White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel Read Online Free Page A

learned to spell 3 new words this morning. Mr. Willie say not to write down hard words lessen I look them up first.
    A band played on the big lawn on the bayou yesterday. A man in a silk hat and purple suit tole the young soldiers they do not haf to worry about the Yankees cause the Yankees is cowards. The brass horns were gold in the sunshine. So was the sword the man in the silk hat and purple suit carry on his side.
    Mr. Willie say not to say aint. Not to say he dont or she dont either.
    This is all my thoughts for the day.
    Signed, Flower Jamison
    She heard Willie's horse in the yard and glanced around her cabin at the wildflowers she had cut and placed in a water jar that morning, her clean Sunday dress, which hung on a wood peg, the bedspread given to her by a white woman on Main, now tucked around the moss-stuffed mattress pad on her bed. When she stepped out the door Willie was swinging down from his horse, slipping a bag of dirty clothes loose from the pommel of his saddle.
    He smiled at her, then squinted up at the sunlight through the trees and glanced back casually at the house, as though he were simply taking in the morning and his surroundings with no particular thought in mind.
    "You by yourself today?" he asked.
    "Some other girls are ironing inside the big house. We iron inside so the dust don't get on the clothes," she said.
    "Could you give a fellow a drink of water?" he said.
    "I done made some lemonade," she replied, and waited for him to enter the cabin first.
    He removed his hat as though he were entering a white person's home, then sat in the chair at the table by the window and gazed wistfully out onto the young sugarcane bending in the breeze off the Gulf. His hair was combed but uncut and grew in black locks on his neck.
    "What did you write for us today, Flower?" he asked, his gaze still focused outside the cabin.
    She handed him her tablet, then stood motionlessly, her hands behind her.
    He put the tablet flat on the table and read what she had written, his elbows on the table, his fingers propped on his temples. His cheeks were shaved and pooled with color that never seemed to change in hue.
    "You look at the world only as a poet can," he said.
    He saw her lips say the word "poet" silently.
    "That's a person who sees radiance when others only see objects. That's you, Flower," he said.
    But she disregarded the compliment and felt the most important line she had written in the notebook was one he had not understood. In fact, she was not quite sure what she had meant when she made the entry. But the martial speech of the man in the silk hat still rang in her ears, and the hard gold light beating on his sword and the brass instruments of the band hovered before her eyes like the angry reflection off a heliograph.
    "Is there gonna be a war, Mr. Willie?" she asked.
    "Why don't you sit down? I'm getting a crick in my neck looking up at you," he said. "Look, y'all are going to be free one day. Peace or war, it's just a matter of time."
    "You gonna join the army, ain't you, suh?"
    In spite of his invitation she had made no movement to sit down at the table with him, which would have caused her to violate a protocol that was on a level with looking a white person directly in the face. But after having shown her obedience to a plantation code that systematically degraded her as well as others, she realized she was now, of her own volition, invading the privacy and perhaps exposing the weakness of a man she genuinely admired and was fond of.
    For just a moment she wondered if it was true, as white people always said, that slaves behaved morally only when they were afraid.
    "I try not to study on it," Willie replied. Then, as though to distract himself from his own thoughts, he told her of his father's participation in the Texas Revolution, the massacre of prisoners at Goliad, the intercession of a camp follower who probably saved his father's life.
    "A prostitute saved all them men from being killed?" she