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For no reason he could quite explain he walked into the quarters, in a tea-colored sunset, among tumbling leaves and the smell of gas in the trees, and knocked on Uncle Royal's door.
"Yes, suh?" Uncle Royal said, his frosted eyes blinking uncertainly.
"You still have any young grandchildren?" Ira asked.
"No, suh, they grown and in the fields now. But I got a young great-gran'child."
"Then give him this," Ira said.
The old man took the merry-go-ground from Ira's hand and felt the carved smoothness of the horses with the ends of his fingers. "Thank you, suh," he said. Ira turned to go.
"How come you to think of this now, Master Ira?" Uncle Royal asked.
"My father made you a promise he couldn't keep. So I kept it for him. That's all it means. Nothing else," he replied.
"Yes, suh," Uncle Royal said.
On the way back to the house Ira wondered if his words to Uncle Royal had become his way of saying good-bye forever to the innocent and vulnerable child who had once lived inside him and caused him so much pain.
NOW the spring of 1863 was upon him, and he knew enough of history to realize that the events taking place around him did not bode well for his future. Some of his slaves had been shipped to unoccupied areas of Arkansas, but it was only a matter of time until the South fell and emancipation became a fact of life.
In the meantime someone had hijacked two dozen slaves from his property, taking them downriver to New Orleans through a Confederate blockade, murdering one of his paddy rollers in the bargain. Ira could not get the image of the dead paddy roller out of his mind. Three of his overseers had carted the body up to the front porch, stuffed in a lidless packing case, the knife wound in his throat like a torn purple rose.
Ira did not believe in coincidences. One of his own men had now died in the same fashion as the young sentry in the New Orleans hospital the night Ira escaped from Yankee custody.
Nor was it coincidence that a woman with a Northern accent was on board the boat that transported a cargo of Negroes supposedly infected with yellow jack to a quarantine area north of New Orleans the same night two dozen of his slaves had disappeared from the plantation.
Abigail Dowling, he thought.
Every morning he woke with her name in his mind. She bothered him in ways he had difficulty defining. She had a kind of pious egalitarian manner that made him want to slap her face. At the same time she aroused feelings in him that left his loins aching. She was the most stunning woman he'd ever seen, with the classical proportions of a Renaissance sculpture, and she bor
e herself with a dignity and intellectual grace that few beautiful women ever possessed.
The spring rains came and the earth turned green and the fruit trees bloomed outside Ira's window. But the name of Abigail Dowling would not leave his thoughts, and sometimes he woke throbbing in the morning and had images of her moaning under his weight. Nor did it help for him to remember that she had rebuffed him and made him feel obscene and sexually perverse.
He looked out upon the sodden feilds and at an oak tree that was stiff and hard-looking in the wind. What was it that bothered him most about her? But he already knew the answer to his own question. She was intelligent, educated, unafraid and seemed to want nothing he was aware of. He did not trust people who did not want something. But most of all she bothered him because she had looked into his soul and seen something there that repelled her.
What was her weakness? he asked himself. Everybody had one. Maybe he had been looking in the wrong place. She seemed to have male friends rather than suitors or lovers. A woman that beautiful? He gazed out the window at the white bloom on his peach trees and a slave girl pulling weeds inside the drip lines. His side ached miserably. He placed a small lump of opium under his lip and felt a sensation like warm water leaking through his nervous system.
He had thought of Abigail Dowling as a flesh-and-blood replication of Renaissance sculpture, an Aphrodite rising from a tidal pool on the Massachusetts coast. He watched the slave girl drop a handful of weeds into her basket and get to her feet, the tops of her breasts exposed to his view. Maybe he had been only partially correct about Abigail's classical origins.
Were her antecedents on the island of Lesbos rather than Melos? He wondered.
Chapter Thirteen
AFTER the retreat from Shiloh, Willie began to dream about a choleric-faced man, someone he did not know, advancing out of a mist with a bayonet fixed to the end of his rifle. The choleric-faced man would not fall down when Willie fired upon him. He also dreamed about the sound of a distant siege gun coughing in a woods, then a shell arcing in a dark blur out of a blue sky, exploding in a trench full of men with the force of a ship's boiler blowing apart. He began to take his dreams into the waking day, and his anxieties and fears would be so great with the passage of each hour that contact with the enemy became a welcomed release.
That's when a line sergeant gave him what the sergeant considered the key to survival for a common foot soldier: You never thought about it before you did it and you never thought about it when it was over.
Nor did thinking make life easier for a commissioned officer, Willie told himself later.
Lieutenant Willie Burke peered through the spyglass at the steam engine and the line of freight cars parked on the railway track. The sun was white in the sky, the woods breathless, the leaves in the canopy coated with dust. His clothes stuck to his skin; his hair was drenched with sweat inside his hat. There was a humming sound in his head, like the drone of mosquitoes, except the woods were dry and there were no mosquitoes in them.
But their eggs were in his blood, and at night, and sometimes in daylight, he would see gray spots before his eyes and hear mosquitoes humming in his head, as was now the case, and he wished he was lying in a cold stream somewhere and not sighting through a spyglass, breathing dust inside a sweltering woods.
The train was deserted, the steam engine pocked with holes from caseshot. Two of the boxcars that had been loaded with munitions had burned to the wheels. Another boxcar, a yellow one with sliding doors that had carried Negro troops, was embedded from stem to stern with iron railroad spikes, like rust-colored quills on a porcupine.
The black soldiers, almost all of them newly emancipated slaves, untrained, with no experience in the field, had melted away into thickly wooded river bottoms and had taken a mule-drawn field piece with them, whipping the mules across the flanks, powdering dust in the air as they crushed through the palmettos and underbrush.
