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crashed through banana trees into the street, its eyes bulging in a ripple of
heat lightning across the sky.
She went into the kitchen and fired the woodstove, then uncovered the water
barrel by the pantry and dipped an iron pot with a long handle into the water
and set it on top of the stove lid.
She locked the door in the living room and sat down in a chair by the front
window. She wished she had a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun, it didn't matter
what kind. She had never held one in her hands, but for a lifetime she had
watched white men handle them, take them apart, clean and oil them, load and
cock and fire them, and she never doubted the degree of affection the owner of
a gun had for his weapon nor the sense of control it gave him.
But Abigail Dowling owned no firearms and would allow none in her home. So
Flower sat with her hands clenched in her lap, her heart beating, and wondered
when Abigail would return home.
She heard a plank bend under someone's weight on the gallery. She waited for a
knock, but there was only silence. The doorknob twisted and the door began to
ease forward in the jamb before it caught against the deadbolt. Her heart
hammered in her ears.
She rose from her chair. She could see no one in the yard and the angle of her
vision prevented her from seeing who was on the gallery. She walked to the
door and stood only inches from it, looking at the threadlike, cracked lines
in the paint on the cypress boards, the exposed, square nailheads that were
darkened with rust, a thimbleful of cobweb stuck behind a hinge. "Who is it?"
she asked.
"Got a message from the aid station for Miss Abigail Dowling."
"She cain't come to the door right now."
"The surgeon don't have a nurse. He says for her to get down there."
"I'll tell her."
"She in the privy?"
"Who are you?"
But this time he didn't answer and she heard feet moving past the side window.
She screwed down the wick in the living room oil lamp until the flame died,
then hurried to the kitchen and took a butcher knife from a drawer. The fire
glowed under the stove lids and the air was hot and close with the steam that
curled off the pot she had set to boil. She stood motionless in the darkness,
her clenched palm sweating on the wood handle of the knife.
The first man through the back door splintered it loose from the bolt with one
full-bodied kick. Then he plunged into the kitchen with two other men behind
him, all three of them wearing white cotton cloths with eye holes tied tightly
across their faces. They went from room to room in the cottage as though she
were not there, as though the knife in her hand were of no more significance
than the fact she was a witness to a home invasion.
Then all three of them returned to the kitchen and stared at her through the
holes in their masks. She could hear them breathing and smell the raw odor of
corn liquor on their breaths.
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"Where's she at?" one man said. He wheezed deep down in his chest.
"Not here."
"That's helpful," he said, and looked at the broken door. He pushed it back in
place with his foot. He grabbed her wrist and swung her hand against the stove
and knocked the butcher knife to the floor. "When will she be back?"
"When she feel like it."
The man looked at the steam rising off the pot on the stove. He coughed into
his hand, then breathed hard, as though fighting for air, the cloth of his
mask sucking into his mouth. "You making tea?" he asked.
She looked at the wall, her arms folded across her chest, her pulse jumping in
her throat.
"Let's get out of here," a second man said.
"We got paid for a night's work. We ought to earn at least part of it," the
first man said.
The three men looked at one another silently, as though considering a profound
thought.
"Sounds good to me," the third man said.
They walked Flower into the bedroom, releasing her arms when they reached the
bed, waiting, the night air outside filled with the singing of tree frogs.
"You want to undress or should we do it for you?" the first man said. He
turned his head, lifted his mask briefly, and spit out the window. "Enjoy it,
gal. We ain't bad men. Just doin' a piece of work."
For the next half hour she tried to find a place in her mind that was totally
black, without light or sound or sensation of any kind, safe from the
incessant coughing of a consumptive man an inch from her ear and the smell of
chewing tobacco and testosterone that now seemed ironed on her skin. When the
last man lifted his weight from her, the cloth across his face swung out from
his mouth and his teeth made her think of kernels of yellow corn.
Chapter Seventeen
ABIGAIL and Willie rode in her buggy to his mother's small farm by Spanish
Lake, five miles outside of town. The house was dark inside the overhang of
the oak trees, and the animals were gone from the pens and the barn. The front
door of the house gaped open, the broken latch hanging by a solitary nail. A
dead chicken lay humped on the gallery, its feathers fluttering in the wind.
Willie stepped inside the doorway and lit a candle on the kitchen table. The
rows of dishes and cups and jars of preserves on the shelves were undisturbed,
but the hearthstones had been prized out of the fireplace and several
blackened bricks chipped loose with a sharp tool from inside the chimney.
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