White Doves at Morning Read Free Page B

back over his shoulder they were playing mumblety-peg
with their pocketknives.
    He was on a dirt road now, one
that led southward into the sugarcane fields that stretched all the way
to the Gulf of Mexico. He passed hog lot and slaughterhouse buzzing
with bottle flies and a brick saloon with a railed bar inside, then a
paint-skinned, two-story frame house with a sagging gallery that served
as New Iberia's only bordello. The owner, Carrie LaRose, who some said
had been in prison in the West Indies or France, had added a tent in
the side yard, with cots inside, to handle the increase in
business from Camp Pratt.
    A dark-haired chub of a girl
in front of the tent scooped up her dress and lifted it high above her
bloomers. "How about a ride, Willie? Only a dollar," she said.
    Willie raised himself in the
saddle and removed his hat. "It's a terrible temptation, May, but I'd
be stricken blind by your beauty and would never find my home ordear mother again," he
said. The girl grinned
broadly and was about to shout back a rejoinder, when she was startled
by a young barefoot man, six and a half feet tall, running hard after
Willie Burke.
    The tall youth vaulted onto
the rump of Willie's horse, grabbing Willie around the sides for
purchase while Willie's horse spooked sideways and almost caved with
the additional weight.
    Willie could smell an odor
like milk and freshly mowed hay in the tall youth's clothes.
    "You pass by without saying
hello to your pal?" the young man said.
    "Hello, Jim!"
     "Hello there, Willie!"
    "You get enough grog in you
last night?" Willie asked.
     "Hardly," Jim replied.
"Are you going to see that nigger girl again?"
    "It's a possibility. Care to
come along?" Willie said. The young man named Jim had hair the color of
straw and an angular, self-confident face that reflected neither
judgment of himself nor others. He pulled slightly at the book that
protruded from Willie's pocket and flipped his thumb along the edges of
the pages.
    "What you're about to do is
against the law, Willie," Jim said.
    Willie looked at the dust
blowing out of the new sugarcane, a solitary drop of rain that made a
star in the dust. "Smell the salt? It's a fine day, Jim. I think you
should stay out of saloons for a spell," he said.
    "That girl is owned by Ira
Jamison. He's not a man to fool with," Jim said.
    "Really, now?"
    "Join the Home Guards with me.
You should see the Enfield rifles we uncrated yesterday. The Yankees
come down here, by God we'll lighten their load."
    "I'm sure they're properly
frightened at the prospect. You'd better drop off now, Jim. I don't
want to get you in trouble with Marse Jamison," Willie said.
    Jim's silence made Willie
truly wish for the first time that day he'd kept his own counsel. He
felt Jim's hands let go of his sides, then heard his weight hit the
dirt road. Willie turned to wave good-bye to his friend, sorry for his
condescending attitude, even sorrier for the fear in his breast that he
could barely conceal. But his friend did not look back.

    THE last house on the road was
a ramshackle laundry owned by Ira Jamison, set between two spreading
oaks, behind which Flower sat in an open-air wash shed, scrubbing
stains out of a man's nightshirt, her face beaded with perspiration
from the iron pots steaming around her. Her hair was black and
straight, like an Indian's, her cheekbones pronounced, her skin the
color of coffee with milk poured in it.
    She looked at the sun's place
in the sky and set the shirt down in the boiling water again and went
into the cypress cabin where she lived by the coulee and wiped her face
and neck and underarms with a rag she dipped into a cypress bucket.
    From under her bed she removed
the lined tablet and dictionary Willie had given her and sat in a chair
by the window and read the lines she had written in the tablet:
    A
owl flown acrost the moon late last night.  A cricket sleeped on the pillow by my head.
    The gator down in the coulee
look like dark stone when the sunlite