"Think so?" he said, looking up at her, his forehead wrinkling.
IRA Jamison sat astride a white gelding and watched his first shipment of convicts from the jails of New Orleans and Baton Rouge go to work along the river's edge, chopping down trees, burning underbrush and digging out the coffins in a slaves' cemetery that had filled with water seepage and formed a large depiession in the woods.
Most of the convicts were Negroes. A few were white and a few were children, some as young as seven years old. All of them wore black-and-white-striped jumpers and pants, and hats that were woven together from palmetto leaves. They flung the chopped trees and underbrush onto bonfires that were burning by the river's edge and raked the rotted wood and bones from the slaves' coffins into the water. As Ira Jamison moved his horse out of the smoke blowing off the fires, he tried to form in his mind's eye a picture of the log skid and sawmill and loading docks that would replace the woods and the Negro cemetery.
He did not like the idea of the children working among the adults. They were not only in the way, they were not cost-effective. But his state contract required he take all the inmate men, women, and children, from the parish jails throughout Louisiana; house, clothe and feed them; and put them to work in some form of rehabilitative activity and simultaneously contribute to the states economy.
He watched a Negro boy, no more than twelve, clean a nest of bones and rags from a coffin and begin flinging them off the bank into the current. The boy picked up the skull by inserting his fingers in the eye sockets and pitched it in a high arc onto a pile of driftwood that was floating south toward Baton Rouge, the boy nudged a companion and pointed at his handiwork.
"Bring that one to me," Jamison said to Clay Hatcher, who was now back at his former job on the plantation, his blond hair the color of old wood, the skin under his right eye grained black from a musket that had blown up in his face at the battle of Mansfield.
"You got it, Kunnel," Hatcher said.
He walked into the trees and the trapped smoke from the bonfires and tapped the skull-thrower on top of his palmetto hat.
When the boy approached Jamison's horse he removed his hat and raised his face uncertainly. His striped jumper was grimed with red dirt, his hair sparkling with sweat.
"Yes, suh?" he said.
"It doesn't bother you to handle dead people's bones?" Jamison asked.
"No, suh."
"Why not?"
"'Cause they dead," the boy said, and grinned. Then his face seemed to brighten with curiosity as he gazed up at Jamison.
"You have a reason for looking at me like that?" Jamison asked.
"You gots one eye mo' little than the other, that's all," the boy replied.
Jamison felt the gelding shift its weight under him.
"Why were you sent to jail?" he asked.
"They ain't ever tole me."
"Don't be playing on the job anymore. Can you do that for me?" Jamison said.
"Yes, suh."
"Get on back to work now," Jamison said.
"Yes, suh."
By day's end the log skid was almost completed, the graves excavated and filled in, packed down with clay and smoothed over with iron rollers, the sides of the depression overlaid with cypress planks and stobs to prevent erosion. In fact, it was a masterpiece of engineering, Jamison thought, a huge sluice that could convert timber into money, seven days a week, as fast as the loggers could fell tree
s and slide them down the slope.
As he turned his horse toward the house he saw Clay Hatcher pick up an object from a mound of mud on the edge of the work area. Hatcher knocked the mud off it and held it up in the light to see the object more clearly. Then he stooped over and washed it in a bucket of water the convicts had used to clean their shovels in. Jamison walked his horse toward Hatcher.
"What do you have there, Clay?" he asked.
"It looks to be an old merry-go-round. It's still got a windup key plugged in it. I wonder what it was doing in the graveyard," Hatcher replied.
Jamison reached down and took the merry-go-round from Hatcher's fingers and studied the hand-carved horses, the corroded brass cylinder inside the base, the key that was impacted with dirt and feeder roots. He had given it to Uncle Royal, who in turn had given it to his great-grandson, the one who died of a fever. Or was it an accident, something about an overturned wagon crushing him? Jamison couldn't remember.
He returned it to Hatcher.