Flags on the Bayou

by James Lee Burke

am a man with no country and no cause, a sojourner at my uncle’s plantation, a painter of birds. But I have become intrigued by a young Creole woman named Hannah Laveau. She was purchased by my uncle one year ago at the slave market in New Orleans, just before the city surrendered, then rented out as what is called a wage slave to an acquaintance on Spanish Lake.

Bad people are going to get me. For some reason it seems that’s supposed to happen, like good people don’t have a chance. And I don’t understand why.

You may wonder why I am not in uniform. Well, I was. Past tense. In ’62, at Shiloh and later at Corinth, where I was accused of shooting my own toes off. No such thing happened. I was sleeping in my tent and this clod from Mississippi started splitting wood right next to my tent and couldn’t tell the difference between my naked foot and a chunk of pine.

Three-fourths of our army is made up of troops who don’t own slaves, yet they are dumb enough, like me, to get themselves blown into sausage links in order to enrich men who are already rich. How did they get so dumb, you ask? The answer is simple. Most of them are illiterate. There are no newspapers or telegraphs where they live; some of them don’t even know a war is taking place. Then they wake up one morning and look out the window and see a regiment of blue-bellies burning their barn, shooting their livestock, and taking a shit in their yard. These kinds of experiences tend to make people resentful.

In my view William Sherman is a detestable man whose methods are no different than Attila’s; ash heaps are his hallmark, and ruination and simple-mindedness his weapons of choice.

“Mr. Cauchon,” I say. “Just promise me you will leave the area.” “No, sir, you will not receive that promise,” he says. “But if you do not object, let me get down a hardboiled egg and a pickled pig’s foot before we go outside.” There are only two kinds of people who talk like that. Those with damaged brains and those who have nothing to lose. I think in my wisdom I have picked on Job in order to have my duel.

Most of them breathe through their mouths and think the words “Dred Scott” are a warning to stay away from Scottish people. Colored troops are captured and sold into slavery so they can stoke up all the other slaves.

Be advised. The sheriff, Jimmy Lee Romain, is not a bad man but, unfortunately, a nincompoop. More unfortunately, he was elected to his office not in spite of the fact that he is a nincompoop but because of it. In Louisiana we elect unintelligent and corrupt people to public office in order to keep them busy in distant cities. The worse they are, the farther we send them. Have you visited our national capitol?

“Sir, did you suffer a cerebral injury as a child? Were you beaten by a parent? Would you at least straighten up in your chair and not lie there like a giant earthworm?”

So God made me mad at the snake and I slung it around and hit its head on a chair and flung it on the floor and stepped on its face and jumped up and down on it until it stopped squirming. Then it squirmed one time and I slammed the chair on its head one more time and it opened its ugly mouth and died.

A coral snake’s poison goes into your brain and makes you crazy and unable to care for yourself. A copperhead will go after you when it doesn’t have to. A rattlesnake will coil and warn you first, but when he lets go, it’s with force and dedication. Cottonmouths ain’t like other snakes. They try to swim away or duck under the water when they see you; in the swamp they work their way up on low-hanging tree limbs and sleep on them. But if a cottonmouth is coiled and it shows you all that white inside its mouth and you don’t see it and you reach down to pick up your fishing line or crab trap, it will pop you in the face and spread its jaws across your cheek and hang from it. Even when you get it off, there is no place to tie a tourniquet.

make no claim on philosophic knowledge, but I have come to several conclusions about the nature and travail of mankind. We are born alone and die alone; in between we can think about Heaven or Hell and which is to our liking; I plan on visiting both.

You ask about the affliction on my face? It is the work of the devil and the wenches in his hire. But I wear my disease as I would a trophy I have pulled from the flames. I lift my face to the light and let it shine as a testimony to my purgation of all that is evil in the world. I glory in the scars on my body, the blood-red color of my beard, the crossed eyes others have mocked me for, until I came to town.

The night is beautiful. Stars are dropping out of the sky. The darkies are dancing around the bonfire, their shadows jerking on the grass, like spirits trying to rise from their graves. I get under my mosquito net inside my tent and pull my coat over my head and sleep the sleep of the dead.

As a New Englander I have to admit there is no equal to the manners of Southern gentility. They’re grand on the field of honor and go down with a sonnet on their tongues. But why are they always on the wrong side?

Gabrielle Lemoine

Although my mother was blind and saw light only in her sleep, she gave me a great gift, the kind we associate only with wisemen searching for a star over Bethlehem. She used to say, “Son, if you are a follower of Our Lord, you can start a bad day all over, anytime you wish.”

I cannot adequately express how I feel about the colonel. The problem is not simply his odious manner and his venereal afflictions. The problem is the fact he is breathing the air around us, holding it in his chest, degrading it in the phlegm that lives in his throat and the diseases that reside in his gums, the fluids that he huffs out of his nasal passages and smears on the back of his cuff.

My mother said the trick was not to engage your adversary, and also to make a covenant with yourself, namely, that you will not change the person you are, no matter how much the world hurts you. “Grin when they throw their worst at you, and leave them with broken glass in their entrails,” she said. “Because that’s the only place they can put their vitriol. It’s a fine way to be, son.”

I believe the Grim Reaper is real and now in our midst. I cannot say I am undaunted. I have seen the Reaper cross a battlefield or sometimes stop and rest in a Mexican village that has turned to ash. Oh, he was an ugly fellow, a troll with a gleam in his eye. Those who felt his touch said he had a sharpened fingernail and a breath like ice water and a stench that would rattle your bones.

Ahead, I can see mules and horses with empty saddles running wild-eyed in a field, their hides splattered, stirrups flying, some disemboweled, their hooves tangled in their entrails. But Mr. Death does not acknowledge me, and leaves me as the contemptable man I am, an object of pity and ridicule, rejected even by the grave.

I wonder sometimes if the people who died in front of the gun I held will gather around my deathbed, perhaps to forgive me, perhaps to walk with me to the place dead people go. But I know this about the dead. They are not gone. They turn into a vapor and slip through the stones we pile on them and suddenly appear like elves in the trees at twilight. I do not want this to happen to my friends. They are very good people and have made my life worth living.