White Doves at Morning Read Free

screams of his comrades filled his ears.
    When Willie woke from the
dream in a backroom of his mother's boardinghouse on Bayou Teche, he
knew the fear that beat in his heart had nothing to do with his dead
father's tale of his own survival at the Goliad Massacre during the
Texas Revolution. The war he feared was now only the stuff of rumors,
political posturing, and young men talking loudly of it in a saloon,
but he had no doubt it was coming, like a crack in a dike that would
eventually flood and destroy an entire region, beginning in Virginia or
Maryland, perhaps, at a nameless crossroads or creek bed or sunken lane
or stone wall meandering through a farmer's field, and as surely as he
had wakened to birdsong in his mother's house that morning he would be
in it, shells bursting above his head while he soiled his pants and
killed others or was killed himself over an issue that had nothing to
do with his life.
    He washed his face in a bowl
on the dresser and threw the water out the window onto the grassy yard
that sloped down to the bayou. By the drawbridge a gleaming white
paddle-wheeler, its twin stacks leaking smoke into the mist, was being
loaded with barrels of molasses by a dozen Negro men, all of whom had
begun work before dawn, their bodies glowing with sweat and humidity in
the light from the fires they had built on the bank.
    They were called wage slaves,
rented out by their owner, in this case, Ira Jamison, on an hourly
basis. The taskmaster, a man named Rufus Atkins, rented a room at the
boardinghouse and worked the Negroes in his charge unmercifully. Willie
walked out into the misty softness of the morning, into the residual
smell of night-blooming flowers and bream spawning in the bayou and
trees dripping with dew, and tried to occupy his mind with better
things than the likes of Rufus Atkins. But when he sat on a hole in the
privy and heard Rufus Atkins driving and berating his charges, he
wondered if there might be an exemption in heaven for the Negro who
raked a cane knife across Atkins' throat.
    When Willie walked back up the
slope and encountered Atkins on his way into breakfast, he touched his
straw hat, fabricated a smile and said, "Top of the morning to you,
sir."
    "And to you, Mr. Willie,"
Rufus Atkins replied.
    Then Willie's nemesis, his
inability to keep his own counsel, caught up with him.
    "If words could flay, I'd bet
you could take the hide off a fellow, Mr. Atkins," he said.
    "That's right clever of you,
Mr. Willie. I'm sure you must entertain your mother at great length
while tidying the house and carrying out slop jars for her."
    "Tell me, sir, since you're in
a mood for profaning a fine morning, would you be liking your nose
broken as well?" Willie inquired.

    AFTER the boarders had been
fed, including Rufus Atkins, Willie helped his mother clean the table
and scrape the dishes into a barrel of scraps that later they would
take out to their farm by Spanish Lake and feed to their hogs. His
mother, Ellen Lee, had thick, round, pink arms and brown hair that was
turning gray, and a small Irish mouth and a cleft in her chin.
    "Did I hear you have words
with Mr. Atkins?" she asked.
    Willie seemed to study the
question. "I don't rightly recall. It may have been a distortion on the
wind, perhaps," he replied.
    "You're a poor excuse for a
liar," she said.
    He began washing dishes in the
sink. But unfortunately she was not finished.
    "The times might be good for
others but not always for us. Our livery is doing poorly, Willie. We
need every boarder we can get," she said.
    "Would you like me to
apologize?" he asked.
    "That's up to your conscience. Remember he's a Protestant and given
to their ways. We have to forgive those whom chance and accident have
denied access to the Faith."  
    "You're right, Mother. There
he goes now. I'll see if I can straighten things out," Willie replied,
looking through the back window.
    He hurried out the door and
touched Rufus Atkins on the sleeve.
    "Oh, excuse me, I didn't