Burke, James Lee - White Doves at Morning by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical fiction
Published: 2011-08-08T14:00:00+00:00

LATE that afternoon Flower filled the caulked cypress tub behind the slave quarters with water she drew from the windmill, then bathed and put on a clean dress and began her pickup route, stopping first at the back door of Carrie LaRose's brothel.

Carrie LaRose could have been the twin of her brother, Scavenger Jack. She was beetle-browed, big-boned, with breasts the size of pumpkins and red-streaked black hair that grew on her head like snakes. She wore a holy medal and a gold cross around her neck, a juju bag tied above her knee and paid a traiteur to put a gris-gris on her enemies and business rivals. Some said she had escaped a death sentence in either Paris or the West Indies by seducing the executioner, who bound and gagged another woman in Carrie's prison cell and took her to the guillotine in Carrie's stead.

Flower paid little attention to white people's rumors, but she did know ont thing absolutely about Carrie La Rose, she either possessed the powers of prophecy and knew the future or she was so knowledgeable about human weakness and the perfidious and venal nature of the world that she could predict the behavior of people in any given situation with unerring precision.

Cotton speculators, arms dealers, munitions manufacturers, and slave traders came to her bordello and had their palms read and their lust slaked in her bedrooms and gladly paid her a commission on their profits.

Early in the war a Shreveport cotton trader asked her advice about risking his cotton on a blockade runner.

"How much them British gonna pay you?" she asked.

"Three times the old price," the cotton trader replied.

"What you t'ink them textile mills in Mass'chusetts gonna pay?" she asked.

"I don't understand. We're not trading with the North," he said.

"That's what you t'ink. The cotton don't care where it grow. Them Yankees don't, either. They rather have it come up to the Mis'sippi than go t'rew the blockade to the British. The blockade runners gonna bring guns back to the Confederates."

The cotton traders who listened to Carrie increased their profits six - and sevenfold.

But those who sought her advice and the service of her girls and sometimes the opium she bought from a Chinaman in Galveston little realized she often listened to their confessions and manifestations of desire and infantile need by putting her ear to a water glass she pressed against the walls of their rooms. On Saturday nights her brothel roared with piano music and good cheer. On Monday mornings a New Orleans export-importer might discover a profitable business deal had been stolen from under his feet.

Flower stripped the sheets from the mattresses in the bedrooms and piled them in the hallway. Outside, the western sky was streaked with gold and purple clouds and under an oak tree in the dirt yard three paddy rollers were drinking whiskey at a plank table. The wind puffed the curtains and blew through the hallway, and Flower could smell watermelons and rain in a distant field.

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