Read Online White Doves at Morning: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke - Free Book Online Page A

sheep-shorn rail of a man with a long nose and pointed chin. Some of the people in the congregation nodded assent, before anyone perceived a glimmer of dissent in their eyes.
    Flower looked directly into Jubal Labiche's face. He stared back at her, then raised his eyes, as though he were caught in a sudden spiritual moment. He began a long prayer of thanks to God during which the congregation would say in unison "Amen" or "Yes, Lord" whenever he paused.
    After the service Jubal Labiche was climbing into his carriage when Flower walked past him. He stepped back down in the road and automatically started to touch his hat, then lowered his hand.
    "You seemed to have great interest in the homily," he said.
    "St. Paul wrote down that slaves is s'pposed to do what the master say?" she asked.                        /
    "He's telling us to put our faith in the Lord. Sometime the Lord's voice comes to us - through those who know more about the world thana simple servant such as myself," he replied, bowing slightly.
    "How come we cain't learn from the Bible ourself? How come it got to be read to us?"
    "I guess I'm not really qualified to talk about that," he said.
    "I guess you ain't," she said.
    She turned and walked down the dirt road through the cane fields, her bonnet in her hand, her hair blowing. She could almost feel his eyes burrowing into her back. 
    BUTall the way home she found no release from the words Jubal Labiche had read to the congregation. Was it the will of God that people should own one another? If that was true, then God was not just. Or was the Scripture itself a white man's fraud?
    She warmed a tin cup of coffee and fixed a plate of corn bread and molasses, peas, and a piece of fried ham and sat down to eat by her back window. But her food was like dry paper in her mouth. She felt a sense of abandonment and loneliness she could not describe. Outside, the wind was hot blowing across the cane fields, and the blue sky had filled with plumes of dust.
    God wanted her to be a slave and Jesus, His son, was a teacher of submission?
    She looked through her front door at the empty yard and laundry house. The widow who ran the laundry for Ira Jamison was away for the day, gone with a suitor who owned a hunting cabin on stilts back in the swamp.
    Flower walked across the backyard, through the wash pots and clotheslines, and entered the back door of the laundry. The widow's bedroom door was open, and on the dresser was a leather-bound edition of the King James Bible.
    It took her less than five minutes to find the lines Jubal Labiche had read aloud from Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Labiche had carefully avoided reading the passages that followed his selective excerpt, namely, that Christians should live and perform "not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with goodwill doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men."
    And a bit farther on: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."
    She closed the cover on the book and went back to her cabin and finished her lunch, a strange sense of both confidence and tranquility in her heart, which she did not as yet quite understand.
    Before sunset she walked downtown and bought a peppermint stick from the drugstore for a penny. She ate it on the bank of the bayou, not far from the boardinghouse operated by Willie Burke's mother. She watched the dusk gather in the trees along the bayou and the water darken and the sunfish and gars rolling in the shallows. The western sky was red and black now and she could smell the rain falling on the fields somewhere out on the rim of the earth.                   
    She stood up from the bank and brushed off her dress and started to walk back to the quarters behind the laundry, before the paddy rollers came out on the roads.