Flags on the Bayou

by James Lee Burke

This is a very strange war we are having. Yankees and Rebs come and go. White trash like the Red Legs attack and terrorize and rob both sides and see if they can outdo William Sherman in scorched-earth diplomacy. Most of them breathe through their mouths and think the words “Dred Scott” are a warning to stay away from Scottish people.

The way this man writes!

My closest companion was the laudanum on my night table, and I no longer cared whether I became an opium addict or not. In fact, the “pink lady,” as we used to call it, was a lovely friend to have at my beck and call.

The source of the name "Lydia Pinkham"? Or vice-versa?

I think about the warm light that encapsulated me at age fourteen beneath the Merrimack River, and the lost children everywhere in the world, and the iconic thorns that seem unfairly imposed on the human heart, and the baptism that can come like a rainstorm of light outside a textile mill, and I know that somehow we rise above the woe and the sound and the fury and the mire of human veins that drag us back again and again into the maelstrom, bathed by a luminosity so intense that we can stand on a scaffold with John Brown at our side, unafraid, Golgotha nothing more than a vapor on the horizon.

Baptism.

I love this character, her faith and courage.

Oh, good heavens, what is that old man doing now? Does not the world have enough trouble already without the presence of Colonel Carleton Hayes? Why did Our Lord put such a creature in our midst, unless it was to show us there are worse things than Original Sin.

This woman. She is better than she knows.