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"I drank water out of the Bloody Pond. I wake up with the taste in my throat. I dream about a fellow with railroad spikes in him," Tige said.
Robert lifted Tige's kepi off the back of his chair and set it on his head and grinned at him.
THAT evening Robert bathed in the clawfoot tub inside Willie's bathhouse and shaved in the oxidized mirror on the wall, then dressed in fresh clothes and went outside. A sunshower was falling on the edge of town and he could smell the heavy, cool odor of the bayou in the shadows. Willie was splitting firewood on a stump by the bayou and stacking it in a shed, his sleeves rolled, his cheeks bright with his work.
Robert suddenly felt an affection for his friend that made him feel perhaps things were right with the world after all, regardless of the times in which they lived. There is a goodness in your face that the war, the likes of Billy Sherman, or the worst of our own kind will never rob you of, Willie, he thought.
"I received the letter you wrote me while you were waiting to be executed by the Federals," Robert said.
"You did?"
"A Yankee chaplain mailed it to me with an attached note. He thought there was a chance you had been killed while escaping and he should honor your last wish by mailing the letter you left behind," Robert said.
"Some of those Yanks weren't bad fellows," Willie said.
"You said you repented of any violation of our friendship and you never wanted in impair my relationship with another."
"A fellow's thoughts get a bit confused when he's about to have eight Yanks fire their rifles into his lights," Willie said.
"I see," Robert said. "Well, you're a mighty good friend, Willie Burke, and you never have to repent to me about anything. Are we clear on what we're talking about, old pal?"
"It's a tad murky to me. May I get back to my work now?"
Robert watched the wind blowing in the Spanish moss and in the trees along the bayou and grinned at nothing. "Did you sign the oath of allegiance?" he asked.
"The oath? No, never got around to it, I'm afraid," Willie said.
"Thought not. My parents are living in a shack behind a Union officer's house."
"We had a good run at it. We lost. Accept it, Robert. When they give us a bad time, tell them to kiss our ruddy bums."
"A nation that fought honorably shouldn't be treated as less," Robert said. "There are men here who have a plan to take Louisiana back out of the Union. They fought shoulder to shoulder with us. They're fine men, Willie."
Willie set down his ax and wiped his hands on a rag and glanced furtively at his friend. Robert's face was wooden, his eyes troubled. Then he saw Willie watching him and he looked again at the wind in the trees and grinned at nothing.
AT dusk the two of them walked through the streets to the house Abigail and Flower had converted into a school. Robert was not prepared for what he saw. Every room in the house, both upstairs and downstairs, was brightly lit and filled with people of color. They were of all ages and all of them were dressed in their best clothes. And those for whom there was no room sat on the gallery or milled about under the live oak in the front yard.
The desks were fashioned from church pews that had been sawed into segments and placed under plank tables that ran the width of the rooms. The walls were decorated with watercolor paintings and the numbers one to ninety-nine and the letters of the alphabet, which had been scissored from red, yellow, and purple pieces of cloth. Each student had a square of slate and a piece of chalk and a damp rag to write with, and each of them by the end of the evening had to spell ten words correctly that he could not spell the previous week.
Then Robert looked through a downstairs window and saw Abigail Dowling in front of a class that included a dozen blacks, Tige McGuffy, the bordello operator Carrie LaRose and her pirate of a brother, Scavenger Jack, who looked like a shaggy behemoth stuffed between the plank writing table and sawed-down pew.
Abigail wore a dress that had a silver-purplish sheen to it, and her chestnut hair was pulled back in a bun and fixed with a silver comb, so that the light caught on the broadness of her forehead and the resolute quality of her eyes.
Robert waved when she seemed to glance out the window, then he realized she could not see him in the darkness and she had been reacting to a sound in the street. He turned and watched a flatbed wagon loaded with revelers creak past the school. The revelers were drunk on busthead whiskey, yelling, sometimes jumping down to pick up a dirt clod, flinging it at a schoolroom window. A slope-shouldered man in a suit and a bowler hat followed them on horseback, a gold toothpick set in the corner of his mouth.
"Who's that fellow?" Robert asked.
"Todd McCain. Abby outbid him on the building," Willie said.
"Not a good loser, is he?" Robert said.
"Toddy is one of those whose depths will probably never be quite plumbed," Willie said.
The revelers got down from their wagon, uncorking bottles of corn liquor and drinking as they walked, watching the families of Negroes under the trees part in their path, like layers of soil cleaving off the point of a plowshare. One of them drained his bottle, carefully tamped the cork back down in the neck, then broke it on the roof of the school.
Robert walked through the revelers into the street, where Todd McCain sat on his horse under a street lantern that had been hoisted on a pulley to the top of a pole. McCain's face was shadowed by his bowler, his narrow shoulders pinched inside his coat. Robert stroked the white blaze on the nose of McCain's horse.
"A fine animal you have here," he said.
