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"I'm a contraband now. I can have anything I want. No different than a free person of color."
"Twelve dollars. I ain't talking about Confederate paper, either."
"Maybe I don't have twelve right now. But maybe part of it."
"That a fact?" He looked into space, as though calculating figures in his head. "Under the right circumstances I can come down to ten, maybe eight."
"Right circumstances?"
"I could use a little hep in the storeroom. Won't take long. If you feel like walking on back there with me."
"I'll be back later."
"Tell you what, hep me out and I'll go down to six. I cain't make more right than that," he said. He wet his bottom lip, as though it were chapped, and looked away from her face.
"You all right, suh?" she asked.
He averted his eyes and didn't reply. After she was gone he threw the revolver angrily in a drawer.
SHE walked down the street toward Abigail Dowling's cottage and saw a carriage parked in front of the Shadows. Through the iron gate she caught sight of Ira Jamison, sitting at a table on a flagstone terrace under oak trees, with two Yankee officers and a cotton trader from Opelousas. The grass was sprinkled with azalea petals, the gazebo and trellises in the gardens humped with blue bunches of wisteria. The gate creaked on its hinges when she pulled it open.
She followed the brick walkway through the trees to the terrace. The four men at the table were drinking coffee from small cups and laughing at a joke. A walking cane rested against the arm of Ira Jamison's chair. His hair had grown to his shoulders and looked freshly shampooed and dried, and the weight he had lost gave his face a kind of fatal beauty, perhaps like a poisonous flower she had read of in a poem.
"I need you to lend me twelve dol'ars," she said.
He twisted around in his chair. "My heavens, Flower, you certainly know how to sneak up on a man," he said.
"The man at the store says that's the price for a Colt.36 revolver. I 'spect he's lying, but I still need the twelve dol'ars," she said.
The other three men had stopped talking. Ira Jamison pulled on his earlobe.
"What in heaven's name do you need a pistol for?" he said.
"Your overseer, Rufus Atkins, paid three men to rape Miss Abigail. She wasn't home, so they did it to me. I aim to kill all three of them and then find Rufus Atkins and kill him, too."
The other three men shifted in their chairs and glanced at Ira Jamison. He pinched a napkin on his mouth and dropped it into a plate.
"I think you'd better leave the premises, Flower," he said.
"You had that Yankee soldier killed at the hospital in New Orleans, just so you could escape and make everybody think you were a hero. Now I 'spek these Yankee officers are helping you sell cotton to the North. You something else, Colonel."
"I'll walk you to the gate," Ira Jamison said.
He rose from the chair and took her arm, his fingers biting with surprising strength into the muscle.
"Why's he letting a darky talk to him like that?" she heard one of the officers say behind her.
The cotton trader raised a finger in the air, indicating the officer should not pursue the subject further.
AT the cottage she told Abigail Dowling what had happened.
"You should have come to me first," Abigail said.
"You would have bought me a gun?"
"We could have talked," Abigail said. Then she looked into space and bit her lip at the banality of her own words.
"You been good to me, but I'm going on down to the soldiers' camp," Flower said.
