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"It's Flower, Miss Abigail. I work at the laundry. I brung something for their trip," she said.
"You shouldn't be here," Abigail said.
"The lady yonder is my auntie. I known for a long time y'all was using this place. I ain't tole nobody," Flower said.
Abigail turned to the two white men. "Does one more make a difference?" she asked.
"The captain out on the bay is mercenary, but we'll slip her in," one of them said.
"Would you like to come with your auntie?" Abigail asked her.
"There's old folks at Angola I got to care for. Here, I got this twenty-dollar gold piece. I brung a juju bag, too." Flower walked up the plank and felt the wood bend under her weight. The water under her was as yellow as paint in the moonlight. She saw the black head and back and S-shaped motion of a water moccasin swimming across the current.
She placed the coin in Abigail's hand, then removed a small bag fashioned out of red flannel that was tied around her neck with a leather cord and placed it on top of the coin.
"How'd you come by this money, Flower?" Abigail asked.
"Found it."
"Where?"
Flower watched the moss moving in the trees, a sprinkle of stars in the sky.
"I best go now," she said.
She walked back across the plank to the woods, then heard Abigail Dowling behind her.
"Tell me where you got the gold piece," Abigail said.
"I stole it from ol Rufus Atkins' britches."
Abigail studied her face, then touched her hair and cheek.
"Has he molested you, Flower?" she said.
"You a good lady, Miss Abigail, but I ain't a child and I ain't axed for nobody's pity," Flower said.
Abigail's hand ran down Flower's shoulder and arm until she could clasp Flower's hand in her own.
"No, you're neither a child nor an object of pity, and I would never treat you as such," Abigail said.
"Them two men yonder? What do you call them?" Flower asked.
"Their names?"
"No, the religion they got. What do you call that?"
"They're called Quakers."
Flower nodded her head. "Good night, Miss Abigail," she said.
"Good night, Flower," Abigail said.
A few minutes later Flower looked back over her shoulder and saw the flatboat slip through the cypress trees into a layer of moonlit fog that reminded her of the phosphorous glow given off by a grave.
THREE days later Willie Burke was walked in manacles from the Negro jail to the court, a water-stained loft above a saloon, and charged with drunkenness and attacking an officer of the law. The judge was not an unkindly man, simply hard of hearing from a shell burst at the battle of Buena Vista in 1847, and sometimes more concerned with the pigeons whose droppings splattered on his desk than the legal matter at hand.
Through the yellow film of dirt on the window Willie could see the top of a palm tree and a white woman driving hogs down the dirt street below. His mother and Abigail Dowling and his friend Jim Stubbefield sat on a wood bench in the back of the room, not far from Rufus Atkins and the paddy rollers.
