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"You could have stayed in New Orleans and been free. But you come back here, to a li'l town on the bayou, where you're a slave," she said.
"I don't mess in your bidness, Miss Carrie. Maybe you ought to keep out of mine."
It was silent except for the muffled conversation of the paddy rollers in the yard and the wind popping the curtains on the windows. Flower could feel Carrie LaRose's eyes on her back.
"You come back 'cause of Ira Jamison. You keep t'inking one day he's gonna come to your li'l house and tell you he's your daddy and then all that pain he give you for a lifetime is gonna go away," Carrie LaRose said.
Flower felt the skin draw tight on her face.
"I'll be getting on my way," she said.
"He ain't wort' it, girl. Learn it now, learn it later. Ain't none of them wort' it. They want your jellyroll wit' the least amount of trouble possible. The day you make them pay for it, the day you got their respect."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Don't play the dumb nigger wit' me."
"I'm fixing to be free, Miss Carrie. It doesn't matter what anybody say to me now. I can read and write. Words I don't know I can look up in my dictionary. I can do sums and subtractions. Miss Abigail and Mr. Willie Burke say I'm as smart as any educated person. I'm fixing to be anything I want, go anywhere I want, do anything I want, and I mean in the whole wide world. How many people can say that about themselves?"
Carrie LaRose propped her chin on her fingers and studied Flower's face as though seeing it for the first time. Then she looked away with an age-old knowledge in her eyes that made something sink in Flower's chest.
The wind was picking up now as she loaded her laundry bags into the carriage behind the brothel. The three paddy rollers were still at the plank table under the oak tree, their heads bent toward one another in a private joke. After the war had begun they had postured as soldiers, carrying the mail from the post office out to Camp Pratt or guarding deserters and drunks, but in reality everyone knew they were mentally and physically unfit for service in the regular army. One man was consumptive, another harelipped, and the third was feebleminded and had worked as a janitor in the state home for the insane.
Flower was about to climb up into the carriage when Rufus Atkins rode into the yard and stopped under the oak tree. He did not acknowledge her or even look in her direction. The three paddy rollers grinned at him and one of them lifted their whiskey bottle in invitation. Atkins dismounted and pulled his shoulder holster and pistol down over his arm and hung them from the pommel of his saddle. His eyes lit on Flower momentarily, seeming to consider her or something about her for reasons she didn't understand. Then the object of his concern, whatever it was, went out of his face and he took a tin cup from his saddlebags and held it out for the harelipped man to pour into. But he remained standing while he drank and did not sit down with the three men at the table.
Flower continued to stare at him, surprised at her own boldness. He stopped his conversation with the paddy rollers in mid-sentence and looked back at her, then set his cup down on the table and walked toward her, the leaves from the oak tree puffing into the great vault of yellow-purple sky behind him.
He wore boots and tight, gray cavalry pants with gold stripes down the legs, a wash-faded checkered shirt, and a slouch hat sweat-stained around the crown. A canvas cartridge belt with loops designed for the new brass-cased ammunition was buckled at an angle on his narrow hips.
"You have something you want to say, Flower?" he asked.
"Not really."
"You bear me a grudge?" he said.
"Miss Carrie in there knows prophecy. Some people say Mr. Willie Burke got the same gift. But folks such as me don't have that gift," she said.
"You're not making a whole lot of sense."
"I cain't read the lines in somebody's palm. But I know you're gonna come to a bad end. It's because you're evil. And you're evil because you're cruel. And you're cruel because inside you're afraid."
He stared into the distance, his fists on his hips, his weight resting casually on one leg. Rain was blowing off the Gulf, like spun glass across the sun. He shook his head.
"I tell you the truth, Flower, you're the damnedest nigger I've ever known and the best piece of rough stock I ever took to bed. That said, would you please get the hell out of here?" he said.
As she rode away in the buggy, she looked back over her shoulder and saw Rufus Atkins counting out a short stack of coins into the palm of each of the paddy rollers. A shaft of sunlight fell on the broad grin of the feebleminded man. His teeth were as yellow as corn, his eyes filled with a liquid glee.
Chapter Fifteen
WILLIE Burke no longer knew if the humming sound in his head was caused by the mosquito eggs in his blood or the dysentery in his bowels. The dirt road along the bayou was yellow and hard-packed and the dust from the retreating column drifted into his face. He wore no socks and the leather in his shoes had hardened and split and rubbed blisters across his toes and on his heels. He watched the retreating column disappear around a bend, then ordered his men to fall out and form a defensive line along a coulee that fed into the bayou.
He lay below the rim of the embankment and peered back down the road. Houses were burning in the distance, and when he pressed his ear against the ground he thought he could hear the rumble of wheeled vehicles in the south, but he could see no sign of Union soldiers.
Where were they? he asked himself. Perhaps sweeping south of New Iberia to capture the salt mines down by the Gulf, he thought. It was shady where he lay on the embankment, and he could smell wild-flowers and water in the bottom of the coulee and for what seemed just a second he laid his head down in the coolness of the grass and closed his eyes.
An enlisted man shook him by his arm.
"You all right, Lieutenant?" he asked.
