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"And?" the major said.
Willie wiped his nose on his sleeve. "I think their yellow flag is one we should heed, sir."
"Close it up," the major said. He handed Abigail her identification card. "You appear to be a brave woman."
"I'm not," she replied.
"Don't you people do this again," he said.
"Sir?"
"You know what I mean," the major said, and gestured for his men to follow him.
Willie passed within inches of her. He wore a mustache now and his faded gray shirt was tight on his body, his skin browned by the sun, his black hair ragged on his neck. His armpits were looped with sweat stains and he smelled of campfire smoke and leaves and testosterone.
His dark eyes met hers for only a moment, then he was gone.
A half hour later Abigail stood on the stern, the Confederate camp far behind her, and once again she looked at the great emptiness of the river and the coldness of the stars. She had never felt more desolate in her life. In her victory, the joy of danger and adrenaline had been stolen from her, and she was left to contemplate the lighted face of a dying man on the edge of a coulee, a red-veined bubble forming on his lips.
Chapter Twelve
THE winter of 1862 and the following spring were not a good time for Ira Jamison. The weather turned wet and blustery, the temperature dipping below freezing at night, and the wounds in his side festered. From his bedroom window on the second story of his home he saw his fruit trees wither, his fields lie fallow, and many of the slave cabins remain empty. In order to sleep he placed a lump of opium in his cheek. The smell of the infection in his wounds filled his dreams.
Even before his wife had died in childbirth, his life had been one of solitude. But solitude should not mean loneliness, his father had always said. A real man planted his feet solidly in the world, chose his own friends, male and female, in his own time, and was never alone except when he wanted to be, his father had said.
But when Ira Jamison's possessions were in jeopardy, he experienced a form of soul sickness that did not seem connected to the loss of the material items themselves. His fireplaces seemed to give no heat, a tryst with an octoroon girl no solace. He wandered his house in his bathrobe, voices out of his childhood echoing from the coldness in the walls. For some reason the fissure in the living room hearth and chimney would catch his eye and obsess him, and he would find himself feeling the rough edges of the mortar and separated brick with his thumb, rolling a marble across the hearth to determine if the foundation of the house was still settling.On Christmas Eve he piled oak logs on the andirons and stoked the fire until his face was sweating. An oil painting of his mother looked down at him from above the mantelpiece. Her cheeks were red, her lips mauve-colored, her black hair pulled tightly behind her head. When his eyes lingered on the painting, he could almost smell her breath, like dried flowers, like cloth that had moldered in a grave.
She had liked to stroke his hair when he was a child and sometimes she pulled him into her skirts, smothering him with her smell. His father had said nothing on these occasions, but his eyes smoldered and one hand clenched and unclenched at his side.
His father was a rough-hewn Scotsman, mercurial in his moods, keenly aware of his wife's education and his lack of one, generous and loving with his son, but always fearful that his wife's indulgent and sentimental ways would make the boy a victim of a predatory world. He was a curious mixture of humanity, severity and self-irony, and Ira loved him fiercely and sought his approval in everything he did.
"Spare the rod to feel good about yourself and create a lazy Negro," his father used to say. Then he would add, with a smile, "Spare the rod enough and create an impoverished plantation owner. Truth is, lad, in spite of everything we're told, there's no difference between the African and white races. The day the Negroes figure that one out is the day they'll take all this from us."
Ira's father was built like a stump, his chest streaked with fine black hair. He enjoyed stripping to the waist and working alongside his Negroes to demonstrate he was their equal if not superior at any physical task, heaving sacks of sweet potatoes into a wagon, prizing a cypress tree out of clay, splitting firewood that cracked like a rifle shot.
One winter Ira's mother contracted pneumonia. The fever and deliriums passed but the cough never left her lungs and the handkerchief she often kept balled in her fist was sometimes freckled with blood. When she leaned down to kiss her son's head, her breath made the skin of his face tighten against the bone.
His father moved out of the main bedroom and slept on a leather
sofa in the library. Unlike some of his male neighbors, he did not visit the slave quarters at night. He didn't have to. As Ira learned at age ten, his father had another life in Baton Rouge.
Ira's father left him to play in the yard of a friend while he rode a livery horse down into the bottoms, an area of Baton Rouge that was still undrained, the streets lined with saloons and tanneries. But Ira had always been allowed to go anywhere his father went, and he slipped out of the yard and followed his father to a cottage, the only one on the street that was painted white and had ventilated green shutters on the windows and a vegetable garden in the side yard.
The front door was closed, even though the weather was warm. Hanging baskets of flowers and ferns swayed from the eaves of the gallery, creaking in the wind, their colors riffling in the shade. Ira sat on the top step and watched the paddle-wheelers and scows on the river and the Irish boat hands from New Orleans unloading stacks of cowhides that they dumped into smoking vats behind the tanneries. He felt himself dozing off, then he heard his father's voice and the laughter of a woman inside the cottage.
He rose from the step and walked into the side yard where the shutters of a window were opened behind a stand of banana trees. He pushed aside the banana leaves and propped a wood box against the side of the cottage and pulled himself up to eye level on the windowsill, expecting to play a joke on his father and see his father's face light with surprise and goodwill.
Instead, he looked upon the naked, clay-colored back of a woman whose knees we
re splayed across his father's loins. Her head reared back and her mouth opened silently, then a sound broke from her lips that he had never heard a woman make before. She blew out her breath, as though the room had grown cold, bending down toward his father now, her knees and thighs clenching him as if she was mounted on a horse. Her back shuddered again and her hands touched his father's face with a tenderness and intimacy that somehow seemed stolen from his mother and misused by another.
Ira's thoughts made no sense and were like shards of glass in his head.
Then the box broke under his feet and he was left hanging from the sill, the woman's eyes fastening on his now, his father's uplifted face popping with sweat like pinpoints of dew on a pumpkin.
Ira fell into the banana sta;ks and ran through the yard, dirty and hot and itching with ants, his head ringing as though someone had clapped him on both ears.
A moment later his father appeared on the gallery, barefoot, his shirt hanging outside his pants.
