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"Rufus?" he said.
"Yes, sir?"
"No one is to harm Flower. Not under any circumstances. The man who does will have his genitalia taken out," Jamison said.
Jamison crossed the yard and walked under the porte cochere and into the house. Clay Hatcher stared after him, breathing through his mouth, his eyes dull.
"A little late, ain't hit? Don't he know Flower got raped by them lamebrains you hired?" he said.
Atkins used the flat of his fist to break Hatcher's bottom lip against his teeth.
ABIGAIL Dowling had discovered she did not know how to talk with Robert Perry. The previous evening she had seen him for the first time in almost four years. When she had run out of the classroom into the hallway to greet him, he had placed his hands on her shoulders and touched the skin along her collar with one finger. Instead of happiness, she felt a rush of guilt in her chest and a sense of physical discomfort that bordered on resentment. Why? she asked herself. The more she tried to think her way out of her feelings, the more confused she became.
He had stood up to Todd McCain and the drunkards who were harassing the Negroes under the live oak; his manners and good looks and the brightness in his eyes and his obvious affection for her were undiminished by the war. He walked her and Flower home, dismissing the shot fired over his head by McCain, offering to sleep on her gallery in case the revelers on the flatbed wagon returned.
But she didn't even ask him in and was glad she could honestly tell him she was feeling ill. When he was gone she made tea for Flower and herself and experienced a sudden sense of quietude and release for which she could offer herself no explanation.
Who in reality was she? she asked herself. Now, more than ever, she believed she was an impostor, a sojourner not only in Louisiana and in the lives of others but in her own life as well.
The next morning she looked out the front window and saw Robert opening the gate to her yard. He wore a brushed brown suit, shined shoes, and a soft blue shirt with a black tie, and his hair was wet and combed back on his neck. In the daylight she realized he was even thinner than she had thought.
"I hope you don't mind my dropping by unannounced," he said.
"Of course not," she said, and unconsciously closed her left hand, which her father had told her was the way he could always tell when she fibbed to him as a girl."Why don't we walk out here in the yard?"
They strolled through the trees toward the bayou. The camellias and four-o'clocks were blooming in the shade, and a family of black people were perched among the cypress knees on the bank, bobber-fishing in the shallows.
She heard Robert clear his throat and pull a deep breath into his lungs.
"Abby, what is it? Why is there this stone wall between us?" he said.
"I feel I've deceived you."
"In what way?"
Her heart raced and the trees and the air vines swaying in the breeze and the black family among the shadows seemed to go in and out of focus.
"You fought for a cause in which you believed. You spent almost two years in prison. I was a member of the Underground Railroad. I never told you that," she said.
"You're a woman of conscience.You don't have to explain yourself to me."
"Well," she said, her mouth dry, her blood hammering in her ears with a new deceit she had just perpetrated upon him.
"Is that the sum of your concerns?" he said.
She paused under an ancient live oak, one that was gnarled, hollowed by lightning, green with lichen and crusted with fern, the trunk wrapped with poisonous vines.
"No, I was romantically intimate with another," she said.
"I see," he replied.
His hair had dried in the heat and it had lights in it, like polished mahogany, and the wind blew it on his collar. His eyes were crystal blue and seemed to focus on a little Negro boy who was cane-lifting a hooked perch out of the water.
"With Willie?" he said.
"I can only speak to my own deeds," she said.
"Neither of you should feel guilt, at least not toward me. Nor does either of you owe me an apology."
