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"Willie Burke."
"Get into another line of work, Willie Burke," he said.
Chapter Twenty
FLOWER Jamison had always thought the beginning and end of the war would be marked by definite dates and events, that great changes would be effected by the battles and the thousands of men she had seen march through New Iberia, and the historical period in which she was living would survive only as a compartmentalized and aberrant experience that fitted between
bookends for people to study in a happier time.
But the changes she saw in 1864 and early 1865 were transitory in nature. The Yankee soldiers camped behind the Episcopalian church pursued the Confederates through Vermilionville and up into the Red River parishes, taking with them the money they spent in bordellos, saloons, and on the washerwomen by the bayou.
Many freed slaves returned to the plantations and owners they had fled and begged for food and shelter and considered themselves lucky if they were paid any wages at all. Others who preferred privation and even death from hunger over a return to the old ways were on occasion given a choice between the latter or execution.
Emancipation Day came to be known by people of color as June 'Teenth. Emancipated into what? Flower wondered.
She moved into an unpainted cypress cabin in the trees behind Amilia Dowling's house and did housework for wages. For a brief time she sorted mail for a nickel an hour at the post office, then was let go, with a sincere apology from the postmaster, Mr. LeBlanc, because he felt obligated to give the work to a woman whose husband had been killed at Petersburg.
Many of the Confederate soldiers from New Iberia returned home before the Surrender, either as paroled prisoners of war with chronic diseases or wounds that would not allow them to serve as noncombatants. Flower thought she would have little sympathy for them, regardless of the degree of their suffering. Why should she? she asked herself. The flag they had fought under should have been emblazoned with the overseer's lash rather than the Stars and Bars, she thought. But when she saw them on the street, or sitting on benches among the oaks in the small park across the bayou, the injuries done to some of them were so visibly grievous she had to force herself not to flinch or swallow in their presence and hence add to the burden they already carried.
Since the rape her anger had become her means of defense and survival. She fed it daily so that it lived inside her like a bright, clean flame that she would one day draw upon, like a blacksmith extracting a white-hot iron from a furnace. It was her anger and the possibilities of revenge that allowed her to avoid a life of victimhood. But an incident in the park almost robbed her of it.
An ex-soldier who had lost his eyes, his nose, and his chin to an exploding artillery shell was escorted each evening to the park by a child. A veil of black gauze hung from his brow, covering his destroyed face, but the wind blew it aside once and what Flower saw in a period of less than three seconds made her stomach constrict.
One week later, on a Sunday afternoon, when the park was almost deserted, the child wandered off. Rain began to patter on the trees, and the soldier rose to his feet and tried to tap his way with a cane to the drawbridge. From across the bayou Flower saw him trip and fall, then gather himself up and walk in the wrong direction.
She crossed the bridge and took him by the arm. It felt as light as a stick in her hand.
"I can take you home if you tell me where you live," she said. "That's very good of you, ma'am. I stay with my father and mother, just behind St. Peter's," he said.
The two of them walked the length ot Main Street, then went through a brick alley toward the Catholic church.
"There's a cafe here on the corner. They have coffee. I'd love to treat you to a cup," the soldier said.
"I'm colored, suh."
The ex-soldier stopped, the gauze molded damply against the skeletal outline of his face. He seemed to be staring into the distance, although Flower knew he had no eyes.
"I see," he said. "Well, everyone looks the same to me these days, and you seem a very sweet person to whom I'm greatly indebted. I'm sure my mother has tea on the stove, if you would join me."
She refused his invitation and told herself she could not look any longer upon his suffering. But in the secret chambers of the heart she knew that the pity he inspired in her was her enemy and the day the clean and comforting flame of her anger died would be the day that every bruise and probing act of the hand and tongue and phallus visited upon her by the three rapists would take on a second life and not only occupy her dreams but come aborning in her waking day.
She and Abigail had driven out in the country with the revolver Abigail had bought at the hardware store. An elderly Frenchman who lived in a houseboat on the bayou and spoke no English showed them how to remove the cylinder from the frame and pour powder and drop the conically shaped.36 caliber balls in each of the chambers and tamp down the wadding on top of the ball with the mechanical rod inset under the barrel and insert the percussion caps in the nipples of the chambers. Then he stepped back on the bank as though he were not sure in which direction they might shoot.
Abigail aimed at a dead cypress across the bayou and fired. The ball grazed an iron mooring plate nailed to a nearby oak and whined away in a field. She cocked the hammer with both thumbs, squinted one eye, and fired a second time. The ball popped a spout of water out of the middle of the bayou and clattered into a canebrake.
Abigail blinked her eyes and lowered the revolver, opening her mouth to clear her ears, then handed the revolver to Flower. "I think I'd have better luck throwing it at someone," she said.
Flower extended the revolver with both hands in front of her. The steel frame and wood grips felt cool and hard and solid in her palms as she forced back the hammer. But unlike Abigail, she didn't try to sight down the barrel at the cypress; she simply pointed, like a finger of accusation, and pulled the trigger.
The ball struck dead center.
She fire'd the remaining three rounds, each time notching wood out of the tree. Her palms stung and her ears were ringing when she lowered the revolver, but she felt a sense of power and control that was almost sexual.
"I'd like to keep the gun at my house, Miss Abby," she said on the way back to town.
"Maybe I should keep it for both of us," Abby said.
"Hitting a man with a buggy whip is a long way from being able to kill somebody."
