White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke

again
until dawn.

    TWO days later she was walking
home from the grocery, stepping around mud puddles in the street, an
overly loaded wicker basket in each of her hands. Rufus Atkins stopped
his buggy and got down and tried to take one of the baskets from her.
    "Don't do that," she said.
    "Marse Jamison says to look
after you," Atkins said.
    "Take your hand off my basket."
    "Sorry, Miss Abigail. I got my
orders." He winked at her, then pulled the basket from her hand and
swung it up behind the buggy seat. He reached for the other basket.
    "He has also ordered you to
stop molesting women in this community," she said.
    "What are you talking about?"
Atkins asked.
    "The telegraph message he sent
you."
    "He didn't send me a telegraph
message. He told me something about not letting the
overseers impregnate any of the wenches. But be didn't send me a
telegraph message."
    She stared at him blankly.
    Atkins laughed to himself.
"Look, Miss Dowling, I don't know what kind of confusion you're under,
but Marse Jamison is giving the niggers a little self-government so's
he can get himself installed in Jefferson Davis' cabinet. Davis is
famous for the nigger councils on his plantations. Is this what you're
talking about?"
    "Give my back my basket," she
said.
    "By all means. Excuse me for
stopping. But your nose was so high up in the air I thought you might
walk into a post and knock yourself unconscious," he said.
    He dropped her grocery basket
in the mud and drove off, popping his buggy whip above the back of his
horse.

    TWO weeks later the
Confederate War Department notified the parents of Robert Perry their
son had been separated from his regiment during the Battle of Manassas
Junction and that he was alive and well and back among his comrades.
    That same night, while the
moon was down, Abigail Dowling rowed a runaway slave woman and her two
small children to a waiting boat, just north of Vermilion Bay. All
three of them were owned by Ira Jamison.

Chapter Six
    IN THE spring of the following
year, 1862, Willie and Jim marched northward, at the rear of the
column, along a meandering road through miles of cotton acreage,
paintless shacks, barns, corn cribs, smokehouses, privies, tobacco
sheds cobbled together from split logs, and hog pens whose stench made
their eyes water.
    The people were not simply
poor. Their front porches buzzed with horseflies and mosquitoes. The
hides of their draft animals were lesioned with sores. The beards of
the men grew to their navels and their clothes hung in rags on their
bodies. The children were rheumy-eyed and had bowed legs from rickets,
their faces flecked with gnats. The women were hard-bitten,
dirt-grained creatures from the fields, surly and joyless and resentful
of their childbearing and apt to take an ax to the desperate man who
tried to put a fond hand on their persons.
    Willie looked around him and
nodded. So this is why we came to Tennessee, he thought.
    Two months earlier he and Jim
had been on leave from the 18th Louisiana at Camp Moore and had stood
in front of a saloon on upper St. Charles Avenue in
New Orleans, dipping beer out of a bucket, watching other
soldiers march under the canopy of live oaks, past columned homes with
ceiling-high windows and ventilated green shutters, regimental bands
playing, the Stars and Bars and Bonnie Blue flags flying, barefoot
Negro children running under the colonnades, pretending they were
shooting one another with broomsticks and wood pistols.
    It was a false spring and the
air was balmy and filled with the smells of boiled crawfish and crabs
and pralines. The sky was ribbed with pink clouds, and palm fronds and
banana trees rattled in the breeze off Lake Pontchartrain. Out on the
Mississippi giant paddle-wheelers blew their whistles in tribute to the
thousands of soldiers turning out of St. Charles into Canal, the silver
and gold instruments of the bands flashing in full sunlight now, the
mounted Zouaves dressed like Bedouins in white turbans and