"He does what you tell him?" she said.
His faced seemed to dilate and redden with his frustration. "In a word, yes," he said.
"He made me go to bed with him, Colonel. Miss Abby told you about it. But you didn't raise a hand."
"I set the example. So you're correct, Flower. The guilt is mine."
He was speaking too fast now, his mercurial nature impossible to connect from one moment to the next.
"Suh, I don't understand," she said.
"Years ago I visited the quarters at night. I took all the privileges of a wealthy young plantation owner. People like Rufus and our man Clay over there are products of my own class."
"You helped them hurt me, suh."
"People can change. I'm sorry, Flower. My God, I'm your father. Can't you have some forgiveness?" he said.
After he was gone she sat on the top step of her gallery, her temples pounding, a solitary crow cawing against the yellow haze that filled the afternoon. She could not comprehend what had just happened. He had looked upon her work, her creations, her life, with admiration and pride, then had accepted paternity for her and in the same sentence had asked forgiveness.
Why now?
Because legally he can't own you anymore. This way he can, a voice answered.
She wanted to shove her fingers in her ears.
WILLIE saw reprinted copies of the article from the racist newspaper tacked on trees and storefronts all over town. One was even placed in his mailbox by a mounted man who leaned down briefly in the saddle, then rode away in the early morning mist. Willie had run after him, but the mounted man paid him no heed and did not look back at him. Night riders had come into his yard twice now, calling his name, tossing rocks at his windows. So far he had not taken their visits seriously. He had learned the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia, when in earnest, struck without warning and left no doubt about their intentions. A carpetbagger was stripped naked and rope-drug through a woods, a black soldier garrotted on the St. Martinville Road, a political meeting in the tiny settlement of Loreauville literally shot to pieces.
But what do you do when the names of your friends are smeared by a collection of nameless cowards? he asked himself.
Make your own statement, he answered.
He saddled a horse in the livery he had inherited from his mother and rode out to the ends of both East and West Main, then divided the town into quadrants and traversed every street and alley in it, pulling down copies of the defamatory article and stuffing them in a choke sack tied to his pommel. By early afternoon, under a white sun, he was out in the parish, ripping the article from fence posts and the trunks of live oaks that bordered cane fields and dirt roads. His choke sack bulged as though it were stuffed with pine cones.
South of town, in an undrained area where a group of Ira Jamison's rental convicts were building a board road to a salt mine, Willie looked over his shoulder and saw a lone rider on a buckskin gelding behind him, a man with a poached, wind-burned face wearing a sweat-ringed hat and the flared boots of a cavalryman.
Willie passed a black man cooking food under a pavilion fashioned from tent poles and canvas. The black man was barefoot and had a shaved, peaked head, like the polished top of a cypress knee. He wore a white jumper and a pair of striped prison pants and rusted leg irons that caused him to take clinking, abbreviated steps from one pot to the next.
"You one of Colonel Jamison's convicts?" Willie asked.
"You got it, boss," the black man replied.
"What are you selling?"
"Greens, stew meat and tomatoes, red beans, rice and gravy, fresh bread. A plateful for fifteen cents. Or it's free if you wants to build the bo'rd road under the gun," the black man said. He roared at his own joke.
Willie turned his horse in a circle and waited in the shade of a live oak for the rider to approach him. The rider's eyes seemed lidless and reminded Willie of smoke on a wintry day or perhaps a gray sky flecked with scavenger birds. In spite of the heat, the rider's shirt was buttoned at the wrists and throat and he wore leather cuffs pulled up on his forearms.
"You wouldn't bird-dog a fellow, would you, Captain Jarrette?" Willie said.
"I make it my business to check out them that need watching," the rider replied.
"You put your sword to me when I was unarmed and had done you no injury. But you also saved me from going before a Yankee firing squad. So maybe we're even," Willie said.
"Meaning?"
"I'd like to buy you a lunch."
Jarrette removed his hat and surveyed the countryside, his hair falling over his ears. He leaned in the saddle and blew his nose with his fingers.