White Doves at Morning

Dear Colonel Forrest,

I have good news from the Union surgeon and am on my way to a fine recovery. However, I am still haunted by the destruction of the 18th Louisiana Regiment at Shiloh and the fact the Orleans Guards, partially under my command, were not there on their flank when they advanced so bravely into Yankee artillery.

But conscience and honor require me to state I also have a practical concern. I plan to enter politics once the war is over. Because my name will be associated in a causal fashion, fairly or unfairly, with the tragedy of the 18th Louisiana, I think accepting a parole will not contribute to my chances of gaining high office. Neither do I relish the prospect or eating dried pras on a Yankee prison camp. I'm also quitesickof being tended by unwashed niggers in a Yankee hospital that stinks of urine-

She heard a Catholic sister pass on the other side of the screen and she refolded the letter and replaced it inside the ledger book.

Jamison woke and stared straight up into her face. For the first time she noticed that one of his eyes was smaller than the other, liquid, with a bead in it, like a glimmering, narrow conduit into a part of his mind he shared with no one.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"What you brung me here for. To tend you. To carry out your slop jar, to fetch your food, to wash the sweat off your skin, to listen to your grief. That's why you brung me, ain't you, suh?"

He propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her with a new and cautionary awareness.

ON her way out the door to catch the public car back to Basin Street, she saw Abigail Dowling sitting on a stone bench under a live oak tree, next to a double-amputee who was sleeping in a wheelchair, his head on his chest, the bandaged stubs of his legs sticking out into space.

"Could I sit down, ma'am?" she said.

"You don't have to ask," Abigail replied.

"What do the word 'par-old' mean?"

"Say it again."

"Par-old. Like something somebody don't want."

"You mean 'parole'? P-a-r-o-l-e?"

"That's it."

"Prisoners of war are exchanged sometimes so they don't have to go to a jail or a prison camp. Or sometimes they sign an oath of allegiance and just go back home. But you say there's somebody who doesn't want a parole?"

Flower watched the ice wagon turn off St. Charles and enter the hospital driveway. The driver stopped and chatted with a Creole woman who was cutting flowers and laying them delicately in a straw basket. Vapor rose from the tarp covering the sawed blocks of ice that had been brought in ships all the way from New England, and were now melting and running off the tailgate of a dray on a dappled, pea gravel driveway lined with pink and gray caladium. Blue-streaked, white-crusted blocks of ice carefully packed in sawdust that could refrigerate medicines and numb the pain in suffering men, now melting needlessly because a man and a lady wanted to exchange pleasantries in a floral garden in New Orleans, Louisiana. She felt her breath catch in her throat. "Are you all right, Flower?" Abigail asked.

"I can read. I can write some, too. Nobody know it, though, except Willie Burke, 'cause he taught me."

"What is it you're trying to tell me?"

Flower loosened the drawstring on the cloth bag she carried and removed the dictionary given her by Willie Burke. She flipped the pages to the P's and ran her finger down a page until she located the word her mind had unclearly formed and associated with an idea and an image which now seemed inextricably linked. "'Possession,'" she said.

"Pardon?" Abigail said.

"Colonel Jamison got one eye smaller than the other. It got a wet blue gleam in it. I didn't know what that look meant. It's possession, Miss Abigail. It's the control he got over other people that keeps him alive. Not love for no family, no cause, no little nigger baby who was found almost froze to death in a woods."

Abigail put her arm around her shoulders and squeezed her. "I'll always be your friend," she said.

But Flower rose from her grasp and walked quickly to the street, her face obscured in the shadows, her back shaking.

AFTER she returned to the hospital that evening, the sky turned black and the wind began to blow hard out of the south. She could hear rain hitting on the window glass and the open shutters vibrating against the latches that moored them to the bricks. When she looked out the window she saw leaves whipping in circles and the highest limbs in the oak trees thrashing against the sky and spiderwebs of lightning bursting inside the clouds.

"Sounds like cannons popping out there, don't it?" the young sentry said. He sat in a chair by the end of the ward, near the foyer where she kept her cot. His rifle was propped between his legs.

"Have you been in the war?" she asked.

"The Rebs potshot at us out on the river. They floated burning rafts past us so they could see us on the far bank. But they didn't hit nobody."

When she made no reply, he added, "I hear we're going up to Baton Rouge and kick their behinds. I'm ready for it."