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The skin seemed to shrink on his face. A black woman in a gray dress with a white apron appeared at the doorway to the dining room.
"Supper for you and your guest is on the table, Mr. Jamison," she said.
"Thank you, Ruby," he said, rising, his face still disconcerted.
"I don't think I'll be staying. Thank you very much for your hospitality," Abigail said.
"I insist you have supper with me."
"You insist?"
"You cast aspersions on my decency in my own home? Then you seem to glow with vituperative rage, even though I've only known you five minutes. Couldn't you at some point be a little more lenient and less judgmental and allow me to make redress of some kind?"
"You're the largest slave owner in this state, sir. Will you make 'redress' by setting your slaves free?"
"I just realized who you are. You're the abolitionist."
"I think there are more than one of us."
"You're right. And when they have their way, I'll be destitute and we'll have bedlam in our society."
"Good," she said, and walked toward the door.
"You haven't eaten, madam. Stay and rest just a little while."
"When will you be talking to Captain Atkins?" she asked.
"I'll send a telegraph message to him this evening."
"In that case, it's very nice of you to invite me to your table," Abigail said.
As he held a dining room chair for Abigail to sit down, he smelled the perfume rising off her neck and felt a quickening in his loins, then realized the black woman named Ruby was watching him from the kitchen. He shot her a look that made her face twitch out of shape.
Chapter Five
AFTER Willie reported to Camp Pratt and began his first real day of the tedium that constituted life in the army, he knew it was only a matter of time before he would empower Rufus Atkins to do him serious harm. One week later, after an afternoon of scrubbing a barracks floor and draining mosquito-breeding ponds back in the woods, he and Jim Stubbefield were seated in the shade on a bench behind the mess hall, cleaning fish over a tub of water, when Corporal Clay Hatcher approached them. It was cool in the shade, the sunlight dancing on the lake, the Spanish moss waving overhead, and Willie tried to pretend the corporal's mission had nothing to do with him.
"You threw fish guts under Captain Atkins' window?" Hatcher said.
"Not us," Willie said.
"Then how'd they get there?" Hatcher asked. "Be fucked if I know," Jim said.
"I was talking to Burke. How'd they get there?" Hatcher said. "I haven't the faintest idea, Corporal. Have you inquired of the fish?" Willie said.
"Come with me," Hatcher said.
Willie placed his knife on the bench, washed his hands in a bucket of clean water, and began putting on his shirt, smiling at the corporal as he buttoned it.
"You think this is funny?" Hatcher said.
"Not in the least. Misplaced fish guts are what this army's about. Lead the way and let's straighten this out," Willie said. He heard Jim laugh behind him. "I can have those stripes, Stubbefield," Hatcher said. "You can have a session with me behind the saloon, too. You're not a bleeder, are you?" Jim said.
Hatcher pointed a finger at Jim without replying, then fitted one hand under Willie's arm and marched him to the one-room building that Rufus Atkins was now using as his office.
"I got Private Burke here, sir," Hatcher said through the door. Atkins stepped out into the softness of the late spring afternoon, without a coat or hat, wearing gray pants and a blue shirt with braces notched into his shoulders. He had shaved that morning, using a tin basin and mirror nailed to the back side of the building, flicking the soap off his razor into the shallows, but his jaws already looked grained, dark, an audible rasping sound rising from the back of his hand when he rubbed it against his throat.
"He says he didn't do it, sir. I think he's lying," Hatcher said. Atkins cut a piece off a plug of tobacco and fed it off the back of his pocketknife into his mouth.
