White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Read Free

the cold, his breath loud inside his checkered scarf.
    "Whoever made the world sure didn't care much about the likes of us, did He?" Rufus said to no one in particular. "Bring up Jackson's horse and get him across the saddle, would you? Best be careful. I think he messed himself."
     
    AFTER she was told of her daughter's death and the baby who had been abandoned somewhere deep in the woods, Sarie's mother left her job in the washhouse without permission and went to the site where her daughter had died. She followed the blood trail back to the slough, then stood on the thawing mudflat and watched the water coursing southward toward the river and knew which direction Sarie had been going when she had finally been forced to stop and give birth to her child. It had been north, toward the river called the Ohio.
    Sarie's mother and a wet nurse with breasts that hung inside her shirt like swollen eggplants walked along the banks of the slough until late afternoon. The sun was warm now, the trees filled with a smoky yellow light, as though the ice storm had never passed through Ira Jamison's plantation. Sarie's mother and the wet nurse rounded a bend in the woods, then saw footprints leading up to a leafy bower and a lean-to whose opening was covered with a bright green branch from a slash pine.
    The child lay wrapped in a blanket like a caterpillar inside a cocoon, the eyes shut, the mouth puckered. The ground was soft now, scattered with pine needles, and among the pine needles were wild-flowers that had been buried under snow. Sarie's mother unwrapped the child from the blanket and wiped it clean with a cloth, then handed it to the wet nurse, who held the baby's mouth to her breast and covered it with her coat.
    "Sarie wanted a man-child. But this li'l girl beautiful," the wet nurse said.
    "She gonna be my darlin' thing, too. Sarie gonna live inside her. Her name gonna be Spring. No, that ain't right. Her name gonna be Flower," Sarie's mother said.

Chapter Two
    IN THE spring of 1861 Willie Burke's dreams took him to a place he had never been and to an event he had not experienced. He saw himself on a dusty Texas road south of Goliad, where the wind was blowing in the trees and there was a hint of salt water or distant rain in the air. The soldiers around him were glad of heart, their backs strung with blanket rolls and haversacks, some of them singing in celebration of their impending freedom and passage aboard a parole ship to New Orleans.
    Then their Mexican warders began forming up into squads, positioning themselves on one side of the road only, the hammers to their heavy muskets collectively cocking into place.
    "Them sonsofbitches are gonna shoot us. Run for hit, boys," a Texas soldier shouted.
    "Fuego!" a Mexican officer shouted.
    The musket fire was almost point-blank. The grass and tree trunks alongside the road were striped with blood splatter. Then the Mexicans bayoneted the wounded and fallen, smashing skulls with their musket butts, firing with their pistols at the backs of those still trying to flee. In the dream Willie smelled the bodies of the men piled on top of him, the dried sweat in their clothes, the blood that seeped from their wounds. His heart thundered in his chest; his nose and throat were clotted with dust. He knew he had just begun his last day on Earth, here, in the year 1836, in a revolution in which no Irishman should have had a vested interest.
    Then he heard a woman, a prostitute, running from one officer to the next, begging mercy for the wounded. The musket fire dissipated, and Willie got to his feet and ran for the treeline, not a survivor, but instead cursed with an abiding sense of shame and guilt that he had lived, fleeing through woods while the 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