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

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 justwalked 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.
    "It's Flower, Miss Abigail. I work at the laundry. I brung something for their trip," she said.
    "You shouldn't be here," Abigail said.
    "The lady yonder is my auntie. I known for a long time y'all was using this place. I ain't tole nobody," Flower said.
    Abigail turned to the two white men. "Does one more make a difference?" she asked.
    "The captain out on the bay is mercenary, but we'll slip her in," one of them said.
    "Would you like to come with your auntie?" Abigail asked her.
    "There's old folks at Angola I got to care for. Here, I got this twenty-dollar gold piece. I brung a juju bag, too." Flower walked up the plank and felt the wood bend under her weight. The water under her was as yellow as paint in the moonlight. She saw the black head and back and S-shaped motion of a water moccasin swimming across the current.
    She placed the coin in Abigail's hand, then removed a small bag fashioned out of red flannel that was tied around her neck with a leather cord and placed it on top of the coin.
    "How'd you come by this money, Flower?" Abigail asked.
    "Found it."
    "Where?"
    Flower watched the moss moving in the trees, a sprinkle of stars in the sky.
    "I best go now," she said.
    She walked back across the plank to the woods, then heard Abigail Dowling behind her.
    "Tell me where you got the gold piece," Abigail said.
    "I stole it from ol Rufus Atkins' britches."
    Abigailstudied her face, then touched her hair and cheek.
    "Has he molested you, Flower?" she said.
    "You a good lady, Miss Abigail, but I ain't a child and I ain't axed for nobody's pity," Flower said.
    Abigail's hand ran down Flower's shoulder and arm until she could clasp Flower's hand in her own.
    "No, you're neither a child nor an object of pity, and I would never treat you as such," Abigail said.
    "Them two men yonder? What do you call them?" Flower asked.
    "Their names?"
    "No, the religion they got. What do you call that?"
    "They're called Quakers."
    Flower nodded her head. "Good night, Miss Abigail," she said.
    "Good night, Flower," Abigail said.
    A few minutes later Flower looked back over her shoulder and saw the flatboat slip