"I ain't got nothing against hit," he said.
Jarrette waited in the shade while Willie paid for their lunches. He watched the convicts lay split logs in the saw grass and humus and the black mud that oozed over their ankles. His nose was beaked, his chin cut with a cleft, his eyes connecting images with thoughts that probably no one would ever be privy to. Jarrette did not sit but squatted while he ate, shoveling food into his mouth as fast as possible with a wood spoon, scraping the tin in the plate, wiping it clean with bread, then eating the bread and licking his fingers, the muscles in his calves and thighs knotted into rocks.
"This grub tastes like dog turds," he said, tossing his bare plate on the grass.
Willie looked at the intensity in Jarrette's face, the heat that seemed to climb out of his buttoned collar, the twitch at the corner of one eye when he heard a convict's ax split a piece of green wood.
"Tell me, sir, is it possible you're insane?" Willie asked.
"Maybe. Anything wrong with that?" Jarrette replied.
"I was just curious."
Jarrette shifted his weight on his haunches and studied him warily. "Why you tearing down them newspaper stories? Don't lie about it, either," he said.
"They defame people I know."
Jarrette seemed to think about the statement.
"Cole Younger is my brother-in-law, you sonofabitch," he said.
Willie gathered up his plate and spoon from the grass, then reached down and picked up Jarrette's and returned them to the plank serving table under the canvas-topped pavilion. He walked back into the oak tree's shade. "As one Secesh to another, accept my word on this-" he began. Then he rethought his words and looked out at the wind blowing across the saw grass. "May you have a fine day, Captain Jarrette, and may all your children and grandchildren be just like you and keep you company the rest of your life," he said.
WHEN the sun was red over the cane fields in the west, Willie pulled the last copy of The Rebel Clarion article he could find from the front porch of a houseboat far down Bayou Teche and turned his horse back toward town.
Now, all he needed to do was bury his choke sack in a hole or set fire to it on a mud bank and be done with it.
But a voice that he preferred not to hear told him that was not part of his plan.
Since his return from the war he had tried to accept the fact that the heart of Abigail Dowling belonged to another and it was fruitless for him to pursue what ultimately had been a boyhood fantasy. Had he not written Robert the same, in the moments before he thought he was going to be shot, at a time when a man knew the absolute truth about his life and himself, when every corner of the soul was laid bare?
But she wouldn't leave his thoughts. Nor would the memory of her thighs opening under him, the press of her hands in the small of his back, the heat of her breath on his cheek. Her sexual response wasn't entirely out of charity, was it? Women didn't operate in that fashion, he told himself. She obviously respected him, and sometimes at the school he saw a fondness in her eyes that made him want to reach out and touch her.
Maybe the war had embittered him and had driven her from him, and the fault was neither his nor Abby's but the war. After all, she was an abolitionist and sometimes his own rhetoric sounded little different from the recalcitrant Secessionists who would rather see the South layered with ash and bones than given over to the carpetbag government.
Why let the war continue to injure both of them? If he could only take contention and vituperation from his speech and let go of the memories, no, that was not the word, the anger he still felt when he saw Jim Stubbefield freeze against a red-streaked sky, his jaw suddenly gone slack, a wound like a rose petal in the center of his brow-
What had he told Abby? "I'll never get over Jim. I hate the sons of-bitches who caused all this." What woman would not be frightened by the repository of vitriol that still burned inside him?
If he could only tell Abby the true feelings of his heart. Wouldn't all the other barriers disappear?
Had she not come to him for help when she and Flower started up their school?
He tethered his horse to the ringed pole in front of Abby's cottage. The street was empty, the sky ribbed with strips of maroon cloud, the shutters on Abby's cottage vibrating in the wind. He walked into the backyard and set fire to the choke sack in Abby's trash pit, then tapped on her back door.
"Hello, Willie. What are you up to?" she said, looking over his shoulder at the column of black smoke rising out of the ground.
"A lot of townspeople were incensed at your being slandered by this Kluxer paper in Baton Rouge. So they gathered up the articles and asked me to burn them," he said.
"What Kluxer paper?" she said.
He stared at her stupidly, then yawned slightly and looked innocuously out into the trees. "It's nothing of consequence. There's a collection of cretins in Baton Rouge who are always writing things no one takes seriously."
"Willie, for once would you try to make sense?" she said.
"It's not important. Believe me. I was just passing by."
"You look like a boiled crab. Have you been out in the sun?"