White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke Page B

come back here. Tell me you didn't do
that, Jim."
    But Jim had already gone out
the tent flap to relieve himself in the privy.
    Willie got up from his cot and
walked unsteadily behind the mess hall and picked up the severed pieces
of rope that had bound his wrists and ankles and the salvia-soaked gun
rag that had been stuffed in his mouth and the sticks that had been
threaded under his knees and pushed back in his teeth. He crossed the
parade ground to Corporal Clay Hatcher's tent and went inside.
    A small oil lamp burned on the
floor, a coil of black smoke twisting from the glass up through an
opening in the canvas. Hatcher slept on his side, in a pair of long
underwear, his head on a dirty pillow, his mouth open. The inside of
the tent smelled like re-breathed whiskey fumes, unwashed hair, and
shoes someone had worn for long hours in a dirt field.
    Willie kicked the cot. Hatcher
lifted his head uncertainly from the pillow, his pale blue eyes bleary
with sleep.
    Willie threw the sticks and
pieces of rope and thong into his chest. "God love Jim for his loyalty
to a friend. But you finish your work, you malignant cretin, or one
morning find glass in your mush," Willie said.
    Hatcher sat up, his lips caked
with mucus. "Finish my work?" he said stupidly.
    "Did your mother not clean
your ears when she dug you out of her shite? You and Atkins do your
worst. I'll live to piss in your coffin, you pitiful fuck."
    Hatcher continued to stare at
Willie, unable to comprehend the words being spoken to him, the bad
whiskey he had drunk throbbing in his head.
    Willie started for him.
    "I'm coming. I got to relieve myself first," Hatcher said, jerking
backward, clutching his groin under the coarse cotton sheet. His throat
swallowed in shame at the fear his voice couldn't hide.

    EXCEPT for the house servants,
Ira Jamison's slaves were free to do as they wished on Sunday. Until
sunset they could visit on other plantations, sit upstairs at a white
church, play a card game called pitty-pat, roll dice, or dance to
fiddle music. Even though Jamison's slaves were forbidden to possess
"julep," a fermented mixture of water, yeast, and fruit or cane pulp,
Jamison's overseers looked the other way on Sunday, as long as no slave
became outrageously drunk or was sick when he or she reported for bell
count on Monday.
    On Sunday mornings Flower
usually put on her gingham dress and bonnet and walked one and a half
miles to a slat church house, where a white Baptist minister conducted
a service for slaves and free people of color after he had completed
services at the white church in town. He was considered a liberal
minister and tolerant man because he often allowed one of the
congregation to give the homily.
    This morning the homilist was
a free man of color by the name of Jubal Labiche, who actually never
attended services in the church unless he was asked to give the sermon.
He owned slaves and, upstream from town, a brick kiln on Bayou Teche.
Behind a long tunnel of oak trees on the St. Martinville Road he had
built a house that sought to imitate the classical design of his
neighbors' houses, except the columns and porch were wood, not marble,
the workmanship utilitarian, the paint an off-white that seemed to
darken each year from the smoke of stubble fires.
    He was a plump, short man, his
eyes turquoise, his skin golden, his hair flattened with grease against
his scalp. Even though it was warm inside the building, he wore a
checkered silk vest with his suit, a gold watch as fat as a biscuit
tucked in the pocket.
    "No one loved God more than
St. Paul. He was bound and jailed and whipped, but no matter how great
his suffering, he never listened to false prophets. When the
Ephesians were of a rebellious mind, this is what he told them ..."
    Jubal Labiche fitted on his
spectacles and looked down at the Bible that rested on the podium in
front of him.
    " 'Servants, be obedient to
them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and
trembling, in