White Doves at Morning Read Online Free PDF Page B

saloon next to Carrie
LaRose's brothel. The plank floor was scattered with sawdust and burned
by cigars and stained with tobacco juice around the cuspidors. Hand
towels hung from brass rings along the bar, and above the bar mirror
was a painting of a reclining nude, her bottom an ax-handle wide, her
stomach like a soft pink pillow, her smile and pubic hair and relaxed
arms an invitation to enter the picture frame with her.
    Willie wanted to concentrate
on the lovely lines of the woman in the painting and forget the events
of the day, particularly the fact he had been so foolish as to enlist
in the Home Guards. But the man standing next to him, one Jean-Jacques
LaRose, also known as Scavenger Jack, was giving a drunken lecture to
anyone within earshot, pounding his fists on the bar, denouncing
Secessionists, Copperheads in the North who encouraged them, and people
stupid enough to join the army and serve their cause.
    Unlike his sister, Carrie
LaRose, who owned the bordello next door, Scavenger Jack operated on
the edges of legitimate society, hauling away Chitimacha burial mounds
that he mixed with manure and sold for high-grade fertilizer, exporting
weevil-infested rice to plantation operators in the West Indies whose
food costs for their workers were running too high, and, rumor had it,
luring ships onto a reef with a false beacon off Key West in order to
salvage the cargo.
    He was a huge man, his black
hair and beard streaked with red, a scar across his nose like a
flattened worm. His bull neck was corded with veins, his teeth like
tombstones, his shoulders so broad they split the seams of his coat.
    "Let me ax you gentlemen
somet'ing. When them Yankees blockade our ports, 'cause that's what
they gonna do, how you gonna get your sugar and salt and cotton out of
Lou'sana, you? Round up the crawfish and pile it on their backs?" he
said to his audience.
    "Now, Jean-Jacques, there's
more involved here than money," said a member of the town council and
part owner of the bank, an older man with an egg-shaped, pleasant face.
"The Negroes have already heard about the firing on Fort Sumter. A lady
in St. Martinville caught her cook with cyanide this morning. But I
worry more about the Negro male population being turned loose on our
women. That's the kind of thing these abolitionists have encouraged."
    "Them rich people couldn't
convince y'all to fight for their cotton, no. So they got all them
newspapers to start y'all t'inking about what's gonna happen to your
jelly roll. That done it when nothing else did," Jean-Jacques said.
    "That's not called for,
Jean-Jacques. We're all serious men here and we speak respectfully of
one another," the older man said.
    "What y'all fixing to do is
ruin my bidness. You t'ink a black man who work all day in the field
got nothing on his mind except sticking his pole up your wife's dress?"
Jean-Jacques said.
    "You should give some thought
to your words, sir," the older man said, lowering his eyes, his throat
coloring. Then he collected himself and said to the bartender, "Give my
friend Jean-Jacques another drink."
    Jean-Jacques belched so loudly
the men at the billiard table turned around, startled.
    "Better enjoy your own drink,
suh. The liquor in here come off my boats. What y'all gonna drink after
them Yankees shut me down?" Jean-Jacques said.
    But Willie had long ago given
up listening to the self-serving arguments about the moral validity of
Secession. Rarely did logic and humanity have any influence over the
discussion. Instead, the most naked form of self-interest always seemed
to drive the debate, as though venality and avarice had somehow evolved
into virtues. He thought about the slave girl Flower and the fact that
her literacy had to be concealed as though it were an object of shame.
    He wondered if Rufus Atkins
had found Flower's notebook as well as the collection of William
Blake's poems. What had he done? Why had he not listened to his mother
or his friend Jim Stubbefield?
    He drank the