[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
smoothness of the horses with the ends of his fingers. "Thank you, suh," he
said. Ira turned to go.
"How come you to think of this now, Master Ira?" Uncle Royal asked.
"My father made you a promise he couldn't keep. So I kept it for him. That's
all it means. Nothing else," he replied.
Page 97
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"Yes, suh," Uncle Royal said.
On the way back to the house Ira wondered if his words to Uncle Royal had
become his way of saying good-bye forever to the innocent and vulnerable child
who had once lived inside him and caused him so much pain.
NOW the spring of 1863 was upon him, and he knew enough of history to realize
that the events taking place around him did not bode well for his future. Some
of his slaves had been shipped to unoccupied areas of Arkansas, but it was
only a matter of time until the South fell and emancipation became a fact of
life.
In the meantime someone had hijacked two dozen slaves from his property,
taking them downriver to New Orleans through a Confederate blockade, murdering
one of his paddy rollers in the bargain. Ira could not get the image of the
dead paddy roller out of his mind. Three of his overseers had carted the body
up to the front porch, stuffed in a lidless packing case, the knife wound in
his throat like a torn purple rose.
Ira did not believe in coincidences. One of his own men had now died in the
same fashion as the young sentry in the New Orleans hospital the night Ira
escaped from Yankee custody.
Nor was it coincidence that a woman with a Northern accent was on board the
boat that transported a cargo of Negroes supposedly infected with yellow jack
to a quarantine area north of New Orleans the same night two dozen of his
slaves had disappeared from the plantation.
Abigail Dowling, he thought.
Every morning he woke with her name in his mind. She bothered him in ways he
had difficulty defining. She had a kind of pious egalitarian manner that made
him want to slap her face. At the same time she aroused feelings in him that
left his loins aching. She was the most stunning woman he'd ever seen, with
the classical proportions of a Renaissance sculpture, and she bore herself
with a dignity and intellectual grace that few beautiful women ever possessed.
The spring rains came and the earth turned green and the fruit trees bloomed
outside Ira's window. But the name of Abigail Dowling would not leave his
thoughts, and sometimes he woke throbbing in the morning and had images of her
moaning under his weight. Nor did it help for him to remember that she had
rebuffed him and made him feel obscene and sexually perverse.
He looked out upon the sodden feilds and at an oak tree that was stiff and
hard-looking in the wind. What was it that bothered him most about her? But he
already knew the answer to his own question. She was intelligent, educated,
unafraid and seemed to want nothing he was aware of. He did not trust people
who did not want something. But most of all she bothered him because she had
looked into his soul and seen something there that repelled her.
What was her weakness? he asked himself. Everybody had one. Maybe he had been
looking in the wrong place. She seemed to have male friends rather than
suitors or lovers. A woman that beautiful? He gazed out the window at the
white bloom on his peach trees and a slave girl pulling weeds inside the drip
lines. His side ached miserably. He placed a small lump of opium under his lip
and felt a sensation like warm water leaking through his nervous system.
He had thought of Abigail Dowling as a flesh-and-blood replication of
Renaissance sculpture, an Aphrodite rising from a tidal pool on the
Page 98
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Massachusetts coast. He watched the slave girl drop a handful of weeds into
her basket and get to her feet, the tops of her breasts exposed to his view.
Maybe he had been only partially correct about Abigail's classical origins.
Were her antecedents on the island of Lesbos rather than Melos? He wondered.
Chapter Thirteen
AFTER the retreat from Shiloh, Willie began to dream about a choleric-faced
man, someone he did not know, advancing out of a mist with a bayonet fixed to
the end of his rifle. The choleric-faced man would not fall down when Willie
fired upon him. He also dreamed about the sound of a distant siege gun
coughing in a woods, then a shell arcing in a dark blur out of a blue sky,
exploding in a trench full of men with the force of a ship's boiler blowing
apart. He began to take his dreams into the waking day, and his anxieties and
fears would be so great with the passage of each hour that contact with the
enemy became a welcomed release.
That's when a line sergeant gave him what the sergeant considered the key to
survival for a common foot soldier: You never thought about it before you did
it and you never thought about it when it was over.
Nor did thinking make life easier for a commissioned officer, Willie told
himself later.
Lieutenant Willie Burke peered through the spyglass at the steam engine and
the line of freight cars parked on the railway track. The sun was white in the
sky, the woods breathless, the leaves in the canopy coated with dust. His
clothes stuck to his skin; his hair was drenched with sweat inside his hat.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]