Flags on the Bayou

by James Lee Burke

This is probably why we will lose the war. What do I mean by that? 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. Look, this is how plantation society works. They create identities for themselves and put on airs and screw down and marry up. The little people do the work; it doesn’t matter if you are white or black. We all pick the white man’s cotton. Maybe it is not like that in the North. I have never been there, although I have read the Irish in New York broke the water mains and drowned three hundred darkies in their basements. Herman Melville wrote about this.

At the edge of a clearing I can see sunlight shining on metal, moving through the trees, the wind revealing a mounted column of bearded men seeking purpose or destination or whatever murderous intention pleases them at the moment. Oh, Lord, were men such as these ever your children? I have never been able to settle this question.

Cauchon has brought a wood stool he can sit on. He’s wearing the tight-fitting white pants of a gentleman, and a split-tail coat and a vest with the shine and coloration of a bleeding pomegranate. I do not know if he realizes his name is pronounced the same as “pig” in French. His face is swollen and lopsided like soft fruit, or maybe he has been bitten by blowflies. He coughs on his hand, but he cain’t hide the smell of his breath. He must have slept all night with his head in a beer bucket.

That’s what I get. I offer to share my brandy with a darky, and she dumps it in a bucket she uses for the contents of a thunder mug. Thank you very much. I went from the jail down to the saloon and tied one on, then went to the house I rent on the edge of The Shadows Plantation and fell down the steps going to the privy and knocked myself out. I woke up in the morning as sick as a gut-shot dog and was refused service in the café at the end of Main Street because, according to the owner, I was “not washed.”

So somehow I always ended up with women who were of an unusual nature. My first wife was a Chickasaw half-breed who gave her own height as seventeen hands, the way you measure a horse, and whose face could make a train turn on a dirt road. My second wife was a cleaning woman at the state asylum. I thought that was a big step up, until I forgot our first anniversary and she almost beat me to death with a bedpan.

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. Colored troops are captured and sold into slavery so they can stoke up all the other slaves. The Yankees have sunk boats up and down Bayou Teche, and now cannot get past the boats they chopped holes in. I am convinced this war was caused largely by people who had too much time on their hands.

By the way, the Yankee general overseeing the invasion of southern Louisiana is Nathaniel Banks.

He was a bobbin boy in the textile mills of Massachusetts when he was twelve. Guess how he is getting even with rich people? I look about me and have only one thought: I hate to...

“Are you a Christian, sir?” he asks.

Christian?” I say. “Let me think. On occasion I have dropped by a local church or two.” “Which denomination?” “I did not get the details. They were definitely against sin.”

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?

I am also convinced that men such as the sheriff are created by God to prove that the superiority of the white race is not a tenable belief.

“Please don’t address me as ‘Miss Florence,’ Mr. Boudreau. This tradition is intended to indicate familial fondness coupled with social formality. That is not our situation.” He makes a sucking sound and lifts a ring of keys from a peg on the wall, his solitary eye focusing on me like the point of a spear. “Coming, Miss Milton? It is Miss Milton, isn’t it? I’m pretty sure I got that right, didn’t I?”

Ask Our Savior for forgiveness and be done with it, you say? Do you think I have not tried? That goes to the very heart of my problem. When I solicit forgiveness, I get angry simultaneously. I asked the Lord’s help before the duel. But the duel went forward regardless. I could not stop it without besmirching the Lufkin name. Where was Our Lord then? He said his yoke was a mild one. My opponent, a crude and licentious man, was left unscathed. My face will probably remain a study in horror, one that will make the kind at heart weep and children flee. A mild yoke? Really.

You have to be a realist, son. It’s comforting to believe the pen and the paintbrush are mightier than the sword. But those are the words of dead Quakers.”

Three, the information I have gathered about the murder of Minos Suarez and now the jailer Louis Boudreau has come from slaves. Nothing slaves say about anything is trustworthy. This is not their fault. When they tell the truth to their masters, they are usually whipped.

Also, she has a roomful of books in the back of her home, and before the secession she would have soirees on her back lawn on the bayou and serve lemonade and read Nathaniel Hawthorne to us. She looked much younger then. I think her worries about mankind have taken their toll. Most of the audience was illiterate, and many couldn’t speak English, but they always seemed the better for the experience. In reality, I have never understood her kind. She doesn’t have a self.

“How you doin’, Miss Darla?” “Just as fine as can be, Mr. Pierre.” “You remember my name. I am very complimented.” “Well, of course, a handsome man like you,” she says. She has eyes the same color as Hannah’s, right out of the Caribbean Sea. Except she can mess with your head. After a couple of exchanges with her, you don’t know if she’s laughing at your thoughts or inviting you to do something you shouldn’t have on your mind.

FLORENCE MILTON My dress has not dried; my skin and hair are matted with debris. The sun is completely gone, but the bay is still lit, as though the Earth has pulled the light under the water. I have to make a confession. My behavior and my rhetoric are largely a pretense. I am afraid. And I am ashamed to admit that. As an educator I always taught my students, who are members of the plantation culture, that they should never bear an animus toward their “servants” or the poor, because a lack of charity is the sister of fear.

Look at New Orleans. Trumpet vine like strings of gold bells and blood-red bougainvillea drip from the Spanish ironwork on the balconies; the French bread and café au lait vendors roll their carts on the cobblestones at first light, and the fog puffs cold and white off the Mississippi. Then you hear the Angelus ringing at the cathedral and think this is the best place in the world, like Eden was before the snake got loose in the tree, but it ain’t.

With time, atrocities will happen, and one side will provoke the other, and each will take revenge in turn, and we will go home with secrets we share with no one. That’s the reality of war, not the quixotic babbling of poets.

As I approach Rue Bassin, a fecund odor, one that is similar to decomposition, replaces the pillows of balmy air drifting intermittently off Lake Pontchartrain. Not far away lie a garbage pit and a giant divot of a trench full of offal and a string of houses with red lamps in the windows. In a large courtyard is an ale and wine shop that has outdoor tables and offers escorts for the evening. None of the customers are in uniform, but I know the cadences of Boston and New York and Michigan when I hear them. And that does not mean my own class is not there, because they certainly are, every one of them wearing the spots and sensibilities of leopards.

I look around me, then see two fellows I saw many times at Lady of the Lake. The younger of the two has a body as supple as a coachwhip and a face with the angularity of an axe blade. In Georgia his kind are called crackers, and everywhere else, trash. They might make good camel drivers, but other than that, I don’t know why they were created.

What’s to lose? Sherman is a hero in the North, and Jubal Early in the South. With leadership like that, the Republic should be an ash heap within five years.

I do not think I will ever sleep again. Hence, I do not try. I lie with my eyes open and let the images of the night have their way. Gargoyles are gargoyles. They are not symbolic. If you invite them into your life, they do not go home easily.

I give up. “Good day to you, sir.” “And to you as well,” he says, tipping his hat, bowing at the waist. 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?

I have learned a lesson from this. You don’t need to seek revenge against your enemies. The bastards eventually fall in their own shite.

This is not a good environment for Miss Hannah and Miss Florence. But I know they will brass it out. No, that’s badly stated. They are members of that special group who refuse to flinch, the kind who don’t consider bravery a virtue, the kind who stand on a balcony in an electrical storm enjoying the fine breeze. The irony is that they don’t know how brave they are.

Late that evening I sit by a bonfire in the backyard of the farmhouse and have supper with the colonel. It is not a situation of my choosing, but as Our Lord has taught us, there are times when we must render unto Caesar. Nonetheless, in the warmth of the fire and the sparks rising into the sky, I am eating a plate of pork and eggplant and rice and gravy a few feet away from a man who has committed war crimes I do not want to think about. He is obviously deranged, and probably depraved. It is difficult to have charitable thoughts about him. I suspect his brain is filled with wormholes, and he slides from one to another with great facility because chaos is the only reality he knows. That’s about as kind as I can get.

There are no secrets on a plantation. I don’t know if he is moved by jealousy, greed, or just meanness. Bad pennies

don’t tell you their motivation. They just keep showing up until they wear a hole in your britches.

I take a walk down Main Street to the telegraph office. 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.”

Let people tell you war is grand, and do not reprove them. Let them tell you the jingle of the sword and spurs and the whooshing sounds of a mounted knight’s armor are the music of a medieval balladeer, and do not reprove them. But never let them tell you there is rhyme or reason to war, lest you join the lunatics who have perpetuated its suffering from the cave to the present.

The Puritans were not a likable group. They cut off the king of England’s head and murdered large numbers of American Indians. They were also good at hanging their neighbors, most of them women. To borrow from my Irish friends, what a fucking mess we have made of our country.

I cannot believe I said that.

I wondered what General Jackson would say. He was certainly a homely man, by reputation an eccentric not given to romantic tales, galloping at the enemy’s line with one arm propped at a forty-five-degree angle because he believed his vascular flow would remain balanced and not disturb his thinking processes.

To hell with all this thinking. I need to see Darla and apologize for offending her, and get her away from Endicott and Suarez culture and all the people who have hurt her over the many years. The world is a big place. Why do we have to confine ourselves to a society that tells us whom we can marry or not marry? We can live in the Islands or in South America, or join up with the war that’s brewing in Mexico. If you are determined to go to war, Hispanic and Italian ones are the best.

The causes are irrelevant. Everyone has a fine time tearing things up, and changing sides whenever they feel like it.

War is a confession of failure, and its perpetrators are the merchants of death, not because they are killers but because they never had the courage to live a decent life.

I felt I had gone to Hell. Or I was in a place between Heaven and Hell, the place we actually live in, one filled with dissonance and cacophony and ruinous choices.

I guess I feel sorry for the colonel and the abused boy Shaye Langtree, who is still trying to win the approval of a man whose brain glows with the venereal consequences of a profligate life. The irony is that my Puritan ancestors bred many a woods colt like Carleton Hayes. They hid their anger and their lust, and groped the innocent and killed the Indians so they did not have to kill themselves. As I walk toward my friends and the situational choices they have made, I am possessed by a terrible fear. Maybe this is because of the penalty I will have to pay for taking human life. But please do not misinterpret me. I am not judging myself. I did not intend to harm others. I was forced to kill. But the

content of your dreams does not take orders, and a stone bruise on the soul can be forever.