Willie could smell an odor like milk and freshly mowed hay in the tall youth's clothes.
"You pass by without saying hello to your pal?" the young man said.
"Hello,
Jim!"
"Hello there, Willie!"
"You get enough grog in you last night?" Willie asked.
"Hardly," Jim replied. "Are you going to see that nigger girl again?"
"It's a possibility. Care to come along?" Willie said. The young man named Jim had hair the color of straw and an angular, self-confident face that reflected neither judgment of himself nor others. He pulled slightly at the book that protruded from Willie's pocket and flipped his thumb along the edges of the pages.
"What you're about to do is against the law, Willie," Jim said.
Willie looked at the dust blowing out of the new sugarcane, a solitary drop of rain that made a star in the dust. "Smell the salt? It's a fine day, Jim. I think you should stay out of saloons for a spell," he said.
"That girl is owned by Ira Jamison. He's not a man to fool with," Jim said.
"Really, now?"
"Join the Home Guards with me. You should see the Enfield rifles we uncrated yesterday. The Yankees come down here, by God we'll lighten their load."
"I'm sure they're properly frightened at the prospect. You'd better drop off now, Jim. I don't want to get you in trouble with Marse Jamison," Willie said.
Jim's silence made Willie truly wish for the first time that day he'd kept his own counsel. He felt Jim's hands let go of his sides, then heard his weight hit the dirt road. Willie turned to wave good-bye to his friend, sorry for his condescending attitude, even sorrier for the fear in his breast that he could barely conceal. But his friend did not look back.
THE last house on the road was a ramshackle laundry owned by Ira Jamison, set between two spreading oaks, behind which Flower sat in an open-air wash shed, scrubbing stains out of a man's nightshirt, her face beaded with perspiration from the iron pots steaming around her. Her hair was black and straight, like an Indian's, her cheekbones pronounced, her skin the color of coffee with milk poured in it.
She looked at the sun's place in the sky and set the shirt down in the boiling water again and went into the cypress cabin where she lived by the coulee and wiped her face and neck and underarms with a rag she dipped into a cypress bucket.
From under her bed she removed the lined tablet and dictionary Willie had given her and sat in a chair by the window and read the lines she had written in the tablet:
A owl flown acrost the moon late last night.
A cricket sleeped on the pillow by my head.
The gator down in the coulee look like dark stone when the sunlite turn red and spill out on the land.
There is talk of a war. A free man of color who have a big house on the bayou say for the rest of us not to listen to no such talk. He own slaves hisself and makes bricks in a big oven.
I learned to spell 3 new words this morning. Mr. Willie say not to write down hard words lessen I look them up first.
A band played on the big lawn on the bayou yesterday. A man in a silk hat and purple suit tole the young soldiers they do not haf to worry about the Yankees cause the Yankees is cowards. The brass horns were gold in the sunshine. So was the sword the man in the silk hat and purple suit carry on his side.
Mr. Willie say not to say aint. Not to say he dont or she dont either.
This is all my thoughts for the day.
Signed, Flower Jamison
She heard Willie's horse in the yard and glanced around her cabin at the wildflowers she had cut and placed in a water jar that morning, her clean Sunday dress, which hung on a wood peg, the bedspread given to her by a white woman on Main, now tucked around the moss-stuffed mattress pad on her bed. When she stepped out the door Willie was swinging down from his horse, slipping a bag of dirty clothes loose from the pommel of his saddle.
He smiled at her, then squinted up at the sunlight through the trees and glanced back casually at the house, as though he were simply taking in the morning and his surroundings with no particular thought in mind.
"You by yourself today?" he asked.