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and right color (gray) and have been sorely needed, as my uniform had
deteriorated into rags. As always, you have proved remarkable in all your
endeavors.
But your letters continue to confuse me. You seem to be harboring a guilt of
some kind, as though you've done me injury. Nothing could be farther from the
truth. You are a true and compassionate and loyal friend. Who could have a
better spiritual companion than one such as yourself?
Do you hear from Willie? Even though he has seen much of war, I think he has
never gotten over the death of our friend Jim Stubbefield.
She folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope without finishing it.
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Robert Perry's words were like acid on her skin. Not only did they exacerbate
her guilt over her self-perceived infidelity, the term "spiritual companion"
reduced her to a presumption, an adjunct in Robert's life rather than a
participant.
Why had she stayed in Louisiana? she asked herself. But she already knew the
answer, and it had to do with her father and it made, her wonder about her
level of maturity. Sometimes she missed him in a way that was almost
intolerable. In an unguarded moment, when the world surrounded her and her own
resolve was not sufficient to deal with it, the image of his broad, jolly face
and big shoulders and pipe-smelling clothes would invade her mind and her eyes
would begin to film.
He was defrauded by his New York business partners and sued in Massachusetts
by men who owed their very lives to him, but his spirits never dimmed and he
never lost his faith in either God or humanity or the abolitionist movement,
which he had championed all his life.
After his death she could not bear the New England winters in their family
home up on the Merrimack, nor the unrelieved whiteness of the fields that
seemed to flow into the horizon like the blue beginnings of eternity. The
inside of the house had become a mausoleum, its hardwood surfaces enameled
with cold, and by mid-January she had felt that her soul was sheathed in ice.
In her mind she would re-create their clipper ship voyages to Spain, Italy,
and Greece, and she would see the two of them together in late summer, hiking
with backpacks on a red dirt road in Andalusia, the olive trees a dark green
against a hillside of yellow grass that was sear and rustling in the heat. She
and her father would hike all the way to the top of the mountain and sit in
the warm shade of a Moorish castle, then fix lunch and eat it, while in the
distance the azure brilliance of the Mediterranean stretched away as far as
the eye could see.
It was a place she went back to again and again in her memory. It was a
special place where she lived when she felt threatened, if the world seemed
too much for her late and soon, like a cathedral in which she and her father
were the only visitors.
When she came to south Louisiana during the yellow fever epidemic and smelled
the salt breeze blowing off Lake Pontchartrain and saw roses blooming in
December and palm trees rising starkly against the coastline, like those
around Cadiz, she felt that the best memories in her life had suddenly been
externalized and made real again and perhaps down a cobbled street in the old
part of New Orleans her father waited for her at an outdoor cafe table under a
balcony that was hung with tropical flowers.
Perhaps it was a foolish way to be, but her father had always taught her the
greatest evil one person could do to another was to interfere in his or her
destiny, and to Abigail that meant no one had a right to intrude upon either
the province of her soul or her imagination or the ties that bound her to the
past and allowed her to function in the present.
But now, in the drowsy shade of a colonnade in April 1865, at the close of the
greatest epoch in American history, she wished she was on board a sailing
ship, within sight ol Malaga, the palm trees banked thickly at the base of the
Sierra Nevada, like a displaced piece of Africa, the troubles and conflicts of
war-torn Louisiana far behind her.
"You all right, Miss Dowling?"
She looked up, startled, at Mr. LeBlanc. The boy in brown homespun and the
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Confederate-issue kepi stood behind him, his choke sack tied with a string
around his wrist.
"This young fellow here says a preacher bought him a stage ticket to find
Willie Burke," Mr. LeBlanc said.
The boy stared down the street, as though unconcerned about the events taking
place around him.
"What's your name again?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.
"Tige McGuffy."
"Where did you know Mr. Willie from?" Mr. LeBlanc asked.
"Shiloh Church. I was with the 6th Mis'sippi. Me and him was both at the Peach
Orchard."
"And you have no family?" Mr. LeBlanc said.
"I just ain't sure where they're at right now."
"Don't lie to people when they're trying to help you, son," Mr. LeBlanc said.
The boy's cheeks pooled with color.
"My daddy was with Gen'l Forrest. He never come back. The sheriff was gonna
send me to the orphans' home. The preacher from our church give me the money
for a stage ticket here," he said.
His skin was brown, filmed with dust, his throat beaded with dirt rings. He
studied the far end of the street, his mousy hair blowing at the edges of his
kepi.
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