"General Butler. 'Spoons' Butler to some. He has a way of ending up with people's silverware. Where you from, anyway?" the man said.
She walked hurriedly toward the balloon of people who surrounded the man in manacles, her shoes splashing in water. She jerked on a soldier's arm.
"What are you going to do to this man?" she asked.
"Whatever it is, it's none of your business. Go back to the edge of the street," the soldier replied.
"You take me to your commanding officer," she said.
"Maybe you should kiss my smelly bum, too," he said.
"What did you say?" she said.
He shifted his rifle to his left hand and spun her in the opposite direction, then pushed her hard between the shoulder blades, snapping her head back. When she turned around again, the other soldiers had already worked their captive inside the building.
Someone on the second story pulled aside the curtains above the empty flag staff that protruded from the bricks. She could see the man in manacles fighting now, butting the soldiers with his head, spitting at their faces.
She tried to push her way inside the door and was shoved back by a sentry. She heard he crowd roar behind her and looked up, just as the manacled man was hoisted onto the windowsill, a narrow-gauge greased length of rope looped around his throat. He fell three feet ingo space before the rope came taut.
But his neck did not snap. Brick mortar shaled from his shoes and fell on her head and shoulders as he twisted on the rope and his feet kicked against the wall.
She fought her way back through the crowd and suddenly found herself inside the collective odor of its members, the dried sweat under the perfume and caked body powder, the dirty hair, the wine breath and decayed meat impacted between their teeth, all of it washing over her in a fetid wave as they shouted out their ridicule of the man whose eyes bulged like walnuts above them, some twisting their own heads and sticking their tongues out the sides of their mouths in mockery.
She pushed her way to the edge of the crowd into the open. She dropped her purse in a mud puddle and almost fell down when she tried to pick it up. The whistle of a steamboat screamed on the river and one of the ironclads fired off a cannon in celebration of the hanging. Then a black woman took her around the waist and walked with her toward the open-air market and the empty bench where a cat was eating the sandwich Abigail had left behind.
"You gonna be all right, Miss Abigail. No, no, don't watch what them people are doing no more. You and me are just gonna keep putting one foot after the other and not worry about them folks back yonder," the black woman said.
"Is that you, Flower?" Abigail said.
"Sure it is, Miss Abigail. I ain't gonna let you down, either," Flower said.
"That poor man."
"No, no, do what I tell you and don't be looking over there," Flower said, touching Abigail's eyes with her fingers. "You a brave lady. I wish I was as brave as you. One day everybody gonna know how brave you been, how much you done for us. I'm gonna see to it."
When they sat down on the bench together they clenched hands like schoolchildren. The palm and banana trees along the levee clattered in the wind off the river, and the deepening color of the sky made her think of the purple cloak Jesus was supposedly made to wear at his crucifixion. The street was empty now. The manacled man hung like a long, narrow exclamation mark against the wall of the Mint.
"My own people did this. Those who claim to be the voice of justice," Abigail said.
"But we didn't. That's what counts, Miss Abigail. You and me didn't do it. Sometimes that's about all the relief the world give you," Mower said.
"It's not enough," Abigail said.
Chapter Nine
FLOWER Jamison walked through Jackson Square, past St. Louis Cathedral, and down cobbled streets under colonnades and scrolled-iron balconies that dripped with bougainvillea and passion vine. A man in a constable's uniform was lighting the gas lamps along the street, and the breeze smelled of freshly sprinkled flower beds on the opposite side of a gated wall, spearmint, old brick that was dark with mold, and ponded water in a courtyard where the etched shadows of palm fronds moved like lace across a bright window.
The moon rose above the rooftops and chimneys and cast her shadow in front of her, at first startling her, then making her laugh.
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She walked past the brothels in Congo Square, two-story wood-frame buildings, their closed shutters slitted with an oily yellow light from inside. The only customers now were Yankee soldiers, boys, really, who entered the houses in groups, never singly, loud, boisterous, probably with little money, she thought, anxious to hide their fear and innocence and the paucity of their resources.
She passed a house that resonated with piano music and offered only mulatto women to its customers, what were always called quadroons, no matter what the racial mix of the woman actually was.
A baby-faced soldier not older than seventeen sat on the front step, klicking pebbles with his thumb into the yard, a kepi cocked on his head. He watched her pass and then for some unaccountable reason tipped his kepi to her.
She nodded at him and smiled.