver.
WILLIE Burke's return journey from Shiloh had been one he did not measure in days but in images that he seemed to perceive through a glass darkly-the emptiness of the Mississippi countryside that he and Elias traversed in a rented wagon, a region of dust devils, weed-spiked fields, Doric columns blackened by fire and deserted cabins scrolled with the scales of dead morning glory vines; the box that held Jim's bones vibrating on the deck of a steamboat and a gaggle of little girls in pinafores playing atop the box; a train ride on a flatcar through plains of saw grass and tunnels of trees and sunlight that spoked through rain clouds like grace from a divine hand that he seemed unable to clasp.
Willie's clothes were rent, vinegary with his own smell, his hair peppered with grit. He drank huge amounts of pond water to deaden his hunger. When the train stopped to take on wood he and Elias got into a line of French-speaking Negro trackworkers and were given plates piled with rice and fried fish that they ate with the trackworkers without ever being asked their origins. At a predawn hour on a day that had no date attached to it they dragged the box off a wagon in front of Willie's house and set it down in the grass. The sky was the color of gunmetal, bursting with stars, the surface of the bayou blanketed with ground fog. "Come in," Willie said.
"I think I'll go out to my mother's place and crawl in a hammock for six weeks," Elias replied. His face became introspective. "Willie, the next time I say I'll help you out with a little favor?"
"Yes?"
"Lend me a dollar so I can rent a gun and stick it in my mouth," Elias said.
Willie walked into the house, not pausing in the kitchen to either eat or drink, and on out the back door to use the privy. He dragged Jim's box onto a wagon at the barn, shoved it forward until it was snug against the headboard, then began stacking bricks in the wagon bed. The stars were fading from the sky now, the oaks along the bayou becoming darker, more sharply edged, against the fog. He heard footsteps behind him.
Tige McGuffy heaved a wooden bucket filled with cistern water across Willie's head and face and shoulders.
"Good God, Tige, what was that for?" Willie asked, spitting water out of his mouth.
"You trailed a smell through the house I could have heat down on the floor with a broom."
"Would you be going out to the cemetery with me this fine morning?"
"Cemetery? What you got in that box?" Tige replied. But before Willie could speak Tige waved his hand, indicating he wasn't interested in Willie's response. "The Knights or them White Leaguers lynched a fellow last night. A bunch of them rode through our yard. Where you been, Willie? Don't you care about nobody except a dead man or a lady ain't got no interest in you? Why don't you wake up?"
AT the school that same morning Abigail Dowling noticed the circles under Flower's eyes, her inability to concentrate on the content of a conversation. During recess Flower shook a ten-year-old boy in the yard for throwing rocks at a squirrel. She shook him hard, jarring his chin on his chest, squatting down to yell in his face. The boy lived in a dirt-floor shack with his grandmother and often came to school without breakfast. Until today he had been one of her best students. The boy began to cry and ran into the street.
Flower caught him and led him by the hand into the shade.
"I'm sorry, Isaac. I was sick last night and I'm not feeling good today. Just don't be chunkin' at the squirrels. You forgive me?" she said.
"Yessum," he said.
He rubbed the back of his neck when he spoke and she could see that neither the pain nor the shock had left his eyes. She got to her knees and held him against her breast. Then she walked to the gallery, where Abigail had been watching her.
"I'm going home, Miss Abby," she said.
"Tell me what it is," Abigail said.
"I don't think I'll be back."
"That's nonsense."
"No, it's a heap of trouble," Flower said.
"I'm going to dismiss the children and take you home," Abigail said.
"I don't need any help, Miss Abby."
"We'll see about that," Abigail said.
It was almost noon, and Abigail told the children they could leave the school early and not return until the next day. While they poured out the front door into the yard and street, she brought her buggy around from the back and went after Flower.
"Get in," she said in front of the hardware store.
"Miss Abby, you mean well, but don't mix in this," Flower said.
"Stop calling me 'Miss Abby.' I'm your friend. I admire you more than any person I've ever known."
Flower paused, then stepped up into the buggy and sat down, her face straight ahead.
"There's a door with a secret catch on it in the side of my house. Last night I woke up with Rufus Atkins and Todd McCain standing by my bed," she said. She glanced back at the hardware store. "They were wearing Kluxer robes and hoods, but it was them."
Abigail reined up the horse and started to speak, but Flower grasped the reins and popped them down on the horse's rump.
"Atkins touched me with his whip, like I was a piece of livestock. He wanted me to know I'd never be free, that he or a hundred like him could come for me anytime they wanted," Flower said. "I'll never get them out of my life."
"Oh yes, we will," Abigail said.
"It's a nigger girl's word against a captain in the Confederate army, Miss Abby. Plus I didn't see his face."
"Don't you dare call yourself that. Don't you dare."
But Flower refused to speak the rest of the way home.
The house and yard and flower beds were marbled with shadows, the wind touched with rain, the cane rustling in the fields. Down the road Abigail could see convict carpenters in striped pants and jumpers framing Rufus Atkins' new house, hammering boards into place, sitting on the crossbeams like clothespins. Farther down the road, past the burned remnants of the laundry, she thought she saw the polished, black carriage of Ira Jamison disappearing around a bend.
Flower got down from the buggy and went inside the house, leaving the door open behind her. Abigail followed her.
"What are you planning to do?" Abigail asked.
"Go to the privy and make water."
"You answer my question, Flower."
"I aim to put Rufus Atkins in hell for what he did to my mother and me. And before he dies I aim to make him hurt."
"It doesn't have to be like this."
"Yes, it does. You know it does. Don't lie. You don't realize how much some folks can hate a lie," Flower said, and went out the back door.
Abigail stood for a long time by the entrance. She felt the wind blowing through the house, twisting the curtains, flipping the pages of a book in Flower's bedroom. She could smell rain outside and see the sunlight disappearing from the yard. She stared through the open door of the bedroom and at the bedroom floor and the pool of shadow under the bed.
When Flower returned from the privy, the house was empty.
"Abigail?" she said into the silence.
She looked outside. The buggy was gone. She glanced through the doorway into her bedroom. The piece of oily flannel in which she had wrapped her revolver lay discarded on the floor.
FOR Ira Jamison anger had never been a character defect to which he attached any degree of seriousness. If your business or personal adversaries tried to injure you, you did not brood over biblical admonitions about an eye for an eye. You buried your enemies alive. Anger wasn't a problem.
If someone challenged your authority, as the dandruff-flecked minister had when he allowed Ira's wife to confide her husband's sexual habits to him, you publicly humiliated the person in such a way he would dread sleep because he might see you in his dreams.
In fact, when anger was controlled and carefully nursed, then sated at the expense of your enemies, the experience could be almost sexual.
But disobedience on the part of people whose wages he paid was another matter. These were usually white trash whom a Bedouin would not allow to clean his chamber pot, self-hating and genetically defective creatures whom he had housed, fed, and provided medical care for, given their children presents at Christmas and on birthdays, and sometimes seen commissioned in the army. Disobedience from them amounted not only to ingratitude and betrayal but contempt and arrogance, because they were indicating they had read his soul and had concluded he could be deceived and used.
Clay Hatcher was a perfect example, a self-pitying imbecile who blamed his stupidity on his wife and killed her with an ax while she was fixing his supper, then burned down his own house with all his possessions in it to hide his crime.
Ira had to laugh thinking about it. He wondered what Hatcher had to say when the Knights of the White Camellia told him the law was the law and they hoped he wouldn't hold it against them when they broke his neck. After all, they were just poor whites like himself, trying to do the right thing.
But Ira had to take himself to task for not anticipating Rufus Atkins' treachery. Atkins was a cynic and pragmatist and knew how to eat his pride when a greater self-interest was involved. But under those flat, hazel eyes and skin that was like seared alligator hide lay a mean-spirited, sexually driven, and resentful man who, like all white trash, believed the only difference between himself and the rich was the social station arbitrarily handed them at birth.
Ira Jamison had left Flower's house that morning and had gone immediately to Rufus Atkins' newly acquired property, but he was nowhere in sight. The prison guards overseeing the convict workmen were no help, either, shaking their heads, speaking in demotic French that Ira could barely understand.
So he tried to put himself in the mind of Rufus Atkins, hung over, probably filled with rut, growing more depleted as the sun climbed in the sky, realizing he had fouled his own nest and made an enemy of the only man in Louisiana who could give him access to the social respectability he had always coveted.
He had his driver take him to the saloon on Main Street, to the jail, to a row of cribs on a muddy road out by the Yankee camp, and finally to McCain's Hardware Store.
McCain's eyes were scorched, his face discolored, as though it had been parboiled, his breath like fly ointment. Ira saw him swallow with fear.
"How do you do, sir?" Ira said.
"Mighty fine, Colonel. It's an honor to have you in my store."
"Do you know Captain Atkins?" Ira asked.
"Yes, suh, I do. Not real well, but I do know him."
"If you see him, would you tell him I wanted to pay my respects, but regrettably I have to return to Angola this afternoon," Ira said.
"Yes, suh, I'll get the message to him. He's building himself a fine house. He comes in here reg'lar for nails and such."
"That's what I thought. Thank you for your goodwill, sir," Ira said.
Ira had his driver take him back to Rufus Atkins' tent, where, as he expected, Atkins was not to be found. He instructed the driver to take the carriage down the road, out of sight, and not return until Ira sent for him.
A light rain began to fall and Ira sat on a cane chair by Rufus Atkins' worktable and looked out the tent flap at the convicts perched on top of the framing for Atkins' house. He wondered what kind of thoughts, if any, they had during their day. Did they ever have an inkling of the game that had been run on them and their kind? Did they ever think of possessing more than a woman's thighs and enough liquor to drink? The best any of them could hope for was to become a trusty guard and perhaps survive their sentences. If their fate was his, Ira believed he would either take out a judge's throat or open his own veins.
But ultimately most of them deserved whatever happened to them, he thought. They were uneducable, conceived and born in squalor and hardly able to concentrate on three sentences in a row that didn't deal with their viscera. Even Flower, who was the most intelligent Negro he had ever known, was somehow offended because he had told her she reminded him of his mother. His father had said there was no difference between the races. That morning Flower had certainly proved she was half-darky, acting rudely after he had journeyed all the way from Angola to see her. What a waste of his time and affections, he thought.
Ira heard a sound like a music box playing in the rain, rising and falling as the wind popped the tent flaps and the canvas over his head. Perched up high on the framing of Rufus Atkins' house he saw an elderly Negro man fitting a board into place, his face as creased as an old leather glove, his purple pants shiny with wear above his bare ankles.
Why was this man wearing purple pants instead of the black-and-white stripes that were standard convict issue? The convict's hair was grizzled, his cheeks covered with white whiskers. What was a man that age, probably with cataracts, doing on top of a second-story crossbeam? Again Ira heard the tinkling of music in the rain, a tune that was vaguely familiar and disturbing, like someone rattling a piece of crystal inside his memory. He rose from his chair and looked out the flap at the Negro carpenter, who had paused in his work and was looking back at him now.
Uncle Royal? Ira thought. He pinched his eyes. My God, what was happening to him? Uncle Royal had been dead for years. What was it his father had once said, Niggers would be the damnation of them all? Well, so be it, Ira thought. He didn't create them nor did he invent the rules that governed the affairs of men and principalities.
He walked out into the rain, splattering his white pants with mud. "Get that old man off there!" he yelled at the foreman.
"Off what?" the foreman asked.
"Off the house. Right there. Why is he wearing purple pants?" Ira replied.
"That ain't no old man up there, Kunnel," the foreman said, half grinning. Then he looked at the expression on Ira's face. "I'll get him down, suh. Ain't nothing here to worry about."
"Good," Ira said, and went back inside the tent and closed the flap. The rain was clicking hard on the canvas now. It had been a mistake to come here, one born purely out of pride, he thought. What was to be gained by confronting Rufus Atkins personally? He was going to pull his convict labor off Atkins' property and ruin his credit by running a newspaper notice to the effect he would not co-sign any of Atkins' loan applications or be responsible for his debts. Ira computed it would take about six weeks for Atkins' paltry business operations to collapse.
When you could do that much damage to a man with a three-dollar newspaper advertisement, why waste time dealing with him on a personal basis?
It was time for a fine lunch and a bottle of good wine and the company of people who weren't idiots. Maybe he should think about a trip to Nashville to see his old friend General Forrest.
He smiled at a story that was beginning to circulate about the regard in which Forrest had been held by General Sherman. After Forrest had driven every Yankee soldier from the state of Mississippi, Sherman supposedly assembled his staff and said, "I don't care what it takes. Lose ten thousand men if you have to. But kill that goddamn sonofabitch Bedford Forrest."
Nathan should have that put on his tombstone, Ira thought.
But where was that tune coming from? In his mind's eye he saw hand-carved wooden horses turning on a miniature merry-go-round, the delicately brushed paint worn by time, the windup key rotating as the music played inside the base.
For just a moment he felt a sense of theft about his life that was indescribable. He tore through the other rooms in the tent, searching for the origin of the sound, kicking over a chair with a black Kluxer robe hung on the back. Then, through a crack in the rear flap, he saw it, a wind chime tinkling on a wood post. He ripped it from the nail that held it and stalked back through Atkins' sleeping area, then ducked through the mosquito netting and curtain that separated it from the front room.
He smelled an odor like camphor and perfume, like flowers pressed between the pages of an old book or blood that had dried inside a balled handkerchief. He straightened his back, the chime clenched in his hand, and thought he saw his mother's silhouette beckoning for him to approach her, the wide folds of her dark blue dress like a portal into memories that he did not want to relive.
WILLIE tethered his team under a huge mimosa tree on the edge of St. Peter's Cemetery, mixed mortar in a wheelbarrow, and bricked together a foundation for Jim's crypt. Then he dragged Jim's box on top of the foundation and began bricking and mortaring four walls around the box. Clouds tumbled across the sky and he could smell wildflowers and salt inside the wind off the Gulf. As he tapped each brick level with the handle of the trowel, the sun warm on his shoulders, he tried to forget the insult that Tige had flung in his face.
If it had come from anyone else, he thought. But Tige was uncanny in his intuition about the truth.
Was it indeed Willie's fate to forever mourn the past, to dwell upon the war and the loss of a love that was probably not meant to be? Had he made his journey to Shiloh less out of devotion to a friend than as a histrionic and grandiose attempt at public penance? Was he simply a self-deluded fool?
There are days when I wish I had fallen at your side, Jim.
You were always my steadfast pal, Willie. Don't talk like that. You have to carry the guidon tor both of us.
I'll never get over the war. I'll never forget Shiloh.
You don't need to, you ole groghead. You were brave. Why should we have to forget? That's for cowards. One day you'll tell your grandchildren you scouted for Bedford Forrest.
And a truly odious experience it was, Willie said. He thought he heard Jim laugh inside the bricks. He saw a shadow break across his own. He turned on his knee, splattering himself with mortar from the trowel.
"Sorry I said them words," Tige said. He took off his kepi and twirled it on the tip of his finger.
"Which words would those be?" Willie said, grinning at the edge of his mouth, one eye squinted against the sunlight.
"Saying Miss Abigail didn't have no interest in you. Saying you didn't care about nobody except dead people."
"I must have been half-asleep, because I have no memory of it," Willie said.
"You sure can tell a mess of fibs, Willie Burke."
"You didn't happen to bring some lunch with you, did you?"
"No, but Robert Perry was looking for you."
"Now, why would noble Robert be looking for the likes of me?"
"Ask him, 'cause there he comes yonder. Y'all are a mysterious kind," Tige said.
"How's that?"
"You lose a war, then spend every day of your life losing it again in your head. Never seen a bunch so keen on beating theirself up all the time."
"I think you're a man of great wisdom, young Tige," Willie said. Robert Perry walked through the rows of crypts and slung a canvas choke sack on the bed of Willie's wagon. It made a hard, knocking sound when it struck the wood. His skin was deeply tanned, freckled with sunlight under the mimosa, his uncut hair bleached on the tips. The wind gusted behind him, ruffling the leaves in the tree, and the countryside suddenly fell into shadow. "It's going to rain again," Robert said.
"Looks like it," Willie replied.
"Why don't you tell people where you're going once in a while?" he asked.
"Out of sorts today?" Willie said.
"That worthless fellow Rufus Atkins was drunk down in the bottoms this morning. The word is he and this McCain character, the one who runs the hardware store, put on their sheets last night and paid Flower Jamison a call," Robert said.
"Say that again?" Willie said, rising to his feet.
"Ah, I figured right," Robert said.
"Figured what?"
"You couldn't wait to put your hand in it as soon as you heard," Robert said.
"What's in that bag?" Willie asked.
"My law books."
"What else?"
"My sidearm," Robert said.