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and Bayou Teche, where the sheriff kept his office in the front part of the
building. When she opened the door, he glanced up from the paperwork on his
desk, then rose heavily from his chair, hypertension glowing in his cheeks,
his mustache hanging like pieces of hemp from each side of his mouth. The
sheriff's name was Hipolyte Gautreau, and he wore a hat both indoors and
outdoors, even in church, to hide a burn scar from Mobile Bay that looked like
a large, hourglass-shaped piece of red rubber that had been inserted in his
scalp. The cuspidor and plank floor by his desk were splattered with tobacco
juice, and through an open wood door that gave on to the cells, Abigail could
see several unshaved, long-haired white men standing at the bars or sitting
against them.
"It's my favorite lady from Mass'chusetts," the sheriff said. He had such
difficulty pronouncing the last word, even incorrectly, that he had to touch a
drop of spittle off his lip.
"It looks like you're about to have a tax sale," she said.
He fixed his gaze out the window on a passing wagon, his eyes seemingly empty
of thought.
"Tax sale? Oh, you seen me nailing up that notice on the tree yesterday."
"That's right. How much will I need to make a realistic bid?" she said.
"How much money? You want to have a seat?" he asked.
"No," she replied.
He remained standing and pushed some papers around on his desk with the tips
of his fingers. The crown of his gray hat was crumpled and sweat-stained and
worn through in the creases. He pulled his shirt off his skin with two fingers
and shook the cloth, as though removing the heat trapped inside.
"You don't need no old building, Miss Abby. Why not leave t'ings be?" he said.
"What are you up to, Hipolyte?"
He raised his index finger at her. "Don't be saying that, no. I'm telling you
somet'ing for your own good."
"Somebody else doesn't want a competitor at the auction?"
He pushed his hat back on his head. The skin below his hairline was white,
prickled with rash.
"Tell her, you old fart. Yankee jellyroll like that don't come around every
day," a voice shouted from one of the cells. The other men leaning or sitting
against the bars laughed inside the gloom.
The sheriff got up from his chair and slammed the plank door that separated
his office from the jail.
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"Who are those men?" she asked.
"Guerrillas. White trash. They calling themselves the White League now. You
heard about them?"
"No," she replied. "Who else wants to buy that house, Hipolyte?"
"Mr. Todd."
"Todd McCain? From the hardware store?"
"He's gonna make it into a saloon and dance pavilion. Them Yankees gonna be
around a long time," the sheriff said.
"What an enterprising man."
"You a good lady. Don't mess wit' him, Miss Abby." The sheriff's voice was
almost plaintive.
"I think Mr. McCain should have been run out of here a long time ago," she
replied.
"I knowed you was gonna say that. Knowed it, knowed it, knowed it," he said.
He picked up a ring of big iron keys from his desk, then dropped them heavily
on the wood.
AT dawn one week later and two days before the auction, Carrie LaRose drank
coffee at the kitchen table in the back of her brothel and stared out the
window at the red sun rising inside the mist on the cane fields. She stared at
the plank table under the live oak where her customers drank and sometimes
fought with fists or occasionally with knives, and at the two-hole privy that
she herself would not use at gunpoint, and at the saddled black horse of a
Yankee major who was still upstairs with her most expensive girl.
During the night she had felt chest pains that left her breathless, then a
spasm had struck her right arm like a bone break. It was the second time in a
month she had been genuinely terrified by premonitions of her own mortality.
In each instance, after the pain had gone out of her chest, she had sat on the
side of the bed and had heard heavy shoes walking in a corridor, then an iron
door scraping across stone. She had pressed her hands over her ears, and her
mouth had gone dry as paper with fear.
Now she sat in her kitchen and drank coffee laced with brandy and surveyed
what she had spent a lifetime putting together: a termite-eaten house, a
two-hole privy that her clientele shat and pissed upon, and a plank table
under a tree where they got drunk and fought with fists and knives, then
lumbered back into her house, stinking of blood and vomit.
The major, who was stationed in Abbeville, visited the brothel every Sunday
night, mutton-chopped, bald, potbellied, effusive, his few strands of hair
slicked down on his pate with toilet water. "Your randy fellow is back!" he
would announce. Upon departure, he would wave in a jolly way and call out,
"Just add it on my bill, Carrie!"
Last night he had sent an aide ahead of him to vacate an enlisted man from the
only upstairs room with a tester bed, consumed two bottles of champagne, and
started a fire by dropping a lit cigar in a clothes basket. But the major did
not pay for services rendered, the liquor he drank, or the damages he did. One
morning, when Carrie pressed him about his bill, he removed three pages of
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printed material from his coat pocket and unfolded and shuffled through them.
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