White Doves at Morning Read Free Page A

mean
to startle you, Mr. Atkins," he said. "I just wanted to tell you I'm
sorry for the sharpness of my tongue. I pray one day you find the Holy
Roman Church and then die screaming for a priest."

    WHEN he came back into the
house his mother said nothing to him, even though she had heard his
remarks to Rufus Atkins through the window. But just before noon she
found him in his reading place under a live oak by the bayou and pulled
up a cane chair next to him and sat down with her palms propped on her
knees.
    "What ails you, Willie?" she
asked.
    "I was just a little out of
sorts," he replied.
    "You've decided, haven't you?"
she said.
    "What might that be?"
    "Oh, Willie, you're signing up
for the army. This isn't our war," she said.
    "What should I do, stay home
while others die?"
    She looked emptily at the
bayou and a covey of ducklings fluttering on the water around their
mother.
    "You'll get in trouble," she
said.
    "Over what?"
    "You're cursed with the gift
of Cassandra. For that reason you'll always be out of place and
condemned by others."
    "Those are the myths that our
Celtic ancestors used to console themselves for their poverty," he
replied.
    She shook her head, knowing
her exhortations were of little value. "I need you to fix the roof.
What are your plans for today?" she asked.
    "To take my clothes to Ira
Jamison's laundry."
    "And get in trouble with that
black girl? Willie, tell me I haven't raised a lunatic for a son," she
said.

    HE put a notebook with lined
pages, a pencil, and a small collection of William Blake's poems in his
pants pockets and rode his horse down Main Street. The town had been
laid out along the serpentine contours of Bayou Teche, which took its
name from an Atakapa Indian word that meant snake. The business
district stretched from a brick warehouse on the bend, with huge iron
doors and iron shutters over the windows, down to the Shadows, a
two-story, pillared plantation home surrounded by live oaks whose shade
was so deep the night-blooming flowers in the gardens often opened in
the late afternoon.
    An Episcopalian church marked
one religious end of the town, a Catholic church the other. On the
street between the two churches shopkeepers swept the plank walks under
their colonnades, a constable spaded up horse dung and tossed it into
the back of a wagon, and a dozen or so soldiers from Camp Pratt, out by
Spanish Lake, sat in the shade between two brick buildings, still drunk
from the night before, flinging a pocketknife into the side of a
packing case.
    Actually the word "soldier"
didn't quite describe them, Willie thought. They had been mustered in
as state militia, most of them outfitted in mismatched uniforms paid
for by three or four Secessionist fanatics who owned cotton interests
in the Red River parishes.
    The most ardent of these was
Ira Jamison. His original farm, named Angola Plantation because of the
geographical origins of its slaves, had expanded itself in ancillary
fashion from the hilly brush country on a bend of the Mississippi River
north of Baton Rouge to almost every agrarian enterprise in Louisiana,
reaching as far away as a slave market in Memphis run by a man named
Nathan Bedford Forrest.
    Willie rode his horse between
the two buildings where the boys in militia uniforms lounged. Some were
barefoot, some with their shirts off and pimples on their shoulders and
skin as white as a frog's belly. One, who was perhaps six and a half
feet tall, his fly partially buttoned, slept with a straw hat over his
face.
    "You going to sign up today,
Willie?" a boy said.
    "Actually Jefferson Davis was
at our home only this morning, asking me the same thing," he replied.
"Say, you boys wouldn't be wanting more whiskey or beer, would you?"
    One of them almost vomited. Another threw a dried horse turd at his
back. But Willie took no offense. Most of them were poor, unlettered,
brave and innocent at the same time, imbued with whatever vision of the world others created
for them.
When he glanced