And a bit farther on: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

She closed the cover on the book and went back to her cabin and finished her lunch, a strange sense of both confidence and tranquility in her heart, which she did not as yet quite understand.

Before sunset she walked downtown and bought a peppermint stick from the drugstore for a penny. She ate it on the bank of the bayou, not far from the boardinghouse operated by Willie Burke's mother. She watched the dusk gather in the trees along the bayou and the water darken and the sunfish and gars rolling in the shallows. The western sky was red and black now and she could smell the rain falling on the fields somewhere out on the rim of the earth.

She stood up from the bank and brushed off her dress and started to walk back to the quarters behind the laundry, before the paddy rollers came out on the roads. But now, for some unexplained reason, the thought of encountering them did not fill her with apprehension.

Then she realized the origin of the feelings that had flooded through her after she had gone into the widow's bedroom and hunted through the New Testament for the excerpt from St. Paul. She could read. No one could ever take that gift from her, and no one could hide knowledge or the truth about the world from her again.

AT sunrise the next morning she heard Rufus Atkins' horse in the yard, then heard him swing down from the saddle and approach her door. She was undressed, and she gathered up her clothes and sat on her bed and held them in her lap and over her breasts. He stepped inside the door, smelling of tobacco and cooked bacon, steam rising from his uniform in the morning coolness.

He removed the bent twenty-dollar gold piece from the watch pocket of his trousers and began working it over the tops of his knuckles.

"I got to go to bell count," she said.

"No, you don't."

"All the niggers got to be there, suh. The widow don't abide lateness."

"Not you, Flower. You can do almost any goddamn thing you want. You're a juicy bitch and you know it."

"Ain't right you talk to me like that, suh."

"I'm not here for what you think," he said. He walked to the back window and looked out on the cane field. The sun had just broken the edge of the horizon, like a soft red lump of molten metal.

"Marse Jamison is establishing a slaves council on all his plantations," Atkins said. "That means the slaves will lay out the punishment for anybody who breaks the rules. Marse Jamison reserves only the right-to overturn a punishment if he thinks it's too severe… are you listening?"

"I'm not dressed, suh."

Atkins took a deep breath and went outside the door. She heard him light a cigar and lean against the railing on her small gallery. She put on her work dress and lit the kindling in her stove and washed her face in the water bucket, then pushed the coffee pot over the flames that leaked around one of the iron pothole lids. She heard Atkins clear his throat and spit and then felt his weight bend the floorboards in the cabin.

"You're going to be on the slaves council for the laundry and two of the plantations up the road," he said.

"This don't sound like Marse Jamison," she said.

"What do you care? It gives you a little power you didn't have before."

"What if I say I don't want it?"

"I'd say you were a mighty stupid black girl."

"Tell him the stupid black girl don't want it."

He removed the cigar from his mouth and tossed it through the back window.

"You're a handful, Flower. In lots of ways," he said, biting down on his lip.

"You been in my bed, Marse Rufus. But it ain't gonna happen again."

"Say that again?"

"You heard me. I ain't afraid of you no more."

It was silent inside the cabin. Outside, the wind off the Gulf rustled the cane and flapped the clothes drying in the yard.

"I wouldn't be talking out of school, Flower. There are houses in Congo Square for girls who do that," he said.

"I ain't afraid."

He took a step toward her, his eyes roving over her face and the tops of her breasts. Her hand touched the oyster knife she kept on the table next to the stove.

Atkins rubbed his mouth and laughed.

"Damned if being white makes any man less of a fool. If I ever get rich I'll buy you and carry you off on my saddle and keep you as my personal strumpet. You believe that? It's a fact. Wouldn't lie to you, girl," he said.

His eyes seemed to be laughing at her now, as though he were reliving each moment he had probed inside her, put her nipples in his mouth, lifted her up spread-eagled across his loins. She turned away and picked up the coffeepot and burned her hand. Behind her, she heard him walk out the door, his boots knocking with a hollow sound on her gallery.

I hope the Yankees kill you, she said under her breath. But the vehemence in her thoughts brought her little solace.

WHEN she was a child, Abigail Dowling's father, who was a physician and a Quaker, taught her that a lie was an act of theft as well as one of deceit. A lie stole people's faith in their fellow man, he said, and the loss was often irreparable, whereas a monetary one was not.

In early August of 1861 the first casualty lists from Manassas Junction made their way back to New Iberia. The postmaster sat down behind the counter where he daily sorted the mail into pigeonholes, an eyeshade fastened on his forehead, and went down the alphabetized row of names from the 8th Louisiana Volunteers with his finger. Then he removed his glasses and placed them on his desk and with some very tiny nails he tacked all the lists to the post office wall.

He put on his coat and went out the front door and walked toward the end of Main, where he lived in a tree-shaded house behind the Episcopalian church. Without apparent cause he began to sway from side to side, as though he were drunk or possessed of epilepsy. When he collapsed against a hitching rail, a black deliveryman picked him up and sat him down in a chair against the front wall of the grocery. Then two white men took him inside and peeled off his coat and fanned his face and tried to get him to drink a glass of water.

Abigail stared through the grocery window at the scene taking place inside.

"What happened?" she asked the black man.

"Mr. LeBlanc's son got kilt in Virginia," the black man said.

"How did he learn?" she asked.

"I reckon it come t'rew the wire or the mail, Miss Abigail. That po' man."

Abigail hurried inside the post office. The wind through the open door and windows was lightly rattling the casualty lists against the wall. Her heart beating, she read the names of the soldiers under the captions "Wounded" and "Killed" and saw none there she could put a face with. She let out her breath and pressed her hand against her heart and then felt shame that her joy was at the expense of families that would never see their soldier boys again.

When she turned to leave the post office she glanced at the floor and saw a sheet of paper the wind had blown loose from the nails. She picked it up, her hand beginning to tremble. At the top of the page was the caption "Missing in Action." The third name in the column was that of Lieutenant Robert S. Perry.

She walked stone-faced down the street to her house, her ears ringing, unaware of the words spoken to her by others on the street or the peculiar looks they gave her when she didn't respond to their greetings.

Later, she did not remember drawing the curtains inside her house, filling it with summer heat that was almost unbearable, nor did she remember pacing from one room to the other, her mind drumming with her father's words about his experience as a surgeon with Zachary Taylor's troops in Mexico.