"Yes, it does. You know it does. Don't lie. You don't realize how much some folks can hate a lie," Flower said, and went out the back door.
Abigail stood for a long time by the entrance. She felt the wind blowing through the house, twisting the curtains, flipping the pages of a book in Flower's bedroom. She could smell rain outside and see the sunlight disappearing from the yard. She stared through the open door of the bedroom and at the bedroom floor and the pool of shadow under the bed.
When Flower returned from the privy, the house was empty.
"Abigail?" she said into the silence.
She looked outside. The buggy was gone. She glanced through the doorway into her bedroom. The piece of oily flannel in which she had wrapped her revolver lay discarded on the floor.
FOR Ira Jamison anger had never been a character defect t
o which he attached any degree of seriousness. If your business or personal adversaries tried to injure you, you did not brood over biblical admonitions about an eye for an eye. You buried your enemies alive. Anger wasn't a problem.
If someone challenged your authority, as the dandruff-flecked minister had when he allowed Ira's wife to confide her husband's sexual habits to him, you publicly humiliated the person in such a way he would dread sleep because he might see you in his dreams.
In fact, when anger was controlled and carefully nursed, then sated at the expense of your enemies, the experience could be almost sexual.
But disobedience on the part of people whose wages he paid was another matter. These were usually white trash whom a Bedouin would not allow to clean his chamber pot, self-hating and genetically defective creatures whom he had housed, fed, and provided medical care for, given their children presents at Christmas and on birthdays, and sometimes seen commissioned in the army. Disobedience from them amounted not only to ingratitude and betrayal but contempt and arrogance, because they were indicating they had read his soul and had concluded he could be deceived and used.
Clay Hatcher was a perfect example, a self-pitying imbecile who blamed his stupidity on his wife and killed her with an ax while she was fixing his supper, then burned down his own house with all his possessions in it to hide his crime.
Ira had to laugh thinking about it. He wondered what Hatcher had to say when the Knights of the White Camellia told him the law was the law and they hoped he wouldn't hold it against them when they broke his neck. After all, they were just poor whites like himself, trying to do the right thing.
But Ira had to take himself to task for not anticipating Rufus Atkins' treachery. Atkins was a cynic and pragmatist and knew how to eat his pride when a greater self-interest was involved. But under those flat, hazel eyes and skin that was like seared alligator hide lay a mean-spirited, sexually driven, and resentful man who, like all white trash, believed the only difference between himself and the rich was the social station arbitrarily handed them at birth.
Ira Jamison had left Flower's house that morning and had gone immediately to Rufus Atkins' newly acquired property, but he was nowhere in sight. The prison guards overseeing the convict workmen were no help, either, shaking their heads, speaking in demotic French that Ira could barely understand.
So he tried to put himself in the mind of Rufus Atkins, hung over, probably filled with rut, growing more depleted as the sun climbed in the sky, realizing he had fouled his own nest and made an enemy of the only man in Louisiana who could give him access to the social respectability he had always coveted.
He had his driver take him to the saloon on Main Street, to the jail, to a row of cribs on a muddy road out by the Yankee camp, and finally to McCain's Hardware Store.
McCain's eyes were scorched, his face discolored, as though it had been parboiled, his breath like fly ointment. Ira saw him swallow with fear.
"How do you do, sir?" Ira said.
"Mighty fine, Colonel. It's an honor to have you in my store."
"Do you know Captain Atkins?" Ira asked.
"Yes, suh, I do. Not real well, but I do know him."
"If you see him, would you tell him I wanted to pay my respects, but regrettably I have to return to Angola this afternoon," Ira said.
"Yes, suh, I'll get the message to him. He's building himself a fine house. He comes in here reg'lar for nails and such."
"That's what I thought. Thank you for your goodwill, sir," Ira said.
Ira had his driver take him back to Rufus Atkins' tent, where, as he expected, Atkins was not to be found. He instructed the driver to take the carriage down the road, out of sight, and not return until Ira sent for him.
A light rain began to fall and Ira sat on a cane chair by Rufus Atkins' worktable and looked out the tent flap at the convicts perched on top of the framing for Atkins' house. He wondered what kind of thoughts, if any, they had during their day. Did they ever have an inkling of the game that had been run on them and their kind? Did they ever think of possessing more than a woman's thighs and enough liquor to drink? The best any of them could hope for was to become a trusty guard and perhaps survive their sentences. If their fate was his, Ira believed he would either take out a judge's throat or open his own veins.
But ultimately most of them deserved whatever happened to them, he thought. They were uneducable, conceived and born in squalor and hardly able to concentrate on three sentences in a row that didn't deal with their viscera. Even Flower, who was the most intelligent Negro he had ever known, was somehow offended because he had told her she reminded him of his mother. His father had said there was no difference between the races. That morning Flower had certainly proved she was half-darky, acting rudely after he had journeyed all the way from Angola to see her. What a waste of his time and affections, he thought.
Ira heard a sound like a music box playing in the rain, rising and falling as the wind popped the tent flaps and the canvas over his head. Perched up high on the framing of Rufus Atkins' house he saw an elderly Negro man fitting a board into place, his face as creased as an old leather glove, his purple pants shiny with wear above his bare ankles.
Why was this man wearing purple pants instead of the black-and-white stripes that were standard convict issue? The convict's hair was grizzled, his cheeks covered with white whiskers. What was a man that age, probably with cataracts, doing on top of a second-story crossbeam? Again Ira heard the tinkling of music in the rain, a tune that was vaguely familiar and disturbing, like someone rattling a piece of crystal inside his memory. He rose from his chair and looked out the flap at the Negro carpenter, who had paused in his work and was looking back at him now.
Uncle Royal? Ira thought. He pinched his eyes. My God, what was happening to him? Uncle Royal had been dead for years. What was it his father had once said, Niggers would be the damnation of them all? Well, so be it, Ira thought. He didn't create them nor did he invent the rules that governed the affairs of men and principalities.