"Doing what?" Carrie asked.
"Cleaning, washing, ironing, anything you want. I can sew, too. The Yankees are calling us contrabands. That means the Southerners cain't own us anymore."
"Already got somebody to do all them things."
"I can write letters for you. I know how to subtract and add sums."
"Want money? You know how to get it," Carrie said.
"Thank you for your time, Miss Carrie."
"Don't give me a look like I'm hard, no."
"You ain't hard. You just for sale."
"You like a pop in the face?" Carrie said.
Flower looked.it the plank table under the live oak where Captain Rufus Atkins had counted out a short stack of heavy coins in the palms of the paddy rollers only yesterday afternoon.
"I axed for a job. You don't have one. I won't bother you anymore," Flower said.
"Wait up, you," Carrie said. She fitted the thickness of her hand under Flower's chin and turned it back and forth, exposing her throat to the light. "Who give you them marks?"
"I need a job, Miss Carrie."
"Abigail Dowling ain't gonna let you go hungry. You wanting money for somet'ing else, ain't you?"
Flower turned and walked down the steps and into the fog rolling out of the fields. It felt damp and invasive on her skin, like the moist touch of a soiled hand on her arm.
SHE wandered the town until noon, without direction or purpose. Many of the shops along Main Street had been broken open and looted, except the hardware store, which the owner, a man named Todd McCain, had emptied of its goods before the Yankees had come into town during the night. In fact, McCain had taken the extra measure of turning the cash register toward the glass window so passersby could see that the compartments in the drawer contained no money.
Yankee soldiers, some of them still drunk, slept under the trees on the bayou. She sat on a wood bench by the drawbridge and watched a steamboat loaded with blue-clad sharpshooters lounging behind cotton bales work its way upstream toward St. Martinville. The sharpshooters waved at her, and one pointed at his fly and held his hands apart as though showing her the size of an enormous fish.
The Episcopalian church, which had been a field hospital for Confederate wounded, had now been converted into a stable, the pews pushed together to form feed troughs. Flower watched the sun climb in the sky, then disappear among the tree branches over her head. She slept with her head on her chest and dreamed of a man holding a white snake in his hand. He grinned at her, then placed the head of the snake in his mouth and held it there while he unbuttoned and removed his shirt.
She awoke abruptly and cleared her throat and spat into the dirt, widening her eyes until the images from the dream were gone from her mind. Then she rose from the bench and walked unsteadily through the shade, into the heat of the day, toward McCain's Hardware.
"You want to look at what?" the owner, Todd McCain, said.
"The pistol. You had it in the glass case before the Yankees came to town," she replied.
"I don't remember no pistol," McCain said. He had been a drummer from Atlanta who had come to New Iberia on the stage and married an overweight widow ten years his senior. His body was hard and egg-shaped, the shoulders narrow, his metallic hair greased and parted down the middle.
"I want to see the pistol. Or I'll come back with a Yankee soldier who'll help you find it," she said.
"That a fact?" he said.
He fixed his eyes on her face, a smile breaking at the side of his
mouth. She turned and started back out the door. "Hold on," he said.
He went into the back of the store and returned to the front and laid a heavy object wrapped in oily flannel on top of the glass case. He glanced at the street, then unwrapped a cap-and-ball revolver with dark brown grips. The blueing on the tip of the barrel and on the cylinder was worn a dull silver from holster friction.
"That's a Colt.36 caliber revolver. Best sidearm you can buy," he said.
"How much is it?"
"You people ain't suppose to have these."