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"What you gonna do, suh? What you gonna do?" she said.
He started to speak, then crimped his lips together and was silent.
AFTER he was gone she sat by herself in the cabin, her heart beating, her breasts rising and falling in the silence. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rufus Atkins' silhouette break across the light.
He stepped inside the cabin, his wide-brimmed hat on his head, his gaze sweeping over the room, the taut bedspread on her mattress, the jug of lemonade on her table, the cut flowers in the water jar.
He removed a twenty-dollar gold piece from his watch pocket and flipped it in the air with his thumb, catching it in his palm. He rolled it across the tops of his knuckles and made it disappear from his hand. Then he reached behind her ear and held the coin in her face.
"Deception's an art, Flower. We all practice it. But white people are a whole sight better at it than y'all are," he said.
When she didn't reply, he smiled wanly. "Young Willie bring you his wash?" he asked.
"Yes, suh," she replied.
"I hope he wasn't here to get anything else washed," he said.
She lowered her eyes to the floor. Atkins sat down at the table and removed his hat and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
"Flower, you are the best-looking black woman I've ever seen. Honest to God truth," he said. He picked up the jug of lemonade and drank out of it.
But when he set the jug down his gaze lighted on an object that was wedged under her mattress pad. He rose from the chair and walked to her bed.
"I declare, a dictionary and a poetry book and what looks like a tablet somebody's been writing in. Willie Burke give you these?" he said.
"A preacher traveling through. He ax me to hold them for him," she said.
"That was mighty thoughtful of you." He folded back a page of her tablet and read from it. "'A cricket sleeped on the pillow by my head.' This preacher doesn't sound like he's got good sense. Well, let's just take these troublesome presences off your hands."
He walked outside and knelt by a fire burning under a black pot filled with boiling clothes. He began ripping the pages out of her writing tablet and feeding them individually into the flames. He rested one haunch on the heel of his boot and watched each page blacken in the center, then curl around the edges, his long hair and clipped beard flecked with gray, like pieces of ash, his skin as dark and grained as scorched brick.
Then he opened the book of poems and wet an index finger and methodically turned the pages, puckering his lips as he glanced over each poem, an amused light in his face.
"Come back inside, Marse Rufus," she said from the doorway.
"I thought you might say that," he replied, rising to his feet, his stomach as flat and hard as a board under his tucked shirt and tightly buttoned pants.
AT four-thirty the next morning, April 12, 1861, a Confederate general whose hair was brushed into a greased curlicue on his pate gave the order to a coastal battery to fire on a fort that was barely visible out in the harbor. The shell arced across the sky under a blanket of stars, its fuse sparking like a lighted cigar tossed carelessly into a pile of oily rags.
Chapter Three
BY AFTERNOON of the same day the telegraph had carried the news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter to New Iberia, and Camp Pratt, out on Spanish Lake, was suddenly filled with young men who stood in long lines before the enlistment tables, most of them Acadian boys who spoke no English and had never been farther from Bayou Teche than the next parish. The sky was blue through the canopy of oak trees that covered the camp, the lake beaten with sunlight, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, the plank tables in front of the freshly carpentered barracks groaning with platters of sausage, roast chickens, boudin, smoked ducks, crab gumbo, dirty rice, and fruit pies that had been brought in carriages by ladies who lived in the most elegant plantation homes along the bayou.
Willie's tall friend, Jim Stubbefield, sat barefoot in his militia uniform, his back against a cypress tree by the water's edge, and drank from a cup of buttermilk and looked with puzzlement at the festive atmosphere in the camp. He turned to a young man in civilian clothes sitting next to him and said, "Robert, I think the fates are not working properly here. I enlisted two months ago and no one seemed to notice."
His friend was named Robert Perry. His hair grew over his collar and was the color of mahogany, his face handsome, his blue eyes never troubled by fear or self-doubt or conflict with the world around him.
"I'm sure it was just an oversight on the community's part," he said.
Jim continued to stare in a bemused way at the enlistment lines, then his gaze locked on one individual in particular and he chewed on a piece of skin on his thumb and spit it off his tongue.
"I think I've made a mistake," he said.
"A man with your clarity of vision? Seems unlikely," Robert said.
"Look there. Willie's joining up. Maybe at my urging."
"Good for Willie," Robert said.
