He got to his feet and urinated behind a corncrib, then realized he was not alone. Between thirty and forty mounted men moved out of the fog in the pecan orchard and formed a half circle around the back of the farmhouse.
They wore ragged beards and bayonet-cut hair. Their elbows poked through their shirts; their pants were streaked with grease and road grime, their skin the color of saddle leather, as though it had been smoked over a fire.
The leader wore gray pants and a blue cotton shirt and a cavalry officer's hat that had wilted over his ears. A sword inside a leather scabbard and a belt strung with three holstered cap-and-ball pistols were looped over his saddle pommel. Even though the morning was peppered with mist, his face looked dilated, overheated, his eyes scalded.
"You Secesh?" he asked.
"I was," Willie replied.
"I've seen you. You was looting the body of one of my men at St. Martinville," the guerrilla said, his horse shifting under him.
"You're wrong, my friend. I won't be abiding the insult, either."
The guerrilla touched his horse's side with his boot heel and approached Willie, leaning down in the saddle to get a better look. His eyes were colorless, filled with energies that seemed to have no moral source. His coppery hair was pushed up under his hat, like a woman's.
"You know who I am?" he asked.
"I think your name is Jarrette. I think you rode with William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson and helped burn Lawrence, Kansas, to the ground," Willie said.
"You got a mouth on you, do you?"
"I saw your handiwork on the St. Martinville Road. Your men give no quarter."
"That's life under a black flag. We recognize no authority except Jehovah and Jefferson Davis. What's inside that house?"
"A woman with a gun and a three – or four-day-old corpse." The guerrilla leader stared at the house, then looked in both directions, as though he heard bugles or gunfire, although there were no sounds except those of a rural morning and the buzzing of bottle flies inside the house.
One of the guerrilla leader's men leaned in the saddle and whispered in his ear.
"We was here?" the leader said.
The other guerrilla nodded. The leader, whose name was Jarrette, turned his attention back to Willie. "I don't want you walking behind me," he said.
"The war's over," Willie said.
"The hell it is."
Jarrette's face twitched under his hat. He glared into the distance, his back straightening, his thighs tightening on his horse. Willie looked in the direction of his interest but saw nothing but gray fields and a fog-shrouded pecan orchard.
"I gut blue-bellies and fill up their cavities with stones and sink them to the bottoms of rivers. Jayhawkers get the same. You saying I'm a liar?" Jarrette said.
Willie looked at his pie-plate face and the moral insanity in his eyes and the rubbery, unnatural configuration of his mouth. "I mean you no harm," he said.
"Stay out of my road," Jarrette said.
"My pleasure. Top of the morning to you," Willie said. He watched Jarrette and his men ride out of the dirt yard toward the road, then scooped off his flop hat and began collecting chicken's eggs from under a manure wagon and in the depressions along the barn wall. He had put three brown eggs inside the crown of his hat and was walking toward a smokehouse that lay on its side, dripping grease and smoldering in its own ashes, when he heard the hooves of a solitary horse thundering across the earth behind him.
He turned just as the guerrilla leader bore down upon him, leaning from the saddle, the point of hes hilted sword extended in frong of him.The sword's sharpened edge knifed through the top of Willie's shirt, just above the collarbone, and sliced across the skin of his shoulder as coldly as an icicle.
Willie crumpled his hat against his wound and collapsed against a rick fence, the eggs breaking and running down his clothes. He stared stupidly at the guerrilla leader, who disappeared in the mist, an idiot's grin on his mouth.
Chapter Twenty-one
THE two-story gabled house next to the Catholic cemetery had been built in the 1840s by an eccentric ornithologist and painter who had worked with James Audubon in Key West and the Florida Everglades. Unfortunately his insatiable love of painting tropical birds as well as Tahitian nudes seemed to be related to a libidinous passion for red wine, Parisian prostitutes, gambling, and trysts with the wives of the wealthiest and best duelists in southern Louisiana.
Residents of the town believed it was only a matter of time before a cuckold drove a pistol ball through his brain. They were wrong. Syphilis got to it first. Just before the first Federal troops reached New Iberia, he gave all his paintings to his slaves, put on a tailored gray officer's uniform he had worn as a member of the Home Guards, then mounted a horse and charged down the bayou road, waving a sword over his head, straight into an artillery barrage that blew him and his uniform into pieces that floated down as airily as flamingo feathers on the bayou's surface.
The first night Federals occupied the town they tore the doors off the house, broke out the windows and turned the downstairs rooms into horse stalls. After the Union cavalry moved on up the 'I'echc into the Red Rivet country, the house remained empty, the white paint darkening from stubble fires, the oak floors scoured by horseshoes, the eaves clustered with yellow-jacket and mud-dauber nests. The taxes on the house were not paid for two years, and on a hot afternoon in late May, the sheriff tacked an auction announcement on the trunk of the live oak that shaded the dirt yard in front of the gallery.
Abigail Dowling happened to be passing in her buggy when the sheriff tapped down the four corners of the auction notice on the tree and stood back to evaluate his handiwork. But Abigail's attention was focused on the gallery steps, where Flower Jamison was sitting with two black children, teaching them how to write the letters of the alphabet on a piece of slate. In fact, at that moment, the broad back of the sheriff, the auction notice puffing against the bark of the tree, Flower and the black children arranged like a triptych on the steps and the vandalized and neglected house of a sybaritic artist, all seemed to be related, like prophetic images caught inside a perfect historical photograph.
Abigail pulled the buggy into the shade and walked past Flower into the building, trailing her fingers across Flower's shoulders. She walked from room to room, computing the measurements in her mind, seeing furnishings and arrangements that were not there. Tramps or ex-soldiers passing through town had scattered trash through the rooms and built unconfined cook fires on the hearths, blackening the walls and scorching the ceilings. She could hear red squirrels and field mice clattering across the roof and the attic. The wind blew hot and dusty through the open windows and smelled of fish heads behind a market and horse manure in the streets. But when she looked out on the gallery and saw the two black children, both of them barefoot, bending down attentively on each side of Flower while she showed them how to print their names in chalk on the piece of slate, Abigail felt a prescience about the future that was more optimistic than any she had experienced in years.
Wasn't it time to put aside anger and loss and self-accusation and live in the sunlight for a while? she thought.
She went back out on the gallery and sat down on the top step next to Flower and placed her palm in the center of Flower's back. She could feel the heat and moisture in Flower's skin through her dress, and she removed her hand and rested it in her lap. She looked at Flower's profile against the light breaking in the live oak, the clarity in her eyes, the resolute tilt of her chin, and experienced a strange tightening in her throat.