She awoke abruptly and cleared her throat and spat into the dirt, widening her eyes until the images from the dream were gone from her mind. Then she rose from the bench and walked unsteadily through the shade, into the heat of the day, toward McCain's Hardware.

"You want to look at what?" the owner, Todd McCain, said.

"The pistol. You had it in the glass case before the Yankees came to town," she replied.

"I don't remember no pistol," McCain said. He had been a drummer from Atlanta who had come to New Iberia on the stage and married an overweight widow ten years his senior. His body was hard and egg-shaped, the shoulders narrow, his metallic hair greased and parted down the middle.

"I want to see the pistol. Or I'll come back with a Yankee soldier who'll help you find it," she said.

"That a fact?" he said.

He fixed his eyes on her face, a smile breaking at the side of his mouth. She turned and started back out the door. "Hold on," he said.

He went into the back of the store and returned to the front and laid a heavy object wrapped in oily flannel on top of the glass case. He glanced at the street, then unwrapped a cap-and-ball revolver with dark brown grips. The blueing on the tip of the barrel and on the cylinder was worn a dull silver from holster friction.

"That's a Colt.36 caliber revolver. Best sidearm you can buy," he said.

"How much is it?"

"You people ain't suppose to have these."

"I'm a contraband now. I can have anything I want. No different than a free person of color."

"Twelve dollars. I ain't talking about Confederate paper, either."

"Maybe I don't have twelve right now. But maybe part of it."

"That a fact?" He looked into space, as though calculating figures in his head. "Under the right circumstances I can come down to ten, maybe eight."

"Right circumstances?"

"I could use a little hep in the storeroom. Won't take long. If you feel like walking on back there with me."

"I'll be back later."

"Tell you what, hep me out and I'll go down to six. I cain't make more right than that," he said. He wet his bottom lip, as though it were chapped, and looked away from her face.

"You all right, suh?" she asked.

He averted his eyes and didn't reply. After she was gone he threw the revolver angrily in a drawer.

SHE walked down the street toward Abigail Dowling's cottage and saw a carriage parked in front of the Shadows. Through the iron gate she caught sight of Ira Jamison, sitting at a table on a flagstone terrace under oak trees, with two Yankee officers and a cotton trader from Opelousas. The grass was sprinkled with azalea petals, the gazebo and trellises in the gardens humped with blue bunches of wisteria. The gate creaked on its hinges when she pulled it open.

She followed the brick walkway through the trees to the terrace. The four men at the table were drinking coffee from small cups and laughing at a joke. A walking cane rested against the arm of Ira Jamison's chair. His hair had grown to his shoulders and looked freshly shampooed and dried, and the weight he had lost gave his face a kind of fatal beauty, perhaps like a poisonous flower she had read of in a poem.

"I need you to lend me twelve dol'ars," she said.

He twisted around in his chair. "My heavens, Flower, you certainly know how to sneak up on a man," he said.

"The man at the store says that's the price for a Colt.36 revolver. I 'spect he's lying, but I still need the twelve dol'ars," she said.

The other three men had stopped talking. Ira Jamison pulled on his earlobe.

"What in heaven's name do you need a pistol for?" he said.

"Your overseer, Rufus Atkins, paid three men to rape Miss Abigail. She wasn't home, so they did it to me. I aim to kill all three of them and then find Rufus Atkins and kill him, too."

The other three men shifted in their chairs and glanced at Ira Jamison. He pinched a napkin on his mouth and dropped it into a plate.

"I think you'd better leave the premises, Flower," he said.

"You had that Yankee soldier killed at the hospital in New Orleans, just so you could escape and make everybody think you were a hero. Now I 'spek these Yankee officers are helping you sell cotton to the North. You something else, Colonel."

"I'll walk you to the gate," Ira Jamison said.

He rose from the chair and took her arm, his fingers biting with surprising strength into the muscle.

"Why's he letting a darky talk to him like that?" she heard one of the officers say behind her.

The cotton trader raised a finger in the air, indicating the officer should not pursue the subject further.

AT the cottage she told Abigail Dowling what had happened.

"You should have come to me first," Abigail said.

"You would have bought me a gun?"

"We could have talked," Abigail said. Then she looked into space and bit her lip at the banality of her own words.

"You been good to me, but I'm going on down to the soldiers' camp," Flower said.

"To do what?"

"Someone said they're hiring washerwomen."

"Did you eat anything today?"

"Maybe. I don't remember."

Abigail pressed her hands down on Flower's shoulders until Flower was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. She smoothed Flower's hair and caressed her cheek with her hand.

"Wish you wouldn't do that, Miss Abby."

Abigail's face flushed. "I'm sorry," she said.

Then she fried four eggs in the skillet and scraped the mold off a half loaf of bread and sliced it and browned the slices in ham fat. She divided the food between them and sat across from Flower and ate without speaking.

"What are you studying on?" Flower asked.

"I was thinking of my father and what he would do in certain situations. You two would have liked each other," Abigail said.

Ten minutes later Abigail went out the back door and removed a spade from the shed and walked through the dappled shade along the rim of the coulee and began scraping away a layer ot blackened leaves from under an oak tree. She dug down one root to a tin box that was wrapped in a piece of old gum coat. Then she gathered her purse and a parasol from the house and walked down Main Street, past the Shadows, to the hardware store.

Todd McCain walked out from the back when he heard the bell tinkle above the front door. He and two black men had been restocking the front of the store with the inventory he had hidden from looters, and his shirt was damp at the armpits, his greased hair flecked with grit.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"You offered to sell a revolver to Flower Jamison for six dollars, provided she'd go in the back room with you," Abigail said.

"Sounds like somebody's daydream to me," he said. She pulled open the drawstring on her purse. "Here are your six dollars. How much is it for the ammunition?"

He touched the inside of one nostril with a thumbnail, then huffed air out his nose.

"You got some nerve insulting me on the word of a nigger," he said.

He waited for a response, but there was only silence. When he tried to return her stare, he saw a repository of contempt and disgust in her eyes, aimed at him and no other, that made him clear his throat and look away.

"It's ten dollars for the pistol. I don't have any balls or powder for it," he said.

She continued to look into his face, as though his words had no application to the situation.

"Seven dollars, take it or leave it. I don't need any crazy people in my store," he said.

He waited while she found another dollar in her purse, then picked up the coins one at a time from the glass counter. "I'll wrap it up for you and throw in some gun oil so you don't have no reason to come back," he said.

"Don't presume," she said.

"Presume what?"