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"Colonel Jamison is a prisoner of war. He cain't hurt you, suh."
"I bought my freedom, girl. I ain't ever gonna lose it. If you come to New
Orleans, scheming to get free, you better not drag me into it, no," he said,
pulling down his shirt to expose a circular scar that looked like dried
plaster, of a kind left by a branding iron poorly laid on.
FLOWER knew she should have been depressed by the hostility and fear of her
host and the hanging she had witnessed that evening, but oddly she was not. In
fact, since the day an overseer had arrived in New Iberia from Angola
Plantation and had told her Colonel Jamison was in New Orleans, badly wounded,
asking for her, she could hardly deal with rhe strange and conflicting emotons
that assailed her heart.
She remembered when she had seen him for the first time as a little girl,
dressed in skintight white breeches and a blue velvet jacket, his hair flowing
behind him as he galloped his horse across a field of alfalfa and jumped a
fence like a creature with invisible wings. A teenage boy picking cotton in
the row next to hers had said, "He ride that hoss just like he rode yo' mama,
Flower."
The boy's mother had slapped him on the ear.
Flower did not understand what the boy had meant or why his mother had been
provoked to such a level of anger, which to Flower, even as a child, was
always an indicator of fear.
She saw Marse Jamison again, on a Christmas Day, when her grandmother brought
her to work with her in the big house. Flower had peeked out from the kitchen
and had seen him talking with other men by the fireplace, the whiskey in his
glass bright against the flames. When he saw her watching him, he winked and
picked up a piece of hard candy from a crystal plate and gave it to her.
In that moment she believed she was in the presence of the most important man
in the world.
She did not see him again for fifteen years.
Then, on what might become his deathbed, he had asked for her. She felt
herself forgiving him for sins that he had neither acknowledged nor had asked
forgiveness for, and she wondered if she were driven less by charity than by
weakness and personal need. But people were what they did, she told herself,
not what they said or didn't say, but what they did. And Colonel Ira Jamison
had sent for his daughter.
Now she enclosed him in mosquito-netting at night and sponge-bathed him and
changed his bandages and brought his food from the hospital kitchen on a
cloth-covered tray. He was melancholy and remote, but always grateful for her
attentions, and there were moments when his hand lingered on hers and his eyes
seemed to turn inward and view a scene she could hardly imagine, a field
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churning with smoke and terrified horses or a surgeon's tent where human limbs
were piled like spoiled pork.
He read until late at night and slept with the flame turned low in the lamp.
On one occasion, when the oil had burned out, she found him sitting on the
side of the bed, his bare feet in a pool of moonlight, his face disjointed
with his own thoughts.
"The war won't let you sleep, Colonel Jamison?" she asked him.
"The laudanum makes you have strange dreams, that's all," he replied.
"It ain't good to take it if you don't need it no more," she said.
"I suspect your wisdom may be greater than mine, Flower," he said, and looked
at her fondly.
But tonight when she reported to the hospital he was not reading either the
Bible or one of the several novels he kept on his nightstand. Instead, he sat
propped up on pillows with a big ledger book spread open on his knees. The
pages were lined with the first names of people-Jim, Patsy, Spring, Cleo,
Tuff, Clotile, Jeff, Batist-and beside each name was a birthdate.
As he turned the pages and read the lists of names, which must have numbered
almost two hundred, he moved his lips silently and seemed to count with his
fingers. He extinguished the lamp and went to sleep with the ledger book under
his pillow.
In the morning a new sentry was on duty at the entrance to the ward. His
cheeks were pink, his hair so blond it was almost white. He straightened as
she walked by, clearing his throat, a hesitant grin at the corner of his
mouth.
"'Member me?" he said.
"No," she said.
"Sitting on the porch at that house on Congo Square? Place I probably didn't
have no business?" he said.
"Oh yes, how do you do?" she said.
He shifted his hands on his rifle barrel and looked past her out the window,
his eyes full of light, thinking about his response but finding no words that
he felt would be very interesting to anyone else.
"I'm on our regimental rounders team. We're gonna play some Vermont boys soon
as I get off duty," he said.
"Rounders?"
"It's a game you play with a ball and a bat. You run around bases. That's how
come it's called 'rounders.'" He grinned at her.
"It's nice seeing you," she said.
"Ma'am, I didn't go in that place last night," he said hurriedly, before she
could walk away.
"I know you didn't," she said.
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He had just called her "ma'am," something no white person had
ever done. She looked back over her shouldee at him. He was twirling his kepi
on the point of his fixed bayonet, like a child intrigued with a top. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]