The judge removed his glasses and pulled on his nose.
"You're a member of the militia?" he said to Willie.
"Yes, sir, I am!"
"Will you stop shouting? It's the sentence of this court that you return to your unit at Camp Pratt and be a good soldier. You might stay out of saloons for a while, too," the judge said, and smacked down his gavel.
After the judge had left the room, Willie walked with his mother and Abigail and Jim toward the door that gave onto the outside stairway.
"Where's Robert today?" Willie asked, hoping his disappointment didn't show.
"Mustered into the 8th Lou'sana Vols and sent to Camp Moore. The word is they're going to Virginia," Jim said.
"What about us?" Willie asked.
"We're stuck here, Willie."
"With Atkins?"
Jim laid his arm across Willie's shoulders and didn't answer. Outside, Rufus Atkins and the paddy rollers were gathered under a live oak. The corporal named Clay Hatcher turned and looked at Willie, his smile like a slit in a baked apple.
IT rained late that afternoon, drumming on Bayou Teche and the live oaks around Abigail Dowling's cottage. Then the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun and a strange green light filled the trees. Out in the mist rising off the bayou Abigail could hear the whistle on a paddle-wheeler and the sound of the boat's wake slapping in the cypress trunks at the foot of her property.
She lighted the lamp on her desk and dipped her pen in a bottle of ink and began the letter she had been formulating in her mind all day.
She wrote Dearest Robert on a piece of stationery, then crumpled up the page and began again.
Dear Robert,
Even though I know you believe deeply in your cause, candor and conscience compel me to confess my great concern for your safety and my fear that this war will bring great sorrow and injury into your life. Please forgive me for expressing my feelings so strongly, but it is brave young men such as yourself who ennoble the human race and I do not feel it is God's will that you sacrifice your life or take life in turn to further an enterprise as base and meretricious as that of slavery.
She heard the clopping of a horse in the street and glanced up through the window and saw Rufus Atkins dismount from a huge buckskin mare and open her gate. He wore polished boots and a new gray uniform with a gold collar and a double row of brass buttons on the coat and scrolled gold braid on the sleeves.
She put down her pen, blotted her letter, and met him at the front door. He removed his hat and bowed slightly.
"Excuse my intrusion, Miss Abigail. I wanted to apologize for any offense I may have given you in the court," he said.
"I'm hardly cognizant of anything you might say, Mr. Atkins, hence, I can take no offense at it," she replied.
"May I come in?"
"No, you may not," she replied.
He let the insult slide off his face. He watched a child kicking a stuffed football down the street.
"I have a twenty-dollar gold piece here," he said. He flipped it off his thumb and caught it in his palm. "Years ago a card sharp fired a derringer at me from under a card table. The ball would have gone through my vest pocket into my vitals, except this coin was in its way. See, it's bent right in the center."
She held his stare, her face expressionless, but her palms felt cold and stiff, her throat filled with needles.
"I lost this coin at the laundry and had pretty much marked off ever finding it," he said. "Then two days ago the sheriff found a drowned nigger in Vermilion Bay. She had this coin inside a juju bag. She was one of the escaped slaves we'd been looking for. I wonder how she came by my gold piece."
"I'm sure with time you'll find out, Mr. Atkins. In the meanwhile, there's no need for you to share the nature of your activities with me. Good evening, sir."
"You see much of Mr. Jamison's wash girl, the one called Flower? The drowned nigger was her aunt."
"In fact I do know Flower. I'm also under the impression your interest in her is more than a professional one."
"Northern ladies can have quite a mouth on them, I understand."