White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Page A

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 baggy scarlet pants.
    Women threw flowers off the balconies into the columns of marching men. Prostitutes from Congo Square winked at them from under their parasols and sometimes hoisted their skirts up to their thighs and