Chapter Nine

FLOWER Jamison walked through Jackson Square, past St. Louis Cathedral, and down cobbled streets under colonnades and scrolled-iron balconies that dripped with bougainvillea and passion vine. A man in a constable's uniform was lighting the gas lamps along the street, and the breeze smelled of freshly sprinkled flower beds on the opposite side of a gated wall, spearmint, old brick that was dark with mold, and ponded water in a courtyard where the etched shadows of palm fronds moved like lace across a bright window.

The moon rose above the rooftops and chimneys and cast her shadow in front of her, at first startling her, then making her laugh.

She walked past the brothels in Congo Square, two-story wood-frame buildings, their closed shutters slitted with an oily yellow light from inside. The only customers now were Yankee soldiers, boys, really, who entered the houses in groups, never singly, loud, boisterous, probably with little money, she thought, anxious to hide their fear and innocence and the paucity of their resources.

She passed a house that resonated with piano music and offered only mulatto women to its customers, what were always called quadroons, no matter what the racial mix of the woman actually was.

A baby-faced soldier not older than seventeen sat on the front step, klicking pebbles with his thumb into the yard, a kepi cocked on his head. He watched her pass and then for some unaccountable reason tipped his kepi to her.

She nodded at him and smiled.

"Some other fellows went inside. I was just waiting on them," he said.

The overseer who had brought her from New Iberia had placed her with a husband and wife who were free people of color and lived in an elevated cottage overlooking Basin and the drainage ditch that sawed its way down the middle of the street to a sinkhole that was gray with insects. She ate supper with the husband and wife, then waited for the husband to drive her to the hospital on St. Charles.

He was a light-skinned man who ran a tannery and looked more Indian than African. He seemed irritable as he pulled a pair of gloves over his palms, vexed somehow by her presence or his need to transport her back and forth to her work.

"Is something wrong, suh?" she asked.

"The overseer tole me yesterday you're Ira Jamison's daughter," he said.

"He ain't said it to me. No white person ever has."

"I seen you walking past them houses down there tonight. Flirting wit' a Yankee soldier on the porch," he said. He wagged his finger back and forth. "You don't do that when you stay at my house."

"Colonel Jamison is a prisoner of war. He cain't hurt you, suh."

"I bought my freedom, girl. I ain't ever gonna lose it. If you come to New Orleans, scheming to get free, you better not drag me into it, no," he said, pulling down his shirt to expose a circular scar that looked like dried plaster, of a kind left by a branding iron poorly laid on.

FLOWER knew she should have been depressed by the hostility and fear of her host and the hanging she had witnessed that evening, but oddly she was not. In fact, since the day an overseer had arrived in New Iberia from Angola Plantation and had told her Colonel Jamison was in New Orleans, badly wounded, asking for her, she could hardly deal with rhe strange and conflicting emotons that assailed her heart.

She remembered when she had seen him for the first time as a little girl, dressed in skintight white breeches and a blue velvet jacket, his hair flowing behind him as he galloped his horse across a field of alfalfa and jumped a fence like a creature with invisible wings. A teenage boy picking cotton in the row next to hers had said, "He ride that hoss just like he rode yo' mama, Flower."

The boy's mother had slapped him on the ear.

Flower did not understand what the boy had meant or why his mother had been provoked to such a level of anger, which to Flower, even as a child, was always an indicator of fear.

She saw Marse Jamison again, on a Christmas Day, when her grandmother brought her to work with her in the big house. Flower had peeked out from the kitchen and had seen him talking with other men by the fireplace, the whiskey in his glass bright against the flames. When he saw her watching him, he winked and picked up a piece of hard candy from a crystal plate and gave it to her.

In that moment she believed she was in the presence of the most important man in the world.

She did not see him again for fifteen years.

Then, on what might become his deathbed, he had asked for her. She felt herself forgiving him for sins that he had neither acknowledged nor had asked forgiveness for, and she wondered if she were driven less by charity than by weakness and personal need. But people were what they did, she told herself, not what they said or didn't say, but what they did. And Colonel Ira Jamison had sent for his daughter.

Now she enclosed him in mosquito-netting at night and sponge-bathed him and changed his bandages and brought his food from the hospital kitchen on a cloth-covered tray. He was melancholy and remote, but always grateful for her attentions, and there were moments when his hand lingered on hers and his eyes seemed to turn inward and view a scene she could hardly imagine, a field churning with smoke and terrified horses or a surgeon's tent where human limbs were piled like spoiled pork.

He read until late at night and slept with the flame turned low in the lamp. On one occasion, when the oil had burned out, she found him sitting on the side of the bed, his bare feet in a pool of moonlight, his face disjointed with his own thoughts.

"The war won't let you sleep, Colonel Jamison?" she asked him.

"The laudanum makes you have strange dreams, that's all," he replied.

"It ain't good to take it if you don't need it no more," she said.

"I suspect your wisdom may be greater than mine, Flower," he said, and looked at her fondly.

But tonight when she reported to the hospital he was not reading either the Bible or one of the several novels he kept on his nightstand. Instead, he sat propped up on pillows with a big ledger book spread open on his knees. The pages were lined with the first names of people-Jim, Patsy, Spring, Cleo, Tuff, Clotile, Jeff, Batist-and beside each name was a birthdate.

As he turned the pages and read the lists of names, which must have numbered almost two hundred, he moved his lips silently and seemed to count with his fingers. He extinguished the lamp and went to sleep with the ledger book under his pillow.

In the morning a new sentry was on duty at the entrance to the ward. His cheeks were pink, his hair so blond it was almost white. He straightened as she walked by, clearing his throat, a hesitant grin at the corner of his mouth.

"'Member me?" he said.

"No," she said.

"Sitting on the porch at that house on Congo Square? Place I probably didn't have no business?" he said.

"Oh yes, how do you do?" she said.

He shifted his hands on his rifle barrel and looked past her out the window, his eyes full of light, thinking about his response but finding no words that he felt would be very interesting to anyone else.

"I'm on our regimental rounders team. We're gonna play some Vermont boys soon as I get off duty," he said.

"Rounders?"

"It's a game you play with a ball and a bat. You run around bases. That's how come it's called 'rounders.'" He grinned at her.

"It's nice seeing you," she said.

"Ma'am, I didn't go in that place last night," he said hurriedly, before she could walk away.

"I know you didn't," she said.

He had just called her "ma'am," something no white person had ever done. She looked back over her shouldee at him. He was twirling his kepi on the point of his fixed bayonet, like a child intrigued with a top.