"We've got five niggers unaccounted for tonight. It isn't a time for cleverness, Mr. Willie," he said.
"Oh, it's Captain Atkins, is it? This is a coincidence. I'm on a mission of recovery myself. I took my laundry to the Black girl, whats her name, Flower, the one owned by Mr. Jamison? I think I dropped one or two of my books out of my saddle bags.You didn't find them did you?"
"Maybe you and I will have a talk about that later," Atkins said.
"Mr. Jamison often visits at the Shadows. I'll mention it to him. Is there anything I should report about amorous relationships on your part with his niggers?" Willie said.
Atkins' ringed finger clicked up and down on the stitched top of his pommel.
"A word of caution to you, Mr. Willie. You were at the home of the abolitionist woman this evening. Now I see you in a neighborhood where five slaves didn't report for bell count. Be aware there are others besides I who feel you bear watching," Atkins said.
"Say again?"
"Robert Perry saved his little tit-sucking momma's boy of a friend from being gagged and bucked today. Don't expect that kind of good fortune again," Atkins said.
"Thank you, sir. It's a great honor to be excoriated by a miserable fuck and white trash such as yourself," Willie said.
He brushed past Atkins' horse and walked through the other riders, the cane in the fields whipping in the wind, dust and rain now blowing across the lighted front of the saloon.
He heard Atkins' boot heels thud against his horse's sides and barely had time enough to turn before Atkins rode him down, whipping the lead ball on the butt of his quirt handle across Willie's head.
He felt the earth rush up at him and explode against his face. Then the booted legs of the paddy rollers surrounded him and through a misting rain he thought he heard the song "Dixie's Land" again.
"Since he likes the abolitionist woman so much, dump him in the nigger jail," Atkins said.
Then Willie was being lifted over a saddle, his wrists and feet roped together under the horse's belly. As the horse moved forward blood dripped out of Willie's hair onto his shirtsleeves and the dust from the horse's hooves rose into his nostrils.
But a huge man stepped into the middle of the road and grasped the horse's bridle.
"You're a constable and I cain't stop you from taking him in, Mr. Atkins. But if there's another mark on him in the morning, I'm gonna strip the clothes off your body on Main Street and lay a whip to your back, me," Jean-Jacques LaRose said.
Atkins was dismounted, his stature diminutive in contrast to Jean-Jacques LaRose. He pressed his quirt against Jean-Jacques' chest, bowing the braided leather back on itself.
"Would you care to see your sister's business establishment shut down?... You don't?... I knew you were a man of reason after all, Jack," he said. He tapped his quirt softly on Jean-Jacques' chest.
A half hour later Willie lay on a wood bunk inside a log jail, an iron manacle around his ankle. Two Negroes sat on the dirt floor against the far wall, barefoot, their knees drawn up before them. Their clothes were torn, their hair bloody. They smelled of funk and horse barns and night damp and fish that had soured on their stomachs. He could hear them breathing in the dark.
"You men ran from your owners?" Willie asked.
But they would not answer him. In the glow of the moon through the barred window their faces were running with sweat, their eyes red, their nostrils cavernous. He could see the pulse jumping in one man's throat.
He had never seen fear as great in either man or beast.
Chapter Four
LATER that same night Flower left her cabin and crossed the cane field through layers of ground fog that felt like damp cotton on her skin. She entered a woods that was strung with air vines and cobwebs and dotted with palmettos and followed the edge of a coulee to a bayou where a flatboat loaded with Spanish moss was moored in a cluster of cypress trees.
The tide was going out along the coast. In minutes the current in the bayou would reverse itself, and the flatboat, which looked like any other that was used to harvest moss for mattress stuffing, would be poled downstream into a saltwater bay where a larger boat waited for the five black people who sat huddled in the midst of the moss, the women in bonnets, the men wearing flop hats that obscured their faces.
Two white boatmen, both of them gaunt, with full beards, wearing leather wrist guards and suspenders that hitched their trousers almost to their chests, stood by the tiller. One of them held a shaved pole that was anchored in the bayou, his callused palms tightening audibly against the wood.
A white woman with chestnut hair in a gray dress that touched the tops of her shoes had just walked up a plank onto the boat, a heavy bundle clasped in both arms. One of the white men took the bundle from her and untied it and began placing loaves of bread, smoked hams, sides of bacon and jars of preserves and cracklings inside the pilothouse.
Flower stepped out of the heated enclosure of the trees and felt the coolness of the wind on her skin.
"Miss Abigail?" she said.
The two white men and the white woman turned and looked at her, their bodies motionless.