Free White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke

shine like polished mahogany in the thickness of his hair, his
eyes that were the bluest and most beautiful she had ever seen in a
man. She saw him on a meandering, pebble-bottomed creek, surrounded by
green hills, saw him rise from behind earthworks and walk with an
extended sword toward a line of dark-clad soldiers, perhaps boys from
Massachusetts, who in unison fired their muskets in a roar of dirty
black smoke and covered Robert's face and chest
and legs with wounds
that looked like the red lesions of the pox.
    What about her participation
in the Underground Railroad? she asked herself. She had told slaves of
the land across the Ohio, filling them with hope, in some cases only to
see them delivered into the hands of bounty hunters. Worse, she had
personally put Flower's aunt on a boat that overturned and drowned her.
    She wanted to cut the word
"traitor" into her breast.
    She fell asleep in her
clothes, the late afternoon heat glowing through the curtains in her
bedroom. She became wrapped in the sheet, her body bathed in sweat, and
she dreamed she was inside a tunnel, deep underground, the wet clay
pressing against her chest, pinning her arms at her sides, her cries
lost inside the heated blackness.
    She awoke in a stupor, unsure
of where she was, and for just a moment she thought she heard Robert's
voice in the room. She pulled her dress over her head and flung it on
the floor and, dressed only in her underthings, went into the backyard
and opened the valve on the elevated cistern that fed trapped rainwater
into the bathhouse.
    She closed the bathhouse door
behind her, stripped off her undergarments, and sat in the tub while
the wood sluice that protruded through the wall poured water over her
head and shoulders and breasts. It was late afternoon now, almost
evening, and the light breaking through the trees was green and gold
and spinning with motes of dust. Somewhere a bird was singing.              
                   
    ,
    You don't know that he's dead,
she told herself.    
                   
      '
    But when she closed her eyes
she saw shells bursting in a field, geysering dirt into the air, while
men crouched in the bottom of a trench and prayed and begged and
pressed their palms against their ears.
    Poseur, she thought. Self-anointed
bride of Christ, walking among the afflicted. Hypocrite. Angel of Death.
    She put her head down and wept.

    LATER, she opened all the
windows of her house to let in the evening's coolness and tried to sort
out her thoughts but could not. Her skin felt dead to the touch, her
heart sick, as though it had been invaded by invisible worms. She
thought she understood why primitive people during,
mourning rituals, tore their hair and gouged their bodies with
stone
knives. She lit an oil lamp on her living room table and
began a letter to a Quaker church in Bradford,
Massachusetts, resigning her title of deacon.
    Then she saw a man walk into
her yard, wearing a gray officer's uniform and a soft white hat. He
removed his hat when he stepped onto the gallery, and knocked on her
door.
    "Mr. Jamison?" she said.
    "Yes. I was visiting in town
and heard of your distress. Your neighbors and friends were concerned
but didn't want to show a disrespect for your privacy. So I thought I
should call upon you," he said.
    "Please come in," she said.
    He stood in the middle of the
living room, his face rosy in the light from the oil lamp, his thick
hair touching his collar.
    "I understand you've been
longtime friends with Robert Perry," he said.
    "Yes, that's correct," she
replied.
    "Are you and Lieutenant Perry
engaged, Miss Abigail?"
    "No, we're not," she said,
clearing her throat. "Could I offer you some tea?"
    "No, thank you." He smiled
self-effacingly. "I arrived at your door in a peculiar fashion. By
steamboat. Would you take a ride with me?"
    She turned and saw out the
back window the lighted compartments and decks of a huge boat, with
paddle wheels on both its