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

Marse Rufus," she said from the doorway.
    "I thought you might say that," he replied, rising to his feet, his stomach as flat and hard as a board under his tucked shirt and tightly buttoned pants.
     
    AT four-thirty the next morning, April 12, 1861, a Confederate general whose hair was brushed into a greased curlicue on his pate gave the order to a coastal battery to fire on a fort that was barely visible out in the harbor. The shell arced across the sky under a blanket of stars, its fuse sparking like a lighted cigar tossed carelessly into a pile of oily rags.

Chapter Three
    BY AFTERNOON of the same day the telegraph had carried the news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter to New Iberia, and Camp Pratt, out on Spanish Lake, was suddenly filled with young men who stood in long lines before the enlistment tables, most of them Acadian boys who spoke no English and had never been farther from Bayou Teche than the next parish. The sky was blue through the canopy of oak trees that covered the camp, the lake beaten with sunlight, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, the plank tables in front of the freshly carpentered barracks groaning with platters of sausage, roast chickens, boudin, smoked ducks, crab gumbo, dirty rice, and fruit pies that had been brought in carriages by ladies who lived in the most elegant plantation homes along the bayou.
    Willie's tall friend, Jim Stubbefield, sat barefoot in his militia uniform, his back against a cypress tree by the water's edge, and drank from a cup of buttermilk and looked with puzzlement at the festive atmosphere in the camp. He turned to a young man in civilian clothes sitting next to him and said, "Robert, I think the fates are not working properly here. I enlisted two months ago and no one seemed to notice."
    His friend was named Robert Perry. His hair grew over his collar and was the color of mahogany, his face handsome, his blue eyes never troubled by fear or self-doubt or conflict with the world around him.
    "I'm sure it was just an oversight on the community's part," he said.
    Jim continued to stare in a bemused way at the enlistment lines, then his gaze locked on one individual in particular and he chewed on a piece of skin on his thumb and spit it off his tongue.
    "I think I've made a mistake," he said.
    "A man with your clarity of vision? Seems unlikely," Robert said.
    "Look there. Willie's joining up. Maybe at my urging."
    "Good for Willie," Robert said.
    "I doubt Willie has it in him to shoot anyone," Jim said.
    "Do you?"
    "If they come down here, I figure they've asked for it."
    "I doubt if it was easy for Willie to come here. Don't rob him of his self-respect," Robert said, rising to his feet, pressing a palm down on Jim's shoulder.
    "Your father owns over a hundred and eighty niggers, Robert. You ought not to be lecturing to the rest of us."
    "You're entirely right, Jim," Robert said. He winked at Jim and walked toward the recruitment table, where Willie Burke had just used quill and ink to enter his name among a long list of French and Spanish and Anglo-Saxon ones, many of them printed by an enlistment officer and validated by an X.
    But Robert soon realized Jim's premonitions about their friend were probably correct, that the juncture of Willie Burke and the Confederate army would be akin to a meeting of a wrecking ball and a crystal shop.
    Captain Rufus Atkins stepped out of a tent, in a gray uniform and wide-brimmed ash-colored hat with a gold cord and a pair of tiny gold icons tied around the crown. A blond man, his hair as greasy as tallow, wearing a butternut uniform with corporal's chevrons freshly sewn on the sleeves, stood behind him. The corporal's name was Clay Hatcher.
    "Where do you think you're going, young Willie?" Atkins asked.
    "Back home," Willie answered.
    "I think not," Atkins replied. He looked out at the lake and the moss blowing in the trees, the four-o'clocks riffling in the shade. "One of the privies needs dipping out. After you finish that,