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

But now, for some unexplained reason, the thought of encountering them did not fill her with apprehension.
    Then she realized the origin of the feelings that had flooded through her after she had gone into the widow's bedroom and hunted through the New Testament for the excerpt from St. Paul. She could read. No one could ever take that gift from her, and no one could hide knowledge or the truth about the world from her again.
     
    AT sunrise the next morning she heard Rufus Atkins' horse in the yard, then heard him swing down from the saddle and approach her door. She was undressed, and she gathered up her clothes and sat on her bed and held them in her lap and over her breasts. He stepped inside the door, smelling of tobacco and cooked bacon, steam rising from his uniform in the morning coolness.
    He removed the bent twenty-dollar gold piece from the watch pocket of his trousers and began working it over the tops of his knuckles.                                           
    "I got to go to bell count," she said.
    "No, you don't."
    "All the niggers got to be there, suh. The widow don't abide lateness."
    "Not you, Flower. You can do almost any goddamn thing you want. You're a juicy bitch and you know it."
    "Ain't right you talk to me like that, suh."
    "I'm not here for what you think," he said. He walked to the back window and looked out on the cane field. The sun had just broken the edge of the horizon, like a soft red lump of molten metal.
    "Marse Jamison is establishing a slaves council on all his plantations," Atkins said. "That means the slaves will lay out the punishment for anybody who breaks the rules. Marse Jamison reserves only the right—to overturn a punishment if he thinks it's too severe . . . are you listening?"
    "I'm not dressed, suh."
    Atkins took a deep breath and went outside the door. She heard him light a cigar and lean against the railing on her small gallery. She put on her work dress and lit the kindling in her stove and washed her face in the water bucket, then pushed the coffee pot over the flames that leaked around one of the iron pothole lids. She heard Atkins clear his throat and spit and then felt his weight bend the floorboards in the cabin.
    "You're going to be on the slaves council for the laundry and two of the plantations up the road," he said.
    "This don't sound like Marse Jamison," she said.
    "What do you care? It gives you a little power you didn't have before."
    "What if I say I don't want it?"
    "I'd say you were a mighty stupid black girl."
    "Tell him the stupid black girl don't want it."
    He removed the cigar from his mouth and tossed it through the back window.
    "You're a handful, Flower. In lots of ways," he said, biting down on his lip.
    "You been in my bed, Marse Rufus. But it ain't gonna happen again."
    "Say that again?"
    "You heard me. I ain't afraid of you no more."
    It was silent inside the cabin. Outside, the wind off the Gulf rustled the cane and flapped the clothes drying in the yard.
    "I wouldn't be talking out of school, Flower. There are houses in Congo Square for girls who do that," he said.
    "I ain't afraid."
    He took a step toward her, his eyes roving over her face and the tops of her breasts. Her hand touched the oyster knife she kept on the table next to the stove.
    Atkins rubbed his mouth and laughed.
    "Damned if being white makes any man less of a fool. If I ever get rich I'll buy you and carry you off on my saddle and keep you as my personal strumpet. You believe that? It's a fact. Wouldn't lie to you, girl," he said.
    His eyes seemed to be laughing at her now, as though he were reliving each moment he had probed inside her, put her nipples in his mouth, lifted her up spread-eagled across his loins. She turned away and picked up the coffeepot and burned her hand. Behind her, she heardhim walk out the door, his boots knocking with a hollow sound on her gallery.
    I hope the Yankees kill you, she said under her breath. But the vehemence in her