Chapter Twenty-two

ROBERT Perry was released from prison at Johnson's Island, Ohio, two months after the Surrender. The paddle-wheeler he boarded without a ticket was packed with Northern cotton traders, gamblers, real estate speculators, and political appointees seizing upon opportunities that seemed to be a gift from a divine hand. At night the saloons and dining and card rooms blazed with light and reverberated with orchestra music, while outside torrents of rain blistered the decks and the upside-down lifeboat Robert huddled under with a tiger-striped cat, a guilt-haunted, one-armed participant in the Fort Pillow Massacre, and an escaped Negro convict whose ankles were layered with leg-iron scars and who stole food for the four of them until they reached New Orleans.

Robert rode the spine of a freight car as far as the Atchafalaya River, then walked forty miles in a day and a half and went to sleep in a woods not more than two hours from the house where he had been born. When he woke in the morning he sat on a tree-shaded embankment on the side of the road and ate a withered apple and drank water from a wood canteen he had carried with him from Johnson's Island.

A squad of black soldiers passed him on the road, talking among themselves, their eyes never registering his presence, as though his gray clothes were less an indicator of an old enemy than a flag of defeat. Then a mounted Union sergeant, this one white, reined up his horse in front of Robert and looked down at him curiously. He wore a goatee and mustache and a kepi pulled down tightly on his brow and a silver ring with a gold cross on it.

"What happened to your shoes?" he asked.

"Lost them crossing the Atchafalaya," Robert replied.

"We've had trouble with guerrillas hereabouts. You wouldn't be one of those fellows, would you?"

Robert stared thoughtfully into space. "Simian creatures who hang in trees? No, I don't know much about those fellows," he said.

"Your feet look like spoiled bananas."

"Why, thank you," Robert said.

"Where'd you fight, Reb?"

"Virginia and Pennsylvania."

Cedar and mulberry and wild pecan trees grew along the edge of the road, and the canopy seemed to form a green tunnel of light for almost a half mile.

"I have a feeling you didn't sign an oath of allegiance in a prison camp and they decided to keep you around a while," the sergeant said.

"You never can tell," Robert said.

The sergeant removed his foot from the left stirrup. "Swing up behind me. I can take you into Abbeville," he said.

An hour later Robert slid off the horse's rump a half mile from his home and began walking again. He left the road and cut through a neighbor's property that was completely deserted, the main house doorless and empty of furniture, the fields spiked with dandelions and palmettos and the mud towers of crawfish. Then he climbed through a rick fence onto his father's plantation and crossed pastureland that was green and channeled with wildflowers. New cane waved in the fields, and in the distance he could see the swamp where he had fished as a boy, and snow egrets rising from the cypress canopy like white rose petals in the early sun.

The two-story house and the slave cabins seemed unharmed by the war but the barn had been burned to the ground and in the mounds of ashes and charcoal Robert could see the rib cages and long, hollow eyed skulls of horses. He did not recognize any of the black people living in the cabins, nor could he explain the presence of the whites living among them. His mother's flowerpots and hanging baskets were gone from the gallery, and the live oak that had shaded one side of the house, its branches always raking across the slate roof, had been nubbed back so that the trunk looked like a celery stalk.

He lifted the brass knocker on the front door and tapped it three times. He heard a chair scrape inside the house, then heavy footsteps approaching the front, not like those of either his mother or his father. The man who opened the door looked like an upended hogshead. He wore checkered pants and polished, high-top shoes, like a carnival barker might wear; his face was florid, whiskered like a walrus's. In his right hand he clutched a boned porkchop wrapped in a thick piece of bread.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"I'm Robert Perry. I live here."

"No, I don't hardly see how you could live here, since I've never seen you before. That would be pretty impossible, young fellow," the man said. His accent was from the East, the vowels as hard as rocks. His wife sat at the dining room table in a housecoat, her hair tied up on her head with a piece of gauze.

"Where are my parents? What are you doing in my house?" Robert said.

"You say Perry? Some people by that name moved into town. Ask around. You'll find them."

"He probably just wants something to eat. Offer him some work," the man's wife said from the table.

"You want to do some chores for a meal?" the man said. Robert looked out at the fields and the pink sun over the cane.

"That would be fine," he said.

"The privy's got to be cleaned out. Better eat before you do it, though," the man said. He laughed and slapped Robert hard on the upper arm. "Not much meat on your bones. Want a regular job? I run the Freedman's Bureau. You were a Johnny?"

"Yes."

"I'll see what I can do. We don't aim to rub your noses in it," the man said.

ONE week later, just before dawn, Tige McGuffy woke to a rolling sound on the roof of Willie Burke's house. Then he heard a soft thud against the side of the house and another on the roof. He looked out the window just as a man in the backyard flung a pine cone into the eaves.

Tige went to the dresser drawer, then walked down the stairs and opened the back door. Mist hung in layers on the bayou and in the trees and canebrakes. The man in the yard stood next to an unsaddled, emaciated horse, tossing a pine cone in the air and catching it in his palm.

"Why you chunking at Mr. Willie's house?" Tige asked.

"Thought it was time for y'all to get up. You always sleep in a nightshirt and a kepi?" the man in the yard said.

"If I feel like it," Tige replied.

"Where's Mr. Willie?"

"None of your dadburned business."

"I like your kepi. Would you tell Willie that if Robert Perry had two coins he could rub together he would treat him to breakfast. But unfortunately he doesn't have a sou."

Tige set a heavy object in his hand on the kitchen drainboard. "Why ain't you said who you was?" he asked.

Robert Perry walked out of the yard and onto the steps, his horse's reins dangling on the ground. His clothes and hair were damp with dew, his face unshaved, his belt notched tightly under his ribs. He came inside and glanced down at the drainboard.

"What are you doing with that pistol?" he said.

"Night riders got it in for Mr. Willie. I was pert' near ready to blow you into the bayou," Tige replied.

"Night riders?" Robert said.

Ten minutes later Willie left Robert and Tige at the house and went on a shopping trip down Main Street, then returned and fixed a breakfast of scrambled eggs and green onions, hash browns, real coffee, warm milk, bacon, chunks of ham, fresh bread, and blackberries and cream. He and Robert and Tige piled their plates and made smacking and grunting sounds while they ate, forking and spooning more food into their mouths than they could chew.

"I didn't know meals like this existed anymore. How'd you pay for this?" Robert said.

"Took advantage of the credit system… Then signed your name to the bill," Willie said.

"Tige was telling me about your local night riders," Robert said.

"Have you heard of the White League or the Knights of the White Camellia?"