"Then you'd damn well better point them out."
A ragged volley of rifle fire exploded from behind the barn.
"Would you have a chew of tobacco on you, sir?" Willie asked.
That evening he stood at the barred window of a brick storehouse on the bank of Bayou Teche and watched the sun descend in a cloud of purple smoke in the west. It was cool and damp-smelling inside the storehouse, and the oaks along the bayou were a dark green in the waning light, swelling with wind, the air heavy with the fecund odor of schooled-up bream popping the surface of the water among the lily pads.
Other men sat on the dirt floor, some with their heads hanging between their knees. They were looters, rapists, guerrillas, jayhawkers, grave robbers, accused spies, or people who just had very bad luck. In fact, Willie believed at that moment that the nature of the crimes they had committed was less important than the fact that anarchy had spread across the land and the deaths of these men would restore some semblance of order to it.
At dawn, the general had said.
How big a price should anyone have to pay to retain his integrity? Willie asked himself. How did he come to this juncture in his life?
Arrogance and pride, his mind answered.
He could hear his heart pounding in his ears.
Chapter Eighteen
FLOWER Jamison did not sleep the night she was raped. She bathed in the iron tub behind Abigail Dowling's cottage, then put back on the same clothes she had worn before the attack and sat alone in the darkness, looking out on the street until Abigail returned home. "What happened?" Abigail asked, staring at the splintered door in the kitchen.
"Three men broke in and raped me," Flower replied.
"Federals broke in here? You were ra-"
"They were civilians. They were looking for you. They took me instead."
"Oh, Flower."
"What one man more than any other wants to hurt you? A man who hates you, who's cruel through and through?"
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do," Flower said.
"Rufus Atkins threatened me. Out there, in the street. Yesterday," Abigail said.
Flower nodded her head.
"I saw him give money to three men behind Carrie LaRose's house earlier today."
"That doesn't prove anything."
"Yes, it does. I saw a man's yellow teeth under his mask. I heard the coins clink in their pants. It was them."
"Are you hurt inside?"
"They hurt me everywhere," she replied.
She refused to use the bed Abigail offered her and sat in the chair all night. Before dawn, without eating breakfast, she left the cottage and walked down Main and stood under the wood colonnade in front of McCain's Hardware. She wiped the film off the window with her hand in several places and tried to see inside. Then she walked out in the country to the laundry where she had worked. It and the cabins behind it were burned to the ground.
She walked back up the road to the back door of Carrie LaRose's bordello. She had to knock twice before Carrie came to the door.
"What you mean banging on my do' this early in the morning?" Carrie said.
"Need to earn some money," Flower said.
Carrie looked out at the fog on the fields and the blackened threads of sugarcane on her lawn, as though the morning itself might contain either an omen or threat. She wore glass rings on the fingers of both hands and a housecoat and a kerchief on her head and paper curlers in her hair that made Flower think of a badly plucked chicken inside a piece of cheesecloth.