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After the war had begun they had postured as soldiers, carrying the mail from
the post office out to Camp Pratt or guarding deserters and drunks, but in
reality everyone knew they were mentally and physically unfit for service in
the regular army. One man was consumptive, another harelipped, and the third
was feebleminded and had worked as a janitor in the state home for the insane.
Flower was about to climb up into the carriage when Rufus Atkins rode into the
yard and stopped under the oak tree. He did not acknowledge her or even look
in her direction. The three paddy rollers grinned at him and one of them
lifted their whiskey bottle in invitation. Atkins dismounted and pulled his
shoulder holster and pistol down over his arm and hung them from the pommel of
his saddle. His eyes lit on Flower momentarily, seeming to consider her or
something about her for reasons she didn't understand. Then the object of his
concern, whatever it was, went out of his face and he took a tin cup from his
saddlebags and held it out for the harelipped man to pour into. But he
remained standing while he drank and did not sit down with the three men at
the table.
Flower continued to stare at him, surprised at her own boldness. He stopped
his conversation with the paddy rollers in mid-sentence and looked back at
her, then set his cup down on the table and walked toward her, the leaves from
the oak tree puffing into the great vault of yellow-purple sky behind him.
He wore boots and tight, gray cavalry pants with gold stripes down the legs, a
wash-faded checkered shirt, and a slouch hat sweat-stained around the crown. A
canvas cartridge belt with loops designed for the new brass-cased ammunition
was buckled at an angle on his narrow hips.
"You have something you want to say, Flower?" he asked.
"Not really."
"You bear me a grudge?" he said.
"Miss Carrie in there knows prophecy. Some people say Mr. Willie Burke got the
same gift. But folks such as me don't have that gift," she said.
"You're not making a whole lot of sense."
"I cain't read the lines in somebody's palm. But I know you're gonna come to a
bad end. It's because you're evil. And you're evil because you're cruel. And
you're cruel because inside you're afraid."
He stared into the distance, his fists on his hips, his weight resting
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casually on one leg. Rain was blowing off the Gulf, like spun glass across the
sun. He shook his head.
"I tell you the truth, Flower, you're the damnedest nigger I've ever known and
the best piece of rough stock I ever took to bed. That said, would you please
get the hell out of here?" he said.
As she rode away in the buggy, she looked back over her shoulder and saw Rufus
Atkins counting out a short stack of coins into the palm of each of the paddy
rollers. A shaft of sunlight fell on the broad grin of the feebleminded man.
His teeth were as yellow as corn, his eyes filled with a liquid glee.
Chapter Fifteen
WILLIE Burke no longer knew if the humming sound in his head was caused by the
mosquito eggs in his blood or the dysentery in his bowels. The dirt road along
the bayou was yellow and hard-packed and the dust from the retreating column
drifted into his face. He wore no socks and the leather in his shoes had
hardened and split and rubbed blisters across his toes and on his heels. He
watched the retreating column disappear around a bend, then ordered his men to
fall out and form a defensive line along a coulee that fed into the bayou.
He lay below the rim of the embankment and peered back down the road. Houses
were burning in the distance, and when he pressed his ear against the ground
he thought he could hear the rumble of wheeled vehicles in the south, but he
could see no sign of Union soldiers.
Where were they? he asked himself. Perhaps sweeping south of New Iberia to
capture the salt mines down by the Gulf, he thought. It was shady where he lay
on the embankment, and he could smell wild-flowers and water in the bottom of
the coulee and for what seemed just a second he laid his head down in the
coolness of the grass and closed his eyes.
An enlisted man shook him by his arm.
"You all right, Lieutenant?" he asked.
"Sure I am," Willie said, his head jerking up. The side of his face was
peppered with grains of dirt. He raised himself on his arms and looked down
the road at the row of oaks and cypress trees that lined the bayou. He felt
light-headed, disconnected in a strange way from the scene around him, as
though it belonged somehow inside the world of sleep and he belonged in
another place.
He could see a curtain of black smoke rising from the fields in the south now,
which told him he had been right in his speculation that the Yankees' main
force would concentrate on capturing the salt mines and, at worst, he and his
men would not have to deal with more than a diversionary probe.
He looked at the empty road and the cinders rising in the sky from the fields
and the wind blowing across the tops of the oak trees and wondered if he would
see his mother and Abigail Dowling that evening. Yes, he most certainly would,
he told himself. He would bathe in an iron tub and have fresh clothes and he
would eat soup and perhaps even bread his mother had baked for him.
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