White Doves at Morning

"How did you get in?" Flower said.

The man in the black robe and hood leaned close to her, as though he wanted his breath as well as his words to injure her skin. The image of a camellia was stitched with pink and white thread on the breast of his robe. "A hideaway door with a spring catch on the side of the house. Lots of things I know you don't, Flower," the voice of Rufus Atkins said. "I know the places you go, the names of the niggers you teach, the time of day you eat your food, the exact time you piss and shit and empty your thunder mug in the privy. Have you figured out what I'm telling you?"

"Explain it to her," the other visitor said.

Flower recognized the voice of Todd McCain, the owner of the hardware store.

"You think you're free," Rufus Atkins' voice said, the mouth hole in his hood puffing with his breath. "But you spit in the wrong man's face. That means no matter where you go, what you do, who you see, either me or my friend here or a hundred like us will be watching you. You won't be able to take a squat over your two-holer back there without wondering if we're listening outside. Starting to get the picture? We own you, girl. Throw all the temper tantrums you want. That sweet little brown ass is ours."

When she didn't answer, he moved the quirt over her breasts, pressing it against her nipples, flattening it against her stomach.

"Damned if you're not prime cut," he said. He blew his breath along the down on her skin and she felt her loins constrict and a wave of nausea course through her body.

The two hooded figures left the front door open behind them. She sat numbly on the side of her bed and watched them ride away, their robes riffling over their horses' rumps, the cap-and-ball revolver on which she had relied thrown into the mud.

Chapter Twenty-seven

EARLY the next morning she took the sheets off her bed, not touching the area where the man in the black hood had sat. She put them in a washtub, then bathed and dressed to go to school. When she tried to eat, her food tasted like paper in her mouth. The sky had cleared, the sun was shining, and birds sang in the trees, but the brilliance and color of the world outside seemed to have nothing to do with her life now.

She drank a cup of hot tea and scraped her uneaten food into a garbage bucket and washed her dishes, then prepared to leave for school. But when she closed and opened her eyes, her head spun and bile rose in her throat and her skin felt dead to the touch, as though she had been systemically poisoned.

You've gone through worse, she told herself. They raped you, but they didn't make you afraid. They murdered your mother but they couldn't steal her soul. Why do you keep your wounds green and allow men as base as Atkins and McCain to control your thoughts? she asked herself.

But she knew the answer. The house, the land, the school, the flower beds she and Abigail had planted, her collection of books, her new life as a teacher, everything she was and had become and would eventually be was about to be taken from her. All because of a choice, a deed, she knew she would eventually commit herself to, because if she did not, she would never have peace.

She went outside and picked up the cap-and-ball revolver from the edge of a rain puddle. She carried it into the kitchen and wiped the mud off the frame and the cylinder and caps with a dry rag and rewrapped it in the flannel cloth and replaced it under her bed.

In the corner of her eye she saw a black carriage with a surrey and white wheels pull to a stop in front of the gallery. Ira Jamison walked up the steps, his hair cut short, his jaws freshly shaved, looking at least twenty years younger than his actual age.

"I hope I haven't dropped by too early," he said, removing his hat. "I was in the neighborhood and felt an uncommonly strong desire to see you."

"I'm on my way to work," she said.

"At your school?"

"Yes. Where else?"

"I'll take you. Just let me talk with you a minute," he said. She stepped back from the doorway to let him enter. She reached to take his hat but he took no heed of her gesture and placed it himself on a large, hand-carved knob at the foot of the staircase banister. He smiled.

"Flower, I'm probably a fond and foolish man, but I wanted to tell you how much you mean to me, how much you remind me of-" He stopped in mid-sentence and studied her face. "Have I said the wrong thing here?"

"No, Colonel, you haven't."

"You don't look well."

"Two men got in my house last night. They had on the robes of the White Camellia. One was Rufus Atkins. The other man owns the hardware store on Main Street."

"Atkins came here? He touched you?"

"Not with his hand. With his whip. He told me he'd be with me everywhere I went. He'd see everything I did."

She saw the bone flex along his jaw, the crow's feet deepen at the corner of one eye. "He whipped you?"

"I don't have any more to say about it, Colonel."

"You must believe what I tell you, Flower. This man and the others who ride with him, I'm talking about these fellows who pretend to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers, this man knew he'd better not hurt you in any way. Do you understand that?"

"He beat my mother to death."