White Doves at Morning

"Did you ask the same of your daughter?"

"My wife and I had no children, so

I'm not sure whom you're referring to. But no matter. Have a fine day, Miss Abigail," he said.

"Your own daughter told you she was raped and you manhandled her. In front of these men. What kind of human being are you?" she said.

The street was deep in shadow, empty of sound and people. The oak limbs overhead creaked in the wind.

"I guess it's just not your day, Colonel Jamison," the cotton trader said.

All four men laughed.

Abigail Dowling pulled the buggy whip from its socket on the side of Ira Jamison's carriage and slashed it across his face. He pressed his hand against his cheek and stared at the blood on his fingers in disbelief.

She flung the whip to the ground and walked to her cottage, then went through the yard and into the trees in back, trembling all over. She stood among the oaks and cypresses on the bayou, her arms clenched across her chest, her temples pulsing with nests of green veins.

A wave of revulsion swept through her. But at what? The owner of the hardware store? The rapists? Ira Jamison?

She knew better. Her violence, her social outrage, her histrionic public displays, all disguised a simple truth. Once again, an innocent person had paid for the deeds she had committed, in this case, Flower Jamison.

The wind swirled inside the trees and wrinkled the surface of the bayou, and in the rustling of the canebrake she thought she heard the word Judas hissed in her ear.

Chapter Nineteen

AT Willie Burke's request, a Union chaplain secured for him three sheets of paper, three envelopes, a bottle of black ink, and a metal writing pen. He sat on straw against the wall of the storehouse, a candle guttering on the brick window ledge above his head, and wrote a letter to his mother and one to Abigail. There was a hollow feeling in his chest and a deadness in his limbs that he had never known before, even at Shiloh. The words he put in his letters contained no grand or spiritual sentiment. In fact, he considered it a victory simply to complete a sentence that did not reflect the fear and weakness eating through his body like weevils through pork.

His third letter was to Robert Perry, somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.

Dear Robert,

I was captured out of uniform and will be shot in two hours. This night I have written Abby and told her I love her but I know her heart belongs to you. It could not go to a more fitting and fine man. I repent of any violation of our friendship, Robert, and want you to know I would never deliberately impair your relationship with

another.

Jim Stubbefield and I will see you on the other side.

Your old pal and friend, Willie Burke

He folded the three letters and placed them in their envelopes and sealed them with wax that had melted on top of the candle burning above his head. Then he gave them to the chaplain, who was consoling a man whose skin had turned as gray as a cadaver's.

Willie stood at the window and watched the stars fade and the light go out of the sky, and the scattered farmhouses and the trees along the bayou begin to sharpen inside the ground fog that rolled out of the fields. Roosters were crowing beyond his line of sight, and he smelled wood smoke and meat frying on a fire. Eight Union soldiers were camped in pup tents among the oaks on the bayou, their Springfield rifles stacked. The canvas sides of their tents were damp with dew, the flaps tied to the tents' poles. Willie's heart dropped when he saw an enlisted man emerge from his tent and stretch and look in the direction of the storehouse. He stepped back from the window and pressed his hand to his mouth, just as a half cup of bile surged out of his stomach.

Jim wasn't afraid when he went up the hill with the guidon at Shiloh, he thought. Don't you be, either, he told himself. A brief flash of light, perhaps a little pain, then it's over. There are worse ways to go. How about the poor devils carried into an aid station with their guts hanging out or their jaws shot away? Or the ones who begged for death while their limbs were sawed off?

But his dialogue with himself brought him no comfort and he wondered if his legs would fail when a Yankee provost walked him to the wall.

The soldiers camped on the bayou were gathered around their cookfire now, drinking coffee, glancing in the direction of the storehouse, as though preparing themselves for an uncomfortable piece of work that was not of their choosing.

A ninth man joined them, an erect fellow with a holstered sidearm and stripes on his sleeves. When the firelight struck his face Willie recognized the sergeant who had tried to prevail upon him to use his head and extricate himself from a capital sentence. What were his words, the only real pacifist was a dead Quaker?

Why had he not listened?

A man with a stench that made Willie think of cat spray elbowed him aside from the window.

"Sorry, I didn't know you had your name carved on the bricks," Willie said.

"Shut up," the man said.