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Willie looked at his pie-plate face and the moral insanity in his eyes and the rubbery, unnatural configuration of his mouth. "I mean you no harm," he said.
"Stay out of my road," Jarrette said.
"My pleasure. Top of the morning to you," Willie said. He watched Jarrette and his men ride out of the dirt yard toward the road, then scooped off his flop hat and began collecting chicken's eggs from under a manure wagon and in the depressions along the barn wall. He had put three brown eggs inside the crown of his hat and was walking toward a smokehouse that lay on its side, dripping grease and smoldering in its own ashes, when he heard the hooves of a solitary horse thundering across the earth behind him.
He turned just as the guerrilla leader bore down upon him, leaning from the saddle, the point of hes hilted sword extended in frong of him.The sword's sharpened edge knifed through the top of Willie's shirt, just above the collarbone, and sliced across the skin of his shoulder as coldly as an icicle.
Willie crumpled his hat against his wound and collapsed against a rick fence, the eggs breaking and running down his clothes. He stared stupidly at the guerrilla leader, who disappeared in the mist, an idiot's grin on his mouth.
Chapter Twenty-one
THE two-story gabled house next to the Catholic cemetery had been built in the 1840s by an eccentric ornithologist and painter who had worked with James Audubon in Key West and the Florida Everglades. Unfortunately his insatiable love of painting tropical birds as well as Tahitian nudes seemed to be related to a libidinous passion for red wine, Parisian prostitutes, gambling, and trysts with the wives of the wealthiest and best duelists in southern Louisiana.
Residents of the town believed it was only a matter of time before a cuckold drove a pistol ball through his brain. They were wrong. Syphilis got to it first. Just before the first Federal troops reached New Iberia, he gave all his paintings to his slaves, put on a tailored gray officer's uniform he had worn as a member of the Home Guards, then mounted a horse and charged down the bayou road, waving a sword over his head, straight into an artillery barrage that blew him and his uniform into pieces that floated down as airily as flamingo feathers on the bayou's surface.
The first night Federals occupied the town they tore the doors off the house, broke out the windows and turned the downstairs rooms into horse stalls. After the Union cav
alry moved on up the 'I'echc into the Red Rivet country, the house remained empty, the white paint darkening from stubble fires, the oak floors scoured by horseshoes, the eaves clustered with yellow-jacket and mud-dauber nests. The taxes on the house were not paid for two years, and on a hot afternoon in late May, the sheriff tacked an auction announcement on the trunk of the live oak that shaded the dirt yard in front of the gallery.
Abigail Dowling happened to be passing in her buggy when the sheriff tapped down the four corners of the auction notice on the tree and stood back to evaluate his handiwork. But Abigail's attention was focused on the gallery steps, where Flower Jamison was sitting with two black children, teaching them how to write the letters of the alphabet on a piece of slate. In fact, at that moment, the broad back of the sheriff, the auction notice puffing against the bark of the tree, Flower and the black children arranged like a triptych on the steps and the vandalized and neglected house of a sybaritic artist, all seemed to be related, like prophetic images caught inside a perfect historical photograph.
Abigail pulled the buggy into the shade and walked past Flower into the building, trailing her fingers across Flower's shoulders. She walked from room to room, computing the measurements in her mind, seeing furnishings and arrangements that were not there. Tramps or ex-soldiers passing through town had scattered trash through the rooms and built unconfined cook fires on the hearths, blackening the walls and scorching the ceilings. She could hear red squirrels and field mice clattering across the roof and the attic. The wind blew hot and dusty through the open windows and smelled of fish heads behind a market and horse manure in the streets. But when she looked out on the gallery and saw the two black children, both of them barefoot, bending down attentively on each side of Flower while she showed them how to print their names in chalk on the piece of slate, Abigail felt a prescience about the future that was more optimistic than any she had experienced in years.
Wasn't it time to put aside anger and loss and self-accusation and live in the sunlight for a while? she thought.
She went back out on the gallery and sat down on the top step next to Flower and placed her palm in the center of Flower's back. She could feel the heat and moisture in Flower's skin through her dress, and she removed her hand and rested it in her lap. She looked at Flower's profile against the light breaking in the live oak, the clarity in her eyes, the resolute tilt of her chin, and experienced a strange tightening in her throat.
The two black children, a boy and a girl, both grinned at her. To call their clothes rags was a euphemism, she thought. Their poverty, the dried sweat lines on their faces, the untreated red cuts and abrasions on their black skin made her heart ache.
"You were born to teach," she said to Flower.
"That's what I'm doing. Every afternoon, right here on these steps," Flower replied.
Abigail touched Flower's hair. It felt as thick and warm as sun-heated cotton in a field. "Yes, you are. Like an African princess inside a painting. One of the loveliest, most beautiful creatures Our Lord ever made," she said.
She felt her face flush but knew it was only from the heat and the unnatural dryness of the season.
THE next morning Abigail went to the brick jailhouse set between Main Street and Bayou Teche, where the sheriff kept his office in the front part of the building. When she opened the door, he glanced up from the paperwork on his desk, then rose heavily from his chair, hypertension glowing in his cheeks, his mustache hanging like pieces of hemp from each side of his mouth. The sheriff's name was Hipolyte Gautreau, and he wore a hat both indoors and outdoors, even in church, to hide a burn scar from Mobile Bay that looked like a large, hourglass-shaped piece of red rubber that had been inserted in his scalp. The cuspidor and plank floor by his desk were splattered with tobacco juice, and through an open wood door that gave on to the cells, Abigail could see several unshaved, long-haired white men standing at the bars or sitting against them.
"It's my favorite lady from Mass'chusetts," the sheriff said. He had such difficulty pronouncing the last word, even incorrectly, that he had to touch a drop of spittle off his lip.
"It looks like you're about to have a tax sale," she said.
He fixed his gaze out the window on a passing wagon, his eyes seemingly empty of thought.
"Tax sale? Oh, you seen me nailing up that notice on the tree yesterday."
"That's right. How much will I need to make a realistic bid?" she said.
"How much money? You want to have a seat?" he asked.
"No," she replied.
He remained standing and pushed some papers around on his desk with the tips of his fingers. The crown of his gray hat was crumpled and sweat-stained and worn through in the creases. He pulled his shirt off his skin with two fingers and shook the cloth, as though removing the heat trapped inside.
"You don't need no old building, Miss Abby. Why not leave t'ings be?" he said.
"What are you up to, Hipolyte?"
