White Doves at Morning

She went back inside the kitchen and sat down at the table and put her head down on her arms. She wondered where Ira Jamison was. She wondered what he would do when Yankee soldiers swept across his lands and drove off or killed his livestock and fired his barns and cotton fields and freed his slaves and gutted the inside of his house and perhaps stacked his furniture in the front yard for burning. She wondered what he would have to say when he was powerless, sick, and alone.

Then she wondered why she even cared.

When would she ever free herself of the father who not only refused to recognize her but who in a letter to Nathan Forrest said he was "quite sick of being tended by unwashed niggers"?

Maybe one day some of them would tend him in hell, she thought.

But the clear, bright edges of her anger would not hold, and again she fell back into the self-hating thoughts that invaded her soul whenever she meditated long upon the name of Ira Jamison.

An image flicked past a side window, like a shard of light out of dream. She raised her head off her arms and stared out in the darkness, wondering if she had fallen asleep. The air smelled like leaves burning on a fall day. A twig snapped in the yard and she heard feet moving fast across the ground, then a shadow went across the kitchen window.

She locked down the boll on the back door and walked to the Iront of the cottage and stepped out on the gallery. She looked up and down the street, but no one was there and the only lamp burning on the block was in the house of a mad woman. Then the riderless white horse thundered across the lawn and crashed through banana trees into the street, its eyes bulging in a ripple of heat lightning across the sky.

She went into the kitchen and fired the woodstove, then uncovered the water barrel by the pantry and dipped an iron pot with a long handle into the water and set it on top of the stove lid.

She locked the door in the living room and sat down in a chair by the front window. She wished she had a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun, it didn't matter what kind. She had never held one in her hands, but for a lifetime she had watched white men handle them, take them apart, clean and oil them, load and cock and fire them, and she never doubted the degree of affection the owner of a gun had for his weapon nor the sense of control it gave him.

But Abigail Dowling owned no firearms and would allow none in her home. So Flower sat with her hands clenched in her lap, her heart beating, and wondered when Abigail would return home.

She heard a plank bend under someone's weight on the gallery. She waited for a knock, but there was only silence. The doorknob twisted and the door began to ease forward in the jamb before it caught against the deadbolt. Her heart hammered in her ears.

She rose from her chair. She could see no one in the yard and the angle of her vision prevented her from seeing who was on the gallery. She walked to the door and stood only inches from it, looking at the threadlike, cracked lines in the paint on the cypress boards, the exposed, square nailheads that were darkened with rust, a thimbleful of cobweb stuck behind a hinge. "Who is it?" she asked.

"Got a message from the aid station for Miss Abigail Dowling."

"She cain't come to the door right now."

"The surgeon don't have a nurse. He says for her to get down there."

"I'll tell her."

"She in the privy?"

"Who are you?"

But this time he didn't answer and she heard feet moving past the side window. She screwed down the wick in the living room oil lamp until the flame died, then hurried to the kitchen and took a butcher knife from a drawer. The fire glowed under the stove lids and the air was hot and close with the steam that curled off the pot she had set to boil. She stood motionless in the darkness, her clenched palm sweating on the wood handle of the knife.

The first man through the back door splintered it loose from the bolt with one full-bodied kick. Then he plunged into the kitchen with two other men behind him, all three of them wearing white cotton cloths with eye holes tied tightly across their faces. They went from room to room in the cottage as though she were not there, as though the knife in her hand were of no more significance than the fact she was a witness to a home invasion.

Then all three of them returned to the kitchen and stared at her through the holes in their masks. She could hear them breathing and smell the raw odor of corn liquor on their breaths.

"Where's she at?" one man said. He wheezed deep down in his chest.

"Not here."

"That's helpful," he said, and looked at the broken door. He pushed it back in place with his foot. He grabbed her wrist and swung her hand against the stove and knocked the butcher knife to the floor. "When will she be back?"

"When she feel like it."

The man looked at the steam rising off the pot on the stove. He coughed into his hand, then breathed hard, as though fighting for air, the cloth of his mask sucking into his mouth. "You making tea?" he asked.

She looked at the wall, her arms folded across her chest, her pulse jumping in her throat.

"Let's get out of here," a second man said.

"We got paid for a night's work. We ought to earn at least part of it," the first man said.

The three men looked at one another silently, as though considering a profound thought.