AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"I'm not following you."
"Seeing as how I'm second overseer, I figured you'd want me moving on into Rufus's place. It goes with the job, don't it?"
Jamison heard a boat on the river and looked in its direction. "You're a good man, Clay. But we're in the penal business now. An oldtime jail warden from New Orleans will be replacing Rufus. I'll be relying on you to get him oriented."
Hatcher turned his hat in his hands, his face reddening, his jawbones knotting, a band of sunlight slicing across his eyes.
"Oldtime jail warden, you say?" he said.
But Jamison did not reply, his eyes taking on a glint that Hatcher failed to read.
Hatcher licked the broken place on his lip. "I seen a heap of shit happen on this place. But this takes all," he said.
"I advise you not to create a problem for yourself, my friend."
"Twenty-five years of herding niggers and living one cut above them? Listening to my old woman bitch about it from morning to night? Four goddamn more years of ducking Yankee bullets? Me create a problem? Kunnel, when it comes to putting a freight train up a man's ass, you know how to do it proper," Hatcher said.
"Go down to the store and get you a bottle of whiskey and charge it to me. Then come back and talk to me in two days."
"You'll see the devil go to church first," Hatcher said.
He started down the drive, then stopped and turned, glaring at Jamison, all his servile pretense gone now, his hands opening and closing at his sides.
That had been three hours ago. Now Ira Jamison stood on the upstairs veranda, surveying all that he owned, the breeze cool on his skin, the air aromatic with the smell of flowers hanging in baskets from the eaves. But neither his prosperity nor the loveliness and unseasonable coolness of the day brought him comfort. Why had he not acted more diplomatically with Hatcher? Had his father not taught him never to provoke white trash, to treat them as one would coal oil around an open flame?
He had placed a ball of opium the size of a child's marble in his jaw, more than he usually ingested, but it did not seem to be taking effect. The wind gusted against the house and for a moment he thought he felt a vibration through the beams and studs, a tremolo that seemed to reach down into the foundation. But that was foolish, he told himself. His house was solid. An engineer had told him the fissure in his hearth and chimney was cosmetic. Why did Ira worry so much about his house? the engineer had asked.
Because not one person in the world cares whether you live or die. Because you are the sum total of your possessions and the loss of any one of them makes you the less, a voice said to him.
"That's not true. One person does care," he said to the wind.
Then he wondered at his own sanity.
That night Clay Hatcher left the plantation. But not before tying both of his bird dogs to a catalpa tree and shooting each of them with a revolver, then setting fire to his shack with his dead wife inside it.
Chapter Twenty-six
IT HAD rained all afternoon and Flower Jamison's yard was flooded. Through her front window she saw mule-drawn wagons carrying green lumber down to the site of the old laundry, where Rufus Atkins was building a home for himself and pretending to be a member of the local aristocracy. Sometimes the wagons sunk almost to the hubs in the mud and the convict teamsters would have to unload them, free the wheels, then restack the pile before they could continue on in the rain.
While he oversaw the building of his home Rufus Atkins lived in a huge canvas tent, one with crossbeams and big flaps and individual rooms inside. Oil lanterns hung from the tent poles, and when they were lit the tent looked like a warm, yellow smudge inside the mist. He had laid out plank walkways to the entrances and in the morning he walked to the privy in an elegant bathrobe to empty his chamber pot, like a scatological parody of a Victorian gentleman.
He asked others to call him "Captain," reminding them of his service to the Confederacy but never mentioning that his rank was given to him only because he was the employee of Ira Jamison and that during four years of war he was never promoted.
In public places he talked loudly of what he called his "land transact ions." Ex-paddy rollers cadged drinks from him in the saloons around town and White Leaguers like Todd McCain visited him in his tent late at night, but the invitations that went to Ira Jamison as a matter of course did not go to Rufus Atkins.
So he abused Negroes to show his power over others, flew a Confederate battle flag over his tent in defiance of the Occupation, and kept late hours in the saloon down the road. Twice Flower saw him stop his horse, a black mare, in front of her house and stare at her gallery for a long time, his stiffened arms forming a column on the saddle pommel. But when she went outside to confront him, he was gone.
It was still raining when she started supper, which meant Abigail Dowling would probably show up soon in her buggy and take the two of them to the school for night classes. She poured a cup of coffee and added sugar to it and drank it at the stove, her thoughts on the school, the field hands who worked ten-hour days and tried to learn reading and writing and arithmetic at night, and the meager donations on which she and Abigail operated.
She heard a horse in the yard and footsteps on the gallery. She pulled open the front door and looked into the face of Clay Hatcher, his clothes drenched, the brim of his hat wilted over his ears and brow. A knife was belted on one hip, a pistol on the other. He looked up and down the road, then back at her, the skin of his face stretched against his skull. His breath smelled of funk and boiled shrimp.
"Got something to tell you," he said.
"Not interested," she answered.
"It's about your mother. Her name was Sarie. Her teeth was filed into points 'cause there was an African king back there in her bloodline or something."
She wanted to tell him to get off her gallery, to take his repository of pain and grief and hatred off her land and out of her life. But she knew the umbilical cord that held her to Angola Plantation was one she would never be able to sever, that its legacy in one way or another would poison the rest of her days. So she fixed her eyes on his and waited, her heart pounding.
